Category: Blog Post

When I teach Contemporary Civilization, I try to link music to the various texts we encounter—a task easier in the second semester of more modern authors than in the first, for sure. (The earliest tune I use is Aquinas’ Adoro te devote.) Sometimes we can make rough connections of time and place, adding an audio dimension to the ideas we glean from the page. When we read Kant’s 1785 Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, I send along Mozart’s 20th Piano Concerto; with Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, I give Gershwin’s 1929 An American in Paris. Some of the students really get into associating an auditory “feeling” with the tenor of the books themselves.

I’ve been listening to some music from my own days as an undergraduate, and some of it has held up well—that is, the music is both an artifact of some earlier era but also immediately engaging, a bit like those songs of the semester. A real stand-out is the 2003 album The Lemon of Pink by The Books, whose first track (up to 4:40 in the video here) begins with a mish-mash of vocal samples and banjo plucks but then culminates—almost crystallizes—into descending scales and rich cellos. The whole album is top-notch, and I don’t think I’ve heard much other music quite like it, either earlier or later.

The challenge in course design, however, would be to find a novel that pairs well with it:

Today’s New York Times crossword takes its theme from the alternating one-way streets found throughout much of the grid layout of Manhattan, although here the crossword grid alternates the direction of both the rows and the columns:

Will Shortz and the crossword word have in mind other metaphors for this gridlock-inspired puzzle like weaving and even Escherian geometry, but when I see these alphabetic switchbacks, I think of boustrophedon, an ancient writing practice named for the back-and-forth path of oxen ploughing a field—the ancient Cretan Gortyn Code is just one of many examples:

via Wikipedia user PRA, CC BY-SA 3.0

Perhaps sometime they’ll toss in some Optatianus-style word-search aesthetics, too….

I taught a Greek class many years ago on Plato’s Crito, and I’m happy to have had the opportunity (at last!) to write something about this dialogue over at Lapham’s Quarterly. In my new essay, I write about Socrates’ belief that “living among irreverent chaos is worse than dying under the rule of law” and consider more broadly why Socrates, “history’s paragon of free thinking,” capitulates to his unjust sentencing to death-by-hemlock. Here’s a little sip from the poisonous cup, but do go over to Lapham’s to gulp the rest down:

Bested only by Jesus, Socrates is the most celebrated of the West’s condemned men. His story is familiar to readers of Plato’s Apology, an account of Socrates’ self-defense at his 399 BC trial, and to viewers of Jacques-Louis David’s 1787 painting La Mort de Socrate: the Athenian gadfly was found guilty of corrupting the city’s young and straying from its approved theologies, crimes that earned him not a cross to bear but a cup to drink. But less familiar than these two forensic episodes—his courtroom sentencing and execution by hemlock about a month later—are the events that come between them.