amimetobios

A class where we end up going into the labor theory of value -- average abstract labor time being what produces equilibria among different commodities.  We were going to talk about Kawabata, and about interest, but that's TK.  We did talk about Aristotle -- and therefore a bit about Adam Smith -- on the functions of actual money: medium of exchange, bookkeeping measure, store of value, and also a bit on how these can be confused with each other.

This was going to be on "The Songs of Experience" (watch this space), but in order to discuss what Blake meant by the word "experience" we took a look at his 1788 tract "All Religions Are One" (printed just before "The Songs of Innocence"), which led to a long discussion of the dialectic between Plato and Locke and a counter-dialectic in Blake against both Plato and Locke.

A class that spiraled outwards from a consideration of Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale to Maugham's parable of the appointment in Samara to parables in general, including the strange parable of the talents in Matthew.  The ontology of things in the world and death as not a thing in the world (in Chaucer, in Maugham).  How treasure or gold is like death -- a catalyst, a vector, something not itself (a marker for a return to Aristotle tomorrow).

Much on "The Lamb" (and a little on "The Tyger"), "A Cradle Song," "Infant Joy" and the Innocence version of "The Chimney Sweeper."  Innocence as privative (like "infant" and "innocuous")-- a contrast to the world as we know it. 

A class mainly on Mammon -- in Milton and in Spenser -- though we don't get that far, because we pause for an explanation of The Faerie Queene and of allegory in general -- e.g. Edward Gorey's Innocence, on the Bicycle of Propriety, Carrying the Urn of Reputation Safely over the Abyss of Indiscretion.  Hence some talk about the harmony of the virtues in Aristotle -- chastity vs. temperance.  Matthew 6:24 quoted -- you cannot serve both God and Mammon.

Aristotle on Midas, and then Ovid on Midas (Golding's translation), which is the just-so story of how the river Pactolus came to run with gold (or actually electrum), leading to the first coining of money under Croesus, with a little fumbling in class about what it was that Archimedes found bathing (that objects submerged in water displace their own volume).

More on the two versions of the Nurses Song, with some subtle narrative theory applied -- who is or are the real narrators of the two songs?  Then back to Paradise Lost: a little history, a little consideration of how it champions the proto-Romantic centrality of human judgment to our sense of the world and of morality.  (Luther on Pharaoh type of thing....)

More Aristotle, on the origin of actual money -- coin of the realm as Gutman will say in The Maltese Falcon (TK) -- and the meaning of the word "tender" in the phrase "legal tender."  Polonius's dumb pun on the word.  Aristotle, very briefly, on infinity (the unbounded) and its relation to goods and money.  Meatloaf's song "Paradise by the dashboard light" naturally comes up, as it most in most classes on Aristotle....

Discussion of a couple of Exeter riddles (you can find them on the original handout) and how they connect money to various other social interactions, prostitution in particular.  Then we broach Aristotle's Politics.

Second class: mainly an intro to Paradise Lost, followed by a return to the two versions of Blake's "Nurses Song."  Blake's illustrations here.