Changed by Ovid

Posted on November 12, 2022 by Kathy
Neptune seizing Caenis
Artist unknown

(Sexual violence and rape are mentioned in this post.)

There once was an eccentric English professor at Cleveland State, a kind of eminence-grise (at least in his own mind), who taught obscure languages and literature. I had never met him but had heard a lot about him. Everyone had a story. I finally met him, and this is my story.

I was minding my own business in my office when a tall elderly gentlemen, the aforementioned  eccentric professor, appeared at my door and introduced himself. I invited him in. Gracious and almost elaborately polite, he sat down and we engaged in a little small talk. At last, he noted that he had seen my Ovid course in the upcoming CSU schedule. I nodded. “Why Ovid?” he asked. “He’s a lightweight.”’

I sputtered a little and then politely disagreed. It seemed rude to argue very vehemently. Mostly I wondered about his intentions. Did he think I would cancel the class based on his objection? It didn’t seem so. It seemed instead that he had traveled down two floors to share his opinion of the Roman poet Ovid and his work with a lowly and ill-informed junior colleague. After a few minutes of advocating for Ovid’s older contemporary Vergil, a weightier and less scandalous choice, he politely made his exit. That was our sole encounter. He has since retired and passed away.

When my students, over many years, would tell me how much they enjoyed reading Ovid, I always shared this story, because I think it’s funny and because critical opinion about Ovid has definitely waxed and waned. To my imposing visitor, he was not sufficiently serious. He wrote about love affairs, he made fun of the gods, and he was satiric. He could be light-hearted. He could be grotesque.

If I’d thought that he cared, I would have told Dr. Ponderous my own story. In high school, I muddled through the first two-plus years of Latin study. I slogged through Julius Caesar during my sophomore year, and I could barely stand Cicero during the first half of my junior year. The only thing I enjoyed about these guys was parsing out the grammar. (And this is not nothing. I like grammar.)

In January of my junior year, we began translating stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and my life changed. I had an epiphany. I saw that translating Latin was not just about identifying the ablative case and recognizing subjunctive verbs. I saw that it was reading, which I loved. I saw that reading Ovid was like reading James and the Giant Peach and the Weekly Reader books I loved. The Metamorphoses was full of stories that were fun to read.

I don’t suppose “fun to read” would have carried much weight with my self-serious visitor.

In a fourth year of Latin, I enjoyed Vergil just as much, but in a different way. I took some Latin classes in grad school and taught high-school Latin for a while. Fortunately for me, I ended up teaching Latin at CSU. All because of Ovid.

This reflection is inspired by “Sexual Violence in Ovid’s Metamorphoses” by Daniel Mendelsohn in this week’s New Yorker. Mendelsohn wrote, among other books, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, a delightful account of his irascible father joining Mendelsohn’s class reading Homer’s Odyssey. Mendelsohn is reviewing a new Ovid translation by Stephanie McCarter. As his essay title intimates, Ovid is once again problematic in our time: there are a lot of rapes in The Metamorphoses. When Pluto snatched the maiden Caenis off the beach (pictured above), for example, he did not ask for her consent.

McCarter contends with this issue in her translation and her notes, and so does Mendelsohn. Read the article, if you get a chance.

But I’m going to spoil Mendelsohn’s ending here. He points out that Ovid asserts “Vivam” at the beginning of his epic poem, meaning “I will live.” Ovid believed his poetry would outlive him, as it indeed has.  Mendelsohn writes:

McCarter ends her introduction with a list of her poet’s themes: the fragility of the human body; the way power works, the traumatic effects of loss of agency; the dark force of the objectifying gaze; the sometimes surprising interplay among desire, gender, and the body; gender fluidity and asexuality; the human will to self-expression. If you didn’t know she was writing about the concerns of someone who died twenty centuries ago, you’d think her subject was still alive. As indeed he knew he would be. ‘Vivam.‘

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More about Dogs

Posted on November 9, 2022 by Kathy
Not my dog, but looks like my dog
Photo by Joe Caione on Unsplash

Just finished reading The Year of the Puppy: How Dogs Become Themselves. Last week, I shared what I learned about altricial species (whose young need a lot of care) and precocial species (whose young are nearly self-sufficient). Near the end of the book, canine researcher Alexandra Horowitz expounds on dogs’ ears, which are nearly as expressive as their tails. The outer ear, the part that shows in both dogs and humans, is the pinna, which means “feather” or “wing” in Latin. (The ear is also called the auricle, from auris in Latin, meaning “ear.”) Pinna fits dogs, whose ears tend to be pointy, better than humans. Horowitz even uses the Latin plural, pinnae.

Pinna also gives us pinnacle; imagine the feather-like shape of a spire, narrowing at the top. Also lots of scientific words describing a feather or wing shape: pinnal, pinnate, pinnated, pinnation. Best of all is pinniped (which has appeared in the New York Times Spelling Bee). You can see the combination of wings and feet in the word. Pinnipeds have wing-like, or webbed feet; think seals and walruses.

When Horowitz refers to dogs and their wild relatives, such as coyotes and wolves, she uses the Latinate canid, from canis, a Roman dog. Most people recognize the more common canine and the eponymous teeth as Latin derivatives. The Greeks and Romans had dogs as pets and as hunting assistants and even memorialized them in stone and bronze.

A famous Pompeian mosaic shows a chained, mean-looking dog with the inscription “Cave canem,” which means “Beware of the dog.” The verb cave (pronounced cah-way) is an imperative, or command. We see the same verb in our word caveat, a warning or caution, and in the expression ”caveat emptor,” or, “let the buyer beware.”

This admonition is, in a way, Ms. Horowitz’s theme. A new puppy will eventually adapt to your household, if you help her, but you have to accept your new dog’s idiosyncrasies as well. She may not be the sweet, perfect dog of your dreams, but her own rambunctious individual self.

Horowitz and her family named their puppy Quiddity, another Latin derivative. Quiddity is the essence, or “thing-ness” of a thing. It comes from the pronoun quid, which means “what” or “something.” Quid, with her own special “quid-ness,” joined not only the family’s humans, but also two other dogs.

Horowitz writes, “Somehow it has taken [a year] for us to realize that we didn’t get just ‘another dog.’ While there are plenty of resemblances between Quid, Finn, and Upton—they are all quadrupedal sniffers with kind faces, long tails, and a shared genetic history—we were really adding an entirely different person to the family. One who is not only a different age . . . but also a different personality, with a different set of skills, drives, concerns, sensitivities. And now, our family has one bearded lady.”

Caveat emptor. Adopt a dog if you like and if you can, but be prepared for its unique canine quiddity, which is bound to change your household and your life.

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Breakfast from the Griddle

Posted on November 7, 2022 by Kathy
This morning's fare
This morning’s fare

Some years ago, a friend gave me some pancake mix that came with a gift basket she’d received. “You’re the only person I know who might still make pancakes from scratch,” she said. Something about her tone, as with many things she said, made it sound like it wasn’t a compliment. I refrained from pointing out that using pancake mix was not the same as pancakes from scratch.

I do make pancakes fairly often, from actual scratch. Mixes are easier, but not much easier. For a long time, I tried different recipes and may again, searching for the fluffiest, lightest, and most flavorful pancakes. My recipe box contains four pancake recipes: All Purpose Breakfast Batter from Martha Stewart’s Living, which wasn’t great; two from America’s Test Kitchen, which were fine; and Fluffy Pancakes, cut out of some magazine, which calls for nonfat dry milk, which I do not keep on hand. On some weekend mornings, I’ve referred to Martha Stewart’s website. She proffers at least five basic formulations, and a zillion variations, with berries, whole wheat flour, pumpkin, and so on.

After trying many recipes, I’ve recently returned to my old Betty Crocker cookbook, which I received as a wedding gift forty-some years ago. These pancakes turn out just fine. I double the recipe, which gives us a few extra for the refrigerator. My husband and son want their pancakes straight up: no berries, no cornmeal, no fancy sauces, no spelt, no exotic additions. Betty Crocker is as basic as you can get.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I add a few teaspoons of lemon juice to the milk and let it sit for a few minutes, or put it in the microwave for thirty seconds. I fancy it interacts with the baking powder for a lighter texture.

What’s your breakfast fare? Have you a favorite pancake or waffle recipe, or have you switched to admirable kale and mango smoothies to start your day?

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Reading/Rereading

Posted on November 4, 2022 by Kathy

Every once in a while, someone will tell me that she or he doesn’t reread books because there are just too many books. Unless you’ve read all that you want to read at least once, isn’t it a waste of time to reread the same book?

I see the logic.

For me, however, pleasure enters in. I reread books because I want to. Because rereading books gives me pleasure. For me, it’s the same as listening to a favorite song over and over or revisiting my favorites in a museum.

Right now, I’m rereading Anna Karenina, on maybe my third or fourth go-round. My husband’s reading it gave me the motivation. It’s fun to refresh my memory and talk to him about it as we progress. It’s interesting to see what I remember (the sweet beauty of the Kitty and Levin relationship) and what I’ve forgotten (the tedium of some of the political arguments). There’s a lot about agriculture in Anna Karenina!

I’ve probably reread The Catcher in the Rye the most, although not for many years. I think the count was around twenty readings when I last estimated. Charlotte’s Web is up there also, as are the two other books pictured above.

During the pandemic quarantine, I craved re-experiencing beloved books rather than encountering new ones. In 2020, I reread (looking at my list) David Copperfield, So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility (are you picking up a theme?), Wuthering Heights, To the Lighthouse, and others. Locked up at home, stressed and worried, I soaked up comforting, familiar things, and there was a lot of time for reading.

Do you who avoid rereading books also avoid re-watching movies? I suspect so. No surprise: I’m on the re-watching team.

Where do you stand? If you’re a rereader (or rewatcher), what books and movies do you return to? If you’re not, why not?

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Three New Words

Posted on November 2, 2022 by Kathy

I learned three new words so far by reading Alexandra Horowitz’s The Year of the Puppy: How Dogs Become Themselves. Horowitz, a dog cognition researcher, decided for the first time in her life to adopt a puppy, not an older rescue dog. Her book chronicles her pup’s development from birth at its foster home (the mom is a rescue) with its ten (ten!) littermates.

The first two words are altricial and precocial. Dogs and humans are both altricial species. Ducks and cattle are precocial. Want to guess the difference? (Or you may be smarter than I and already know.)

Ducks and cattle are born pretty much ready to go. They can walk, they can see, and they’re fully furnished with feathers and fur (or, let’s say, a coat). They’re precocial, in other words.

Puppies and babies are not so prepared, are they? No teeth, little to no eyesight, no temperature regulation, and so on. Dogs and humans require some pretty intensive parenting. They’re helpless babies! They’re altricial!

Could Latin roots have helped us figure out this distinction? Altricial’s root, alere, means “to nourish.” The verb’s participle is altum (“having been nourished”), and, in case you’re wondering, that word gives rise (so to speak) to our words related to height, such as altitude. Because eating all your dinner makes you big and tall. An altrix in Latin is a nourisher. And altricial babies need their altrices.

Precocial species, in contrast, are nidifugous, which clears things up, right? Put nidi- and fugous together, and you have fleeing the nest. Latin praecox means “precocious” or “ripe before its time.” Even more interestingly, the -coc- root comes from the Latin verb meaning “to cook.” So when your friend is bragging about her precocious daughter, you should ask, brow furrowed with concern, “Oh, no. She’s precooked?”

Horses and ducks and calves and dinosaurs and wildebeests, like your friend’s daughter, are precocious, or more scientifically, precocial. They can take care of themselves almost from birth, which is helpful when you’re born into a predator-rich environment. Altricial species like ours require crib rails and blankets.

Horowitz also taught me the word merle. It describes the mottled coat of dogs like Australian shepherds. Take a look here to see for yourself. Such dogs often have blue or odd-colored eyes as well. Naturally, I wondered where this word came from. A merula is a Latin blackbird and has given the name merle to a species of blackbird in our language. But those birds are not speckled or mottled.

As to why a dog with a mottled coat is called “merle,” who’s to say? Every source says “origin unknown.” Its derivation is a linguistic mystery! I’m glad to have learned the word, though, as well as altricial and precocial. And I’m only about one-third of the way through the book!

What’s new in your vocabulary?

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Fall Breads

Posted on October 31, 2022 by Kathy

My gardening friends will blanch to hear that I’ve purchased zucchini in order to make zucchini bread. They still have some hanging out in their vegetable drawer and even more in their freezers. Since I shouted, “Uncle!” to our neighborhood deer a few years ago, I raise only a few herbs out in our garden. I actually have to buy tomatoes, cucumbers, and zucchini.

These fall breads are fun and easy to make. The pumpkin bread I made a couple of weeks ago was satisfying, but it’s not my favorite. My family members don’t like banana bread, so that leaves zucchini bread or maybe something cinnamon-gingery to try. Something with apples always appeals.

Here’s the zucchini bread recipe I followed. Because it’s called “the best,” it has to be best, right? This, like most such recipes, produces two loaves, so you have one to stick in the freezer or to give away. Or you can always halve the measurements.

Grating the zucchini is the only aspect of the recipe you can possibly complain about, and a food processor makes short work of that. (Then you get to complain about washing the food processor parts.)

This bread made for a fun treat to share with the grandchildren, and, as you can see, a lovely light lunch for me. So extremely nutritious, too!

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Life Lessons

Posted on October 28, 2022 by Kathy

I mentioned last week that chef Vivian Howard always wanted to be a writer. Cooking gave her a subject, and her two cookbooks, indeed, make for entertaining reading. Similarly, Dana K. White, a decluttering blogger and YouTuber, hoped someday to write a book. She never expected that cleaning up her house would serve as her muse.

I met Dana K. White during the pandemic, when I started watching minimalist YouTube videos on our new TV. The Minimal Mom, my entry drug, led me to Ms. White. Inspired by both women’s videos, I occasionally got off the couch and filled up a box with stuff we didn’t need. My house is nowhere near minimal-ized nor even actually decluttered, but I have adopted Ms. White’s slogan, one of many, that says, “Better is good.”

Just think how helpful that advice is. How often do we avoid starting something because we won’t have time (or think we won’t have time) to finish? I’m going to clean out that extra bedroom when I get some time off from work or when my back stops hurting or when I retire. Why do we wait? Because it’s going to feel emotionally draining and take hours and hours and hours. Au contraire! says Ms. White. If you stand just inside the door with a trash bag and throw away old receipts, junk mail, broken appliances, and socks with holes, you can make things better in, say, ten minutes. You may even feel inspired to work another ten minutes, but, if not, you have already made things better, and better is good.

Such common-sense ideas made Ms. White’s website and blog and her funny YouTube videos successful. This success gave her the opportunity to write books, because she had developed a platform, i.e., some thousands of subscribers who would be likely to buy her books. She’s now written three: How to Manage Your Home without Losing Your Mind, Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with Stuff, and Organizing for the Rest of Us.

In her books, she’s able to further explain her process. The Container Concept is one fundamental component. Instead of asking herself if an item is useful or whether it gives her joy (a la Marie Kondo), she asks if it fits comfortably in the space allotted. The size of the container—a medicine cabinet or sock drawer or book shelf—determines how much of something you can keep. In Decluttering at the Speed of Life, for example, she imagines having too many scarves (a made-up scenario) before understanding the Container Concept.

Ugh. My closet floor is covered in scarves. I know it’s not possible to have too many scarves, because scarves are useful and having choices is essential to fashionable dressing, but I’m really tired of my closet floor being covered in scarves.

I know what I’ll do! I’ll use one of those five different scarf-organizing systems I’ve purchased over the past few years! I need to get organized. . .

Here’s exactly what I’d have done before I understood the Container Concept: bought more wall-hanging-organizing thingies and more scarf hangers until the floor was clear but there was no more wall space because it was covered in wall-hanging-organizing thingies and no more room for my clothes because the closet rods were full of scarf hangers.

The Container Concept simplifies the process. Here’s how it works. Designate your wall-hanging-organizing-thingie, a basket, or a drawer for your scarves. Then, she says,

  • Fill the container with your favorite scarves first.
  • Once the container is full, you know how may scarves you can keep.
  • Donate the rest of the scarves.

She’s not Shakespeare, but she’s clever, empathetic, and realistic. Most importantly, helpful. Aside from the content, it interests me that Ms. White turned her success as a decluttering guru into her real dream, writing books, which she’s good at.

If you always wanted to write a book, maybe there’s something you know about or something you’ve always thought about that could become a book. Write about what you know, they say. Dana K. White knows about being a slob (her word) and and then deslobifying (also her word). These experiences helped her fulfill a lifelong dream.

In addition to decluttering wisdom, Ms. White, a Texan, has taught me still another new word: doolally, a charming synonym for thingamajig or what-do-you-call-it. All these, by the way, are common synonyms for clutter.

What would you write a book about?

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Fingers and Flowers

Posted on October 26, 2022 by Kathy
Photo of foxglove by Leandro Loureiro on Unsplash

Last week we arrived at the word digital by tracing the history of movie projection. No longer is actual film run through a movie projector. Nowadays, pretty much all theaters use digital projection. How did we get from digits as fingers to digital as something ineffable and mysterious, at least to me?

The Latin root, as you probably know, is digitus, which was, indeed a Roman finger. The Romans, like us, held up one index finger (index coming from a verb meaning “to point”) to represent the number one. The Roman numeral “I” represents that one finger. To indicate (also from “to point”) the number five, the Romans, like us, held up one hand. See the “V” created by your thumb and forefinger? That’s the Roman numeral “V.”

You can see how the word for finger came to represent numbers as well. All human beings, I daresay, use their fingers for counting. Because the hocus-pocus of computers relies on a sequence of digits, the process took on the name digital.  We are now reaching the point where my understanding and ability to explain has all but vanished.

I can explain, however, how digitus gave us at least one other interesting English word, that is, digitalis, the heart medication. The medication originally derives from the plant we call foxglove in English, and the name gives you a hint; the flowers are shaped like the fingers of a glove. Why a fox’s glove? Who knows? But the image makes for a charming name. The also charming German name fingerhut translates “finger hat.”

I always enjoyed telling my Latin students that understanding our English words’ etymologies is like visiting a museum. If occasionally a Greek statue can move you by its age, you might also feel awestruck by digital. Something so ancient and so simple as a finger has morphed into 21st century words for the esoteric science we rely on every day.

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Viv’s Baked Beans

Posted on October 24, 2022 by Kathy

Last week I described Vivian Howard’s book This Will Make It Taste Good and her Community Organizer, a melange of bell peppers, garlic, onions, red wine vinegar, and tomatoes cooked to a fare-thee-well, meant to be used as a sauce or a dip or a braising liquid. I used it for from-scratch baked beans last week. It worked.

I soaked a pound of navy beans overnight. Early the next afternoon, I discarded the water and boiled them in fresh water for about an hour. I mixed them in a casserole with a cup or two of Community Organizer, along with the remaining tomato sauce from the canned tomatoes I used. I intended to cook them for three hours at 300 degrees, but they took about an extra hour, with the temperature increased to 350 degrees at the end. I also added water intermittently.

The result was tasty. I won’t be making it again soon, because we eat baked beans only occasionally, and it was a lot of trouble. I’m glad to have prepared baked beans from scratch once in my life.

I’m sure that eventually you’ll be able to find the recipe for Community Organizer online, but I don’t feel right sharing a recipe from a brand-new cookbook, and, as I said last week, your library owns This Will Make It Taste Good and will lend it to you. We used the remaining tonight as spaghetti sauce. In the meantime, my friend Kathie sent this recipe for Heirloom Beans, which I relied on for reference in my baked beans project. It warns you, for example, that the beans are going to take awhile and that you’ll have to be adding water.

In the meantime, I see Vivian has a new online hustle. She’s offering all of her “flavor heroes” from the book, including Community Organizer, in small batches online. You can order them and compare them to your own attempts, or just order them and save yourself the trouble of cooking.

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Everything Old Is New Again

Posted on October 23, 2022 by Kathy

In March of 1970, about two-hundred armed white people In Lamar, South Carolina, attacked a phalanx of school buses carrying black children. Fifty years later, one of those children described the violence this way:

Photo by Maximilian Simson on Unsplash

“Once the bus stopped, they took those ax handles and knocked out every window in the bus—there were bricks and everything flying. We had to hit the floor. I kept calling everybody’s name to see if everybody was alive. Ever since that day, it has been recovery for me.”

 Lamar was under a federal court order to integrate their schools, almost twenty years after the Supreme Court desegregation decision, Brown vs. the Board of Education.

Another attack survivor recalled, “The hood of the bus flew up and the engine died. Rocks and bricks started coming through the windows. I got on the floor and started crawling. I heard two gunshots. I think it was tear gas. It smelled, and my eyes teared. Then the back door of the bus came open. A highway patrolman with a gas mask said, ‘Come on, get off.’ I ran to the school. I looked back, and the bus we were on was turned over. For too many years, it was hard even to move on with my life. . . The reason I don’t talk about it is that I get angry when I talk, and I don’t want [my family] to see that.”

Before the attack, politicians had fomented white people’s rage about the desegregation order. A Republican candidate for governor, Albert Watson, told a campaign rally, “Every section of this state is in for it unless you stand up and use every means at your disposal to defend against what I consider an illegal order of the Circuit Court of the United States.”

After the assault, Watson defended the rioters, “(Y)ou can expect that to happen when you have frustrated people … People get restless and then things occur.”

I have researched this history because, rifling through some of my dad’s old writing, I ran across a mock letter that my dad, Martin Miller, a writer and newspaperman, wrote to his “Fellow Americans” in 1970 in reaction to the Lamar riot. It was never published, as far as I know. See if the content doesn’t ring some bells.

It begins, “You have been chosen for the unique opportunity of charter membership in our new exclusive organization dedicated to maintenance of Constitutional principles handed down to us by our forebears.”

Dad’s alter ego goes on to praise Lamar’s white citizens. “Throughout history, those who have hesitated have been lost . . . That is why we hail . . . the good people of Lamar for grasping the nettle as precursors of the victorious defenders in the coming revolution.” Backhandedly, he acknowledges the other side. “Many bleeding hearts will attempt to excite your sympathies on behalf of the little black children in the bus who were showered by broken glass. Their experience is one of the facts of life, and the sooner they get used to it the better.”

He alludes to the “warnings” of a coming revolution by Vice President Spiro Agnew, Attorney General John Mitchell, and his wife Martha Mitchell*. The federal government, they all would agree, is “the greatest threat to our freedoms,” having “grown to such proportions in recent decades that it is completely unresponsive to the grass roots.”

He then gets to the point of the letter, an invitation to join a new organization, a “group of white nationalists devoted to fostering a respect and knowledge of the contribution of whites to the history of the United States.” Without the example of the Mitchells, he says, “We would not have had the courage to organize, and the good citizens of Lamar would not have had the courage to strike the first defensive blow in the coming revolution.”

At the letter’s close, he slyly copies Mrs. John Mitchell.

Violent political rhetoric. Revolution. Abuses of the federal government. White nationalism. My dad would be sad to be complimented for his prescience.

*This piece was written before Watergate and the eventual rehabilitation of Martha Mitchell, a Watergate whistle blower, a view promoted by the recent Julia Roberts movie Gaslit. This was back when she was appearing on talk shows to call anti-war demonstrators Communists and parrot her husband’s right-wing ideas.

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