Classics meets current events

My fellow classics student and friend Ben (@plmwinedrnkrd) posted this earlier on twitter - got a kick out of it and thought I'd share:

It's almost summer

I know it's almost half past midnight, but I can't help but wish I were sitting on a grassy lawn under the sun, in a light cotton dress, sipping Pimm's cups.


It'll happen.

The final statistics

29 pages
8,688 words
13 poems (Greek and Latin) translated and analyzed
2 hilarious epigrammatists
2 crazy emperors (this could be a sitcom)
1 semester-long junior qualifying exam (a.k.a. qual, a.k.a. qualrus)


/victory


My orals board is on Friday. I'm scared (I know I shouldn't be, but I can't help it). Really I should just put it out of my head and focus on the fact that I still have four papers to finish before Renn Fayre rolls around in a week and a half.


I have been an awful blogger as of late (sorry to my non-existent readers!). I promise frequent updates in the future - especially once the end of the semester rolls around and I will have oodles of time and will be reading/translating/researching many delightful things.


A wordle for your enjoyment:

Unless I miraculously get better at time management, this is the rest of my semester

Courtesy of Fuck Yeah, History Major Heraldic Beast

The Violoncellist

[This post is left-over from several weeks ago. Forgot to post. Whoops!]


I feel a bit wrong updating this blog from the library (usually I am very particular these days about only using my computer in here for writing papers, doing research, or checking email, though I will occasionally deviate from that and do an online crossword or read the blogs I follow; thankfully I have left my younger self's days of library facebook/tv watching/text twist behind me), but I just finished writing a significant chunk of a paper in the last half-hour, and so this seemed to me to be at least a (vaguely) constructive break.

The paper in question is for my art history class this semester, and I've really fallen in love with the work that I'm analyzing for it. 

 Gustave Courbet, The Violoncellist, 1847, oil on canvas

My previous familiarity with Courbet, one of the foremost figures of the Realist movement in France during the mid- to late-19th century, has extended mostly to two of his most famous works, Un enterrement à Ornans (A Burial at Ornans), and the highly controversial and scandalous (click at your own risk, it is very much NSFW) L'Origine du monde (The Origin of the World).


Courbet's use of tenebrism in The Violoncellist is striking, no? I'm struck by the similarities to some Rembrandt paintings I've seen in various museums - the intense chiaroscuro, compelling figure, very painterly. What do you all think?

Rette mich

I just received a book from Interlibrary Loan that I need for my junior qual, because it's the only real in-depth textual study that has been done on the subject I'm writing about.


Its title: Untersuchungen zur Struktur des Witzepigrams bei Lukillios und Martial. Which means, unfortunately, that it is all in German. Why oh why, my parents, did you not make me keep learning German after age 4? All of those Muzzy tapes gone to waste! All I remember is "Ich bin Bob; ich bin der Gärtner" and "Ich bin die Prinzessin Sylvia." Really though this is my own damn fault since I dropped German last term because my schedule was too stressful. I can conjugate basic verbs, talk about school supplies, the weather, and numbers, but that's about it. 


If I don't pull an Oedipus and poke out my eyes by the end of the semester, I'll be quite pleased with myself.

Happy Lupercalia everyone!

While we all in the here-and-now may consider February 14th Valentine's Day, in my mind, it is Lupercalia! Time to sacrifice some goats and run around Rome half-naked hitting people with a hide thong!


My February 14ths have always been considerably lackluster. I woke up this morning, resigning myself to a day that is just like most other days in Portland—slightly chilly, vaguely rainy, no sun in sight—only with the added benefit of large quantities of chocolate. But the prospect of a mostly depressing morning quickly disappeared when I opened up my email inbox to find a message from one of my professors (and qual adviser), asking me to work on a ridiculously interesting joint research project with him over the summer, that I would receive compensation for and my name listed as a co-author on the final publication. 


I am so excited I could burst. I'll post a bit more on this later, but right now I want to jump around giddily (and then should probably translate some Aristotle...).