Author: Rufus F.

I’m preparing to head back to France next Saturday, preparing a Napoleon course for the spring, and trying to land a job teaching at a university in Singapore; so posting will be light! However, I...

Apologies if everyone’s seen it already, but this is perhaps the best response to arbitrary authority that I’ve ever encountered outside of a Marx Brothers film.

Ozymandias is one of Shelley’s best known sonnets and was actually written in competition with his friend Horace Smith, who wrote a very good (although inferior) sonnet on the same topic. Ozymandias is another name for Ramses...

“Porpoises Rescue Dick Van Dyke“. Have a happy weekend!

Maximum rock’n’soul: If you ask me what the problem is with the radio today, I’d start with the fact that I never hear them play the BellRays.

You think I’m a curmudgeon? Writing about “party schools” and their legacy students, Margaret Soltan ups the ante for scathing, funny critiques of our “Alexandrian culture”. Bless her soul.

Seven Against Thebes is a war play that shows no war. Rivaling the Homeric epics in its descriptions of the beauty and horribleness of warfare, the play instead shows its audience the helpless spectators...

“Librarians are the worst enemies of books there are.” He smiles sardonically when he says this, an amiable old fart that the library keeps around to shelve books. With his fire-hose arms and gut...

I remember a bookstore cashier once flirting with me over my purchase of Catullus, whose poems she considered to be very sexy. I suppose it depends on your tastes. Most of his poems are either...

What a coincidence! Today, Mr. Brown and Mr. Carter debate the role of religious belief, or disbelief, and the state- largely about what ground of being provides the best common basis for society- and...

A website that facilitates adultery is offering to pay a momentarily-famous adulterer $100,000 to promote adultery. (Insert something flip here about capitalism being ethically-neutral.)

When Hollaback NYC debuted their iPhone application, I mused here that they were soon going to push for stronger anti-street harassment legislation (and got flamed as a heartless, paranoid “libertarian”). Anyway, they’re now pushing for stronger anti-harassment...

Is there such a thing as a feel-good tragedy? Certainly this play, in which Oedipus who was horribly wronged previously goes from crippled dependence to visionary strength before dying what we can assume was...

Image via Wikipedia All three of the great Athenian tragedians (Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles) dealt with the story of Orestes and Electra killing their mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus in revenge for their...

Smoke Smoke has been the sign of human settlement ever since Prometheus’ defiant act, ever since people settled down to roasting, torching, scorching and cremating, ever since human history began its smoldering. The pale...

SUNY Albany has decided to cut costs by getting rid of their “underperforming” departments. First to go, a few esoteric fields: classics, all foreign languages except Spanish, and theatre. No news about how this will...

Scott recently posted about the strikes in France, citing an NPR report from a Paris correspondent who said, among other things: “This strike/protest is only using the pensions as a trigger to fight against...

Sophocles’s Women of Trachis presents us with all sorts of problems, which is likely why it’s rarely performed today, even in Ezra Pound’s controversially conversational but still quite good translation. Part of this, I...

I’ve seen this video linked elsewhere in a condescending let’s-laugh-at-young-conservatives sort of way. And, admittedly, it’s cringeworthy. But damned if it isn’t far more compelling than most discussions of Burke and tradition and how...

One of the real mixed blessings of modern warfare has been that improvements in medical technologies have allowed more wounded soldiers to survive what would have once been fatal injuries- now there are more...