news, events, and commentary from the Arts & Sciences Core Curriculum
November 26, 2012 at 3:00 pm
In view of Professor Barfield’s lecture on 11/29 about Malinowski’s notions of exchange and reciprocity, here is today’s analect:
Apart from any consideration as to whether the gifts are necessary or even useful, giving for the sake of giving is one of the most important features of Trobriand sociology, and, from its very general and fundamental nature, I submit that it is a universal feature of all primitive societies. (Argonauts of the Pacific, p.175)
November 19, 2012 at 4:49 pm
Professor Ricks lectured last week to the students of CC201 on the sonnets of William Shakespeare. Since he did not have time enough in the short span of the lecture period to grant the students a sung performance of any of the poems, here is a popular American singer Rufus Wainwright with his own musical interpretation of Sonnet 29 (part of the "fair youth" sequence). The text of the sonnet appears below.
When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possess'd,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
(Video: "Shakespeares Sonette" by Robert Wilson and Rufus Wainwright at the Berliner Ensemble, 2009)
*
Core students and alumni are encouraged at any time to record and upload their own performances of Shakespeare's sonnets or other Core works. If you do not have access to recording equipment, contact the Core office staff and we'll arrange a time for you to borrow one of our cameras.
October 22, 2012 at 2:47 pm
An excerpt from The New Yorker magazine on "The Woman Reader" by Belinda Jack.
In the history of women, there is probably no matter, apart from contraception, more important than literacy. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, access to power required knowledge of the world. This could not be gained without reading and writing, skills that were granted to men long before they were to women. Deprived of them, women were condemned to stay home with the livestock, or, if they were lucky, with the servants. (Alternatively, they may have been the servants.) Compared with men, they led mediocre lives. In thinking about wisdom, it helps to read about wisdom - about Solomon or Socrates or whomever. Likewise, goodness and happiness and love. To decide whether you have them, or want to make the sacrifices necessary to get them, it is useful to read them. Without such introspection, women seemed stupid; therefore, they were considered unfit for education; therefore, they weren't given an education; therefore they seemed stupid.
Read the full text here.
October 14, 2012 at 7:57 am
Silber’s lifelong meditation on the strengths and limits of Kant’s ethics was like Jacob wrestling with the angel. A Germanophile, Silber was haunted by the fact that the noble Germanic philosophical tradition best represented by Kant had not been able to do more to prevent luciferian National Socialism: He thought this revealed an inadequacy in Kant’s thinking and, like C. S. Lewis, proposed the Christian Milton’s depiction of Satan in Paradise Lost as an ultimately more accurate reading of diabolical evil. Yet Kant had also said that “from the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can be made,” a paraphrase of the Christian doctrine of original sin. Silber never himself indulged in the flattery of human nature, but never turned pessimistic or cynical either.
-- From Prof. Michael Aeschliman's eulogy for Dr. John Silber, as appears in National Review. Dr. Silber, longtime president and thereafter chancellor of Boston University, passed away on September 25th.
October 11, 2012 at 11:18 am
Yet another film project inspired by a classic Core text!
The Tube Open Movie is an ambitious 3D animated film project inspired by the Assyrian tablets in the British Museum whose fragments are all that we have of the original Gilgamesh story.
The epic centers on the Sumerian king who ruled Uruk, in ancient Iraq, who for his tyranny the gods teach friendship and loss, and through them, the fear of his own death. In the end, the immortality he achieves is different to the one he first seeks. Nearly five thousand years later, Gilgamesh, a woman and a soldier, rushes into a station in pursuit of a fragment of paper blown about by the passing of trains. In an ever-accelerating vortex, her hero's progress becomes the animation's own frames.
The project director, Bassam Hurdali, raised over $40,000 in Kickstarter funding earlier this year. We'll reach out and see about doing a screening of the film for a Core crowd, when it reaches a nearer stage of completion. In the meantime, teaser clips and other media can be found on the project website.
October 11, 2012 at 10:37 am
Student: "No, I'm waiting for them to turn it into a movie."
NB: When your humble blog author read this joke aloud in the Core office, the workstudy student on duty said: "That's so typical."
September 27, 2012 at 10:52 am
Earlier this week, Prof. Eckel lectured to the students of CC101 on the Book of Exodus. As an introduction to the topic, he showed the clip above from the 1956 feature film, The Ten Commandments.
September 25, 2012 at 10:52 am
Prof. Eckel, during his lecture on the Book of Exodus this morning for the students of CC101, showed a clip of Martin Luther King, Jr., speaking on the night before his assassination in 1968.
September 17, 2012 at 5:09 pm
This weekend while visiting New York City, Prof. Sassan Tabatabai (above, left) caught up with alumnus Tom Farndon (Core '10, CAS/SMG '12) for an afternoon of kayaking on the Hudson River. If we were to ask them how the trip went -- what with the strong currents and winds on that part of the river -- I wonder if they'd recall Cassius' words to Brutus in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: "A friend should bear his friend's infirmities."
