Friday February 9

stichomythia: row of speech

laughter: has many different meanings

Wallace Stevens: A Postcard From the Volcano

Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;

And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion-house,
Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion's look
And what we said of it became

A part of what it is... Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,

Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls,

A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

~

each of us enacts Persephone

Dr Sexson on death:

"Hades dragging you into the underworld, or Shakespeare taking you the other way."

Is a person your

• Rescuer or abductor?
• Devil or deliverer?

gone with the wind

• was Leslie her rescuer or abductor? She loved him so much that it ruined her marriage
• was Rhett the devil or her deliverer? He loved her so much it caused him to go a little mad

lotus eater: "The irony of the story is that Wilson moves to Capri due to the boredom of his "everyday routine" of working/living in London and after relocating to Capri he falls into a new, but equally boring routine." I believe that this is the most important part of the wiki article

The characters of Antigone (Elizabeth), Ismene (Megan) and Creon (Mick)

Antigone: she is outgoing, and believes that her family is more important than the government

Ismene: timid, and doesn't like confrontation with anyone, she too believes that her family is more important than the government, but is too timid to fight for her beliefs. She values her life enough to 'not fight city hall,' she doesn't have the 'cojones' of her sister, so she won't stand up for what she believes in

Creon: he believes that the law comes before family, but I believe that he may have changed his mind at the end

SOPHOCLES

I --------------I

I----------------- I

I -------------------I

I -----------------------I

ASCALES ------------------EURIPIDES

Aeschylus: the birth of Greece (the beginning), he wrote Oresteia (Agamemnon has to fight in the Trojan War- they needed a virgin to sacrifice, so he allowed them to kill his daughter, which made his wife Clytemnestra very angry, so she slashed him into tiny pieces)

Sophocles: Greece at it's zenith, this was the time of perfection and the height of articulation

Euripides: thought of as 'loose,' untranslatable, disjointed, and random, but passionate, intense and emotional

enthusiastic: entheos= god inside you

Cassandra

Matriarchs

The Furies or Erinyes: the gods of the underworld

Wednesday February 7

Men obsessed with:

1. women
2. little girls

• Humbert Humbert and Lolita
• dickens and little red riding hood
• Jerry Lee Lewis and Myra Gale Brown
• Cary Elwes and Alicia Silverstone in The Crush

'Fear and trembling and the sickness unto death' ~Kierkegard 'Existential'

Hegel

"When books are outlawed, only outlaws will have books"

Hysterical: wandering wombs

female hysteria

1. men and women page 234
2. young and old page 242
3. individual and society page 247
4. living and the dead page 263
5. men and gods page 266

mythos: story "Mythos is a term often used for a collection of myths (in the scholarly sense). Some authors of fiction influenced by mythology have used the term to cover a collection of similar background elements in their writings."

Tall Tale

Antigone: more concerned with her family than politics

Harry and Tonto

Europa and basket= Europe

Cadmus: Europa's brother who was sent to rescue her after she was abducted by Zeus

Cadmus and Harmonia

Monday February 5

The Homeric Hymn to Demeter

is it possible for a man to understand what it means to be a woman? Imagination is what makes the genders understand each other. Or you can just be like Arnold in Junior

The Triple Goddess: the crone, the child and the mother

is it more tragic when a child dies, or when an old person dies?

sparagmos: the tearing or rendering of living flesh, turn to shred's, is like a block of cheese being grated

tragedy:

1. wasted potential
2. extreme pain resulted in our shredding
3. food for worms "worms meat"

Romeo and Juliet: Act 3, scene 1

"A plague o' both your houses. They have made worms' meat of me."

Hamlet was obsessed with decomposition. This is evident especially in the scene with the gravediggers. Act 5 scene 1: HAMLET

COMEDY:

polytrope: wily, 'trickster figure'

Prometheus

Hermes: invented music, which possessed Apollo, he also leads you to the land of the dead, so to go there, you much invoke him, he is also the god of laughter

May: 'the bright-haired nymph and Zeus lover"

It was Zeus impregnation of tons of women that made all the stories. It is good that he 'liked the ladies'

Pythagorean: "metempsychosis" is the transmigration of the soul from one body to another body: reincarnation= nothing dies and everyone is transformed

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

ART: provides a vessel for other energies to transform into them

Pygmalion => My Fair Lady => Pretty Women

Eleusisian Mysteries

Herma: found at a crossroads, nothing ever happens in the center, only at the edges

"Forget about being entered, that place where things happen are at the edges"

~Dr. Sexson

"Hermes the Thief: the Evolution of a Myth" by Norman O. Brown shows how an outsider became an insider through the art of thievery and trickery

The line "The lord of the babies" made me think of the David Bowie song (Magic Dance) from The Labyrinth, which led me to google 'Labyrinth' which led me to an interesting wiki site: 'Labyrinth'

'Born Yesterday' with Judy Holiday

pantheon: 12 gods (highest place)

much of comedy has to do with the body: 'bathroom humor' like in the new comedy flushed away

The presocratics:

1. Pythagoras
2. Anaximenes
3. Zeno
4. Heraclitus

Dionysus and grape juice

This reminded me of the episode of 'I love Lucy' when she made wine

'The Inequality of Aries': when the boring husband is at work, the wife has an affair