Archive for the ‘Art’ Category
Sunday, May 31st, 2026
It is often asked why we should read; more specifically, why we should read the classics or ‘fine literature,’ by which is meant generally poetry, plays, and prose narratives of various kinds – these days especially, ‘serious’ novels. The question is motivated by the fact that reading this literature is ...
Posted in Art, Cognitive Science, Philosophy | No Comments »
Sunday, May 24th, 2026
You might think that such a widely cited and referenced work had something significant to say about the nature and significance of reproduction, but I find that what is said is mostly trivial or just wrong-headed. In particular, I note that Benjamin is aware that mechanical production is not the ...
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Sunday, May 24th, 2026
There was recent kerfuffle online when a blogger posted an image of a real Monet and said that he had generated it using AI.
Could his readers tell him, he asked, why it was inferior to this other image that was of a real Monet?
Of course, his replies were filled with ...
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Saturday, April 11th, 2026
We do not have Aristotle’s work on Comedy promised to us in the Poetics, but we might be able to get a rough idea of what he would have said from clues in his surviving writings and commentaries from later ancient authors.
The principal evidence directly from Aristotle is the passage ...
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Friday, February 27th, 2026
According to the poetic corpus itself, poems such as Beowulf were typically performed in front of the lord in his feasting hall by a scop, roughly equivalent to the ON skald. There are those who doubt the reality outside literature of this class of persons, but the evidence of all ...
Posted in Art, History, Texts | No Comments »
Saturday, February 21st, 2026
A post on the Althouse blog discussing the Vogue cover of ‘Dr’ Jill Biden compared it to the figure of Catherine in a painting by Raphael.
She commented that
Catherine's hands do not hang limply at her sides. They are expressive of ecstasy and placed in locations that would seem truly odd ...
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Monday, February 9th, 2026
As part of my effort to create a performance-oriented version of Beowulf, I had to look into the proposed theories of metre for Old English. I thought I might as well put the summaries of what I found here.
From a study of old Germanic and Scandinavian poetic metres, Eduard Sievers[1] derived ...
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Tuesday, November 9th, 2021
Things never heard: 'I reckon my kid could do better than that.'
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Friday, July 19th, 2019
‘Angel’ translates the word mal'akh in Hebrew, which is a particular kind of messenger. The Hebrew word can refer to either spiritual beings or material, but our translations only use ‘angel’ for the spiritual kind. In the Bible they are never said to have wings but are described as being ...
Posted in Art, Religion | No Comments »
Saturday, April 20th, 2019
The central question of the tragedy of Othello is: what is Iago’s motivation? Here is the usual list of possibilities:
He resents that Othello has given position to Cassio, for which he, Iago, is better qualified
He suspects that Othello has cuckolded him
He resents that Othello’s virtues make him, ...
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