"In April one seldom feels cheerful"
Apr. 18th, 2005 05:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfish'The classical holy grail' [via ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kateyvic and others]
The previously unknown texts, read for the first time last week, include parts of a long-lost tragedy - the Epigonoi ("Progeny") by the 5th-century BC Greek playwright Sophocles; part of a lost novel by the 2nd-century Greek writer Lucian; unknown material by Euripides; mythological poetry by the 1st-century BC Greek poet Parthenios; work by the 7th-century BC poet Hesiod; and an epic poem by Archilochos, a 7th-century successor of Homer, describing events leading up to the Trojan War. Additional material from Hesiod, Euripides and Sophocles almost certainly await discovery.
Oxford academics have been working alongside infra-red specialists from Brigham Young University, Utah. Their operation is likely to increase the number of great literary works fully or partially surviving from the ancient Greek world by up to a fifth. It could easily double the surviving body of lesser work - the pulp fiction and sitcoms of the day.
To dive deeply and willingly into cliche, it is an exciting time to be a classics scholar. I almost wish I'd gone with a classics major instead of theatre.
On a lighter note, the recipe for disaster cookies.
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire.
Professor Len Scigaj ["ski plus jive minus the V"] died Saturday of a heart attack. He was fifty-nine.
Scigaj was the first professor I actually had any respect for. He taught me modern poetry nine years ago, H.D. and William Carlos Williams and W.H. Auden [who, I maintain, makes up in obscurity what he lacks in style], and of course Yeats and Eliot. I can't even begin to describe the doors that he opened up for me with the two weeks he spent on The Waste Land.
Your assignment for today is to read Wendy Cope's Waste Land Limericks and chuckle appreciatively. (The page has a link to the full text of the original poem if you simply don't get the limericks.)
kateyvic and others]The previously unknown texts, read for the first time last week, include parts of a long-lost tragedy - the Epigonoi ("Progeny") by the 5th-century BC Greek playwright Sophocles; part of a lost novel by the 2nd-century Greek writer Lucian; unknown material by Euripides; mythological poetry by the 1st-century BC Greek poet Parthenios; work by the 7th-century BC poet Hesiod; and an epic poem by Archilochos, a 7th-century successor of Homer, describing events leading up to the Trojan War. Additional material from Hesiod, Euripides and Sophocles almost certainly await discovery.
Oxford academics have been working alongside infra-red specialists from Brigham Young University, Utah. Their operation is likely to increase the number of great literary works fully or partially surviving from the ancient Greek world by up to a fifth. It could easily double the surviving body of lesser work - the pulp fiction and sitcoms of the day.
To dive deeply and willingly into cliche, it is an exciting time to be a classics scholar. I almost wish I'd gone with a classics major instead of theatre.
On a lighter note, the recipe for disaster cookies.
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire.
Professor Len Scigaj ["ski plus jive minus the V"] died Saturday of a heart attack. He was fifty-nine.
Scigaj was the first professor I actually had any respect for. He taught me modern poetry nine years ago, H.D. and William Carlos Williams and W.H. Auden [who, I maintain, makes up in obscurity what he lacks in style], and of course Yeats and Eliot. I can't even begin to describe the doors that he opened up for me with the two weeks he spent on The Waste Land.
Your assignment for today is to read Wendy Cope's Waste Land Limericks and chuckle appreciatively. (The page has a link to the full text of the original poem if you simply don't get the limericks.)
no subject
Date: 2005-04-19 12:36 am (UTC)