Am I the only one who does this?

Sometimes when I am writing a paper and I've hit a wall or am not pleased with my argument, I'll write the worst possible sentence I can think of in the style of a 4th grade book report and then erase it. I think I do it because anything I write afterwards will be better than what I just wrote.

If I died on the way home today...

...this is what would have been found in my backpack:

My computer
Lots of school related papers.
Two editions of Beowulf
An Index of Theme and Image to the Homilies of the Anglo-Saxon Church
Richard Rolle's Emendatio vitae
Runes and Magic: Magical Formulaic Elements in the Older Runic Tradition
Magic, Mystery, and Science: The Occult in Western Tradition
The Western Esoteric Tradition: A Historical Introduction
Two ginormous volumes of History of Magic and Experimental Science
and a Latin dictionary

The coroner would have declared me both dead and very odd.

Seriously??? Again???

ANOTHER BLASTED HEAD COLD. This is absolutely ridiculous. This is my fourth time being sick since November (3 colds and 1 flu). I REFUSE TO ACCEPT THE THEORY THAT MY BODY CANNOT HANDLE THE WEATHER UP HERE.

And the wonder continues!

Ok, so as it turns out the upper level of the CMS looks pretty much like any other academic institution on the inside.

Behold one of our luxurious hallways!

Great Hall, view 1! There is a kitchen sans oven/stove on the other side of the wall thing.

Great Hall, view 2! Evidently I took this picture right when I got back, as evidenced by the Christmas tree. There are a couple manuscripty pictures on the walls, but that is pretty much all that would designate the room as belonging to a program housing medievalists. The Great Hall serves basically as a place to hang out and maybe get some work done. Some of the parties take place in the room as well.

I might put up some photos from CMS classrooms, but those are also just pretty much standard
in appearance. The colleges and libraries are more interesting...

Long Delayed Pictures

Ok, so here I am being a good little blogger/son and actually posting some pictures. I don't want to deluge you guys with a bajillion pictures at once, so here are a few that I took recently


This is a front view of the building which the Centre for Medieval Studies shares with Classics.

Here is the Royal Ontario Museum, directly across the street.

This is the entry way to the CMS building. I kind of like the marble pillars opening up to the big ol' staircase. Sometimes I use the stairs instead of the elevator just because I think they look classy.

This is one of the stained glass windows that is in the entry way, depicting "household sciencey" activities set in Ancient Egypt.

Ok, I'll post more tomorrow on the theme of "wonders of the third floor". For realsies.

Recent doings

Here are the haps:

I have been sort of overwhelmed since I got back to Toronto and on top of it I got sick, so this last week and a half has been simply marvelous :P

My courses this semester are as follows:

Old English II- We're translating Beowulf, which is really really exciting. I first did some translation from the poem for a class back in my junior year, but I'm not sure that should really count since I had no clue what I doing at the time. I've been sort of amazed and how much faster I can get through stuff. However, the flip side of this is that while I was translating a little over 30 lines a week back in undergrad, this class requires 300+ lines each week. It takes about 6-8 hours, which I guess isn't that terrible but still manages to be very time consuming. The prof for the class is incredibly excited over the material and is absolutely bursting during her lectures, which makes class time pass really quickly. I'm enjoying this class a lot.

Medieval Magic: Predicting the future and influencing events- As if I wasn't having enough fun with the Beowulf class, this class is shaping up to be a blast as well. The first class session was mostly about runes and the meanings of the various letters to an Anglo-Saxon or Norse audience, which was sort of hard to follow but was extremely interesting. This class is pretty much just the dream of anyone into arcane esoterica, but since its all being approached from an academic angle it doesn't veer off into any weird craziness. There is a certain kind of geekiness that really likes this sort of stuff, but I feel like the class is very far beyond appealing to that sort of appetite (I might be simply fooling myself on this point, as that same geekiness is very present in me). Dr. Orchard leads the class somewhat dialectically, so its a really comfortable format and very engaging. He can be a bit demeaning, though, if you're wrong in what you say. Oh well, such stuff comes with the territory. This class and Beowulf are vying very heavily with each other for which gets to be my favorite.

Medieval and Early Modern Inquisition- Yup, that's right I wasn't expecting the Spanish Inquisition either, but here I am. I needed to fill up one more slot and this was one of the only classes that would fit. I was going to take Romance of the Rose, but as I do not speak French my ability to engage with the secondary scholarship would have been rather limited. This course is way too late in its scope to have any bearing on my studies, but it is at least sort of interesting and it justifies me running Monty Python lines through my head during class. Plus, if I'm ever talking to someone and they decide to be a ******** (fill in your favorite expletive) by attacking religion or Christianity about the Inquisition, I will at least have the facts readily at my fingertips.

Latin- Latin is Latin is Latin. We translated a few hundred lines of the 8th century (mock?) epic poem Waltharius over the past two weeks, and though I enjoyed the text a lot the course is still by far the most crazily time consuming class I have ever encountered. Granted, I know a lot more now than I did coming in, but I'm sort of starting to get exhausted.

...

I also turned in my PhD application today...

...

I would love to get in, but I am not exactly brimming with confidence over my chances. A lot of the people in my year are extremely competent, and in some ways I would even feel guilty if I got accepted over others. I hope that I will be here next year, but I'm trying to not hold that hope too dear and I am definitely not counting on it. Assuming I don't get in (and that is what I am assuming currently) I've decided that I will take a year off and make the round of applications again in the fall. I only applied to Toronto this year, partly because its my top choice and partly because the application process is just really time consuming. I also always feel guilty asking profs to sacrifice their time in writing letters of rec for me (guilt is sort of a hobby of mine).

I'll try to get some pictures up over the next couple of days. I'm going to do a series of all my major haunts up here...stay tuned!

Latin Christmas Carols Redux!: O Antiphons

I'm gonna give the Latin translating another shot by translating the remainder of the "O Antiphons." The O Antiphons are prayers said by western catholic Christians in the days running up to Christmas. One antiphon is said or sung each day starting from the seventh day before Christmas Eve and each begins with the interjection "O" (hence the name). If you take the first letter of the word following "O" and line them up in reverse order you get the Latin acrostic "ero cras," meaning "I will come tomorrow." Here is what it would look like:

Dec. 17: O Sapientia
Dec. 18: O Adonai
Dec. 19: O Radix
Dec. 20: O Clavis
Dec. 21: O Oriens
Dec. 22: O Rex
Dec. 23: O Emmanuel

Obviously, I'm a bit behind. I'll do two today and three tomorrow to catch up:

O Sapientia, quae ex ore Altissimi prodiisti,
attingens a fine usque ad finem,
fortiter suaviterque disponens omnia:
veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiae.

O Wisdom, You who procede out of the mouth of the Most High
Stretching all the way from boundary to boundary,
Mightily and sweetly ordering all things:
Come to teach us the way of wisdom.

O Adonai, et Dux domus Israel,
qui Moysi in igne flammae rubi apparuisti,
et ei in Sina legem dedisti:
veni ad redimendum nos in brachio extento.

O Adonai, and leader of the house of Israel,
You who appeared to Moses in the fire of burning bush,
and You who gave the law to him on Sinai,
Come to redeem us through an outstretched arm.

...wow these are super easy. That took like 3 minutes and I didn't even need a dictionary. Yay for Latin class paying off!