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It has been a good, fairly ordinary Saturday. I ate breakfast, walked the dog, played a video game. I went to the video game store and traded in some old DS games I'll never play again, and resisted buying anything new; bought groceries and lunch, ate the latter. Took the dog and roommate to the hardware store, where we admired a lot of plants in the garden center, bought dirt, and brought it home.
And now I'm having a snack and fighting though Plutarch, who is delightfully straightforward (for the most part) in his grammar and rather depressingly novel in his vocabulary choices. (I can't really blame him for that; I mentioned in my first post about him that he's as removed from Themistocles as someone writing now would be from Joan of Arc, so it's to be expected that the language would shift a bit over the intervening centuries.) Despite the difficulties, I'm really enjoying the reading. It's a nice change of pace from War and Politics to actually read about someone growing up and learning things, even if we're going to plunge inevitably into War and Politics fairly soon.
I'm mostly set on the topic for my Big Important Latin Paper (...hey, fifteen pages isn't huge, but it sure as hell isn't short, either), insofar as I idly compose paragraphs in my head while walking to the bus after class, but don't exactly have a thesis yet. I mean to discuss the relationship between slaves--both explicit/on-stage and implicit/off-stage, as we get strong hints of the latter--in Casina, and at some point I need to staple a thesis onto that. Maybe after I've got ten pages of actual writing in there.
My paper for Greek, however--smaller, less important, very much focused on the text and not on research--I don't know what to do with yet. I think we're supposed to talk about how the different authors handle Themistocles differently, but that seems awfully narrow as something we should all be talking about, and the prof clearly wants us to come up with a specific idea for our own individual treatment thereof. So I guess I need to think about that, and see if I can wrangle a thesis out of thin air. As one does.
It'd be nice to get some writing done, too. My brain is full of ideas. But writing my novels doesn't get the grades in the classes, or get the languages into my brain, or convince the nice professors that I have an academic career ahead of me that they should write me references for. So. Homework now, writing later. So be it.
And now I'm having a snack and fighting though Plutarch, who is delightfully straightforward (for the most part) in his grammar and rather depressingly novel in his vocabulary choices. (I can't really blame him for that; I mentioned in my first post about him that he's as removed from Themistocles as someone writing now would be from Joan of Arc, so it's to be expected that the language would shift a bit over the intervening centuries.) Despite the difficulties, I'm really enjoying the reading. It's a nice change of pace from War and Politics to actually read about someone growing up and learning things, even if we're going to plunge inevitably into War and Politics fairly soon.
I'm mostly set on the topic for my Big Important Latin Paper (...hey, fifteen pages isn't huge, but it sure as hell isn't short, either), insofar as I idly compose paragraphs in my head while walking to the bus after class, but don't exactly have a thesis yet. I mean to discuss the relationship between slaves--both explicit/on-stage and implicit/off-stage, as we get strong hints of the latter--in Casina, and at some point I need to staple a thesis onto that. Maybe after I've got ten pages of actual writing in there.
My paper for Greek, however--smaller, less important, very much focused on the text and not on research--I don't know what to do with yet. I think we're supposed to talk about how the different authors handle Themistocles differently, but that seems awfully narrow as something we should all be talking about, and the prof clearly wants us to come up with a specific idea for our own individual treatment thereof. So I guess I need to think about that, and see if I can wrangle a thesis out of thin air. As one does.
It'd be nice to get some writing done, too. My brain is full of ideas. But writing my novels doesn't get the grades in the classes, or get the languages into my brain, or convince the nice professors that I have an academic career ahead of me that they should write me references for. So. Homework now, writing later. So be it.