THE THEN AND NOW NEWSLETTER - W. Robert Connor

THE THEN AND NOW NEWSLETTER

10/27/2023

THEN AND NOW
A Now and Then Newsletter
October, 2023
Bad news regularly trumps good news, both in the media and, often, in the psyche. There’s been plenty of it lately, globally, nationally, and culturally. While on my blog I will soon be commenting on what has happened at West Virginia University and the Florida higher education system, this Newsletter looks not at the gloom but at several more hope-filled developments, including a technological breakthrough from the Vesuvius Project, the excitement generated by a new translation of The Iliad, and a major change in college admissions.
          First, admissions:
Economic Diversity:
          A big shift in college admission practices has been going on for a decade or more but is now being accelerated by the Supreme Court’s ruling against Affirmative Action. Colleges may no longer consider race in their decisions but are allowed to pay attention to the economic status of their applicants.   That means that economic equity is now the best available means to achieve diversity in higher education. Movement in this direction can be recognized in many ways: Topflight colleges and universities are at last functioning as role models in this effort; the algorithm behind the rankings in US News’ Best Colleges has changed to give more weight to economic diversity, and the New York Times has produced a fascinating new way of looking at economic diversity at your alma mater. In combination these developments are game changers.
-Economic diversity can be measured, crudely but effectively, by the percentage of Pell Grant recipients in a college’s student body, and can be tracked over time by the abovementioned database developed by the New York Times Magazine.   Here are some of the institutions where the percentage of Pell grants has increased dramatically over the past decade:
          Washinton Univ. St. Louis from 6% to 16%
          Johns Hopkins, from 12% to 20%
Yale from 13% to 21%
Princeton from 11% to 18%
Vanderbilt from 13% to 18%
Laggards? Plenty! At Duke economic diversity may actually have gone down (from 13% to 12%.) A reporter for the Times sums up a consistent message he heard from low-income students there: “It’s a special college that is transforming their lives, but they wish there were more students like them on campus.”
          These are all well-heeled universities. They can afford to set economic diversity as a priority and apply their resources to reaching that goal. It’s not easy at a small college with limited resources and, sometimes, a small number of applicants; indeed, a surge in the percentage of students with Pell grants can in some cases be a sign of financial or other problems in the institution. A mix of congratulations and concerned attention, then, should be paid to colleges that have rapidly become economically more diverse. It may not all be good news for them. But for the moment best wishes to   Muhlenberg and Franklin & Marshall in Pennsylvania, Cooper Union and Hobart & William Smith in New York, Hampshire in Massachusetts, Beloit in Wisconsin, Southwestern in Texas, and other colleges that have worked hard to achieve double digit increases in the percentage of Pell grant recipients over the past decade.
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What Should Washington Do?
Economic diversity is not a pecking-order game colleges play among themselves. Startling new research by Anne Case and Angus Deaton shows how attending college affects life expectancy. If you want a healthy, long-lived citizenry, then see to it that every qualified student can afford college. It’s the Pell grants, stupid! The maximum Pell grant for 2023/24 is $7395, way below in-state tuition levels even at many public universities. (At UC Berkeley it’s $14,266.) So, dysfunctional Congress, redeem yourself: increase the number of Pell grants. It could make a life or death difference.
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The Vesuvius Challenge:
The eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE buried a Roman gentleman’s library. Excavations in the 18th century extracted more than 1800 scrolls. Some of these could be read, but many were so heavily carbonized that they could not be unrolled, let alone, deciphered.
Then, last year, came the Vesuvius Challenge. , Prof. Brent Seales of the Visualization Lab at the University of Kentucky, The New York Times reports, persuaded Nat Friedman and   Daniel Gross, to provide $700,000 in prizes for work leading to the decipherment of these scrolls. About 1500 people took up the challenge. The first prizes have just been awarded. At the top of the list is Luke Farritor, a 21 year old computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, who used advanced technology not to unroll a scroll, but to produce electronic images of various layers within it. The first word to be read was porphyros, the name of a color reserved for royal and other high status individuals. A good omen for the future of the Vesuvius Challenge!
There’s a long way to go before all these scrolls (and others still to be excavated), are deciphered, but a century from now our understanding of ancient philosophy, literature and cultural history may be totally changed. We’ll see, but in the meantime, let’s wrap all associated with the Vesuvius Challenge in cloaks of royal purple.
Here's the story of the winners and how they did it.
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More on Ancient Colorfulness::
          For almost a century now evidence has been emerging of color on ancient Greek and Byzantine art works. Traces survive despite exposure to the elements and sometimes misguided cleaning efforts by benighted museum curators. (On the latter see Carolyn Connor The Color of Ivory.) Now the Parthenon sculptures have joined this colorful club, as this article shows. It turns out they were a colorful lot, these ancient Greeks, in their art as in their speech.
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Guest Essays Brighten Bob’s Blog:
A Modest Proposal" from Hunter Rawlings and "Ideas Not Despair" by Richard Ekman are newly posted Guest Essays at https://www.wrobertconnor.com/blog
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..--
“Women Poets and the Origins of the Greek Hexameter,” originally published in Arion in 2018 is beginning to get attention, I’m glad to report. You can read it here
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Early Latin:
No, no, no! – I don’t mean Manios me fhefhaked Numasioi“ (Manius made me for Numasius) on a pin from the 6th century BCE, probably the earliest preserved Latin text. I mean starting the study of Latin early, e.g. in middle school. The movement is enjoying some success, helped along by the video game Duolingo. Check it out here. Eleven year-old Prem Connor reports it is his favorite videogame.
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Memorable:
“On those who nurture their souls: “No one can take this source of happiness from them. It is theirs so long as they live and continue to choose it. It does not depend on anyone else’s judgment or approval, and it does not require a long life or a string of achievements.”
Paul Woodruff, Living toward Virtue.
Pall Woodruff died on September 25th in Austin Texas. The words just quoted, in my judgment are part of a long string of achievements and sum up his values and his personality. They will live on among all of us who were fortunate enough to know him.
          This obituary tells part of his story.
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Ponderable:
“Bach's Goldberg Variations begin and end with the same aria, as if to affirm the symmetry of life, no matter how many variations one encounters along the way, … birth and death are both progressions into what has hitherto been unimaginable.”
Maurice Brendenheim Confessions III
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Einstein on Bach:
          "Listen, play, love, revere — and keep your trap shut,"
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A Homer for Our Time?
          Emily Wilsom’s new translation of the Iliad is just out and already getting a lot of attention, including a skillful interview by Geoffrey Brown on the PBS Newshour, an enthusiastic send off in the New Yorker by Judith Thurman, and more cautious approaches in the   Guardian and in Graeme Wood’s essay in The Atlantic, not to mention many other reviews and discussions
Thurman’s essay, “How Emily Wilson Made Homer Modern” points to a question at the core of this discussion. She argues that “Wilson’s ambitious project of the past decades has been to re-democratize both the poetry and its audience.” That takes the form of turning complex, often formulaic, hexameters into succinct, contemporary speech, accessible to any citizen-reader. Example: the first line of her Odyssey: “Tell me about a complicated man.” No obscure Muse whispering ponderous hexameters in the poet’s ear.
          See what you think. To me there is much to argue about, but what’s most interesting is the attention the translation is getting. Somehow, it speaks to our condition.
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A Sharp Reply:
          When a pianist criticized the famous harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, she replied, “ That’s fine - You play Bach your way and I’ll play him his way.”
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The Modernist Trap:
It’s not easy to be a poet these days. If you try to attune your verse to modern ears, a trap may snap closed. We are, I fear, over our heads in prose, so much so that repeated rhythms, rich cadences, sonority, rhymes, , unfamiliar vocabulary, wordplay, let alone ancient tantalizing formulae, all sound dissonant, old-fashioned, even unintelligible. .
What’s a poor poet to do? Write straightforward prose then hit the Return key with fastidious regularity, every five pulse beats or so? If that trap snaps shut, there is always the old excuse, “The Age Demanded.”
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Poem of the Month:
          The thought of translating Homer sent me shivering back to the earliest English translation of the Odyssey (1616), the rhymed couplets of George Chapmam. His Odyssey begins:
The man, O Muse, inform, that many a way
Wound with his wisdom to his wished stay;
That wander’d wondrous far, when he the town
Of sacred Troy had sack’d and shiver’d down;

Not fit for the modern, “democratic” reader? Perhaps not, but good enough for John Keats:
Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
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A Chaucer for Our Tine?
The rhymed couplet lives and so do Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, retold by Josiah Hatch, whose pilgrims head not to the shrine of St. Thomas in Canterbury, but to the island of St. Thomas in the Caribbean, aboard a cruise ship
“A floating torte of countless frosted decks.
…
Within her labyrinthine layers she’d hold
Up to five thousand passengers ,all told.”
          The fun continues throughout Journey to St. Thomas: Tales for our Time.
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The History of the 20th Century in a Schoolyard:

At the Realschule in Linz Austria both Adolf Hitler (born April 20, 1889) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (born April 26, 1889) were pupils at the same time.
For a class photo, click here.
Imagine recess time: the future dictator, no doubt already a bully, picking on that brainy Jewish kid, who would grow up to be perhaps the most powerful intellect of the twentieth century. But don’t assume that Hitler would have had his way; Wittgenstein, who was later decorated several times for heroism, knew how to stand up for what he thought was right. He was not someone who appeased bullies.

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Wittgenstein on Nonsense:
“In his preface to the Tractatus Wittgenstein states that the question of nonsense has to do with drawing the limits of language. Nonsensical expressions go beyond the limits of meaningful language and reside "on the other side" of what can be said. Yet, at the end of the book he declares that his own propositions are, strictly speaking, nonsensical. “”
Shlomy Mualem
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Bad News Bias Blasted:
“Bad news needn’t get the most attention: “...yes, majors in the humanities are falling; yes, humanities departments are contracting—but it is equally true that week after week, my colleagues and I at the Teagle Foundation are cheered by a contradictory reality, namely a growing commitment to liberal education in classrooms across the wide range of institutions with which we work.”
Andrew Delbanco, President, the Teagle Foundation. Delbanco’s whole report is worth reading,
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What Purdue Started:
          Delbanco gives the back story to the change:
“The revival began in 2016 at Purdue University, a distinguished STEM-centric institution where, thanks to visionary administrative and faculty leadership, a program called Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts has transformed the liberal arts from a marginal—in some fields, moribund—sector into a thriving scene of innovative teaching and energized student engagement ... the seed planted at Purdue is spreading to campuses across the country, from Stanford University, where faculty from multiple departments—including the sciences—have committed to a sequence of courses with common readings required of all first-year students, to Vanderbilt University, where the faculty recently voted to launch a required first-year two-semester sequence of reading- and writing-intensive courses (the First-Year Core), in which students encounter a common set of key texts chosen collaboratively by faculty and drawn from various epochs and cultures.”
The Purdue Story:
... here’s a link that will tell you quite a bit if you scroll around in it: https://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/cornerstone/index.html

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Word of the Month:
“knowingness
“The other big obstacle to the willingness to learn is the urge to present yourself as always already informed. The philosopher Jonathan Lear calls this attitude knowingness. He regards it as a sickness that stands in the way of gaining genuine knowledge. It is “as though there is too much anxiety involved in simply asking a question and waiting for the world to answer,”
Sam Wood, following Jonathan Lear in his essay
“Knowingness and Abandonment: An Oedipus for Our Time is in his book Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul. .
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Bookshelf and Beyond:
          Danielle Allen’s Justice by Means of Democracy addresses tough issues and finds ground for hope – and action. She is also helping lead a Democracy Renovation project. What’s that? Click here. Or watch her recent
PBS conversation with Judy Woodruff .
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Etymology of the Month:
frantic (adj.)
          Frantic was not frequently used until about 1980, to judge from a Google NGRAM . But we have been frantic on and off since the mid 14th century, and frentik even in Middle English days.    Frenesie, the French antecedent of frenzy goes back even further, to the 13th century. Frantic and frenetic share an origin in frenetik, "temporarily deranged, delirious, crazed," and behind that in Latin phreneticus, "delirious." The Latin came from Greek phrenitikos a word built on phren, which located cognition and emotions in the midriff, not the brain. So, when we are frantic, we are, etymologically speaking, brainless. (Thanks to Etymonline for help in untangling all this.)
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Names on the Land:
          This Newsletter was drafted in Cataumet, Massachusetts, just south of Pocasset and across the way from Mashpee. These are all Wampanoag names expropriated and sometimes garbled by European settlers. They may sound funny, but Massachusetts is full of place names that invite parody. See Fake Massachusetts Names. Thanks to the luthier for the link.
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Thanks to David Derbes, Judith Hallett, Joanna Hitchcock, Jean Houston. Gary Pence and, of course to Carolyn Connor, and others who have helped with this Newsletter. I especially appreciate those who have called my attention to interesting material. I hope all readers will consider themselves Associate Editors of this Then and Now Newsletter. Your duties will not be onerous - just send me links to material that other readers might want to explore. Don’t assume I’ve already seen it. Send it to wrconnor1@gmail.com. Thanks!
Bob Connor
PS: Please forward this Newsletter to any who might find in it something worth arguing about!

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