Doin' tha running man (of many turns)

Three crews of South Korean breakdancers have scored hit shows at the Edinburgh Fringe, underlining the nation's depth of talent and showing hip-hop moves did not die out in the 1980s, an expert said Friday.

. . . . .

"Spin Odyssey" takes on a more ambitious narrative -- the Last For One group attempts a loose re-telling of Homer's Greek epic with a few dashes of slapstick humour thrown in for good measure.

Odysseus was the original beta boy.

Housman's Letters

I'm fairly certain that Dennis has already seen this, but just in case and for the benefit of other readers--David Butterfield has reviewed Archie Burnett's The Letters of A.E. Housman, a massive 960-page volume, in BMCR. Here is the lead paragraph:

The name of A. E. Housman (1859-1936) causes an instant reaction in the Classical community. The very intensity, and indeed variety, of sentiments that the letters 'A. E. H.' can evoke is startling when it is considered how few, whether scholars or not, have engaged directly with his Classical work. Housman has never lacked attention from both a deeply respectful following and a firm band, regrettably more numerous, of detractors. It is of course one of the wearying but unsurprising facts of Classical scholarship that each bold and revisionary scholar is met with a less than positive reception. Yet Housman's lot deserves particular attention: why should a man, reserved but polite in company, passionate for accuracy and excellence in print, inspire such strong feelings among academic circles even of the present day? A satisfactory answer to this question remains to be given.

The Spirit of the Anti-Classicist

I rarely read any Latin, Greek, German, Italian, sometimes not a French book, in the original, which I can procure in a good version. I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven. I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Religion/Mythology/Anthropology

Sorry for my absence of late. I now have regular access to the internet again, so thought I'd throw another Google Books post here. The topic can be seen above.

Jane Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion

E.B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (4th ed., revised), vol. 1 and vol. 2

James Frazer, Totemism

James Frazer, Lectures on the Early History of Kingship

James Frazer, The Golden Bough (2nd. ed., revised and enlarged), vol. 1, vol. 2, and vol. 3

Otto Gruppe, Griechische Mythologie und Religionsgeschichte

Lewis Richard Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States

W. Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites. First Series: The Fundamental Institutions

Christian Gottlob Heyne, Ad Apollodori Bibliothecam observationes

Travels with Kapuściński

I've finally gotten around to picking up Ryszard Kapuściński's Travels with Herodotus, which I mentioned previously. I'm 25 pages in and there's so much I could quote, but I thought I'd select the following and encourage others to pick the book up as well. The author relates how he purchased a copy of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls to work on his English once he'd settled in India:

I returned to the hotel, opened the Hemingway to the first sentence: "He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees." I understood nothing. I had a small English-Polish pocket dictionary, the only one that had been available in Warsaw. I managed to find the word "brown," but none of the others. I proceeded to the next sentence: "The mountainside sloped gently..." Again—not a word. "There was a stream alongside..." The more I tried to understand this text, the more discouraged I became. I felt trapped. Besieged by language. Language struck me at that moment as something material, something with a physical dimension, a wall rising up in the middle of the road and blocking my way, closing off the world, making it unattainable. It was an unpleasant and humiliating sensation.

We've all felt that way, but Greek and Latin have never left us alone in a foreign land. Even Herodotus, as Kapuściński notes, had the benefit of Greek being the lingua franca, which is why English was so important for Kapuściński to learn. How he did it showed great determination and possibly courage, though he really had no choice. One bit in particular could be taken as good advice by students of Greek and Latin:

I was never without the Hemingway, but now I skipped the descriptive passages I couldn't understand and read the dialogues, which were easier...

How to make Latin seem lame

Something that always drives me nuts is seeing people who care about the same things I do making those things seem lame. Like Star Trek. Watching the interaction between Spock and McCoy isn't much different for me from reading Sherlock Holmes as he invites Watson to join him on a case and says he'll be lost without his Boswell. But then some jerk has to dress up in a costume and get into debates with other jerks about the smallest things, and make me feel like I shouldn't ever confess to liking Star Trek. But there. I said it.

I also like Latin.

And sometimes Latinists make Latin seem so ... dorky.

If you're like me maybe you wouldn't mind seeing the following on a t-shirt:

LATINAM STVDEBAM
ET VNVM ACCEPI HANC
SVBVCVLAM STOLIDAM

It beats some of what I've seen, that I know my students would never be caught dead in, and I can't blame them.