The Burrow

Today was our first class, and it was a full class, 95% of whom raised their hands and admitted to having read The Sound and the Fury  in their past lives and nearly the same number who admitted ot having finished the book recently, for this class. Scarlet and I may be in over our heads. The professor looks like someone I could be friends with, someone more concerned with words than appearance.  Once she got into the swing of the audio-visual set up and stopped reading her notes, she gave a concise history of literary criticism from the early 20th century to the present day, clearly establishing which camp she favored.  She also told us that sometime during his sojourn with the Canadian armed forces (he was too skinny for the USofA) he added a u  to his last name.  It was moments like those that kept me engaged during the paragraphs of dense critical theory; I had to pay attention in case she dropped another nugget. That's what I like about the Humanitie...

Scarlet, whose locks are no longer eponymous, and I will be Humanities Seminarians again this semester.  For two hours every Monday afternoon for the next five weeks, we'll do close readings of William Faulkner's first three novels - The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!  (the only book I know of with an exclamation point in its title). It seemed like a worthwhile plan at the time.  An author we'd be unlikely to pick up on our own, one we might have read long ago but have long since forgotten, and one that Little Cuter, the English major, had well represented on her bookshelves. I remembered her saying that she loved that course.  After spending an hour with the first 15 pages of The Sound and the Fury , I wondered why. "Mom, I said I loved the course .  I hated the books.  Hated them.  But the teacher was interesting and young and cool and invited us to his house.  I loved that course." Well, that leaves Sc...

In June, amidst surgeries and heartaches, Scarlett and I spent two blissful hours each Thursday listening to snippets like this: You can listen to it the way her audiences did; just turn it on in your living room.  She preferred playing to small groups.  Close your eyes and imagine her fingers dancing over the keys, while Johannes Brahms sits in the corner, slyly smiling. wikipedia wikipedia Did you know he was such a good looking young man? Neither did I.  I'd only seen the scary old man pictures. Tannis Gibson, Dean of the College of Fine Arts at the UofA, showed me a side of the composer hitherto unknown and unconsidered.   She talked to us about the interpersonal and the technical, the instruments and the times, the performances and her own experiences.  It was a magical month. She shared her favorite performers, and sometimes I recognized the music: Listen past the scratchiness; it's from 1938. Imagine the fingers flo...

It's right there next to love and hope, according to my Humanities Seminar 's professor, Dr. Albrecht Classen . Humans, he said, " destroy ourselves and keep on going.  Why?  The human spirit!" That's love and hope and happiness all rolled up into one lovely package, tied with a ribbon of all of us.   "We are looking for light." It was cold and drizzling this morning.  Monday during the school year brings out many more cars than Thursdays in the summertime; my commute to class took the same amount of time, but there were many more idiots annoying me.  The parking lot was filled, not just the prime spaces, but the ones in the middle of the middle, too. The wind at my back hurried me across the street just a little bit faster than I'd anticipated. But, I had hope.  I was on my way to a favorite professor talking about interesting works I'd never have found, let alone read, on my own.  There were fourteen chairs arranged in a semi-circle aro...

"There is a lot in the world that I just don't know." I made that announcement as Scarlet and I were leaving the first of our  Humanities Seminar 's classes on Mozart.  There were things I knew that turned out to be untrue (the story about the composing being effortless stems from a forged letter) and there were things I didn't know existed and by the end of two hours I had a better understanding of why Mozart's music is considered structurally and emotionally exceptional. It wasn't easy getting there.  The professor was a study in How to Teach an All-Levels Class.   There were sage nods of heads as I felt myself skirting the edges but never quite hanging on. It was mildly frustrating.... and then he played the music. Sometimes he spoke over it, pointing out the sections of the fugue as they morphed from one to the next.  His voice was a gentle nudge in the right direction; without his guidance I'm not sure I'd have caught the nuances.  And t...

I'm taking two courses through the University of Arizona's Humanities Seminars Program  this month. On Mondays, I'm learning about Sex and Violence in the Bible. On Tuesdays, I'm reading Middlemarch . For five hours every week, a smart person stands in front of me and tells me things I did not know.  I don't always agree  with everything that's presented, but I am never at a loss for topics which engage my mind. For instance, this morning a classmate pondered the behavioral rigidity of George Eliot's study of provincial life  and the rules laid down to the Hebrews in their Bible .  External versus internal, immediate consequences versus eternal damnation, the role of belief and faith and whether social norms have the same effect as Biblical proscriptions..... she walked away, but my brain has been spinning ever since. None of Eliot's characters seem to have a deep attachment to the trappings of formal religion, not even the Vicar or the Rector.  Ye...

That's the conclusion I have drawn after today's Humanities Seminar .  The topic is The Evolution of Cognition, and my approach to the subject has evolved as the class has gone on. I enjoyed the first few lectures, although they seemed rather basic in many respects.  What is science?  What about the scientific method?  Do we start with a hypothesis or is general curiosity preferred?  I had been taught the answers, and thought that everyone in the room had been taught them, too.  We were all fairly well educated older adults, after all. But today, as we moved from the provable to the hypothetical, a certain sentence caught my attention. "And, you remember, science teaches us that  ...." All the what if's and possibly's were caught up right there - there were certain pieces of the puzzle which are provable.  There's a touchstone of what is  that science can explain.  The leaps between those facts are what makes it the humanities, I...

... a post which could also be titled : Why I Like The Things Dead White Men Wrote. My children were raised on myths and legends.  They read the books their mother read and the books their grandmother read.  They knew nursery rhymes.  I may have forgotten to teach Big Cuter the order of the months of the year - an oversight quickly remedied but never excused - but he could explain the Muses to his third grade classmates, including the pretty blonde Thalia in the front row. We read new books, too.  Don't think I was unwilling to open new doors.  Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories  inspired my license plate and added several memorable phrases to our family's shorthand. We learned that bad things do happen to children in books ("Don't worry, Little Cuter.  Beth can't die. This is a kids' book," was one of the only times her brother failed her) and that kids are strong enough to overcome anything (Max roared his terrible roar and gnashed ...

The University of Arizona's Humanities Seminars has reunited me with one of my favorite professors and some of my favorite ancient Greeks this semester.  I'm ever so grateful that Mike Lippman decided to forgo the study of law in favor of swimming in the wine dark sea.  His syllabus included much of what I'd read before, and a few new additions to the mix.  It was turning out to be a wonderful mental adventure. We started with Thucydides and Herodotus and Plutarch, all of whom have pride of place on my bookshelves.  I've two translations for Thucydides, and, of course, the bigger and heavier one is also the most readable.  I probably didn't have to drag the texts to class.... in fact, we never really discussed the facts at all...... but I like to look prepared so I filled my Belvedere-Tiburon Library book bag with the tomes last week, and shlepped into class severely weighted down.  They made for a very efficient footrest. In my next life all chairs ...

It's been a year since I've sat in a classroom.  I've missed it.  Between the wedding and the rehab, there wasn't much time for extraneous activities.  Only that which demanded my attention received it in 2012.  GRIN got off the ground, numbness was banished, children were married, and novels were read.  So many, many novels were read last year, and I can't say that I learned nothing from any of them.  But, there were no facts, there was no analysis, there was no conversation surrounding them.  I needed a classroom experience, and Ms Levine's kindergarten was not what I wanted. I needed to feel challenged, to stretch my brain, to keep ideas and places and people in context. Amidst the plethora of opportunities presented by the University of Arizona's Humanities Seminars  this semester, I found many smiles and one giant grin.  Mike Lippman, who introduced me to Rome, is presenting Greece in 2013.  My check was in the mail the day the br...

Dr. Mike Lippman, formerly of New Jersey and Emory University, is visiting Tucson this semester, bringing his fascination with the ancients along with his love for east coast pizza to the Humanities Seminars every Tuesday morning.  The reading s are longer and deeper than many other Seminars have required, but I find myself referring back to Scullard when Plutarch has me scratching my head.  Did  Satullus really just tell the same story from another perspective, or had I forgotten who had bribed whom to achieve success on the battlefield?  It started out as a mystery and ended up as a parable and I wish you had all been there with me, denizens.  My head was spinning and my brain was stretched and 3/4 of the students were participants in a conversation that ranged from Eisenhower to Caesar to OWS. Why are wars fought?  If you have a standing army, is it standing around looking for someone to fight?  Will a draftee fight harder or long...