beyond the wide world's end

So I've been reading this book (The Elizabethan Secret Services, by Alan Haynes, if you don't want to click on the link), and I've been trying to figure out if I just really, really don't care about the Elizabethan period or if the book is written really weirdly. Combo of both, I think: Haynes' structure is a bit odd, he doesn't begin or end chapters with anything resembling rhyme or reason, there's nothing particularly exceptional about his prose, and this is not a book to read if you know next to nothing about Elizabethan England, because he assumes that if you're reading a book about Elizabethan spies, you must know about major (and minor!) events and people during Elizabeth I's reign. (Which I don't: turns out my interest in European history is already waning after about the year 300 AD, unless it involves dirty, dirty papal politics or the bizarre antics of the Byzantines, in which you have my attention up to the year 1453; the next up on my list is A World Lit Only by Fire.) Which is to say that he will take you through a whole chapter about some spy plot having something to do with Mary Queen of Scots, but he won't tell you anything about Mary Queen of Scots or what she's doing or where in England she is or even when she finally dies except as a throwaway line at the end of the chapter, and then from there he will launch straight into some other spy plot, throwing out names and locations and very occasionally dates as if they ought to mean something to you already. Heaven help you if you don't know who these people are or where these places are or what these events are. This book could have benefited from a timeline in the back.

Plus, Haynes has Opinions. Which, okay, I expect a historian to have Opinions, but they seem to be spectacularly useless opinions -- they come through the text but he never justifies them. And boy, does this guy like adjectives. I like adjectives as much as the next girl, but this guy likes them when they're absolutely not necessary and when the events should be explained and not merely...well, adjectived upon, for lack of a better word. I spent the whole book wondering if he actually likes Queen Elizabeth at all, considering that he mostly portrays her as cranky, petty, cruel, mean-spirited, mercurial, and, my favorite, "the dominatrix of the English Renaissance." Plus on the adjectives note: he really likes to emphasis the excessive brutality of the justice system, but again he assumes that his reader knows everything about the period. He'll mention the brutal execution reserved for traitors, but won't explain what it actually is. He'll talk about vicious torture methods in the intro, but it's a good hundred pages into the text before he actually explains what those are. He likes to name-drop like mad; if I didn't know who a few people were before coming into this book (because of my Shakespeare and Spenser classes, which are, basically, my only foray into Early Modern England), I would have been even more hopelessly confused than I already was. (A list of names to accompany a non-existent timeline would have been wonderfully helpful.) And, as I mentioned above, his sense of structure is really, really whacked. I have no idea why he started the book where he did -- basically in the middle of the action -- or why he ended the book where he did, or why his chapters began or ended where he did, and to be honest, I'm still not entirely certain what happened in the body of the book, except for Christopher Marlowe's antics and stabbing, but I knew that part coming in. Oh, and some English spy whose name may or may not have been bacon may or may not have been in France, or possibly Spain, and gotten accused of pederasty and attempted sodomy. And also fourteen people were horribly executed in two goes (the Babbington affair, I think)?

Naturally, in the afterword, he talks about Shakespeare. Because when one is writing a history that includes the Elizabethan or Jacobean periods, one must always talk about Shakespeare. (Specifically, he talked about the play we were actually just doing in my Shakespeare class, Measure for Measure.)

Anyway. What I got out of this book was that Haynes kind of sucks as a writer, and that I really don't care about Elizabethan England. Which is kind of a problem, as right now my honors thesis for next year takes placce during Elizabethan England. (Not Shakespeare, though: Spenser. Haynes namedrops him too, just because he can, not because he was actually involved in any spying.)

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The Classics Department has apparently decided that my Latin teacher's quizzes are "too difficult" and have told her to change the format, which the rest of the class has reacted in horror to as "too hard." (Heavens! We now have to give all four principle parts of the verb and the genitive of the noun as well as the translation! We have to translate a sentence from the Sententiae Antiquae! Later we will have to do chunks of prose that approach actual Latin! Look, I had a really, really old school professor for my first Latin class; my view is a little borked. Of course, my view as far as traditional methods of teaching Latin boils down to, "Hey, it worked for the last 2000+ years, why change now?" Danger of being a classics major, I guess. Hey! The ancient Romans did it! Can't be that difficult, right?)

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The University of Washington has put up their summer quarter classes! And they still have accelerated Greek, for which I am desperately grateful. I might take their class on the Roman Republic, too, just to have something else to do with my time -- everything in the English department I've either already taken at Tulane or don't care about, there's nothing in classics or history that particularly thrills me, or if there is, it's at the same time as Greek. There's an Intro to Folklore class in the Scandinavian Studies department (also Sexuality in Scandinavia, but it looks like that might be modern Scandinavia). Oh, hey. It looks like there might be intensive Icelandic. There's one more Latin class that isn't accelerated Intro Latin, but I think it's too advanced for me, since I'm only going to finish out this semester with 1020 and that one is 461. (Tulane goes into four digits, the UW is normal and goes with three.)

And, thankfully, it looks like the UW summer quarter is actually going to end a WHOLE TEN DAYS before Tulane's fall semester starts -- last year they almost overlapped, which is why I was at CWU, not the UW. I like at least a little vacation time. (I mean, I would prefer to go abroad for the summer, but I think getting Greek is probably slightly more important than studying ancient Rome in, you know, Rome. *sighs*)

Going to the UW will be a good idea because it's the main school I'm looking at for grad, so I can actually talk to the professors in History and Classics, and get a feel for the program. (Also, harder for them to say you don't have the languages if they taught it to you themselves, yeah?)

Also, have I mentioned that Tulane's homepage is the cleanest, most efficient, and easily navigable university website I've ever run across? I hate dealing with other universities' websites; it's so much harder to find anything. Some of it is just that I'm really used to Tulane, but I think it actually is pretty damn useful. (For example: I can get to the academic calendars for Tulane in two clicks of the mouse. Even with a search engine I couldn't find UCL's academic calendar.)

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My mother is coming to New Orleans in March! A couple weeks after Mardi Gras, you know, when one can actually get a hotel room. I am very excited!

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Random federal grant I'm not entirely sure I qualify for is random. But hey, money! I will take that, dude. Guess the feds are good for something after all. (I kid. I have a not indecent amount of grant money from them already. Well, it's only not-indecent if you don't know how much my tuition is, but along with my scholarship it puts a major dent in my stupid, stupid private school tuition.)

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Still watching Farscape. I like Crichton when he's crazy. (I am actually also not the biggest Crichton/Aeryn shipper, although Aeryn is awesome. I don't oppose it, though.) I've seen it (mostly) before up until some mid-point in the fourth season, and am partway through the third season now. (Having seen the first season several times, and not feeling up to all the intro stuff, this time I started with "Crackers Don't Matter" -- I told you I like Crichton when he's crazy -- and moved on from there, skipping an ep here and there for one reason or another. Good times, man, good times. The first time I saw this show was streaming online a few years ago, prompted by someone on my flist seeing it for the first time, and I remember sitting on my bed watching it on my laptop and hoping the stream wouldn't crap out after the first seven minutes or so. There are a ton of episodes, especially in the later seasons, that I've only seen the first seven minutes of. (Don't ask me why. Something to do with the stream.) I have the series box set at home, but I didn't haul it out to New Orleans -- watching it on Netflix Instant View, this time.

(I have to admit, I care a heckuva lot more about the Crichton on Moya with D'Argo, Chiana, Pilot, and Jool than I do about the Crichton on Talyn with Aeryn, Crais, Rygel, and Stark. I love D'Argo and Chiana and Jool! Good times, man.)

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This semester I have figured out that I do not care about the Middle Ages nearly to the extent that I do about the Classical period. Well, at least I worked that out.

So I just realized that Farscape hits my two biggest kinks ever and it took me this long to figure it out: the show is basically all about "You can't go home again" and "Adapt or die."

How did it take me this long to realize this? I'm already into the fourth season, here!