Tag: literature
This Means Nothing To Me
I have been in Austria for a week and a half now for teaching work. I meant to update last week, but some brutal 7.30 am start times, heavy snow, a lot of planning to do outside the classroom, and a diet of pure stodge in a small town with few dining options (and even fewer options for vegetarians) tired me out. It feels strange to be in small-town Austria, where not much tends to happen, while political turmoil with dire consequences for many vulnerable people goes on around the world.
15 fun ways to learn languages better
15 fun and effective ways to brush up on your foreign language skills.
Odds and Ends
Here’s some nice things I’ve found lately. Starting with this stop-motion cooking video by PES Studios.
Penguin Little Black Classics
I bought some of these tiny 80th anniversary Penguin books the other day. Each book is around 50 pages long, and has short stories, poems or extracts from writers from around the world. The perfect size to keep in a bag for spare moment reading. There are 80 different ones to choose from, and each one costs a bargain 80p. In picking the books, I went for authors I had never heard of, or writers like Cavafy I’d heard of but never checked out. Hopefully I’ll discover something I really like. The full list of titles can be seen here.
Bacchae prints for sale
I still have a couple of these 22×25 cm / 8.5×9.5″ risograph prints based on the Bacchae by Euripedes left.
The text says “ἔμαρψα τόνδ᾽ ἄνευ βρόχων λέοντος ἀγροτέρου νέον ἶνιν ὡς ὁρᾶν πάρα.” which means “I caught this young lion by myself, without a trap”. Pentheus’ mother, having run off into the woods with Dionysus to be a maenad, kills her son in a frenzy because she thinks he’s a lion, and then parades his head around the stage boasting about the lion she’s killed. That old plot cliché.