Grad School: The Reading List

One of the things that most classics grad programs (e.g. Berkeley, U of Toronto) seem to require from their applicants is a reading list of texts read in the original language. Presumably this is because classes are not standardized at different schools, and this replaces what might once have been a list of classes. I have read quite a few texts in their original language-- especially Greek texts. Some of these texts, given when I read them, I read or remember better than others. However, Berkeley's list was a little different. It gave examples of what it considered to be second and third year classes, and expected two more semesters on top of that. This was fine in principle, but the texts they provided as examples were kind of scary.

• Homer (3-4 books)  I haven't read Homer since highschool, and I only read Book I of the Iliad.
• Plato (1 short dialogue) I read the Phaedrus which is much harder than most of the short dialogues (although I have to admit, I had a lot of trouble with it) plus selections of a number of other Plato's texts.
• A complete Greek Drama I read the Bacchae back my freshman year, which was awesome, but a long time ago and I think it would be a lot easier to go back over it now. I also read about 90% of the Agamemnon.
• Aeneid (3-4 books) I read Book 8, and excerps from books 10 and 12 in my second year Latin class, but still, obviously not enough.
• Republican Prose (40-50 pages) Pro Caelio and selections from Caesar's Civil Wars, which I would think add up to about 40 or so pages.
• Horace (30 poems) none until yesterday-- and I read I.1, 5, 9.

My lovely friend Propertius II and I went over my readings of I.1 and 5 today, during which I think I enjoyed the poetry much better than the first time that I read it. It is so nice to have another classicist who is willing to patiently work and discuss with me (as well as provide, at least in theory, some mutual benefit because he has not read much Horace either).

However much I am enjoying my grad school prep, at least at the moment, I am already behind. The timeline that Princeton Review puts out really scared me. I am so behind.

At an alumni dinner tonight I met a lovely classics grad who is getting his PhD working on Homer. I only hope that I can get into grad school and move things forward in the direction that he did. I hope also that I can live up to my own expectations bot in getting into and doing well in graduate school.

Teaching through the Invisible Wall

I proctored another practice test today. Practice tests are a long four hours and I finished Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy and was able to cross it off of my reading list [1]. I also read two other works which I will discuss in detail over the next few days.

At one of the five-minute breaks in the four-hour exam, I asked my students how their college applications were going. People were nervous-- and rightfully so-- but were in the process. I told them that I was doing graduate school applications, and they were a nightmare because they do not have a common application and require a lot of strange GPA manipulations (depending upon whether the school is focused on your grades in courses in your major, in your last two years, etc). After explaining this, I realized that this attempt to explain my sympathies with the students' situation was precisely the wrong approach. They do not want to hear how hard my experience is-- or the things that may be awaiting them after college-- but rather they would like some encouraging words.

I always thought, while I was in high school, that when I became a teacher (I wanted to be a professor of course, but I figured that it was a similar principle) that I would understand the plight of the student and not be alienated from it in the way that my teachers seemed to be. My specific specific qualms were with busy-work, "creative projects" as graded material, and improper balancing of review and new material (in either direction). Now, I realize that there is as much of an invisible wall between my students and me as there was between me and my teachers. Maybe it is the inevitable position of being a teacher.

One thing that cheered me up was an essay that a student wrote today. The topic asked the students to consider what type of learning should be done in schools. One of the girls related a personal anecdote about a friend of hers sitting at lunch one day and complaining that school did not have enough breaks and did not incorporate enough creative learning. The girl questioned her friend, and through questioning the friend agreed that although it might feel that way, but the purpose of school was to provide a learning experience and that it was ultimately useful. I do not know if the anecdote was true, but it made me feel a little bit better.

Endnotes

1. Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy is fabulous. Andrea Nightingale utilizes a mixture of history and classical scholarship with Bahktin and a smattering of literary theory to provide an energetically written and scholastically footnoted work that provides a fascinating analysis of Plato and the development of philosophy as a genre. I will do a full review soon.

 

Cerinthus Reports: Where is Electra?

Sulpicia Asks: Where was Electra lamenting in Sophocles' Electra?
I recently saw a wonderful production of Sophocles' Electra. You can read the review on my blogpost. In the play, Electra spends most of her time crouching outside of the gates of Mycenae.

Cerinthus Answers: Right where those tourists are in my photo!

Photo by Cerinthus

Updates: Kindle and Free Books

I wrote two blogposts of the last few weeks which I feel are in need of updating: A Bibliophile's Review of the Kindle DX and Problems With Free Books. (I also recently updated the Blog on the Minoan Octopus Jar.)

Kindle for Cooks

One of the things that I did not mention in my original review is my use of the kindle for cooking. I use it in two ways. One is to download and put recipes on my kindle and stand it up on my counter-top. This only works, obviously if one downloads a cookbook or creates a PDF or MOBI document. I used a particular case, a platform kindle case, that allowed me to stand the kindle upright so that I could read the recipes easily. The other way that I used the kindle was to have it read to me while I was cooking. I downloaded a free version of The History of the Peloponnesian War and had the Kindle read to me while I was cooking so that I did not waste time [1]. It was pretty helpful, except for the pronunciation of the Greek names. For example, Themistocles (the-mist-oo-cleez) was pronounced (the-mis-do-cls). Although the humanoid voices can be kind of annoying, it gets the information across and entertainment can be found by poking fun at it.

As a random technological sidenote, I have had my phone for 6 years and it is finally beginning to break down (people cannot hear me when I answer the phone and I have to shout, etc). Does anyone have a good recommendation?

A Clarification and More Amazing Free Books

I realized that I never explained the meaning of the title "The Problems of Free Books." The idea is that Google Books provides some downloadable free books as well as providing essentially an enormous, no-membership-required digital library that allows the reader to browse through editions of books online for the purposes of research, as well as for the ability to preview books online. For any other book, there is the difficulty of finding the book in the first place, making sure that it is the correct edition, etc. Speaking of free ebooks, there is another Amazing Site (referred to me by Propertius II) that has a bunch of academic books marked "public" which can be read online.

Endnotes

1. At the time when I was doing this, I was taking a class on Thucydides: Book 1 in Greek, I was attempting to read the rest of Thucydies' History of the Peloponnesian War for context. Usually I would read the beautiful Landmark Edition, which was a wonderful gift from my parents, but I ended up just trying to breeze through the kindle edition, and look at the Landmark for reference.

Movie Review: Cairo Time

Juliette: "I have always wanted to go to Alexandria"
Tareg: "The library burnt down, you know. You would be surprised how many people ask me that."

Cairo Time is the brilliant and unexpected romance of an American woman, who is the wife of a UN worker in Egypt, and an Egyptian man who is a former colleague of her husband. While Juliette's husband is trapped in Gaza trying to help solve a refugee camp crisis, Juliette, a woman with an adventurous spirit, cannot stay cooped-up in her hotel in Cairo and sets out to explore the city. Finding a number of unforeseen complications with wandering alone, Juliette befriends two unlikely people: the girlfriend of another UN worker who has been in Cairo for two years, and Tareg, a close friend and retired colleague of her husband who was sent to pick her up at the airport. As he accompanies her on her explorations in Cairo, Tareg exudes a quiet vibrancy, charm, humor, and earnestness which are as captivating as the city itself.




I found this movie incredibly charming. It was beautifully shot, brilliantly acted, and well written. I found the story to be believable and powerful, without being overwrought or tied up too perfectly. I recommend it highly. The soundtrack is also incredible.

I Can Read That, uh, I Think...

Until a few days ago, I had never been to the Getty Villa. With a combination of it being far away and requiring an appointment, even when I was in the same city, I never got around to it. Until this time. It was incredible.

Getty Villa picture from Wikimedia Commons [1]

The floor plan is based on the Villa dei Papyri in Herculaneum, which got its name for the well over 1,500 papyrus scrolls found there. The Getty Villa is stunningly beautiful. The Roman architecture is paired with wonderful landscaping, pools of water, and replica bronze statues and murals.

Inside, I found an incredible collection of Greek pottery and statues, as well as Roman and Etruscan artifacts. The first room that I went into was an incredible time-line of pottery in these three civilizations. I was with my parents, and I was able to point out and describe the different pots, especially since I have been studying this recently (see my blogpost). We then moved into another room that displayed a mixture of Attic pottery and Roman pottery. Some of the attic red figure vases were incredible.

A few of the vases had names scratched above the characters depicted upon them. I went over and said "I can read this" and then I froze for a second. The words were in capitals with no accents. My mind went blank even looking at words that I clearly recognized. Fear just was struck into my heart. The same thing happened when I looked at the Latin inscription on a young girl's sarcophagus. Although the Latin turned out to be really easy, I froze. I think this comes from a combination of pushing myself into a Greek class I was not entirely ready for when I started college and a sense of extreme pride that hates passionately being wrong. My first class, on the Bacchae, I would not have given up for the world. It was amazing. However, it taught me a combination of bad habits: always assuming I was behind the curve (which often prevented me from moving out of this position), spending a lot of time on the Perseus Project instead of with a paper dictionary and a grammar (which I began work toward fixing in my junior and senior year), and getting bothered and antsy when translating took too long instead of enjoying the process of reading.

I have promised myself that I will fix all of these before I go to graduate school. I hope I am going to make it! The applications are a nightmare.

Endnotes

1. Wikimedia Commons

Cerinthus Reports: Octopus=Awesome

Sulpicia Asks: Could you send me some awesome photos.

Cerninthus Answers: Look! An octopus!
(Just kidding. Cerinthus actually responded by sending 93 incredible photos from Crete but this one is totally my favorite)

 This is Minoan. Other than that I don't know. I think Cerinthus saw it in a museum on Crete. More information forthcoming.

Update (09/14/10):

This is known as the "Octopus Jar" and is from the late Minoan period. The Stanford Humanities lab website says: 

"At the end of the Middle Minoan era the Kamares style has been relegated to background and a new style stealing from wall paintings of this period was developed. This new style delt mainly with vivid representation of human and animal figures in dark colors on light colored clay. This trend of naturalism is extreamly short lived however. The return to the formulated decorative patterns and stylized plant forms returns and is the basis for future styles."

This jar was made circa 1500 BCE found at the palace at Knossos and now sits in the Herakleion Museam, Crete (Saskatewan University).

The Problems with Free Books

This morning, my mother emailed me a thoroughly amusing article called "The Trouble with Google Books." The article deals with the errors and problems that Google books has, specifically with metadata (i.e. the data that allows you to find the book you are looking for, e.g. publication date, author, etc). Some of the pieces are particularly hilarious, such as attributing a book an the Mosiac Web browser to Sigmund Freud's distinguished co-authorship [1]. My biggest problem with google books was that it always omitted exactly those pages of a book that I needed most when I looked something up because some other enterprising classicist had checked it out of the library before I got there [2].

Although I have always been a massive lover of cheap books and used books (which is the only way I could have amassed the massive collection of books around my house and in boxes in the garage), receiving a Kindle (see my previous blogpost) I have become a zealot for free electronic books. Part of the time while Cerinthus was visiting, I stupidly spent showing him the wonders of ACLS Humanities E-Book Archive (because he still has access to our college's server). It is incredible. Although one can only download PDF pages in three pages bursts, there are some fabulous academic texts on every subject from archaeoastronomy to modern urban planning. If one compiles the books oneself, they're free (provided, of course, access to said archive through school or an academic institution). I also have spent a lot of time searching for books, especially classics books and found a number of different places (to many of which I link on Platonic Psychology). Some interesting ones are as follows:

• Project Gutenberg: An archive of out of print books and audiobooks. Has a pretty awesome variety of formats available, including MOBI documents for the kindle. They are now also compiling audiobooks, as well as adding works in their original languages, such as Greek and Latin (as well as German, French, etc)
• Internet Archive: Very much like Project Gutenberg, this archive includes a variety of out of print books in many different formats, including the Sanskrit Grammar that I included in my blogpost last night.
• Textkit: A selections of out of print materials for teaching Classical Greek and Latin.
• Free Books from Amazon: this is all in kindle format (but can be read with free kindle reading apps), but it includes out of print books, as well as government documents like the U.S. Budget, and a number of new studies on digital media and learning by MIT, like this one.
  

There are some more but this is a start and I would love to hear about more I have not found yet.

Harping on my education theme, again (sorry!), I think cheap used books and free ebooks are awesome. I believe, most certainly, that authors and the institutions who aid in dissemination their work should be paid and that they provide a vital service for society. However, the library near my house has a book section only twice the size of my bedroom. Thus far, I found no classics texts there I am interested in reading. The books are simply too expensive for a small local library. It seems to me that libraries are one of the great places that one can supplement or design their own education. It makes no sense that only university libraries have the necessary academic texts when cities and towns without universities are the ones could most use an extensive library. So I think that used book sites and free ebooks are great because they provide access to a whole range of materials not otherwise available.

Endnotes

1. This reminded me of when I asked a group of my SAT kids what they knew about Charles Dickens' writing, and I got three blank stares and a girl who told me that she had only read half of Alice in Wonderland and did not remember it very well. I was also shocked to learn that out of a 13 person class, not one person knew who Adam Smith was. On the other hand, every one of them can work a smartphone, an art which I have not yet mastered.
2. My junior year this was a particularly pernicious trend, which prevented me from ever getting a chance to read Genres in Dialogue for my Phaedrus paper. Luckily, I received a copy for my last birthday and I am enjoying it thoroughly.