Classics in Contemporary Culture

Drama, Poetry, Film...

How's this for a change...I was browsing the new journals and came across this:

M. Wyke, "Are you not entertained? Classicists and cinema," International Journal of the Classical Tradition 9 (2003) 430-445.

Worth reading, if you can find a copy...and it inspired me to post about a few internet resources (some of which I knew about before, others not), dealing with Classical influences in modern drama, poetry, and film (just as the post title said!)...

Poetry and Drama:
There's a project called "THE RECEPTION OF THE TEXTS AND IMAGES OF ANCIENT GREECE IN LATE TWENTIETH-CENTURY DRAMA AND POETRY IN ENGLISH" at the Open University in the U.K. One of the more interesting features of the site is a searchable database (still slightly under construction, it seems, but fun to play with...)

Film:
There's Dr. J's Audio-Visual Resources for Classics, of course...But don't forget Ancient Greece in the Cinema [a new version of which is promised soon!] and Fordham U.'s Ancient History in the Movies...all worth bookmarking...

Stoic Avatar

The hottest thing from Taiwan: DJ Marcus Aurelius, who is playing (I kid you not!) a celebration of David Hasselhoff's 52nd birthday...reported by the Taipei Times. An older article also mentions DJ M. A.'s hip-hop/electronic stylings, and appears to provide a photo...Oh, and here's the info page from his website (?)...

Latin::I::Hardly::Knew::You

Damian Conway has created a module for the Perl programming language called "Lingua::Romana::Perligata"--which, as the name implies, allows you to write programs in a sort of Latin, simplified case system (and hence flexible ordering) and all! And here's an example, the "Sieve of Eratosthenes" algorithm:

#! /usr/local/bin/perl -w

        use Lingua::Romana::Perligata;

        maximum inquementum tum biguttam egresso scribe.
        meo maximo vestibulo perlegamentum da.
        da duo tum maximum conscribementa meis listis.

        dum listis decapitamentum damentum nexto
            fac sic
                nextum tum novumversum scribe egresso.
                lista sic hoc recidementum nextum cis vannementa da listis.
            cis.

I'll leave you to see whether he has really provided "a plausible rationale for wanting to do such a thing"...

[Thanks to GK at Classics-L; UPDATE: OK, this has been around for a while; still, it was new to me!]

Goldhill on the Greek Legacy

Mark Simpson has an article in the Cape Times (S. Africa, not NZ as I initially--strangely--posted) that ruminates about Greece and reviews Simon Goldhill's latest, Love, Sex and Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shapes Our Lives, in a very, very matey way...He begins as follows:

"Today we are again getting close to all those fundamental forms of world interpretation devised by the Greeks," enthused one of the more famous examples; "we are growing more Greek by the day." No, not Camille Paglia, but jolly old Friedrich Nietzsche back in the 19th century. According to Nietzsche, even then we were growing more and more Greek: "At first, as is only fair, in concepts and evaluation, as Hellenising ghosts, as it were; but one day in our bodies too."

That day appears to have arrived - or at least the enthusiastic uptake of this aspiration by the masses has. The Greek legacy in the arts and sciences is almost forgotten in the scramble to achieve a body like Apollo's; the state itself, like that of Athens, has begun to exhort its members to join gyms and take regular exercise, while the idealised, boyish form has all but usurped the female in public art, ie advertising and fashion (even when the models are actually female).

Contemporary aesthetics seems to have been wholly Hellenised in a way that Leni Reifenstahl could only dream of.

And somewhere in the middle is the disturbing "money quote":

Daphne Today

In an interview with the Atlantic, poet Alice Fulton talks about one of her Metamorphoses-esque poems and her love of technical/scientific writing:

I happen to love technical books. I get hooked on certain technical dictions; for instance, a few years ago I bought a book that was about wood grains in trees. It talked about how deviant grains make some trees unable to be harvested, and how other sorts of diseases lead to beautiful things, like bird's-eye maple and other visually interesting aberrations. It was full of technical terms that I lifted and de-contextualized in Sensual Math, for poems like the sequence "Give," which is about the Greek myth of Daphne being turned into a tree. It helped me so much when I was thinking about Daphne to learn about how a tree is made, about the process of rings in trees, about how wood grain develops, and how it's used commercially.

Prometheus Basketballer

Bill Danks has published his first novel through the "Borders Personal Publishing Program"...hmm...well, it's got a classical theme (of sorts), and the title is Prometheus Rebounds:

[It]...transforms the ancient Greek myth of Prometheus into a contemporary inner-city story when an ancient and mysterious Immortal offers a young, urban Prometheus the gift, not of fire this time, but of basketball.

This magical basketball talent is stolen from the gods and brought down to earth to give hope, beauty, joy and enlightenment to people’s lives. In using the gift, Prometheus learns how it must be constantly defended from the forces of evil trying to keep the human race enslaved by ignorance and despair.

Heartwarming!

Berlusconi and the Greco-Roman World

Nico Narsi at Classico e Moderno selects a few choice sentences from St. Jerome (and provides Italian translations)--as a statement against Silvio Berlusconi:

In Isaiam, 33.13:
Nisi cum alterius damno et malo, pecuniae alteri non coacervantur.
Gli uni non accumulano ricchezze se non a danno e detrimento di altri.

Ep. 120.1:
Omnes enim divitiae de iniquitate descendunt, et nisi alter perdiderit, alter non potest invenire.
Ogni ricchezza infatti proviene da disonestà : senza che prima uno abbia perso, un altro non può trovare.

Tract. in Ps. 8.24:
Quicumque enim dives est, nisi pauperem expoliaverit, dives esse non potest.
Chiunque sia ricco, infatti, a meno che non abbia spogliato un povero, ricco esser non può.

Sapientibus, pauca.

Oh, and a more recent post notes the book in which Berlusconi's wife depicts herself as Penelope to his Odysseus...

Monkeys, Solon's Uncertainty Principle, Investing

The worst part about the disturbed summer schedule is that I don't necessarily keep up on sites like RogueClassicism--but I don't think this item has been mentioned there...oh, but maybe it has. Now, the "monkeys and typewriters" bit seems too familiar (apart from the obvious reason):

"If one puts an infinite number of monkeys in front of (strongly built) typewriters and lets them clap away, there is a certainty that one of them [will] come out with an exact version of the 'Iliad,' " writes Nassim Nicholas Taleb in a recent book, "Fooled by Randomness."

The monkey typist story is an old one, and the key word is "infinite." But Taleb takes this hoary tale a step further. "Now that we have found that hero among monkeys, would any reader invest his life's savings on a bet that the monkey would write the 'Odyssey' next?"

And then we turn to Solon, Croesus, and such...

"Fooled by Randomness" is loaded with crackling little insights, but the best one is that what looks like skill is often plain old luck, so beware of investment geniuses. They will get their comeuppance, just as Solon warned. Solon was an upright ancient Greek legislator, known for speaking his mind. When King Croesus of Lydia, the richest man of his day, bragged to Solon about his wealth, Solon admonished, "The uncertain future is yet to come, with all the variety of future." And it did. Cyrus defeated Croesus and nearly burned him at the stake.