Destino - Dali and Disney

Creation of the World makes a splash with highbrow "sophistikids"

Please click HERE to order the new translation of Torquato Tasso's Creation of the World.

Torquato Tasso's Creation of the World is now Available

On behalf of International Authors, I am happy to announce the new translation of Torquato Tasso’s Creation of the World has been published.

It took over two years for Dario Rivarossa, Salwa Khoddam and me to translate the poem, which is a thorough, line-by-line rendering of Tasso’s original. Modesty aside, it is a beautiful poem. It should provide hours of enjoyment to readers and scholars. Also, the book features over fifty illustrations by the Magic Trio: Mr. Rivarossa, Eva “Nivalis” Nieri, and Tiziana “Selkis” Grassi.

A description of the book and a brief biographical note on Tasso appear below.

To view the book on Amazon and purchase, please click HERE.
 
The book should appear on the International Authors website by the end of the week.

Time for a break!

Description:

Creation of the World by Torquato Tasso. Translated by Dario Rivarossa, Salwa Khoddam, and Carter Kaplan. Illustrations by the Magic Trio: Dario Rivarossa, Eva “Nivalis“ Nieri, and Tiziana “Selkis” Grassi.

Combining myth, philosophy, theology, science, astronomy, astrology, history, politics, geography, and exploration, Torquato Tasso's Creation of the World is a sweeping vision of the universe and our place in it. This new translation is a comprehensive line-by-line rendering in modern English, allowing readers to fully appreciate the subtle nuances of Tasso's exquisite poetry as well as the stunning expanse of his learning and understanding. Over fifty illustrations offer lively and diverse interpretations of the poem, contributing to a unique aesthetic experience that readers will happily enjoy and return to again and again.

About the Author:

Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) was an Italian poet known across Europe for his poem La Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered, 1581). His late masterpiece Il Mondo Creato (Creation of the World, 1592, 1607) is an exposition of early-modern sensibility emerging from the turbulence of the late Counter-Reformation. Some scholars have suggested Tasso influenced John Milton, whose Paradise Lost reflects elements of Tasso’s style, themes, and genius.

Noh Hamlet perfomed by Prof. Munakata Ueda Kuniyoshi

Hamlet performed in a traditional Japanese Noh style by Munakata Ueda Kuniyoshi, Professor Emeritus of Shizuoka University, Japan.

"The Crystal Egg"

Inspired by the H.G. Wells story.

Postmodernism Weaponized

"Conscience" is a "bourgeois" value. The Revolution must overcome it and the idea of truth that stands behind it.

Be of Good Cheer

Recommendation: "Kashmir" by Vitasta Raina

Permit me to recommend a new poem from Vitasta Raina.  Please click HERE.

Composing the Composition

Rendezvous with Early Modernity (Il mondo creato coming soon)

Torquato Tasso and Eleonora D'Este examining a proof copy of the new International Authors translation of Creation of the World.

Rendezvous with Modernity

Apollo 11 Command Module in High Resolution

To mark the 47th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon-landing mission, the Smithsonian has made available high-resolution 3-D scans of command module “Columbia,” the spacecraft that carried astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin and Michael Collins to the moon.  To view the interior, click HERE. Once the viewer is opened, control the perspective with your mouse. Buttons in the upper left corner provide additional features, including a detailed tour of capsule highlights.  To view the capsule exterior, click HERE.

The Place of Philosophical Inquiry

Understanding the sense of propositions proceeds the project of explaining reality, as the analysis of the former calls into question the authority of the latter.

Paradise Lost and the analysis of intellectual mythology, very brief

Myth is not fiction: it consists of facts that are continually repeated and can be observed over and over again. It is something that happens to man, and men have mythical fates just as much as the Greek heroes do.

                                           ~ Carl Jung, CW 11, §648.

Milton would disagree, I think, as Jung's formulation attributes a kind of logical, scientific legitimacy to emotional experience. It's like Jung is saying the experience of a headache is the same as a scientific understanding of headaches. By way of explanation, let's dilate upon a definition of poetry and myth, and then clarify their relationship to each other.

I use the words interchangeably: myth is poetry, poetry is myth, and it--poetry/myth--is either in some sense accurate, or in some sense deceptive. Compare Wittgenstein: "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language" (PI §109). In Paradise Lost, Milton is using the poem to analyze this very bewitchment, and as such it can be read as an anthropological exposition of the emergence of analytic philosophy and clear(er) understanding. In Milton, the language of religion and religious myth becomes the vehicle for the emergence of this clearer understanding: the transcendence of misunderstanding and deception (lies/Satan) is realized metaphorically in the victory of the Son, who is the clarification of philosophical credulousness that is rooted in conceptual confusion and the misuse of language.

Milton begins with religious language because of our historical circumstance. We are forced to use this language, but over time the discussion produces various heterodoxies that allow us to view the linguistic-stream-of-life confluence in toto--or rather in context--thus enabling us to gain a clear overview of the parts, the whole, and their relations to each other.

Hester and Dimmesdale go through this in The Scarlet Letter: the context of their Calvinist orthodoxy gives them the linguistic tools they use to transcend that same orthodoxy. In working this out, Hawthorne suggests a two-phase Calvinist experience, and places the "post-Calvinist" phase at the center of American political and philosophical understanding. Compare Melville in Moby-Dick, and Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  Nabokov plays on this string producing marvelous effects in Pale Fire. The plot and theme of these novels is suggested by Wittgenstein:

  What is your aim in philosophy? - To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.

                                         ~  Ludwig Wittgenstein, PI §309

I would argue, too, that this post-Calvinist worldview compares very closely to core aspects of Judaism, and also sets forth the outlines of the modern worldview we associate with Ockham, Bacon, Locke, and Jefferson--whose originality chiefly rests in his ability to clarify these ideas in memorable and effective political language. 

Milton--returning once more--shows that poetry is the vehicle par excellence for examining the phenomenon and realizing Wittgenstein's aim. 

Nationalism in the United States and Europe

While our use of the word is similar, Europeans and Americans understand the concept of nationalism in fundamentally different ways. The American "nation" is rooted in identification with the state and the social contract. In Europe, "nation," by definition, is rooted in culture and ethnicity.

In Europe, state and nation are separate entities. For historical and legal reasons, in America that can never be the case. Moreover, in America nationality is a philosophical concept, rooted not in identity but rather in process and activity. Nevertheless, America does have an identity.

State and nation are used almost interchangeably in America. Almost. Specifically, the state is subject to the democratic will and the republican structure of the political process. Nationhood--or national identity--is an acceptance of the social contract that defines and shapes the process. American national identity therefore is embodied in the U.S. Constitution.

(Note: I am circumspect about the use of the word "will" in the third paragraph, but for now we'll table that question for another occasion, when we will also tackle the distinction between government and state.)

Breaking: Professor Hodges to go K-Pop (trigger warning: cuddly American ex-pat culture and literature maven prepares to jump the shark)

Today I was going to write something profoundly insightful about fine contradistinctions among sundry American and European theories of nationalism, when I ran into Professor Hodges' recent Gypsy Scholar post describing his EWIS course, which he just finished teaching for the summer at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South Korea.  Well, as you can tell from the pictures, the aesthetic whirlwind I found myself caught up in switched me over to a consideration of K-pop.  Allow me to explain...

The Wikipedia article describes K-pop as an exciting mix of popular musical genres:

K-pop (an abbreviation of Korean pop; Hangul: 케이팝) is a musical genre originating in South Korea that is characterized by a wide variety of audiovisual elements. Although it comprises all genres of "popular music" within South Korea, the term is more often used in a narrower sense to describe a modern form of South Korean pop music covering a range of styles including dance-pop, pop ballad, electropop, R&B, and hip-hop music.

The genre emerged with one of the earliest K-pop groups, Seo Taiji and Boys, forming in 1992. Their experimentation with different music styles "reshaped Korea's music scene". As a result, the integration of foreign musical elements has now become common practice in the K-pop industry.

K-pop entered the Japanese market at the turn of the 21st century and rapidly grew into a subculture among teenagers and young adults of East and Southeast Asia. Currently, the global spread of K-pop and Korean culture known as the Korean Wave is seen in Latin America, India, North Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere in the Western world.

K-pop represents a style of music that is not afraid of experimentation. As Highbrow readers especially know, years of developing new ideas can get a little tiresome. Moreover, there is ever the  problem of exhausting the possibilities, of "drying up" and discovering that the next "new" idea has already been done.  Bold new intellectual sensations don't grow on trees. Coming up with a "zilch" is always the specter lurking behind the next corner in the world of avant-garde "wow" engineering. One wonders, could even K-pop run out of steam?

Short answer: NO!

K-pop is getting smart again once more with a really new idea. How about a girl band featuring a forty-five (ahem) year-old American professor as the lead singer and dancer!?  Now, my Korean pop culture IQ prohibits me from venturing to guess what the new band might be called, but I have a feeling my suggestion is for sure going to match the trendy excitement of the concept itself!

 Dr. Daddy-O a-Go-Go!

Technological Enigma in Search of a Title

De vulgari eloquentia

Museum for Art and Trade Celebrates Expressionist Mask Dance

Mask dance with expressionist costumes by Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt (around 1920) on the occasion of the reopening of the exhibition modern at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg in February 2012. A co-production of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe and the Hochschule für Musik und Theater, Hamburg.

  

To learn more about the costumes, please click HERE.

"The Engineers" by Julius Horsthuis