Posts from — in the wee hours

I went to a great little coffeehouse to study yesterday and on the way home listened to part of A Prairie Home Companion. GK was talking about the weather, and I realized that, in a way, we have moved to Lake Wobegon. That weather on the radio is my weather now. GK is doing a show twenty minutes from my house. You can hear his love for this place when he speaks. And it is so beautiful. Autumn is creeping in, the leaves on some of my trees are turning yellow, and even though we have warm days coming, the air feels crisp. This is my favorite time.
School: buried, working harder than I have ever worked at anything in my life…and loving it.
Friends: I think about you always.

And so that is the news from our place in MN, where the man may not be attractive, but the woman is strong, and the child is above average.

“Children find everything in nothing, adults nothing in everything” – Leopardi

First day of grad school! I had Latin prose composition, a reading class in the Latin novel, and a seminar class on Greek tragedy. Still waiting on German. What have I begun?!

I knew that the workload would be more, but, to be frank, I had no idea it would be this much. My comp class is the easiest in the beginning, but we will be building up to constructing Ciceronian paragraphs in a matter of weeks and are expected to “retranslate” a large portion of his Phillipics back into Latin from English in a few months. We will end the class with incredibly difficult passages of English, perhaps from authors such as Shakespeare and Dickens, and be asked to translate into Latin.

In my Latin novel class, we will be reading the Satyrica of Petronius (15 pages a week). In addition, in English we will be reading “Greek” novels and wading through a five-page bibliography. We will give oral reports and construct a commentary on a selected passage of the Satyrica with the aim of creating a suitable guide for second or third-year Latin undergraduates.

My Greek tragedy class is the hardest by far. We will trudge through 350 lines a week of some of the hardest Greek imaginable. We will scan (not the easy task it is in English), briefly discuss grammatical stumbling blocks, and be tested every 700 lines. In addition, we will be wring 25 page PUBLISHABLE papers, attacking a specific aspect of the work and using a modern European language source as a significant contribution (hence my Reading German class on Mondays). Each student will also lead a class, tackling both Greek linguistic issues and minute interpretive questions. In addition to this, we will read approximately fifty pages of scholarly journal articles per week.

Then, of course, I am expected to be making my way through the reading list. To stay on schedule, this semester I will read Cicero, Catullus, and Horace in Latin. In Greek, I will read Homer and Herodotus.

On Saturday nights, I might sleep.

On a personal note, the family is great, the house is wonderful, and we are so excitied for our friends who are expecting “new editions.” We miss you all.