Slow Art Literary Tour
Attached is the Slow Art Literary tour guide for the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.
This guide is not meant to be sold or used to raise money. Thanks to the Met for providing such a wonderful museum including the treasures in the Ancient Near East and Greek and Roman galleries.
Support the Met! Visit. Become a member.
Enjoy!
Phil
Sean Carroll webcast
The full video from Professor Sean Carroll’s wonderful lecture, “Making of the Fittest”, for the Darwin150 fall 2009 lecture series is now available online.
Please share this terrific lecture with colleagues, students, friends and family.
Untitled
We had a great call last night discussing Chapters 6 & 14 of Origin ofSpecies! Unfortunately, I forgot to start the recording at the beginning, of the chat, so I’ve attached a copy of my notes from the call and the partial recording (we pick up during the discussion Chapter 14 – I’ve marked that point in the notes). If you were unable to make the conversation please download my notes and mp3 here:
Download 8 December 2009 Darwin Chapter 6 & 14 notes
Download 8 December 2009 Darwin Chapter 6 & 14
I apologize for my forgetfulness! If you have any questions regarding my notes or the text, please don’t hesitate to email me at stephanie.aktipis [at] gmail.com.
Happy reading!
Stephanie Aktipis
Homer-1 Audio Recording December 7 2009 Books 17-24
Here’s the audio recording for the Homer-1 Books 17-24 call. Listen online or download the mp3 file and listen to it as a podcast on your ipod.
Homer-2 December 2009 Books 17-24 audio recording
Here’s the audio for our conference call on December 7, 2009 to discuss the final books of Homer’s “Odyssey.” A very enjoyable discussion, and a great way to wrap up an enjoyable read. Thanks to all of you! -Pat
The Underworld and Justice in Homer
Hi Andre,
I had a question not directly related to the Odyssey story, but when I was reading over the glossary of names in the back of the book, I came upon Rhadamanthus who was granted eternal life in the Elysian fields because he was a fair king. I had forgotten about the Elysian Fields, and I don’t know much about entry requirements to this much more preferable place than Hades. Why is it that ‘fair’ mortal heroes like Achilles don’t end up in the Elysian Fields? Do you know?
Pauline
***
Hi Pauline,
The Greco-Roman variations on belief in the after-life differ from legend to legend. Although there was never any official orthodoxy concerning the underworld, most ancient Greeks and Romans still believed in a sort of after-life. As legends grew concerning the underworld, various places of punishment or peace were attributed to the realm of Hades and Persephone. One was the Elysian fields mentioned in Homer (Od. 4. 561-9) and Hesiod (Op. 167-73), “as the place to which certain favoured heroes, exempted from death, are translated by the gods. Elysium appears to be a survival from Minoan religion” (The Oxford Classical Dictionary). After Homer and Hesiod, other Greco-Roman writers like Vergil embellish the realm of Hades with all kinds of areas for certain people due to their actions on earth. Dante was inspired by Vergil and interpolated Book VI of the Aeneid into his own Inferno making up a third of his Divine Comedy. But going back to Homer, it is hard to see anything clear about what the underworld was, and why certain heroes were favored. Achilles, Agamemnon etc. all share the same basic fate in the Odyssey regardless of their status on earth. That says quite a lot in itself. If the gods were said to choose certain heroes to be blessed (i.e. Hercules was said to have been immortalized and brought to Olympus itself), then it shows how arbitrary the gods could be when they wanted. Justice (if any) is hard to see rationally at this point.
Andre
***
I think it makes sense that we wouldn’t see justice in these depictions from Homer. The Gods in Homer are behind things like the weather, the ocean, and things of chance like the tide in battle. The Gods are seen as being behind unexpected events like a small military force somehow beating a larger military force. The weather, the elements, the ocean, and turns of chance do not follow any rules of justice so the Gods arbitrary behavior is a reflection of the arbitrary nature of our world. For example, why are good people sometimes killed in a boat when an expected storm blows up and their boat is sunk? Such people don’t deserve that but it happens all the time in an arbitrary way in our world. There are others who get away with murder and don’t come across any misfortunes. Justice itself does not occur naturally in nature; it’s a human abstract concept.
Jim
Aristotle Poetics and Rhetoric podcast
Here’s the podcast from our final Aristotle reading group for the 2009 session. We discussed Rhetoric, Poetics and the year of reading Aristotle.
Here’s the podcat in mp3 format to download:
It was a wonderful year – joyous and difficult.
Phil
Video: Aristotle’s Poetics Explained
Really looking forward to the final Aristotle call tomorrow night, especially the discussion around Poetics. If any of you are still fuzzy on the concepts Aristotle lays down in the Poetics, here is an illuminating video clip.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41cMNrh7yYA?wmode=transparent]
Next and final conference call for Homer
Hope your Thanksgiving was bountiful and that your reading has been enjoyable. I just want to remind you about our upcoming final conference call for Homer’s Odyssey next week: Monday Dec 7, @8pm EST.
Please look over our Study Guide Questions which were sent out earlier in November, and are also posted on the Reading Odyssey website, to help guide your reading and thinking about this great epic. We will be discussing the conclusion to the Odyssey and Odysseus’ revenge on the suitors as well as reunion with his wife Penelope. Please join us as we wrap up this classic.
Remember that the following Monday Dec 14 will be a special recitation by none other than Stanley Lombardo.
Register here:
http://Lombardo2009.eventbrite.com
Also, I will be leading a Xenophon reading group in January and we will be using the newly published Landmark Hellenika. Xenophon picks up where Thucydides leaves off, thus finishing a narrative of the Peloponnesian War, then narrating events of Greek city-states in the 4th cent. BC leading up to Philip of Macedon. This is a great bridge to Alexander the Great’s eventual campaigns. Later in 2010, special events relating to the 2500 year anniversary of the battle of Marathon will be scheduled. We will also be leading a Herodotus reading group sometime in September of 2010.
Register here for the Xenophon reading group:
http://xenophon2010-1.eventbrite.com
Andre
ut ager quamvis fertilis sine cultura fructuosus esse non potest, sic sine doctrina animus. “Just as a field, however fertile, cannot be fruitful without cultivation, so the mind cannot be productive without education.” -Cicero
Art Garfunkel is on a reading odyssey too
Art Garfunkel is on a reading odyssey too.
If you are interested in what he has read, then you can visit his website where he’s posted the more than 1,000 books he’s read since 1968.
You can browse year-by-year so you can see that in 1968 Art Garfunkel read books you might expect like The Beatles by Hunter Davies. But you can also see that in that fateful year he also read Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckelberry Finn and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
This year – the year of our Darwin150 campaign – he read the wonderful book, The Beak of the Finch, by Jonathan Weiner. You can see Professor Weiner’s Darwin150 webcast lecture for the Reading Odyssey here: [vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/7346098 w=500&h=283]
Check out Art Garfunkel’s library: http://www.artgarfunkel.com/favorites.html
Phil
28. December 2009 by Arrian
Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: General Comments | 1 comment