Jeremy Patterson on the Plinth

If you didn’t manage to get down to Trafalgar Square, all is not lost. Catch Jeremy here, while you can :

http://www.oneandother.co.uk/participants/Jeremy

Thanks to Anne for this link

And if that has whetted your appetite, don’t miss the Latin videos from the Conventiculum Lexintoniense.

 Videos from this year’s conventiculum can be viewed at:

http://rogueclassicism.com/2009/07/22/conventiculum-lexintoniense/

Thanks to Keith for this link.

Latin teachers needed for TV documentary

from Lisa Forrest;

This summer, as part of a course at the National Film and Television School, I’m making a short documentary about Latin in the UK. I’m keen to talk to a range of Latin teachers about their careers and what they think the outlook for Latin may be. Initially I’d like just to have a chat, with a view to possibly doing some filming in August. If you’d like to help out, please e-mail me your name and I’ll send you some more information about what I’m doing and we can go from there.

 

many thanks,

 

Lisa Forrest

lisamail@gmail.com

Teacher’s Pack for the Roman Baths museum at Aquae Sulis

from Anne Dicks;

A project I have recently taken on is updating the Teacher’s Pack for the Roman Baths museum.  The education staff there are very keen to get ideas from teachers about the sort of information they would like to have included in the pack.

We want to expand the scope of the pack to include topics studied for Key Stage 3 as well as for GCSE and in the 6th form.  As well as giving help with translating the Latin on inscriptions etc. we can focus on topics like Romanisation, women, the economy – anything that might be of use for Classical Civilisation, Archaeology and Ancient History courses.  Any ideas will be very welcome!  I don’t know anything at all about IB exams ….

The museum displays are in the process of being reorganised and the route around the museum has changed, so I consider it a real privilege to be involved in liaison between teachers and the museum at this exciting time. If you have any ideas, please contact me at  anne@pyrrha.me.uk

You can find out more about Anne’s work here – 

Pyrrha’s Roman Pages website  pyrrha.me.uk

CICERO Latin competition website ciceroeuropa.eu

Suki’s own website   pyrrha.demon.co.uk/suki.html

Roman graffiti provides the inspiration for Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg’s new choral work

Tuesday’s Guardian had this from Charlotte Higgins:

“Magnus Lindberg, the innovative Finnish composer, has finally cracked choral music – with a work commissioned by the Philharmonia Orchestra that takes its text from choice graffiti found in Pompeii and Herculaneum. Snippets of Latin he uses vary from quotations from Virgil (clearly some of the vandals of ancient Pompeii were pretty cultured) to recommendations of prostitutes’ oral sex skills (“Myrtis gives good head”). Lindberg likens the breadth of the texts to “a Google map – I was enchanted by the idea of having all those aspects of life at once. The dirty things they wrote on the walls were even stronger than the stuff you get today. I couldn’t use some of the really bad ones – I thought of my mum listening to the piece.” The Philharmonia will premiere Graffiti at London’s Royal Festival Hall in October.”

O Arelates, I think this could catch on. Maybe there will be something of the like making a guest appearance in the entertainment at the ARLT Summer School later this month?

Rouse & Ancient Greek

Whilst the ‘reform’ part of the ARLT refers to the efforts of founder W.H.D.Rouse to change the nature of Latin teaching, he also produced Direct Method materials on the teaching of Greek such as ‘A Greek Boy at Home’ and his ‘First Greek Course’.  Revised versions of these two volumes are being produced by Anne Mahoney at Tufts University and are to be published by Focus — http://www.pullins.com – early in 2010.

from Keith Rogers

recitatio in foro Trafalgariano

My thanks to Keith Rogers for this early promotion of  the upcoming recitatio in foro Trafalgariano

“The sound of Latin will be heard publicly in London as Jeremy Patterson will be reciting Latin on the plinth in Trafalgar Square from 10-11 am on Thursday 23^rd July.

 The whole event is available to view online at http://www.oneandother.co.uk/

Antony Gormley describes the event as follows:

‘Through elevation onto the plinth, and removal from the common ground, the body becomes a metaphor, a symbol… In the context of Trafalgar Square with its military, valedictory and male historical statues to specific individuals, this elevation of everyday life to the position formerly occupied by monumental art allows us to reflect on the diversity, vulnerability and particularity of the individual in contemporary society. It could be tragic but it could also be funny.'”

audio video disco

This sounds like an excellent name for a Latin blog – and so it is.  

inter alia – a useful piece on birthplaces of Latin authors and …..have a go at improving JM ‘s univocalic lipogrammatic translation of Catullus 85:

Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

We detest her, yet we feel glee. Seek ye the key, re: these resentments? We’re rejected, dejected, demented.

and only carp after you have improved on it!

The blog is here:

 http://audio-video-disco.blogspot.com/search/label/Catullus

floreat lingua Latina

from Evan Millner,

“The Collegium Poetarum was a guild that met in Rome, and we know poets and actors belonged to it. We know it held competitions, and public recitals, but the rest is lost in the haze of time.

This is the reincarnation of the Collegium – the goal is to take Latin and Greek out of the schoolroom, out of the living room, and out into the marketplace.

 Latin Oratory was written to be orated, poems were written to be read aloud, theatrical pieces, even letters, were often written to be read aloud.

We will be holding our first meeting on July 16, 2009 from 6:30pm to 8:30pm – Paternoster Square, (meeting under the column)  next to St Paul’s Cathedral……come along, either to listen, or to recite your favourite poem, oration,dramatic scene, or epistle….there are lots of pubs around the square, should lubrication be required.

 You can contact the organisers through their website http://collegiumpoetarum.ning.com   “

Webchat in Latin

From Keith Rogers: –

Evan Miller recently posted the following article on the Latinteach discussion group.  Teachers who wish to develop their spoken Latin skills or use the archive as a classroom resource may find it of interest
If anyone wishes to attend a ‘conventiculum’ of speaking in Latin then consult the following page
http://web.ukonline.co.uk/caractacus.bears/CLI/html/conventicula.html  

Chatting in real-time

Evan Miller.

Those of us who wish to develop our skills as communicators in Latin, there
is a wonderful resource on Schola – the real-time chatroom. Obviously, when
people are typing fast, they make lots of errors, and many of the
participants only have a couple of years of Latin. The fact they can
communicate actively at all, and are trying to communicate actively, says an
enormous amount about the methods we promote on this list.

You can visit the archives and see what sort of stuff is talked about – you
may perhaps be surprised at how much Latin gets written in that chatroom
every day. True, modo balbutiendo it is, but some of the contributors have
very good Latin – and in this free environment, skills can develop. When a
beginner uses a language, they are going to make a lot of errors, but
they’ll learn faster if they use the language.

There is an archive available, of the past month’s conversations http://chatlogs.meebo.com/room/locutoriumnovum7ae28870/logs/today/>,
which you can visit. Maybe they could make a useful classroom activity –
print them up, and get your students to correct all the mistakes!!

Spoken Ancient Greek

Thanks to Keith Rogers for the following:

The Classical Greek pedagogy site recently posted information about a new text aimed at using a communicative approach to teach the Greek language. It is focused on the Koine dialect of the first Century AD (New Testament, Plutarch, etc.).

There is an ongoing discussion at this website:

 http://www.textkit.com/greek-latin-forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=9580

 More details about the book itself together with audio recordings and video clips can be seen at:

 http://poliskoine.com/site/

 Keith Rogers