So, What Are You Reading?

I cringe when I think about how she was treated in the 90s.

I was too young to appreciate it (Clinton's impeachment was a few weeks after my 8th birthday), but there were a lot of adults who made her into a spectacle and a joke instead of treating the situation like they would with any other survivor of sexual harassment.

 

Aretha, the Queen of Soul. A life in Photographs - Meredith Ochs.

Primarily a beautiful memory book - more well-chosen photographs than there is print. Sharp writing - and great quotes by people who knew Aretha.My suggestion: Put on some of Aretha's music, while you read. I'm glad she left us so much of it - all brilliant.

Your fans all miss you, 'Miss Ree,' and will, forever. We're grateful for the memories, and the rich and exquisite musical legacy you left us. Every one of us thanks you with all our hearts. We love you. J.

https://www.amazon.ca/Aretha-Queen-Soul_A-Life-Photographs/dp/1454934581

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I think Roy Cohn should have been disbarred shortly before his birth. That could have saved the world a lot of trouble.

 

I wrote: "Great quotes by people who knew her." That's lame. My apologies for not including just a couple of them:.

Etta James: "I remember running into Sarah Vaughan, who always intimidated me. Sarah said, "Have you heard of this Aretha Franklin girl?" I said, "You heard her do 'Skylark,' didn't you?" Sarah said, "Yes, I did, and I'm never singing that song again."

Jon Batiste: "There's a master class in every song that she's recorded."

Right. The kind of people who knew. A well-sourced and well-researched book.

 

The Great Conversation, Volume 1 of the Great Books of the Western World

This is the first volume in the Great Books set. It makes the case for a liberal education, separating it from specific curriculums in philosophy or the Classics which became more common.

The fairly rapid decline in liberal education is attributed to alternative approaches that emphasize training in occupations (as John Dewey advocated) and an increase in the number of students as universal education became an achievable ideal. Additionally, the fields that split off from philosophy (like political science and psychology), in the process of professionalizing themselves tend to reject any methods not empirical, producing an artificial distinction between themselves and many thinkers who may have had valuable insights like Plato or Socrates.

The auyhors explain that learning the liberal arts makes one part of the Great Conversation, able to participate in discussions with others regardless of one's specialty career or occupation

The argument is made that we underestimate the common person's ability to understand and appreciate the Great Books.

On the subject of Russia and the East in general, a warning is given against hastily created survey courses and departments to study "The East." These courses may have the opposite effect as scholars with insufficient knowledge of the culture teach it to others. Instead it's recommended that those who truly understand Russian culture and history are encouraged to slowly build methods for dissmeniating that knowledge while the rest focus on gaining a deep understanding of the Western canon since ideas in them also appear in Eastern thought.

The 54 books in the set are arranged in chronological order because many of the authors themselves read those that came before. Plato read Homer. Dante read Plato, Aristotle and Homer. John Stuart Mills read Plato, Homer, Dante, and so on. Therefore as a reader and re-reader of the Great Books, one is prepared to take part in this Great Conversation as well, just as these authors did.

The book concludes with a 10 year reading plan, reproduced here: https://thinkingwest.com/10-year-reading-plan/

 

Grotius, Law of War and Peace.

Translation from the 1930s I think.

 

On my mission to tackle the 10 year reading plan of the Great Books of the Western World (GBWW), I recently finished Plato's Apology and Crito as well as
Aristophanes' The Clouds and Lysistrata. Reading about an hour a day, the 56,000 words took me much longer than I would have expected. For comparison, I read a novella of 40,000 words in a day.

I definitely enjoyed Plato more than Aristophanes (though Aristophanes was very funny), and I'm now a few pages into The Republic. What's most interesting to me is that the comedies have maintained the rhyming. I assume they rhymed in Ancient Greek. That's impressive for a piece of poetry moving between different languages. That's a challenge even in modern languages.

One thing I found interesting online was a discussion of The Clouds. When it was written, portraying Socrates as an unkempt man whose followers were emaciated and concerned with ridiculous pursuits like figuring out why a gnat sounds the way it does (it's rear is trumpet shaped) was funny, but by the time of Socrates' trial some 20 years later, it was considered deeply subversive and even offensive for someone to run a school that treated its students like this, in comparison to the gymanasia of the day where physical fitness and a good education were praised equally.

I think that on a second reading of both The Apology and Crito I will have a deeper appreciation of the arguments and will attempt to work them out more deeply. This first read I just took in the different arguments and tried to understand the story, but I haven't tried to work through them with formal logic as is sometimes advised when reading philosophy.

 

No, Dustin. They didn't. It's all in the first paragraph here. (And lots of other places.) Ancient Greek- no rhyme. Latin - first use in early Medieval hymns. Looks like translators are up to their usual tricks. They know what people like.
https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~rnoyer/courses/103/Ling10309Rhyme.pdf

 

Wow! Definitely reinforces the importance of "read multiple translations" that @Rachel83az mentioned in the other thread.

 

And / or - you can learn Greek and Latin - and read the originals. That's a viable option. You might get awesome "street cred" when chillin' with your homies in front of the bodega. Or not. I'm not sure...

 

Oh. right - you live in Iowa. Sorry.

 

Reminds me of this clip from The Simpsons where Bart and Lisa have spent days trying to convince a Rabbi that he should mend things with his son, with whom he was estranged because the son disobeyed him and became a clown:

Lisa: Here you go, Bart. It's a longshot, but that's all I can do without learning ancient Hebrew.

<Bart looks at her>

Lisa: Bart, I am not going to learn ancient Hebrew!

https://comb.io/G7jaie

 

Yeah, the sole ancient language I'm even slightly able to read is Biblical Hebrew and ancient Hebrew is quite different from that. I don't think reading ancient languages critically can be done in isolation. There's often controversy over the meaning of a word or phrase.

Favorite example comes from Jonah, the most basic book of the Hebrew Bible. Remember the "gourd plant" that springs up and gives Jonah shade? Well, we don't really know what "kikayon" meant back then.

 

Right - it seems to mean castor oil plant these days.

Christians argued about this, too. Saints Jerome and Augustine (during their lifetimes on Earth) had a dispute about the meaning.
Story here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kikayon#:~

Bo Diddley's "Bring it to Jerome" here. (i.e. Jerome Green, in Bo's band.)
​

 

Re-reading "Thus Spoke Zarathustra." Nietzsche for the 720 time.

 

They may not have rhymed, but a lot of Ancient Greek pieces were at least rhythmic in a way that isn't necessarily possible with English. Maybe more like Shakespearian sonnets; though, without rhymes? So the translator's not exactly right, but not exactly wrong either. Definitely read a different translation as well!

 

Also every language ancient and modern must be read in context, something Biblical literalists don't seen to understand. Favorite example is the "lex talionis", an eye for an eye. This absolutely does not mean and never meant what its literal meaning suggests, that we blind someone as punishment for blinding someone else. It is, rather, a measure of monetary damages. But if you don’t read the phrase in its proper context you might well be mislead.

 

Yes. Both Roman and Greek poetry - regularly metric. Much dactylic hexameter in both - I remember it well from Latin class - we read the major poets there. Shakespeare? Metric, of course. Iambic pentameter. The sonnets had two or three different rhyme schemes, however.

"New sonnets" with the same rhythm and rhyme schemes are popular with "new formalist" writers. I had a poetry prof. in Uni who was of that school. Great experience We all got to write modern work in the traditional forms - sonnet, villanelle, sestina etc.

An intro here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_classical_meters

 

Dang the timer! Shakespearean sonnets usually stick to one rhyme scheme. ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. There are Petrarchan sonnets (named after the Italian poet) - that have different schemes. And there are "Spenserian" and "Miltonic" sonnets also. All kinds are important in English Lit.