news, events, and commentary from the Arts & Sciences Core Curriculum
September 13, 2010 at 10:41 am
Dine hunc ardorem mentibus addunt, Euryale, an sua cuique deus fit dira cupido?
This urge to action, do the gods instill it, or is each man’s desire a god to him?
— Nisus, The Aeneid, Book IX, 184 f., trans. Robert Fitzgerald (Vintage, 1990). A discussion of the implications of this’ question of the “urge to action” is taking place in the EnCore message board on Facebook.
This image and quote appeared on the back of the Spring 2010 Core tee-shirt
September 10, 2010 at 4:25 pm
Following a department tradition, the natural sciences faculty of CC105 will once again be releasing various types of fruit from a high fire escape behind CAS, in a recreation of Gaileo’s famous though apocryphal demonstration of the equal action of gravity on objects of differing weight. CC105 students are required to attend; but all members of the Core community – faculty, staff, and students – are invited to join the fun, this Sunday, September 12th, in the CAS rear parking lot.
In recent years, this annual fruit drop has become a social gathering where veterans of the Core can welcome the newcomers and reunite with each other at the start of the semester.
Please stop by and say hello to the freshmen! Free ice cream sundaes will be distributed at 12:30, by alumni and faculty wearing Core tee-shirts. At 1 PM, the CC105 instructors will commence the fruit drop.
Below, Prof. James Jackson releases experimental fruit in September 2008. More photos from the fruit drop in previous years can be viewed at the Core website or in this Facebook gallery.
September 10, 2010 at 11:17 am
Alumni of CC204 will take special interest in this piece at Huffington Post, where Leah Finnegan looks at a new study suggesting a measurable price on day-to-day happiness:
Not having enough money causes emotional pain and unhappiness, the researchers found. But the happiness tipping point is about $75,000 - more money than that doesn't make a person cheerier, though it can help people view their lives as successful or better.
Kahneman and Deaton distinguished between life satisfaction and joy by asking people to assess how happy they were on the previous day, and found that there was no difference between daily happiness levels of individuals making more than $75,000 per year.
Read the rest of the article, “The Price of Happiness: $75,000,” posted September 7, 2010, retrieved September 9, 2010. See also the Business Week coverage of the study.
A point relevant to this issue of leveraging wealth into happiness comes from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: “The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else.” (I.1096a5)
Prof. Jorgensen, in chatting about this article, recommends that we also consider pilgrim Dante's encounter with the personification of Fortune in Inferno, Canto VII:
ché tutto l'oro ch'è sotto la luna
e che già fu, di quest'anime stanche
non poterebbe farne posare una
As translated by Allen Mandelbaum:
for all the gold that is or ever was
beneath the moon could never offer rest
to even one of these exhausted spirits.
September 10, 2010 at 11:08 am
illustration from a 1918 editionJe voulus cent fois me tuer, mais j'aimais encore la vie. Cette faiblesse ridicule est peut-être un de nos penchants les plus funestes; car y a-t-il rien de plus sot que de vouloir porter continuellement un fardeau qu'on veut toujours jeter par terre […]
I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our most melancholy propensities; for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away?
- complaint of the one-buttocked old woman, in Candide by Voltaire, translated by John Butt (Penguin, 1950). A 1918 edition of the text, translated by Philip Littell, is available online at Project Gutenberg.
September 9, 2010 at 4:54 pm
The world was all before them, where to choose
their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.
– lines 646-9, from Paradise Lost, by John Milton (Signet Books, 2010)
September 9, 2010 at 4:34 pm
The first EnCore Book Club, in April 2010
An invitation from the steering committee members of EnCore, the Association of Core Alumni:
Another academic year is upon us, and a new cohort of Boston University freshmen has just begun the amazing journey that is the Core Curriculum. How exciting for them(!), and how exciting for us as we reflect on the beginnings of our own Core experiences.
Do you miss the excitement and invigoration of discussing great ideas and important works with Core friends and faculty? If so, we encourage you to join us for the fall 2010 EnCore Book Club gathering, our third this year. We'll be meeting on October 7, 6 pm, in the BU Alumni Lounge at 595 Commonwealth Avenue, West Entrance, 7th floor.
The book we'll be reading and discussing this time is Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. You should feel free to read any edition of the book within your reach.
Please RSVP by reply email to corealum@bu.edu.
All of us in the EnCore Book Club look forward to reconnecting with you on October 7, as we continue the Core journey we began as freshmen, together as alumni.
With best wishes,
The EnCore-Boston Steering Committee
Chris McMullen, Core '93 | Benjamin Flaim, Core '98 | Anna Bursaux, Core '01 | Joe Sacchi, Core '06
September 9, 2010 at 11:58 am
As part of the Core’s ongoing initiative to engage students with the cultural resources of Boston, the department has organized a series of Friday afternoon excursions under the heading “My Favorite Boston. All groups depart Fridays at 3:00 PM from CAS 119; sign-up beforehand in the Core office as space is limited. These events are free, but bring your BU ID and a pass for the T.
September 9, 2010 at 10:50 am
The Flood Tablet, relating part of the Epic of Gilgamesh
To inaugurate the launch of the Core blog, Prof. David Eckel—Director of the Core Curriculum—conducted an interview with respected author and translator David Ferry, whose poetic rendering of Gilgamesh is the first book read by students in Core Humanities. This is the second half of that interview.
[... in continuation of the interview from yesterday's post... ]
David Eckel: Many students are puzzled by the text’s approach to sexuality. It is hard to know, in the case of Shamhat, the temple prostitute, whether we should admire her or fear her. The same could also be said about the goddess Ishtar. Could you give us any guidance about how to interpret these figures?
David Ferry: I don’t see how any issues of admiration or fear come up about the temple prostitute. She’s sent on a sexual mission. She invites the wild man, who is more animal than not, into a week of sexual intercourse that, along with beer and cooked food, brings him into human or more human, identity and human culture. She invites him to Uruk and his service to human beings, his love for Gilgamesh, and ultimately his fate. But I don’t see that there are issues of our response to her as a character. She’s an agent, with a religious function of seduction. Ishtar of course, we do fear. But there are other words to use about her, for example in the great comic but also dire scene where she hits on Gilgamesh, and then in her interview with her father god Anu. What does one make of her in the Flood, where she seems contrite. She’s the goddess of love, the goddess of taverns, the goddess of lots of things. Complex in the way Venus is in the Aeneid, Aphrodite in the Iliad, and in the ways that Juno (Hera) and Minerva (Athena) are. Admiration, well, yes, fear, certainly, uncertainty, certainly. Too many possible words to use to describe how we take her in our experience of the poem.
DE: When we last spoke about the Epic, you said that its account of the Flood seemed more convincing to you than the account in the book of Genesis. What did you have in mind?
DF: I don’t know that I said “convincing.” I do think the narrative, the telling of the story, is thrilling detailed beyond the telling of the story in the Hebrew version; especially as preceded by the story of how Utnapishtim is taught by the god Ea to deceive his doomed townspeople. I think. The Hebrew telling has nothing like those tears running down the sides of Utnapishtim’s nose. I’m just a reader. I have no right to interpret the differences between the two great tellings. If the criterion is justice, the Hebrew tale seems much more coherent to me. The Flood is a punishment of men for their bad conduct and Noah is saved because of his virtue. (I know this is an oversimplification). In Gilgamesh (and in the Sumerian flood story that precedes it) the Flood is a flood and the gods are bewildering (and themselves somewhat bewildered). There isn’t a clear justice pattern. But there is questioning of the gods, not stated directly but involved in the very telling. Both are convincing, which is to say, we recognize their relevance to what happens to us in our lives. But so different.
DE: In the text of the Epic, Gilgamesh fails in his quest for immortality. But the story of Gilgamesh is as close to immortal as any text in the literature of the world. Why do you suppose the Epic has had such enduring significance, not just in Mesopotamia but in the rest of the world?
DF: It’s hard to answer this. It appears in different versions in several languages, in ancient times. On the other hand, since it was only discovered for us in the nineteenth century it came close to not being immortal. On the other hand it’s enduring significance is, I guess, in the great political and moral lesson it teaches: immortality is unavailable to us human beings; we are going to die; we need to define ourselves and our behavior, within the constraints of that knowledge. I think the “intention” of the poem was to teach something like that, politically and morally. But of course that’s an oversimplification. It’s also, for example, a great enduring love story, between Gilgamesh and Enkidu, comparable to the love between David and Jonathan, Achilles and Patroclus. The vocabulary, in the Gilgamesh telling, is in some ways maybe more particularly sexual. I think one of the lessons of the poem, along with the teaching about the acceptance of the constraints of mortality, is there in “Two people, companions, they can prevail.” They don’t prevail, but the love story is a great, beautiful, enduring example.
Do you have your own questions for David Ferry? Core students and alumni are invited to email their inquiries to Core, to be forwarded to Prof. Ferry and answered in a follow-up post next week.
Related links:
September 8, 2010 at 4:21 pm
Bedenke wohl die erste Zeile,
Daß deine Feder sich nicht übereile!Before you write this first phrase, think again;
Good sense eludes the overhasty pen.
–the scholar Faust, in Faust: Part One, by J. W. von Goethe, translated by David Luke (Oxford University Press, 1998)
September 8, 2010 at 3:47 pm
In an article for the The New York Times, Benedict Carey examines the recent research that suggests that some of the received wisdom on study habits may be counter-productive:
In recent years, cognitive scientists have shown that a few simple techniques can reliably improve what matters most: how much a student learns from studying. [...] But they directly contradict much of the common wisdom about good study habits, and they have not caught on.
For instance, instead of sticking to one study location, simply alternating the room where a person studies improves retention. So does studying distinct but related skills or concepts in one sitting, rather than focusing intensely on a single thing.
(from "Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits," published September 6, 2010, retrieved September 8, 2010.)
