Your London Prof has an Exhibit here in Pomona

Don't know how many of you check your updates to the London Blog, but I thought you might find it fun to know that your instructor finds himself with a photographic show opening this coming Second Saturday in the Pomona Arts Colony.

That's June 12th at the SCA Project Gallery at the address shown on the image. Best, JM

This Blog Explained

This Blog has a core place for examples, information, historical interpretation, geocaching, and more for the two courses I taught for this year's London Quarter at Cal Poly Pomona. There are 9 student blogs associated with this one in which students fulfill assignments given to them. The two courses CLS 362 and CLS 482 focus finding key historical points in London and on philosophy of art in London as only London can make possible with its many wonderful (and free) museums.

In the first 3 weeks, the course was anchored in a Blackboard website, but from early on we migrated to the set of blogs made possible by Blogspot. The student blogs developed through answering weekly assignments and mirrored this core blog. All of the students mastered the basics of blogging. Some did so very well. Priscilla Ngo's blog is a good illustration of this, but do look at all of them at the URL's indicated in the previous posting.

Best,
Jim Manley

Garsington (and the End of the Quarter)

We return to the US tomorrow morning. The time has been incredibly compressed. I managed to get to a performance of Fidelio at the Garsington Opera, primarily to see the manor and grounds, but the opera was first class. Perhaps I'll have occasion to say more in this Blog.

But for those of you who are following this blog from the US and elsewhere, don't forget to check out the student blogs.

Which Keats' Poem? Not "On Seeing the Elgin..." but...

The British Museum label identifies "Ode on a Grecian Urn"; in particular,

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?

To what green altar, O mysterious priest,

Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,

And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?

But he must have been inspired by multiple objects: not only the Grecian Urn, but paintings by Claude Lorrain and Raphael which were on display at the British Museum in 1819. And the poem "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles" doesn't at first glance make reference to the Elgin Marbles at all!

From Pope's "Rape of the Lock"

What dire offence from am'rous causes springs,

What mighty contests rise from trivial things,

I sing--This verse to Caryll, muse! is due:

This, ev'n Belinda may vouchsafe to view:

Slight is the subject, but not so the praise,

If she inspire, and he approve my lays...

See also this source.

Tintern Abbey

...And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear, -- both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.

Keats 'On Seeing Elgin Marbles for the First Time'

My spirit is too weak; mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagined pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.
Yet 'tis a gentle luxury to weep,
That I have not the cloudy winds to keep
Fresh for the opening of the morning's eye.
Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
Bring round the heart an indescribable feud;
So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old Time -with a billowy main,
A sun, a shadow of a magnitude.