{SQT}: Clever Romans and Darcy for Ever

Hello, hello internet! Ready for some random thoughts? Here goes:

1.

Something momentous happened this week.

No, bigger than that.

Bigger again.

Are you ready?

I ACTUALLY SEWED TOGETHER ALL MY KNITTING PROJECTS!

I know, right?

Can't quite believe it myself.

Here's the proof:

Isn't it just the worst part of knitting? It is. There is no argument. Now to find some buttons.

2.

We've been making steady progress on the crazy plan, and I'm so glad some people have decided to join in. This is going to be fun! 

So far, I'm really enjoying Don Quixote, but I can't help but feel a little sad that I don't know more of the chivalry books Cervantes mentions, because I think the book was originally truly hilarious because of that, rather than merely quite amusing as it appears to me.

Also, I can't decide whether to skip or re-read the novels on the list which we have already read. On the one hand, it feels like my understanding would benefit greatly from it, but on the other, do I really want to read Madame Bovary again?

Not sure.

Although this (excellent) film did make me want to err on the side of reading it again.

Anyway, that's a problem for later. I shall finish Don Quixote, I shall.

(Did you see this in your head when you read the last line? Me too.)

3.

In Patapon-news, Jude has started to be really into photos lately. He keeps pointing at them and trying to say the names of the people in them.

(As an aside, this frame really needs to be hung up on the wall as Jude just picks it up and brings it to wherever I am, and my spooky sixth-sense can see this habit not ending well.)

4.

Also, we have discovered that he is now old enough to actually enjoy the park, running around shouting with glee as he clambers up the structures and down the slides (sorry, no pictures, I was running after him).

This is a problem, as he now seems to need to go outside. A real dilemma for the pathological homebody on this side of the computer. 

At what age am I officially allowed to leave him be, whilst I read a book on the bench?

When can I send him on his own?

Is 16 months really too young for it?

5.

I've been enjoying this podcast immensely lately (nothing else will make me do the ironing), but listening to the stories and schemes of Roman emperors, I can't help but wonder at how much better they were at being savvy politicians.

via Hadrian is my fave.

Were they really of a better mettle than the current public-opinion-courting, short-sighted blunderers who seem to people our government these days? Or are we giving people credit for things they cobbled together just as haphazardly as our current politicians, but which turned out to be great ideas in the end?

Are they being made retrospectively clever?

Or is our system just breeding mediocrity?

It is quite depressing to think about, really.

6.

My beautiful little sister has now flown over to Dubai for a year. Just when Jude was getting really good at saying "Tata Baba".

Our hearts are broken.

(This post is brought to you by the P&P obsession support group. Points if you can tell what bit I am quoting from).

7.

Finally, to answer this week's official Link-toberfest bonus question, this appears to be my 7th {SQT} post, including the first one, where I was wondering whether or not I should start a blog. Ha. That ship has sailed!

So We Have This Crazy Plan...

You know how if you've been in higher education for any length of time, there are these books that people keep referencing, so you start doing it too, even though you never read them?

Me neither. I totally, always had read all the books.

Yup. Read those too.

Erm.

Moving on.

Although I strongly suspect that many academics actually haven't read those books either, I have always been kind of curious, but also, you know, already defeated by the enormity of the task.

Enters The Well-Trained Mind. 

As I have mentioned before (or was it in the comments?), Simon and I hope to homeschool our children if at all possible, and the trivium method obviously appealed to my historian heart. (Yes, I am aware of the Golden Age Fallacy, but I can't help myself).

- In a nutshell, the Trivium was the method used in classical education, which relied on the division of learning in three stages: fact gathering - grammar stage -, analysis -  logic stage -, and development of a personal argument - rhetoric stage. Of course, it's a bit more complicated than that, but that's the main idea. It is also language and written word driven. -

Anyway, I have been reading up on the method and planning an imaginary wonderland of enthusiastic familial learning, with cheery children enthusiastically memorizing Latin declensions and historical dates in a magically immaculate house with books everywhere. 

Good morning mother! I was just spontaneously teaching myself to sew. Your coffee is on the counter.

I'll give a bit of time for people who are already homeschooling so they can finish laughing.

Whilst doing all this reading, I discovered that Susan Wise-Bauer also wrote another book to help adults give themselves the sound grounding in the classics we are only pretending we have. I bought it for my ever-bent-on-self-improvement husband, and he was kind of smitten. And roped me in.

So, we have decided to go through the lists of classics the author proposes  one by one (but I reserve the right to do some changes to the lists if I feel French culture needs to be better represented), following the Trivium method. 

Although I was all for starting with the history list and finally reading Plutarch and Francis Fukuyama, Simon preferred to start more gently with the novels.

So we are reading Don Quixote at the moment.

Does anyone fancy doing it with us?

The principle is very simple: you commit to reading for 30 minutes 4 times a week, with a notebook handy, where you write a one-sentence summary of every chapter as you go through them, as well as any questions you have. Then we will go back to the notes in order to re-read the key moments and ask ourselves some basic questions (logic stage), before writing an essay about it for the rhetoric stage. Not a long essay though.

Anyway, we are doing it, so if anyone feels equally geeky and would like some company and a place to start, just let me know and I'll do regular updates. If not, prepare yourself for random essays on classic books to appear from time to time over here (because it's my blog, so if I want to geek about the classics, well, I will.)

We are reading Don Quixote, by Cervantes, the Oxford World's Classic edition (here), and we are on chapter 7 (they are very short chapters, so you can easily catch up).

So, wish us luck! Or, in the unlikely event that you too like obscure, crazy, geeky goals, jump in!

The Niceness of Kafka

I work at a university (which shall remain nameless). Overall, they are a pretty brilliant employer, no complaints here.

But the other day, I was filling in a form (as I often have to) about, you know, gender, religious affiliation, blah blah blah. I was merely going on my usual answers: yes, I am female, no, I do not wish to tell you my ethnic origin, dear anonymous data collector, however, yes, I will tell you that I am Roman Catholic (because inconsistency is my middle name).

And then, I stumbled on a new set of questions.

About gender.

Wait a minute, I thought I had answered that already?

"Is your gender identity the same as the one you were assigned at birth?"

I love this image of a Mysterious Authority who "assigns" you a gender "at birth". I can't help but picture a stern bearded giant, pointing at a tiny newborn and declaring peremptorily: "Thou Shalt Be..... Female!" Round of applause as appropriate genetic organs appear.

Political correctness is very poetic really, I mused.

Then I pressed on to the next question :

"Do you live and work full-time in a gender role different from that assigned at birth?"

Qué?

I don't even know where to start with this one! First of all, it is so cautiously worded, it is almost incomprehensible. Imagine it as a statement: "Hi, I am Bob. White-British follower of the Most Ancient Order of the Jedi and part-time female." Or, "Well, I do live as Bob, but when I work I put on the special persona of Melody, a middle-aged librarian with a cat obsession (momentarily interrupting living in the process, one surmises)."

So yes, this question is mostly nonsensical, and the sequence is pretty weird. The questionnaire basically asks: 

"What gender are you? 

Are you sure? 

Are you sure you're sure? 

100% of the time and in all circumstances? 

Pinky swear?"

Now, it is pretty clear why the questions have been added. Now that gay marriage is no longer the agenda, transgenderism has become the new way for you to show, as an institution, that you are EVEN MORE politically correct than everybody else. But the reasoning behind the data collecting is hard to fathom. If the university is worried there is rampant discrimination in its ranks among transgender people, how is this going to show anything? We are talking about a minute minoritette of people here. The university not employing any of them would actually be pretty unsurprising, and not a sign of anything other than, you know, this is a very small minority. Not all tiny minorities are represented in every institution. It's just not possible.

So what is the point?

I suspect they are trying to be nice.

You know, protecting the feelings of one hypothetical person who is suffering through this particular psychological difficulty, and finding him/herself acknowledged and valued.

And it is good, in general, to be nice.

However, I don't see the questionnaire ever offering reassuring questions to protect the feelings of all people with some form of psychological difficulty. How about asking for the number of children to a parent who has lost one? How about asking her marital status to a widow?

Aren't you worried that your institution discriminates against widows?

This kafka-esque niceness is simply not sustainable. So the inclusion of only certain questions just reeks of political grasp-ism (it's a thing). It does nothing to the psychological state of the person answering the questions, who could have just clicked "prefer not to tell" at any given point if they felt uncomfortable.

But hey, that's what we do now, we care about transgender people's feelings A LOT.

In fact a lot more than everybody else's feelings apparently, who may resent the fact that the questions ask whether they lied in their previous answers.

The human mind is immensely complex, and its complexity cannot be reflected by data-collecting questionnaires or creating new rules for every single occasion for which one person risks having their feeling hurts.

That's life.

I don't ask the Brits to stop their Last Night At the Proms traditions because they make me feel foreign.

I AM foreign. And I just deal with it. Like a grown-up person.

Who hates data-collecting questionnaires.