Chance favours the connected mind

This excellent piece in the Guardian makes me want to read several of this guy’s books, but this paragraph in particular pretty much encompasses why I feel it’s important to go to conferences:

What all this means, in practical terms, is that the best way to encourage (or to have) new ideas isn’t to fetishise the “spark of genius”, to retreat to a mountain cabin in order to “be creative”, or to blabber interminably about “blue-sky”, “out-of-the-box” thinking. Rather, it’s to expand the range of your possible next moves – the perimeter of your potential – by exposing yourself to as much serendipity, as much argument and conversation, as many rival and related ideas as possible; to borrow, to repurpose, to recombine. This is one way of explaining the creativity generated by cities, by Europe’s 17th-century coffee-houses, and by the internet. Good ideas happen in networks; in one rather brain-bending sense, you could even say that “good ideas are networks”. Or as Johnson also puts it: “Chance favours the connected mind.”

There are people who believe that the only purpose of conferences is to market oneself, but I think that’s a bad way to look at it. I think the people who only go to APA and only go when they’re on the market are missing the main point: even if Classics is one of the few disciplines that really can happen in a vacuum, if you’re smart enough and your library is big enough, Classics is better when we are networking. Our ideas are richer, more varied, and just better when they happen in our community, when they are exposed to the light of day long before they’re ever written down. The “only purpose of conferences is marketing” people also miss out on smaller conferences, which, even discounting the enjoyment of presenting at a smaller, more intimate regional conference, provide as many opportunities for meeting new people and talking about new things as larger conferences do, and often allow you to make connections with people near you geographically that you otherwise might not encounter.

Also, conference-going allows us to get lots of important drinking done. Never discount the importance of drinking.

Sir Kenneth Dover has died.

Kenneth Dover was the finest English-speaking classicist of his generation, and I have long been grateful for his many excellent commentaries as well as his other work. A few nice obituaries can be found here at the Times Online, as well as here on the Guardian’s website. (I like the Guardian obit better, but that’s just me.)

My partner Jack used to say of men of this stripe, those who lived into active and productive old age not resting on the laurels of their prime, but continuing their work right up to their deaths, and those who seem in photographs to be engaging, interesting people with an endearing openness about their features, that they were “smashing old geezers”. There was no higher praise in his book–and I think that K.J. Dover was just such a man.

A few links of a dubiously classical nature

A little news from the far north and the green and fertile land of Egypt.

Roman skeleton found in York is, it appears, of a lady of African origin, which suggests that Roman Britain was a teense more ethnically diverse than had previously been thought.

Also, Amenhotep III had an enormous head. Well, his actual head was probably normally proportioned, but archaeologists have found the head of a previously-uncovered large-scale statue of the pharoah. It is remarkable for being quite large (the head alone is about as tall as a standing person) and also for being complete, and of excellent craftsmanship. Dr Hourig Sourouzian, the head of the team, says that it is possible that the beautifully-worked features of the head found by his team are due to the stylistic advances of the time, but that the pharaoh may just have been a “very beautiful, very handsome man.”

Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief

Last week, I went to see the new film The Lightning Thief, a movie version of the first of Rick Riordan’s “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” books. Knowing that I was going to be doing so, a few days before that I went to my favorite place to buy YA fiction, Kidsbooks (support your local specialty bookstores, folks, and they’ll support you and your community), and bought the first two books of the series in softcover.

It’s a five-book series: The Lightning Thief, Sea of Monsters, The Titan’s Curse, The Battle of the Labyrinth, and The Last Olympian. The books are well-suited to the age for which they’re written–they’re YA books, and fall fairly well into the “school stories” genre, so the books are intended to age with the audience, from eleven to fifteen or so, with a bit of leeway particularly to the younger end of that spectrum. They’re quick reads–I went through the entire series in less than a week, around my other work.

It’s been a while.

I am not sure whether anyone is still reading this, but for those who are, I’m going to start posting again, although it may be boring for a while.

A lot has happened in the last year–which is about how long ago I last posted.

I am still at Current U working away at the PhD. I’ll be writing my comprehensives soon, and so I’m doing a lot of reading list reading in additional to my coursework (not much of that these days–I finished my coursework requirements and further classes are just because, well, I like taking classes), my TA responsibilities (not as onerous here as they were at Former U, but also not as engaging or exciting), the odd side project (there are currently two of those), and other less-academic things like sleeping, eating, and obtaining coffee. And petting my cat.

The thing looming largest on my personal horizon is that last summer, my partner of nearly thirteen years, Jack, died suddenly of a heart attack in our home in Major Midwestern City, where he had stayed in our little house with the majority of our menagerie as well as our menage. I had to rush home and make the various arrangements, clean out our little house, make the difficult decision about which of our pets I could keep and which I would have to find other homes for, and all the various horrors that attend upon the primary horror, which is that Jack is gone. Many of the little horrors (endless arrangements, arguments with family over arrangements, the absolute hell that is trying to decide what to save and what to discard of your entire life while 98% of your brain resounds with only the static of grief) were forgotten–gratefully–as soon as they were done, but that primary horror remains and is so far unsoftened by time.

That stress, as often happens, has been compounded by various others, including incredibly bathetic roommate drama (am I not too old for this?, I asked rhetorically–apparently, the answer is no) here in Current City, which will hopefully end next month–Religious Studies Colleague and I plan to become roommates, and are even now in happy possession of appointments to tour prospective apartments. I hope that a new household will be unplagued by the problems of the old one, to wit, roommates who eat all my food and also expect me to clean the dishes off which they ate their ill-gotten gains, as well as everything else in the apartment. There has also, I am sad to admit, been a rebound relationship–of sorts–which was, as all such things are, a terrible idea.

Expect a review of the Percy Jackson books as well as the first (and probably only) movie soon.

And don’t forget the remake of Clash of the Titans, which will be released at the end of March! I expect it to be giant-scorpion-tastic.

Boosting signal for a friend

My dear friend Karnythia is, with one of her friends, trying to start up a small press for writers of colour. They have called it Verb Noire and are currently running a fundraiser to try and get a little money together for startup costs. If you have a little cash you want to contribute, please do. I think this is a worthy endeavour and I wish them the best of luck.

Contribution widget can be found here.

Observe how I post just as though no time had intervened…

I’ve been settling down into my new home and program.  The dog had to go back home in December, which makes me sad.  I’m hoping that I can have him back at some point, but now is not that point.

In semi-classical news, a U Chicago professor’s son is charged with identity theft after he impersonated several other leading experts in his father’s field in order to advance his father’s ideas regarding the Dead Sea Scrolls. This came across via the Reuters article, but a bit of Googling found me this wrap-up, to which I shamelessly link, with appreciation.

This is one of those things that I’d like to cast as a cautionary tale, but simply cannot understand why anyone would think that this was a good idea.  We should not need cautionary tales about things like this.

In happier news, I saw the new Watchmen movie last night at a midnight show, and was very very pleased.  The end reminded me very powerfully of the end of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, when Hyllos says,

μεγάλους μὲν ἰδοῦσα νέους θανάτους,
πολλὰ δὲ πήματα καὶ καινοπαθῆ,
κοὐδὲν τούτων ὅ τι μὴ Ζεύς.

You have seen great and grievous sights,
and many calamaties hitherto unheard-of,
but there is not one of these things that is not Zeus.

We will resume shortly

…after this non-commercial break.

I’ve relocated.  Jack remains back home while I start a new adventure in Classics, accompanied by our dog.  I’m currently couch-surfing, a stranger in a strange land.  Expect more soon.  In the meantime, get thee to Amazon and buy season one of The Wire.  Quickly!  Observe the classical themes!  Report back!

Some exciting archaeological finds

The first Greek mummy has been found and is being analyzed by a team of Swiss researchers. She was embalmed in oils and spices, much like the Egyptian process, and some hair including her eyebrows remains. She dates from about 300 CE, and the article notes gravely that they have been unable to determine a cause of death.

Another first, the first complete chariot to be found in Bulgaria has been unearthed in a Thracian tomb in southeastern Bulgaria. This is very exciting! The chariot is about 1900 years old and in a good state of preservation. Nearby they found well-preserved brass and leather that they think to be the harness, even more exciting than the chariot.

In Turkey, a head thought to be the empress Faustina has been found! It’s been a good summer for digging, including for a friend of mine working on a dig in Israel who spent several weeks finding an excitingly-curved wall and some mosaics this year. (And a lot of time washing pottery!)

Lesbian anti-lesbian group ordered to pay court costs

A Greek court denies the petition of three residents of Lesbos to restrict the adjective “Lesbian” from being applied to gay women, and orders the complainants to pay court costs. I’m sure almost everyone has heard about this case by now–it first hit the news quite a while back–but I thought that while I’m posting links today, I might as well hit this one as well.

These residents were apparently upset that some gay people were using the word “lesbian” to refer to themselves, and decided to do something about it. Of course, they didn’t decide to do something constructive about it–I’m sure the fact that it has absolutely no power over global speech habits had something to do with the court’s decision. Note that the identification of gay people and Lesbos has led to a protracted upswing in island tourism.

One cannot help but call to mind the recent flap over the American Family Association’s policy of globally replacing the word “gay” with the word “homosexual” on their “news” site OneNewsNow. At least, one cannot help it if one is Jane and has a lively sense of the absurd.