On the top surface of the moulded base, two bronze coins were found: one (RP 14) along the southern edge (fig. 31), the other (RP 15) along the western edge near the NW corner (fig. 24). RP 14 (figs. 24, 32) is a quincunx from Luceria (Obv. head of Minerva / Rev. eight-spoked wheel, legend LOVCERI with archaic L), datable to the late 3rd century BC, while RP 15 (fig. 33) is a semiuncia (diam. 2.0 cm; Obv. head of Mercury to the right / Rev. prow to the right, legend ROMA), also assignable to the late 3rd century BC. Given the small number of coins recovered from trench M-6 — just three in total — the discovery of two of them at the edges of the base and in contact with it may not be entirely coincidental.

The stratigraphic sequence helps make sense of the recognition of activities. At the end of the sanctuary’s life, in the 1st century AD, the inscribed block RP 19 was still on the moulded base, along with another block to which it was connected by two iron clamps; the data does not tell us whether they still supported a crowning block. At some point, the clamps were broken, and a fragment of one ended up on the surface in front of the base, before the fall of block RP 19; presumably, it was only at this point that the upper block was dismantled. The coins, found on the edges of the base and covered by the abandonment layer, may have been uncovered during the dismantling of the blocks. If this hypothesis is accepted, they could be interpreted as objects deliberately placed between the blocks at the time of the base’s construction; otherwise, one must suppose that they were inserted into the joints during the ‘ritual’ life of the base, emerging by chance only after its dismantling.

Osanna et al. “Rossano di Vaglio, santuario italico:
cronaca e nuovi dati dalla campagna di scavo del 2024″
doi.org/10.69590/e8zcns05

Once again I’m grateful to Dan Diffendale for sharing his work so readily. I would have missed this publication and its FIVE new Oscan inscriptions, to say nothing of these coins without his public out reach.

By they by, I’ve been to this site, but not since 1999 when in October Michael Crawford took me and two other students on a Lucanian adventure. An amazing man. An amazing mentor. He was so committed to showing us more than just artifacts, but the actual landscape of the history we so wanted to understand.

Another pre-writing post, not a draft.

We all want our work to ‘matter’.

Matter is a strange word. The OED tells me the noun predates the verb in English by a few hundred years and verb derives from the noun. Just like email is a noun but we can also use it as a verb: to email someone something. Matter comes to us from the Normans–likes so many of our points of overlap with the other romance languages.

“The sense development of Latin māteria was influenced by that of ancient Greek ὕλη hyle n., of which it was the accepted equivalent in philosophical use.”

Oxford English Dictionary, “matter (n.1), Etymology.”

To be or have substance, to be substantial, for there to be a there there.

Perhaps I find it hard to articulate why my work matters, to make meaning of it, is because I tend to put first the pleasure, or at least satisfaction, I derive from it. The work calls and drives me forward. It feels good in my brain. Like crochet. Like a great conversation. Like gardening. Like dozing under heavy blankets on a cold evening listening to the rain.

Second, I value any meaning others might derive from my work. If it helps them look at the world in new way or sparks their curiosity or answers a question they might have had. I like the potential that my work has to create connections. I know my brain is different than most brains. Perhaps even most brains that enjoy coins. Not, better, not worse, just different. Unique. There is a pleasure to be had in meeting both the familiar and the unique.

These are not the things of academic book introductions, I suspect some even raise an eyebrow to my placing them here on an academic blog for all to see.

But, facing facts, we are in crises, be they local or regional or global. There are significant limits to our personal agency. This does not absolve us of moral responsibility, but it does complicate our relationship to the mundane.

Over the last month I’ve become more intent in enjoying the transience of life. A sunbeam. The sound of my children. The feel of the night air. The taste of bread baked by a friend. I know this is to a degree an outgrowth of my dread of what may come. The unknown future and the disturbing present.

This being in the moment and centering my awareness of the goodness of my life helps intensely in coping with the day-to-day, but it does not easily spark forward momentum. I prefer to plan than to react, and right now in most aspects of my life with respect to the emerging crises, the best approach is hold space for multiple possibilities and not rush engagement from my frustration at not knowing what will come to be. I know my options. I know my values. I trust I will make the right decisions as it is time to make decisions.

Yet, the flip side is I miss dreaming and pushing towards a goal. That last blog post helped me see not only what I want to include in this introduction but the ways in which over the last decade and more each apparent set back has laid a foundation for my next career step, even as they felt devastating.

So perhaps this moment too will bring something new and wonderful that 10 years from now I will celebrate.

My relationship with RRDP and the project itself are things to celebrate. Partly because they brought me pleasure and satisfaction, good conversations, and deep meaningful partnerships. But, again, we cannot admit in any formal context that this is the function of our work.

Joy has is not a legitimate justification for an academic project.

So maybe to find the justification, the meaning, the substance of my work (of joy, sssshhhh), I must ask different questions. Not “why does it matter?” because, frankly, in comparison to the present human suffering and our likely futures, it does not truly matter at all.

Perhaps I need to ask:

what questions does it answer?

what questions could it answer?

how does it intersect with the work of other scholars?

who has and who can utilize this data?

Not “why it matters”, but rather “what is its utility?” and if it must “matter” perhaps we can say, yes it has substance, depth, and seriousness and rigor. These things need not have moral or ethical values or even practical value for addressing practical problems.

[Yes it is exhausting to have my brain work this way. No, it is not always quite this bad, but trust me it is better to write through the contortions of my thinking, to iron out the wrinkles of my mind, than to remain paralyzed and self-loathing for not engaging with the work I said I would do. Please do not feel you must read any of this.]

—-

At this point you may be glad to know that I actually started writing something like a real draft. I cut and pasted it into a word doc and will keep on going tomorrow.

It took almost 3,000 words of navel gazing to produce just over 600 plausible words on the topic I need to write about, but this is ok. If 80% is tossed to the wind and I keep 20%. This is not so bad.

I will persist.

This is a post of pre writing, not a draft.

The origins of this blog and the RRDP project are pretty much the same. I was trying to figure out how to write my second book on Roman republican coins and how to explain their significance to the average historian. In the spring of 2014 (still in the first year of this blog) I was still thinking of the book as a chronological treatment (I gave that approach up in 2018). But even as I conceptualized the project of translating republican numismatics for republican historians, I already knew that certain topics and themes would be more important or just frankly easier for the uninitiated to see the relevance.

Already in December 2013 I had identified the grain supply as one of those topics and had written off the blog in a word document some 5,500 words on that topic. I naively thought at that point that that writing was ‘drafting’ my ‘book chapters’. I still clung to the view that this blog was ‘non-sense’ and that drafting could be done in the raw without pre-writing. I did eventually post the timeline I had created and then used those early off-blog drafts to influence other bits of published writing in the book. Some of the work also ended up in my 2017 Minucius article. Strangely, the topic ended up being scattered over the whole book.

Sometime while I was wrestling with the grain supply, I think, in early 2014, I realized the key importance of RRC 330/1, the Caepio Piso issue, as potential quantitative evidence to set against literary testimony of state expenditure on grain, particularly for the urban population.

Then came the key question: Had a die study been done already or was that for me to do?!

I asked Rick Witchonke and in his response was the first time I learned about Schaefer and his monumental archive. I wrote Richard and he very kindly sent me scans of the binder pages for RRC 330/1. I didn’t believe such a thing could exist. It was brilliant and tantalizing. If the metadata is correct on the below image file. The birthday of RRDP or at least the first seeds of the project were planted on April 17, 2014. I was out of my mind on all the hormones and stress involved with invasive infertility treatments and here was a numismatic treasure trove that promised a lifetime of curious puzzles, meaningful work, and joy. I was obsessed.

That August I returned to the US pregnant with twins and with about 80% of a manuscript. I hit three walls simultaneously. The deep fatigue of growing humans, the demoralization of learning my manuscript bore no resemblance to what my publisher wanted to publish, and teaching four days a week for the first time ever because of scheduling snafu. Fall 2014 was the hardest teaching semester of my life. I taught, I slept, I tried to ingest as many calories as I could keep down. I did not think about coins. And I really didn’t return to coins for a significant period of time. As the fog lifted mid 2015 (post birth and post-partum depression) I let myself enjoy Dionysius of Halicarnassus, work that will appear in future years, in various fora, and I threw myself into Mellon Mays, which eventually took me towards new meditations on debt, slavery, and the nature of freedom. As those regular readers of the blog will know that debt is a topic to which I’ve been returning with gusto over the last 18 months.

I didn’t make it back to mentally engaging with either my second book project or the Schaefer archive until Fall 2017. [That is about one year after I bought my house and left the city to get a little physical distance from my campus, as I was not really managing to have any emotional distance.] That Fall I recruited a team of undergraduate research assistants and wrote a successful proposal for us as a team to work on the RRC 330/1 using the images Schaefer had sent me back in April of 2014. Those students were so brilliant! They helped me learn how to teach RR coins and die studies and databases to Undergrads. Each took a control symbol and completed the remainder of the die study augmenting the the Schaefer material with other specimens. Of course at that point I didn’t know about overflow/clippings images Schaefer didn’t have in the binder. The students ended their semester’s work with data visualization of how best to represent die links within their individual controlmarks. Those posters decorate my office in Brooklyn and they collectively convinced me of the Roman republican inclination to pair dies. There are a few clusters but mostly pairs.

[I’ll finish the origin story, but I’ve already decided that the introduction to the RRDP volume will center RRC 330/1 as a case study and exempla of the importance of the project as a whole. I had to write to this point to know that I want to do this and to believe it would work and I’d have something to say. Just like my previous post was necessary to realize, I WANTED to write the volume introduction, not just to have written it.]

Fast forward a year and I was thinking more about aes grave and my former teaching partner, Wayne Powell, was talking to me more and more about his work on ancient bronze artifacts. I started dreaming up a metallurgical project on cast coinages. I pitched it to the ANS. After much back and forth, I failed to convince them that such a project had any merit such that they wished to provide access to their materials for testing.

That was hard to hear, but eventually led to two great outcomes. First, the aes grave work has continued first with my work on metrology and then actual metallurgical work with Princeton, Yale, Rutgers and then Nottingham for the Nemi material, and now the ISIS particle accelerator. This work is ongoing and has led to a much broader network of collaborations. Had, the ANS not said ‘no’ in the first instance, it is hard to see myself as being brave enough to reach out to other partners and the project might never have led me to such exciting horizons. Second, as I was discussing my disappointment and numismatic ambitions with Lucia Carbone in the aftermath, I told her my biggest dream, the one I most wanted to accomplish, was a digitization of the Schaefer archive. And, she said, LET’S DO IT. I needed that “yes”. That confidence that it could be possible, that it was worthy of funding, and time, and preservation, and our creative engagement.

There have been many struggles and compromises along the way, but I have no regrets we did it. And we did deliver what we said we would. I might have dreamed of more and different data interfaces, but the data is accessible and safe for future generations. I doubt I will ever write anything on republican coins that will not utilize it in some fashion.

It is good to still be hungry for more…

Things are not good. Perhaps we can just all agree on that.

The title of this post is not a giving up, but rather yet another sincere effort to push myself to engage, to write, to know why I do what I do. I’ve been writing but all my blog posts end up in the drafts file this past month. An alternate post title might be: What am I NOT writing today?

I’ve got 2/3s of a banger of a post on disciplinarity. Yes, once again I’m wrestling with what the heck is Classics and where does it belong in the 21st century academy. That post is most certainly inspired and necessitated by my own struggles as a chair of a shrinking department. And, yet discretion is often called for in delicate moments. I write to know my mind and sometimes its best not to share. I know. I know. That is radically different than the very premise of this blog and my own general philosophy of being. I want to be an open book.

I’ve got another draft of a massive numismatic-themed post about a gorgeous 18th century series of drawings of coins, the vast majority of which don’t exist but are directly inspired by identifiable types. It feels a rather a significant step forward in my emerging work on fantasy pieces. I think I may actually have something original and necessary to say on the topic given some more time and data collection. After 12 years of blogging my research process, I know how slow it is to go from post to completed article. My first post on elephants and pigs appeared 2014 and the article didn’t appear in a PR journal until 2021. I like complex puzzles and pulling ALL the threads together. I’d publish more, I think ,if I turned more of my one-off ideas into articles or notes.

Today, I have time to write and I’m in the mood to return to either of those two pieces. But I’m not doing so. And, in fact, I stopped working on both because of other professional commitments.

I have also not started any new blog posts. I have an incredible itch to write about necro-classics, a concept introduced to me in conversation with Kyle Khellaf, a visiting scholar, I hosted earlier this week for a campus lecture. If I’ve captured the idea he himself adapted from other scholars of more contemporary periods, necro-classics is when an ancient society marks certain humans as unworthy of life and/or where their death is without any significance or meaning. Humans so marked then experience being in essence the living dead. If you want a quick conceptualization just think of Cicero’s state of mind after Clodius manages to have him exiled. Or the proscribed under Sulla. We know and discuss these historical examples because in fact whether those lives mattered were disputed by the Romans themselves. By contrast, there were whole peoples the Romans were happy to exterminate that barely blip on our historical radar. In this conversation, I then raised the concepts of social death and natal alienation as the defining characteristics of enslavement as theorized by Orlando Patterson. Who were the scholars influencing Khellaf on this? I’d write and ask, but the answer might just be another distraction.

So here we have already three things that I’m NOT writing about (that I want to write about!) and looming over me (with SO many shades of guilt) is the need to draft some sort of introduction for the conference volume for the AAR-RRDP conference last April. There I said it. Confession is good. Even a little bit of public shaming of myself.

I keep telling myself that I have no inspiration, that it doesn’t move me, that I don’t know what to say, that I wish to be back in Rome in the gardens of the Academy bouncing ideas off my fellow conference attendees and contributors. I tell myself I’m bored with the topic. That there is nothing left to say. Or, that none of it matters–what’s the point?! On the flip side, the conference was awesome and I want the papers published and I want to say why six years of RRDP matters and why I bothered to give that project so much time and why I think there is still work to be done.

On Monday, after Khellaf’s brilliant lecture on the PostClassical Magreb, I had a conversation with Joel Christensen about writing at the reception. He was talking to a student when I joined in. Christensen was extolling the virtues of writing (only?) when one has something to say, giving it a little time (rather than hours, days, weeks of sitting with the work), and letting one’s brain continue to work on the topic even as one engages in all the other aspects of academic life. There is truth in all this. When I know what I want to say, even what I need to say, the words just come. Setting work down and coming back to it always makes it stronger. Writing is an iterative process. And, when I’m in a writing project it is easy to return to it, I even feel compelled to do so. Such is very much the case with the post on disciplinarity or the one on fantasy pieces sitting in my drafts folder.

Yet, as I said to Christensen, sometimes we can also write just to start. To know that our fingers will move. That we can control our brains and take the noise and chaos and put it to a problem in a linear fashion. Herein is the essence of my blogging. It started as an exercise and meditation on how to write. It evolved into a repository of ideas. A workspace for connecting disparate pieces of primary evidence. And, now when I find being simultaneously a scholar and petty bureaucrat so hard, it is again an exercise and meditation on writing.

989 words. In less than an hour.

I can make myself write. I will make myself write.

I can explain why my work matters, even in the face of fascism. I will not despair.

To be a humanist of esoteric things is to resist despair.

It is not selfish, but rather a small gift I can give future generations.

I’m delighted to learn that the proceedings of the International Numismatic Congress held in Warsaw, Poland, in 2022 is now published AND is OPEN ACCESS. Now we can all read the papers we couldn’t attend!

Greek, Vol. I https://www.brepolsonline.net/action/showBook?doi=10.1484/M.WSA-EB.5.143933

Roman, Vol. II https://www.brepolsonline.net/action/showBook?doi=10.1484/M.WSA-EB.5.144041

Medieval, vol. III https://www.brepolsonline.net/action/showBook?doi=10.1484/M.WSA-EB.5.144042

Medals, Modern, and General, vol. IV https://www.brepolsonline.net/action/showBook?doi=10.1484%2FM.WSA-EB.5.143657

In the Roman section I contributed two short pieces on RRDP both co-authored, on the second one Alice did all the heavy lifting. I’m dead impressed and honored to be on the author list. The first one is an abbreviated preliminary version of ideas that will appear in a fully fleshed out article this year or next in RBN.

The Roman Republican Die Project (RRDP). History and New Methodologies (with Alice Sharpless, Lucia Carbone) In Proceedings of the XVI International Numismatic Congress, 11–16.09.2022, Warsaw, Vol. ii, Roman Numismatics, 81-90

The Roman Republican Die Project (RRDP). Methods and Preliminary Findings (with Alice Sharpless, Lucia Carbone) In Proceedings of the XVI International Numismatic Congress, 11–16.09.2022, Warsaw, Vol. ii, Roman Numismatics, 91-100

I think I never mentioned my being LAST AUTHOR on this fun piece earlier this year:

“Money and Mid-Republican Rome” (with Termeer, M. et al.), Journal of Roman Studies, pp. 1–25.

I remembered when I was updating my publications page today.

Shana Tova!

And in honor of today, please take a moment to learn something of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

History matters.

Inscription content: Inscribed by Ghezzi:

“Quintus Fabius Maximus called the Verrucosus who was dictator of the Roman People – Five times / Consul – Twice Viceroy Aedile – Curole [sic; Curule] – Military Tribune Pontiff and Augur – / king – In the first Consulate he subjugated the Ligurians – held Hannibal under control several times – / being Consul The fifth time, he brought Taranto under the obedience of the Roman People and / to this fact, the reverse of the Medal makes allusion, where the consular / fasces are seen – / The head of this great man has never been seen on the Medals / by any Antiquarian, therefore this one is very rare and is preserved among the antiquities of – / my Dear Friend the S.[igno]r Abbate Ballerini, a man very learned both in Antiquities / and in Literature, and is librarian in the library of Casa Barberini and antece – / the former librarian, is Vicar of Monsignor of Carpentrasso, and also of His Holiness Cardinal Monti / is the present Librarian of the Barberini House, Designed by My Lord Pietro / Leone Ghezzi, on the 15th November 1753, at my age of 79 years -” Inscriptions on large coin: Obverse: Q.[VINTVS] FABIVS MAX.[IXIMVS] On the reverse: TARENT[VM] RESTIT[IT] and below: ROVERCIO DELLA TESTA DI Q.[UINTO] FABIO Above small version of obverse: DRITTO and of reverse: ROVERCIO [sic]

This is super important for demonstrating that the fashion for fantasy pieces and the belief in their authenticity (in some cases) pre dates the mid 18th century.

I mentioned in the “just email” post that I’ve trying to read a little in the morning over coffee something that stimulates my intellectual curiosity, but not directly connected to research. My theory is if I spend my days as a petty bureaucrat and event planner at least I will not forget I am a scholar and I may find it easier to hit my research goals in the moments in between.

Ehrman, Bart D. Lost Scriptures : Books That Did Not Make It into the New Testament. Oxford University Press, 2003. [full text PDF download from Internet Archive]

Why this? It was to hand. I picked up a copy at some charitable book store over the last few years. It comes in small chunks–so easy to pick up and put down. I like fragmentary texts. I like alternate perspective and less known voices from the ancient world. The narrative variations are fun.

I’m teaching Sex and Gender and thus gender is on my brain. Or maybe it is this moment where government entities seem obsessed with policing gender expression and trying to define and codify the gender binary. Or maybe I just think about gender and gender performance a great deal regardless.

This passage many of you will already know. It gets leaned on hard in many progressive communities of Christian faith, and interpreted with different emphases in conservative ones.

²⁷ As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. ²⁸ There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. ²⁹ And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.

Galatians 3:27-29 (NRSVA translation)

If you’re not familiar with this letter of Paul the wikipedia entry isn’t half bad and gives a nice little outline of the letter to help you see the context of this quote.

So this canonical text is in my mind, for all I always struggle with Paul. I prefer Mark, then Acts, then Matthew and Luke, the rest of the canon is interesting, but I find less compelling… The dangers of being a Roman historian engaging with ancient texts as both ethical spiritual teaching and as a scholar. I have heterodox opinions.

Here are two passages that seem to speak to this idea in discussion in early Christian communities.

First the so called Gospel of the Egyptians known from Clement of Alexandria. Clement was particularly obsessed with a reported convo between Jesus and Salome. No, not the lady who asked for John the Baptist’s head. Just a common enough name to make one check twice.

“Death will last as long as women give birth”

“Then I’ve done well not to give birth?” “Eat of every herb, except the bitter one.”

[when will secret knowledge, be revealed] “When you trample on the shameful garment and when the two become one and the male with the female is neither male nor female.”

Clement has his own reasons for cherry picking this text, but for me the verbal echoes of Paul are suggestive of a conversation on the nature of gender, one familiar from stories of Thecla and Perpetua from the early church. The two become one motif is popular in other apocrypha as well appearing in Coptic Gospel of Thomas. And I am curious how much we can read the motif generally about gender.

It seems to me a great deal of the interpretation depends on the sense of META (“with” in the above translation).

“The Male together with the Female is neither Male nor Female” suggests an end to gender distinction as an ideal state

“The Male in dealings with the Female, is neither Male nor Female” suggests the teachings is meant to say something of how the sexes interact.

The natural reading seems to be using META as a conjunction giving primacy to the Male position, but given that the rest of the quotes have to do with procreation, I wonder and I appreciate the ambiguity of the “with” in the translation. Which got me to think “what f– does that mean?!”.

The ideal of Maleness over Femaleness is the very last verse of the Coptic Gospel of Thomas, a collection of Jesus sayings from the Nag Hammadi library discovered in 1945.

The internet is a wonderful place. I don’t read Coptic but I did find this gem.

All of this is just to ensure I have this material to hand for my last seminar of the semester and also so I have a place to add more gems as I continue my morning readings.

Our culture is changing. It always does. Quite often in response to wider events. I can stop my own doom scroll and limit my news in-take. I can speak up where it might make some small impact. I can do the right thing by those I meet. Yet, I cannot stop noticing the signs of despair and fragmentation among my neighbors and nation-wide. It tells me we collectively are a long way from the hope of 2008, when change seemed possible. Positive change, not the violent, traumatizing kind that seems bubbling up everywhere.

Personally, I’m in a pretty good place. I don’t have long Covid, the initial viral infection just sparked a bacterial one in my sinuses. 24-hours into antibiotics I started feeling like my old self. I’ve had clarity of purpose in my work and a degree of mental peace from learning to trust my ability to make moral choices and accept whatever comes next. It helps that my small domestic world is full of joy and pleasures. I picked beans and treated the weathered front door. Dinner is in the slow cooker. All the neighbor kids are in the dining room playing D&D with the best of all DMs (a doting father). My beloved is building a garden shed out of salvaged hardwood doors. Life really does not get better than this. I even have time to write and interrogate the shift I’m seeing.

Exhibit one.

I posted this on Instagram as a story. I thought it was silly and unexpected. Then a colleague helped me connect the dots. It is a pre-packaged BORG or more accurately in this instance a BORL.

A BORG is a Black Out Rage Gallon. I kid you not. It has a wikipedia page. And these are all the rage I’m told on college campuses. Around this country, our smart young people want to lose consciousnesses. To stop the rage? To feel the rage? To embrace the rage? Whichever it is they certainly want to forget it all.

The practice is so common that companies are now emulating the packaging and recipes to bring this to a liquor store near you. There were other flavors but this one leans into tongue and cheek patriotism and a shade of artificial blue reminiscent of anti-freeze, that famously sweet ‘treat’ that has killed many an unsuspecting family pet.

It’s good business to make something cheaper and more convenient than one can make at home. This is a sound example of entrepreneurship in late stage capitalism. Make it easier to black out and give the people a little joke to chuckle about as they do so. The elites can thumb their nose at the packaging and think it ironic. The working class can embrace the messaging and thumb their nose at the judgy elites who would never buy such a thing. Something for everyone.

Genius.

Exhibit 2.

This is Spirit Halloween 2025. The whole business model of the company profits from the failures of late stage capitalism. Aged malls are full of abandoned spaces. A big box store closes and no new company wants to move into a failed space. 99% invisible did a fabulous deep dive on this so just go listen to that for the corporate context. Spirit Halloween rents those places at deep discount for just a couple months of the year. No long term contracts: fast cash into the landlord’s pocket and no off-peak costs for the tenant.

For the customers the annual opening marks the beginning of the ‘holiday season’. More and more I hear friends and friends of friends say Halloween is their favorite holiday, more than Christmas, more than Thanksgiving. I get it. You decorate, but cooking is at a minimum, and far less pressure to be with your family of origin. Back in the day, Dan Savage, a sex-positive gay advice columnist, used to call Halloween ‘straight pride’. Go head and do a little bad cross-dressing. Get into a slutty nurses outfit. Play with handcuffs with your cops and robbers costume.

My kids adore Spirit Halloween. My beloved and I play act our way through each visit. Do you like me in this mask? Don’t we need this giant fake battle axe? We learn a little more about our children’s internal fantasies, fears, hopes, dreams by watching them interact with the ever more dazzling array of plastic crap. This year as we approach the store one kiddo says she wonders what the theme will me. Carnivals and Carnies was last year. It is always that sort of thing. Gothic Horror or Mad Scientist or anything else you might find as a theme for a haunted house.

By now you’ve realized what the pictures are. It’s this years theme–the NYC subway.

Somewhere in a corporate creative unit they workshopped this idea. What are we afraid of this year? Not Nazis, they’re back in fashion. Creepy Doctors? Plague? Too soon. Pedophiles? Could be too political.

I KNOW. PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION.

*cough* Unsegregated Urban Spaces *cough*

Thanks Fox News.

What’s the biggest baddest city of them all. The most iconic. NYC of course.

Didn’t you hear those people want to elect a brown muslim mayor? One who might actually address issues like public transportation and the cost of living.

Spirit Halloween creative team hit the nail on the head. There is profit in fear. They serve populations with cars that shop on Stroads. People who can at least dream of owning a 20 foot skeleton and having a place to store it in the off season. They may live near those urban centers, but they don’t necessarily know how to navigate those spaces. They tell stories of rich panhandlers pretending to be homeless while living in deluxe apartments right off Time Square. The city is not for the innocent or the naive.

I understand. I travel. Each new transit system takes some learning. But while I’ve smelled death on the subway (don’t get in the empty car, it is empty for a reason), it never features in my nightmares.

Instead, when the night gremlins come to wake me up at 3 am, they only ask, will my children be able to move through this country and the world with the incredible freedom and joy with which I have?

It is Friday of the first week of classes. It is the last week of August a month I’ve spent almost entirely either sick with Covid or trying to get back to normal. I’m still foggy, fatigued, and phlegmatic. How’s that for an alliterative tricolon?

Yesterday I finished emails and fell asleep for 2 plus hours in the afternoon. This is unheard of for me. I can certainly perform, I’ve had great classes and meetings, but instead of feeling energized I feel zonked. Yes, I’m griping, but I’m also doing that thing of re directing my focus and exercising my writing muscles to try to get to a different mental space.

Beside this little writing exercise, I’ve been starting my day with a short walk and reading something intellectual and in my discipline but without direct connection to any project. My idea is that if I get my blood moving and my brain working before the email, it will set a better tone for the day. I’m finding my work for the college all-consuming. This isn’t necessarily bad. I love my students. I value my colleagues. I’m motivated by our mission. The work is good and meaningful. Besides the fatigue, there is my age old problem of switching gears. I tend to do one thing well and find it all consuming in any moment. This is a core asset to my identity as a researcher. Once I get stuck in I don’t let go.

When I was a lowly grad student, Michael Crawford (yes that one), said to me the secret of success was knowing exactly what you most wanted to look up the next time you had just 15 minutes in a research library. This terrified me. My supervisor told me not to worry, I wasn’t at that point in career. Now, I so wish, I knew the answer to Crawford’s question. I have promised many people many things related to my research. I even think I know what most of them are. I have as always a thousand puzzles I’d like to investigate. I have ambitions to continue to apply for grants and similar opportunities so future me will have what she needs to do the work.

And then there is email.

I find it more addictive than social media. Social media is where I dump intrusive thoughts. Email puts me in a reactive rather than proactive state of mind. What have I missed? Who needs my attention? Where are the fires? How can I avert the next crisis? I write and write and write and beast never quiets. Until it does and then I wonder why I don’t have answers to my questions yet…

I yearn for pigeon post, inter office mail, paper memos, and actual letters. Anything to slow down the flow of communication. It is like drinking from a fire hose. As I type this I’ve my work email closed on my computer.

And… I just slipped and peeked at it on my phone, as I was trying to remove it from my phone for the long holiday weekend. So now I know I have a draft personal statement to comment on and a bunch of lunch requests for a catered meeting next week (no I don’t have a secretary right now and the back up person is out on annual leave). This is not urgent stuff. I can write and get back to those little tasks when I finish this little writing exercise.

I. CAN. COMPARTMENTALIZE.

I. CAN.

Or, I must believe it is possible to both rest enough and work enough.

My beloved has suggested that I physically block out my research hours on my calendar. The advantage of trying this out is both the reminder to myself and also the physical act of knowing I’m sacrificing my research if I take a meeting at that time. I won’t say it won’t happen but at least I will have to face facts about what I’m doing.

The other goal for today is just to figure out what tasks can get fit around the edges. Stuff that doesn’t need large blocks of free space but that I could knock out rather than obsessing over my inbox.

That phrase I used earlier, PRO ACTIVE, rather than reactive, is really my current professional goal. I want to drive my work forward rather than scrambling from behind.

Another part of my internal dynamic is that it is so much easier to prioritize the immediate needs of living humans, than my own quest for knowledge. There is still a part of my brain that feels research is selfish. A vanity project.

Obviously that thinking is a little messed up. My research connects me to many brilliant humans with whom I also want to remain engaged. And my own drive to know is a worthy of attention. I never doubt that when I doing the actual work. Of course I sometimes find certain tasks boring, but the material remains ever fascinating. It is when I’m am focused else where that I tend to discount it.

Ok. With this window still open, I sweeped up the last of those emails and set an out of office until Tuesday.

It will be ok. I might even get some writing and/or research tasks done.

Or I might just sleep.

In addition to chairing I’ve taken on two new roles for the coming academic year. I’m serving as the Faculty Director for the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship on my campus and I’ll also have seven weeks in residency at the Institute for Classical Studies in London as the 2025-2026 T.B.L. Webster Fellow. Those week should be the last two in November, the middle two of January, the second week in February, and the first two weeks in June.

BUT, I really hoped on here to announce this publication in which I played a part.

Termeer, Marleen, et al. “Money and Mid-Republican Rome.” Journal of Roman Studies, 2025, 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0075435825100683. It’s open access!