TC – Poetry

I’ve embarked on a new Teaching Company Course – How to read and Understand Poetry, taught by William Spiegelman  It is lovely to listen to and think about poems while commuting to work, facing another day of drudgery.  As Goethe said, “One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good [...]

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Teaching Company Revelations

I just finished Classical Mythology taught by Elizabeth Vandiver. You really can’t go wrong with Greek and Roman myths and it was fun to revisit old familiar stories and learn  new interpretations of some of them.  Her discussion of Ovid was particularly interesting to me after reading Jane Alison’s fictionalized account of the exiled poet.  [...]

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Which Iliad redux

I finally finished my Teaching Company course which was great! Like all the best courses, it seemed to move the walls of the mind, to rearrange the furniture.  I’m still trying to absorb and process it all.  The problem with TC is the lack of a forum to discuss the ideas; however, I’ll write more [...]

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More on the Iliad

I am really struggling to understand The Iliad, or piece together the bits I have gleaned into something comprehensive.  What I got out of it was that Homer was trying to point the way to wisdom, to help mortals understand a tiny bit of the ways of the gods—or at least to realize how subjective [...]

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Hubris

In the first literature class I took at community college (where I was an accounting major), we read Oedipus Rex and were introduced to the concept of hubris — “overweening pride against the gods,” in the words of my professor.  Naturally, hubris comes up in The Iliad, with a much more thorough definition.  According to [...]

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The lessons of the Iliad

I’ve listened to the Iliad lectures at least five times now and am still trying to grasp the enormity of it all.  Fears lays out many, often overlapping, lessons and themes from the book.  For instance, the great lesson is that learned by Achilles, that one should be moderate in the pursuit of one’s values.  [...]

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Reading The Iliad

I finished the Iliad; and I’m quite glad that after some false starts over the past decade I finally did it, and I enjoyed it.  More than that, it changed my life (more to follow on this).  First of all, two things helped me finally conquer this classic:  1) the motivation and context provided by [...]

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Reading connections

I love the game of literary references, how one thing leads to another, for instance, I had never heard of Dietrich Bonhoeffer before my TeachCo course.  I read the New Yorker cover-to-cover (well, almost) every week.  So, in a recent issue (in October?), there was a reference to Bonhoeffer in a letter from a reader.  [...]

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Random reading remarks

Thanks to the TeachCo lecture (“Books that Have Made History; Books that Can Change your Life”), I am awash in books.  I am up to Book 18 in the Iliad (Fitzgerald translation, which I’m finding pretty readable).  I’m also perusing The Bhagavad Gita (Sky Light Illuminations edition, translated by Shri Purohit Swami) as well as [...]

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Which Iliad?

I’m already bogged down in my Teaching Company course because of the compulsion to read the books which Professor Fears is discussing.  I’ve ordered Bonhoeffer’s book from the library and I picked up the Iliad from my own bookshelf.  I’ve tried reading it before and was overwhelmed by the sea of prose, the mind-numbing lists of [...]

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