Return to normlacy.

Or something like it. It actually feels good to be back at the Circulation Desk, although this afternoon I narrowly missed a run-in (two, actually) with someone from my Classics days at B.U. - an intellectual troglodyte of a fellow graduate student whose pompous and yet at the same time joyless approach to Greek almost made me question my own committment to the discipline. Fortunately she was checking books out when I was first arriving for my shift, so I was able to duck behind the hold shelves and talk to one of my supervisors until she had left; then again, when she came back for a second foray, I was busy assisting a patron on the phone, sparing me a second time. How I disliked this person! So full of contempt for her colleagues and hostility towards her professors, whom she would interrupt every few minutes during a lecture in order to show off her acumen in all things Greek or Latin. Of course this was before I came to understand that my field was positively littered with such pedants, and that bringing the soul of humanism back to what they'd sucked the life out of over the centuries was the most important challenge for a teacher of the Classics today.

As if this weren't enough reason for this individual to enjoy lifetime persona non grata status in my book, a student of mine - my first, to be exact, as well as my best - was dressed down by her in a graduate level Greek class at another university which she was teaching as a substitute because he dared to use the Modern Greek pronunciation when reading the ancient. She called him a "base nationalist", among other things, and was utterly dismissive of the idea that a language with a millennia-long continuous usage should be spoken in a manner that embraces such a continuity, instead of attempting to wall off one particular period and one peculiar albeit influential dialect from the rest of Greek by means of an artificial scheme. And though she was in fact so rude that she was reprimanded later by the Classics faculty at that school at the behest of my former student's classmates, her savage response to a reasonable proposal is a constant reminder of how instinctively scholars tend to rally around tradition for tradition's sake. The pronunciation battle is likely going to be a long and ugly one, but I think time is on our side on this one.

Speaking of which, I was kicking around the internet looking at other programs of instruction in Greek and found the Romance & Classical Language and Literature Department of the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey (formerly known as Stockton State College), whose course description for 100-level Greek reads as follows:

An introduction to the elements of the Greek language that have remained unchanged through most of the time Greek has been spoken. Emphasis is on the grammar, syntax, and vocabulary common to all forms of Greek language from Ancient to Modern. The present course aims at preparing students to read adapted/simplified Attic, Medieval, and Modern Greek texts mostly in prose.

I'm betting that this professor doesn't use multiple systems of pronunciation when teaching this class!

Stockton was recently in the news - okay, The Hellenic Voice, but hey, they published my essay about Demetrios Bikelas! - as the college just received a multi-million dollar endowment earmarked for the creation of a Center for Hellenic Studies, a truly amazing thing to have happened in these days of diminished philanthropy and what seems at times downright adversarial attitudes towards the liberal arts. Maybe they'll be looking for a librarian or two in the next year or so!

Another fun fact: The Richard Stockon College also happens to be a stone's throw away from Atlantic City. Which brings us to my next post...