Visit the Core Facebook gallery to see more photos from last spring's Aristophanes show.
As many of you know every year Core and Classics does an informal but wild Aristophanes play, with students and faculty joining in. The time has come once more to think of Aristophanes, candy-throwing, and phallic processions. We will be having a preliminary meeting for anyone interested in being part of the show this Wednesday, February 1st, from 6-7 pm in the Classics Library, STH 409. The show this year will be on Friday, April 13th; mostly we’ll wait and do whatever needs to be done in the beginning of April.
If you’d like to be part of the fun but can’t come to the meeting just email me at nelson@bu.edu and I will put you on the list.
Play yet to be determined! All suggestions are welcome.
As was mentioned yesterday in lecture, CC102 students have the chance to start the semester in by visiting a truly spectacular exhibit about "Pompeii," now being shown in Boston's Museum of Science. The exhibit shows a perfectly preserved slice of life as it was lived in Italy in AD 79, frozen in time by the eruption of the volcano Mt. Vesuvius. One of the most striking things to learn from this show is how much first-century Roman culture was imported from Greece.
Students will have a chance to explore this connection between Greece and Rome when we turn to the Aeneid, after exploring some of the classical texts of Asia. The exhibit is fascinating, surprising and, in some respects, terrifying, as it shows not only artifacts of ancient Roman life, but plaster casts of the human beings and animals who were buried by the volcano.
CC102 students can sign up for tickets for one of three dates:
- Friday, January 27 at 6 pm.
- Saturday, January 28, at 1 pm
- Sunday, January 29 at 2 pm
Sign up for, and pick up!, tickets in the Core Office, CAS 119. The number of tickets is limited, so earlier is better. The exhibit tickets include entrance to the Museum exhibits, so students will want to allot themselves time to look at the other exhibits.
Come one, come all! The Calliope Project presents Euripides' classic tragedy of the hellish fury unleashed by one woman scorned. Passion and a fury for performance required.
The Calliope Project invites everyone to audition for our production of Medea, the classic of Greek Tragedy by Euripides. Audition swill be held January 23rd through 25th, with callbacks on the 26th. Monday the 23rd and Wednesday the 25th (7-10 pm) will be in CAS Room 214. Tuesday the 24th and callbacks Thursday the 26th (7-10 pm) will be in CAS 225. This exceptional play is directed by Ryan Collins and Harry Gustafson, and is sure to one for the ages.
For almost two centuries, Charles Darwin and his theories have been studied, criticized, and validated by the scientific community and yet, to this day controversy continues to surround his work.
To try and address the continued controversies of Darwin’s work, scholar Robert Dorit re-analyzes the Origin of Species in terms of time and its importance upon man’s evolutionary history:
The Origin remains, even in the 21st century, a radical work, which argues that the fundamental forces driving life on this planet occur on timescales that render the span of a human life insignificant. Furthermore, although the effects of natural selection are there for all to see, its daily operation is almost completely hidden from view. Both our life spans and our five senses are inadequate to the task of comprehension: The most powerful mechanism of organic change lies well beyond our everyday experience. ["Rereading Darwin", American Scientist]
Although Dorit claims humans cannot comprehend the scope of evolution due to the limit of our senses and our mortality, in CC106 students will attempt to conquer the ideas of not only Darwin but other influential scientists, in their quest at understanding the biodiversity of the earth in which they live. Students in CC106 will be interested to see one of their teachers attempts to do just that as he explores Darwin’s theory of evolution amongst hummingbirds in Ecuador.
A YEAR or two, and grey Euripides,
And Horace and a Lydia or so,
And Euclid and the brush of Angelo,
Darwin on man, Vergilius on bees,
The nose and Dialogues of Socrates,
Don Quixote, Hudibras and Trinculo,
How worlds are spawned and where the dead gods go,--
All shall be shard of broken memories.
And there shall linger other, magic things,--
The fog that creeps in wanly from the sea,
The rotton harbor smell, the mystery
Of moonlit elms, the flash of pigeon wings,
The sunny Green, the old-world peace that clings
About the college yard, where endlessly
The dead go up and down. These things shall be
Enchantment of our heart's rememberings.
And these are more than memories of youth
Which earth's four winds of pain shall blow away;
These are earth's symbols of eternal truth,
Symbols of dream and imagery and flame,
Symbols of those same verities that play
Bright through the crumbling gold of a great name.
This is just a reminder that there are only TWO DAYS LEFT to sign up for The Calliope Project's CC102 text raffle. For a paltry $2, you can get your name on our drawing list for a chance to win the ENTIRE CC102 BOOK LIST! It's too good pass up!
You can purchase tickets in the Core Office, CAS 119, until 5 PM this coming Monday. The drawing to select a winner will be held on Tuesday, December 13th.
Winter blues and finals got you down? Come to a special world music performance this Saturday and be transported to another land! The event will feature Balinese Shadow Plays, along with the BU West African Music and Dance Ensemble, the BU Greek Music Ensemble. This Saturday, December 10, at 8 p.m., in the concert hall at 885 Commonwealth Ave. Admission is free!
Are you a first-year student planning to take CC102 in the spring? Do you want to get all of your books for just $2? If you answered yes, you should know about The Calliope Project's Core Book raffle! We will be selling $2 tickets this week outside of Core lectures, and in the Core office from now until December 12th, the last day of classes (ask at the front desk). The more tickets you buy, the better your chances of having the winning ticket! We will conduct a drawing on December 13th; the Core student with the winning ticket that student will receive a FULL SET of CC102 texts!
For more information, contact calliope.bu@gmail.com.
From Erin McDonagh (Core '08, CAS '10), member of the EnCore Steering Committee:
As Core alums, we all know that no one understood war or tragedy like the ancient Greeks. In Theater of War, actors read excerpts from Sophocles' tragedies Ajax and Philoctetes, with the aim of drawing attention to the challenges faced by veterans returning home from war. More information about the show can be found at http://bu.edu/core/theaterofwar.
Those of us who read the Oresteia or another Greek tragedy in Core may be unfamiliar with Ajax and Philoctetes, the plays featured in Theater of War. But we are in luck! Professor Stephanie Nelson has kindly agreed to save those of us who may be floundering in ignorance of these works. She will be in the Core office tonight at 6pm (that's 30 minutes before the start) to give us an overview of the plots, significance, and context of these plays. If you have not read them, or even if you have, feel free to stop by -- her commentary will certainly add to your enjoyment of the main event.
Less profoundly but no less importantly, we'll be having a reception after the performance in the Core office , where alums, professors, and friends, can mingle and engage in conversation.
Click here to view the PDF event poster
TONIGHT: Theater of War Time: Wednesday, December 7 at 6:30 p.m. Place: Tsai Performance Center
Cost: Free (and open to the public)
No epic survived the welter of history unless both its language and story were unforgettable. From a plot posterity demands both immediate pleasure and enduring moral significance. An epic narrative must vividly and unforgettably embody the central values of a civilization -- be they military valor or spiritual redemption. Only a few poets at a few fortunate points in history had met this challenge successfully. To understand these poems, [Robert] Fitzgerald insisted, one not only needed to study the cultures and literary traditions which created them. One also needed to measure them against life. The ultimate measure of Homer, Virgil, and Dante's greatness was that their poems taught one a great deal about life, and that life, in turn, illuminated them.
-- Dana Gioa, from his essay "Learning from Robert Fitzgerald", in The Hudson Review vol. LI, No. 1, Spring 1998
The Core Blog is a hub for information and media related to the CAS Core Curriculum at Boston University. It will be updated regularly, with photo galleries, interviews, links to related reading online, news of events or activities, and other kinds of content that help connect our Core people—prospective, current, and former students—with each other.
You can stop by here once a week to scroll through the posts, or make this your homepage in order to keep your finger on the pulse of the Core. Either way, we hope you find this to be a pleasant way to strengthen your connection with the great people, the great books, and the great questions we encounter in the Core.
