Rough Edges

Yes, that's me bringing some wood to the campfire; my tomahawk is carried on my belt. Having a pioneer mentality, being a male with a Ph. D. in a hard physical science makes my having many, many "rough edges" no surprise. In the domain of culture, I admit freely to having none until recent years. The only bit that I had was due to a course requirement in the humanities at Harvard College. I fulfilled that one by taking a famous course [Humanities 3] in Greek literature by Prof. John Finley. That distribution requirement did work, though, as it exposed me to a crack of light from a universe of culture that I would have otherwise never recognized existed. War.

How does a guy smooth out his rough edges? Read. Learn. How?

Courses in the humanities by the Teaching Company help: see http://www.teach12.com/. My current course is "Classics of British Literature". There are plenty of good courses on music, art, philosophy and literature available from them.

Read BOOKS. The Internet is a culture wasteland - you don't know what you are seeing unless from a reliable source. Classic books provide reliable places to learn culture, places that have endured decades, centuries or millenia.

Read good literary magazines. I expanded my magazine universe over the past two years and can recommend two: Lapham's Quarterly and The Paris Review. The former provides great writing from classical and even recent authors on gathered on particular subjects - the current issue is titled, "The City". The Paris Review offers good selections of current fiction and poetry. You need someone to select good material for you, or you will waste huge amounts of time with junk. The editors of these two quarterly journals do a good job, in my "humble" opinion ;)

Learn a foreign language - at least to be "literate" in it. Fluency is very, very hard to achieve as an adult, but literacy is doable and gives you the cultural exposure you need. I suggest Italian or French or both. Both have much great original literature in the language and are often used in English writing in snippets.

If you devote an hour a day to this program, in a couple years you'll have enough culture to not seem to be a troglodyte or a barbarian.

Word of the Day

"Belletristic" - adjective [$1000]; "Belletrist" - noun [$1000] and "belles-lettres" - substantive, plural [$10]
Belles-lettres means elegant or polite literature or literary studies.
Belletristic means of or pertaining to belles-lettres.
Belletrist means one devoted to belles-lettres.Sentence: Being a wee bit literate in Italian or French helps one read belletristic English language writings, as quite often quotes or epigrams in those languages appea

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.

Actions

Nothing - still sitting in the shade, waiting for a trend.

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.