Check out this TED Talk by Phuc Tran, a Classicist who contemplates the power of the subjunctive mood in comparing his command of Greek (which, like Latin, uses this important non-reality mood) to his Vietnamese parents’ lack of it:
Listen to excerpts from Phuc Tran’s TED Talk by clicking here.
In re my current seminar on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a recent cartoon from The New Yorker:
“I feel like every time I turn into a swan there’s this expectation of sex.”
From the director of “Resident Evil”, “Resident Evil: Afterlife”, “Resident Evil: Retribution”, and the upcoming “Resident Evil 6” comes “Pompeii”, a movie about gladiators loving and trying not to die during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. Starring Kit Harrington, a.k.a. Jon Snow from “Game of Thrones”.
Will “Pompeii” be amazing, terrible, or so terrible it’s amazing? Find out starting Friday February 21st–in 3D!
Sherlock Holmes, in any incarnation, packs a lot of information into his head, and he has to be ready to draw out those details as he makes his deductions and solves the most mysterious of mysteries. The Holmes of Sherlock, the BBC/Masterpiece program that aired its season finale Sunday night on PBS, is no exception. This time, though, his creators have gifted him with a talent for a mnemonic device straight out of ancient Greece—the mind palace. Of course, this being Holmes (and television), his version was somewhat more advanced than that of the average rememberer.
According to myth, the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos invented the technique after attending a banquet gone wrong. Simonides stepped outside to meet with two young men. But when he arrived outside, the young men were not there and the hall was collapsing behind him. Though his fellow banqueters were too badly crushed by the collapse for their remains to be identified, Simonides was supposedly able to put a name with each body based on where they had been sitting in the hall. That ability to remember based on location became the method of loci, also known as memory theater, the art of memory, the memory palace and mind palace….
Recently, “Radiolab” ran an episode on color that featured a segment, “Why Isn’t the Sky Blue?”, on modern inquiries into why Homer assigned counter-intuitive colors to certain objects in his famous epics, The Iliad and the Odyssey:
“What is the color of honey, and “faces pale with fear”? If you’re Homer–one of the most influential poets in human history–that color is green. And the sea is “wine-dark,” just like oxen…though sheep are violet. Which all sounds…well, really off. Producer Tim Howard introduces us to linguist Guy Deutscher, and the story of William Gladstone (a British Prime Minister back in the 1800s, and a huge Homer-ophile). Gladstone conducted an exhaustive study of every color reference in The Odyssey and The Iliad. And he found something startling: No blue! Tim pays a visit to the New York Public Library, where a book of German philosophy from the late 19th Century helps reveal a pattern: across all cultures, words for colors appear in stages. And blue always comes last. Jules Davidoff, professor of neuropsychology at the University of London, helps us make sense of the way different people see different colors in the same place. Then Guy Deutscher tells us how he experimented on his daughter Alma when she was just starting to learn the colors of the world around, and above, her.”
The opening of “The Odyssey” describes Odysseus as polytropos, a man “much turned” and “much turning.” He makes much happen, and much happens to him. When I selected “The Odyssey” as the first text for my English 101 course at San Quentin Prison, I worried about the choice. It’s a difficult work for readers of limited literary background, and I wondered how a population of mostly black and brown men doing long prison terms would relate to the story of an ancient Greek king. As it turned out, I had them at polytropos.
Read on at http://www.salon.com/2013/12/21/teaching_the_odyssey_at_san_quentin/
The myth of Icarus was both figuratively and literally represented on last night’s episode of Brooklyn 99, “Operation Broken Feather”: Captain Holt flies too close to the “sun” of data-driven office management, and Doyle’s fringed jacket catches on fire as a tragi-comic consequence (pictured above). Also, watch Adam Sandler bid on Greek antiquities!
On the first half of the season finale of Sleepy Hollow, Ichabod Crane (pictured here) is astonished that his partner Lt. Abbie Mills knows the story of Cincinnatus (in relief behind Crane), the Roman who came out of exile to lead his people to victory in war, then retired back to his farm when his duty was done, rather than seize lasting power for himself.
“I took Latin in high school,” Abbie explains casually.