classical lit

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Persephone in the strangest places...


Last weekend, while watching 'Catch and Release' in theaters, I found the strangest thing... One of Jennifer Gardner's friends in the movie was dating a girl named Persephone! When his roommate answered her call one time, he asked her if it was hot down there, and when she answered where? He said: "In hell." She was really upset by this, and hung up on him, and then he said: "I don't know what's wrong with her, its not like I called her Antigone!" (or something to that effect, it was 2 weeks ago!) As you can imagine, I was pretty excited! What are the odds that two of the pieces that we are reading in class would be mentioned in one movie!? The best part, though, was when my friend turned to me and said: "Hey, isn't that the chick that you have been talking about all the time?" I was so proud that she remembered! So, I'm sorry Dr. Sexson, I don't think that I fulfilled your assignment to lose friends, but at least they will all be very well educated!

Monday, February 05, 2007

Dr. Sexson's article

Here is a link to Dr. Sexsons article, after reading it a second time, I found that it really is profound. This is amazing!

http://www.mississippireview.com/1996/msexson.html

Sunday, February 04, 2007

Hades and Prince Charming....


Are Hades and Prince Charming, alike? Or very different?

Both 'abduct' their loves and take them off into the sunset. It can be argued that Hades did it against Persephone's will, and the Princess' that Prince Charming rescue want to be taken, but do they really. Because it is not possible for us to ask them, we must infer. For Cinderella, Rapunzel and even Sleeping Beauty, the Prince was rescuing them from a life of captivity and slavery. Cinderella was forced to cook and clean for her evil step family, Rapunzel was kept captive in a castle, and Sleeping Beauty didn't want to marry the Prince, she was in love with someone she met 'once upon a dream' (although they were the same person, she didn't know that yet). But for Princess' like Belle, Snow White and Mulan, they were perfectly happy before they were taken. The Beast made her stay locked in his castle and didn't let her leave, the Prince was too late in rescuing Snow White, because the hunter had already done that, and was probably happy living with the dwarves. And Mulan didn't need to be rescued because she rescued him, which probably means she could rescue herself too. I'm beginning to think that Prince Charming isn't quite as magical as I once believed him to be, and I'm thinking that he maybe is more like Hades than we ever could have imagined as children!

week 3 cont.

January 31, 2007

Homeric Hymns:

  • Written down sometime between 8th and 6th Century BCE
  • Eumba (Baubo) "The Metamorphosis of Baubo"
  • 2000 BCE- Persephone was abducted (the myth anyway)
  • nar(sleep)cissus- the flower that looks like Persephone (the flower-faced child)
  • eating: nectar and ambrosia

"The gods neither eat bread nor drink wine, and that is why they are bloodless. Instead they drink and eat Nectar and Ambrosia, and their blood is called Ichor [see below]. So, for example Leto did not give Apollo her breast, but Themis poured nectar and ambrosia with her hands." ~ Carlos Parada

  • the mother, the daughter and the crone are all one
  • 'the White Goddess'
  • Helios= the sun
  • Demeter has the power of agriculture, and the seasons

Hot 'older' ladies:

1)Cher

2)Kim Cattrall

3)Sophia Loren

4)Elizabeth Tayor?

5)Susan Sarandon

6)Julie Andrews


week 3, part 3

February 2, 2007

Groundhogs Day!!! There is a great movie made about this holiday, but most people don't know more about it than just the little rodent. February 2nd is also the purification of the virgin day in the Catholic Church, the Aztec New Year, James' Joyce's Birthday, and today, 20 years ago, in Grand Junction, Colorado @ approximately 7 am Cassie Clampett was born!! Who knew?


  • Bill Murray had to do it over and over again until he got it right
  • He eventually found the extraordinary in the ordinary

It is important to do this in everyday life as well. You don't have to look too hard to find the extraordinary in Bozeman, just look at it's name and you will find Oz!

On June 16th, 1904 James Joyce fell in love. He wrote Ulysses on this day to immortalize it, it is now called 'Bloomsday.' The story is about an ordinary day, where extraordinary things happen, like falling in love! Isn't that romantic?

There is even a movie about this, starring Ewan McGregor and Susan Lynch called Nora


Nativity: a way of making a day important, sacramentalizing something

everyone is not only extraordinary, we all fell from divine bliss, we fell from heaven to earth

'The Man Who Fell to Earth' starring: Mr. David Bowie!!!!


plays a man who is came to earth to get water for his dying planet, and is so distracted by television that he forgets his mission

Jed Clampett

In Ancient Greece everyday was a holiday or 'holy day,' they had something to celebrate everyday!

But us, on the other hand live the same day over and over again, and are all boring! We need to look at the world in a very different way to see how it is a gift.

Like Jim Hardy in Holiday Inn, who wanted to be lazy everyday, and open an Inn just on the holidays, we forget that each day is a gift.

'In Memory of WB Yeats' by WH Auden

Friedrich Nietzsche's 'The Eternal Recurrence'

"This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything immeasurably small or great in your life must return to you-all in the same succession and sequence-even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over and over, and you with it, a grain of dust."
~Nietzsche

Deja vu: Keanu Reeves, Beyonce, Bill Murray and Denzel Washington are all feeling it, are you?

The Myth of ER

Mysteries of Eleusis

It's a Small World

Iambe: told dirty jokes to make Demeter laugh, is part of the holy procession

during this ritual the high priest:

  1. said something: 'rain conceive'
  2. showed something: showed a stalk of grain, that symbolized growth and was very important to these people
  3. did something that transformed them: performed a promenon drama, probably the story of Demeter

These experiences heightened their senses of:

  • hearing
  • sight
  • speaking

John 12:24 "I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds"

Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, it one of my favorite of all time! What are the odds that Dr. Sexson would chose that sonnet, out of all of them to talk about? And I may be alone, but if a guy came up to mquotingng this, and asked for a date, I think he may get one!


Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

This is an excellent example not only of hightened speech, but also an example of Shakespeare at his finest! This shows that it does matter how we talk.

Although Dr. Sexson thinks that marriage isn't about love, I would have to disagree with him! Everything is about love, and I think that it definitely exists. Although arranged marriages seem to last longer statistically, I think that not everything is about statistics.