April 5, 2013 at 11:45 am
Relating to CC102′s study of Dante’s Divine Comedy are illustrations made by Salvador Dali for Inferno. Here is a sample:
For the full set of images, visit bit.ly/14TfLgu.
To view Dali’s illustrations for Purgatorio, visit bit.ly/17H3fQT, and for Paradiso, visit bit.ly/17vAa9P.
By mdimov
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Posted in Academics, Art, Core Authors, Great Ideas, Great Personalities
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Tagged book, CC102, dante, Divine Comedy, drawing, illustration, inferno, painting, picture, Salvador Dali
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April 2, 2013 at 12:51 pm
In her post for Poetry Foundation, Laura Sims discusses the strange inspiration that waiting rooms can bring, and how they can be “conducive to poetry”. Here is an extract:
The speaker of Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘In the Waiting Room’ has a famously crucial moment in a doctor’s office, too. She looks around at all the adults, all the human beings surrounding her, and sees only body parts, or items of clothing: knees, boots, and “pairs of hands / lying under the lamps.” It’s like a scene from a horror movie…Even as she’s awakening to her self, her I-ness, she’s also awakening to her them-ness, and it is terrible, necessary, and awesome.
But ultimately unsustainable. The parted veil must fall back into place.
Then I was back in it.
The War was on. Outside,
in Worcester, Massachussetts,
were night and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth
of February, 1918.
For the full article, visit bit.ly/YZc81c
By mdimov
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Posted in Academics, Art, Great Ideas, Great Questions
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Tagged appointment, doctor, idle, inspiration, medicine, mortality, poetry, procrastinate, room, time, waiting
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April 2, 2013 at 12:06 pm
Relating to CC105′s study of astronomy is an article from The Guardian titled ‘The Cosmic Gallery – In Pictures’. It gives beautiful depictions and descriptions of some of our galaxy’s landmarks. Here is a sample:
The Heart of The Milky Way - Some 26,000 light years and countless intervening clouds of stars, gas and dust separate Earth from the core of our galaxy. In visible light it is totally hidden from our view behind the bright star clouds of Sagittarius., but orbiting telescopes that observe at other wavelengths can pierce the veil to reveal a strange landscape of twisted dust clouds, violent stars and superhot gas. Right of centre, a blaze of blue and white reveals a huge cluster of heavyweight stars swimming in a sea of hot gas: they mark the exact centre of the Milky Way, orbiting around an invisible supermassive black hole with the mass of 4 million Suns.
The Dunes of Mars - Complex sand patterns ripple across a crater floor in the Noachis Terra region of the Martian southern hemisphere. While the northern regions of Mars are dominated by low rolling plains, the southern hemisphere is more chaotic and heavily cratered. Windblown sand accumulates in the floor of these craters, where it is frequently blown into beautiful dune patterns, some of which are unknown from Earth's deserts and probably owe their unique forms to the tiny size of Martian sand grains.
For the full article, visit bit.ly/10vKZ62.
By mdimov
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Posted in Academics, Art, Curriculum, Great Ideas, Great Photograph
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Tagged astronomy, CC105, galaxy, gallery, image, nebula, picture, space, stars
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April 2, 2013 at 11:39 am
On a lighter note, let us explore pronunciation. In his article for The Spectator, Mark Mason discusses the strange but interesting book, How To Pronounce It, written by Alan S.C. Ross in 1970. Here is a sample:
It took me quite a while to be sure that the book isn’t a spoof after all. ‘Gone’, we’re told, should rhyme with ‘born’, NOT with ‘on’. ‘Lather’ must be pronounced to rhyme with ‘gather’, and NOT (Ross’s capitals) with ‘father’. ‘This second, non-U pronunciation,’ he fumes, ‘is almost universal in the television advertisements for soap powders’.
The reason it’s so amusing in 2013, yet seemed so sensible in 1970, is that back then if you set something down in a book you set it in stone. Books were written by clever people who knew things, and what’s more had lots of initials to remind you that they knew things. They legislated on language for the rest of us, piteous little oiks that we were. There was right and there was wrong, and woe betide you if you didn’t know the difference. Today, on the other hand, social media is inventing new words faster than even an e-book could cope with, never mind a conventional one.
For the full article, visit bit.ly/16jgkwa.
By mdimov
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Posted in Academics, Friday Fun, Great Questions, Tuesday Humor
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Tagged Alan S.C. Ross, pronounce, pronunciation, review, rhyme, The Spectator, word
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April 1, 2013 at 9:26 am
The Core presents an article from The Economist, which discusses enjambment’s popularity and origins. Here is an extract:
In “The Force of Poetry”, Christopher Ricks, formerly the Oxford Professor of Poetry who is now at Boston University, writes elegantly of the way enjambment can make language seem elastic:
Lineation in verse creates units which may or may not turn out to be units of sense; the “flicker of hesitation”…as to what the unit of sense actually is—a flicker resolved when we round the corner into the next line—can create nuances which are central to the poet’s enterprise.
Mr Ricks cites some fine examples, such as John Milton’s use of the device to turn an intransitive verb to a transitive one in two lines from “Paradise Lost”:
Then feed on thoughts, that involuntary move
Harmonious numbers.
For the full article, visit econ.st/YW1HeH
By mdimov
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Posted in Academics, Art, Friday Fun, Great Ideas, In the News
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Tagged Christopher Ricks, enjambment, iambic, John Milton, method, news, Paradise Lost, pentameter, poetry, The Economist, tool
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April 1, 2013 at 9:10 am
Relating to CC202′s study of Blake’s work, here is an image from ‘The Tyger’
William Blake: draft for 'The Tyger' British Library Add. MS 49460, f.56 Copyright © The British Library Board
By mdimov
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Posted in Academics, Art, Core Authors, Curriculum, Great Personalities, Great Photograph
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Tagged CC202, Enlightenment, Humanities, image, Modernism, photo, William Blake
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