the best postcard I've ever written

Dear Ellie - 7am and I'm wide awake after getting in at 3 because it's Rome. I am in awe of and humbled by my classmates here and inspired because they learn without grades or obligations, but because they love to. Street noise, heat and dirt are replaced at night with leisurely dinners, intense conversation, cool breezes and wine. The city is alive and gritty and I feel very much awakened by this whole program. One thing is certain - things are going to get moving once I'm back home and grad school's going to change. Latin is good for the soul - Amelia

Reggie hodie flagrans est!

Reggie was on fire today – here are some highlights.

To the class brownnoser when he yelled “Yay!” in response to the mention of the chapel dedicated to St. Thomas Aquinas in Sta. Maria sopra Minerva:

-- Who said “Yay”? You? The chapel then – done by whom? Done by whom? Done by WHOM you SMARTASS?

On the bronze loincloth tactfully covering the naughty bits of Michelangelo’s Risen Christ

-- Stupid loincloth put on by stupid old farts, stupid old pope. EEHHHH THAT’S what the pope should do tomorrow! Bomph! Get that thing outta there!

To the stuttering woman put on the spot by his question, which was general, when she attempted to find the answer in the text:

-- DON’T look at this text, look at ME and my BALD HEAD!

To the class, generally:

-- I respect you and all of your educations. Sed est manca – it’s mutilated. Half-baked. You get it?

-- I’m not making fun of you, it’s just WRONG!

-- You say “we want Latin conversation!” and then you SIT there … like a bunch of DUMMIES and don’t talk!

To some Catholics who insist on traditions older than the Church itself wishes to continue (these might sound worse out of context than they really are; and should be taken with plenty of sal):

-- We ought to take a machine gun and shoot them down off the wall!

-- The OLD mass?! The OLD MASS was OUT before your parents were even born! Saying I love the old mass is like saying I love the old Klu Klux Klan!

*****

That, plus a long conversation about beer (cervisia), how to give a toast (propino, propinare) and other such nonsense (nugas!) basically covers what class was like today.

Via Appia Antiqua et “sub arboribus”

OK, I haven’t written in a few days because I’ve had this cold, see, and I didn’t really feel like it. But now I feel better and my voice has returned (not just metaphorically -- vocem perdidi for two days and now it’s back), so I can bring things up to date. First, a few Reggie-isms:

If you put this sentence in a bathtub, the dolphin would go right for the verb.

I think it’s a great idea: to stand at the shore of a lake or the top of a mountain naked and praise the Lord of the universe! Bingo bango!

Latin is not a grammar … that’s like saying Mozart is do re mi fa so la ti do … with a few variations.

Any German Shepard on the street knows this.

Zip zip!

So. I’ve seen a couple of cool things with Emily – Castel San’ Angelo, a Cappuchin crypt with all the bones in baroque designs, and, on Sunday, we walked the Via Appia. (The “queen of roads”.) We were supposed to go to Tivoli and Hadrian’s villa, but Reggie’s copy machine broke down so he couldn’t make the packets, and he called off the trip (there’s no point in going if we can’t read Latin!). So some of us decided to take the day to walk the Via Appia, the old road which connected Rome and, in 312BC, Capua, then later to Beneventum and Brundusium. Along the sides of it are rather rich tombs, and as you continue down, the parasol pines and trees become more apparent, the road is surrounded by wheat fields dotted with bright red poppies, and the original paving stones, worn by the feet of travelers, become more apparent.

We took the bus to the church called “Domine, quo vadis?” – legend has it that Peter (yes, the apostle) was fleeing persecution in Rome when he had an apparition of Jesus Christ heading the other way. Peter called out, “Domine, quo vadis?” – Lord, where are you going? Christ answered that he was going to Rome to be crucified a second time. Peter, thoroughly ashamed, turned back towards Rome, where he was crucified for his faith. The church supposedly marks the spot where Christ appeared and owns a plaster cast of His footprints. Uh, yeah. Anyway, we couldn’t see inside because it was Sunday and mass was going on, so we didn’t go in. (But on Sunday, the road is closed to traffic.) Anyway, I was wearing shorts and probably would’ve been kicked out (I’ve been kicked out of more important basilicas for wearing too-short skirts…).

So we visited the catacombs of San Callisto – much bigger than the catacombs of Priscilla, but basically the same – which measure about 13km. We were lead around by a crusty old Irish Catholic priest, which was a lot of fun – much better than the perky Italian woman leading the English tour in front of us. Catacombs, I have to say, are awfully cool. We saw inscriptions from the first few martyred popes, the room of St. Cecilia, and some sarcophagi with remains still remaining (reliquae adhuc manent??). Then we walked along… and walked… and walked… and we saw some tombs, and trees, and some tombs that were mounds, which means we looked at lots of dirt. Thanks, Emily. :)

So today was our first session sub arboribus -- under the trees. Latin conversation under the trees in the garden of Reggie’s monastery. Conloquabamur Latine sub arboribus in horto monestarii Reginaldi. I brought a pizza, everyone brought wine, and, yes, for about an hour we spoke together in Latin. How crazy is that???

Ostia Antica - Sunday

We meet at the Piramide metropolitana station to take the train out to the coast, to Ostia Antica. Before a 16th century flood diverted the Tiber several miles north, before the ocean receded with deposits, fill, and beach, Ostia was the bustling port city and outer stronghold of Rome. No longer a port, the city died suddenly, leaving a well preserved skeleton of houses, necropoli, shops, taverns, baths, mosaics and theaters along the straight Roman road Via Ostiensis.

Before we even enter the city, Reggie has us sitting in the middle of the street near where the tour buses enter. “Open your packets!” he says, “Here we are… the place where Aeneas SOMNIABAT! Somniabat? To dreeeeeeam… Open to Ostia apud Vergilium, the Aeneid books 7 and 8…” All that marks the spot now is an expensive restaurant called “The disembarking of Aeneas.” We sit and read about how Aeneas sees the beautiful tree-lined shore from the Tiber and orders the ships in, disembarks and “PROCUBUIT! “What’s that?? FLOPS DOWN. Aeneas flops down and has a dream, ok, and when he wakes up what does he see? INGENS SUS! What’s that? An ENORMOUS PIG. And here she is, right over there, through the trees. Any of you Latin teachers? You can tell your students I WAS THERE. I was there,” he sings, “where Aeneas dreamed. What more do you WANT?”

The whole city might have well been scribbled with the graffiti of past times – Aeneas was here, Pompei was here, Atticus, Livy, Terentius, Plautus, and St. Augustine were here. At the Porta Romana we read pieces of Cicero’s speech to the senate, requesting them to give power to Pompei to clear out the pirates attacking Ostia. In Fortunatus’s tavern, where a floor mosaic of a blue goblet and the word “BIBE” is still visible, we break open a box of wine and raise a glass while reading a bit of Plautus’s comedy Mostellaria, in which the teenage son of a merchant is throwing a wild party when dad is seen coming home from the port early. (Imagine! Everyone drinking wine out of plastic cups in a spot where wine had been drunk nearly 2000 years before!) We walk tipsily to a temple with mosaics of sacrifices and altars to the gods… (er, I don’t really remember what we read…). After a short trip through the museum, around one o’clock we set up picnic supplies at a stone table underneath a leafy arbor (the first glass of wine having been drunk at about 10am – ablative absolute!). From pockets and backpacks appear cheese, plums, cherries, salami, prociutto e melone, bread, and more wine. (Yours truly was the only one who brought WHAT? Plates, extra cups and paper towels! “The woman’s touch,” said Reggie – one argument, he conceded, against celibacy, or at least a good reason to have a few nuns around.) More wine and more wine, and we’ll reconvene at 3:00. Reggie takes a siesta under the trees while adventurers wander off to explore. (I have a passionate conversation about LOTR.) We reconvene at the theater, we walk through the winding streets, up the antique stairs to second floors of houses looking over mosaic tiled baths. We crawl through basement mithrea, cross thresholds of more taverns, and through another bath, and finally we find ourselves in a garden. In the garden, we are told, where Monica, St. Augustine’s mother, died.

Pull out your packets. Augustine’s Confessiones, Book Nine. You don’t like Augustine, neither do I… you’re not Christian, neither am I, ok? Let’s read. Et cum apud Ostia Tiberina essemus, mater defuncta est. Augustine and his mother, looking out from a window into an enclosed garden, discuss qualis futura esset vita aeterna sanctorum, quam nec oculus vidit nec auris audivit nec in cor hominis ascendit (how the eternal life of saints will be, which neither the eye sees nor the ear hears nor the heart of man ascends to). “Well here we are,” growls Reggie, “in that garden. Can you see them? Can you hear them talking?” Further down – Monica awakens from a faint and tells Augustine and his brother to bury her here in Ostia rather than taking her back to Africa, where they had been heading. “Nihil” inquit “longe est deo, neque timendum est, ne ille non agnoscat in fine saeculi, unde me resuscitet.” Nowhere is far from God, nor must I fear that God not know from where to raise me up at the end of times...

And then what does Augustine do? “He takes a BAAAATH…” Reggie says, “next page… Visum etiam mihi est, ut irem lavatum… You see, okaaayyyy? The baths we just walked through. There we are. Do they make him feel better? Noooooooo…. What more do you want my friends, if not this I don’t know… Let’s read it together:

Et inspira, domine meus, inspira seruis tuis, fratribus meis, filiis tuis, dominis meis, quibus et corde and voce et litteris seruio, ut quotquot haec legerint, meminerint ad altare tuum Monnicae, famulae tuae, cum Patricio, quondam eius coniuge, per quorum carnem introduxisti me in hanc uitam, quemadmodum nescio.

And inspire, my lord, inspire your servants, my brothers, your sons, my lords, whom I serve with heart and voice and letters, so that whoever reads this, let them remember at your alter MONICA, your handmaiden, with Patricius, for a certain time her husband, through whom you introduced my flesh in this life, in what way I know not.

“Okaaayyyy… The Confessions of St. Augustine. Okay. Good. Let’s go home.”

******

Some of us take the train to the end of the line instead of returning to Rome. Ten minutes and we’re on the coast. Everyone has gone home for the day and we have the beach to ourselves. We wade in – the sea is warm and the air is cool. I gracefully change into my suit and rush in – here I am! I did it! Into the Mediterranean. Back out, borrow Emily’s towel. Now a little shivery, with sandy feet. We wander back to the station and catch a train to Rome, a bus to Trastevere, and eat pizza and drink wine into the night.

(And now I have a cold to show for it. Oh well.)

Teaching Philosophy

Reggie hates the Melonheads from Pompeii. That’s how he refers to the Cambridge beginning Latin textbooks, which have a cartoon family with heads shaped like footballs – Maria habet parvos annos or something like that. And he hates Wheelock, where you can say you “did the subjunctive” over the weekend. And he really hates, according to one of his letters, the “AP [Latin] nightmare which has killed Latin as a mature and serious study of a whole world.”

He hates most of all the mystification of the language caused by grammatical terminology. “Pluperfect infinitive periphrastic conjugation WHAT?!?” he shouts. “Pooh pah buh buh buh buuuuuuugggghhhh…” he leans heavily to one side for emphasis. “You think Cicero used that when talking to his KIDS?? HUH?” Reggie gestures and says sweetly, “No, daddy, I think you need to use the pluperfect subjunctive here –” and growls “oh YES?? I tell you he did not!”

He believes instead in the teaching and acquisition of Latin from REAL. LATIN. SENTENCES. Do his beginners during the year have a textbook? No they do not – that’s why you’re there, the teacher, you’re supposed to know this stuff you understAAAAAND? They have sheets, just like us – the giant packets of xeroxed Latin passages from the past 2200 years. He dreams of the day where someone will make a textbook from real Latin sentences, with a simple cartoon drawing and a caption which reads: Tryphon, Syriae rex, victus, per totum iter fugiens pecuniam sparsit: eique sectandae Antiochi equites immoratos effugit. [Tryphon, King of Syria, beaten, sprinkled money through the whole way as he was fleeing: he escaped the horsemen of Antioch who were wasting time collecting it.] – Sextus Julius Frontinus (40-103 post), in his Strategematicon, Chapter XIII number II. Or Marcus Aurelius in a letter to his teacher Fronto – “Ego te numquam satis amabo. Dormiam.” [I will never love you enough. I’m going to sleep.] (Book 5, Letter 2). “This was the emperor of the WOOOOORLD!” Reggie sings, “and he’s writing to stupid Fronto about fevers and inguina – groin problems!”

Someone asks him from the back what he teaches beginners on the first day – sentence structure. He says he shows the students that the words of the sentence don’t go in order, and that we have to figure out their 1) meaning and 2) function by the endings. He spends the better part of class showing them how Maria habet amicum and Mariam habet amicus are two completely different sentences, and showing them how the words go in REAL. LATIN. SENTENCES. And then, he says, with about 8 or 9 minutes to go, he says OK now, I’ll show you how to do verb endings. [And I don’t do them in order, dearies, noooo…] We is -mus. They is -nt. You singular is -s. I is -o, -m, or -i. He, she, it is -t. You plural is -tis. And then I tell them to pick a verb from the page of the sheets – ok they pick perdidissemus. And I tell them – I tell them my friends – that it means “we would have looooost.” And I say, so what would “they would have lost” be? And you know what they say? “Perdidissent.” And I would have lost? Perdidissem. And you know what? They leave class and say, What's all the fuss? Latin's not so hard...

[And you might say well, but they don’t understand the subjunctive. Beh bah buuuuggghh! They know what it MEANS! They have a lifetime for the rest, dearies, a lifetime.]

Day Three - Wednesday

“INCIPIAMUS!” grunts Foster amid the clamor of gossip. “INCIPIEMUS!” The children from the catholic school are peering in through the upper windows of the cafeteria – it’s recess. “AHHhhhhh…. The screaming children do not disturb us – DA-vid!” sings Reggie, “What is it in Latin DA-vid?!” Parvuli… clamantes… “Come on, perturbo” – nos non perturbant? Now the passive. Now another way – 4 more ways to say it! Inquietant! Obturbamur! Conturbamur! Now – “IT WILL NOT HAPPEN that we are disturbed by the screaming children and we will miss them when they will have gone in a week! Desidero – to miss! With UT! Jo-oe!”

“OK! With school having been closed?? Easy stuff – the children know this; German shepherds on the street could understand this… you think Latin is OOHHHH!” he gestures wildly, “you think it falls from the sky? Noooooo! It was invented by the prostitutes and their clients on the STREEEEEET…” (And the ladies, he tells us, around Termini are so nice – they give money to the program! He grimaces sweetly.)

Day C (Wed. and Fri.) is reserved for the rather strange mix of Ecclesiastica Latinitas – Carmina; et Exempla Temporis Artium Renatarum. [Ecclesiastical Latin – Songs; and Examples of the Time of the Arts Having Been Reborn, i.e. the Renaissance.] We begin with Erasmus’s own translation of the New Testament from the Greek, and Reggie offers his own view of what the Catholic Church nowadays can do with the Vulgate. Not quite carta purgatorium (a favorite phrase of his, meaning toilet paper) but – “If they had followed Erasumus there never would’ve been a Protestant revolution! But down the street here they’re they’re they’re they’re STUPID! The world is in flames but NO ONE CARES because everyone is waving flags and jumping around like IDIOTS… … St. Thomas Aquinas buh buh buh buh … using a Bible that was what? For the birds! For the BIRDS I tell you dearies, it was so corrupted…” He scandalizes the devout Catholics in the class (not for the first time) elucidating a change in the new Catholic translation of the Vulgate (rev. 1997?): all those Marys stomping on serpents, he tells us, are for the BIRDS. Because it’s not ILLA anymore, it’s ILLUD. She doesn’t step on the snake, her SEED does – ILLUD, he intones. ILLUUUUD. So you can throw out those statues dearies, just throw them out. He loves this, he revels in it. Revels with his voice of gravel.

And then, he melts. In the Juniores class it was C-5, a title of a prayer Pro moriendibus, for those dying – he mentions he’s lost maybe ten friends in the past three months. “And you can go hold their hands, my dearies, but what else are you doing to do, HMMMM? SAY something! PRO MORIENDIBUS! This is a nice one... Well, ok then, let’s move on.” And then, later – “Let’s sing,” he says. In the Seniores section, we’re on Page C-3, mode seven. A Gregorian chant. “You ever sing Gregorian chant? Noooo, of course not … because you don’t like it? Well neither do I. You’re not Christian? Well neither am I. But this is Latin my friends, living Latin. We’ll sing it together. This one is just … lovely. For the dying…”

In paradisum: deducant te Angeli:
In tuo adventu suscipiant te Martyres,
Et perducant te in civitatem sanctam Jerusalem,
Chorus Angelorum te suscipiat,
Et cum Lazaro quondam paupere
Aeternam habeas requiem.

[May the Angels lead you into paradise,
May the Martyrs take you up in your arrival,
And lead you into the Holy City of Jerusalem,
May the Chorus of Angels take you up,
And with Lazarus, once a pauper,
May you have eternal rest.]

“I always cry when I sing this,” says Reggie, “You remember… Remember those who have died. OK, let’s sing it again. And no crying.”

And we sing, our voices echoing off the walls of the tiny cafeteria of the Catholic school a parvulis clamantibus non perturbati...

Day Two - Tuesday

Reggie almost got choked up today when talking about the assassination of Cicero. We spent about twenty minutes on exactly two sentences of his letters to Atticus: Erat enim ars difficilis recte rem publicam regere. Sed iam iamque omnia sciemus et scribemus ad te statim. [Ruling a republic rightly is a difficult skill. But already now we shall know everything and we shall write to you immediately.] “Can you hear him talking?” Reggie whines. “He’s talking to us. Talking on the phone. Do you see what day this is? 11 February 49. Civil War. Caesar is taking over. He’s in Formia – we’ll go there, oh yessss… We’ll swim right where he was killed, on the beach… eeeeggghhh?!

Momentarily put at ease by this thought of beaches, I let my guard down and was promptly called on – “You, you – if we would have known, we would have written. You know your forms? Pluperfect subjunctive.” I freeze like a duck in headlights. I start to mutter what I think are paradigm forms but are actually pleas to the Latin God to send me the answer quickly… no answer. Finally Reggie throws me a bone – “third principle part of sciooooo?!” Scivi! Yes! There it is! “And the perfect infinitive?” Scivisse. “And…?” Scivissemus. Si scivissemus, scripsissemus.

Reggie did a lot of muttering about Germans in the Vatican today. He said he would bring in a papal bull, too. And we learned some choice phrases – the Vatican Press is full of latrones et filii latronum and nothes.

I think it is hard to tell whether Reggie is plenus stercoris.

---

In other news, I visited the Basilica of San Clemente this morning. WOW! A 12th century basilica built on top of a 4th century church built on a 1st century Roman house and mithraeum. You can go down all three levels. It is something else!

Day One

“LINGUAM STUDETIS LATINAM heeeeerrrghhhhh!?” growls Fr. ‘Reggie’ Reginaldus Foster as we enter the small garden in front of the Basilica San Pancrazio. He screeches OOOOHHHHH in a gravelly tone after each one of us says our name. “Yes, Kim. Shapiro is it? Very nice penmanship!” Or, “Yes, on the yellow paper. But with a white envelope, no?” We file into the cafeteria of a local Catholic school run by nuns. The desks are small and the chairs are smaller. We shift uncomfortably with our incongruously oversized books, Lewis and Short (2,017 pgs, 6lbs.), Gildersleeve (594 pgs, 3lbs), and whatever additional dictionary we have brought. Likewise the packets we receive: thin but huge, measuring approx. 1ft. x 1.5ft.

We pull out the sheets of Latin and Reggie picks a sentence and a target. Read, translate. Put it into the plural. Now the subjunctive. One by one the targets falter and the room falls silent. Reggie says anyone who doesn’t know this one can head back to the airport, tells us we’ve never studied Latin before, tells us where we can put that macron of ours (on his asshole, in case you were wondering).

This man wrote Benedict XVI’s first speech to his cardinals. Benedict rather liked it and didn’t change anything. It had been written five days before his election, Reggie says. You know, we thought we should say something about peace, the children, bleah bleah blah gruuuueeeeenngghhhk! He sounds like a dying rhinoceros, or a cave troll. (His completely bald head only assists that analogy.)

When we return from break he has a half-empty bottle of red wine on the desk. No glass.

More Latin tomorrow.

Where am I?

All right, all right, I know it’s been a while… but internet costs me 2 euro per hour so I’m not about to spend all my time and money blogging something hardly anyone reads!!! But now that I’ve bought an adaptor for my computer, I can type things up and then upload them in mere seconds. Aren’t you pleased?? But I don’t have a digital camera, so I won’t be able to take funny pictures and upload them like Anna. : ( (I’ll just have to wait until Anna comes and upload HER pictures!)

So. Matt and I departed May 26 for London, where we spent 5 lovely days in a serviced apartment left vacant by Matt’s friend Scott, who had, in fact, gone back to spend the week in San Fran. While there saw the sights and had some amazing dinners and drank a lot. I’ve decided London is a very livable city. On June 1, Matt poured me onto a 3:30am train to Gatwick Airport, and I caught a 7am flight to Rome. I have no doubt that Anna was in London at exactly the same time I was, but alas! didn’t know to meet up.

Once in Rome, I met up with Emily, who is a grad student in Vancouver also here for Latin. I met her because she saw my Craigslist posting begging for summer housing and wrote me and told me about Amy. OH! Yes, the pick up went without incident – Giofreddo, with blue cap white numbers 831, was there in his station vagon, and I had my copy of some London tabloid, and all was well. My room is in an apartment that is otherwise full of antiques, art books, paintings, and two old Italian ladies. Who knew? Angela, the landlady, is one of those Italian grandma-types who pushes her way through marketplaces and throws elbows, I’m sure of it. Elisabetta is I think a cook or cleaning lady – she does all the work, anyway, and she’s a bit younger. As for the art, I can’t say it’s good, but out of the THIRTY paintings on MY walls alone, there are four of the naked female form. Hmmm….

So I met up with Emily and, because our program has class 6 days a week and excursions on Sunday, we decided to hop up to Florence for the day (June 3 – the 2nd was a holiday and there were fireworks!). I got to visit all my old haunts: sandwiches at Antico Noe, gelato at Gelateria dei Neri, and Tornabuoni Beacci for prosecco on the rooftop garden. Yum! Oh yeah, and we saw stuff too – Palazzo Vecchio, Duomo and Baptistry, Santa Croce, San Spirito.

The next day we had a park adventure – yes, Rome has parks – but they’re really out of the way. We went to the Villa Borghese and the Villa Ada (by getting off at the godforsaken stop of Campi Sportivi and walking the long way round!), then we managed to make the Catacombs of Priscilla about half an hour before closing. It is now a monastery of Benedictine nuns, one of whom led the tour around in Italian (English language nun had already left). But hey, turns out this is where some of the earliest bits of Christian art come from, and I recognized a lot of the frescos from the first 10 pages of my Medieval Art book from sophomore year! (Yes, Anna, we can go.)

OK, I have to run off to my first lesson! Yikes!!