Monday, August 28, 2006
I am disappointed in The Birth of Tragedy content-wise, although it is somewhat useful to gauge Nietzsche's early style. He rambles at times about anything but the birth of Greek tragedy, and he certainly lacks the sort of modern methodological scholarship that I am accustomed to reading. There are also certain idioms and phrases that would sound fine and be forcefully effective in German but are awkward for English (e.g. he references this or that as being the "kernel" of something, where an English writer would more likely use "core", "center", "base", et cetera). Nevertheless I find The Birth of Tragedy more interesting than the Pussycat Dolls (featuring Snoop Doggy Dogg) video which played on VH1 this morning as I bike-ticized in front of the television stations.
Today marked the beginning of the school year. At fifteen after six this morning I rode my bike through partially-flooded streets (any Lubbock drainage system being a non-existent dream) to exercise at the student recreation center. Every morning before classes I have plenty of time to work out, take a shower, and eat some sort of breakfast, with enough time to read (depending on whether I also decide to swim).
I sat upstairs in the foreign language building, drinking down a Diet Coke as I studied Greek, until the seminar over Greek and Roman sculpture began at ten. I imagine it ought to be less demanding than the Trojan War seminar I took last spring, since the information for any research topic I might choose would be vastly more easy to locate. The textbooks, of course, have more pictures than text, as opposed to the odious alternative of proportionally greater text to illustrations. "What's the use of a book with no pictures in it?"
After art I trek across campus to sophomore Attic Greek with Steve. He integrated a basic review into the first few sessions, which ought to be enough for me to regain my ability to at least recognize forms in the passages we are reading. Saturday and Sunday I crash-reviewed the first several chapters of the textbook I used the past two semesters, which allowed me this morning to complete a noun paradigm at the board with no errors. No one of the other eight or nine people seemed any more prepared than I, for which I was thoroughly relieved. Steve assigned the first paragraph of the first chapter of Plato's Symposium, which I hope to at least begin this evening, if I am not too tired from biking back to The Lauree Lair.
My classes each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday thus end at noon, with a two-hour break until I am obligated to arrive at work, during which time I intend to complete the daily Greek assignment and perhaps run any errand or two. Today, however, I ate lunch with Adrian at a cheap (but muy bueno) Mexican restaurant. I accompanied her afterward as she entered a jewelry store to have a ring of hers resized, peering bemusedly into the glass cabinets as Dean Martin sang, "When the moon hits your eye, like a big pizza pie..." in the background.
Then I worked.
[Lauree Frances Keith concluded this diatribe at 7:06 PM]