Name: Mark Landon
Department: Classics
Pronouns: He/Him
Hometown: Newark, CA
What was it like growing up in the West Coast in California?
I loved it and still miss it. I appreciate it more now that I’ve left. I love the climate. I love the access to good produce twelve months out of the year. I miss the easy availability of being comfortable outdoors, again, twelve months out of the year. Because I grew up spending a lot of time doing things like backpacking in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, I’m used to spending more time in outdoors that are friendlier than the outdoors in New England. I don’t hate the cold winters so much as the humid summers. I really just can’t take them.
How did you decide to study Classics in college?
I had always been interested in Greek and Roman things. When I was a kid I had an illustrated book of Greek myths that I really loved called D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. It had some beautiful paintings in it that I still associate with some Greek myths. When I went to Berkeley as an undergraduate, I took a course my freshman year on ancient epic poetry. The professor was wonderful. When we started reading The Odyssey, he read us a portion of the opening in Greek and I thought, “Wow, that sounds great! That sounds really cool.” I took a few more courses and before I knew it I was majoring in Classics and learning Greek and Latin. One of the things that attracted me to it was that every time I had a question about something and I looked into it, the answer that I’d find was just as interesting as I’d thought it would be. That made it a very rewarding field of study.
How would you describe a Classics major?
Classics is one of the original interdisciplinary fields of study. The goal is to try to understand as much as possible about Ancient Greek and Roman Civilizations. In order to do that, you draw on the languages, the literature, the archeological remains, and on a variety of other things. You draw in any kind of information and evidence that you can find. When you do classics, if you do it right, you are using a whole range of different kinds of evidence to reconstruct an entire ancient society.
How would you pitch Classics to a student?
If you want good training for your brain, the Classics are a wonderful way of doing that. Everyone in the job market knows that in order to learn a language like Latin or Greek and to study ancient civilizations, you have to have a certain amount of intellectual and analytical ability. For example, with Latin you need to understand exactly what’s going on in a sentence. You have to take a Latin sentence apart and apply various analytical tools in order to figure out the form of the noun or the form of the verb. Classics students are generally good writers because they are forced to think more carefully about the way that they speak and how words create meaning. Classics students are also good at approaching a body of information, whether it is a bunch of dates in Roman history or a bunch of problems in a job, and analyzing that material in a methodical, logical fashion in order to find the most effective approach to solving it. Students have gone on to do all sorts of things that are not directly related to, say, learning Latin. It is a very popular major for people planning to study law because it makes you pay close attention to words and how they work. One of our alums won an Emmy in children’s television a couple years ago and she uses her knowledge of Greek myths and Roman history.
How did you decide to come to Mount Holyoke?
My wife and I were married in 1998. At the time, I was teaching at Cornell and she was teaching in Indiana. She got a job a the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, so I came out to Massachusetts to be with her. I was fortunate enough that the second year I was out here, in 2000, one of the professors was going on leave and Mount Holyoke needed a replacement for him. I spoke to the college and they gave me a one year position. We got along splendidly. I have been here as a visiting professor, off and on, for the last 16 years. I like to joke that I’m like the dinner guest who came and then refused to go home. I just never left.
What is one thing you like about Mount Holyoke?
Some students, inevitably, get here and decide that they don’t like Mount Holyoke. They decide, “I don’t like a single-gender school” or “I don’t like a school in a small town” or something like that. Those people become unhappy and leave. The administration views this as a problem because retention is one of the things that marks the success of a school. If all of your students leave, then there’s a problem. They also worry about it because it affects the algorithms that publications like US News and World Report use in their rankings. From my point of view, however, I don’t see it as a problem at all. I see it as a very good thing. Because it means that the students who stay here almost always really like it here. That is different from some of the other schools I’ve been at. Before I came to Mount Holyoke, I was teaching at Cornell. I met a lot of students at Cornell who were unhappy there, but they were gonna stick it out and get their Cornell degree, even though they hated it. I rarely encounter students like that at Mount Holyoke. The ones who don’t like Mount Holyoke usually go, which means that the ones who stay really love it here. Students come from all sorts of different backgrounds. Some of them are conservative, some of them are liberal, some of them are American, some of them are from other countries. But the one thing that they tend to have in common is that they enjoy Mount Holyoke, and that gives the place a tremendous sense of community. I prize that. There were things I liked about Cornell as well, but there wasn’t that sense that everyone belonged to a larger community.
What’s your favorite TV show?
I’ll preface this by saying the older you get, the more the popular culture you’re interested in and the popular culture your students are interested in diverges. You’re not listening to the same music, you’re probably not watching the same tv shows, and so on. But when I arrived at Mount Holyoke, we were all on exactly the same page, because everybody was watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was quite wonderful. After a while, Buffy went off the air, and fewer students were watching it. The videos weren’t easily available since there wasn’t streaming. Students moved onto Harry Potter and various other things that I didn’t follow. But for those first few years, it was Buffy. They were watching Buffy and I was watching Buffy.
Which ancient writer would you like to meet/have a drink with?
Ovid. Ovid was a poet who had the luxury of being able to look back on an established tradition and satirize it in a number of very amusing ways. He was as elegant a craftsman as a poet. Nobody wrote more mellifluous or smooth verses than he did. But he was also hysterically funny because he was able to take the conventions and the tropes of poetry and turn it on its head. He’d set up a situation and just when you think you understand what’s going on, he’d knock the legs out from under you with a funny little twist. He wrote this work called The Art of Love, which is basically a handbook addressed to men in Rome, telling Roman men where to go to find girls and how to pick them up and how to keep them once you get them. After writing two books in which he tells the men how to get the girls, he then wrote a separate book for the women in which he tells them how to defend themselves against the men that are out there armed with his tools. The whole thing is an elaborate play on a traditional kind of poem that tells people how to do things. How to plant your crops, how to read the constellations. There is also a tradition of love poetry and Ovid skewers that tradition as well by turning love into a clinical thing that you can teach someone by a series of steps instead of genuine emotion.
What was your worst subject in school?
Math was the worst. I think if I had studied Latin before college, I might have been a little better at math because Latin helped me learn to look at balanced sequences of signifiers (I’m deliberately using vague language) and to fit those signifiers together to create meaning. In that respect, it’s not that different from the way that various numerals and other variables in an equation fit together to find a solution. Maybe I would have been better if I had taken Latin. Maybe not.
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