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Category Archives: Minus Plato Today
Today, the day before Thanksgiving, I am writing this, the penultimate post of the year-long project ‘Minus Plato Today’, a project started the day after Thanksgiving last year. (In fact, this really is the last post, as tomorrow’s will just comprise the links to every single post from the project). I remember, sometime in November, […]
What are days for? Days are where we live. They come, they wake us Time and time over. They are to be happy in: Where can we live but days? Ah, solving that question Brings the priest and the doctor In their long coats Running over the fields. – Philip Larkin ‘Days’ (1953) […]
This post is a belated birthday gift to my friend and collaborator, Dani (Leventhal) Restack. I feel privileged to know her, have her so close to me in my life and to have worked with her projects that have always taught me something new. Together we have explored connections between writing and drawing (Rough Draft), […]
This is my last Sunday of ‘Minus Plato Today’ and, typically, it is the hardest day to squeeze in a post. As with today, I usually have less than an hour to write, and so I often post something suggestive and less fleshed-out than on other days. While many Minus Plato posts are the result […]
Birds flying high you know how I feel – Nina Simone “Feeling Good” Why you wanna fly Blackbird You ain’t ever gonna fly Why you wanna fly Blackbird You ain’t ever gonna fly – Nina Simone, “Blackbird” The tension between the bird’s desire to fly and the failure of its flight in Nina Simone’s ‘Feeling […]
Imagine it is the morning of November 17th, 1978. George Steiner was visiting Oxford University, conducting research for his book Antigones, which he would publish six years later. He is sitting down to breakfast with the other dons, leafing through the days newspapers. He picks up a copy of that day’s Oxford Mail, and as […]
hactenus annorum, comites, elementa meorum et memini et meminisse iuvat: scit cetera mater. That is all I remember, friends, of the training I had when I was young, and I take joy in the memories. My mother knows the rest. These lines are the last of what remains of Statius’ Achilleid, the poem about the […]
At times, over this year of posting daily on Minus Plato, an artist or an artwork comes to me, seemingly out of nowhere, as the fruit of a momentary alignment of interests that pass between a Classicist and their obsession with contemporary art. These moments are very special to me, because they highlight how this […]
