week 2 (part 3)

Friday January 26

The Trojan Women

politics: polise- the city 'polis' also meaning the city vs the individual

BCE= Before common era

Sophocles

chthonic: 'thonic' of or related to the underworld, which was created by men

Steiner page 120:

"It has been proposed that Sophoclean treatment of the relations between the living ___ and the claims of the dead, particularly in Antigone, reflects the atmosphere and style of Athenian politics as declared in Pericles' celebrated funeral oration which was delivered in the winter of 431-30 BC. Some scholars find evidence for a new spate of familial tombs in Athens at about this time. Ajax and Antigone would constitute a pointed advocacy for the freedom of familial burial practices at a moment when the state, under pressure of war and internal polemic, was seeking to control, indeed to regiment, private piety."

Here is the wiki site for the Homeric Hymns, its got some really interesting info!

Here the lyrics that I couldn't remember in class, I also included a few other great songs that my sister and I would blare to annoy my parents when we were young:

John Lennon 'Jealous Guy' lyrics

Michael Jackson's 'Black or White' lyrics

Meatloaf's 'I would do anything for love (But I won't do that)' lyrics

George Thorogood and the Destroyers 'One Bourbon, One Scotch, and One Beer' lyrics

SING!!! "I'm gonna sing this song..."

To write well back in the day you had to first invoke the muses:

1. Calliope, Muse of epic song
2. Clio, Muse of history
3. Euterpe, Muse of lyric song
4. Thalia, Muse of comedy and bucolic poetry
5. Melpomene, Muse of tragedy
6. Terpsichore, Muse of dance
7. Erato, Muse of erotic poetry
8. Polyhymnia, Muse of sacred song
9. Urania, Muse of astronomy

Many things have the route word 'muse':

• museum
• musical
• amused

The writers of the time didn't believe that they were actually creating anything, they believed that they were the vessels that the muses' were working through

Homer Simpson, freak or genius? Who knows?

polytropos: poly = many, trope= a word used in a figurative sense, image "to turn"

concubine: what my mom would call "a lady of the night"

Gesand ist dasein: song is existence

Wally Stevens once said: "I have no life out of poetry"

anamnesis: recollection "you know everything, you have just forgotten it"

STORY TIME!!!!

Once upon a time you lost your wings, but every time you encounter something beautiful in this world your shoulders start to itch.

~Plato

• Mother and daughter
• Madonna and Bambino
• Demeter (the mother of corn) and Persephone (the virgin)
• the old woman and the young girl

this story is all about being abducted or raped