Oo, Jane, that's the same troupe I saw performing Marlowe's Doctor Faustus last year at Big State U.! It was especially marvellous since touring artists usually pass us by for Dallas or Houston or San Antonio. Love your photos! What a fun time y'all are having.

Access roads, blow off courses, and beer barns put me right where I am and ought to be. Good to see my college years weren't wasted.

English was written phonetically through the Middle Ages; one challenge of reading ME is the wide variation in spelling according to geographic variations in speech. But spelling became gradually standardized according to London pronunciation--and then set in stone by the advent of the printing press--by the mid-17th century. Unfortunately this was exactly the time when a massive change in English pronunciation was underway, in particular what's called "the Great Vowel Shift," but also changes, especially silencing, of various consonant sounds (e.g. -gh-, kn-, gn-, -mb). So really I think the solution is to go back to pronouncing English as Chaucer and Gower did.

I think you hit the nail on the head there. I liked Samuel Beckett better in my callow pretentious youth. As an avid tv-watcher I also derived great joy from the hero of Quantum Leap being named Sam Beckett: I fervently hope that its creator was thinking of Beckett quotes "I can't go on like this" and "I can't go on. I'll go on."

An article speculating that Stephen Maturin may have been modeled on A. B. Granville: https://learnearnandreturn.wordpress.com/2011/11/25/was-this-the-real-stephen-maturin/ Maturin has something of a following in Trad Catholic circles. In one of my own favorite moments, he looks at a rope bridge swinging high over a mountain gorge and wonders if one would have time to recite an Act of Faith on the way down; I calculated you'd need the bridge to be a little more than 1000 feet high, with air resistance providing some extra time for screaming. Robin, I've only read the series twice, so I'm on for July!

Coh-MEEN-oh.

Uh oh. I have a Ken Kesey on my TBR shelf. Dh is interested in it, so maybe if I dislike it, it can be abandoned with a clear conscience.

Braziiiiiiil ... where hearts were entertained in Juuuuune.... Oh, sorry. Currently reading The Eustace Diamonds, the third volume in Trollope's Palliser novels. All of these are chunksters, clocking in at 700+ pages, but they go so fast! I think I've discovered my fluff reading. Trollope likes to do this thing where he masterfully and hilariously describes some character who is a real piece of work, then steps back and addresses the reader in amazement: Can you believe how awful (s)he is? he asks, shaking his authorial head. It always works. The "heroine" of The Eustace Diamonds is so obviously drawn from Thackeray's Becky Sharp that Trollope at one point outright points out the resemblance -- and then assures the reader that, really, Lizzie isn't like Becky Sharp, no no.

Virtual hugs. Of course you're not the only one who's felt that way. I loved my grandmother more than any other member of my family besides my husband and child, and it was an immense relief to me when she died and was freed of her worsening paranoid dementia into God's grace. I loved my cat Phil (aka Best Cat Ever) immensely but putting him down meant no more cleaning the messes from a cat with a failing digestive system, and I was really glad about that. Some part of that relief is relief on behalf of the sufferer. Your dear pet's anxiety was a burden on him as well as on you and your family. But it was only a burden on you, and therefore a relief when it was over, because you're a loving owner: an owner who didn't care would have just had him put down or abandoned him when he started to be inconvenient, and would have had nothing to feel relieved about.

Back from the desert to my lovely humid home, and finished Challenge by Vita Sackville-West. This was supposedly a controversial book, written by Sackville-West during (and in part reflective of) her scandalous absconding with childhood friend Violet Keppel in 1919. Sackville-West was convinced by their husbands (who came to get them) that it was probably best left unpublished; and after reading it, I have to agree. Scandalous it may have been; but the writing is overwrought, the improbable plot sluggish for the first half, the ending predictable ... and the hero Julian is possibly the most annoying Mary Sue in literary history. I have Sackville-West's Joan of Arc, but now I have to seriously reconsider my plans to read it. Back to Trollope and Newman for a while I think.

Great news Stacia!

To be honest the "Church Latin" my fellow worshippers use sounds more Texan than Italian. If civilization falls apart Canticle-for-Liebowitz-style, I look forward to our community developing our own Texan dialect of Latin, to be studied by serious academics of the future.

One option is learning both pronunciations. We use Artes Latinae, set to classical pronunciation (really American Scholastic ... there's another called "restored classical" but we won't go into those tall weeds), so they'll be able to move on easily to Latin poetry eventually. But our church services are entirely in Latin, so they pick up the ecclesiastical pronunciation there. Classical pronunciation is the stick shift and ecclesiastical the automatic: it's easy to pick up the latter if you've learned the former, but not so much the other way around. Legal Latin uses an Anglicised pronunciation, which you just have to learn as you go. Medical and biological "Latin" is often enough actually from Greek. As far as Romance language pronunciation, ecclesiastical is basically Latin spoken with Italian pronunciation; but other than that, I can't see how your choice of Latin pronunciation might affect modern language acquisition.

Prayers for your father Stacia and continuing prayers for you.

I am hiding out in the Chihuahuan desert* with no wifi & my phone which I can barely see the words on, and so will be brief. I read another Guareschi, Don Camillo and His Flock; and Penguin Island by Anatole France, a satire on French history and politics which I enjoyed much but does involve some knowledge of French history or the whole Dreyfuss Affair section (for instance) isn't going to make much sense. My chief criterion for desert reading was small paperback I could fit in my pocket; thus the above; and now onto Vita Sackville-West's Challenge, also small. *no rattlesnake encounters this year, so far

You are Catholic, and if you would like to return with your family to the sacraments, you should consider talking to a priest. Unless there are other complications involved, while your marriage would likely not be considered valid, from your description of the facts it should be easily convalidated if you wish. Your first putative marriage would not be valid for "defect of form" (Catholics are obliged to be married in the Church; you weren't). Thus you weren't divorced in the eyes of the Church, because you didn't successfully marry, and so were free to marry your current husband. Your current marriage also lacks form; but since that's a technical defect, form can be supplied ex post facto (i.e. you don't have to "remarry" your husband). Note! Don't take canon law advice from strangers on the internet. I could be wrong. But a parish priest could help you out here; yours looks like an easy and probably quick "repair." (Edit: You would have to have your earlier attempted marriage declared null; but annulment for defect of form is a rubber-stamp kind of thing.)

Because! Wee Girl at last, at last, at last is reading books to herself! The dam has broken and she is making up for lost time: in the last few weeks she has burned through all the Magic Treehouses, the Elmer and the Dragon trilogy, all of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's cures, and is on the fourth Oz book. I think she may have moved forward two grade levels in two months. Her curriculum now consists of reading, math, reading, cello, reading, reading, and reading. And she likes me to read next to her, so what else can I do?

Finished my medieval lyric poetry. Started and finished Euripides' Bacchae (in preparation for attending a performance). Started on Anatole France's Penguin Island, on dh's recommendation. What a strange book. The penguin colony in the Arctic is the least of it. Oh Violet Crown, aren't you suddenly reading much faster than in previous years? Why yes, yes I am. Somebody please ask me why. :)

The Way We Live Now is probably his best novel. The Barsetshire series is the better-loved; it may be the better series, but it's been a long time since I've read them. Either series needs good notes unless one is already pretty conversant with the structure, dynamics, and terminology of Victorian ecclesiastical (Barsetshire) or political (Palliser) life. I know you don't like dead-tree editions, but I do have both series sitting around in well-annotated Oxford paperbacks, needing a good home.

If you need a non-electronic copy, just let me know. :D

Checking in late, again. Yesterday I finished the second book in Anthony Trollope's Palliser novels, Phineas Finn, my increasingly addictive substitute for actual politics this year. And possibly for the next four years, as it looks like my choices for governing the nation will be limited to people I wouldn't trust to feed my cat over the weekend. But we won't go there. Fortunately, there are four more books in the series, and each one is 700-800 pages long. And if I run out of Victorian political intrigue--mixed with breathless romantic plotlines--amongst Tories vs Liberals vs Radicals--Trollope wrote about fifty novels, so I'm happy for a long while. Almost done with Secular Lyrics of the XIV and XV centuries, which is slow reading but surprising fun. Many of these verses were found written on fly-leaves or in the margins of various books; or on the backs of documents; or inscribed on walls. Did you know that the best-attested medieval lyric we have--nineteen (slightly differing) copies have been found--is a mnemonic for all the things you need to check when buying a piece of property? Here's a bit: ... Se whether yt be bond or free, and se the Relese of euery fefee; Se that the seller be of age, & yf the land be not in morgage... "Sumer is icumen in" is all very well, but folks were even more interested in making sure they didn't pay for land that turned out to be entailed. My very favorite lyric is an absurd bit of doggerel written in the back of a Latin grammar book, apparently composed by a student at the University of St Andrews, with silly and jangly stanzas in Middle English and Dog Latin alternating. When I have the time I will copy it here. I already copied it into my journal because it makes me smile every time I read it. Must continue with Newman, sadly neglected, and see to the next Palliser novel; but perhaps something else in-between. Inspection of our shelves turned up three copies of Origin of Species but zero of Voyage of the Beagle, alas.

Re: James. What did you think of Washington Square? I recommended it recently to Middle Girl (who had picked up The American and was already finding it confusing), but she was waylaid by Pride and Prejudice instead. I think there is great appeal in the Jamesian satisfying but not conventionally "happy" ending. Maybe the test for James is whether one liked Stuart Little as a kid. Re: young voters. Interesting times indeed. Not getting specifically political; but let me just say that it was pleasant to see that Great Girl was a lot more genuinely excited about her first candidate than I was about mine (cough*dukakis*cough). Re: Fahrenheit 451. Truffaut > Bradbury as Coppola > Puzo.

likewise! Chocolated up and ready to go.

As I mentioned on the other thread, E. D. Hirsch's knowledge-based educational ideas were influential; I read The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them shortly after Great Girl was born, and paid through the nose for his Core Knowledge Sequence (now free), which for a long time was my only "homeschooling" curriculum. Dh and I were already very interested in tutoring instead of classroom-based education; dh was in this regard influenced by genuinely classical (i.e. pre-medieval) practices. His theories about math education were also influenced by the New Math movement (before it flamed out) and Eastern European problem-based mathematics. I read Diane Ravitch's Left Back: A History of Failed School Reform and The Well-Trained Mind a few years later, which together helped me confirm that I wasn't so much doing "classical homeschooling" as trying to recreate and update the turn-of-the-century "academic curriculum" which Ravitch explains was supposed to replace the Classical Curriculum but was overwhelmed by Progressive theories early in the century. Once we started homeschooling, somebody loaned me a John Holt book. That was influential. So, I thought, the opposite of that then.