On the short and momentous life of Milman Parry
“Sappho and Alcaeus,” by Lawrence Alma-Tadema,1881. Courtesy of the Walters Museum of Art.
One afternoon in 1935, Milman Parry, a 33-year-old scholar whose research would revolutionize the study of Ancient Greek poetry, was unpacking his suitcase at the Palms hotel in Los Angeles. According to his wife, Marian, Parry was naked from the waist up and rummaging through his clothes when he accidentally jostled a handgun tangled up in a shirt, which sent a bullet into his heart. Underneath a news photograph of Marian taken later that year, a caption read: “Mrs. Milman Parry, who was widowed in Los Angeles, recently, when her husband, in a tragic example of professorial absent-mindedness, accidentally shot himself to death.”
Iliad and the
Odyssey have been commonly regarded from antiquity to the present as the most exemplary, the truest and the most inspired secular poems in the western heritage. To account for their received excellence, each age has been inclined to interpret them as doing better what it conceived its [own] poets to be doing or aiming at.
That is, they tended to be seen like the poems of one’s own age, whatever it was, only better. But no, said Parry, Homer was different, and not just from the literature of our own time, or from Victorian literature, or from that of the Middle Ages, but even from almost all other ancient Greek literature. A rough, ill-formed thought might place the
From 2006 to 2020, Albert Edmund Lord III served as writer and curator of the African American Heritage Month (AAHM) photo and art exhibits, presented by the Los Angeles City Council at City Hall in recognition of Black History Month. A brainchild of City Council President Emeritus Herb Wesson, Councilmember District 10, the photo and art exhibits were based on African American themes to reflect social, cultural and political occurrences in American society. Photo courtesy of Poolside Post Productions Some might know
Albert Edmund Lord, III as the dutiful Deputy to Los Angeles’ first and only African American President of the City Council, the Honorable President Emeritus Herb Wesson from District 10. However, there is so much more to Albert Lord, the new Vice President of Community Build, Inc.
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Sunday morning coming down
Tom Rush made his name in the sixties folk revival; he is a peer of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Eric Andersen, and Judy Collins. Tomorrow he turns 80. I’ve loved his music for a long time, Incorporating notes from my 2011 interview with him, I want to take the occasion to celebrate his birthday. I hope readers who may have missed the interview or who may have joined us since then might find the notes of interest.
Performing at the Club 47 coffeehouse, Rush emerged from the vibrant Cambridge folk scene around Harvard. Tom recorded two fantastic folk albums on Prestige in the early sixties. Tom’s first album on Prestige was