You are leading a Study Abroad program to a significant ancient city (e.g. Athens, Rome, Alexandria) and one morning, midway through the trip, you usher your students onto a small platform at one end of the room where you have breakfast in the hotel where you are all staying. In the room are chairs arranged […]
You are teaching an elementary Latin course using the so-called “Reading Method”. You gather your class (of between 6-10 students) on the floor in a small room and brief them on whether they want to participate in this “ordeal”. If they agree, the students enter the classroom one at a time. The walls and floors […]
You are teaching a Classical Mythology class and you have reached the topic of “Creation Stories” (either this is early in the course or later, after “Epic Myths”). In today’s class you want to compare and contrast ancient Greek, Roman and Near-Eastern myths about the origins of the universe. You will discuss (and the students […]
I first encountered the work of choreographer Anna Halprin at documenta 14 this summer when I was stopped in my tracks by a diagram showing one of her Myth performances from 1967 in at Documenta-Halle in Kassel. Halprin describes the Myths as follows: Myths are experimental…What unfolds is a spontaneous exploration of ideas. Myths are meant to […]
What would the cultural leveling of Valerius Maximus’ Facta et dicta memorabilia look like online in 2009? Click and find out
How can I make the experience of my labor speak? This is how artist Carmen Winant begins her brief text To Whom Is It Given?, published in the first volume of Mother Mother, an artist book conceived and edited by Sheilah Restack (Wilson), written seven weeks after giving birth and addressed to her new born […]
In a comment on yesterday’s post about attention and excess, my OSU colleague Rick Livingston posted the poem Enough Music by Dorianne Laux: Sometimes, when we’re on a long drive, and we’ve talked enough and listened to enough music and stopped twice, once to eat, once to see the view, we fall into this rhythm […]
How can I expect anyone to read these daily posts of Minus Plato? Whenever someone comes up to me and says that they have read some posts, but they cannot keep up on a daily basis, I always tell them that there is no way I would expect anyone to read Minus Plato every day, […]
Today I will be attending a talk by Edith Hall, Professor in the Classics Department and Centre for Hellenic Studies at King’s College London. Hall is not only an expert on Greek tragedy, but also on the reception of ancient drama through the ages. More recently, her work has focused on Aristotle and the talk […]
On a Sunday morning in 2008, artist Seth Price arrived at his studio, swinging his MC-N012 50cc Moped Scooter into a parking lot at 38th Street Publishers. Sitting down at his desk, he wrote a hilarious fictional dialogue called For a Friend (Excerpt) to accompany the audio the 2007 audio piece “8-4, 9-5, 10-6, 11-7”. […]