Before moving onto the hilariously obscene Lysistrata, we finished up the Symposium with a few Platonic observations, via Diotima. The notion that Love(Eros) is the child of Poverty(or Want) and Contrivance. And that, contrary to what many tell you, it is better to be a lover than to be loved. And that, on an elemental level, love a search for two things, immortality of the soul and the good. A way to the immortal is the beggeting(sp?) of children of the brain--The Illiad and The Odyssey are Homer's--, not to be confused with children of the body.
And to Aristophanes, the sole surviving representative of Old Comedy--which had direct politcal commentary in the plot-- and his play Lysistrata, where virtually all the characters(except perhaps the eponymous heroine) are completely off-the-wall horny.
We have also been asked to think of comedy in this sense: If the gist of tragedy was that it was better never to have been born at all, then the gist of comedy is found in the call of Sir John Falstaff: "More life!" It may be lewd, bereft of dignity and honor, and incredibly nasty, but it is life, and so one should have it.
I also think I should see Lina Wertmuller's Seven Beauties now.
I also liked the nugget about how the Greek word for poetry is poesis, which means to make up. So what does it matter if something is "real" or "plausible" or "contrived" or "just something that somebody made up"?
And to Aristophanes, the sole surviving representative of Old Comedy--which had direct politcal commentary in the plot-- and his play Lysistrata, where virtually all the characters(except perhaps the eponymous heroine) are completely off-the-wall horny.
We have also been asked to think of comedy in this sense: If the gist of tragedy was that it was better never to have been born at all, then the gist of comedy is found in the call of Sir John Falstaff: "More life!" It may be lewd, bereft of dignity and honor, and incredibly nasty, but it is life, and so one should have it.
I also think I should see Lina Wertmuller's Seven Beauties now.
I also liked the nugget about how the Greek word for poetry is poesis, which means to make up. So what does it matter if something is "real" or "plausible" or "contrived" or "just something that somebody made up"?
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