"Clair de Lune": Claude Debussy

"Clair de Lune": Claude Debussy

I've played Debussy's Arabesque No. 1:



Here's the equally enchanting Arabesque No. 2:

Classic Mindy Kaling

I recently posted on Mindy Kaling, the successful and popular comedian, who was invited to Dartmouth University, her alma mater, to give the graduation ceremony speech, and the example she uses to the students.

I wrote:

[S]he chooses an alumni: "Poet" Dr. Seuss, of The Cat in the Hat fame is an alumni!. Well we can give her that bit of nostalgia.

But why not evoke (invoke) the spirits of another Dartmouthian poet, the deceased white male laureate and Pulitzer prize winner Robert Frost, who wrote "I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference," highlighting the adventurous character of (dead and alive) white men who take on those less travelled worlds out of CURIOSITY! To see where the adventure would lead them! Then they build things like universities.

Well Kaling was a Classics student who - briefly - majored in...Latin!

Kaling began as a Latin major, but decided to pursue a degree in playwriting instead...[Source: Dartmouth.edu

Yes what are you going to do with a dead white language?

Her Facebook page has this introduction:

About

Mindy Kaling is an actress, comedian, writer, producer & shopper. She can translate Latin...

I studied Spanish in Mexico for a full two years (I went to language school and earned a Spanish Language diploma, I read books difficult books, written by Mexican poets, philosophers and politicians, I worked in an all-Spanish research centre, I lived in a rural outpost several weeks at at time, I travelled the country where people thought I was Mexican, and I still don't say I can translate Spanish on a public site! My resume reads:

LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY
- English: Excellent speaking, reading and writing
- French: Good speaking, reading and writing
- Spanish: Moderate speaking, reading and writing
- Amharic: Moderate speaking, reading and writing

Kaling makes some quote about the superbowl as a case for her Latin proficiency on her twitter post:

AM I THE ONLY LATIN NERD OUTRAGED BY THE SUPERBOWL DROPPING ROMAN NUMERALS?! LUPAE FILIUS!!!

In a New York Times interview, Kaling is asked:

Whom do you consider the best writers — novelists, essayists, critics, journalists, poets — working today?

She answers:

Cormac McCarthy, Jhumpa Lahiri, Zadie Smith, Gillian Flynn, Salman Rushdie, Jonathan Franzen.

See here my posts on:
- Cormac McCarthy
- Jhumpa Lahiri
- Zadie Smith
- Salman Rushdie

I argue that they are not the greatest.

And about her Latin moments, the New York Times interview:

NYT: You studied classics at Dartmouth. What was the best thing you read there?

MK: I loved translating the “Aeneid” from Latin. Poor Aeneas and his pietas. That guy could not catch a break. I also love stories within stories, and the “Aeneid” is full of that.

Yes as a homework assignment.

I did that. I studied Latin for two years during my highschool years. It is tough and requires the utmost dedication! If Kaling had said that her brief Latin exposure helped her with the English language as I say it does (including French and Spanish - and by the way German too - all that GRAMMAR!) then it would have had a ring truth to it.

Now she just comes off as a show-off who wants to dig in how much of the white man's world she can say "boo" to in her usual infantle comedy.

So much for a Latin (dropped) major.

Lawrence Auster's Reading List

O Muses! O High Genius! Be my aid!
O Memory, recorder of the vision,
here shall your true nobility be displayed!
------------------------------------------------------
Quote from Dante's
The Divine Comedy: The Inferno, Canto II
Posted by Larry at View From the Right

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Lawrence Auster dared to make a reading list. In this day and age of internet reading, where our attention span is good enough to look for (and click on) links), Larry gave us close to 150 books to read. He has read all of them (he calls his list "personal favorites and recommended books.") He made the list in 2006, as an "unfinished draft," so we can assume that the list is much longer.

I've posted below the titles and authors of the books. If you want to read Larry's commentaries on the books and the authors, his impressions, when he read the books, etc., you can find them at The View From the Right, under the simple title: Reading List.

It is interesting that Larry start his list with the classics, and end it with race and immigration, the transformative powers which are changing the classics of Western, and American, civilization.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Literature/Classics/fiction

Edith Hamilton
- Mythology

Mary Renault
- The King Must Die
- The Bull from the Sea

Aeschylus
- The Oresteia

Sophocles
- The Oedipus plays
- Ajax
- Philoctetes

Homer
- The Iliad

Dante Alighieri
- The Divine Comedy
-- Inferno
-- Purgatorio
-- Paradiso

Chaucer
- The Canterbury Tales

Shakespeare
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream
- Hamlet
- King Lear
- Richard II
- Henry IV Part I
- The Tempest
- Julius Caesar
- As You Like it
- Much Ado About Nothing
- Macbeth
- Antony and Cleopatra
- The Merchant of Venice
- The Sonnets

Charlton Ogburn
- The Mysterious William Shakespeare.

John Donne
- Woman’s Constancy
- The Sun Rising

Milton
- Paradise Lost

Jane Austen
- Pride and Prejudice

Wordsworth
- Intimations of Immortality
- She was a phantom of delight
- I wandered lonely as a cloud

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- Kubla Khan
- The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Percy Bysshe Shelley
- Ode to the West Wind

Keats
- Ode to a Nightingale
- Ode on a Grecian Urn

Victor Hugo
- Les Misérables

Herman Melville
- Moby Dick

Walt Whitman
- Leaves of Grass

Mark Twain
- Huckleberry Finn

Dostoevsky
- The Brothers Karamazov

Tolstoy
- Anna Karenina

Bernard Shaw
- Man and Superman
- Caesar and Cleopatra
- Pygmalion
- Saint Joan

Oscar Wilde
- The Importance of Being Ernest

Henry James
- The American
- The Bostonians

Thomas Mann
- The Magic Mountain

Yeats
- Collected Poems

T.S. Eliot
- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
- The Waste Land
- Ash Wednesday
- The Four Quartets

Hemingway
- The Collected Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
- The Sun Also Rises
- For Whom the Bell Tolls

F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and Other Short Stories

Ayn Rand
- The Fountainhead
- Atlas Shrugged

Alexander Solzhenitsyn
- One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich
- The First Circle
- The Gulag Archipelago, vol I

Philosophy

Plato
- The Republic

Aristotle
- Nichomachean Ethics

Cicero
- The Republic

Augustine
- The City of God, Books XI and XII

Machiavelli
- The Prince

Leo Strauss
- Natural Right and History

Eric Voegelin
- The New Science of Politics
- Israel and Revelation
- The World of the Polis
- Reason: The Classic Experience

Irving Babbitt
- Democracy and Leadership

C.S. Lewis
- The Abolition of Man

Allan Bloom
- The Closing of the American Mind

Nietzsche
- The Birth of Tragedy
- The Gay Science
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra
- The Twilight of the Idols
- Geneaology of Morals

Seraphim Rose
- Nihilism: The Revolution of the Modern Age

Mircea Eliade
- Cosmos and History

The Bible

The King James and the Revised Standard Version

The Torah

The Prophets

The Four Gospels and the Revelation

Genesis

The Book of Common Prayer
- 1928 edition.

William Neil
- Harper’s Bible Commentary

The Pentateuch and Haftorahs
- Ed. J.H. Hertz

Consciousness; alternative and non-Western religions

P.D. Ouspensky
- In Search of the Miraculous
- A New Model of the Universe
- Tertium Organum
- The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution

Rodney Collin
- The Theory of Celestial Influence

Maurice Nicoll
- The New Man
- The Mark

Meher Baba
- God Speaks
- Discourses

The Upanishads, trans. by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood

The Bhagavad Gita

Mary Baker Eddy
- Science and Health

History and civilization

Henry Bamford Parkes
- Gods and Men: The Origins of Western Culture
- The Divine Order

H.G. Wells
- The Outline of History

Arnold Toynbee
- A Study of History

Thucydides
- The Peloponessian War
- Thucydides

Polybius
- The Rise of the Roman Empire

Edward Gibbon
- The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Plutarch
- Lives

Will Durant
- Story of Civilization
- In Caesar and Christ
- In The Age of Reason
- The Age of Voltaire

Winston Churchill
- History of the Second World War
- A History of the English Speaking Peoples

Paul Johnson
- Modern Times

Bede
- A History of the English Church and People

Paul Murray Kendall
- Richard the Third

American history and biography

James Thomas Flexner
- George Washington

Willard Sterne Randall
- George Washington

George Washington
- Circular letter to the States
- First Inaugural
- Farewell Address

Thomas Jefferson
- First Inaugural

Joseph Ellis
- Founding Brothers
- American Sphinx

Willard Stern Randall
- Benedict Arnold

James McPherson
- Battle Cry of Freedom

Steven Oates
- With Malice Toward None

- Selected Writings and Speeches of Lincoln

Lloyd Lewis
- Sherman: Fighting Prophet

Conservatism

James Burnham
- The Suicide of the West
- The Machiavellians

Burke
- Reflections on the Revolution in France

Ed. by Russell Kirk
- The Portable Conservative Reader

Raoul Berger
- Government by Judiciary

Liberalism

Rousseau
- Essay on Inequality

Locke
- The Second Treatise of Government

James Kalb
- The Tyranny of Liberalism

Science

Darwin
- The Origin of Species

Francis Hitching
- The Neck of the Giraffe

Norman Macbeth
- Darwin Retried

Arthur Koestler
- Janus

Richard Rhodes
- The Making of the Atomic Bomb

Race and immigration

Wilmot Robertson
- The Dispossessed Majority

John Higham
- Strangers in the Land

Madison Grant
- The Passing of the Great Race

Jared Taylor
- Paved with Good Intentions

William McDougall
Is America Safe for Democracy?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------