amimetobios

amimetobios

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amimetobios episodes

  • 13. Skepticism and Zeno's paradoxes, again
    A class on the difference between external world skepticism and other mind skepticism: their conceptual independence.  Parmenides and Zeno on why to be skeptical of the external world.  Filming Achilles and the tortoise: what you'd see. Egerton. Berkeley's solution to Zeno's paradoxes.
    1 hr 20 min
  • 12. Film and Philosophy: Akerman's La Captive
    Mainly a discussion of La Captive and the question of other minds, and of what the male lead (Simon) wants from his captive (Ariane): what kind of thing wanting more from her or something different from what she gives him could possibly be.  Discussion therefore about replicants, zombies, and other minds.  The sheer fascination of looking in La Captive.  Some discussion of Jeanne Dielman, but without the spoilers that would indicate how Jeanne turns out (to herself even) to have a mind -- an other mind.
    1 hr 18 min
  • 11. Film and Philosophy
    A class mainly on Blade Runner, and how it is practically the same movie as Chantal Akerman's La Captive: both Cartesian explorations of the reality of others, and of other minds.  Tyrell as the evil genius in Descartes.  Seeing souls in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Emerson, and Blade Runner.  The ontology of voiceover.
    1 hr 18 min
  • 15, 17th Century Poetry: Ben Jonson, mainly "The Hourglass"
    A little bit about Jonson's urbanity, and his different voices, then a reading mainly of "The Hourglass," and a comparison with Herbert's "Church Monuments."  The hourglass as symbol of vanity, but the dust also the literal remains of the dead, so that it's both the sign of time and its result (like the skull).  And then a brief look at "Inviting a Friend to Supper" (and some discussion of the nature of rhyme), and "To Penshurst."
    1 hr 18 min
  • 14. 17th C Poetry: Ben Jonson's songs

    Mainly a close reading of the unutterably subtle effects of the Song to Celia "Drink to me only with thine eyes."


    Drink to me only with thine eyes,

             And I will pledge with mine;

    Or leave a kiss but in the cup,

             And I’ll not look for wine.

    The thirst that from the soul doth rise

             Doth ask a drink divine;

    But might I of Jove’s nectar sup,

             I would not change for thine.


    I sent thee late a rosy wreath,

             Not so much honouring thee

    As giving it a hope, that there

             It could not withered be.

    But thou thereon didst only breathe,

             And sent’st it back to me;

    Since when it grows, and smells, I swear,

             Not of itself, but thee.


    What makes it a song? What makes it a story?  What's their relation?  A look at "So Beauty on the water stood," in this context:


    So beauty on the waters stood, 

    When love had sever’d earth from flood. 

    So when he parted air from fire, 

    He did with concord all inspire.

    And then a motion he them taught, 

    That elder than himself was thought, 

    Which thought was yet the child of earth, 

    For Love is elder than his birth.


    And then a brief return to "On my first son":


    Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;

    My sin was too much hope of thee, lov'd boy.

    Seven years tho' wert lent to me, and I thee pay,

    Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.

    O, could I lose all father now! For why

    Will man lament the state he should envy?

    To have so soon 'scap'd world's and flesh's rage,

    And if no other misery, yet age?

    Rest in soft peace, and, ask'd, say, "Here doth lie

    Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry."

    For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such,

    As what he loves may never like too much.



    1 hr 18 min
  • 10. Film and Philosophy: Berkeley and Beckett's
    Then another class that I thought went pretty well (two decent classes in one day!) on Beckett's Film.  To put in the form of a paradoxical tweet: the title refers to Buster Keaton's irreducible and insoluble condition, existing in a film of perception, not to the fact that it's a film.
    But what I was glad to have articulated was the distinction opposing what I was calling the Descartes/Kant/Emersonian view that the difference between the perceived (empirical) self and the perceiving self redounded to the absolute, transcendental priority of the perceiving self's noetic vector towards freedom to the Beckett/Berkeley view that the perceived self is what actually exists (esse is percipi) and therefore our own feeble, foible-filled, failing, febrile facticity is what we actually are and what we can't escape.  Beckett's Berkeley prevents (paradoxically, again) any sublimation towards idealism, and keeps us as the inescapable sum of our accidents, always covered by, always in fact identical to, a sticky film of the local, limited, particularized being that I am.  (What Philip Roth, in The Counterlife, was parodying when Zuckerman meets a guy who plans to be cryonically frozen in order to achieve immortality when the science catches up with death.  Zuckerman shakes his head at the idea of the guy -- Barry Shuskin -- looking forward to "a billion more years of being himself.... Forever Shuskin.")  "Alas for characteristics," as James Merrill put it.
    1 hr 18 min
  • 13. 17th C Poetry: Trinity and then Ben Jonson
    I thought this class went pretty well: first a discussion of the Trinity based on a really fine letter to the TLS by someone named Neville Martin Gwynne (hello! if you're Googling yourself: that was a great letter!).  Then a brief intro to Jonson and a close reading of Jonson's beautiful epigram/epitaph "On My First Daughter," here:
    Here lies, to each her parents’ ruth,Mary, the daughter of their youth;Yet all heaven’s gifts being heaven’s due,It makes the father less to rue.At six months’ end she parted henceWith safety of her innocence;Whose soul heaven’s queen, whose name she bears,In comfort of her mother’s tears,Hath placed amongst her virgin-train:Where, while that severed doth remain,This grave partakes the fleshly birth;Which cover lightly, gentle earth!
    1 hr 16 min
  • 12. 17th c poetry: Done with Donne
    We finish discussing the Trinity, and then go through the seven La Corona sonnets, where the interesting question of their temporality -- of the eternal vs. the sempiternal, of endless time vs. being outside of time -- comes up in the very question of how or where the sequence may be said to begin, since the first sonnet sums up the fact that the sequence is the crown which seems to spring out of that very first sonnet,
    1 hr 19 min

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New for 2023: Victorian Poetry