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< Earlier Kibitzing · PAGE 421 OF 963 ·
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| Sep-25-08 | | Trigonometrist: A W Fox vs H E Bauer, 1901 |
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Sep-25-08
 | | Domdaniel: <Trig> That, I imagine, is Albert Whiting Fox. I know about him because there's another A. Fox whom I've played about six times, and I had to disentangle their games in various databases. The difference of a century helps. |
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Sep-25-08
| | Domdaniel: Quite a finish from old Foxy, I admit. A spectacular queen sac. |
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Sep-25-08
| | Domdaniel: "Certainly here are the beginnings of a singular characteristic trope -- the catalogue movie. Most of the subsequent moviemaking for me is structured around a list or a catalogue -- where the items or events or ideas are approached, ticked off and moved on -- using narrative if necessary, using chronological time if necessary, but always essentially fulfilling the obligations of completing a list ..." Peter Greenaway on <The Falls> |
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Sep-25-08
| | Domdaniel: Now where did I put my list of <People to Make and Do> ...? |
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Sep-25-08
| | Domdaniel: <mckmac> No problemo. BTW, you and Deffi and anyone else whose forum is being used for GMAN analysis should feel free to hang out here. We all need to satisfy those baser urges sometimes. But you knew that. |
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| Sep-25-08 | | euripides: Interesting thought that the Odyssey feels more modern than the Iliad. In one sense, the Odyssey presages Aeschylean tragedy more than the Iliad - the late scenes when the suitors are massacred have quite a bit in common with tragedy - which makes them both newer and older in an odd way. The righteous revenge that does for the suitors feels more conservative than anything in the Iliad. At another level, I guess the time of the Odyssey is closer to contemporary with the poet and in some sense feels permanently contemporary. There are parts - especially Odysseus' long conversation with Eumaeus - that cut through to a kind of European agricultural or pastoral continuity which feels almost outside history. And other parts that have the timelessness of folktale. There is a book which one of my Greek teachers used to read from that gives parallels to the Polyphemus story from all over the world. Whereas the Iliad exists in another space and time - the spotlit arena of heroic catastrophe. I did somehow manage to enjoy the Ships on this reading, but I appreciate this may be a taste restricted to Greeknerds. <Tpstar> is right to draw attention to Odysseus's treacherous conduct in Iliad 10 - which might reflect a gradual darkening of the tone of the poem as time goes on or the possibility scholars since ancient times have considered that Book 10 is an insert. |
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Sep-25-08
| | Domdaniel: <euripides> My understanding - fueled by books like 'Orality and Literacy' by Walter Ong - is that both Homeric poems existed in oral form, passed on by generations of bards, for at least a couple of centuries before being written down. One sign of this is formulaic tropes like 'wine-dark sea' which work as memory aids. But minor differences accrue between oral composition and eventual fixing in writing. Does it makes sense to talk of inserts in such a context? I used to be fascinated by the orality - literacy - electronic media (aka Zapkinder) triplet. Still am, really, though now I think McLuhan overdid the similarities between oral culture and whatever we're in now. This is no Global Village, though Globville might be a good name for it. |
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| Sep-26-08 | | Red October: <a handmaiden is valued at "four oxen"> they cant give me away these days *sigh* |
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| Sep-26-08 | | Eyal: <One sign of this is formulaic tropes like 'wine-dark sea' which work as memory aids.> According to the original theory, developed by Milman Parry and Albert Lord (and based on comparisons with contemporary Serbo-Croatian oral poetry), it's actually more an aid for composition than for memory, since the true oral poet doesn't recite from memory but rather improvises the poem on the spot every time. He's able to do that (in the Homeric case, producing a new dactylic hexameter every few seconds) by relying on a highly-developed traditional system of ready formulas. And when the poem is fixed in writing, what's fixed is not <the> poem, in the sense we think about it today, but a specific performance of it. According to the <extreme> form of the argument, traditional epithets such as 'wine-dark' in 'wine-dark sea' hardly carry any semantic significance at all, but are mainly motivated by rhythmical considerations (allowing the poet to "fill-in" a hexameter or half-hexameter). So when Menelaus and Diomedes are both called "good at the war-cry" [boen agathos] it's not because they shout louder than others, but because their names are prosodically identical; and when we run into some positively strange epithets, like the (notorious) "blameless Aegisthus", or Nausicaa going to wash her "shining clothing", it's because the poet was using rhythmically appropriate traditional poetic diction, without worrying too much about the immediate semantic context. |
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Sep-26-08
 | | jessicafischerqueen: <Euripides Tpstar Dom and Cabin>... I am enjoying your discussion very much !!
Obviously, you all have a great deal of <depth> with regard to this topic... This is a fine quality for we students to enjoy.
Especially in an age when people my age generally don't actually learn much more than the contents of a <Weak-a-pedia> summary on the Internet... Mrs. Short Attention Span |
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Sep-26-08
| | Domdaniel: <Eyal> Yes, I was going to mention Parry and Lord. I'm interested to see you refer to the contemporary material they used for comparison as 'Serbo-Croatian' -- a category that barely exists anymore, with Serbian and Croatian diverging as fast as they can. The older (as in older 20th century) texts referred to Yugoslavian oral poetry. Might it have been Montenegran? Does anyone know where these actual bards survived? Comparisons have also been made with verses from other oral cultures, from Papua New Guinea to Old Gaelic. Jaynes went much further, arguing that 'modern consciousness' is present in the Odyssey but not the Iliad; that this reflects a gap of some centuries between their times of original composition; and that our sort of individual selfhood was a very recent evolutionary phenomenon, less than 3000 years old. There are many flaws in this theory, brilliant as Jaynes' book is. The biggest flaw, for me, is the fact that human societies in Australia (etc) have been separated from Euro-Asiatic culture for much longer than 3000 years -- yet they are genetically 100% human and certainly possessed of individual selves. In any case, Ong suggested that the orality/literacy difference was a simpler explanation of Jaynes' data. |
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| Sep-26-08 | | euripides: <dom> I think almost every scholar agrees that Parry proved that Homer's language comes from an oral tradition. But the process of formation of the poems is still very much up for grabs. Several major scholars, inluding Millman's son Adam Parry, (if I remember right) have thought that Homer, though trained in an oral tradition, might have written the poems or dictated them. If they are orally transmitted, I take the point about inserts, but I guess one can still speak of them if the bulk of the poem is highly faithful to the legacy of a particular bard but one section has nothing to do with him. Of course, which is the 'real' poem is then itself up for grabs, once the tradition has accepted the 'insert'. Alexandrian inserts would make sense either way, as the poems were written down at least a couple of centuries before the Alexandrian scholars got going on them. Of course a third possibility is that each generation of rhapsodes created new variations within the poem, and what we have is just a snapshot of a fluid process with several equal partners. I believe the poems, particularly the Iliad, have a coherence consistent with either of the first two of these and hard to imagine in the third case; but of course many unimaginable things are true. The audience might well have played some part in keeping the rhapsodes to the straight and narrow. |
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| Sep-26-08 | | Eyal: <Dom> Yeah, 'Serbo-Croatian' does sound rather inappropriate these days... though I think it was used quite often by Parry and Lord themselves (among other things, as an umbrella term for dialects spoken all over former Yugoslavia). Notwithstanding all the interesting differences, there are still so many fundamental similarities between The Iliad and The Odyssey that they always struck me as definitely products of the same culture. At any rate, the studies of Parry and Lord (as well as later ones in this line, I believe) would probably tend to support this, since The Odyssey displays as many symptoms of oral composition as The Iliad - it doesn't give a less "archaic" impression in this regard. |
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| Sep-26-08 | | deerslayer888: Are you OK?
YOu look tired as if you have been working too much.. Make some bread..... Look out your window and relax.... Just let everything go.... take a deep breath and say to yourself "HE's right... that damn deerslayer@!!!!! always right!!!!!!! I wish I knew who he was this... chess master of mystery???"" then say to yourself... "But boy am I happy now... Now that I realize what deerslayer is saying... Ahhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!! .... I am a granite rock... and the world wraps itself around my foundation....""""" |
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Sep-26-08
| | Domdaniel: <deerslayer> Easy on the screamers aka exclams. (!!) Personally, though I'd like to make a chess move that warranted one or two, I try never to use them in writing. And ten of the buggers is just plain vulgar. |
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Sep-26-08
| | Domdaniel: <Red> Can a handmaiden pull a plough? Or even a plow? People gotta eat, and oxen come out ahead of handmaidens in this respect. |
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| Sep-26-08 | | Red October: <People gotta eat, and oxen come out ahead of handmaidens in this respect.> aah but who is gonna do the cookin ? |
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Sep-26-08
| | Domdaniel: <aah but who is gonna do the cookin ?> Um, whoever does the eatin ? |
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| Sep-26-08 | | Red October: back in the day the maidens cooked the oxen... the system worked i think |
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| Sep-27-08 | | Insane Olde Batte: <jessicafischerqueen: And finally, contrary to what his Profile says, <Domdaniel> is in fact the fabled 16th century Swedish theologian <Gerndt Stingbat>. Which explains a lot, if you ask me.>
Hey! It is against posting regulations to pretend to be someone you are not, "Domdaniel." I am considering "blowing the whistle" on you for this. Also, what do "theologians" do?
Are they like liberry keepers?
You better watch out buster.
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| Sep-27-08 | | Mrs. Alekhine: Hmmm... if you count, there are actually <FIVE> different "handmaidens" who regularly come to this place to lend a hand. Unfortunately, we maidens are all too busy studying and playing chess to cook your damn oxen for you. Plus I'm married, so technically I'm not a maiden.
Cook your own oxes!!
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| Sep-27-08 | | Trigonometrist: Hey <dom>..
I hear from <jess> that you guys "were" discussing Homer... I suppose it's ox time now...
I'm vegetarian mind you...:)
Btw <Mrs.Alekhine>.. not to sound didatic to her Excellency but the plural of ox is oxen not oxes...;} |
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Sep-27-08
| | Domdaniel: Oxen? You'll be telling us next that the plural of child is *chillun* or something. While really, as everyone knows, it's "one child, two childs, three brats, four monsters, five ... five? Haven't you ever heard of family planning?" |
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Sep-27-08
| | jessicafischerqueen: Actually the "original" plural was <oxolotl>. |
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