The masthead has been finalized for the forthcoming twentieth issue of The Journal of the Core Curriculum. Your Spring 2011 editors are:
-Jennifer Zimmerman, Editor
-Hannah Franke, Poetry Editor
-Megan Ilnitzki, Translations Editor
-Reenat Sinay, Social Media Manager
-Kalani McDaniel, Production Manager
-Caitlin Outterson, Senior Editor
-Elise Alexander, Designer
– Prof. Sassan Tabatabai, Faculty Advisor
The editors will continue to review submissions submitted before the deadline of March 24th. Submissions should be sent to corejournal@gmail.com. You are encouraged you to submit your work for consideration; publication in the Journal is a way to add another kind of experience to your resume, and is satisfying in its own right.
Many former students folks stopped by the Core office for an EnCore reunion on February 26, during the annual Winterfest festival.
In the photo above, Katherine Lochery (CAS '11), Lindsey Gould (CAS '10), and Prof. Alex Coverdill (CC105/106) catch up. EnCore steering committee member Joe Sacchi (CAS '08) can be seen peeking out from behind Kate's shoulder.
The baiji, or Yangtze Dolphin, has been declared functionally extinct.
It’s hard to believe that extinction is happening right before our eyes. There are five primary causes: habitat fragmentation, pollution, introduction of invasive species, overexploitation and climate change.
Here is a list of ten species that have been declared extinct so far this century. These are masterpieces of nature that we can no longer enjoy. We are running the Ecolympics (registration begins on March 21) to raise awareness of exactly this problem. The same information is presented, with a stirring soundtrack and more photos, in the video below, produced by the MotherNatureChannel:
Both of these need to be updated to include the Eastern Cougar, declared extinct this year, though it's last confirmed sighting was in Maine in 1938. You can also find a timeline of extinctions on Wikipedia.
On Wednesday, March 7, the Core welcomed Prof. Peter Hawkins of Yale Divinity School for a talk about Sandow Birk’s modern illustrations (2004) of Dante’s Commedia. Hawkins' lecture was the last of a four-part series on "Insight and Inspiration," in which speakers explored instances where themes from the Core texts can be seen influencing contemporary art, literature and theatre.
When introducing Birk's project -- which sets Hell in Los Angeles, Purgatory in San Francisco, and Heaven in a hodge-podge metropolis something like New York -- Prof. Hawkins posed the question: "What Would Dante Think?"
Los Angeles is depicted with "fast food signs jumbled together with junked cars; there are oil rig dinosaurs and telephone poles heavy with crows, and just to one side, a classical death's head to remind us of what we already know. The sense of scale is vast, the detailing gemlike, the suffused gold and orange gorgeous. This may be hell, but who can turn away? In the left foreground, two tiny figures perched above the radiant abyss -- Virgil and Dante -- take it all in."
Cover of Birk's Inferno
Hawkins explained how "the great tradition of Dante illustration has usually taken the poem out of our world and presented it in an alternative afterlife universe unto itself. Birk, however, takes his cue from Dante, who constantly made the Inferno vivid and relevant to his contemporary readers by referring them to places they knew: this crowded Roman bridge with two way traffic, that tower in Bologna, or the Arsenale in Venice, whose shipyard workers spend the winter months using hot pitch to make boats seaworthy for Spring. Birk's Inferno comes to us via the sleazy parts of LA and presents a vision of post-industrial America that, like Dante’s Inferno, is relentlessly urban and decayed. Looking for hell? Look around you."
Let them eat the lie and swallow it with their bread. Whether the two were lovers or no, they'll have accounted to God for it by now. I have my own fish to fry.
- Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, author of Don Quixote
At yesterday's CC102 lecture, Prof. Stephanie Nelson spoke about the two stories in Virgil's Aeneid-- the one being the story of the founding of Rome, and the other a tale of 'pious Aeneas', who fled his destroyed home in search of another.
For the benefit of those who couldn't attend the lecture, here are a few quotes where Prof. Nelson considers the character of Aeneas.
I'll say, as a literature person, that the question of how an individual person works, is a question that's too big for history, and, looking Professor Roochnik in the eye, I'll say it's too big for philosophy, that only literature can encompass it. The reason why is that literature can show us two worlds at once.
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The story of Rome, like the story of Aeneas, is a story of loss.
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I think many students resort to the easy way out. And the easy way out is to say that Aeneas doesn't have free will.
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Maybe not all of you wanted to go to college. But you have free will. You could, right now, walk out those doors, hitch a bus, go to Florida... But you won't.
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There's an enormous amount of social expectation that grows up with being an individual. Society pushes us from the outside and from the inside... It's easier to think you had to. But you don't have to... And Aeneas is easier to understand in that context.
About the art. The image above shows a marble sculpture, in the Grand Parterre of the Mirabell Gardens in Salzburg, Austria, by Ottavio Mosto, 1690. It depicts Aeneas carrying his father Anchises on his back during their flight from Troy. His son Ascanius is carrying one of the family’s penatës, or hearth idols. Photo by Prof. Kyna Hamill, July 2010; to appear in the forthcoming 20th issue of The Journal of the Core Curriculum.
A guest post from Core alumna Erin McDonagh, CAS '10):
New York Times columnist David Brooks recently discussed the results, 250 years later, of the split between the French Enlightenment and the English one. The French “emphasized individualism and reason,” while the British thinkers focused on social sentiments. As our modern selves learn to rely on provable logic when we make decisions, he explains, the divide between our rational and our emotional selves has become so wide in our society as to nearly be a wall. In trying to reform our school system, in approaches to international crises, and in just about every situation, we are taught to rely on numbers and facts, when (as Brooks posits) we are truly social animals. Most of our brain matter is devoted to the subconscious, and when we fail to take social or other non-quantifiable needs into account in, say, Iraq, we make disastrous mistakes like failing to account for “the psychological aftershock of Saddam’s terror” – which may have changed the decisions of our policymakers.
This is an issue central to the Core education. Every student in the program can delightedly recall how Jonathan Swift recognized this problem at the outset, and mocked the inability of Enlightenment society to balance reason and emotion in his memorable satire Gulliver’s Travels. Lao-Tzu tells us, “The great scholar hearing the Tao tries to practice it…The lesser scholar hearing the Tao has a good laugh. Without that laughter, it wouldn’t be Tao.” No Way of life can be complete with only memorization and application; it must have some laugher, some human involvement. Robert Pirsig, in his memoir Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, brings the issue all the way back to Plato and Aristotle, claiming that the initial split between science and the humanities and the subsequent isolation of science in the realm of logic is the biggest failing of modern learning. Pirsig makes some very bold claims about education and even about the nature of human thought, just as Brooks does.
Brooks does not claim that we should all migrate from one side to the other, and begin to rely on our instincts and emotions for decisions instead of our rational minds; the point is that any keeping to extreme “sides” at all fails to take into account the full range of human capability. Relationships and “soft side skills” in human capital, the ability to feel sympathy to ingratiate oneself with others, and metis, “the ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from complex situations”, are just as important as IQ scores. This is the skill side the Core works to develop, seeing patterns and taking into account all factors in a situation, including historical and psychological influences. Brooks’ article may be an excellent argument for similar programs as American education evolves.
This evening, Professor Peter Hawkins of Yale University will speak on "America's Underworld: Sandow Birk's Divine Comedy." Birk is a painter who illustrated Dante's Divine Comedy by depicting decadent urban spaces in LA, NY, and San Francisco. 5:30 PM at The Castle, 225 Bay State Road. Refreshments will follow.
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.
