Additional Summer School 2023 Readings, Updated 06/06
Passages Added from Plato and Aristotle. In addition to the assigned readings, the following passages and fragments will be referred to. More will be added in the coming days. P
Category: Fleming
Rereading Homer’s Iliad, Book II
Instead of meeting with a massive protest, there is a stampede to the ships that is stopped, just in time by wiser heads. Old Nestor advises him to muster the troops according to tribes (phyla) and clans (phretres)
Chronicles of Wasted Time: White Lite
I am a little tired of hearing white Republicans complaining about reparations. Most of them supported discriminatory wealth transfer programs and did little or nothing to oppose affirmative action.
Poetry: Robert Browning
My father was a scholar and knew Greek.
When I was five years old, I asked him once
“What do you read about?”
“The siege of Troy.”
“What is a siege, and what is Troy?”
America–A Captive Nation. A Regime of Privilege
The Lincolnian Regime governed the United States, roughly speaking, from 1860 to 1932, when it was transformed by left-wing Fascists into the New Deal Regime, which endured down to about 1960, when FDR’s national-socialist apparatus was rechanneled into a system whose primary beneficiaries were specially designated minorities.
Rereading the Iliad, I A, B, C (updated 05/19)
In fact, we do have a lot to learn about ourselves from studying Homeric man. Homer’s heroes are extraordinary men, but they are not the etherial saints of ethical philosophers since Kant. ”To know the will as an ethical factor” is a gift reserved for few mortal men in any era, but ordinary people, even when they do not possess these abstract concepts, are capable of sitting on juries and pronouncing on questions of guilt and innocence.
Chronicle of Wasted Time
With the expiration of Title 42, the flood of illegals across our southern border is approaching the proverbial “biblical proportions”, though there is no sight of Noah or any ark under construction.
Rereading a Classic
Some decades ago the psychologist Mortimer Adler produced one of his many cultural “how-to” books with the preposterous title, How to Read a Book. If only Adler had first considered the question of how to write a book, he might never have indulged his vanity to the point of telling people they were only permitted to read the way that Mortimer Adler reads.
Chronicle of Wasted Time 2: News Readers and Joke Writers
Sitting, like the late Otis Redding , and watching the tide roll away out of Navarino Bay, I find it hard to think much about TV land—a country inhabited by the minds of most of my fellow-Americans and the great bulk of the world’s population.
News from Somewhere
The “somewhere” is Nafpaktos (which the Venetians, when they acquired the town, renamed Lepanto) on the Corinthian Gulf.
The Wrongs of Rights