September 12, 2011 at 12:26 pm
Today's visual Analect is taken from Robert Crumb's sumptuous
Illustrated Book of Genesis (Norton, 2009).
Click on the thumbnail above to view Genesis 4:1-15.
By zakbos
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Posted in Analects, Art
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Tagged Abel, adaptations, Cain, cartoon, Genesis, graphic novel
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September 12, 2011 at 10:17 am
LECTURES THIS WEEK
CC101: Michael Zank on Genesis (9/13)
CC105, Tuesday: Scott Whitaker on "Motions in the Earth" (9/13)
CC105, Thursday: Alan Marscher on "Motions in the Sky" (9/15)
CC201: Michael Corgan on Machiavelli (9/13)
CC203: Thornton Lockwood on "The Ancient World & Social Science" (9/15)
A reminder to alumni -- if you will be in Boston during a scheduled course lecture, and have a desire to sit in, email core@bu.edu and let us know. It is often that case that you'll be able to join the audience as a guest.
This year the Core will make audio recordings of all lectures and post these as downloadable mp3s on the respective course webpage.
If you have any trouble accessing these recordings, starting 24 hours after the lecture, please contact Zachary Bos, at core@bu.edu.
THE CORE WRITING CENTER is now open; tutors will be available for half-hour appointments Monday through Friday, 10-1 and 2-4. Students may visit the Core office, CAS 119, to sign up for a session, or email core@bu.edu to request and appointment.
UPCOMING EVENTS IN THE CORE
- THIS WEDNESDAY, 9/14: Ecolympics planning meeting. Prof. Hudon invites you to a planning meeting for the 3rd annual Ecolympics (which this year will have to operate under another name, since the United States Olympic Committee has issued a cease-and-desist order, alas). The Eco-[something] is a series of events, taking place in the spring, which are designed to raise awareness of our impact on the environment. Last year's program included movie screenings, nature walks, a sustainable cooking class, expert seminars, and other eco-fun. Your help is needed in planning the 2012 events -- please join the discussion at 5 PM in CAS 129.
- Friday, 9/16: Core Open House. All new students are invited to join us in the Core Office, CAS 119, from 3 to 5 pm to meet informally with Core faculty, staff, and other students, learn about Core student organizations, and sample some of the best chocolate cookies in Boston, gathered from a selection of bakeries in Boston and Brookline. RSVP at http://on.fb.me/Core-F11-3.
- Monday, 9/19: Workshop on How to Engage Professors. In this workshop, led by professors Cirulli, Kalt, and Nelson, students will learn strategies for academic success, including how to get to know their professors better, how to use office hours effectively, and how to best participate in class. 4-6 PM, in CAS room 203. Refreshments will be provided; first-year students are especially encouraged to attend.
- Friday, 9/23: CITC Trip to the Semitic Museum. Prof. Kyna Hamill will lead a trip to Harvard Square, where students will be given a guided tour of the Harvard Semitic Museum. Students should bring fare money for the T; the group will leave from CAs 119 at 3 PM, and will leave to return not later than 5 PM. RSVP at http://on.fb.me/Core-F11-4.
- Friday, 9/30: CITC at the BPL. Prof. Thornton Lockwood will lead a tour through the Boston Public Library branch at Copley Square to view John Singer Sargent's famous mural, "Triumph of Religion." Students should bring fare money for the T; the group will leave from CAs 119 at 3 PM, and will leave to return not later than 5 PM. RSVP at http://on.fb.me/Core-F11-5.
Students may RSVP for any of these events by emailing core@bu.edu, by adding their name to the sign-up sheet in CAS 119, or by visiting the RSVP link provided.
If you have any ideas, or comments about Core activities, please contact Prof. Jennifer Formichelli at jlf@bu.edu.
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Get connected with Core:
The Core blog - http://bu.edu/core/blog
Facebook - http://facebook.com/BUCore
Core events - at http://www.bu.edu/core/calendar
By zakbos
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Posted in e-bulletin
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Tagged e-bulletin, Events
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September 9, 2011 at 4:45 pm
... going carbon-based for the life-forms seems a tad obvious, no?
-- A comment left on God's blog post, when He invited feedback on His world-in-progress, and updated his status to read: "Pretty pleased with what I've come up with in just six days. Going to take tomorrow off." (From a humor piece in The New Yorker by Paul Simms, recommended for the Core Blog by Prof. Franco Cirulli).
Prof. Michael Zank will walk first-year students through the Book of Genesis next Tuesday, in his lecture for CC101. Alumni are welcome to join the audience.
By CAS Core Curriculum
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Posted in Friday Fun, Other Publications
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Tagged CC101, Cirulli, Genesis, humor
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September 9, 2011 at 1:30 pm
Ethnology is in the sadly ludicrous, not to say tragic, position, that at the every moment when it begins to put its workshop in order, to forge its proper tools, to start ready for work on its appointed task, the material of its study melts away with hopeless rapidity.
- Malinowski, Argonauts of the Pacific, page xv, from the author's Foreword
By zakbos
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Posted in Analects
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Tagged anthropology, CC203, humility, Malinowski
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September 8, 2011 at 2:54 pm
Thank Heaven! I am going to-morrow where I shall find a man who has not one agreeable quality, who has neither manner nor sense to recommend him. Stupid men are the only ones worth knowing, after all.
-- Elizabeth Bennet, in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Volume II, Chapter iv, 151-152 (Penguin Classics edition)
*
Jane Austen's P&P is studied in the spring semester of the second-tear Core Humanities. Relatedly, here are some snippets from recent writing in the trade and literary press concerning Austen and her legacy:
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When V.S. Naipaul picked a fight with women writers in an interview earlier this year, citing a "narrow view of the world" as the source of female inferiority, he scorned Jane Austen for "her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world," declaring that no woman, not even Austen, was his literary equal. "A woman," he said, "is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing." Women at best produce "feminine tosh." [from the beginning of Audrey Bilger's double review, "Just Like a Woman" (5 Sept 2011) for the Los Angeles Review of Books.]
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Bilger, writing about Rachel M. Brownstein's new book, Why Jane Austen?: "For Brownstein, emphasizing Austen’s role as a woman limits any sense of artistic greatness. 'Readers who excoriate (or, indeed, adore) her too narrowly imagine Jane as first-and-foremost a woman, a writer of romances, and/or a moralizing goody-two-shoes,' she declares. 'She was in fact much more than that.' All the same, she has fun taking potshots at Naipaul’s virility, declaring, 'If [his] pronouncement that no woman writer can be considered his equal is merely the sad senescent squawk of a geezer, his grandiose comparison of himself to Austen is a silly show of faux-boyish daring'."
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... and Bilger quoting from William Deresiewicz's A Jane Austen Education: "The fact is that Jane Austen is not only a great writer, she’s a great writer because she was a woman, because instead of going out hunting and shooting and conquering India like the men of her time, she was sitting in a drawing room, watching how people interacted, listening to how they talk. She’s the greatest writer of dialogue in the language, after Shakespeare, because she listened to how people talked."
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Bilger: "In Deresiewicz's approach, feminism coexists with humanism. We can see gender difference as a cultural reality without writing off women as less than fully human." With this notion, the Core concurs.
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"Wanting Austen for the Enlightenment means more than dissociating Austen from Aristotle. It also involved saving her from the film industry and its "romantic" reconstructions of her novels." [James A. Harris in his essay "Morals of the Story" for the Times Literary Supplement No. 5657, 2 September 2011]
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"Yes, her heroines always get the guy. But Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice isn’t the only man who unexpectedly falls in love. Male readers, including some severe critics, have read and reread her novels for 200 years. Though Mark Twain complained, 'Every time I read Pride and Prejudice, I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone,' we need to count him, too, as a repeat reader. Maybe he returned to it because it’s a novel that runs like a Rolls-Royce, as Austen scholar Richard Jenkyns has suggested." [Carol Adams, rejecting the notion that Austen's novels are "chick lit", in her article "Five myths about Jane Austen" for The Washington Post, 14 July 2011]
By CAS Core Curriculum
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Posted in Analects, Other Publications
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Tagged Austen, CC202, criticism
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September 8, 2011 at 11:19 am
Professor Nathan Phillips, of BU's Department of Geography and Environment, coordinator in Spring 2012 of CC106, has earned a reputation as a passionate advocate for sustainability. In 2007, BU Today recognized him for maintaining a zero-emissions office, powered by a bicycle generator. This summer, he made headlines in the Boston Globe for using a personal cavity ring-down spectrometer to monitor natural gas leaks from his car. Professor Philips began this work in order to document wasted greenhouse gasses that add to the Boston metropolitan area's carbon footprint. However, as he explored the Boston area--he estimates he has covered about 1% of its streets--he has found several leaks that are significant enough to pose explosion hazards. Professor Phillips' work comes at a time when the Massachusetts legislature is debating a new law that would require more immediate responses to gas leaks by utilities companies, as concerns grow about the nearly 8 million cubic feet of natural gas that goes unaccounted for in the state each year. (via)
By zakbos
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Posted in Great Personalities, In the News
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Tagged Boston, Boston Globe, CC106, geography, Phillips, sustainability
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September 7, 2011 at 4:45 pm
Prof. David Eckel welcomed the class of 2015 at the start of yesterday's CC101 lecture, inviting them to think about what it means to succeed in college and in the Core Curriculum. he suggested that our challenge is to "make the strange familiar and the familiar strange":
If the books seem familiar to you, ask yourself, "What's strange about them?" And if they seem strange, ask: "What is in them that speaks to us, in a language we can understand?" How do these books challenge us to think differently about the past, and to think differently about ourselves?
Following Prof. Eckel's Director's welcome, Prof. Stephanie Nelson -- first-year Humanities coordinator for AY2011-2 -- briefly laid out the structure of the Core Humanities, and offered six simple words for success in Core: “Come to class. Read the books.” She credited this mantra to Prof. Brian Jorgensen, the Director of the Core at the time of its founding more than 20 years ago, and yesterday's lecturer on the Epic of Gilgamesh.
In my view, Prof. Jorgensen's lecture served to deepen the students' understanding of the work, to inform their seminar discussions, and to place the work in the constellation of works that make up the curriculum of the Core. I have been told that this inaugural lecture and its attendant images of the “ultimate journey beyond human limits” has been an essential introduction to the Core experience over the many years Prof. Jorgensen has been asked to deliver it. I can see why -- yesterday in his talk, he brought the human drama of this ancient tale directly to the fore, drawing out the irrepressible question: “Why did my friend die, why must I die, why?” An answer to this question, Prof. Jorgensen suggested, is the true aim of Gilgamesh's quest for “the one principle beyond everything”.
Prof. Jorgensen put things in perspective this way: “The story of a hero's ultimate journey” has been “on the mind of human beings about ten times as long as the United States has been around.” The great age of this text suggests its great value, both as a story to be explored, and as a cultural foundation for one's educational journey through the Core, and BU, and beyond.
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Core student employee Tom Farndon (CAS/SMG '12) wrote this lecture report for the Core blog; his fellow employee Logan Gowdey (CAS ' 12) contributed to it as well. CC101 students will find an mp3 recording of yesterday's speakers available for download at the course homepage.
By CAS Core Curriculum
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Posted in Core Lecturers, Great Personalities
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September 7, 2011 at 4:23 pm
Today's Analect is drawn from Petrarch's Canzoniere (#189) translated by Mark Musa:
My ship full of forgetful cargo sails
through rough seas at the midnight of a winter
between Charybdis and the Scylla reef,
my master, no, my foe, is at the helm...
Passa la nave mia colma d’oblio
per aspro mare, a mezza notte il verno,
enfra Scilla et Caribdi; et al governo
siede ’l signore, anzi ’l nimico mio.
By CAS Core Curriculum
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Posted in Analects
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Tagged CC201, Petrarch, poem, sonnet
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