Literary Discussions

I did manage to contact one of my teachers and told him how one of his talks had stayed with me all my life. What he told us was almost like a Liberal Arts sermonette. The late Robert Bart had given the same kind of pep talk once. What was said basically was that we should continue these sorts of readings and discussions throughout our life. That teacher replied "so, you remembered one thing I said,... thanks for telling me."  Actually I remember a second thing about how the Neapolitan sixth chord is built upon the flatted second note of the scale and is used by composers like Mozart as a kind of unique punctuation. I never actually could HEAR the Neapolitan sixth although there were people in class that could. I think I also remember that the LOWEST note in all of Bach's St. Matthew's Passion occurs on the word Todd (death).  He also mentioned that Cosi Fan Tutte was written with an incredible range from highest notes to lowest notes to demonstrate the virtuosity of one particular soprano and women have been struggling to squeak out those high notes and fart out those low notes ever since. The coolest opening question was by Nick Maistrellis, why does Aeneas leave Hades through the gate of FALSE dreams.  Last week, during some discussions of Osama bin Laden and forgiveness it occurred to me that a great opening question might be "did Jesus suffer the crucifixion for the sake of all people including the Hitlers and Stalins of this world." Another great opening question might be "was Christ on the cross UNHAPPY" (or was Socrates unhappy on the day of his execution.)  I can honestly say that I have tried to make my entire life like a seminar as much as possible. Once the Internet became available to me in 1998 then I tried to have seminar-like discussions in Yahoo chat and in IRC channels. Once I was in the Strand's used bookstore line and started a conversation with a woman who then asked whether the Greeks or Shakespeare had achieved the height of tragedy and I blogged about that for a while.