26March2007

Bacchae - Carnage as metaphore

• see through the carnage and into the clarity.
  
• Holocaust - outbreak of logic.


• In order to experience Dionysus' clarity of vision and peace of mind, you must first see the carnage.

Music of the Spheres - Pythagoras taught of the Music of the Spheres and how the movement of the heavenly bodies could be perceived and reflected in the intervals of plucked strings.

Sexon's stories:

1. The Rape of Io - pg. 25


2. Syrinx ( the first instance of a frame ) - pg. 31


3. Europa - pg. 71(rape of Europa - Titian version and Velasquez's Spinners.)


4. Arachne - pg. 177


5. Pygmalion- pg. 335


6. Procne - Book 6


7. Daedalus- Book 8
   
8. Pythagoras- Book 15

• You should not eat meat because of the transmigration of souls.
• There is no death, only change.

Ovid - we suffer from the disease of insuficient sight.

• The Metamorphoses was published in 8 A.D.
  

23March2007

Assignment: Discover my story from the Metamorphoses of Ovid.

Elvis is not only a Dionysus but also an Adonis (must die tragicaly young).

In modern parlance the name "Adonis" is frequently used as an allusion to an extremely attractive, youthful male, often with a connotation of deserved vanity: "the office Adonis".
In Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman refers to his sons Biff and Happy as "Adonises." This is representative of the idealistic way he views them.
Giovan Battista Marino's masterpiece, Adone, published in 1623, is a long, sensual poem, which elaborates the myth of Adonis, and represents the transition in Italian literature from Mannerism to the Baroque.

Adonis was born of incest from a tree.

• storytelling (most erotic activity in which a man and a woman can be involved).


• Gored in the groin by a wild boar.


• Anemoni (flower from his blood). Anemone (Anemone) (from the Gr. Άνεμος, wind), is a genus of about 120 species of flowering plants in the buttercup family

Euripides - (The Music Man)

Dionysus - Wild Thing

• "You do not see him because you lack reverence."
• "Who are you?" ~Catapiller
• Evius - Elvis

Ovid's Metamorphoses

• "you bare the city's pain alone."
• Ecstatic - Agave
• Pentheus = grief
• *Test* Anagnorisis - Recognition *Test*

19March2007

*test* Lysistrata - Read Sarah Rudan's essay on Athenian Women. *test*

The feast of fools was a day in which the roles of men and women are reversed, as women rule.

Group 1: We do our presentation on the 18th of April

The personal Presentations are on the subject of our three to four page final term papers. The papers are due when you present, and the presentations will be done in reverse alphabetical order. The individual topic will most likely be something that you have blogged about.

Tragedy and comedy are two sides of the same coin. Pg. 32 of Lysistrata

• Dress as a woman (the councilor) - this was the most humiliating thing that could happen to a manly man.


• Scapegoat: ritually expunged from the community to get rid of the evil(sin).


• Unconsciously practicing scapegoat ritual(phalocentric representative).


• Dressed as a corpse(the counselor) - Aristophanes is making fun of the Phalice - deflation of the masculine will to power.


• Comedy - must happen at the end: Reconciliation, happy ending, feast & dancing, marriage (happily ever after) at the end of comedy, all conflicts must be resolved.
  (death or war gives way to life or peace).


• Leda's rape by Zeus as a swan produces Castor and Polydeuces (lat. Pollux) and sisters Helen, Clytemnestra, and Timandra.
  W.B. Yates' Leda and the Swan:
  
  A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
  Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
  By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
  He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
  How can those terrified vague fingers push
  The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
  And how can body, laid in that white rush,
  But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
  A shudder in the loins engenders there
  The broken wall, the burning roof and tower[8]
  And Agamemnon dead.
  Being so caught up,
  So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
  Did she put on his knowledge with his power
  Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

Baccants - The Bacchae at Aranui High School

• a.k.a. Maenads - female worshippers of Dionysus, the Greek god of mystery, wine and intoxication, and the Roman god Bacchus. The word literally translates as "raving ones". They were known as wild, insane women who could not be reasoned with. The mysteries of Dionysus inspired the women to ecstatic frenzy; they indulged in copious amounts of violence, bloodletting, sexual activity, self-intoxication, and mutilation. They were usually pictured as crowned with vine leaves, clothed in fawnskins and carrying the thyrsus, and dancing with wild abandon.


• Hair = virility (Sampson and Delila).


• A "new" example of the riot of a Dionysus like figure is shown here: DiCaprio Causes Near Riots In Jerusalem

Dionysus - Drives you out of your mind.

• is a liberator - first deconstructor.
  
• entheos - god inside you.
  
• ecstasy - outside yourself.
  
• homopabia - the ingesting of flesh
  
• sporagmos - rending or shredding of human flesh.
  

09March2007

Shakespearian Comedy - Aristophanic

• Mummer's play - (also known as mumming) are seasonal folk plays performed by troupes of actors known as mummers or guisers (or by local names such as rhymers, pace-eggers, soulers, tipteerers, galoshins and so on), originally in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales (see wrenboys), but later in other parts of the world. They are sometimes performed in the street but more usually as house-to-house visits and in public houses.
  Although the term "mummers" has been used since medieval times, no play scripts or performance details survive from that era, and the term may have been used loosely to describe performers of several different kinds. Mumming may have precedents in German and French carnival customs, with rare but close parallels also in late medieval England (see below).
  The earliest evidence of mummers' plays as they are known today (usually involving a magical cure by a quack doctor) is from the mid to late 18th century. Mumming plays should not be confused with the earlier mystery plays.


• Feast of Fools


• Feast of the Ass


• Saturnalia - The Saturnalia was a large and important public festival in Rome. It involved the conventional sacrifices, a couch (lectisternium) set out in front of the temple of Saturn and the untying of the ropes that bound the statue of Saturn during the rest of the year. Besides the public rites there were a series of holidays and customs celebrated privately.


• Boy Bishop - In England the boy bishop was elected on December 6, the feast of Saint Nicholas, the patron of children, and his authority lasted till Holy Innocents' day (December 28). The real Bishop would, symbolically, step down at the deposuit potentes de sede of the Magnificat ("he hath put down the mighty from their seat"), and the boy would take his seat at et exaltavit humiles ("and hath exalted the humble and meek").


• Chosen Lord of Misrule


• Repression Expression


• Laughter is what teaches us nothing is sacred.
  

07March2007

Greeks appreciation for community

• Tragedy - individual


• Comedy - not about the individual, but all

There is nothing about the human being that is shamefull. Whatever is human is okay in comedy.

Marriage - validation of fertility.

Shakespeare makes fun of those who cannot laugh at life.

Lysistrata(?strata of women?) - ends justify the means

• Least obscene(off-scene) of Aristophanes plays.


• Very Political.


• Obsenity


• Death and rebirth.

Menandrian tradition - new comedy

• girl that is usually a slave or courtesan


• father and son want that same girl


• heroin discovered to be hero's sister

Aristophanes - peacenick - hated Sparta(note pg. 39 today)

Comedy-

• is a release of emotion


• parody of state

New Comedy -

• Moonstruck or Graduate


• Temptress / Mrs. Robinson

"And here's to you, Mrs. Robinson,
Jesus loves you more than you will know
God bless you please, Mrs. Robinson"

• Simon and Garfunkel


• comedy celebrates the stupid.


• As You Like it - best example end with a marriage, this ends in four.


• The naked woman on the cover of Lysistrata is Peace.

Feast of Fools (wiki)

Bottom - Golden Ass

Society - women are opressed.

Literature -

• big roles for women


• women can be more emotional than men.

Aristotle - Comedy deals with those who are worse than us and tragedy deals with those who are better than us.

Comedy deas a lot with Phallic procession

• ithyphallic (Herms) (Priapus)


• Happy Ideal (comes up in the beginning, then happens in the end).

Body - Bawdy (carnal)

Carnivals - used to be "freak shows" (pertaining to the flesh).

Pg. 11 has a reference to Helen.

05 March 2007

Nick: The guy who loves his cat.(Evil Kitty) This pertains to the rungs on the ladder of life/love. We must first learn to love small things.

Elizabeth showed us her wonderful school project that is a great representation of the frame of stories that take place within the Symposium.

Vertiginously (Vertigo) - dizziness from infinite depths.

Accused of contrivance. English department has a one-hundred dollar prize for the best contrivance.

Poetry --> Poesis (make up)
Truth --> Logos (logic) (so, did they consider logic and truth one and the same?)
Mythology --> story and truth.

The Symposium says that it is more important to be a lover than loved.

The Wizard of Oz shows the transformation from Naivety, to scepticism, to acceptance(critical?).

Pouros means way, resourcefulness, contrivance(father of Eros)
Eros - child of contrivance and want (desire)

Daimon(demon) - Messenger

Pregnant in the soul (children of the mind). Is the more desirable form of immortality.

1. Immortality & Existance of the soul.


2. Virtue or goodness.

The greatest lovers are philosophers.

Lysistrata - graphic, horrific, women withholding sex.

• Resistance to counselor
  - lewd & crude
  - classical smut
  - shameless

The best thing in the mind of the tragedian was to never have been born at all.

Comedy - Shameless

• Falstaff - Give me life [more].
  - drunkard, whore master, robs his friends, pretends to be dead, kills a man who is
  already dead and takes the credit.


• Seven Beauties - movie, first woman nominated for an Oscar for directing.

If death is honor, I'll have none of it.(life abundant, because it is life.)

We have children to protect from that which destroys life.

Old Comedy - very political.

• much about the polis - old men

New Comedy - boy meets girl (romantic comedy)

Little Miss Sunshine - Old Comedy.

02March07

Okay, I missed class on Friday, so mine is probably not the best to visit for this day. I noticed that Jann does her notes quite a bit like mine though, and Elizabeth's are, as always, all encompassing. I would like to note that I believe that Plato, speaking as Socrates, is very contradictory in his explanation of why Eros must not be beautiful nor good. I say this because he says that the gods are happy and good, yet most gods and some goddesses desire beautiful mates and do things that would not be veiwed as very good. Aphrodite herself cheats on her husband with Ares because Haephestus is not the most attractive of the gods, and because she feels like it. This was an act of both desiring beauty, and one that was not particularly good. The fact that it was not good is proven when Aphrodite is ashamed upon being caught in the act. So, I don't believe that Socrates's reasoning holds up to prove that Eros is a spirit and not a god. Oh, and I must have committed some small act of hubris, as four out of the five people in my house are all sick with different things, and that is why I missed class.

This is taken from Jan's blog(I am sorry Jan, but I wanted to represent the lesson, and was not there):

in our version of Aristophanes speech on pg 27, a better version would be "Each of us is the mere broken tally of a man"

Dr. Sexon likes this translation better.

Vocab -

1. tally- roman coin, broken piece


2. numismatics-scientific study of currency


3. etiology-the study of causations or origins (how things came to be)


4. tabula rasa- "clean slate", refers to thesis that people are born "blank" (no innate knowledge) See http://www.reference.com/browse/wiki/Tabula_rasa for more.

Silenus Statue - The Sileni were followers of Dionysus. They were drunks, and were usually bald and fat with thick lips and squat noses, and had the legs of a human.