Tag: thoughts
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The Principle of Exchange in The Shipman’s Tale
The Shipman is a western man, perhaps hailing from Dartmouth (as Chaucer suggests in the “General Prologue”). He is a modest man, riding a cart horse, and wearing a wool cloth with a dagger around his neck. He is a “good felawe.” On his way to the pilgrimage had stolen a good deal of wine […]
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The Story of French Impressionism, Part VII: Edgar Degas
Edgar Degas (1834-1917) (pronounced “day-dahs” but in later life he changed the pronunciation to “day-gah”) never wished to be called an “Impressionist” instead preferring to be called a “Realist.” In his paintings he was obsessed with motion, particularly of dancers, which occupied nearly half of his works. Degas was raised in an upper middles-class family. […]
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Treason in the Acharnians
Aristophanes’s Archanians is his third comedy, and his earliest surviving play that has come down to us from antiquity. It won first prize at the Lenaia in 425BC, under the production of Callistratus, as Aristophanes was a young dramatist at the time. Like The Clouds, The Acharnians begins with a lone soliloquy. A rustic arrives very early […]
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The Harsh But Forgiving Prairie in O Pioneers!
I recently detoured from reading the Pulitzer Prize-winning novels to venture into the harsh but pleasantly forgiving fields of Willa Cather’s prairie pioneers. When Willa Cather was thirty-nine years old she wrote her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, which was published as a serial collection in McClure’s Magazine in 1912. It was a tragic story about […]
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Notes on Numbers
The traditional Hebraic title for the book of Numbers is “Bemidbar” meaning “In The Wilderness.” It is titled to honor the census that takes place in its opening chapters, followed by a reiterating of the Israelites in the Sinai wilderness following the embodiment of the Lord in a cloud. Eventually, at Chapter 11, the Israelites complain […]
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Zemlaya (Earth) (1930) Review
Zemlaya (Earth) (1930) Director: Alexander Dovzhenko ★★★☆☆ Zemlaya is silent Soviet propaganda film, and it is Dozhenko’s best known film in the West. Zemlaya is part three of his Ukraine trilogy (he only personally directed seven films during his lifetime, before deciding to focus on writing novels instead). Zemlaya is a good movie, in my […]
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