news, events, and commentary from the Arts & Sciences Core Curriculum
April 30, 2013 at 11:49 am
Relating to CC102′s study of Dante’s Divine Comedy are illustrations made by Salvador Dali for Paradiso. Here is a sample:
For the full set of images, visit bit.ly/16iqVvI.
To view Dali’s illustrations for Inferno, visit bit.ly/10jHp1E, and for Purgatorio, visit bit.ly/17H3fQT.
April 24, 2013 at 9:46 am
Here is where these great writers get their zest for reading:
For the full set of such quotes, visit bit.ly/10d7eNs.
April 24, 2013 at 9:32 am
To all Core scholars:
You are invited to next week’s Core Banquet; we’re very much looking forward to the occasion. We would like to invite you to submit your shout-outs and photos, so that they can be inserted into the slide show that will be playing throughout the evening. Any photos (of Core friends, classes, activities, personalities, etc.) or quotes (addressed to faculty or friends, of just favorite snippets from Core readings) can be submitted for the show. We’ll want to see an array of tones — from high-minded to fun — represented in the slides, so please don’t be bashful about sending in whatever you like.
You can send your materials by email attachment or via Dropbox to core@bu.edu.
With warm regards,
The Core Curriculum
April 23, 2013 at 1:29 pm
In an intriguing article for the New York Times, Jody Rosen discusses a fascinating but little-known bookstore called Monkey’s Paw, and gives ideas on how such businesses fit into today’s literary world. Here is an extract:
“Life-Spark Stories for the Intelligent Young.” Attributed to the author “R. K.,” it tells the story of a “bright little Life-Spark living in the heart of the great Lord-King of the Sun,” who comes down to earth and embarks on a series of adventures. The Life-Spark meets Mother Earth, Nurse Destiny and other deities; it changes form, inhabiting various plants and animals — a pansy, a dog named Gipsie, a little boy.
…
The Monkey’s Paw specializes in oddities like “Life-Spark Stories”: printed matter that has fallen between history’s cracks and eluded even Google Books’ all-seeing eye. There are Victorian etiquette handbooks, antique sex manuals, obscure scientific treatises. There are forgotten 19th-century travelogues with sumptuous chromolithographs and leather-bound correspondence courses on fingerprinting.
…
“This isn’t the store where you’ll find the book you were looking for,” Fowler says. “It’s the store where you’ll find the book you didn’t know you were looking for.”
…
You could also say that the Monkey’s Paw is an idea masquerading as a bookshop. It’s a cross between a retail establishment and a conceptual art installation, which upends traditional book-trade values and views the literary canon through a cracked lens. It’s a bookstore that argues that bookstores are, by definition, Dickensian old curiosity shops. “Most booksellers can’t adjust to the postprint era,” Fowler says. “The only way to sell books in the 21st-century is as artifacts. I’m a 20th-century person myself, but with Monkey’s Paw, I’ve tried to adapt. This place is a church of print. It’s just that the old rules are a bit scrambled.”
For the full article, visit nyti.ms/11B2BzA.
April 23, 2013 at 1:12 pm
Below is a list of important topics from lectures since CC106′s last exam (not including the April 16th lecture and those after).
April 23, 2013 at 12:59 pm
The Core presents a “set of two poems, which are the same poem” as phrased by Zachary Bos, one of the respected speakers at the Annual Poetry Reading this year on April 16th. The theme of the reading was “Poetry’s Distant Voice”, and here is Zachary Bos’ contribution:
From The Book of Hours I, 36
MacDiarmid, Hugh, 1892-1978 (trans.)
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 1875-1926 (orig.) :What Will God Do?
What would God do if I should die.
I am his jar (if I should break?),
His fountain (if I should run dry?),
I am His consciousness, and make
All that he knows His Own Self by.I am the sandals he must wear
Or with bare feet crave wearily.
If I should die and go not there
His Heaven would his prison be.From my barr’n bones his cloak would drop,
His glance that on my cheeks depends,
As a tired head a cushion befriends,
Will founder if old Death extends
Dust for the comfort my life lends
Naught but a void where He may grope!What will God do if my life ends?
( The Scottish Nation, 8 May 1923)
—–
What Will You Do, God?
Translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna MacyWhat will you do, God, when I die?
I am your pitcher (when I shatter?)
I am your drink (when I go bitter?)
I, your garment; I, your craft.
Without me what reason have you?Without me what house
where intimate words await you?
I, velvet sandal that falls from your foot.
I, cloak dropping from your shoulder.
What will you do, God? It troubles me.Your gaze, which I welcome now
as it warms my cheek,
will search for me hour after hour
and lie at sunset, spent,
on an empty beach
among unfamiliar stones.
What will you do, God? I am afraid.—–
Was wirst du tun, Gott, wenn ich sterbe?
Was wirst du tun, Gott, wenn ich sterbe?
Ich bin dein Krug (wenn ich zerscherbe?)
Ich bin dein Trank (wenn ich verderbe?)
Bin dein Gewand und dein Gewerbe,
mit mir verlierst du deinen Sinn.
Nach mir hast du kein Haus, darin
dich Worte, nah und warm, begrüßen.
Es fällt von deinen müden Füßen
die Samtsandale, die ich bin.
Dein großer Mantel lässt dich los.
Dein Blick, den ich mit meiner Wange
warm, wie mit einem Pfühl, empfange,
wird kommen, wird mich suchen, lange -
und legt beim Sonnenuntergange
sich fremden Steinen in den Schoß.
Was wirst du tun, Gott? Ich bin bange.Rainer Maria Rilke, 26.9.1899, Berlin-Schmargendorf
April 22, 2013 at 10:03 pm
“…Not to be.”
Hamlet, his father now only a memory, makes a final, solemn decision. His life cut short in its prime, because he could not face a new reality.
“Who’s there?”
Ophelia, a young girl caught off guard in the middle of the night, is pulled into the darkness. Thrown into a terrible nightmare, she can never escape.
“How now? What noise is that?”
Laertes, a newly wed, discovers his wife in a compromising position. He loses himself in the moment, and does something he will soon regret, but yearn for again.
The three are taken to Denmark for treatment, in the hopes that a heavy hand of psychiatrics can shock them back into normalcy. Unbeknownst to their parents, and the asylum’s caretakers, there may be no hope for our new denizens of madness.
So begins Hamlet Asylum, an altered script of Shakespeare’s seminal play, re-arranged and re-interpreted by director Kellas Cameron to show that little bit of insanity hidden within the psyche of each of us. A visceral, brutal interrogation of the human condition, Hamlet Asylum promises to be unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.
Hamlet Asylum runs May 3, 4, 10, and 11th at 8PM in Green Street Studios Theatre, 185 Green St. Cambridge MA. It is easily accessible from Central Square off the Red Line.
Tickets are being sold online for $12, and will be $15 at the door.
Tickets are currently available online at thecalliopeproject.com/hamletasylum
April 22, 2013 at 2:47 pm
Former US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, who teaches here at BU, shares his reaction to the Boston Marathon bombings:
Out of town, watching the horror on a screen, in a familiar place on a familiar occasion, I thought first of my daughter, who works at Mass. General, and my daughter-in-law, who was in Copley Square a couple of hours before the explosions. Along with grief, sympathy, and that personal dread, I thought of a poem about a long-ago war, in another place. In “Souvenir of the Ancient World,” Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902-1987) understands what might be called the loss of the normal. Boston will endure, the Marathon will endure, we will celebrate again as we remember. But to some distinct degree, yet to be known, the security of the normal will be, for many of us, diminished. Or if not exactly diminished, it will include a note of being — in de Andrade’s terms — ancient.
Souvenir of the Ancient World
Clara strolled in the garden with the children.
The sky was green over the grass,
the water was golden under the bridges,
other elements were blue and rose and orange,
a policeman smiled, bicycles passed,
a girl stepped onto the lawn to catch a bird,
the whole world — Germany, China —
All was quiet around Clara.
The children looked at the sky: it was not forbidden.
Mouth, nose, eyes were open. There was no danger.
What Clara feared were the flu, the heat, the insects.
Clara feared missing the eleven o’clock trolley,
waiting for letters slow to arrive,
not always being able to wear a new dress. But
she strolled in the garden, in the morning!
They had gardens, they had mornings in those days!— Carlos Drummond de Andrade, translated by Mark Strand.
Poem used with the permission of Mark Strand.
For the Boston Globe article, visit b.globe.com/ZgGMXL.
April 22, 2013 at 2:36 pm
The Core presents the original English version of an article that was published in the April 2013 issue of Hiatus, la revue. Here is an extract:
Punctuation, as any dictionary will tell you, consists of the marks that dance around the letters of a text to mark clauses, sentences and inflection. What, though, is minimal punctuation? Is it in the range of marks that a writer uses? Ernest Hemingway wrote famously minimalist prose, for instance, where marks such as the semicolon (;), the ellipsis (…) and the dash (–) are notable mostly for their absence. The Old Man and the Sea contains but one colon and one exclamation mark, and is none the worse for it.
…
Writing in ancient Greece was broken by neither marks nor spaces. Lines of closely-packed letters ran left to right across the page and back again like a farmer ploughing a field. The sole aid to the reader was the paragraphos, a simple horizontal stroke in the margin that indicated something of interest on the corresponding line. It was up to the reader to work out what, exactly, had been highlighted in this fashion: a change of topic, perhaps; a new stanza in a poem; or a change in speaker in a drama.
…
Punctuation itself – literally, the act of adding “points” to a text – did not arrive until the third century BC, when Aristophanes of the great Library at Alexandria described a series of middle (·), low (.) and high points (˙) denoting short, medium and long pauses. Over the centuries, this system gave rise to punctuation as we know it: from Aristophanes’ three dots came the colon, the full stop, and many other marks besides. At the same time the paragraphosevolved into the “pilcrow”, a C-shaped mark (¶) placed at the start of each new section in a text. The word space was a late arrival, appearing only when monks in medieval England and Ireland began splitting apart unfamiliar Latin texts to make them easier to read.
For the full article, visit bit.ly/12CmatU.
