Greetings, Corelings. This week we bring you news of art installations, controversial reinterpretations of plays from the literary canon, and more. Read on:
- Artists Various & Gould’s “City Skins – Marx and Engels” is a papier mache piece molded onto bronze statues of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels located in Berlin, as part of an international competition “Art in the Underground – The Middle in Nowhere.”
Hanging around. (Photo: Various & Gould Studio)
- Delacorte Theater in Central Park, NYC, presents a performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, directed by Oskar Eustis, that bears a (controversial) resemblance to the current situation in the United States. The show closes on June 18.
- “Whether its Coleridges nightingale or Petrarchs, Ted Hughess wren or Shelleys skylark, Helen Macdonalds hawk or Max Porters crow,” birds and birdsong are classic metaphors in poetry and literature. So why do birds sing? Author Richard Smyth hopes to find out in his book A Sweet, Wild Note.
- Did you know that Descartes wasn’t appreciated before the 19th century? Did you also know that St. Teresa of Avila, a 16th-century Catholic mystic from Spain, established the foundation to Descartes’ Cogito argument? Read moreon Quartz.
- Turns out Bob Dylan referenced Homer in a lecture upon receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature. Long quotation incoming:
“When Odysseus in The Odyssey visits the famed warrior Achilles in the underworld Achilles, who traded a long life full of peace and contentment for a short one full of honor and glory tells Odysseus it was all a mistake. ‘I just died, thats all.’ There was no honor. No immortality. And that if he could, he would choose to go back and be a lowly slave to a tenant farmer on Earth rather than be what he is a king in the land of the dead that whatever his struggles of life were, they were preferable to being here in this dead place. Thats what songs are, too. Our songs are alive in the land of the living. But songs are unlike literature. Theyre meant to be sung, not read… I return once again to Homer, who says, ‘Sing in me, O Muse, and through me tell the story.’” (source)
That’ll be it! May your days be blessed with tolerable warmth and limited UV radiation.
