Another New Feature

I intend to write about the CD and DVD courses that I complete. All are from The Teaching Company [ see http://www.teach12.com/ ]. I buy them on sale at what seems to me quite reasonable prices. I concentrate on its offerings in the humanities: philosophy, literature, history, and religion. The science and math courses don't interest me as I have such an extensive background in those areas. But the humanities were an area neglected for years, and I am now enjoying myself filling that vacant space in half my brain.

I mainly buy the CD versions, unless the course is art or about a part of the world where I don't know the geography or places. The CD works best since I like to listen in the car driving my dog Sky to sheep herding classes.

A few days ago I finished How to Read and Understand Poetry. The course was excellent - covering many aspects of how a poem is constructed and how the poet makes his/her points. All this technical knowledge helps one appreciate the poetry as a poem, and not simply to read it as prose to figure out its meaning. The professor in fact said "meaning" is one of the least important parts of a poem, as most poems are about traditional subjects such as love, loss, death, heroism, etc.

In my opinion, one must read a poem out loud, preferably twice, to absorb its value. Human language and thinking developed over tens of thousands of years orally, so poetry captures a crucial part of languages' communication dimension. And literature for the first few thousands of years was all poetry. To me, then, it's self-evident that a good technical knowledge of poetry is crucial to having a deep understanding of humanity.

This course helped me immensely. One must buy The Norton Anthology of Poetry to get the most of the course. All poems covered in the lectures are included in the anthology [except very few]. I read them all after reviewing the course notes provided, certainly thus reading more poetry that I had done prior in my entire life.

I recommend this course to anyone seeking to diversify one's knowledge in the humanities.

PS: Another excellent course I'm now watching on DVD is Dutch Masters: The Age of Rembrandt, in preparation for a trip to Amsterdam this spring.

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Word of the Day

"Tocsin" - noun [$10]
Tocsin means 1. an alarm bell or the ringing of it; 2. a warning signal
Sentence: No one sounds a tocsin when the market herd begins to head to a new waterhole; one must watch the signs and portents to see it and climb onto the elephant in time to ride along.