DATE CHANGE! November 19, 2009 –

Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

If you ever thought reading this giant classic would be difficult, erase that thought now. Gibbons is tongue-in-cheek history. We are reading only a portion of the great book, a discussion of Christianity's role in the progress, or decline, of Rome.

Join us.

October 22. Moliere, Le Misanthrope.

Some characters never die.  They don't fade away, either.  They just keep coming back, from Moliere's time till now.

Join us for a discussion of one of the most amusing plays ever written.

Oct.8. Weber. --The Protestant work ethic and capitalism.

Does the Protestant work ethic mean anything?  Should we have a resurgence of this idea?  Do we hear echoes of the idea that to keep workers, you have to underpay them?  Does the present noisy health-care debate have anything to do with the Protestantism of this essay?

Medea Comments Invited

The Sept. 24 meeting was a discussion of Medea, which has also been featured recently on the News Hour (PBS).  Annette Deming in the leading role.  Comments on the play, the new production, or related musings are always welcome. 

Sept. 24. Greek play discussion.

You can read or download Euripides' Medea from MIT.

http://classics.mit.edu/Euripides/medea.html

Sept. 10

September 10, 2009 – Schopenhauer: The Indestructibility of Our Inner Nature – Amy
Postscript comments welcome.

2009-2010 Calendar

 September 10, 2009 – Schopenhauer: The Indestructibility of Our Inner Nature – Amy
 September 24, 2009 – *Euripides: Medea – Dick
 October 8, 2009 – Weber: The Spirit of Capitalism -
 October 22, 2009 – *Moliere: The Misanthrope - Marilyn
 November 12, 2009 – Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire -  
 December 10, 2009 – Job, from the Bible -
 January 14, 2010 – Mill: Utilitarianism – Bob
 January 28, 2010 – *Shaw: Caesar and Cleopatra -
 February 11, 2010 – St. Augustine: The City of God - Bob
 February 25, 2010 – Plato: Symposium – Wil
 March 11, 2010 – *Montaigne: Of Experience -
 March 25, 2010 – Diderot: Rameau’s Nephew -
 April 8, 2010 – *Shakespeare: The Tempest - Mary
 April 22, 2010 – Hamilton, Jay, Madison: The Federalist – Howard
 May 13, 2010 – *Gogol: The Overcoat – Kathleen  
 May 27, 2009 – Snow date
  * Complete work; others are excerpted

Don Hanway's Movie List, 2008.

 TOP 20 LIST of 2008 Movie Releases (on-line version): compiled 1/10/09  
  by Don Hanway (104 releases seen to date); based on personal impact: intellectual/ emotional/sensual/spiritual)

1. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (Romania) – true friend helps her irresponsible
room-mate through crisis
2. Frozen River – two desperate women ally for family survival
3. The Visitor – burned-out academic re-energized by knowing illegal immigrants
4. *Slumdog Millionaire – striver from Mumbai streets cashes in his experience
5. Doubt – suspicious nun battles priest over a student’s welfare
6. *The Reader – tragic ex-lovers in post-Nazi Germany learn the cost of secrets
7. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – two friends aging in opposite directions
re-connect at key stages of life
8. The Fall – expressive child is rapt audience for depressed stuntman’s vivid stories
9. The Edge of Heaven – interwoven stories of tragedy and redemption moving
back and forth between German and Turkey
10. Let the Right One In (Sweden) – outsider friendship triumphs in the only
vampire movie you need to see
11. Rachel Getting Married – grieving family struggles thru wild wedding weekend
12. Paranoid Park (by Gus Van Sant) – young skateboarder in jeopardy after
witnessing tragic accident
13. The Band’s Visit (Israel) – Egyptian musicians in wrong place spend awkward
day with reluctant Israeli hosts
  14. Milk – Sean Penn nails Harvey’s infectious passion in Gus Van Sant’s other 
  2008 movie
  15. Mongol – epic of Genghis Khan’s early life and career in Mongolia
  16. I Served the King of England (Czech) – wide-eyed young man learns ways of 
  world in sly romp through Nazi occupation
  17. Jellyfish (Israel) – three women in various troubles, and the people who help them
  18. Caramel (Lebanon) – beauty salon operators & friends in elegant, sexy, funny
  and touching film
  19. Happy-Go-Lucky – resolutely upbeat teacher shows her mettle when it counts
  20. Rocknrolla – Guy Ritchie’s latest, a stylish British gangster movie

HONORABLE MENTION: Young@Heart, WALL-E, *Gran Torino, Roman de Gare
  (France), Appaloosa, *In Bruges, Encounters at the End of the World, Elegy, How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer

*Movies marked with an asterisk include graphic violence or sex
NOTES:
1) Worthy 2007 films seen too late for last year’s list: The Savages, I’m Not There,
*There Will Be Blood, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Taxi to the Dark Side,
Starting Out in the Evening
2) 2008 Films Not Seen Yet: The Wrestler, Synecdoche N.Y., Frost/Nixon,
  Revolutionary Road

Last discussion of the 2008-2009 season

May 14, 2009 - Tolstoy: The Death of Ivan Ilych

Join us for this last meeting before the summer break.  

You can download the 65pp. reading from http://www.classicallibrary.org/tolstoy/ivan/

For additional background on Ivan's job, see:  http://neabigread.net/books/deathivanilyich/teachers/DeathIvanIlyichHandout2.pdf

Politics again, April 29

Readers will get a chance to discuss one of the world's most famous political tracts on April 23, 2009. Machiavelli's work The Prince is perennially relevant.

This work may be downloaded (37 pp.) from the internet.

The following link is no longer functioning: http://religionanddemocracy.lib.virginia.edu/library/tocs/MacPrin.html

For a good-looking, easy-to-search copy from Down Under, go to: http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/m/machiavelli/niccolo/m149p/

If you would like an audiobook of The Prince, free download is available from: http://www.online-literature.com/machiavelli/prince/

The Great Leap Forward, April 9

In our next discussion we leap forward 2500 years. American author Henry James published his novella, The Beast in the Jungle, in 1903.

This 52pp. work is downloadable from http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1093

Aeschylus Post-Mortem

Still debating with Plato : Where do mathematical objects live?
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/31392/title /Math_Trek__Still_debating_with_Plato
Did Socrates "Teach New Deities"? Or: Homer's Gods, Plato's Gods: A Public Talk by Dr. Jan Garrett
http://www.wku.edu/~jan.garrett/pgods.htm
Homer's Gods, Plato's Gods
http://www.wku.edu/~jan.garrett/pgodscht.htm
Western Concepts of God
http://www.iep.utm.edu/g/god-west.htm
“The world lives by its incarnation of God in itself” (A.N. Whitehead):
http://www2.sbg.ac.at/whiteheadconference/abstracts/OOMEN%20-%20Incarnation.pdf
Kurt A. Raaflaub, Josiah Ober, Robert W. Wallace; Origins of democracy in ancient Greece -- partially viewable through Google Book Search.
Plato, THE REPUBLIC
http://luna.cas.usf.edu/~demilio/2211unit2/platocmt.htm

Some dates for comparison purposes.

Abraham was born around 1800 BC (or BCE).
Aeschylus, 525-456/5 BC.
Aesop, 620-560 BC.
Plato 428/427 BC – 348/347 BC
Confucius (Kongfuzi) 551-479 BC
Sophocles, c. 496- 406 BC.
Hesiod lived in 8th cent. BC.
Homer, 9th - 12th cent. BC.

The date of Homer's existence was controversial in antiquity and is no less so today. Herodotus said that Homer lived 400 years before his own time, which would place him at around 850 BC;[3] but other ancient sources gave dates much closer to the supposed time of the Trojan War.[4] The date of the Trojan War was given as 1194–1184 BC by Eratosthenes, who strove to establish a scientific chronology of events and this date is gaining support because of recent archaeological research.

-- Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer