Shows
amimetobiosAdvanced Shakespeare 28, Friday May 1 2020--LAST CLASS. Dolabella and Cleopatra's dreamThe last class this semester. Cleopatra and her dreams of Antony. Her death. Ass unpolicied vs. lass unparalleled.
2020-05-041h 28amimetobiosAdvanced Shakespeare 27 April 30 2020 -- The Death of AntonyWe continue going through the play, to Antony's loss of himself ("the heart of loss"), his botched suicide, and his reunion with Cleopatra.
2020-05-011h 24amimetobiosAdvanced Shakespeare 26, Tuesday April 28 2020: Act IV and Antony's ExtravaganceBeginning of Act IV. More on Antony vs. "an Antony." The latter is an object in the world, has worldly being. The former is the extravagant, isolated subjectivity which is the tragic waywardness which is more and more where he is: in "the heart of loss." If extravagance -- waywardness, wandering outside of any world which is one's own, Binswanger's Verstiegenheit -- weren't more intense than worldliness, if things didn't get more intense as one loses everything, tragedy would be of no aesthetic interest. A brief adumbration of the difference between daemonization (for Macbeth) and extravagance (for Antony).
2020-04-291h 19amimetobiosAdvanced Shakespeare 25, Friday April 24, 2020: Act III concluded: Knowing Antony and knowing CleoipatraWe conclude Act III, and discuss how well people know Antony, and how well Antony can know Cleopatra. His anger at her, and his recovery from that anger. Enobarbus' loyalty, and then his planned defection. Enobarbus compared with Horatio, Kent, and Banquo.
2020-04-241h 27amimetobiosAdvanced Shakespeare 24, Tuesday April 21, 2020: Act III continued: Antony profuse wastefulnessAntony's insistence on fighting by sea: his loss, and anger at Cleopatra
"I am so lated in the world that I..."
("Have lost my way forever.")
"Fall not a tear, I say."
This is where the play starts getting to be Shakespeare's greatest play.
2020-04-221h 17amimetobiosAdvanced Shakespeare 23 Friday April 17 2020 -- dramatic perspectivesWe continue close reading of Act III, but then the last half hour, in response to a series of questions, is about how to interpret drama: what freedom and what constraints are there on how actors interpret? How should we interpret? Taking Dworkin's dictum that we should interpret in a way that makes the work the best possible work it can be, how does that apply to Shakespeare? What is the meaning of canonicity? Something like: a work that is open to lots of possibility for great interpretation. I thought that last half hour or so was interesting.
2020-04-181h 29amimetobiosBonus aria on WittgensteinI am team-teaching a class on Wittgenstein this term. The person I team-teach with, a philosopher, is too careful about how to put things to want the class podcast. The class largely consists of us disagreeing. He thinks (like lots of Anglo-American philosophers) that Wittgenstein was sloppy and couldn't make his case in a systematic and well-organized way. I defend Wittgenstein, and I usually do it in the spineless liberal way that I was brought up in: "Even accepting everything you say..." after which I try to say that LW is still great. There may be a little of that...
2020-04-1621 minamimetobiosAdvanced Shakespeare 22 Tuesday 4/14/20 Leaders and advisors and news managementWe continue reading through the play: Pompey disappoints Menas; Ventidius comments on who gets credit; Menas, Agrippa, Ventidius, and Enobarbus are represented as belonging to the same type (so that Menas's turn away from Pompey will adumbrate a very intense later scene); the love between Octavian and Octavia; her contrast with Cleopatra; Cleopatra's news management; Charmian's encouragement. Alexandrian vs. Roman Feasts. We're now well into Act III.
2020-04-151h 19amimetobiosAdvanced Shakespeare 21 Friday 4/3/2020 MessengersWe continue with Act II. The treaty between Pompey and the Triumvirate. Cleopatra and the messenger who reports Antony's marriage. I should have said that her relation to the messenger is a version of the third person imperative force of the play: she demands what can't be demanded, that the truth be different from what it is.
2020-04-061h 17amimetobiosAdvanced Shakespeare 20 Tuesday 3-31-20 She did make defect perfection (Continuing Act II)News for Pompey. Characterization of Antony in his absence, again. Delicate negotiations. Octavia. Enorbarbus predicts what Antony will do: his amazing description of Cleopatra. Antony confirms that he'll go back to Alexandria.
2020-04-011h 16amimetobiosAdvanced Shakespeare 19 Friday 3-27-20 Act I concludedCleopatra's character. Antony and Cleopatra as, essentially, the one life-affirming tragedy: the tragedy that does what comedies do. "Strong as death is love." Versions of the verb "to bear." Jokes at Mardian's expense. Apostrophes to Antony. How they are together in separation. What I didn't quite say is that Rome and Alexandria are established as social spaces, while Antony is between them and so gone during the period of his transition from one to the other,. More uses of the word where: Where is Antony? Where he is asking, Where is Cleopatra?
2020-03-271h 21amimetobiosAdvanced Shakespeare 18 Friday 3-20-20 Antony and Cleopatra Act I continuedWe continue our close reading, especially of the clash of mood or tone between characters in scenes 2 and 3, in the way Shakespeare is representing people trying to set the dominant mood of the scene: Antony and Enobarbus, and then Antony and Cleopatra. Some attention to the extremely subtle foreshadowing and creation of perspective in those scenes. Similarities and differences between Antony's relation to Enobarbus and his relation to Cleopatra.
2020-03-221h 13amimetobiosAdvanced Shakespeare 17. Antony and Cleopatra 2.1: the soothsayer and Cleopatra's womenSince we're now online, and since it is Antony and Cleopatra, we're going to go through the play scene by scene. Here we looked at the clash of tonalities between the soothsayer and Cleopatra's women, in 2.1, and also the way Antony treats the messengers from Rome.
2020-03-191h 16amimetobiosAdvanced Shakespeare 16 Being Mark AntonyFirst class on Zoom. I recorded the class as though in class but I was sitting at my computer. That means there's more me and less them, alas.
Anyhow: we talked about being Mark Antony (cf. Being John Malkovich) and the odd phrase "an Antony." Comparing that to the king's two bodies. And we talked about time frames again: how Octavian is always the age he is at the beginning, and Antony and Cleopatra always the ages they are at the end.
2020-03-141h 17amimetobiosAdvanced Shakespeare 15, 3-10-20 Ages of the characters -- Shakespeare's temporal preferencesAfter a 15 minute discussion of Covid-19 (not recorded here) we talk about the actual ages of various characters, and the ages that Shakespeare wanted them to be: not only in A & C but in Richard II, 1 Henry IV and the romances: the idea that you can go from the start of adulthood (Octavius) to the maturity that makes you fit for tragedy and old enough to have lived long enough (Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra) within 16-18 years or so. Shakespeare's highly skillful stage setting in scene 1. Too all over the place, but I am hoping that if classes aren't can...
2020-03-1151 minamimetobiosAdvanced Shakespeare 14 3/6/2020 Opening of Antony and CleopatraWe finally really begin Antony and Cleopatra, discussing Plutarch's interest in character, and Shakespeare's, and what makes a tragic character interesting since we know what the plot will be. Aristotle on pity and terror again: usually the protagonist or main is someone innocent or at worst someone like ourselves: not so in Macbeth. After which we start analyzing the opening scene, with comparisons to Lear and to Hamlet as well (on the quantification of love). Many corny jokes.
2020-03-081h 15amimetobiosAdvanced Shakespeare 13 - March 3, 2020 Last class on Macbeth: sonnets and then "My way of life is fallen...." A class where we finally talk about the whole soliloquy, with which I am obsessed, in which Macbeth calls or Seyton and considers how his way of life is fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf." We get there by means of Sonnet 12, but that means talking about the sonnets: first the nature of sonnet sequences from Petrarch through Wyatt to Sidney and Shakespeare, then of course (via Wyatt) about Tottel's miscellany, and then a discussion of Sonnet 73 and its echoes of Macbeth's soliloquy, and ultimately about the nature of interruption, here as well as in Lear:
...
2020-03-041h 17amimetobiosAdvanced Shakespeare 12 Feb 28 2020 Poetic form and Yes Fear ShakeFearA class which turned out to be a lot on verse drama, and how and why it works, partly based on Evelyn Tribble's ideas about "fluent forgetting" (which I mentioned before) in her book Cognition in the Globe. Lots of stuff on proto-Indo-European and on how poetic lines work: "loose onsets, strict endings." How Shakespeare makes us focus on particular words but also justifies that focus. Hint: rhyme. We finally get to talking about 5.3, and to Shakespeare's bad Dad pun on Macbeth's refusal to "shake with fear." Antony and Cleopatra officially starts next week, but we'll have one more day on A...
2020-02-291h 15amimetobiosAdvanced Shakespeare 11 2/25/20 Interiorizing timeA class which first is about Protestantism and Catholicism in Shakespeare, and the idea in Protestantism that theological issues take on a psychological air. That is, they are interiorized. Then a digressive account of time in Shakespeare (and many others, including Ashbery and Kafka), with the idea being that as you get older -- as the Macbeths get older -- time is interiorized.
2020-02-251h 07amimetobiosAdvanced Shakespeare 10 Class of 2/14/20A class on doubling, literal and metaphorical, e.g. Lady Macbeth and Lady Macduff, Hecate, etc. The meaning of doubling. The conglomeration and dissolution of social groups. Simmel (of course!) on spatial relations as both the condition and the symbol of human relations. The quickness of friends (in anticipation of Antony and Cleopatra). Miscellaneous digressions, not all my fault.
2020-02-191h 17amimetobiosAdvanced Shakespeare 9 2/11/20: Remorse and repentanceWe start with Coleridge's insight (followed by Bloom) that Macbeth confuses his own pangs of conscience with imaginative fear. Then some discussion of remorse vs. repentance as analogous to that confusion. A couple of jokes, and then a close reading of the line "Which of you have done this" when Macbeth sees Banquo.
2020-02-121h 20amimetobiosAdvanced Shakespeare 8 2/7/20 Being a character and daemonizationA class I actually liked some of: on daemonization (Lionel Abel's term in his article "Daemons true and false") and character. How the most practical matters of representing character on stage (what we hear about Macbeth vs. what we see) give insight into the deepest existential-psychological. This is me essentially trying to turn aspects of Macbeth into L'attente l'oubli. With digressions and a digression on digressions.
2020-02-071h 17amimetobiosAdvanced Shakespeare 7 2/4/20 Friendship and love in ShakespeareA student brings up Banquo and tries to relate the line of kings to the edge of doom to Dante's Inferno. Which leads to a discussion of Banquo and the more general tension in Shakespeare between friendship and love, solved in the comedies but always part of the loss in the tragedies. Considerations of this issue in Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, King Lear, and of course Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra.
2020-02-051h 14amimetobiosAdvanced Shakespeare 6 1/31/20 -- witches and soothsayers and messengers o myMainly about witches: Reginald Scott's skepticism, James's motivated belief in them, the King's touch, the relation of witches to the soothsayer in A&C (vs. the one in JC), and some attention (again, as in other courses) to Dan Decker's Anatomy of a Screenplay and the insights it affords into Shakespeare's construction of scenes: the way soothsayers and messengers are similar and the way they differ. At the end a brief consideration of what De Quincey means by sympathy.
2020-02-011h 16amimetobiosAdvanced Shakespeare 5 1/28/20 De Quincey Knocking at the GateElements in Macbeth that were more or less likely to come from elsewhere. Who played whom. Robert Armin (and Will Kemp). Johnson on whether the reference to Antony and Cleopatra (Macbeth's genius overmatched by Banquo's as Antony's is by Caesar) is an interpolation. De Quincey on the knocking at the gate, and the effect that the juxtaposition of scenes has.
2020-01-291h 17amimetobiosAdvanced Shakespeare 4 Friday 1/24/19 -- knocking at the gate, &cHolinshed, Knocking at the gate, Banquo, self-fulfilling prophecies, as psychological and causal, subjectivity: who in the story is the story for? Who is real in the story?
2020-01-251h 17amimetobiosAdvanced Shakespeare 3 1/21/20: Macbeth, conflict, Coleridge on punsColeridge on puns in Shakespeare. Aristotelean unities and how Shakespeare violates them. Doctor Johnson's bad conjectural emendation. The great line he wishes to emend: "Time and the hour runs through the roughest day."
2020-01-221h 16amimetobiosAdvanced Shakespeare 2 1/17/20Why editors change the originals -- canonical words and lines, as we now know them. Theobald on Autumn/Antonie. Theobald on "this bank and shoal of time"
2020-01-191h 17amimetobiosAdvanced Shakespeare Episode 1 1/14/20Introductory class in this course on Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. Punning and equivocation.
2020-01-151h 12amimetobiosEarly Romantics XXVII 5-10-19 LONG Last class on ColeridgeA long class, chiefly on Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Kahn. I think I realized some things about the latter worth realizing. (N.B. I repeat a mistake I made earlier: the apparently supernatural episode that isn't isn't in "Michael," as I misremembered, but in "Peter Bell.")
2019-05-112h 26amimetobiosEarly Romantics XXVI Climbing Mt. Snowdon in Prelude XIIIWe complete our discussion of the Prelude by looking at the Snowdon scene in Book XIII, with a lot of comparison to the unfortunate and enfeebling revisions Wordsworth made in Book XIV of the 1850 version. One student reads Oppen's "The Forms of Love" as a kind of pendant to the Snowdon scene. I notice a bunch of things that I don't think I ever did before a connection to King Lear for example, and something about Wordsworth's prosody in the 1805 version.
2019-05-041h 18amimetobiosImagining Money XXXVII Wed 5-1-19 Last class: managing desireA little about Hurston's "Gilded Six Bits," and a lot about management of desire. Newcomb's proposed as something to think about at the end.
2019-05-0256 minamimetobiosEarly Romantics XXV 4-29-19 -- The Prelude and Wordsworth in generalThe structure of The Prelude. The amazing way, in Wordsworth, that we get to now in the absence of some connection to then. The way then is always retrospective. The spots of time.
2019-05-011h 22amimetobiosImagining Money XXXVI Mon 4-29-19 Preference, loss aversion, anxietyRelationship between loss aversion, preference, and anxiety. The two envelope game. Is happiness a preference, or is it another name for the existence of preferences? A Serious Man and Suspicion.
2019-04-3048 minamimetobiosImagining Money XXXV Thurs 4-18-19 maguffins and the management of longingA kind of culmination of the material on maguffins, loss aversion, and the management of longing. The sunk costs of antes. The symbolic value of the last cigarette before you quit. That last cigarette being a kind of maguffin which allows for making it satisfy both the desire to smoke and the desire to quit.
2019-04-1949 minamimetobiosEarly Romantics XXIV Wednesday 4-17-19A lot of stuff on rhyming, on emic and etic understanding, on phonemes, before we finally get back to Wordsworth, in particular Simplon Pass and what follows: the strange melancholy mansion they stay in; then the Winander Boy: all about estrangement from nature, and being at home in that estrangement, at home in homelessness.
2019-04-181h 16amimetobiosImagining Money XXXIV Wed 4-17-19 Stories of gamblingNarrating gambling. Getting the benefits of the breaks. Kinds of gambling narratives: present tense as you're playing and presenting yourself to the other agonists, and past tense: stories of loss.
2019-04-1744 minamimetobiosEarly Romantics XXIII Monday 4-15-19 Home and homelessnessPowerful anticlimaxes. How being estranged from childhood, and then recognizing that childhood is already the beginning of estrangement, is to achieve the destiny of being at home in homelessness. [Wild turkey flies into a window across the quad and freaks us all out, one way or another.] Mention of Frankenstein. Some of Book VI of The Prelude.
2019-04-161h 17amimetobiosImagining Money XXXIII Mon 4-15-19 How endings shape desiresA class -- since no one is keeping up with the reading, to put it mildly -- on the effect that endings have on our desires for narrative. The way endings turn all preferences into short term ones, whereas with the whole novel, movie, epic, series to go, long term preferences will tend to clash more with short term ones. This is (though I don't mention him in the class) one of the ways that convergence works, e.g. in Dan Decker's Anatomy of the Screenplay.
2019-04-1651 minamimetobiosImagining Money XXXII Loss aversion - ThalerMoney offer on the table when we came in! Loss aversion -- it depends how you present things, as Thaler et al show. Medical versions. A brief introduction to Bayesianism and why MD's need to learn some Bayesean analysis. Brandeis's plan to sell its art collection and the "endowment effect." Wins above replacement.
2019-04-1252 minamimetobiosEarly Romantics XXII Wednesday 4-10-19 Intimations Ode, Prelude, NatureWe finally get to the end of The Intimations Ode, after detours again through "Frost at Midnight" and the nature of nature in The Prelude and the relation of nature to death.
2019-04-111h 21amimetobiosImagining Money XXXI -- poker, money, chips, macguffins, loss aversionIn which I try and fail to remember the form of a good paradox about loss aversion; some discussion about narratives and macguffins, and the two word summary of every exciting story with a happy ending: "loss, averted"
2019-04-1047 minamimetobiosEarly Romantics XXI Monday 4-8-19 More Intimations OdeEchoes of Milton in Wordsworth. More of the Intimations Ode with a detour through Tintern Abbey. The shockingness of "O joy!"
2019-04-091h 13amimetobiosImagining Money XXX Mon 4-9-19 MacGuffinsMacGuffins in Hitchcock, as an intro to Ainslie. Why we like suspense fiction. Hitchcock on suspense. Rereading. Relation to the sublime vs. the beautiful as described by Smith and Kant.
2019-04-0948 minamimetobiosImagining Money XXIX Hyperbolic DiscountingWe start on Ainslie -- hyperbolic vs. exponential discounting and we broach the question of what Ainslie calls "the management of longing."
2019-04-0649 minamimetobiosEarly Romantics XX Wed 4-3-19More about the Prelude -- the skating scene, the boat-stealing scene, Wordsworth's later revisions for accuracy but against memory or wishful memory or the superpositions of memory. Shades of the prison house in the Intimations Ode. The child and its two worlds.
2019-04-041h 23amimetobiosImagining Money XXVIII Wed 4-3-19 Hyperbolic Discounting and suchMoney burning a hole in your pocket. Strategies of Commitment Lotteries as savings devices. Hyperbolic discounting.
2019-04-0454 minamimetobiosEarly Romantics XIX Monday 4-1-19 Bouncing around the PreludeWe go back briefly to the intimations ode and to Montaigne's that philosophy is learning how to die -- intimations of mortality. All philosophy is. Then we knock around The Prelude -- recumbent o'er the surface of past time, the two consciousnesses, and some of the boat-stealing scene, with a digression on metaphor: sex as a vehicle in that scene about vehicles.
2019-04-021h 23amimetobiosImagining Money XXVII Mon 4-1-19 Common Knowledge and pokerPoker. Common knowledge, where everyone's knowledge of what everyone else knows converges. The psychological components of games of skill. Turing tests and reverse Turing tests.
2019-04-0253 minamimetobiosImagining Money XXVI Thursday 3-27-19 Mainly on cultural capitalThe difference between new money and old money. The value of old money, or of high culture -- its relation to value. The idea that that kind of value is related to the potlatch as a marker of status which precisely refuses monetization. Cultural capital in subcultures. (Essentially Bourdieu's ideas, though I don't explicitly cite him.)
2019-03-3052 minamimetobiosEarly Romantics XVIII Wednesday 3-27-19 Henry Crabb Robinson on Blake on WordsworthBlake's view of Wordsworth, as reported by Henry Crabb Robinson in a letter to Dorothy Wordsworth and in his reminiscences. Robinson on Wordsworth's technical death in 1814: his indifference to tyranny after the fall of Napoleon. Return to the Intimations Ode and the subtle new start manifested in stanza 5.
2019-03-291h 18amimetobiosImagining Money XXV Wed 3-27-19 Common knowledge and suchThis ended up being a class on common knowledge -- that is on games (and puzzles) with complete information.
2019-03-2952 minamimetobiosEarly Romantics XVII Mon 3-25-19 -- Intimations Ode 1-4 and opening of PreludeWe start with the Intimations Ode, which means we really start with "My Heart Leaps Up" -- and after the fourth stanza, which is where Wordsworth broke it off, we go to the glad preamble of The Prelude. Some attention to echoes between Coleridge and Wordsworth.
2019-03-261h 23amimetobiosImagining Money XXIV Monday 3-25-19 How heterogeneous values are like giftsSince no one had read The Gambler, this class was a kind of summing up of thinking from Mandeville to Kant under the rubric of Mauss -- how credit, gratitude, obligation bring in other minds and differentiate our credit with them from the way money is a bookkeeping measure.
2019-03-2552 minamimetobiosEarly Romantics XVI Wed 3-20-19 Mainly Lucy, mainly "A Slumber Did my Spirit Seal"Basically a class where we rush through "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal," with a little reference to a couple of Shakespeare sonnets Wordsworth was probably thinking of -- 73 and 104.
2019-03-231h 18amimetobiosImagining Money XXIII Thursday 3-21-19In which we go over the answers to the midterm -- you don't need to read it, since I read the questions out. A little discussion Merchant of Venice: paying with all my heart, and of Ulysses: Leopold Bloom's joke advertising jingle, "Tell me where is fancy bread? At Burke's the Baker's, it is said."
2019-03-2252 minamimetobiosImagining Money XXII Wed 3-20-19 Prisoner's DilemmaUsing the game show Golden Balls, we look at some Prisoner's Dilemma situations, and discuss Golden Balls as a more classic PD than it might seem at first (it's certainly at the least a modified PD). Episodes for watching are available here (an anthology) and here ("Weirdest split or steal every"). Different ways of valuing, different ways of strategizing.
2019-03-2150 minamimetobiosEarly Romantics XV Monday 3-18-19 How Wordsworth is like Milton is like BlakeWordsworth on Gray in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. Like Blake he channels Milton's view that poetry is something other than artifice, and like Blake he corrects the Miltonic example. Home at Grasmere vs. Paradise Lost.
2019-03-201h 21amimetobiosImagining Money XXI Wed 3-13-19 Adam Smith on Beauty and UtilityAdam Smith on utility and beauty -- revealed preference as a tautology -- utilitarianism -- Smith on how preference isn't a tautology -- different from Mandeville. Smith on utility here. This will lead to Smith on self-command.
2019-03-1551 minamimetobiosEarly Romantics XIV Wed 3-13-19 Mainly WW: "We Are Seven" with "Lines Written in Early Spring, and "Two April Mornings"Mostly Wordsworth and the mysterious power of the absurdly great "We Are Seven," as well as a consideration of "Lines Written in Early Spring" and "Two April Mornings."
2019-03-141h 20amimetobiosEarly Romantics, XIII, Monday 3-11-19 Lyrical Ballads -- Goody Blake and Harry GillMore about ballads and their relation to the supernatural, in a discussion of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads. Some exemplary ballads. "Goody Blake and Harry Gill" as an example of an apparently supernatural ballad which isn't one. Beginning of "We are Seven," with Coleridge's collaborative first stanza.
2019-03-131h 20amimetobiosImagining Money XX 3-11-19 Mandeville, Hume, InflationA little more on Mandeville and the line that leads from him through Hutcheson (whom I didn't mention by name) to Hume and Smith. The nature of inflation, due to money's only having exchange value, and the nature of stimulus, as analyzed by Hume. A beginning of a discussion on the beauty of utility, according to Smith.
2019-03-1251 minamimetobiosImagining Money XIX Thursday 3-7-19 More Mandeville and value of honor and altruismMandeville's analysis of acting for reputation -- does it, can it, make sense, and if so how? Here's the fascinating passage we began looking at:
The Soldiers, that were forc’d to fight,
If they surviv’d, got Honour by’t; [p. 22, l. 1]
[From Mandeville’s notes:] The Man of Manners picks not the best but rather takes the worst out of the Dish, and gets of every thing, unless it be forc’d upon him, always the most indifferent Share. By this Civility the Best remains for others, which being a...
2019-03-0852 minamimetobiosEarly Romantics XII Wed 3-6-19 Blake's Milton with special guestAfter a snow day, a special guest leads a class on Blake's Milton and the dynamics of the relations among the Immortals. We focus in particular on Milton himself and Urizen and how Milton overcomes his own spectre.
2019-03-071h 21amimetobiosImagining Money XVIII Wed 3-6-19Some discussion of sunk costs and throwing good money after bad, poker strategy, the doubling cube, Talking Heads' "Once in a Lifetime" and more Mandeville.
2019-03-0750 minamimetobiosImagining Money XVII Th Feb 28 2019 Mainly MandevilleMandeville on the advantages of self-dealing and selfishness. Discussion of morality of plane flight, since that's all the rage these days, from a Kantian and from a game-theoretical point of view. Free riding and problems of collective action. Mandeville compared and to some extent contrasted with Rand.
2019-03-0146 minamimetobiosEarly Romantics XI Wed 2-27-19 A class on Orc, Urizen, and LosWe discuss Blake's mythology in general, then his America, fairly briefly, and then some of The Book of Urizen, in particular the coming into separate being of Urizen, the coming into being of Los as the allegory of Urizen's separation from him, and the binding of Orc with the chains of jealousy.
2019-03-011h 17amimetobiosImagning Money XVI Wed 2-27-19: More on the GiftMore on gift-giving and its manifest and latent content. Obligation and acceptance of obligation. The gift as pure use value -- at least manifestly. A bit more on The Merchant of Venice.
2019-02-2751 minamimetobiosEarly Romantics X Monday Feb 25 2019 Blake Marriage of Heaven and HellWe try to sort out some preliminary confusions about who's who in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. I try -- stumblingly -- to give an account of the Romantic idea that loss is (as Harold Bloom puts it) "shadowed gain."
2019-02-261h 21amimetobiosImagining Money XV Monday Feb 25 2019Given the sheepish coughing you'll hear, by people acknowledging they weren't keeping up with the reading, this turned into an exposition mainly of Marcel Mauss's great work The Gift, along with some mention of Joel Waldfogel's notorious article "The Deadweight Loss of Christmas."
2019-02-2643 minamimetobiosImagining Money XIV Thursday 2-15-19 Mainly Merchant of Venice and the BibleMainly the Merchant of Venice, with discussion of its Biblical source: Jacob as trickster; Laban as trickster; Shylock as trickster; Portia as trickster; much about Jacob, Esau, Isaac, and the man Jacob wrestles with; the meaning of the turquois ring and the pound of flesh.
NB: this coming week is vacation so no updates till the week of Feb 25.
2019-02-1748 minamimetobiosEarly Romantics IX Wed 2-13-19: Book of ThelA last class on Blake's Book of Thel, with much attention given to the Clod of Clay's line: "I ponder and I cannot ponder."
NB: February vacation next week, so no new episodes till the week after.
2019-02-151h 15amimetobiosImagining Money XIII Wednesday Feb 13 2019, mainly about usuryA class mainly about interest, usury, compounding of interest vs. Malthusian limits to biological growth -- the interesting fact that if Judas had invested his 40 pieces of silver at prevailing rates of compound interest, he'd own an amount of silver more greater than the entire volume of the earth (so that Christ's redemption, compounded over two millennia, would indeed more than repurchase the entire world).
2019-02-1448 minamimetobiosEarly Romantics VIII Monday Feb 11 2019 mainly on most of ThelWith a quotation from Blake's description of his (lost) painting "A Vision of the Last Judgment":
I assert for My self that I do not behold the Outward Creation & that to me it is hindrance & not Action it is as the Dirt upon my feet No part of Me. What it will be Questiond When the Sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty I question not my Corporeal or...
2019-02-121h 20amimetobiosImagining Money XII Feb 10 2019 Kawabata, Exodus, Shakespeare(February 11, actually, but I think if I change the title I may change the link.) We start with Earle Stanley Gardner on writing by the word -- then on to Kawabata and the spookiness of the story. Then The Merchant of Venice, and the significance of the rings and their value. The reason Shylock is a stranger, and that all the Jews in Venice are: because Deuteronomy permits lending at interest to a stranger, so the Christians wanted to be strangers to the Jews so made the Jews strangers to them. The stranger in Simmel mentioned: "The wanderer [the merc...
2019-02-1153 minamimetobiosEarly Romanticism VII -- more BlakeIn particular "The Garden of Love" and "London," "To the Evening Star," and a touch of The Book of Thel
2019-02-091h 25amimetobiosImagining Money XI, Thursday 2-7-19 Game theory: Keynesian Beauty Contests, Stampedes and PanicsBuying and selling based on predictions of what others will buy and sell: Keynesian Beauty Contests (cf. "Family Feud") and what they have to do with narrative interaction. An in class demonstration in which a student wins a dollar! Some discussion of other manipulative games.
NB that previous episode was mistitled as Monday's: It was actually Wednesday's....
2019-02-0851 minamimetobiosImagining Money X Wednesday February 6 2019 -- Merchant of Venice and Ezra PoundFunctions of money. Ripping a bill in half. A little more on the etymological background of interest as breeding. Usura Canto in Pound, with youtube audio of him reading it. Kinds of wealth in The Merchant of Venice, following James Buchan.
2019-02-0747 minamimetobiosRomanticism VI 2-4-19 Blake's There is no Natural Religion, and some songs of ExperienceSome discussion of "There is no Natural Religion" and then some Songs of Experience: "The Chimney Sweeper," the two versions of "Holy Thursday," "The Clod and the Pebble," and -- a Song of Innocence -- "The Little Black Boy."
2019-02-061h 17amimetobiosImagining Money IX Monday February 4, 2019Some discussion of the Super Bowl, and of game theory at the end of the game. Then a return to Aristotle on the three functions of money, and on interest -- and the Greek word's etymology as breeding or procreation (from the word τόκος , ὁ, [tokos] = childbirth from (τίκτω [titko]) meaning to give birth, whence also τεχνη, craft, i.e. the art of producing objects, which word Aristotle uses elsewhere in discussing the unmoved mover).
2019-02-0551 minamimetobiosImagining Money VIII Thursday January 31 -- Mostly MarxA class where we end up going into the labor theory of value -- average abstract labor time being what produces equilibria among different commodities. We were going to talk about Kawabata, and about interest, but that's TK. We did talk about Aristotle -- and therefore a bit about Adam Smith -- on the functions of actual money: medium of exchange, bookkeeping measure, store of value, and also a bit on how these can be confused with each other.
2019-02-0148 minamimetobiosRomanticism, Class V: Mainly on "All Religions Are One"This was going to be on "The Songs of Experience" (watch this space), but in order to discuss what Blake meant by the word "experience" we took a look at his 1788 tract "All Religions Are One" (printed just before "The Songs of Innocence"), which led to a long discussion of the dialectic between Plato and Locke and a counter-dialectic in Blake against both Plato and Locke.
2019-01-311h 14amimetobiosImagining Money VII Wednesday Jan 30 2019A class that spiraled outwards from a consideration of Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale to Maugham's parable of the appointment in Samara to parables in general, including the strange parable of the talents in Matthew. The ontology of things in the world and death as not a thing in the world (in Chaucer, in Maugham). How treasure or gold is like death -- a catalyst, a vector, something not itself (a marker for a return to Aristotle tomorrow).
2019-01-3050 minamimetobiosRomanticism Class IV: Songs of InnocenceMuch on "The Lamb" (and a little on "The Tyger"), "A Cradle Song," "Infant Joy" and the Innocence version of "The Chimney Sweeper." Innocence as privative (like "infant" and "innocuous")-- a contrast to the world as we know it.
2019-01-301h 22amimetobiosImagining Money VI 1-28-19A class mainly on Mammon -- in Milton and in Spenser -- though we don't get that far, because we pause for an explanation of The Faerie Queene and of allegory in general -- e.g. Edward Gorey's Innocence, on the Bicycle of Propriety, Carrying the Urn of Reputation Safely over the Abyss of Indiscretion. Hence some talk about the harmony of the virtues in Aristotle -- chastity vs. temperance. Matthew 6:24 quoted -- you cannot serve both God and Mammon.
2019-01-2950 minamimetobiosImagining Money V Thursday Jan 24 2019 -- Midas and moneyAristotle on Midas, and then Ovid on Midas (Golding's translation), which is the just-so story of how the river Pactolus came to run with gold (or actually electrum), leading to the first coining of money under Croesus, with a little fumbling in class about what it was that Archimedes found bathing (that objects submerged in water displace their own volume).
2019-01-2747 minamimetobiosRomanticism, class III: Nurses Songs, MiltonMore on the two versions of the Nurses Song, with some subtle narrative theory applied -- who is or are the real narrators of the two songs? Then back to Paradise Lost: a little history, a little consideration of how it champions the proto-Romantic centrality of human judgment to our sense of the world and of morality. (Luther on Pharaoh type of thing....)
2019-01-261h 21amimetobiosImagining Money IV Wednesday Jan 23 2019More Aristotle, on the origin of actual money -- coin of the realm as Gutman will say in The Maltese Falcon (TK) -- and the meaning of the word "tender" in the phrase "legal tender." Polonius's dumb pun on the word. Aristotle, very briefly, on infinity (the unbounded) and its relation to goods and money. Meatloaf's song "Paradise by the dashboard light" naturally comes up, as it most in most classes on Aristotle....
2019-01-2550 minamimetobiosImagining Money III 1-22-19Discussion of a couple of Exeter riddles (you can find them on the original handout) and how they connect money to various other social interactions, prostitution in particular. Then we broach Aristotle's Politics.
2019-01-2449 minamimetobiosEnglish Romanticism: Blake, WW, STC second class 1-22-19Second class: mainly an intro to Paradise Lost, followed by a return to the two versions of Blake's "Nurses Song." Blake's illustrations here.
2019-01-231h 20amimetobiosImagining Money II 1-17-19A class mainly on Kay Ryan's poem "Money is a kind of poetry," a riff on Wallace Stevens' line (in his Adagia): "Poetry is a kind of money." The class, of course, is about both. Link to handouts (including this poem) available in previous episode or here.
2019-01-2247 minamimetobiosImagining Money (Literature and Economics) 1-16-19This is the first class of a new course called "Imagining Money." You can find a draft syllabus -- an aspirational one, since we'll never get through it all -- here. There are handouts for the first three days: the short passage from Beckett we discuss first, a miscellany of poems and riddles about money, and a selection of passages from Milton, Ovid, and Ambrose Bierce. The syllabus gives you the lines to read from Milton's Paradise Lost, viz. Book 1, ll. 674-751, and Book 8, ll. 1-178. And here is the Kawabata story.
2019-01-2048 minamimetobiosEnglish Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge 1/16/19An introductory class for a course on the early Romantics. Today we talked about the oxymoronic title of Lyrical Ballads, more about ballads than about lyrics; about Milton; about Blake's describing him as being of the devil's party without knowing it. Syllabus TK -- watch this space.
2019-01-191h 17amimetobiosSoyinka - Death and the King's Horseman (1a-32 = last class)Last class of the semester, on Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman. Compared and contrasted with Achebe's Things Fall Apart, which unlike the play is about the clash of cultures, and what happens when European culture arrives and destroys the cultures it is ignorant of; and with Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which makes African culture a backdrop to European reckoning with its own tragic ontology. Death and the King's Horseman as treating British colonial culture as a catalyst and otherwise a (ridiculous) backdrop to its own concerns, concerns as archaic, as fundamental, and essential as anything to be found in A...
2016-05-0353 minamimetobiosPrint the Legend: The Man Shot Liberty Valance -- 1a - class 31The one film in the class. "Print the legend," as a commentary on the kinds of movies Ford makes. Flashback and truth in fiction. Showing vs. telling. Who did shoot Liberty? The two scenes of his death. Flashback within flashback. Woody Strode (Pompey). What is he doing in the second scene? Why does it matter?
What we didn't get to: the way Vera Miles seems to have learned the story as we do. We assume she now knows what we now know, though of course she (presumably) didn't know it before whereas now she (presumably) did know it before. Still we r...
2016-04-2638 minamimetobiosO'Connor -- the Violent Bear it Away (1a-30)What this strange book is about, at least in part. Macguffins: baptism and murder. And Free Indirect Discourse, natch. The Protestant vs. the Catholic bible. O'Connor quoting from Douay-Rheims. The relevant passage in Matthew:
[7]And when they went their way, Jesus began to say to the multitudes concerning John: What went you out into the desert to see? a reed shaken with the wind? [8] But what went you out to see? a man clothed in soft garments? Behold they that are clothed in soft garments, are in the houses of kings. [9] But what went you out to see? a pro...
2016-04-2550 minamimetobios29 -- A class on Waiting for Godot: Godot as MacGuffinSeeing it as a residue of real drama. Paradramatic elements: what we can know by knowing elements of the script that we wouldn't know on stage. Who is Godot? Who are we meant to think he is? Really an introduction to the play, to how the play makes you think about what it's doing.
2016-04-2051 minamimetobiosSecond and last class on Invisible Man (1a, class 28)Invisible Man and Whitman. What does the last sentence mean? MacGuffins in the novel. Du Bois on the education of Black Men. 1943 riot in Harlem and the end if Invisible Man. William Henry Johnson's "Moon Over Harlem." Moral of Invisible Man: don't use people. Doing so turns them into the kind of people who use people. (Even the Invisible Man does: uses Sibyl for example.)
2016-04-1851 minamimetobiosBurns, Blake, and perspectives on the innocentTwo Burns poems -- "A Poet's Welcome to his love-begotten Daughter; the first instance that entitled him to the venerable appellation of Father," and "To a Mouse, On turning her up in her Nest, with the Plogu, November, 1785." (This latter required some thought in class about what exactly was going on agriculturally. Feel free to comment on this [or anything] at amimetobios.com!) The shifts in Burns's language between Scots light and near-standard English. The distance therefore between speaker and poet. Comparison to Wordsworth's writing in the "natural language of natural men." Then Blake's "To the Evening Star" and a couple...
2010-12-021h 17amimetobiosThird talk: Amimetobios on Tense, narration, and loss in Proust; followed by discussionTalk on the anonymity of the narrator and narratee in Proust, and their relation to the losses that occur in the book but not in the narrative. Illustration of idea that Proust presents the converse of Cavell: uncountable external worlds but only one other mind. How narrator turns into his mother watching his mother turn into his grandmother. Roger Caillois and vision as mimesis. Discussion session (poorer audio) for all the papers.
2010-04-031h 06