I've Been Away . . .

I've been at the annual convention of the American Philological Association (known to the world at large as the Classics Geek Convention) in Boston. I won't bore you with the details of the scholarhship presented there, since many of the topics discussed are obscure even to professional classics geeks like myself. Instead, I'll confine myself to some trivial observations:

(1) I used to think of the APA convention as having the highest concentration of tweed, corduroy, and comfortable shoes to be found anywhere on the planet, and there's still plenty of it there, especially among the older scholars. But I noticed that the younger generation (which doesn't include myself) was dressing considerably more snappily. Along those same lines . . .

(2) My friend Bruce, a Bostonian and a non-classicist who stopped by the convention center to take me out to dinner, remarked that the lobby was "crawling with babes." Classics babes?I thought he was joking at first, but then I looked around. There wasn't a dowdy academic spinster in sight. Rather, we were surrounded by brainy and beautiful women. (I shouldn't have been surprised; I married one of those, after all.) Academic demographics are changing.

(3) Classics scholars don't get any social prestige from what they do, and they don't get paid much money for it, but they really love learning, scholarship, and teaching. I admire that a lot.