Tag: classics

Paperback Nation:  My Favorite Classics Publishers

Paperback reader (paperback reader)
Paperback reader (paperback reader)
Paperback reader (paperback reader)
Paperback reader (paperback reader)

–A riff on the chorus of “Paperback Writer” (The Beatles)

When I try to calculate how many paperbacks we have, I wish that I had paid more (any) attention in math. We have hundreds of paperback classics, and some are duplicates. We have Conrad and Colette, Dickens and Dostoevsky, George Eliot and T.S. Eliot. A multitude of publishers specialize in classics, and we have a variety of editions to choose from. Here are some of my favorite publishers of classics, and a few words about them.

A variety of Penguins.

1.  Penguin Classics

According to a brief precis on the back page of a Penguin,  the first Penguin classic was published in 1945, E. V. Rieu’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey. Penguin stresses that classics were not widely available at the time except to students and scholars. Penguin brought affordable classics to the masses.

Penguins dominate our shelves. For one thing, they are attractive, with orange, green, or black spines, according to the era of publication, and are easy to find in bookstores. I appreciate the scholarly notes and fascinating introductions. Does any publisher have a more varied list of classics?

Penguin has branched out into a number of different classics lines in recent years. The Penguin Deluxe Classics are oversized paperbacks, with bold, original, sometimes cartoonish covers.  I love the outre, slightly surreal Jane Austen covers (Jane was nothing if not humorous) and the gritty realism of the the cover of Steinbeck’s East of Eden. On the other hand, the covers of Jane Eyre and The Scarlet Letter are grotesque.  But the Deluxe editions have the same notes and introductions found in the “straight” Penguins.

I also love the sturdy, attractive Penguin Clothbound Classics, with wallpaper=like cover designs by Coralie Bickford.  I never enjoyed Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea until I read it in the beautiful Penguin hardcover.  It is not my favorite of her books, but covers do matter! And these hardbacks too have the intros and notes from the original Penguins.

2.  Oxford World’s Classics

Oxford World’s Classics has been in business for “more than 100 years,” says its website. I am very fond of Oxfords: I like their covers, and the contrast of their white covers with their rival Penguins’ dark. Penguins and Oxfords are almost interchangeable to me. Both have excellent introductions and notes, but Oxfords go one step farther, providing a Chronology that compares the events in the author’s life with the main events and books published at the same time.

The print in the Oxfords is of a comfortable size and has enough space between the lines to be easy on the eye. Over the years I have acquired three “generations” of Oxfords, the yellows, then the red-and-whites, and now the whites. To be honest, I preferred the red-and-whites.  But all of them are gorgeous, so why complain? Oxford World’s Classics also has a hardcover line, with only 10 or so books. The Oxford hardcover War and Peace, translated by the Maudes and updated by a modern translator, is very nice indeed.

Vintage classics

4. Vintage Classics

The Vintage classics win my heart because they are so pretty.

Founded in the UK in 1990, Vintage features an eclectic group of authors ranging from Angela Carter to Fumiko Enchi, Irina Ratushinskaya to Nancy Mitford, Willa Cather to Charles Dickens, and W. Somerset Maugham to Ford Madox Ford.  The covers have always been gorgeous, but in 2007 the red signature spine made them even more eye-catching. .  Really, I adore those books. There are no notes, and only occasionally short introductions, but I can do without either.

4.  University of Chicago Press. 

The best translations of the Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by Richmond Lattimore and David Grene, are published by the University of Chicago. This was a huge project of Lattimore and Grene’s, who translated some of the plays themselves, but recruited other poets and classicists, among them Robert Fitzgerald, for others.   The translations are close to the Greek, as close as you’re likely to get.  The University of Chicago also publishes Lattimore’s beautiful translation of Homer’s Iliad.

5. Dover Publications

Founded in 1941, Dover publishes inexpensive, attractive editions of hard-to-find classics such as Anatole France’s Penguin Island, Le Fanu’s Complete Ghost Stories, and The Early Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick. They publish mainstream classics, too, but beware of the shorter Dover Thrift Classics: my copy of Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World had tiny print and no margins on the page, so I could not read it. No problem at all with the LONGER books, though, such as Dostoevksy’s Demons. Dover recently changed ownership, so perhaps someone forgot about margins. But over the years they have published a glorious variety of books, and you can still buy out-of=print Dovers online.

6.  Otto Penzler Presents American Mystery Classics

I have discovered many spellbinding American Golden Age classics through Otto Penzler’s series.  We hear so much about Golden Age English detective novels that we forget the American writers were also working in this era. :Among my favorites are Ellery Queen’s The Spanish Cape Mystery, Charlotte Armstrong’s The Unsuspected, H. F. Heard’s A Taste for Honey, and Stuart Palmer’s The Puzzl of the Happy Hooligan.

What are your favorite publishers of classics? Are you a Penguin person, or a groupie of a publisher I haven’t mentioned here?

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Why Classicists Don’t Need Gym

I recently read in The New Criterion  (November 2023) that students at Princeton can get a degree in classics without taking Greek and Latin. This startled me:  classics is by definition the study of ancient Greek and Latin literature. If Princeton whimsically lowers its standards, where does that leave the rest of us?  Does  Princeton intend to phase out classics?  There can be no other explanation.

In a  short story I wrote, a classics student at a small liberal arts college refuses to take required classes outside her major.  She takes pride in her resistance to science and gym. At the end of her sophomore year, she is summoned by the Dean. 

“There must be some misunderstanding. Did you know that you need these classes to graduate?”

She says that she has neither the time nor the energy to study subjects outside her major. “I’ve already done physics.  I’ve read Lucretius in Latin on physics and Epicurean philosophy. That should count for physics and philosophy.”

He compliments her on her versatility but reminds her that she needs the required classes anyway.  “And I’m sure you’ll enjoy the modern take on physics.”

The student quits and transfers to a state university where  she is also required to take core courses. She doesn’t mind: it was the principle of the thing at the posh college, where elite  students from the east coast had essentially taken college-level-courses at prep schools, which gave them an advantage over others, whether or not they had understood the subjects in their adolescence. On the other hand, the egalitarian state university gave bright, occasionally under-prepared students a chance to catch up and bloom.

I threw out this story because it was basically a treatise on education.  I, too, grumbled about core requirements. Fortunately, Drama in Western Culture proved to be my favorite class for two semesters, though I was bored by the Physics of Something or Other, and have blocked all memory of gym.

These days articles in newspapers and magazines frequently describe the confusion and anxiety in humanities departments. Enrollment is declining. They’re trying everything they can to survive.

But the description of the undergraduate classics program at Princeton is depressing.

 Five of the eight courses counted toward requirements must be taught by Department of Classics faculty ….. Of the eight courses, one must deal primarily with ancient literature, whether read in the original or in translation.

Photo from the Princeton website.

In the photo at the Princeton classics website, there are no books in Greek or Latin, except the green Loebs, referred to by my professors as the Low-ebbs, because they have the English translation facing the Greek or Latin. Loebs are useful if you want to read an obscure author, because it is sometimes the only text in print.

Here’s the good news: state universities still have traditional classics programs. And I’m sure the faculty at Princeton would like to restore tradition.

I am saddened by the desperate changes in the humanities.

O brave new world!

O tempora! O mores!

Where Are We Now? There’s No Such Thing As a Rich Classicist

Why, one wonders, are college students shy of studying the liberal arts?  According to an article by Peter Heller in The New Yorker, enrollment in the humanities is suffering.  The latest generation of college students, even at Harvard, is intent on “practical,” i.e., potentially lucrative, studies, hoping to get rich fast and retire early. 

All I can say is, it must be a nightmare to be young today.   And how naive to think that anyone gets rich fast in the post-Covid economy!  Perhaps they should read Maynard Keynes or Henry David Thoreau. 

Not that it was so different in my day.  Tsk, tsk, so impractical, people exclaimed if I mentioned classics – so I did not. 

I do not regret studying the humanities.  I  never deceived myself as to the financial potential of classics. 

But even though I have no regrets, it does not mean that the experience was perfect.  Many lovers of classics dropped out along the way – and perhaps this sketch/memoir will explain why.

THE FAUX-CLASSICS CAREER PATH

 On my first night in X-town, where I’d moved to attend graduate school, I was invited to a classics cocktail party. “Party” is not an accurate description of this gathering, but I do not know what else to call it.  We milled and thronged,  chatted and sipped cheap wine, or, in the case of the sole teetotaler,  7-Up.

I switched from bad wine to 7-Up.  “I do wish they had ginger ale.”

The teetotaler agreed.  “Or Sprite.”

“Anything without numbers.”

“Seven against Thebes?”

We could not name them.

But soon the joking was over.  The director of graduate studies tapped his glass with a fork.

“I’m going to be honest with you.  There are few jobs in classics,” he said, “and it is a competitive field.  It is essential to start publishing right away if you want to get a job.”  

A few of the students nodded feverishly, some took notes, and the rest of us looked stricken. I had been in town 10 hours and already was bored by academic bullshit. There  were no classics jobs.  There are no classics jobs.  Nobody goes into classics expecting to get a job.  Well, a few go for it – and good luck to them.  Most of us just want to read classics.

And this was a party!  


Some professors at the university were brilliant, others too eccentric to communicate – par for the course.  But the second year, we all suffered because the department admitted students who were not prepared: they had previously taken only a couple of classics classes.

The faculty came up with the Survey Solution.  Here we were, six or seven or ten or twelve years into our studies, and suddenly everyone – even those working on their doctorates – had to take Survey of Latin Literature and Survey of Greek Literature. 

Here’s what this meant: we had to reread several works we had studied as undergraduates. This was exasperating because we were denied the chance to take seminars in other literature.  Hello, Pro Caelio and Pro Archia again and yet again.  Ave atque Vale, Catullus!  And the Greek Survey class was even more frustrating:  we did not read enough philosophy to get a grip on the pre-Socratics let alone the tangled prose of Aristotle. No, since it was a survey class, we had to move on. 

A lot of us were pissed off. “I already have a master’s,” said Mary, one of the new students in the  Ph.D. program.  “And they’re treating me like an undergraduate.”

“Yeah, I have a master’s too.” I was exasperated.  The only thing that kept me going was being a T.A.  I loved teaching.

The Survey classes were the thin edge of the wedge.   My friend,  Mary, who had earned her master’s elsewhere and felt ill-treated in the doctoral program, dropped out to be a waitress and then found a job teaching at boarding school.  “I regret going into classics,” she said years later.  Being a Latin teacher had sent her to teach at many different schools in different cities, as one by one their Latin departments folded.

The classics department at X University lost several students at the end of that year.  They were shocked when brilliant, amiable Jack dropped out to go to law school. But perhaps he wasn’t keen on spending a career as an adjunct or Visiting Professor. 

Then there was Larry, a bright but very nervous man who failed his exams and decided to go to journalism school.

Graham did stints as a Visiting Lecturre and then went to library school. 

Charming, pretty Liza, the most stable and kind of the grad students, dropped out to get married and went back to school to get a teaching degree.  She taught English at a public school.

Cody, who had a B.A. from a posh English university, breezed through his classes at  X University because he had already read everything as an undergraduate.  He switched to computer science.


Susan spent a year as a Visiting Lecturer and was dismayed by the low quality of her students.  She went into business.

To my knowledge, only three of my fellow students became classics professors.  

Each of us has a different path – my guess is everyone still loves the classics.

It was never about money – but I do pity those who tried to make a career and did not get tenure. 

What Is Your Favorite “Brand-Name” Publisher of Classics?

 

Do you have a favorite “brand-name” publisher of classics?

There are quantities of choices:  Penguin, Dover, and countless other companies publish their own line of classics.  Jane Austen must keep them from bankruptcy:  there cannot be much demand for Eiric the Red and Other Icelandic Sagas or Polybius’s The Rise of the Roman Empire.
                         

I do have a lot of Penguins.  On the bookcase in front of me are several black-cover Penguins, among them Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, Balzac’s A Harlot High and Low (this is an older Penguin, with a yellow frame around the cover art), Natsume Soseki’s Botchan, Plato’s Republic, and Andrei Bely’s Petersburg. I thought all the Penguin classics  had endnotes, until I checked the Japanese novels – these do not – nor does my 1970 copy of Balzac’s A Harlot High and Low. So perhaps the abundant notes are a recent phenomenon. 
                  

I am also fond of Oxford World Classics, which I consider to be in the same class as Penguins.  Most of my Oxfords were published this century, so all have an introduction, notes, and a chronology of the author’s life with the main historical events in another.  I have a few older used Oxfords (Trollopes) with yellow covers –  and I don’t believe those do have notes.  But they are all perfectly durable and readable, with notes or without.

Few classics publishers provide footnotes. That is the advantage of Penguins and Oxfords.  I am a huge fan of the Vintage classics, because I love the covers, but if you want notes, forget it. I do enjoy reading these pretty Vintage  paperbacks of Dickens and the Brontes, but some may be to-be-read once editions, because the paper quality varies.
                  

Modern Library paperbacks used to look dull, but they are sturdy and usually have good-sized print.  Lately they have spruced up the design.  And some of them do have notes!

Some of my used paperback classics are from defunct publishers. Were the old Everyman paperbacks published by Everyman’s Library? I also have some used ’80s Hogarth Press paperbacks of E. F. Benson (okay, not quite a classic) and a few obscure 19th-century writers.  

Are you a Penguin fan? Do you collect new or used paperbacks by certain publishers?  Do you choose one “brand” over another?

In Which I Meditate on Classical Snobbery and Have a Fling with Cicero

There are two kinds of classicists: the snobs and the proles. I am a snobbish prole, or do I mean a prole snob? For most of my life I have read widely in the canon of ancient literature. Though I do not make my living in classics, I occasionally enjoy a scholarly book such as Sarah Lindheim’s relatively light Mail and Female: Epistolary Narrative and Desire in Ovid’s Heroides. 

Classics is not for everybody, yet I am grateful every day for an education by snobbish classics professors who taught not only Latin and Greek but the close reading of literature. Their obsession with grammar, style, figures of speech, and poetic meter blew my little undergraduate mind. And when I was offered a teaching assistantship at the only graduate school I applied to (the application fee of $25 was too expensive!), I was able to teach first-year Latin and Virgil as well as continue my studies.

Though sure of my language skills, I was apprehensive about teaching. My attitude was: You WILL do this, Kat! You HAVE to. And so I did. I was a gifted Latin teacher at the college level. My students enrolled for the language requirement but were hard-working and a pleasure to teach: they ranged from an extremely sweet frat boy (polite, never drunk) to a goofy English major who seemed dazed by the weight of the Complete Shakespeare to two brilliant pre-med students who were by far the best students. All eventually mastered grammar and read the Antiquae Sententiae in Wheelock, which is still a favorite first-year Latin textbook.

Teaching honed my Latin and my confidence. The only adverse effect of such an education on my personality was a certain snobbery, a disdain and pity for those who read the classics only in translation. I do have a strong feeling that classics professors, not English professors, should teach the Classical Lit in Translation classes. It baffles me that English professors can poach Classical Literature in Translation, when the same class is offered by the classics department–and taught by classicists! The particular English professor I’m thinking of dabbled in the Greeks but eschewed Roman literature altogether. O tempora! O mores!

Cicero

The real gift of my education, though, has been the solace of getting better-acquainted with the ancients through my own reading. This fall I had a literary fling with Cicero, and was extremely touched by his little-known speech, Pro Marcello (In Defense of Marcellus). Friends of M. Marcellus gathered in 46 B.C. in the Senate to ask Julius Caesar to allow Marcellus, who he had fought on the wrong side of the Civil War, to return from self-imposed exile. Cicero, who had also sided with Pompey, argued that Marcellus should be allowed to return safely to Rome as had Cicero and others of similar background.

This speech is as much a eulogy of Caesar as it is a defense of Marcellus. Cicero’s obsequiousness and flattery of Caesar can seem absurd, unless you are, like me, breathing a sigh of relief when Cicero manages not to alienate yet another powerful man and literally keep his head on. He needed to pay court to Caesar in order to help his friend. He tells Caesar that the pardon of Marcellus will be his greatest deed, that brilliant though his war prowess was, his deeds of peace and restoration of civilization would be even greater.

Here is a famous passage from the speech. Bear in mind all these words fit gracefully into two sentences in Latin.

Unless this city is stabilized by by your plans and institutions, your name will merely wander far and wide, and not have a stable place in history. There will be among those who will be born, just as there is among us, a great difference of opinion about your achievements: some will praise your deeds to the sky , others will think they lack some great signifiance, if you have not quenched the flame of civil war with the security of our country. The result of the deeds of war may seem to them the work of fate, but the stability of Rome will be praised as your own design.

Alas, Marcellus was assassinated while he traveled back to Rome. Dangerous times…

Homework at the End of the World: Lockdown, Classics, and Snakes and Ladders

Turn on, tune in, drop out.  But we’re doing this through literature, not drugs.

It’s time to read the classics. We’ve got a lot of homework at the end of the world!  My copy of Don Quixote is on the night table, but I am also finishing up Anthony Burgess’s Enderby books, which are comic classics in their own right. 

And then there’s the Latin literature.  Much of it is comic, too.  

Why, you may wonder, would anyone want to read Roman comedy during lockdown?  Well, it’s fun for me, and it’s funny.  But I do love classics in other languages too,  and am thrilled that so many people are turning to the great books. According to essays  in The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Washington Post, people are reading War and Peace, Middlemarch, and The Decameron.  And sales are up at Penguin, according to The Guardian.

In the fifth (or is it sixth?) week of lockdown, the number of coronavirus cases here has climbed from seven to 5,000.  All I can say is, it is terrifying, but thank God we live in a sparsely-populated state.  Every day we wake up and are glad we’re well, but at the same time,  What fresh hell is this?    

I have a bookish discovery.  LET ME RECOMMEND THE BEST BOOK YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF,  Doris Langley Moore’s A Game of Snakes and Ladders, first published in 1938 and recently reissued by Furrowed Middlebrow. This is one of the most charming novels I have read, and I will certainly read it again and again.  A great theater novel!

At the end of World War I, Lucy and Daisy, actresses in a theatrical company, have become casual friends:   Lucy, a  witty, charming vicar’s daughter,  got the job for Daisy, a lower-class woman stranded in Australia after a bad marriage.  When the company arrives in Egypt, the social gap between the two  widens: Daisy absorbs herself in an affair with the rich owner of the company, while Lucy desperately saves money to return to London.  Lucy loses her money, her looks, and job after a long illness, mainly because of a decision of Daisy’s.  You will love Lucy’s story–she never loses hope but is stranded for years in Egypt–and you will  admire Moore’s graceful, dazzling prose.  

This is the best of the three books I’ve read by Moore, who was a novelist, a Byron scholar, and founder of a fashion museum.

Diary of a Latinist: The Classics Bulletin Board

The first problem is, we were poor.  The second is, we were  women. The third  is, we were not the canny students who read the classics bulletin board and scribbled down information about summer scholarships at The American Academy in Rome.

Showing up for class after working the night shift: “Filled out your application?”

Stage direction:  Burst into giggles.

There was nothing on that bulletin board for my friends and me.  We could not afford Rome, even if we had won a scholarship. The irony is that the secretary might have found us other grants, since she was the only one who understood the system.  But we stared blankly at the professor who told us to check out the bulletin board.  He was well-meaning but clueless. 

It was never going to happen.

Once a member of the middle class, I’d dropped a class or two in the struggle for independence.  For a year, a toxic relative paid my tuition, grudging to the point that he did not reveal until my senior year that there was a college savings account for me. (He had spent most of it.)   And so I  worked part-time, as did most of my friends, to pay rent (for a tiny room in a house with a communal kitchen), tuition (eventually covered by loans and grants),  food (a lot of Ramen noodles), and necessities (soap, shampoo, etc.).

I was too exhausted to think about Rome.  Bizarrely, like the travel writer in Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist, I had little desire to travel.  I had already attended dinner parties with Catullus in my head (“You will dine well if you bring your own”) and pondered the words of  Horace (Epistle 1.11):  “…They change their sky, not their spirit, who hurry across the sea.”

 And I certainly would not have gone to Rome without my boyfriend.  Was that being a woman? No, I was in love. 

As I have said, I was not a bulletin board person.  But a wonderful small thing happened there.  A friend’s brilliant, charming parent showed up in front of the bulletin board and congratulated me on winning the Latin Prize.

I was so touched.  In the end, it’s these little moments that make it possible to pursue our dreams. Professors are distant, friends care. I fondly remember the socialists, hippies, anarchists, poets, and others I met along the way.  Just a word from the past to the future, now from the future to the past. 

Musing on the Classics & the Mystery of the Lapsed Subscription

My collection of copies of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.”

I love rereading the classics. Not occasionally, but constantly.  My shabby copies of nineteenth-century novels fall open to favorite scenes. What ho!  Is it War and Peace time? (That’s on New Year’s Day.)  And I am once again spellbound by the kindness and simplicity of my favorite character,  Marya Bolokonsky, when she forgives Mademoiselle Bourienne, her  shallow French companion, “with her ribbons and pretty face,” for making out with Marya’s imbecilic suitor.   

Every year I reread four of my best-loved books, War and Peace,  Daniel Deronda, Villette, and Bleak House.  They are brilliant, witty, intense,  and gorgeously-written.   These are the most perfect books I have ever read.

Occasionally, when I feel almost too well-acquainted with one of them,  I read another by the same author.  For example, Anna Karenina is my Tolstoy alternate.  Yet I also know this book extremely well.  Oh, yes, I love this scene, I thought, smiling, during a recent rereading of Anna Karenina.

And who could not be charmed by Levin’s comic perturbation when he is late for his wedding because of a wardrobe mix-up?  His servant forgot to provide a fresh shirt, and he can’t wear yesterday’s crumpled shirt with his new stylish waist-coat and coat.  Levin’s other shirts are packed in a trunk at his fiancee’s house.

The dialogue charms and perfectly depicts the personalities of Levin and his friend Oblonsky.

‘Was ever a man in such a terribly idiotic position?’ he demanded.

‘Yes, it is stupid,’ Oblonsky concurred with a soothing smile. ‘But don’t worry, it will be here in a minute.’

‘Oh, how can I help it?’ said Levin with suppressed fury. ‘And these idiotic open waistcoats—it’s impossible!’ He glanced at his crumpled shirt-front. ‘And suppose the things have already gone to the station!’ he exclaimed in despair. ‘

‘Then you’ll have to wear mine.’

Tolstoy weaves a web of happy and unhappy families.  The wedding of Levin and Kitty occurs in the middle of this masterpiece, which centers on three marriages, two disrupted by adultery. Anna Karenina leaves her husband Karenin for Vronsky, and virtually ruins Karenin’s career as well as her reputation;  her brother Stiva Oblonsky cheats on his wife Dolly, but Dolly forgives him, ironically because of Anna’s intervention. (Does Tolstoy think adultery runs in families?)

Tolstoy descrbes the marriage of the innocents Levin and Kitty optimistically, though no marriage is romantic or ideal.   

Tolstoy’s books are nimble, well-plotted, fast-paced, vibrant, and the characters jump off the page.  As for translations, my favorite is the Maude.

THE MYSTERY OF THE LAPSED SUBSCRIPTION.  I do not read enough of the TLS to justify a subscription, but I enjoy the N.B. column, and you can’t go wrong with Mary Beard as classics editor. Over the years I have bought way, way too many books because of the fascinating reviews.  (That aspect of a subscripiton is not good.)

A few days ago, when I was mysteriously “shut out” of the website, I wondered, What the hell…?   So I wrote to the helpline, in India or China or wherever, and was told that my subscription was canceled last March.  I know I resubscribed later;  how otherwise could I have accessed all the articles until this January?  But they say they have no record…

I’ll resubscribe after I’ve read all the books I’ve bought!

The Future of Education: Why Is It Trendy to Trash the Classics?

Although I am trying to be peaceful and positive— avoiding the crowd, steering clear of argument, making chitchat for the greater good, bicycling to save a devastated planet—I have decided to respond to an irresponsible, depressing article published at the Millennial blog, Book Riot,  “When You Hate the Classics, But You’re an English Teacher.” 

First, let me say I have known many splendid, well-read English teachers.  And yet I have been appalled by others who have not cracked a classic since college.

The writer Lily Dunn may well be of the latter persuasion.  She begins, “Hello, my name is Lily and I hate the Classics. Also, I am an English teacher.”

She writes,

I know what you’re thinking.…but wouldn’t it be more hypocritical if I made my students read books I pretended to love while secretly wishing I could bring the dead author back to life just to tell him (it’s usually a him) how overrated he is? 

Indeed, Dunn is an equal-opportunity enemy of the classics: she spares neither sex in her ravings.  She despises Hawthorne’s The  Scarlet Letter, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Melville’s Moby Dick,  Mark Twain (she finds the dialect too challenging), Joyce’s Ulysses, and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles.  

One does wonder if she has finished  any of these books.  She writes of her loathing of Thomas Hardy, “I can’t expect a 17th century author to be all woke.”  Can’t you imagine her professor writing gently in the margin, “Victorian”? 

I am sure Book Riot has some talented, bright contributors who could have written a thoughtful essay about the classics.

When you click on Dunn’s bio, you will discover that she is not a high school English literature teacher, as she implies, but a literacy teacher in Hong Kong.   

Whew!

The Class in Classics

Class is fluid when you are in classics. You can rise a class or two in the world.  Without classics, I might have puttered around for years as an office clerk or at a library circulation desk (and the latter would have been a long shot). But when you are young, have a degree in classics, and invest your life savings in preppy clothes, you can get any job. Yes, you’ll have to move to Maine or Texas, but at least you’ll work.

I fell out of the middle class for a time.  Can that really happen?  When my parents got divorced, my dad got custody, and then got bored and left me to live on my own. A lesbian teacher on the prowl picked me up (I was her second high school student) and installed me in her house for a year and a half. I wonder, what class was I then? Meretrix (a prostitute)? Serva (a slave)? Later, I knew another classics student who’d been prey to whoever came along, and had a reputation as a meretrix, poor girl. She’d had sex with the sex education teacher.

Classics brought us back into the middle class.  We both found good, if not lucrative, jobs.

Classics— derived from the Latin noun classis,  meaning “a  class or division of the people (according to property),” and classicus,  an adjective meaning “of or belonging to the highest class.”

Language enthusiasts love Greek and Latin. Some enjoy the puzzle of the grammar and syntax, others the elaborate figures of speech and meters, still others the history or the philosophy.

I was always a serious reader.  I’d devoured Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Trollope on my own. I was a Victorian, or might as well have been. But unlike John Stuart Mill, who started learning Greek when he was three,  I took it up in college.  It all started when I decided Homer was ridiculous in translation. Before I knew it I was studying Greek and Latin, and reading Homer and Virgil in the original. I was an epic freak!

It wasn’t just the literature I loved, it was the all-absorbing process of translation. It required so much equipment!  I hustled into the library and spread out my Greek and Latin books, dictionaries, grammars, commentaries, notebooks, and flashcards.

The Greeks and Romans are with me for better or worse, through sickness and health. In the hospital, I have recited lines of Latin poetry feverishly. Once a doctor decided I was well enough to go home when he discovered me reading Lucretius in my room.  Nowadays I snuggle up on the couch with classics and a dictionary.  I’ve read classics so long I no longer need an entire table!  There’s less “equipment.”

The ancient languages are no longer spoken; you study them to read the literature. And since you are reading poetry, plays, philosophy, oratory, history, and more, the vocabulary is different for each genre. Even if the words overlap, they mean something different. That’s why you need a dictionary.   For instance, the Latin word classis, which can mean “class,” also means “fleet (of ships).”You cannot read Virgil or Livy without encountering a  classis, a fleet of ships.

Excuse me while I go read Sappho and Catullus.  (Sappho influenced Catullus, and he translated one of her poems.”

Later!

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