Fran Connor

Some intense coaching from Maryland coach Brenda Frese to her star player Oluchi Okananwa 👀

What sort of little tit expects a song recorded in 1970 to be "evolved" on trans rights? Anyway, the lyrics of "Lola" *aren't* hostile to the title character; they're actually rather sweet, and even progressive, by the standards of the era. Eminem was SO right about this schmuck.

I love this: the Cambridge Persianist Edward Granville Browne writing to Ignaz Goldziher in Arabic rhymed prose (sajʿ). Let’s bring this back among Arabist colleagues!

Timely reminder of when this guy reviewed that guy... Iggy Pop on Gibbon's Decline and Fall (Classics Ireland, 1995): Caesar Lives by Iggy Pop In 1982, horrified by the meanness, tedium and depravity of my existence as I toured the American South playing rock and roll music and going crazy in public, I purchased an abridged copy of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Dero Saunders, Penguin). The grandeur of the subject appealed to me, as did the cameo illustration of Edward Gibbon, the author, on the front cover. He looked like a heavy dude. Being in a political business, I had long made a habit of reading biographies of wilful characters — Hitler, Churchill, MacArthur, Brando — with large profiles, and I also enjoyed books on war and political intrigue, as I could relate the action to my own situation in the music business, which is not about music at all, but is a kind of religion-rental. I would read with pleasure around 4 am, with my drugs and whisky in cheap motels, savouring the clash of beliefs, personalities and values, played out on antiquity’s stage by crowds of the vulgar, led by huge archetypal characters. And that was the end of that. Or so I thought. Eleven years later I stood in a dilapidated but elegant room in a rotting mansion in New Orleans, and listened as a piece of music strange to my ears pulled me back to ancient Rome and called forth those ghosts to merge in hilarious, bilious pretence with the Schwartzkopfs, Schwartzeneggers and Sheratons of modern American money and muscle myth. Out of me poured information I had no idea I ever knew, let alone retained, in an extemporaneous soliloquy I called ‘Caesar’. When I listened back, it made me laugh my ass off because it was so true. America is Rome. Of course, why shouldn’t it be? All of Western life and institutions today are traceable to the Romans and their world. We are all Roman children for better or worse. The best part of this experience came after the fact — my wife gave me a beautiful edition in three volumes of the magnificent original unabridged Decline and Fall, and since then the pleasure and profit have been all mine as I enjoy the wonderful language, organization and scope of this masterwork. Here are just some of the ways I benefit: I feel a great comfort and relief knowing that there were others who lived and died and thought and fought so long ago; I feel less tyrannized by the present day. I learn much about the way our society really works, because the system-origins — military, religious, political, colonial, agricultural, financial — are all there to be scrutinized in their infancy. I have gained perspective. The language in which the book is written is rich and complete, as the language of today is not. I find out how little I know. I am inspired by the will and erudition which enabled Gibbon to complete a work of twenty-odd years. The guy stuck with things. I urge anyone who wants life on earth to really come alive for them to enjoy the beautiful ancestral ancient world.

Indiana's statehouse just signed two bills that cannot survive being read in the same sentence. The first: public universities must now accept the Classic Learning Test for admissions. The CLT draws its questions from classical texts. Plato. Augustine. Cicero. Shakespeare. The argument is that these works represent the intellectual foundation of Western civilization and self-government. The second: public colleges must eliminate programs deemed to produce "low earning" graduates. No carve-out for humanities. No protection for the programs where students actually read and wrestle with those classical authors the first bill just elevated. Fort Wayne's Redeemer Classical School sent a representative to the statehouse to champion the CLT. Their students read Homer and Euclid. Their graduates will now test into universities that are legally required to accept their scores and simultaneously required to shut down the departments built around the tradition those scores are supposed to measure. You cannot champion the classics as a signal of intellectual seriousness and then eliminate the classrooms that make the ideas real. That is not education reform. That is a credential without a curriculum.

Virginia Woolf’s diary entries on James Joyce’s Ulysses: “An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me; the book of a self taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating. … I finished ‘Ulysses’ and think it is a misfire. Genius it has, I think; but of the inferior water. The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious. It is underbred, not only in the obvious sense, but in the literary sense. A first-rate writer, I mean, respects writing too much to be tricky; startling; doing stunts.”

there’s no “teen” music anymore

Virginia Woolf’s diary entries on James Joyce’s Ulysses: “An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me; the book of a self taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating. … I finished ‘Ulysses’ and think it is a misfire. Genius it has, I think; but of the inferior water. The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious. It is underbred, not only in the obvious sense, but in the literary sense. A first-rate writer, I mean, respects writing too much to be tricky; startling; doing stunts.”

Quintessential 1970s mass market paperbacks.

Syllabus for Michael Hardt’s 1999 seminar on Capital. He took a call from Antonio Negri in the middle of a class once.