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dankodesThis is the last book in Lessons from the States! After this, we get into some fairly different material:
Minor odes of the kingdom (about 7 weeks)
Greater odes of the kingdom (3 weeks)
Odes of the temple and the altar (4 weeks)
And then we'll be talking about what we want to do next. But seriously, working through all the Lessons from the States is itself a milestone: one building-block of your Classical Education achieved.
* I found the best option for the weekly reminder emails, via Gmail. The external service options are more involved than our purposes require. Does anyone know anything about how to arrange an Apps Script? Basically all it has to do is tell ten people, on Saturdays, to come and get their juice/poems.
Until someone knows what to do there, I'll send out manual messages weekly. If you'd like to receive these and are not getting them, please let me know.
* If you haven't read it yet, chapter one, on tetrasyllabic shi poetry, in How to Read Chinese Poetry is hugely useful for the Book of Odes, imo.
* IF YOU HAVE FRIENDS WHO MIGHT LIKE TO JOIN or have other ideas, please let me know on this post.
* Every week I search the poems' English results to see if I can find any scholarship or neat bits and pop the results in Resources. Here is this week's collection.
* In case you missed it and are interested, some people on the com are doing a Nirvana in Fire read-along here. Anyone with thoughts is welcome to chime in.
**NEXT BATCH MARCH 22.**
Minor odes of the kingdom (about 7 weeks)
Greater odes of the kingdom (3 weeks)
Odes of the temple and the altar (4 weeks)
And then we'll be talking about what we want to do next. But seriously, working through all the Lessons from the States is itself a milestone: one building-block of your Classical Education achieved.
* I found the best option for the weekly reminder emails, via Gmail. The external service options are more involved than our purposes require. Does anyone know anything about how to arrange an Apps Script? Basically all it has to do is tell ten people, on Saturdays, to come and get their juice/poems.
Until someone knows what to do there, I'll send out manual messages weekly. If you'd like to receive these and are not getting them, please let me know.
* If you haven't read it yet, chapter one, on tetrasyllabic shi poetry, in How to Read Chinese Poetry is hugely useful for the Book of Odes, imo.
* IF YOU HAVE FRIENDS WHO MIGHT LIKE TO JOIN or have other ideas, please let me know on this post.
* Every week I search the poems' English results to see if I can find any scholarship or neat bits and pop the results in Resources. Here is this week's collection.
* In case you missed it and are interested, some people on the com are doing a Nirvana in Fire read-along here. Anyone with thoughts is welcome to chime in.
**NEXT BATCH MARCH 22.**
Re: 158. 伐柯 - Fa Ke
"The same urge to compare courtship with the world of everyday activities, and in the same questioning format, is to be seen in the poem Fa Ke 伐柯, “Chopping an axe-handle’ (Mao 158).159 As Arthur Waley points out, the poem Fa Ke goes on to show “the popular view that marriage was a very simple matter, and a match-maker by no means necessary”, thus problematising the wisdom dispensed by Nan Shan.
160 However, the first stanza of Fa Ke, in setting up the assumption of the need for a match-maker, notably uses almost exactly the same diction as is used in Nan Shan:
伐柯如何? Chopping an axe-handle, how is it done?
匪斧不克 If not for an axe it would be impossible
取妻如何？ Seeking a wife, how is it done?
匪媒不得 If not for a matchmaker, she cannot be obtained.
This indicates that either one of these poems plays off the other in its coincidence of marriage and axe imagery, or both poems play off some existing conventional way of thinking about, and, in particular (given their shared diction), talking about marriage. It is quite possible that this convention could also be associated with a convention of ritual. The use of axes is a vividly physical and visual act - elements which, as we will recall, Granet considers indicative of and fundamental to performative ritual."
Also, is there something here in the idea that you need a woman to get a woman?