30March2007

John Keats - John Keats was born in Finsbury Pavement near London on October 31st, 1795. The first son of a stable-keeper, he had a sister and three brothers, one of whom died in infancy. When John was eight years old, his father was killed in an accident. In the same year his mother married again, but little later separated from her husband and took her family to live with her mother. John attended a good school where he became well acquainted with ancient and contemporary literature. In 1810 his mother died of consumption, leaving the children to their grandmother. The old lady put them under the care of two guardians, to whom she made over a respectable amount of money for the benefit of the orphans. Under the authority of the guardians, he was taken from school to an be apprentice to a surgeon. In 1814, before completion of his apprenticeship, John left his master after a quarrel, becoming a hospital student in London. Under the guidance of his friend Cowden Clarke he devoted himself increasingly to literature. In 1814 Keats finally sacrificed his medical ambitions to a literary life.

• Read John's Blog
  
• Elizabeth's Blog is once again all encompassing.
  
• Marriage of Cadmus & Harmony - Book to read.
  
• The Greatest gifts come through madness when one is divinely inspired.
  
• Phenomenal or Fun Animal?
  
• What is divine intervention?
  
• Roberto Calasso - apparently pursuing a self-alliterating course of titles: Cadmus (The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony), on Greek mythology); Kasch (The Ruin of Kasch) on modernity; Ka (Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India, on Indian mythology); Quarantanove (49 in Italian) (The Forty-nine Steps, philosophy, addressed to Pierre Klossowski and his wife); even Garuda (The Story of Garuda, Hindu myth); and Kafka (K). In so doing he has traced a very broad path.
  
• Ate - Infatuation to the point in which you've ruined your life.
  Mortal Life cannot have anything great about it but Ate.

"You need to be crazy to hear music (of the spheres)."

• Turned his mind to unknown arts - Changes the laws of nature - we have become nature.


• Rat & Mole - A Wind in the Willows : Chapter 7 Piper's at the gates of dawn.
  The baby otter is on Pan's lap, but when they find him, Pan makes them forget what they have heard.


• Pan's Labyrinth - 2006 Academy Award-winning Spanish language film written and directed by Mexican film-maker Guillermo del Toro. Its original Spanish title is El laberinto del fauno, which refers to the faun of Roman mythology and directly translates to The Labyrinth of the Faun; the English title refers to the faun-like Greek god Pan, though del Toro has stated that the faun featured in the film is not actually Pan.


• Margarette Atwood - Ovid's Metamorphoses "After Ovid"


• Decadent - In the end, the only thing that matters is art.


• "According to Pythagoras." (funny link)
  
• In addition to its use of all keys, the Well-Tempered Clavier was unusual in the very wide range of techniques and modes of expression used by Bach in the fugues. No other composer had produced such vividly characterised and compelling pieces in the fugal form, which was often regarded as a theoretical exercise. Many later composers studied Bach's work in an effort to improve their own fugal writing: Verdi even found it useful for his last work, Falstaff
  
• Keep changing your mind/subject.
  

28March2007

The Redemptive Power of Art:

I love to sing, and I love to write. I believe that these are two of the greatest expressions of the soul. Some people feel great after a two mile run. I however get the greatest high from perfoming in front of an audience. I also have horrible stage fright, and prefer being in a choir, but the exileration is the same. I am terrified at the thought of someone reading something special that I have written, and yet when that reading occurs, it seems to give my life purpose. Being successful in art seems to justify my existance. That may sound odd, but as we know from this class, art does not only effect the mind, it effects the soul. Music can change your outlook on life, and a single chord can give me chills. I am strictly a vocal person when it comes to music. I like that it has a mystery about it, as disecting it would bring the composition down to a scientific level. Anyway, on with the notes:

Budda - wittnessed illness, death, and old age.

We must redeem the world through acts of art.

Shakespeare and Joyce are the two authors other than Ovid who have the ability to transform you.

Finnegans Wake - One of the many sources Joyce drew from is the Ancient Egyptian story of Osiris, who was torn apart by his brother or son Set, and the pieces were gathered and reassembled by his sister or wife, Isis, with the help of their sister or daughter Nephthys. In this narrative, their other brother or son, Horus, emerges to slay Set and rise as the new day's sun, as Osiris himself. Osiris's night journey through the otherworld is described in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a collection of spells and invocations to enable the recently deceased to join Osiris and rise with the sun.

A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man : Joyce's novel traces the intellectual and religio-philosophical awakening of young Stephen Dedalus as he begins to question and rebel against the Catholic and Irish conventions he has been brought up in. He finally leaves for Paris to pursue his calling as an artist. The work pioneers some of Joyce's modernist techniques that would later come to fruition in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The Modern Library ranked Portrait as the third greatest English language novel of the twentieth century.

Weave = art

Imagination changes similes into metaphors.

Tragedy - Titus Andronicus - The Most Lamentable Romaine Tragedie of Titus Andronicus may be Shakespeare's earliest tragedy. It depicts a fictional Roman general engaged in a cycle of revenge with his enemy Tamora, the Queen of the Goths. The play is by far Shakespeare's bloodiest, taking its inspiration from the Senecan Tragedy of Ancient Rome, the gory theatre that was played to bloodthirsty circus audiences between gladitorial combats. The play lost popularity during the Victorian era because of its gore, and has only recently begun to revive its fortunes.

After Ovid - Rewritten Ovidian tales. *wink*

Pan Pipes - is an ancient musical instrument based on the principle of the stopped pipe, consisting usually of ten or more pipes of gradually increasing length (and, at times, girth). The pan flute has long been popular as a folk instrument, and is considered the ancestor of both the pipe organ and the harmonica, or mouth organ. The pan flute is named for its association with the rustic Greek god Pan. The pipes of the pan flute are typically made from bamboo; other materials used include wood, plastic, and metal. Another term for the pan flute is syrinx, after the sound-producing organ in birds. The plural of syrinx is syringes, from which the modern word syringe is derived. (Pan pipes is both singular and plural.) Other names for the instrument include the medieval fistula panis.

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.