Here's the January 2023 edition of my Newsletter. I hope you like it. If so, send me an email and I'll put you on the subscription list.
-
Breaking News: There’s some movement for the return of the Parthenon marbles from Britain to Greece. Here’s some background:
Vatican Sends Its Parthenon Marbles Back to Greece
The Vatican is restoring a few pieces of sculpture from the Parthenon. including a rather fine male head. You can see it and get the story here. ,
- This surely increases the pressure on Britain to do the same -- big time. . If the Vatican can do the right thing, why can’t the British Museum?
--
The Color of the Classics:
In the late 1930s, British Museum masons “skinned” some of the Elgin marbles, that is, in an ill-judged cleaning operation much of the patina on these Parthenon sculptures was literally scraped away with wire brushes, copper chisels and coarse carborundum. The idea was to scrub off the rich, honey-hued surface to make it conform to then dominant views of classical beauty. Now efforts are being made to manufacture highly accurate replicas of the marbles to which “some degree of color” will be added to “immunize [them] somewhat from academic criticism,” as reported in a New York Times article, “The Robot Guerilla Campaign to Restore the Elgin Marbles.”
Aesthetic ideas change over time, sometimes for the better. Now both the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston have changed the installations of their classical collections to make it easier to recognize the bright, to our eyes maybe garish, palette of ancient Greek art.
But there’s a story museum curators may be less eager to tell – the deliberate removal, , of traces of color on many works of art including Byzantine ivories. That story is told in Carolyn Connor’s article “Ivories and Steatites“ in the recent Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Art and Architecture.
Hippocrates to museum curators: First, Do No Harm!”
--
Please think with me about color as a metaphor for other sensory aspects of ancient civilizations that run counter to our social, political or ethical predilections. What are we consciously or unconsciously scrubbing away?
--
Stolen Scythian Gold, and much, much more.
Russian forces have systematically looted Ukrainian museums and other collections despite the fact that both Russia and Ukraine are signatories to a 1954 Hague “Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property i the Event of Armed Conflict.” It clearly applies to art objects looted in war. When a settlement to the Ukraine war is finally negotiated, we must all insist on the return of these objects.
Quotable:
“ … any damage to cultural property, irrespective of the people it belongs to, is damage to the cultural heritage of all humanity, because every people contributes to the world’s culture.” Preamble to the Hague Convention just mentioned
--
“Liberty” in a Gun Magazine and on Campus: -
plus
Glib Bilge
are recent blogposts at https://www.wrobertconnor.com/blog .
--
A New Philology?
These blog posts and other work I’ve been doing have led me to start thinking about the need for a New Philology. one that cherishes the richness of language but blows the whistle on those who misuse it for political or other gain.
Credo: language shapes thought and thought shapes action.
--
Milman Parry:
The story of the revolution in our understanding of the Homeric poems remains one of the great tales of 20th century classical scholarship. Robert Kanigel adroitly retells the story in a brief article in a recent Harvard Magazine. (Thanks to Jean Houston for calling it to my attention.)
--
In Case You Missed It:
“The Key to Success in College is So Simple, It’s Almost Never Mentioned “ by Jonathan Malesic can be found at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/03/opinion/college-learning-students-success.html
Pass it on!
--
Oral exams in undergraduate courses?
They work, says Molly Worthen in “If It Was Good Enough for Socrates, It’s Good Enough for Sophomores.”
Examination viva voce may be the best antidote we have to the burgeoning capacity of Artificial Intelligence to produce essays, research papers - and even haikus.
--
AI is not coming; It’s Here:
I made a probe and it fizzled- see “What will Artificial Intelligence Do For (or To) Us?“ (blog post of December 17 2022), but there’s no doubt it will change things throughout society – for the better, if we are smart enough t use it right.
--
Congratulations to Greg Hays whose translation of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations was number one just before Christmas on Amazon’s list of books on Greek and Roman Philosophy. Santa was choosing well.
--
And Congratulations to American historian Bill Leuchtenburg on his 100th birthday.
--
Four and Twenty Bronze Statues Mired in a Spring:
In case you missed this extraordinary find, check it out here:
https://www.npr.org/2022/12/03/1138904735/italy-ancient-bronze-statues-discovery-tuscany Thanks to Kate Faherty for alerting me to this story.
--
A palindrome from Alexander Nehamas:
Νίψον ανομήματα μή μόναν όψιν.
“Wash your transgressions, not just your face.” Can you top that?
-
Solved! The Riddle in the last Then & Now Newsletter:
The riddle was:
“ Alive my braying voice could drive a man to tears;
Dead my knobbly bones will bring pleasure to your ears.
What am I?”
First to report a solution to the riddle was David Konstan, who proposes “an ass,” whose bones are knuckle bones.“ Or were they made into a recorder, an aulos?
One of our riddles was solved by a 13 year old granddaughter of David McCullough, reminding him of a riddle from childhood: “What goes up the chimney down, but not down the chimney up?” (Answer in next Then &No Newsletter)
--
More on the Rectification of Language Series, a.k.a. Getting Words Right and Getting the Right Word:
Jean Houston called my attention to this report, “The ‘Closer” who Finds the Right Words When Climate Talks Hit a Wall.”
--
Potemkin’s Bones and Putin’s Surname – two attempts to get at the psychology behind Russia’s actions. Both are in my blog: scroll down at https://www.wrobertconnor.com/blog
--
Useful Jargon of the Month: “Collective Efficacy.” The negative sense is powerful: as social institutions fail, distrust and violence result. But is the opposite also the case?
Check out: “Neighborhoods and Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective Efficacy.“
--
Gross National Happiness: Bhutan has adopted an index to measure happiness among its people and to develop policies to increase it. It may be working! The BBC explores the setting, while Sean O’Connell and others at UC-Berkeley take a look at the evidence here..
--
Ponderable:-
“An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
--
Also Ponderable:
“Spirituality and sexuality are two sides of the same coin. If the coin is not counterfeit, it will be made of unalloyed joy.” Maurice Brendenheim )
--
Useful Jargon of the Month:
entrainment
The social sciences borrowed it from biology, and now no one has a monopoly on its use, for example, “The concept of entrainment points to the ways in which our experience of time can be affected by so much more than the number of hours we have in a day. “ Jenny Odell.
--
“Searching Friction:
It’s always fun to peek into the classroom of a talented teacher. In Henry Petroski’s “The Push and Pull of Friction,” Ameican Scientist November – December 2022, you can watch aspiring engineers still struggling with Newton’s Laws.
--
What Is a Classic, anyhow?
C.A Sainte-Beuve asked that question in 1857, T.S. Eliot in 1944, and J.M. Coetzee in 2002. James Tatum trac es the question back to Fronto and Aulus Gellius, and has a surprising answer of his own in “What Was a Classic?” in Classical World 114,1.
And here’s a palindrome in honor of that irrepressible Latinist Jim Tatum:
Tatum non mutat.
--
Quiz in the Happiness Series:
“There is no truth more thoroughly established, than that there exists in the economy and course of nature, an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness, between duty and advantage, between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy, and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity.”
Guess who said that? Send your answers to me at [email protected] and tell me whether you agree or not. Answer in the February Then & Now Newsletter.
--
Help Wanted:
Please send me your favorite palindrome, riddles, neologisms or nominee for Word of the Month, and links to articles you think other readers might enjoy.
--
Do you have any friends? If so, give them a subscription to Then & Now a now and then newsletter. Just send me their email address.
Thanks!
Contact: [email protected]
Bob Connor
-
Breaking News: There’s some movement for the return of the Parthenon marbles from Britain to Greece. Here’s some background:
Vatican Sends Its Parthenon Marbles Back to Greece
The Vatican is restoring a few pieces of sculpture from the Parthenon. including a rather fine male head. You can see it and get the story here. ,
- This surely increases the pressure on Britain to do the same -- big time. . If the Vatican can do the right thing, why can’t the British Museum?
--
The Color of the Classics:
In the late 1930s, British Museum masons “skinned” some of the Elgin marbles, that is, in an ill-judged cleaning operation much of the patina on these Parthenon sculptures was literally scraped away with wire brushes, copper chisels and coarse carborundum. The idea was to scrub off the rich, honey-hued surface to make it conform to then dominant views of classical beauty. Now efforts are being made to manufacture highly accurate replicas of the marbles to which “some degree of color” will be added to “immunize [them] somewhat from academic criticism,” as reported in a New York Times article, “The Robot Guerilla Campaign to Restore the Elgin Marbles.”
Aesthetic ideas change over time, sometimes for the better. Now both the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston have changed the installations of their classical collections to make it easier to recognize the bright, to our eyes maybe garish, palette of ancient Greek art.
But there’s a story museum curators may be less eager to tell – the deliberate removal, , of traces of color on many works of art including Byzantine ivories. That story is told in Carolyn Connor’s article “Ivories and Steatites“ in the recent Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Art and Architecture.
Hippocrates to museum curators: First, Do No Harm!”
--
Please think with me about color as a metaphor for other sensory aspects of ancient civilizations that run counter to our social, political or ethical predilections. What are we consciously or unconsciously scrubbing away?
--
Stolen Scythian Gold, and much, much more.
Russian forces have systematically looted Ukrainian museums and other collections despite the fact that both Russia and Ukraine are signatories to a 1954 Hague “Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property i the Event of Armed Conflict.” It clearly applies to art objects looted in war. When a settlement to the Ukraine war is finally negotiated, we must all insist on the return of these objects.
Quotable:
“ … any damage to cultural property, irrespective of the people it belongs to, is damage to the cultural heritage of all humanity, because every people contributes to the world’s culture.” Preamble to the Hague Convention just mentioned
--
“Liberty” in a Gun Magazine and on Campus: -
plus
Glib Bilge
are recent blogposts at https://www.wrobertconnor.com/blog .
--
A New Philology?
These blog posts and other work I’ve been doing have led me to start thinking about the need for a New Philology. one that cherishes the richness of language but blows the whistle on those who misuse it for political or other gain.
Credo: language shapes thought and thought shapes action.
--
Milman Parry:
The story of the revolution in our understanding of the Homeric poems remains one of the great tales of 20th century classical scholarship. Robert Kanigel adroitly retells the story in a brief article in a recent Harvard Magazine. (Thanks to Jean Houston for calling it to my attention.)
--
In Case You Missed It:
“The Key to Success in College is So Simple, It’s Almost Never Mentioned “ by Jonathan Malesic can be found at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/03/opinion/college-learning-students-success.html
Pass it on!
--
Oral exams in undergraduate courses?
They work, says Molly Worthen in “If It Was Good Enough for Socrates, It’s Good Enough for Sophomores.”
Examination viva voce may be the best antidote we have to the burgeoning capacity of Artificial Intelligence to produce essays, research papers - and even haikus.
--
AI is not coming; It’s Here:
I made a probe and it fizzled- see “What will Artificial Intelligence Do For (or To) Us?“ (blog post of December 17 2022), but there’s no doubt it will change things throughout society – for the better, if we are smart enough t use it right.
--
Congratulations to Greg Hays whose translation of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations was number one just before Christmas on Amazon’s list of books on Greek and Roman Philosophy. Santa was choosing well.
--
And Congratulations to American historian Bill Leuchtenburg on his 100th birthday.
--
Four and Twenty Bronze Statues Mired in a Spring:
In case you missed this extraordinary find, check it out here:
https://www.npr.org/2022/12/03/1138904735/italy-ancient-bronze-statues-discovery-tuscany Thanks to Kate Faherty for alerting me to this story.
--
A palindrome from Alexander Nehamas:
Νίψον ανομήματα μή μόναν όψιν.
“Wash your transgressions, not just your face.” Can you top that?
-
Solved! The Riddle in the last Then & Now Newsletter:
The riddle was:
“ Alive my braying voice could drive a man to tears;
Dead my knobbly bones will bring pleasure to your ears.
What am I?”
First to report a solution to the riddle was David Konstan, who proposes “an ass,” whose bones are knuckle bones.“ Or were they made into a recorder, an aulos?
One of our riddles was solved by a 13 year old granddaughter of David McCullough, reminding him of a riddle from childhood: “What goes up the chimney down, but not down the chimney up?” (Answer in next Then &No Newsletter)
--
More on the Rectification of Language Series, a.k.a. Getting Words Right and Getting the Right Word:
Jean Houston called my attention to this report, “The ‘Closer” who Finds the Right Words When Climate Talks Hit a Wall.”
--
Potemkin’s Bones and Putin’s Surname – two attempts to get at the psychology behind Russia’s actions. Both are in my blog: scroll down at https://www.wrobertconnor.com/blog
--
Useful Jargon of the Month: “Collective Efficacy.” The negative sense is powerful: as social institutions fail, distrust and violence result. But is the opposite also the case?
Check out: “Neighborhoods and Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective Efficacy.“
--
Gross National Happiness: Bhutan has adopted an index to measure happiness among its people and to develop policies to increase it. It may be working! The BBC explores the setting, while Sean O’Connell and others at UC-Berkeley take a look at the evidence here..
--
Ponderable:-
“An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
--
Also Ponderable:
“Spirituality and sexuality are two sides of the same coin. If the coin is not counterfeit, it will be made of unalloyed joy.” Maurice Brendenheim )
--
Useful Jargon of the Month:
entrainment
The social sciences borrowed it from biology, and now no one has a monopoly on its use, for example, “The concept of entrainment points to the ways in which our experience of time can be affected by so much more than the number of hours we have in a day. “ Jenny Odell.
--
“Searching Friction:
It’s always fun to peek into the classroom of a talented teacher. In Henry Petroski’s “The Push and Pull of Friction,” Ameican Scientist November – December 2022, you can watch aspiring engineers still struggling with Newton’s Laws.
--
What Is a Classic, anyhow?
C.A Sainte-Beuve asked that question in 1857, T.S. Eliot in 1944, and J.M. Coetzee in 2002. James Tatum trac es the question back to Fronto and Aulus Gellius, and has a surprising answer of his own in “What Was a Classic?” in Classical World 114,1.
And here’s a palindrome in honor of that irrepressible Latinist Jim Tatum:
Tatum non mutat.
--
Quiz in the Happiness Series:
“There is no truth more thoroughly established, than that there exists in the economy and course of nature, an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness, between duty and advantage, between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy, and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity.”
Guess who said that? Send your answers to me at [email protected] and tell me whether you agree or not. Answer in the February Then & Now Newsletter.
--
Help Wanted:
Please send me your favorite palindrome, riddles, neologisms or nominee for Word of the Month, and links to articles you think other readers might enjoy.
--
Do you have any friends? If so, give them a subscription to Then & Now a now and then newsletter. Just send me their email address.
Thanks!
Contact: [email protected]
Bob Connor