Italian Reflections (Cont.): The Platypus Travels Part IX

A wilderness of stone.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, artists and architects would come to Rome to sketch the ruins. From those sketches came profusions of paintings, engravings, books, and new feats of design. Ruins were picturesque. In the 21st century, they are still picturesque. What creative inspiration now flows from them? A million snapshots and the occasional blog post.

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The Platypus Reads Part XXVII

Thoughts after reading the "Iliad" to prepare a Greece unit for my students: -Hector is a jerk until he's dead. He even advocates the exposure of Achaean corpses and then has the cheek to turn around and ask Achilles to spare his. He rudely ignores Polydamas' prophecies and fights outside the gate to save his pride knowing full well what it will cost his family and city. After he's dead, he becomes a martyr for the cause. -Agamemnon has several moments of true leadership to balance out his pettiness. In this way, he's a haunting foil to Achilles: the two men are more alike than they want to acknowledge. -We see that Achilles is the better man at the funeral games of Patroclos. His lordliness, tact, and generosity there give us a window into Achilles before his fight with Agamemnon and the death of Patroclos consumed him. -Nestor is a boring, rambling, old man who's better days are far behind him, and yet every Achaean treats him with the upmo...

Tolkien's Dark Tower: The Platypus Reads Part CLXXXVI

Tom Shippey points out in his Road to Middle Earth that the germ of Barad Dur, Sauron's Stronghold, comes from a scrap of Chaucer where the poet makes an offhand reference to a knight and his approach to "the dark tower." Chaucer expected that everyone knew that story, but somehow in the intervening centuries it has become lost. Using his imagination, Tolkien tried to delve back into the mine of story and imagine what this Dark Tower might have been. We see several tries at this image, or several "accounts" in Tolkien's corpus. The first is Thangorodrim, Morgoth's "dark tower," where he sits "on hate enthroned." The second, and like unto it, is Sauron's original keep at Tol Sirion. This is the dark tower before which Luthien, in all her frailty, stands and lays the deepest pits bare with her song (an image oddly reminiscent of protestant poets like Spenser, Bunyan, and Wesley). Building on these two images, Tolkien constru...

Platypus Past: Bachelor Cooking

Having been married for several years now, I can begin looking on my bachelor past with an "outsiders" perspective. One of the interesting things I've noticed while being married is the different approach my wife and I have to cooking. My wife actually learned How To Cook is quite good at it. Give her a recipe and she can make just about anything. I had to pick up bits and pieces as I went along. I call my style of cooking "bachelor cooking," and the first rule is that there are no recipes. The main goal of the bachelor cook is to get filling food on the table quickly and in a way that elevates him above the mere ramen-and-t-bell-forever caveman. This goal often has to be achieved in the context of a communal environment with other bachelors where what food is available at any given time may vary widely. This means that formal recipes are out. Instead, the bachelor cook needs to adopt a more open and creative approach to food. A bachelor cook sees a mea...

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