On books of genius

Do you ever read books or articles (or novels, for that matter) which are completely mesmerizing pieces of work? To me, the ultimate test of a good article/book is if I wish I had written it, or something like it. Usually that entails the author either thinking about the issues in a way I never have, or expressing thoughts and ideas which I have had, but have not been able to elucidate nearly so well. One of the truly great joys of life is encountering these towering monuments of achievement. A true test of this is its applicability to multiple concepts and time periods. You know, those articles which cause a florescence of marginal notations along the lines of "this is like this!" or "implications for this?" or just arrows, stars, and exclamation points.

Clearly, I'm currently reading such a book, Diplomacy by Design, by Marian H. Feldman. It's one of the books I have to read for a rather exacting professor who thinks that I, as a graduate student, have nothing better to do than read three extra books and write 3-5 pages reviews of them in addition to a 15-20 page research paper, on TOP of the four question sets all the undergrads in the class are doing (but if the other two books are as good as this one, I will officially stop complaining about it...a bit).

Basically, in examining small luxury goods found throughout the Aegean, Egypt, Levant, and Near East in the Late Bronze Age, Feldman argues that they function as exchange items among elite, are intentionally expressive of a generic, hybridizing international system (she uses the analogy of the iconography of the Euro), and completely transform in meaning depending on who was giving the object to whom (e.g. as tribute, gift, or exchange). Along the way, she calls upon several newish theories such as object biography and agency, but not in an obnoxious or self-congratulatory way. So, she uses theory as one should - as a means of interrogating a concrete set of material evidence. None of this theory-for-theory's-sake nonsense. Anyway, I just finished the introduction, so we'll see if the rest of the book holds up, but I'm really looking forward to reading the rest. The fact that I could really give two hoots about the Bronze Age, and am still totally loving this book, is a true testament to its awesomeness.

In other news, I passed my Latin exam, meaning I am officially DONE with all four language requirements for my program. Which is pretty exiting, when you think about it, considering how much languages have been the total bane of my existence for years.

Rage, sing of the rage

Spring semester has now passed the two week mark, and I'm cautiously optimistic that I will not actively loathe any of my classes (cough, Prehistoric Greek Art, cough) and may actually enjoy a few, which would be a nice change of pace. I have, however, been exceedingly grumpy about Greek and Latin, since I somehow forgot that the beginning of the semester is the most challenging and time consuming in language classes due to a combination of forgetting things over break and adjusting to new authors with different writing styles and vocabularies. For example: our first Greek assignment, the first 20 lines of the Iliad, probably took me about three hours. Today's assignment of 30+ lines took less than two hours. And while assignments may get marginally larger (perhaps 40-50 lines), I'll keep getting faster and will likely be able to get it done in about an hour. (The same holds for Livy.) The trouble is, I always remember the end of the previous semester, in which I blaze quickly through the readings, and it's obnoxious when things take longer than I think they should.

I also tend to get grumpier about languages taking up a lot of time when I feel like I have better, more productive things to be doing with said time. (This goes back to my long-standing resentment of having to learn languages at all. I will never ever be as good at Latin or Greek as other people around me. In the future, the most I'll have to do is read an inscription or quickly check a translation; anything more substantial I could pawn off on those who enjoy it more.) So, me struggling to read the Iliad accomplishes nil in the grand scheme of the world. I'm not going to get anything more from it than the zillion other people who have read it before me. Working on my own research and projects feels so much more productive to me. I'm doing something new, something unique, something which adds to our accumulated knowledge rather than takes from or duplicates it. This feeling has been particularly acute in the last couple weeks, as I'm trying to finish the last draft of the beads paper and put together a talk for the Upper Midwest Bead Society.

There are a lot of parentheticals in this post. Clearly, I've been spending too much time reading Claire's blog.