app. crit. cheat. sheet.

The classicist’s killer app is the app crit.

Horrible puns aside: the apparatus criticus (app crit) is that big block of text at the bottom of any OCT or Teuber edition, and it shows the variants and conjectures for uncertain words in ancient texts. (As a pedagogical point, I find it valuable to show students a good scholarly Bible with an enormous app crit documenting the conflicts in manuscripts and textual traditions.) These guides to textual problems, however, are dense and loaded with inscrutable abbreviations, and even for advanced graduate students, they can be daunting.

At work, I recently discovered a helpful guide to the symbols and abbreviations one finds in an app crit, compiled by Karl Maurer at the University of Dallas. Many thanks to him for this helpful document, which I’ll add to this site’s list of classicist resources.

February 13, 2017

grand presentiment

Even Caesar’s fortune at one time was, but a grand presentiment. We know what a masquerade all development is, and what effective shapes may be disguised in helpless embryos.—In fact, the world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome dubious eggs called possibilities. Will saw clearly enough the pitiable instances of long incubation producing no chick, and but for gratitude would have laughed at Casaubon, whose plodding application, rows of note-books, and small taper of learned theory exploring the tossed ruins of the world, seemed to enforce a moral entirely encouraging to Will’s generous reliance on the intentions of the universe with regard to himself. He held that reliance to be a mark of genius; and certainly it is no mark to the contrary; genius consisting neither in self-conceit nor in humility, but in a power to make or do, not anything in general, but something in particular. Let him start for the Continent, then, without our pronouncing on his future. Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.
George Eliot, Middlemarch I.10

January 12, 2017

jahresrückblick

Ed Lefkowicz, BAM

It’s the season for best-of lists, but for this and that reason I wasn’t able to put together a new version of Lecta Delecta, my annual collection of the “best ancient literature of the year.” (My friend Patrick Burns at NYU/ISAW is carrying on the tradition — scope it out at his site.) In lieu of oddball Latin, here’s some of my favorite music from 2016:

  • Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, Real Enemies
    As one review points out, Real Enemies was imagined some time before this November’s presidential election, and it doesn’t have an overt political agenda, but it’s a fitting soundtrack as the credits roll on 2016: the album explores “the broader themes of cultural paranoia and false truth.” Regardless of these topical considerations, Argue’s mish-mash of jazz, electronic sampling, and symphonic modernism is solid from start to finish.

  • Kadhja Bonet, The Visitor
    I think I originally found Bonet’s album through NPR, which has covered it a couple times. She’s a striking vocalist, and her classical training as a violinist shows in the strings that she incorporates throughout the album. It’s hard to pin down the decade that this album could fit in, a good sign of its freshness.

  • Isabelle Faust, Il Giardino Armonico, and Giovanni Antonini, Mozart: Violin Concertos
    I love Isabelle Faust’s violin performances, and her collaboration with Alexander Melnikov on Beethoven’s Sonatas for Violin and Piano remains a favorite classical album from the past several years. Mozart isn’t normally my composer of choice, to be honest, but the playing here on period instruments is top-notch.

  • Johnnie Frierson, Have You Been Good to Yourself
    Found in a thrift store, Frierson’s Have You Been Good to Yourself is a lo-fi, immediate picture of the American South. It’s a reminder of my former life in rural Arkansas and all its characters — in Frierson’s Memphis, for instance, we find a “Space Man” who performs the everyday miracles of auto shop work.

  • Fred Hersch, Sunday Night at the Vanguard
    Another great jazz album, from Evans-style ballads like “For No One” to more erratic tracks like “We See.” Hersch’s own “Valentine,” played as an encore for this recording, has the lyricism of a melancholic Christmas standard and perhaps is an appropriate final track for the year.

Post Scriptum: This year I also unearthed some older gems: German music from early 20th-century cinema, including works by Friedrich Holländer and Robert Stolz, and this 1979 new wave from Japan. Not new, still great.

December 27, 2016