Friday March 9

We started by doing an awesome esoteric ceremony

Erich Segal: wrote "Love Story" and "The Death of Comedy"

Comedic Rituals:

Mummers Play

Feast of Fools

"Drama of the Green World"

"The Name of the Rose"

"Laughter is the thing that teaches us that nothing is sacred"

There are many different translations of 'dirty lit,' especially of Lysistrata

Wednesday March 7

Comedy is all about community, it's a social matter. Unlike tragedy, which is all about the individual. Comedy however is usually at the expense of the individual. Comedy also tells us that there is nothing about human nature that is shameful. They usually makes fun of what the state holds sacred. Comedians can do anything, and they usually have a 'potty mouth.'

"Comedy brings everyone together onstage at the end, and usually they have a symbolic ritual of marriage" Like in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and like Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

Malvolio from 12th Night , who tells people who are laughing, that they must stop. He wants "no more cakes and ale"

Lysistrata:

• least obscene of all Aristophane's plays
• he was the most personal of all writers
• he wanted peace, he was a dove
• he could write about politics because he was a comedic writer
• has a theme of 'death and rebirth'
• this is like the sitcoms of today (ie- Friends)

obscenity

Menander: a Roman man who was one of the first 'new comedy' playwrites

Neil Simon: wrote Odd Couple, and Barefoot in the Park

Star Wars: Han, Leia and Luke- the bother and the sister want eachother, but instead she gets together with the friend

Lysistrata's of Today:

• There's Something About Mary
• American Pie
• Little Miss Sunshine

The Feast of Fools: of, as in "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" the 'Festival of Fools' and Quasimodo was crowned the 'king of the fools' ~YEAH!

"Literature is the process of neurotic people" ~ Freud

Freud believed that what you repressed came out on the stage

Comedy deals with people who are worse than they really are, people aren't usually that terrible. Except for maybe the people from Jackass...

comedy LOVES stupidity: like the phallic proessions, Aristophanes was obsessed with these

ithyphallic- eww!

priapus

the old men can't go up, and the young men can't go down ;)

Lysistrata is fully of happy ideas- the women want to stop the war, and at the end they do!

body and bawdy or Ribaldry

carnal: of or related to the flesh

"Comedy is not pretty" ~ Steve Martin

Monday March 5

Mick= "The man who loved his cat"



I agree with Mick though, because I think that usually pets are better than people.

vertiginously: turning around, whirling or dizziness

contrivance: to bring about something, or make it up (fiction is a contrivance)

poesis: poetry

logos: truth

mythos (story)+ logos (truth) = mythology

Symposium continued and ended...

• symbol- symboline- tally
• pg 48- Diotima tells a story...it is more important to be loved than to love
• The Wizard of Oz: "better to be loved by others"

3 levels of belief:

1. naive acceptance: believing without questions
2. skeptism: a stage of terror- afraid to believe, but afraid not to
3. believing and disbelieving in a fruitful way- truth and story work together

When did you learn that there was no Santa?

• One day at school in the 5th grade a little boy said that there was no Santa, and I hit him. When the principal called my mom, and told her why I had gotten in a fight, she said that she'd take care of it. When she came to pick me up, she sat me down and told me "Santa is more of a state of mind, he is the spirit of Christmas, rather than a person." And I said: "NO! He is real! And you are a liar!!" We got in a huge fight, and my Mom gave up and let me believe. And I still believe to this day.
• My roommate Megan said that she found out there was no Santa when she noticed that her Mom's handwriting was the same as Santa's. When she approached her Mom about it, she told her not to tell her brother.

Poros: 'contrivance,' the father of Aphrodite

Contrivance + Poverty (want) = Aphrodite

"Important not to be loved, but to be a lover" ~ page 49

daimon: demon

Pregnant in the soul: Homer

• The Odyssey
• The Iliad
• these children last longer than real children

CORE PHILOSOPHY:

1. immortality/existence of the soul
2. virtue/goodness

"We are all lovers searching for some thing to love" ~ Dr. Sexson

The most wonderful type of love is:

• someone you can learn from
• "Someone who makes you be a philosopher (a lover of wisdom)"
• to be immortal, you must be virtuous
• it is important to be good, and learn how to be good

Words to describe Lysistrata:

• graphic
• horrifying
• funny
• amusing
• disliked the pink cover
• men withholding sex
• lewd, crude humor
• resistors
• classical smut
• crude
• liked it
• unexpected
• ruthless
• shameless

comedy: life is the best thing ever "give me more life" ~Faulstaff

• life that is absolutely shameless is better than no life at all
• need to hang onto it even if we shamed ourselves
• all they want in life
• "love is all you need"

1. Old comedy: only 1 to survive= ex) Aristophanes (repelling and funny)
2. New comedy: 90% of what we've seen is this- the same plot over and over: boy wants girl, boy can't get girl, boy gets girl ex) Moonstruck and The Graduate
3. Shakespearian comedy: folk ritual drama, and immemorial paganism

Roman comedy: boy and dad want the same girl, boy gets rid of them to have girl, and the mom usually helps

Friday March 2

Ancient Greek comedy

Aristophanes: the speech of a poet (and my favorite speech from the Symposium)

pg 27= a better translation: 'Each of us then is the mere broken tally of a man...'
Tally: when people were not going to see each other for a very long time, they would break a coin (or a tally) and each take a piece so that they would always have something of the other's and be connected. And maybe if they saw each other someday in the future they would know each other because of the coin.

"We are all only the broken tallies" ~Dr. Sexson

Finding your soul mate:

• Made in Heaven
• What Dreams May Come

Platos: blank slates- there are traces of memory left from past lives "almost a remembrance" ~John Keats

Or like Jerry Maguire said "you complete me"

Silenus Statue: if you break it open, a lot of things inside it that you couldn't see before come out! Just like Christmas!

"The greatest of all treasures are found on the inside" ~Sophocles/ Dr. Sexson

The secrets of illusion: Henry James

• Daisy Miller
• Turn of the Screw

"Poetry is the subject of the poem" ~Wally Stevens, The Man with the Blue Guitar

Hermes+Aphrodite= Hermaphrodite: someone who has both gender organs.

Wednesday February 28

Dionysus: drunken speech

Frame story:

Socratic irony: is used to distance us from the story to see what is really going on

Plato: invented Socrates, who invented Diotima, but there was a real man named Socrates too, who was also a scholar

2 types of love:

1. EROS
2. PHILIA

Sophia: wisdom

philosophy: love of wisdom (an erotic pursuit)

rhetoric: erotic

Symposium players:

1. Phaedrus
2. Pausanias: lawyer
3. Eryximachus: doctor
4. Aritsophanes: a comedic poet
5. Agathon
6. Socrates and Diotema
7. Alicibiades

Homoerotic love: is found in this story

pedophilia: can also be found between the lover (erastes) and the beloved (eromenos)

greekophilia: passionate about Greek

Raymond Carver: "What we talk about when we talk about love" a novel modeled after the Symposium that is conversational and realistic

People in love who do crazy things:

• eat rat poisoning
• eat shampoo: like in the movie Down To You
• stalking:

1. I had a friend who was so in love with this guy that she would steal his used milk cartons from the garbage can after he threw them away
2. This one really creepy guy who wouldn't leave me alone walked 15 miles to my work at 1 am because I didn't call him back, imagine that...

Back then, women were inferior to men, so the only real love was with someone who was 'equal' to you and helped you intellectually, which is why men loved men

'interstate without issue': means that someone has no children

aesthetic: pleasing to the eye, beautiful

SOCRATES: At the end of the Symposium we are told that Socrates isn't 'into' sexual practices, but Alcibiades wants him, and the roles are reversed.

PHYSICAL LEVEL:

Socrates= erastes and Alcibiades= eromenes

SPIRITUAL LEVEL:

Alcibiades= erastes and Socrates= eromenes

"Socrates made the elephant man look like Robert Redford" ~Dr. Sexson

aka- he wasn't a very good looking man...

but he teaches us that beauty is not love, but that intellect is love (beauty in the soul, good/virtuous acts)

Stories on a plane continued...

The King and the Corpse: Drawing from Eastern and Western literatures, Heinrich Zimmer presents a selection of stories linked together by their common concern for the problem of our eternal conflict with the forces of evil. Beginning with a tale from the Arabian Nights, this theme unfolds in legends from Irish paganism, medieval Christianity, the Arthurian cycle, and early Hinduism. In the retelling of these tales, Zimmer discloses the meanings within their seemingly unrelated symbols and suggests the philosophical wholeness of this assortment of myth. (source)

The Parrot: When a merchant goes away and leaves his beautiful daughter alone, the young prince who has loved her from afar is determined to keep her safe from the clutches of the evil old king. In order to keep watch over her, the prince turns himself into a parrot and tells her a marvelous story, which he threatens to cut short if there are any interruptions. So spellbound is the maiden that she ignores the soldiers insistently pounding on her door, until before she knows it, her father returns and she is safe once again. (source)

She did 3 things:

1. DO: she gave Dr. Sexson a package that he knows is book, yet hasn't opened it
2. SAY: 'I just want to please you'
3. SHOW: She showed him the real numbers on her arm, and that she was lying about lying

THE BIG QUESTION:

who are you?

• Oedipus asked it
• Alice asked the caterpillar this
• Inigo Montoya asked Westley this while he was disguised as the man with the black mask who does what is 'inconceivable'

stupid: ignorant 'don't know stuff' ~ this is the worst thing that you can be in classy lit!!

you must 'know thyself' which can have an erotic charge

We must all go forth and do something that makes lives more interesting!!

Monday, February 26

irony: what is expected and what really happens

Socratic irony: what is said and what is meant

hiccups: is it ironic that the speech was interrupted by hiccups?

patriarchy: only men are aloud in the Symposium

"I'm a he-man woman hater"

Frame story: a story, within a story, within a story...

Plato-------> Apollo-----> Aristodemis: the story was being told 4 hands away

dialectical philosophy: philosophy and literature

Plato: "all of us are sitting in a theater watching shadows"

Why do we feel that things are real, when they are just a movie? It's not real, but we act as if it is.

"We don't see the 'real' things unless we are educated in our imagination" ~Dr. Sexson

The Matrix is an allegory of the imagination. They think they are awake, and then one day wake up and realize that they are in an incubator and aren't awake at all.

Socrates: leading you out of your errors of thinking gently

Job: the man from the land of Uz

Konig: German word for king

a mark: someone who can be taken advantage of

raconteur: a storyteller

other storytellers: The Scheherazade and Esther

It was all a dream...

The Beggar King

Dorothy: "There's no place like home"