Mark Zuckerberg and the Aeneid

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was a student of the classics, studying Latin in prep school and planning, at one point, to major in classics. (Who knew?) From a New Yorker piece by Jose Antonio Vargas:

Zuckerberg has always had a classical streak, his friends and family told me. (Sean Parker, a close friend of Zuckerberg, who served as Facebook’s president when the company was incorporated, said, “There’s a part of him that — it was present even when he was twenty, twenty-one — this kind of imperial tendency. He was really into Greek odysseys and all that stuff.”) At a product meeting a couple of years ago, Zuckerberg quoted some lines from the Aeneid. On the phone, Zuckerberg tried to remember the Latin of particular verses. Later that night, he IM’d to tell me two phrases he remembered, giving me the Latin and then the English: “fortune favors the bold” and “a nation/empire without bound.” Before I could point out how oddly applicable those lines might be to his current ambitions, he typed back:

again though these are the most famous quotes in the aeneid not anything particular that i found.

The Face of Facebook (New Yorker)

[The most famous words in the Aeneid are those that begin the poem: “Arma virumque cano,” or “I sing of arms and of a man,” in Allen Mandelbaum’s 1971 translation. (These are words in the poem, not a “quote” in the poem.) I wonder whether Zuckerberg knows about the now-gone Aeneid on Facebook project.]

Robert Fagles' Aeneid

Robert Fagles' translation of Virgil's Aeneid will be out in a couple of days. From a New York Times article:

"I usually try not to ride the horse of relevance very hard," Mr. Fagles said recently at his home near Princeton University, from which he recently retired, after teaching comparative literature for more than 40 years. "My feeling is that if something is timeless, then it will also be timely." But he went on to say that The Aeneid did speak to the contemporary situation. It's a poem about empire, he explained, and was commissioned by the emperor Augustus to celebrate the spread of Roman civilization.

"To begin with, it's a cautionary tale," Mr. Fagles said. "About the terrible ills that attend empire -- its war-making capacity, the loss of blood and treasure both. But it's all done in the name of the rule of law, which you'd have a hard time ascribing to what we're doing in the Middle East today.

"It's also a tale of exhortation. It says that if you depart from the civilized, then you become a murderer. The price of empire is very steep, but Virgil shows how it is to be earned, if it’s to be earned at all. The poem can be read as an exhortation for us to behave ourselves, which is a horse of relevance that ought to be ridden."

Translating Virgil's Epic Poem of Empire (New York Times, free registration required)

And here's a link to a related post, with one passage from the Aeneid, as translated by Robert Fitzgerald, Stanley Lombardo, and Robert Fagles:

Three Virgils

Reader, which translation do you prefer?

"Uber-responsible" types

Lifehacker, the home of "tips and downloads for getting things done," had a remarkably ill-advised post over the weekend, Get Drunk Faster. Oy. Some spirited (no pun intended) comments followed, one of which challenged readers to "name one …1… literal or fictional uber-responsible type that the opposite sex ultimately digs."

That's easy. In Homer's Iliad, there's the Trojan warrior Hector. His wife Andromache loves him, and Helen (the most beautiful woman in the world) seems attracted to him. In Iliad 6, when Hector and Helen speak, she wonders,

"But since the gods have ordained these evils,
Why couldn't I be the wife of a better man,
One sensitive at least to repeated reproaches?"

Like Hector? Helen then rebukes her keeper Paris by name and invites her "'Dear brother-in-law'" to sit with her. Hector's reply leaves little doubt about the undercurrent of feeling in this scene:

"Don't ask me to sit, Helen, even though
You love me. You will never persuade me.
My heart is out there with our fighting men."

Hector then tells Helen that he's off to see his wife and child. His wife and child. Get it? He's a family man, whom we see as a son, brother, husband, and father. Yet his responsibility to the people of Troy trumps even his devotion to family: when, in one of the most moving passages in the poem, Andromache pleads with Hector to consider his own safety in fighting the Greeks, he cannot honor her plea. The city is his responsibility, and he is his responsibility: his name means holder in Homer's Greek.

Aeneas, the hero of Virgil's Aeneid, one of the few survivors of the fall of Troy, is another "uber-responsible" figure with strong sexual appeal. Aeneas is devoted above all to what Virgil calls pietas, his duty — to the gods, his family, his people. Aeneas' departure from Troy gives us an emblem of that devotion: as Aeneas leads the band of survivors, he carries his father Anchises on his back. Aeneas is responsible too for his own son Ascanius: thus Troy's past and its people's future are both his responsibility. Dido, queen of Carthage, is smitten as Aeneas tells the story of Troy's destruction. She is, literally, love-sick, "a wound / Or inward fire eating her away," and she kills herself when Aeneas abandons her (not long after consummating the relationship) to find a home for his people.

Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) at the end of Casablanca (1942) is a distant inheritor of Aeneas' sense of pietas: "But I've got a job to do too. Where I'm going, you can't follow. What I've got to do, you can't be any part of." Rick walks off into "a beautiful friendship" (not sexual of course) with Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains), who has said that "well, if I were a woman and I weren't around, I should be in love with Rick." Thus the "uber-responsible type" might appeal not only to the opposite sex but to "all the sexes," as Ira Gershwin put it. Everybody comes to Rick's.¹

[Iliad translation by Stanley Lombardo (1997). Aeneid translation by Robert Fitzgerald (1983). Casablanca screenplay by Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, and Howard Koch.]

¹ Everybody Comes to Rick's: the title of the Murray Burnett–Joan Alison play that was the basis for Casablanca; also a line in the film, spoken by Louis to Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt).

Related posts
On the Iliad and Aeneid

Aeneid on Facebook

[From Aeneid on Facebook. Click on the magnifying glass after following the link.]

This inspired project is by Erika Grace Carlson and Heather Day.

(via Coudal Partners)

Three Virgils

Here's a passage from the Aeneid in three translations. The Trojan hero Aeneas is recounting the fall of Troy to Dido, queen of Carthage. In this passage, Aeneas offers an extended (epic) simile to characterize the Greek warrior Pyrrhus (Achilles' son, also known as Neoptolemus). Pyrrhus is soon seen breaking down doors, hunting down the Trojan warrior Politës, and killing the Trojan king Priam at his own altar. (Virgil spares his reader the details of Priam's beheading.) In this simile, Pyrrhus is a figure of sinister phallic force:

Just at the outer doors of the vestibule
Sprang Pyrrhus, all in bronze and glittering,
As a serpent, hidden swollen underground
By a cold winter, writhes into the light,
On vile grass fed, his old skin cast away,
Renewed and glossy, rolling slippery coils,
With lifted underbelly rearing sunward
And triple-tongue aflicker.

Robert Fitzgerald, 1983

*

Framed by the portal to the entrance court
Pyrrhus stood in his glory, haloed in bronze,

    As a snake raised on poison basks in the
        light
    After a cold winter has kept him
        underground,
    Venomous and swollen. Now, having
        sloughed
    His old skin, glistening with youth, he puffs
        out
    His breast and slides his lubricious coils
    Toward the sun, flicking his three-forked
        tongue.

Stanley Lombardo, 2005

*

There at the very edge of the front gates
springs Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, prancing in
    arms,
aflash in his shimmering brazen sheath like a
    snake
buried the whole winter long under frozen turf,
swollen to bursting, fed full on poisonous
    weeds
and now it springs into light, sloughing its old
    skin
to glisten sleek in its newfound youth, its back
    slithering,
coiling, its proud chest rearing high to the sun,
its triple tongue flickering through its fangs.

Robert Fagles, 2006

A few details that strike me: Fitzgerald's "sprang" instantly makes Pyrrhus a figure of frightening energy. "Writhes into the light" has an eerie beauty but seems at odds with the sudden movement of "sprang." Lombardo's Pyrrhus is more a warrior who's ready for his close-up, basking in the spotlight and puffing up with pride. "Venomous and swollen" stands out as choice phrasing. (Here, as in his translations of Homer, Lombardo sets off epic similes with italics.) Fagles' translation is striking in its over-the-top alliteration but sometimes bewildering in its diction. "Prancing in arms" seems unintentionally funny (is Pyrrhus camping it up?), and "sheath," which might suggest a sheath dress or, alas, a condom (British slang), seems like a very oddly chosen word.

Reader, which version(s) do you prefer?

Related posts
Aeschylus in three translations
Robert Fagles' Aeneid
Whose Homer?

Variations of Virgil (New York Sun, article with two excerpts from the Fagles translation)

Three Virgils

Something I wrote when comparing translations by Robert Fitzgerald, Stanley Lombardo, and Stephen Mitchell:

A translation of a poem as vast as the Odyssey rises or falls not in its treatment of great, memorable lines — such as those that describe Argos, lying neglected and bug-ridden on a pile of dung — but in its treatment of what might be called ordinary lines, those that go by in a way that invites no special attention from a reader. Someone walks into town; someone offers a greeting; someone serves a meal: the translator must attend to it all.

So too with Virgil’s Aeneid , which I’m now teaching. A couple of days ago I found myself admiring these lines from Stanley Lombardo’s 2005 translation (in the Latin, 4.522–529):

It was night, and all over earth weary bodies
Lay peacefully asleep. Woods and wild seas
Had fallen still, and the stars were midway
In their gliding orbits. Ox and meadow were
    quiet,
And all the brilliant birds who haunt
The lapping lakes and tangled hedgerows
Were nestled in sleep under the dark, silent
    sky.

But not Dido, unhappy heart.

For me, Lombardo’s translation of these lines shines even brighter when read against translations by Robert Fitzgerald and Robert Fagles. Here is Fitzgerald’s 1983 translation:

The night had come, and weary in every land
Men’s bodies took the boon of peaceful sleep.
The woods and the wild seas had quieted
At that hour when the stars are in mid-course
And every field is still; cattle and birds
With vivid wings that haunt the limpid lakes
Or nest in thickets in the country places
All were asleep under the silent night.
Not, though, the agonized Phoenician queen.

And Fagles’s 2006 translation:

                                     The dead of night,
and weary living creatures throughout the
    world
are enjoying peaceful sleep. The woods and
    savage seas
are calm, at rest, the circling stars are gliding
    on
In their midnight courses, all the fields lie
    hushed
and the flocks and gay and gorgeous birds
    that haunt
the deep clear pools and the thorny country
    thickets
all lie quiet now, under the silent night, asleep.
But not the tragic queen . . .

In FItzgerald’s translation, the clause beginning “cattle and birds” seems weighted down with prepositional phrases: “with vivid wings,” “in thickets,” “in the country places,” “under the silent night.” Fagles’s translation is marred by clichés (“dead of night,” “savage seas”), redundancy (“living creatures,” “calm, at rest”), and strangely extravagant phrasing (“gay and gorgeous birds”). Here as elsewhere in his translations, he . . . trails off.

Looking at Fitzgerald and Fagles helps me to notice how Lombardo captures the Latin pictaeque (“painted,” “colored”) with the one word brilliant and avoids the predictable “silent night.” Looking at the Latin (via the Perseus Digital Library) helps me to admire what Lombardo does with the final line, “At non infelix animi Phoenissa” (literally, ”But not the unhappy Phoenician soul”). From soul to heart : a reasonable shift. And, I suspect, a tip of the hat: in William Morris’s 1876 translation, 4.529 refers to Dido as “that most unhappy heart.”

For my money, it’s Lombardo first, Fitzgerald second, and Fagles a distant third.

Related posts
Aeschylus in three translations
Three more Virgils
Translators at work and play
Whose Homer?

Grammer and spelling

Mark Zuckerberg, inscribing a copy of The Elements of Style: “Now learn some grammer.”

Well, he could have been joking. Hard to say.

Related reading
All OCA Elements of Style posts (Pinboard)
Mark Zuckerberg and the Aeneid

Refugees

Virgil, Aeneid, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (1983).

“O tell me where is fancy bread?”

It is now Friday, June 17, 1904, sometime after midnight. Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus make their way to a “cabman’s shelter,” a coffeehouse where Bloom aims to set Stephen right with a cup of coffee and something to eat. (As we will soon learn, Stephen hasn’t eaten since June 15.) Here’s a wonderful passage showing Bloom’s and Stephen’s utterly different responses to their surroundings. From the “Eumaeus” episode, written in the meandering, sleepy sentences one might be speaking in the wee small hours of a hard day’s night:

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922).

Four notes:

~ “Ibsen, associated with Baird’s”: an association established in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916):

as he went by Baird’s stonecutting works in Talbot Place the spirit of Ibsen would blow through him like a keen wind, a spirit of wayward boyish beauty.

Don Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated notes that Joyce changed the real-life D.G. Baird and J. Paul Todd’s engineering works to “the stonecutter’s” and cites Joyce’s essay “Ibsen’s New Drama” (1900), describing the wife of a sculptor in Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken (1899):

Her airy freshness is as a breath of keen air. The sense of free, almost flamboyant, life, which is her chief note, counterbalances the austerity of Irene and the dullness of Rubek.

~James Rourke’s city bakery: a real Dublin bakery.

~ The faithful Achates, “fidus Achates,” is Aeneas’s companion in the Aeneid.

~ “O tell me where is fancy bread”: a play on Shakespeare.

Related reading
All OCA Joyce posts (Pinboard)

Charles Van Doren (1926–2019)

The New York Times has an obituary for Charles Van Doren, who has died at the age of ninety-three. The snarky Times headline calls Van Doren “a quiz show whiz who wasn’t.” Yes, the quiz-show scandals.

But here’s another way to think of Charles Van Doren: as a deeply thoughtful student of the sorrows and possibilities of human life. And now I’m borrowing from a post I wrote in 2006:

In 1999, Van Doren was invited to address a reunion of Columbia College’s class of 1959. Like these alums, he started at Columbia in 1955 (as an assistant professor); he resigned in 1959. In the course of some remarks on how to live late in one’s life, he mentions Aeneas’s journey to the world of the dead, which begins at Lake Avernus in Italy, and quotes the Sibyl’s words to Aeneas:

“The way downward is easy from Avernus.
Black Dis’s door stands open night and day.
But to retrace your steps to heaven's air,
There is the trouble, there is the toil.”

[Virgil, Aeneid 6, translated by Robert Fitzgerald]

Van Doren notes (in his own translation) the advice that the shade of Phlegyas gives Aeneas: “Study justice, and do not scorn the gods!” (Phlegyas, enraged after Apollo seduced his daughter, set fire to the god's temple at Delphi.) Van Doren goes on to say that

None of us can take Aeneas’s journey, nor, in fact, did he. The story of his descent into the Underworld and his return to the brightness of the sun is a myth, and myths are stories that are so true they can never happen. Something like his journey may happen to anyone. The human name for it may be despair.

Despair — the Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard called it. As we enter this last part of our time we mustn’t forget that bad things can happen. The failure of hopes, the death of friends, the venality of politicians, the manifest cruelty that stalks the world — these may tempt us to descend from Avernus into that dark place where safety seems to lie. But then we scorn the gods. This great line is from Paul Valéry’s “Le cimitière mari”:

Le vent se lève; il faut tenter de vivre!

The wind's rising; we have to try to live!

Related reading
“All the Answers” (Van Doren’s 2008 New Yorker piece on the quiz-show scandals)
Two accounts of Van Doren’s talk — 1, 2 — from members of the class of ’59

Best years, given or given up

I was browsing a biography of Teresa Wright in the library, looking first at the pages about Shadow of a Doubt (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1943) and The Best Years of Our Lives (dir. William Wyler, 1946). And my confidence in the writer began to drop. Here is his discussion of the title of Wyler’s film:

“The best years” cannot refer to the time of the war, nor to what preceded it — that would be too cynical and would reduce the significance of the heroic exploits of these men. Nor can the title refer to what is in the future — that would be hypothetical and, from a narrative standpoint, a cheat. Nor can the best years indicate what we see in the present, which is obviously a time of disillusionment and disappointment.

The title makes sense only if we understand it not literally but ironically. That is certainly the impact of the only moment in the picture when the phrase is spoken: when the character played by Virginia Mayo complains loudly to her husband (Dana Andrews), “I’ve given you the best years of my life!" In fact, she’s given him nothing of the kind: she married him less than three weeks before he went off to war, and he has returned to find her frivolous, avaricious and adulterous.

Donald Spoto, A Girl’s Got to Breathe: The Life of Teresa Wright (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016).

But that’s not what “the character played by Virginia Mayo,” otherwise known as Marie Derry, says to husband Fred. What she does say:

“I’ve given you every chance to make something of yourself. I gave up my own job when you asked me. I gave up the best years of my life! And what have you done? You've flopped.”

Selfish Marie doesn’t claim to have given Fred anything — except chances. But she has given up , given up what belonged to her — the time that has been lost to war, time that can never be regained. In an earlier scene, when Marie speaks of being “right back where [we] started,” “just as if nothing had ever happened,” Fred tells her, “We can never be back there. We never want to be back there.”

I suspect that the title of Wyler’s film lurks behind a passage in Robert Fitzgerald’s 1961 translation of the Odyssey . In book 23, Penelope speaks to Odysseus of their twenty years apart:

                                                      “Think
what difficulty the gods gave: they denied
    us
life together in our prime and flowering
    years,
kept us from crossing into age together.”

“Our prime and flowering years” — or the best years of our lives.

[Fitzgerald served in the U.S. Navy in the Second War. He writes about that in the postscript to his translation of the Aeneid .]

Baby naming

Being a parent can be as complicated as you choose to make it:

Lisa and Jon Stone of Lynnwood, Wash., turned to a name consultant because they didn't want their son to be "one of five Ashtons in the class," says Mrs. Stone, 36, a graphic designer. For Mr. Stone, 37, a production director for a nonprofit arts organization, the challenge was to find a "cool" name that would help his son stand out. "An unusual name gets people's attention when you're searching for a job or you're one in a field of many," he says.

At first they considered a family name, Greene, but thought Greene Stone sounded like "some New Age holistic product." Mr. Stone liked Finn Stone and Flynn Stone, but thought both sounded too much like the name of a cartoon family from the Stone Age. After reading through eight baby-name books, the Stones contacted Laura Wattenberg, author of "The Baby Name Wizard," for advice. She suggested they avoid names that ended in "s," given their last name, or names that seemed to create phrases. Her recommendations: Evander as a top choice, with Levi and Vaughn close behind.

When the Stones unveiled the name Evander Jet to family and friends three months ago, Mrs. Stone says they were surprised. "Everybody was like, 'Oh, you named him after the boxer,' when actually it's a really old name."

The Baby-Name Business (Wall Street Journal)

Evander is in Virgil's Aeneid.

Why didn't they go for Roland? (Sorry.)

Allen Mandelbaum (1926–2011)

The translator Allen Mandelbaum has died at the age of eighty-five. From the New York Times obituary:

Mr. Mandelbaum was well known for his translations of the modern Italian poets Giuseppe Ungaretti and Salvatore Quasimodo, and for his Aeneid, which won the National Book Award in 1973. His verse translation of The Divine Comedy was published in three volumes by the University of California Press in the early 1980s and was later brought out by Bantam in an inexpensive paperback edition that is still used widely in college courses.

I like his Dante and Metamorphoses. Looking at Inferno this morning, I thought this last line of Canto I a fitting tribute to Mandelbaum’s work:

Then he set out, and I moved on behind him.

That’s Dante of course, speaking of Virgil. Like Virgil, the translator too is a guide to what might otherwise remain inaccessible.

Homer's Rumsfeld

From a brief interview with Robert Fagles, whose translation of the Aeneid was published last week:

"I was asked by a reporter, 'Is there a Rumsfeld in the Iliad?' I said, 'I don't think so, but isn't one enough?'" Fagles said. "He laughed and didn't print it."

That reporter may have been hoping that Fagles would liken the Greek leader Agamemnon to Donald Rumsfeld. The similarities are not difficult to work out: when the Iliad begins, the Greek forces are in an ever-worsening situation, dying of a plague sent by the god Apollo. Is Agamemnon doing anything to change that? No. Moreover, he himself has caused the problems the Greeks are facing, by refusing to honor the priest Chryses' plea for the return of his daughter Chryseis, now Agamemnon's war prize. When the Greek prophet Calchas explains what is happening and what must be done to appease Apollo -- return Chryseis and make sacrifices, Agamemnon is furious. Here's a particularly Rumsfeldian bit of arrogance and cranky complaint about the media (or the medium):

                                                    "You damn
    soothsayer!
You've never given me a good omen yet.
You take some kind of perverse pleasure in
    prophesying
Doom, don't you? Not a single favorable omen ever!
Nothing good ever happens!"

(Iliad 1, translated by Stanley Lombardo)

A reader interested in exploring broad parallels between Homer's world of war and our own should investigate Jonathan Shay's Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character and Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming.

Fagles brings Aeneas into modern world (dailyprincetonian.com)

Exploring Combat and the Psyche, Beginning with Homer (article on Jonathan Shay, New York Times)

_L

Orange Crate Art just had its fifty-thousandth visitor. I'm teaching the Aeneid on Wednesday, so I'm marking the visit with a Roman numeral. The bar above the numeral indicates multiplication by 1,000 -- a lot simpler than 50 Ms.

The fifty-thousandth visitor was from Redmond, Washington, from some company called Microsoft, going to my post Cool laptop via a link at Lifehacker.

Words from Charles Van Doren

The name Charles Van Doren will bring to mind the quiz show Twenty-One and scandal. But here's another way in which Charles Van Doren might be remembered -- as a deeply thoughtful student of the sorrows and possibilities of human life.

In 1999, Van Doren was invited to address a reunion of Columbia College's class of 1959. Like these alums, he started at Columbia in 1955 (as an assistant professor); he resigned in 1959. In the course of some remarks on how to live late in one's life, he mentions Aeneas' journey to the world of the dead, which begins at Lake Avernus in Italy, and quotes the Sibyl's words to Aeneas:

"The way downward is easy from Avernus.
Black Dis's door stands open night and day.
But to retrace your steps to heaven's air,
There is the trouble, there is the toil."

(Virgil, Aeneid 6, translated by Robert Fitzgerald)

Van Doren notes (in his own translation) the advice that the shade of Phlegyas gives Aeneas: "Study justice, and do not scorn the gods!" (Phlegyas, enraged after Apollo seduced his daughter, set fire to the god's temple at Delphi.) Van Doren goes on to say that

None of us can take Aeneas's journey, nor, in fact, did he. The story of his descent into the Underworld and his return to the brightness of the sun is a myth, and myths are stories that are so true they can never happen. Something like his journey may happen to anyone. The human name for it may be despair.

Despair -- the Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard called it. As we enter this last part of our time we mustn't forget that bad things can happen. The failure of hopes, the death of friends, the venality of politicians, the manifest cruelty that stalks the world -- these may tempt us to descend from Avernus into that dark place where safety seems to lie. But then we scorn the gods. This great line is from Paul Valéry's "Le cimitière marin":

      Le vent se lève; il faut tenter de vivre!

      The wind's rising; we have to try to live!

You can read a transcript of Van Doren's remarks to the class of 1959 via the link.

       » Charles Van Doren revisits Morningside Heights
      from Columbia College, Columbia University

Wireless or wireless-less

In light of recent news items about college students messaging and playing online poker during lectures, it didn't seem to me that there could be much debate among academics about the inappropriateness of wireless connectivity in classrooms. But On Campus, published by the American Federation of Teachers, has two profs debating this question in its March 2006 issue.

Dennis Adams, who teaches "decision and information sciences" -- i.e., he's a computer guy, not a technophobe -- argues against laptops in classrooms, pointing out that students who have been raised in a culture of ever-diminishing attention-spans need to learn how to focus. Rudy McDaniel, who teaches "English and digital media" -- i.e., he's also a computer guy, not a technophobe -- argues for the usefulness of laptops and suggests ways to deal with students who are idly surfing. One such strategy:

The next time you spot students with glazed eyes peering into a laptop during your lecture, consider a new approach: Ask them to find an online example of a topic you’re discussing and share it with the class. Repeat as necessary with new offenders. That "distracting laptop in class" problem might just take care of itself.

I started daydreaming today about how such a strategy might work out. Imagine a class devoted to Book Four of Virgil's Aeneid, the episode of Dido's passion and death. What would count as an online "example" of that "topic"? Unrequited love? Devotion to duty? Royal suicide? Roman marriage customs? (Aeneas notes that he never held the torches of a bridegroom, never really married Dido.) The role of Mercury in Roman mythology? Sword wounds? A map of Carthage? An MP3 of "When I am laid in earth" from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas? An MP3 of the pop singer Dido?

I wonder too how quickly a student with glazed eyes would be able to think up a suitable "example of a topic." And were a student to begin searching for one of these possibilties, what would be the point? What are the other students supposed to be doing while the search is underway? And if class simply goes on while the searcher searches (still out of it!), won't the sharing of the discovery make for yet another interruption of forward movement?

Now imagine this sort of interruption occurring with two or three students, perhaps with arguments and protestations of innocence. Allow two or three minutes for the necessary details of identifying each perp, assigning the task, and hearing a brief report. In a 50-minute class, these scattered minutes would eat up roughly 10% to 20% of the available time. I'd hate to be a student intent upon following and learning from a lecture or discussion while my prof's attention repeatedly shifts from the work at hand to students whose minds are elsewhere.

A truth that bears repeating: Technology makes it possible to do things, not necessary to do them. It's possible to type a shopping list into a cellphone, but pencil and paper are simpler and more efficient. And it's possible to watch tv while driving, but it's not a good idea. It's, uhh, distracting, just like a wireless connection in a classroom.

» Should wireless laptops be banned from the classroom?
(from On Campus)

Empire

2601 students: There’s a long essay by Tony Judt on the idea of American empire in the November 4 New York Review of Books. Here’s the opening paragraph:

Talk of “empire” makes Americans distinctly uneasy. This is odd. In its westward course the young republic was not embarrassed to suck virgin land and indigenous peoples into the embrace of Thomas Jefferson’s “empire for liberty.” Millions of American immigrants made and still make their first acquaintance with the US through New York, “the Empire State.” From Monroe to Bush, American presidents have not hesitated to pronounce doctrines whose extraterritorial implications define imperial authority and presume it: there is nothing self-effacing about that decidedly imperious bird on the Presidential Seal. And yet, though the rest of the world is under no illusion, in the United States today there is a sort of wishful denial. We don’t want an empire, we aren’t an empire—or else if we are an empire, then it is one of a kind.

Judt never mentions Rome, but for someone who’s been thinking about the Aeneid, this essay is especially interesting to read.