major breakthrough in conceptualizing non-speaking performers in Greek drama when I realized that Pylades and Orestes in both Electras and Polydeuces and Castor in Electra and Helen are basically this

mollior lacte coacto is really a top-tier compliment

introducing comparative adjectives next week and realizing that I have the perfect opportunity to make students read the terrible poetry that Polyphemus composes for Galatea in Ovid

—the rest is silence.

telling my intro Latin class about the forbidden present participle of esse

what a day to find out that mayonnaise is named after 3rd-century Carthaginian general Mago Barca. never letting anyone tell me classics isn't relevant.

I have a joke about that guy sitting across from you who seems to me like a god but I have no voice left in my mouth with which to tell it.

this is an incredibly effective motivator to get me to the polls because I absolutely DO want to get a good grade in voting

"dissertation methodology" I will be consulting the ancient tomes

Speak hands for me! [They stab Caesar.]

CAESAR The ides of March are come. SOOTHSAYER Ay, Caesar; but not gone.

Is not tomorrow, boy, the ides of March?

writing a fellowship application to be reviewed by a committee of non-classicists like. hm. do I need to specify what I mean by "the fifth century BCE"???

the curse of writing about Aristophanes is the number of times you have to explicitly say "x is funny"

typing "birds" into wikipedia and confidently hitting enter as if that's going to take me directly to the page for the Aristophanes play

it feels very unfair that I've got my big landmark Thucydides out for the work I'm doing on this chapter about tragedy. that is emphatically not what I signed up for when I chose a dissertation topic.

favorite page of the dissertation so far is the one where I have four separate footnotes going "*except for Oedipus at Colonus"

enough about haunting the narrative, what about haunting the dissertation???

at least this time the person who wrote his obituary for a journal had the decency to mention the scholar's 1944-1945 German military service in the opening paragraph about his early life????

I have GOT to stop submitting library requests for articles and books in Italian if I'm just going to avoid reading them for months once I have them

Never mind the jobs you had, tell me five classes you took in college: The Wizard of Oz in Context Visions of the End Michelangelo to Mussolini: The Classical Tradition in Rome Queering the Bible Homer's Illiad (sic)

apparently my role in this department is going through people's works-in-progress and correcting their use of vocabulary that suggests textile manufacturing processes that are anachronistic for that period of antiquity

I'm thankfully usually reading more recent scholarship these days but it's always jarring when books from the 70s and 80s consistently refer to other male scholars by last name only and then suddenly start talking about what "Miss Dale" has to say on the matter

not bad (me after skimming a monograph that’s taken a decade to research, write)

seems a bit off but okay

currently going through my own draft and trying to straighten out where I talk about 'Athene' vs where I talk about 'Athena'. choices were made.

nothing like googling "how much meat in a cow" to make me feel like I'm doing real classical philology

it's actually a manifesto for vegetarianism

changing all the journal titles to their abbreviations in the bibliography section of my conference handout to show that I'm in on the gatekeeping

it's that time of year again: JSTOR wrapped, my top five reads of the year on @jstor.bsky.social

aside from "classics? what, like Shakespeare?" the worst I've gotten on saying I study/teach ancient Greek and Latin literature is definitely "do you think Jesus was real?" historical Jesus is not generally a can of worms I want to open with an Uber driver.

since we're coming up on that time of the year again www.redbubble.com/i/sweatshirt...

Historians Admit To Inventing Ancient Greeks https://theonion.com/historians-admit-to-inventing-ancient-greeks-1819571808/

ah yes the familiar ritual of adding some early 20th century German stuff to my bibliography as the source of some idea or other in classical scholarship and then combing through the internet to figure out what this scholar was doing in the years 1939-1945...

this week I finished knitting a sweater that I started in spring 2023, so honestly three years seems like a pretty reasonable time frame for Penelope to be weaving a shroud

since we're coming up on that time of the year again www.redbubble.com/i/sweatshirt...

I think for my 8 am Tereus paper I need the screeching whistle sound from the Sweeney Todd cast album

gnocchi seauton

talking about "the turn of the century" and I mean the late 400s and early 300s BCE

LIVE - Classicist reacts to BMCR Books Received list for October

in what follows i will reinvent the wheel

a periodic illustration of what I mean by "rhapsode in the most literal sense" (ῥάπτω+ἀοιδή)

once again watching videos of bird noises for research purposes, desperately trying to hear the acoustic similarity to the aulos

Fall is approaching which means it's almost time to read "The Pumpkinspiceification of the Divine Claudius."

I figure this image should come in handy

You want me to roll out the red carpet? The thing that killed Agamemnon?

underrated implication of the recognition tokens in the Libation Bearers is that Orestes and Electra don’t just have the same hair, they both have their MOTHER’S hair

standing and staring at the artifacts in the museum for so long that the motion-sensor lights go off and it's just you in the dark with the iron-age coinage

neither iota subscript nor iota adscript but a secret third thing

I would ask who the market is for the €1800 cithara in the museum shop but I know. it’s me. I am the target market for that.