The Rag and Bone Bookshop of the Heart – after William Butler Yeats’ ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ and the poetry anthology – a gift from your mother – edited by James Hillman, Michael Meade and Robert Bly. On September 25th, 2017, back when I was still alive (albeit barely) and you were still a classicist […]
Too General or Arcane? Didactic or Funny? Introducing The Digital Democratising Classics Library: Maggenti: I think that the tension that emerges around AIDS is that it’s not a gay disease, right? But, in fact, there are a lot of gay men who have AIDS. So, in fact, it’s gay/lesbian people who are doing the work […]
Did Eos live within a system that reduced her world? – Claudia La Rocco In Cicero’s reworking on the Myth of Er in Plato’s Republic, he presents the fictional dream of Scipio Aemilianus, in which his illustrious (adoptive) grandfather Scipio Africanus explains how the soul escapes the prison of the body to live the true […]
In a letter to Atticus (Att. 4. 8. 2), Cicero expresses his delight at the installation of some new bookshelves in an oddly convoluted and high-flown fashion: postea uero, quam Tyrannio mihi libros disposuit, mens addita uidetur meis aedibus. qua quidem in re mirifica opera Dionysi et Menophili tui fuit. nihil uenustius quam illa tua […]
A while ago, when researching the use of Latin by contemporary artists, I came across three works that used the dummy Latin, design proxy text known as Lorem ipsum. It is a repeating section of Latin that was been taken from Cicero’s De finibus bonorum et malorum. It begins: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur […]
I just returned to Ohio after spending the last two and half months in Europe. While I felt that I was being rather restrained, I still managed to bring back a small red suitcase worth of books from my travels. I persuaded myself that these books were bought out of necessity, especially for my investigations […]
In the recent issue of Artforum, I just read an interview with Christine Macel, the curator of the 57th Venice Biennale, in which she described a key concept of the exhibition (called Viva Arte Viva): I’m very interested in the tension in the artist’s life between production and self-reflection, moments of otium, to use the […]
Tomorrow documenta 14 opens in Athens. Like the fifth book of Cicero’s On Moral Ends, I want Minus Plato to be the place that you can encounter Athens, its sites (such as the Temple of Olympian Zeus) and the artists’ work (e.g.Prinz Gholam’s My Sweet Country) through a far-away simulation and an imaginary dialogue. So, […]
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 […]