What is it About Displaced New Yorkers in the Mid-Hudson Valley?

In a sense, this book reminds me of 52 Loaves by William Alexander ... another City person who moves to the country but carries their metro pace and compulsions with them.  Here we have a person who is not designing the perfect garden or in search of the perfect bread recipe, but a laid off publisher who decides to learn Latin at age 58.

Besides the reprise of mid-Hudson mania, the book reminds me of me.  And I guess that is why Hammergrael bought it for me for Christmas (even though I got the present in July, probably our latest seasonal gift exchange yet).

Oh yes, the book is Living with a Dead Language by Ann Patty (in case us older folk don't recognize the name, she published The Life of Pi).

Unlike Hamilton, there is not one single word underlined in this book despite the many times it made me laugh.  But like Hamilton, this book is on its way to Houston, where my daughter-in-law, wife of a Latin teaching magister at a private prep school, is trying to master the dead language herself.  (So much in common, my son dragged me with him -- he was too young to drive -- to learn Italian as my advanced age.)

Ms Patty audits Latin courses at Vassar (a bow to my visit to Po'keepsie earlier this summer) where the politically correct school no longer calls Latin and Greek "Classics" but GRST for Greek and Roman Studies."  ARGH.  She describes her follow undergrad students who sound just like the conglomerate of various sexual identities that predominated the last CAMWS conference I went to.  She compares them to sci-fi aficionados.

I absolutely love that she calls an ex-husband her ablative absolute although her current husband sounds a bit too back to nature to me (he did nonetheless give her a fabulous present, a Thomas Cole like view of the Hudson River and Catskill Mountains by selective pruning ....).

Patty eventually ends up at Bard and spends a summer in Rome, so her course of studies follows what I understand to be the "classical" sequence of learning the language.  So okay, I admit it, as a winner of two national merit pins in Latin from high school, I skipped over the Latin and only read the translations.  Once she gets into poetry, I wonder whose translation is the closest, as well as the most poetic.  Circle back to Heaney's translations of Greek drama.

I'm sure D-I-L will love it; also sure son will think it drivel.