• Tag Archives Ovid

  • Transformations

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                       Waning Flower Moon

    A calmer day today.  After the bee work I planted bok choy and monkshood, finished raking the potato patch level, dead-headed tulips and daffodils.  A productive day.  The stuff I protected last night survived the frost well, though some of the coleus got nipped a bit the night before and I forgot three coleus plants in the park.  They don’t look great, but I think they’ll survive.

    I said the other chapter 14 in Wheelock was half way through the book.  Not quite.  Chapter 20 is halfway.  It’s still a steep learning curve and that’s what I like.  Even the 9 verses of the Metamorphoses I’ve translated have already given me a deeper appreciation for the whole project Ovid set himself.  He correlates the painful and often vindictive transformations he records in the book with the kind of transformations the Gods have made to the whole of creation.  A dark thesis.

    Kate’s hip is giving her fits.  I’m really glad she has the surgery scheduled for June 30th.  Won’t come too soon.


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture Family Health Humanities Letters 📎and tagged

  • Marx and Global Art

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                              Waning Flower Moon

    I checked and rechecked my Latin today and still had a couple mistakes; but, mostly it was much improved over last week’s work.  Greg and I also made our way through 4 more verses of the Metamorphoses; if I count right that leaves only 14, 991 or so to go.  That was the morning.

    When I finished, Kate put a blue sack in my hand and I headed off to the MIA.  The sack had a grilled cheese sandwich, a banana, mochi, pickles and a diet rootbeer.  I polished that off on the way while listening to a very interesting lecture on Marx’ theory of alienation.  When I’ve had a chance to absorb it a bit more, I’ll write about it here.

    At the museum I attended a lecture on contemporary art with an emphasis on its global expression.  The woman, Kristine Stiles, has impressive academic credentials and has compiled a key text for the study of contemporary art:  Theory and Documents of Contemporary Art.  She tried to stuff a consideration of Until Now and ArtRemix into an already existing lecture on her new book, World Trends in Global Art Since 1945.  It was too much.  She spoke fast, trying to finish, leaving little room for the audience to write or absorb.  Even so, there was a lot of interest and it will help frame tours of the Until Now exhibit when I have to begin.

    (much of the contemporary art in Vietnam uses socialist realism, sometimes done on billboards, but also, sometimes using oil paints on silk.)

    Spoke a moment with Wendy Depaolis who had surgery February 1st.  She looks great and credits her exercise and healthy eating.  Something’s working well for her.


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture Friends Health 📎and tagged

  • A Long Journey’s First Step

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                     Awakening Moon

    The weather has turned cooler and the sky gray.

    I’m proud to report that I have almost completed translating my first four lines of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  Of course, there are thousands of lines in the complete work and my translation is far from poetic, but this journey is underway.  When I feel a bit more comfortable with it, I’ll post it.  In fact, I’ll post the whole thing in progress on its own page.

    Today is the birthday of cybermage, William Schmidt, ex-Jesuit and sheepshead connoisseur,  a combination of attributes that makes him in turn interesting, resourceful and a card shark.

    For Mammoths reading this, I have added the Wandervogel entry to my webpage about Nick.

    (Pygmalion by Gerome)

    Among other top news items today:  Madonna laid a brick (in an African orphanage) and McNabb held up a Redskins jersey while Tiger was honest in a press conference and earned credit for it.   Meanwhile back in the real world health care reform continues to make news as does a 7.2 earthquake that struck southern California and drug cartels to the south.

    I think I’m gonna go back to the first decade of the first millennium, no madonna there.  Well, ok.  The Madonna, but you know what I mean.


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture Humanities Letters 📎and tagged

  • Liking Latin

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                               Awakening Moon

    Didn’t go into the Woolly restaurant meeting this evening and feel mildly guilty.  I didn’t have a good reason not to go, I just wanted to stay home.  Showing up is important.  Anyhow.

    How about this?  I’m really liking Latin.  Not quite sure why.  It has a puzzle aspect I find enjoyable and, of course, there’s the learning curve which I find challenging–a good thing for me.  The key reasons are two, I suspect.  First, I’ve never finished studying a language, have never gotten to a point where I felt like I had a good grasp of one.  A bit of French, some Greek, some Hebrew, some previous Latin, a disastrous semester of German, but no focused, positive experience.  I feel like I’m headed toward a good grasp of Latin.  Second, I have a particular goal, translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses for myself.

    There’s a novel in there, too and I’m excited about that as the language comes more and more easily.

    I also like having a tutor.  This one-to-one learning works well for me.  Kate’s taking it has ramped up my learning by the joint working through of chapters after we finish the assignments separately.  So, there’s that together aspect to it, too.

    Tomorrow I’ll finish the ancient sentences, translating from Latin into English, then a bit of Cicero, but I’m most excited about a paragraph of Ovid I’ll translate, too.


    📂This entry was posted in Humanities Letters Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged

  • Latin and Contemporary Art

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                      Awakening Moon

    Had our Latin session with Greg at noon today.  I asked him if he thought my trying to translate Ovid now would hurt my learning.  He said, no, go for it.  But.  Get a latin text with a commentary and work out your translation to your satisfaction before you compare it to someone else’s.  So, I went on Amazon and found a 2-volume latin text with commentary.  They are on their way.  I’m excited.  I know I’ve got a long way to go before I’m a competent translator, if I ever make it to that level, but I can punt away at it.  He said to expect frustration.  Oh, I do.

    (from the Metamorphosis, Ulysses men turned into swine. 1591)

    After that into the Art Institute for the first of two lectures on the upcoming spring show, Until Now.    The lecture was excellent.  Docent training leaves out huge chunks of the world’s artistic tradition with a necessary focus on the art history of objects in the museum’s collection, but the biggest lacuna was contemporary art. I found the guest curator’s lecture very informative, a good background for an aspect of art history in which I feel very weak.

    Until Now is contemporary art in a large show and it combines with Art Remix which features museum contemporary works placed at provocative or evocative locations. David Ryan, curator of modern design, said years ago the museum would only purchase works of an artist who was dead.  This was to ensure that whatever work we purchased represented an important and/or mature example.  That policy ended a few years ago and the museum has begun collecting living artists.

    We have a new contemporary art curator and her initial job was to figure out how contemporary art fits into the MIA’s mission as an encyclopedic collection.  At the MIA we can place contemporary work in context, the art historical context which informed and informs artists working especially since WWII.  The Art Remix is an attempt to draw on the museum’s historical examples and use them as conversation starters about contemporary art as it has evolved out of the older works and how the older works can be illuminated, seen in a different way when viewed through the lens of later artist’s work.

    (a work by Kara Walker, African/American, 1998)

    The last hour of the day was a conversation about the Art Remix.  I found Liz Armstrong’s rationale for the Remix strong though I felt this first effort was uneven.  Some of it is very provocative, like the photographic panels in the Korean collection and the TV Buddha, which features a bronze buddha watching television, a television screen filled with a video camera turned on the Buddha statue and especially the Chinese Ming dynasty chair carved from a single block of marble and placed in the Wu family reception hall.  The works put in the Egyptian and African galleries (not the Shonibare, which I love) are not as effective for me.

    A day with a lot of learning.


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture Humanities Letters Poetry 📎and tagged

  • Curiosity

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall                                   New Blood Moon

    “Curiosity is one of the most permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.” – Samuel Johnson

    That may be, but I can tell you from experience that it can also lead one astray.  Since I was old enough to trek off to the library on my own, I’ve followed so many different paths, walked so many ancientrails.  The problem is this.  Each one leads to another one, or, somewhere in the midst of searching for material on liberalism I might find a remark about Greek ideas about justice.  That leads me in thought back to the Greeks, but instead of pursuing Plato I may wander off to the Iliad or perhaps to the  idea of the classics in general which might push me over to Ovid or, aware of the vast chasm between our Western knowledge of the Greek classics and any knowledge of the Asian equivalents I might get shunted off to, say, Confucius or Lao-Tse.  By that time I may recall a tour of Asian art I have on October 16th, feel a slight twinge and decide to  prepare for that.  And, where did all this start again?

    This sort of meandering (I have seen the Meander River which gave rise to the Greek symbol so often seen in decorative arts.) does accrete knowledge.  It’s a slow process and the linkages may not become apparent for years, but I find now that associations, not obvious ones, come more easily.  Perhaps all those ancientrails had secret or frequent intersections that were not apparent the first or even the second or third times I used them.  I’m not sure, but there is a richness to thinking now that I don’t believe I had access to when I was younger.

    Any of you have a similar experience?


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Humanities 📎and tagged