Scientist smackdown

For those of you not familiar with either Richard Dawkins or Neil DeGrasse Tyson, both are respected scientists... And I just watched a clip online of Tyson "rebuking" Dawkins.  The transcription below (as well as corrections and punctuation) are mine, and this is what Tyson says about the difference between being an advocate and an educator: "One of them is you put the truth out there, and like you said, they either buy your book or they don't. Well, that's not being an educator; that's just putting it out there. Being an educator is not only getting the truth right but there's got to be an act of persuasion in there as well. Persuasion isn't always: 'here's the facts, you're either an idiot or you're not,' it's, 'here are the facts and here is a sensitivity to your state of mind;' and it's the facts plus the sensitivity, when convolved together, that creates impact."

I wish that I could have attached the clip...  But there's un-bleeped language from Dawkins at the end and, well, I'd rather spend ten minutes transcribing than two hours responding to emails about how I let a university professor drop profanity onto my blog.

Also, "convolved."  New favorite word.  ;)

Black Nile by Dan Morrison

I picked this up because I am, after a childhood of Indiana Jones and steady diet of Victorian-era explorers, an avowed Egypt-nut.  When my wife and I went there, it was a trip of a lifetime and we always talk about going back...  Which would be the price of another trip of a lifetime.  ;)

Until then, I have books.  This one chronicles one man's journey from the White Nile's origin at Lake Victoria aaall the way to Rosetta on the Mediterranean coast.  I was glad he spent a lot of time detailing the southern reaches of his journey, and I was expecting some Latin-related stuff later on...  But then I came across this not half-way in:

"We were approaching the Sudd.  For thousands of years this giant swamp--more than fifty thousand square miles, as big as England--had repelled invaders from the lands to the north.  The British explorer Samuel Baker described it as "a vast sea of papyrus ferns and rotting vegetation, and in that fetid heat there is a spawning tropical life that can hardly have altered very much since the beginning of the world."  In AD 61 the Roman emperor Nero, who controlled Egypt, dispatched troops up the river to find the source of the Nile.  They returned with reports of "immense marshes" that were too dense for all by the smallest of one-man canoes."

Imagine...  A physical barrier that stopped the Romans.  Not the Alps, Pyrenees, Rhine, Danube or even the deserts of the Middle East...  But a swamp.

Citation:
Dan Morrison, The Black Nile, New York: Viking Penguin, 2010, p. 132.

Old stories and a question

I was goofing around, finding fun tid-bits for the myth class I may be teaching in the Fall, and I remembered a line by one of my favorite authors, Terry Pratchett: "But it was much earlier even than that when most people forgot that the very oldest stories are, sooner or later, about blood." Comes from the opening page of his book Hogfather, a send-up of Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, etc. I do love satire.

But here's the rub, how do I teach that? Right now, I'm in the middle of a great book, The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break by NC native son Steven Sherrill. It's good, although dense, and not a book I could recommend to a student... Under eighteen. It has sexuality, cursing and a slew of check-marks that would get an "R" rating slapped on the movie.

... But how is that any different from teaching Saturn lying in wait for Uranus and dismembering him? Or Jupiter's cavalcade of conquests (read: rapes)? I mean, I'm not about to throw out decorum or good taste here, but where is the line? For this blog, for me as a teacher? I am curious what you all think. I am especially interested in parental input, since (after all), it's your children's minds I'm corrupting.

Citation:

Terry Pratchett, Hogfather, New York: HarperTorch, 1996, p. 1.

The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt

I heard about this one on the radio some months ago, but only just got around to it.  Even though Greenblatt's focus is on the Renascence humanist and bibliophile, Poggio Bracciolino, it is Bracciolino's discovery of the first-century BCE On the Nature of Things by Lucretius is the drive.

I really, really liked Greenblatt's reading and analysis of Epicurean, Stoic and Humanist philosophy within the context of their respective ages but...  Wow.  Is he ever biased.  He only grudgingly admits that Scholasticism (the intellectual driving force of the early to high Middle Ages) might (just maybe) have had something to do with the preservation of this great poem...  And, more to the point, he seems to delight in bashing on imperial and medieval Christians whenever he gets the chance.  


Ok, he's a prof at Harvard and his previous book was on Shakespeare, so I know he's going to favor the Ren/Ref ex post facto mentality...  But still.  There was something about reading this that set my intellectual tummy turning, both as a Latin teacher and former medievalist.  


That said, I want to read it again and mine it like the good little curiosity monster that I am.  ;)  

New label--"no-escape"

Ok.  I'm reading a book on the GOBI DESERT, right?  There should be nothing in here related to Rome, Western Europe or even the Indo-European language group (aside from the odd mention of the Silk Road), right?!  It's the middle of Outer Mongolia.

Alas.  King Midas.

The last chapter of John Man's Gobi: Tracking the Desert opens with the story behind a road named, "the Road of the King with the Ass' Ears" and as he starts telling it...  I'm thinking, hang on a sec.  Take out the daughter of the barber and swap in the reeds for the field-mice and it's one of the Midas myths.  Man does not state outright if the myth was a Turkish original grafted onto the Greek or if it was a story which migrated from west to east along the Silk Road but...  Yeesh!  There really is no escape, is there?

Warrior of Rome series by Harry Sidebottom

Well, you can tell by his (horridly unfortunate) name that he's British.  I grabbed the third book in this series, The Caspian Gates, by accident today at the library, but based on the opening chapter alone (to say nothing of his copious maps, chronology and glossary), I'm putting this one down in favor of starting from the beginning with Fire in the East.

The guy knows from Rome too; he isn't just a talented writer whose fiction happens to be historical...  He's an Oxford classics prof who happens to write fiction.  His website is here, and I am kinda geeked about these books.  Ever since I tried, and failed, to get into Jim Butcher's Codex Alera series last summer, I have been hankering for a little more machismo from my Roman fiction.  Especially after the slew of female-first-person books I've been reading of late (Pilate's Wife, Cleopatra's Daughter and I promise that I will try to read Cleopatra's Moon before the summer's out), I think that I'm looking forward to a little rock'em-sock'em action.  ;)