Episode 120: A Very Special Episode Of Proverbial

True story, I enjoyed recording this episode so much that I recorded it twice, and the second version is ten minutes longer than the first. There will likely be a corresponding post on the CiRCE blog about this proverb in the next couple weeks.

The subject of the episode? Stupidity. More specifically, the word “stupid” and our profound fear of using it, despite the fact it’s absolutely necessary to do so from time to time.

Changing Values

In the 1980s, family portraits tended to be hierarchical and formal. Parents in the back, kids in the front, obviously posed. All faces were highly visible, there was little distance between the photographer and his subject. The emphasis was on the character of the subjects.

Current family portraits are egalitarian and informal. They’re taken outside with all the members in a row. The emphasis is less on the people and more on the place they have chosen. Faces are relatively unimportant.

This Conversation Always Goes Like This

Tom: So you want the government to develop a mind-reading technology that could forcibly extract thoughts from people’s heads with clinical accuracy? You want the government to have access to your most private, sensitive, intimate memories? You want the government to have the technological capacity to delve into your most embarrassing secrets, or secrets which your wife or parents have entrusted to you? You want the government to be able to extract passwords from human brains? Phobias? You want private companies to be able to do this to their employees? Seriously?

Harry: Yes.

Tom: How in the world could such technology be justified?

Harry: Dominion mandate.

Tips For College Teachers Applying At Classical High Schools

“I’ve seen many college profs conduct high school classes with the same game plan they use in a Lit 510 discussion of Milton or Dante. It doesn’t work. They ask a lot of provocative questions and get a lot of short answers, bad answers, or silence. Socratic discussions work far better among older people who have a bit more experience than the average high school freshman. College profs who think a Socratic discussion on Milton will work with fifteen-year-olds end up having to joke, “You all are a quiet bunch,” to save face. If you’re teaching a one-hour sample lesson, prep a thirty-minute lecture which is interspersed by a dozen quick questions you ask students (“Can someone give me a three-word description of Odysseus’s relationship with his wife?”) to keep them involved.”

-from my latest for CiRCE

A Few Comments On My Latest Book

“When I was young, popular music was a sort of religion to me, but then I got a job teaching classical literature, and over the last twenty years, I’ve come to see just how very different things which last are from pleasant, trendy things that come and go quickly. I’ve also seen how prolonged exposure to blockbuster films, blockbuster novels, and blockbuster theologies corrupt our ability to enjoy or even understand real beauty or piety. I have seen this in my students. I have seen it in myself.

It’s never too late, of course. The responsibility to love and enjoy beautiful things is a lifelong task which is not abrogated simply because we start late.”

-from my latest for CiRCE