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Of course, summer isn’t over for another month and a half, and in northern California, the weather often feels summerish until November, but I can hardly believe that the fall semester starts in another week.Must work faster on my thesis.
I’ve been distracted with other activities this week, which might explain the scant blog posts. Here are a few things from other blogs to wet your whistle.
That’s it for now.
“[T]he mob of the sluggards has so grown in numbers that unless there are at least a modest few like yourself to defend the exact use of the language of Latium from the rust of vulgar barbarisms, we shall in a short time be lamenting its extinction and annihilation, so sadly will all the bright ornaments of noble expression be dulled by the slovenliness of the mob.” — Sidonius, writing in the fifth century, to his friend Hisparius, Ep. 2.10.1. (Translation W. B. Anderson, Loeb Classical Library).
Bumper sticker seen on a car in the employee parking lot at a Palo Alto high-tech company yesterday:
Growing the economy / shrinks the ecosystem
This from a person who works at a company that doubled its staff each of the last two years and will soon expand into a brand new building.
[Update: The company was VMware.]
“You blame both my delay and my silence. Both these charges can be refuted: for I am coming and I am now writing. Farewell.” — Sidonius, fifth century Roman nobleman and Gallic bishop, to his friend Florentinus, Book 4.19. (Translation W. B. Anderson, Loeb Classical Library).
I would like to have heard Tom Wolfe deliver the 35th Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities. Here are some of the highlights as reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Mr. Wolfe’s lecture, “The Human Beast,” took its title from a novel by Émile Zola, the 19th-century French novelist who described himself as a “naturalist” and whom Mr. Wolfe called “my idol.” But he also gave the author of La bête humaine and his scientific inspiration a mock scolding: “I love you, Émile, but by the time you and Darwin got hold of it, evolution had been irrelevant for 11,000 years. Why couldn’t you two see it? Evolution came to an end when the human beast developed speech! As soon as he became not Homo sapiens, ‘man reasoning,’ but Homo loquax, ‘man talking’!” . . .
He also referred to Max Weber, and then Clifford Geertz:
The work of scientists, in particular neurobiologists, Mr. Wolfe concluded, offers proof that culture, or “those things in human life that could not exist without speech,” trumps evolution. “It becomes difficult for neo-Darwinists to continue to say that structures consisting only of words are not real and durable,” the writer argued. He offered a quote from the Princeton anthropologist Clifford Geertz: “There is no such thing as a human nature independent of culture. Men without culture would not even be the clever savages of Lord of the Flies.”
I’ll keep an eye on the interweb for the entire lecture.
Everyone by now knows, or should know, to take anything on Wikipedia with a grain of salt. It’s not without some genuine value though. I like to use it as a quick way to find a few dates, or at least to get a sense of the historical context on a subject, to refresh my memory, or to help me fill in the gaps in my knowledge about a historical event. This works for some topics better than others. It seems to work well for topics in modern western military history, such as the two World Wars. It can also work for information about famous places. I just referred to the page on Seville to refresh my memory on the date of the city’s switch from Muslim to Christian control, although I wouldn’t cite this date in a paper without consulting a more reliable source.
But these pages are in a horrible state: Moors, Hispania Baetica, Córdoba, and Mezquita. Woe to any student who relies on them for a school report. These pages could lead them into C territory, or worse, if I were grading them. Beside all that, if I ever teach a class on medieval Spain, I can already anticipate the problems I’ll have trying to deal with the term “Moors.” It belongs in the same bin as “feudal.” Students should be familiar with these terms, but they also need to know how troublesome the words have become.
I’ve just updated this site to the 2.0 version of WordPress. In the process, I ended up with another blog page over at WordPress’s site itself. Maybe I’ll use that site for technical stuff. Not sure yet.
In the meantime, this here blog will be as lively as ever.
The semester is over. I’ll probably resume blogging again, but maybe not for another day or two.
Can’t people stop using the word “ask” as a noun? I hear that around the office all the time lately. “Our top five asks are…”, for example. Why not just say “our top five requests are…”? What’s wrong with that?
Although I said I’d only post articles on late antique and medieval topics, I can’t resist making fun of the jargon I hear at the office. (I’m on the 4-year plan for the MA degree mainly because I can’t give up the riches, glory, and fame that comes with a Silicon Valley programming job.)