Erin McKeown Wants Fans To Learn Latin

Friday July 22, 2005 @ 03:30 PM
By: ChartAttack.com Staff

Erin McKeown

An Ivy League education at Brown University helped Virginia-born singer-songwriter Erin McKeown learn what it takes to be an artist. It also taught the petite 27-year-old chanteuse some Latin, which she uses to make listeners dig a little deeper to grasp the meanings of a couple of her songs on her latest disc

Read the article and see the picture.

First report from the ARLT Summer School

Heat. OTT central building. Wandering meal venues. Great company. Great lectures. Excellent food.

We have had one and a half days so far, with only another one and a half to go, and the second attempted round of bombs in London, even the Ashes test match, are pushed to the back of our minds as we are revelling in a feast of Classics.

I have myself attended two option groups on conversing in Latin, led by Avitus, which I have found stimulating. Our
leader speaks Latin 'like a native', and I have been pleasantly surprised that I can follow everything he says. We, his class, struggle to put a sentence together, even when we are not wondering what the Latin word for 'to ski' might be. (Apparently it is nartare.) One tends to forget in the heat of the moment that utor is a deponent verb and takes the ablative!

Still, today Avitus commended the Direct Method of Latin teaching, and really made us feel that it might be possible. Some of us remembered that our ARLT Founder, Rouse, formed the Association for the very purpose of promoting teaching Latin by means of Latin. I want to get hold of Avitus' Latin questions on the Cambridge Latin Course, which he says can easily be used as a Direct Method course book – with a few alterations. He challenged ARLT to set up a teaching course for teachers who wish to use this method.

There was an excellent lecture this morning on Aeneid Book X, and I am awaiting an electronic copy of the very full handout on this, which I intend to share with you on this blog. This evening Jonathan Powell took what looked on paper to be a boring topic, Latin Word Order, and brought it to life with clarity and humour; it was one of those lectures that will really change the way I read Latin. I took lots of notes, but it will take a little while to render them readable. Be patient – it will be worth it.

We enjoyed 45 minutes of choral singing before supper this evening. There were 23 of us, and we sang the European Anthem in Latin, the first movement of Vivaldi's Gloria, an Ave Maria by Rachmaninov, and a Gloria by Lotti. I was delighted by the number who took part, the expert sight-reading, and the quality of the voices. This is in preparation for an evening of entertainment and Classical Quiz tomorrow.

We have also had the Association's AGM, and two committee meetings! The ARLT is in good heart, in a sound financial state, and with exciting plans for the future.

As they say, wish you were here (if you're not).

Summer School 2005: Will Griffiths on IT in the classroom

The official topic of the lecture was to be: ICT Print paper and mind – best practice in ICT in the classroom.

Will Griffiths is the Director of the Cambridge Classics Project. He brought up to the moment news about the long awaited DVDs to accompany the first two books of the Cambridge Latin Course. See this blog for reports of the horrendous delays in getting the discs out. The latest news is that the software for Book 1 will be out in September 2005!!

3 ½ years late.

The story given to the press would have been given even greater prominence, but the Pope's death pushed the news of death of Latin off the front pages. Still, the furore that followed the new stories has led the government to promise that the first disc will be issued this autumn.

The task of completing the software has been taken from the firm that delayed it for so long, and Cambridge's own team has taken it over. Book 1 will really be out in September.

It is being updated every day.

Will Griffiths was clearly very keen on the new product, but urged teachers not to use ICT in order to to tick a box, and not to use it for a whole lesson. Just use it as part of a lesson, as you might use a video clip. It is not a good idea to use it solidly for an hour.

Will advised: Before using, ask 'why am I using this?' If best way is a book, use a book.

Will then demonstrated the disc as it is at the moment. There are three possible ways of entry: as a teacher, as a student, or as a self-taught learner.

The program searches for an internet connection first of all. As a teacher you can make a list of activities at home, save your list on the Cambridge web site, and use them next day in school. There are 1000 activities.

The disc is useful for established Latin teachers, but its primary purpose is to get Latin into schools where it is not, now.

Book 2 will be out in Feb 2006.

100-120 activities for each stage. They are organised so as to help you find them. There is now a thumbnail of each activity on mouse-over.

There are story activities, language activities, civ, extra language…

Those who have used independent learning materials will recognise some things on the DVD

You can make a playlist on-line – you need to register on the Cambridge site. It's free.

All videos are encoded in 3 qualities: use the best for data projection, low for network.

The cost will be £39.95 for the disc, and £35 for an annual site license. DSS has invested £5 million. There won't be discs for Books 3 and 4 unless the US market produces enough money.

The Cambridge Website:

Using a website without internet connection. Go to the site, then click File and Work off-line. You can use any page you have visited since last clearing your cache.

From book 5 there is parsing information in Exploring the story.

The web site costs £12,000 a year. The present site will remain free, but there will probably be an extra subscription site.

I was not entirely clear about this next bit, but apparently you can set an on-line test for homework, which will be automatically marked, and and you will be sent the results.

We were told by one of the audience that OCR have just released the 2007 vocab list.

Cambridge has set up on its web site a shared resource area for teachers. 3 or 4 have posted resources, 200 plus use it. (This is a similar number, both of contributers and users, to those who belong to the ARLT Teachers' Section.)

Bob Lister has made a program that looks up any word in the pocket Oxford Latin dictionary.
Where is this available? £19.99 from Cambridge web site.

Will recommended The Latin Library for on-line Latin texts, but warned that the texts will not necessarily be the same as those in prescribed editions. Surprisingly, texts in editions are copyright.

He pointed out that a data projector now costs £800 or even as little as £500. When choosing a projector, remember that Ansi Lumens are the key. Get a remote control mouse – you can move around the classroom. Check noise and heat.

Little speakers cost £15 only, and produce agood quality sound. You can set up your own data projection in 5 minutes.

Roger Dalladay's ministrips – you can scan them onto a computer and use them with a data projector at a few seconds' notice. Cambridge is working with Roger to put all his ministrips onto disc.

Laptops, good enough for all this, now cost £450 only.

In answer to a question, Will gave his opinion that interactive whiteboards are not much better than data projectors, and are much more expensive. If someone else is paying, he said, don't say no!

Summer School 2005: Troy Stories by Nick Lowe

Dr Nick Lowe took the difficult after-dinner slot on our first evening; difficult, because a lecturer needs to be fast-moving and entertaining to keep us awake at that juncture. Dr Lowe succeeded very well indeed.

He began by talking about marking essays on the Iliad. Two students demonstrated that they had not read the Iliad, but they had seen the film “Troy”! This rang a bell with me. I well remember being told in exam scripts that Odysseus married Nausicaa, on the strength of a cartoon version of the Odyssey in which that was the ending; and Nausicaa was called Penelope.

What, then, can we tell our pupils about the film or the DVD of Troy? No one has published a book to help us.

For 'Alexander' Alan Lane Fox has written a very good book, but no one has done this for Troy. Yet it is likely to be very influential. It is the most successful classical film of all time!!

In 2001 Warner Brothers looked for the next Gladiator, and commissioned a first-time script-writer called Michael Tabb to make a Troy script. The result was a love story seen from Trojan side, which included the destruction of Troy and the escape of Aeneas. It was packed with classical howlers. It was in fact about Troilus and Cressida, two characters of medieval fiction unknown to Homer. Michael Tabb's name was still on the script till late 2002.

David Benioff, the writer of the film we know, was in similar situation to Michael Tabb, “extremely low on the Hollywood food chain.” He was invited in late 2001 to pitch for another script. Dr Lowe's handout contained an interview with him. He had written just one script before, “The Twenty-fifth Hour”, an adaptation of his own single novel.
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He had to show that he could script more than one story. After the success of Troy, he has written another script, “Stay”, which he sold for a million dollars. He has now sold a lot of scripts. Michael Tabb's C.V. shows that he has done nothing since his abortive script for Troy.

Benioff did 32 drafts. There was no classical consultant on the script. Lesley Fitton of the British Museum was the only classical advisor, to the producer, not the script writer. As a result, one can spot many artefacts from the British Museum in the film, from a large range of periods. [Note by David Parsons: The Iliad itself is a similar hotch-potch of periods. Iron weapons coexist with bronze, old grammatical forms coexist with later inflections, to suit the metre.]

Troy is a writer's film, and the writer has no power in Hollywood. He is very sackable. Benioff shows himself in his interview as an amateur in writing and in classics. How much of his interview can one believe? One must remember his position, wishing to take as much credit for the film's success as possible, without disrespecting other people with whom he may need to work in future.

Michael Tabb's script:

Textual evidence: A shooting script from 2003 can be seen on the web, here.

Tabb invents a character called Octavius Strato to be the leading baddie. There is a very bad scene between Troilus and Octavius in which they fight and talk about being remembered or forgotten. At least the Homeric concern with glory is addressed.

Benioff's Feb. 2003 draft:

Scenes are discontinuously numbered, e.g. 138, 140, 140A, 140B, showing last minute changes.

Dialogue is often different from final version.

Only three stars were cast in good time. The finding of an actress to play Helen of Troy was left till very late. A website on the lookout for a story asked Ladbrookes for its odds on the top 5 Hollywood actresses. This became a news story, that suggested that the actresses were competing for the part.

Among the scenes that did not appear in the film was one with Hector and Andromache on a staircase with the infant Astyanax. The writer wanted to get a key Homer moment of deep pathos into the film in a Hollywood way.

The best Homeric script was written by Nicholas Meyer for an Odyssey film, which was never made. You can read it here.

Some of the best words in Troy are voice-overs, including a few words straight from Homer. They are unlikely to be by Benioff, because Benioff used Fagles' translation, not Lattimore's.

An example of poor script: The 'sword of Troy' was invented to encapsulate traditions of Troy, but doesn't do anything in the story.

Benioff didn't consult any classicist, because to do that would suggest weakness, and make him liable to sacking. He kept his job on the grounds that he was competent both in the Classics and in script-writing.

He tries to tell the story as it would have been before it was mythologised, banishing the gods. In fact, most of eight retellings on Homer that were published in 2004 “euhemerise away the divine machinery”.

The film employs a collapsed chronology, which Nick Lowe demonstrated episode by episode. The action in the film, including the destruction of Troy, takes 18 days; the Iliad takes days. One effective device is to use the truce for the building of the wooden horse.

Surprises in the film include Menelaus killed in book 3, Ajax killed in book 7,
Glaucus killed during the sack by Odysseus, and Priam killed during the sack by Agamemnon.

The original final scene, which was cut, was of Aeneas with a surprising band of Trojans including Helen, walking towards the mountains.