Category Archives: Minus Plato Today

As today is the day that my new translation of Catullus 47 (or, The New Adventures of Poros and Penia) goes on display on the Badlands Unlimited website as part of their Search & Tell project (click the image below to see for yourself), it makes sense to use the Roman poet as a way to segue […]

All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners Abbreviations of the names of ancient authors and their works follow, whenever possible, the practice of the Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd edition (1996), referred to as OCD3 Names of authors or works […]

I’m still dwelling on names and naming today and this leads me, inevitably, to the work of Josh Smith and his signature “name” paintings. Bob Nickas, in his book Painting Abstraction, describes these works as follows: The “name” paintings, composed with the letters that spell his first and last names, at first seem to identity their […]

In August 2014, at the beginning of our sabbatical year in Madrid, we visited the Palacio de Cristal in the Parque del Retiro. At that time, the exhibition in the Palacio organized by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, was Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s Splendide Hotel. It wasn’t until last year, however, that I read […]

Lucian’s work Dialogues of the Dead begins with a dead Diogenes the Cynic asking someone called Pollux to send a message to his fellow Cynic, Menippus, in the upper world. DIOGENES: Pollux, I have a commission for you; next time you go up—and I think it is your turn for earth tomorrow—if you come across […]

On hearing of the passing of Greek-Italian artist Jannis Kounellis, I went searching online for examples of his work to write about today, knowing that there would be a wealth of examples to choose from, bridging ancient and modern, Greece and Rome. I also felt that Kounellis is a fitting artist to think about on […]