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A woman called this morning and said, Oh, Dr. Lee, I would love to hear you tonight, but there’s a demonstration at the Town Clock against Bush’s talk last night, so could you postpone your talk?  I’ve been waking up every morning at about 3 or 4 a.m. and lying in bed and rehearsing this– for the last three weeks!  The first week it was kind of fun.   I got a big kick out of listening to myself.  Second week, ehhh.  The third week I thought: will this hour never come? I told her no we were going on as scheduled. I’m very pleased to be here and to welcome you to the Dinner Theater Of the Mind, the first in a series of humanities talks at The Attic that we call One Night University.  I got the term from a fellow on the East Coast, who started the Saturday University.  It’s a sequence of classes that he books and it’s a huge success, as an adult education program.  He’s going to franchise it.  So I’ve got the dibs on One Night University.

Continue reading Homer and the Foundation of the Western Humanities

I told you I was worried last time about sticking my neck out but it was such a success, and I’m so grateful for all of your turning again tonight. I’d like to thank Nigel Sanders-Self for doing the PowerPoint display for me. And my granddaughter, Phoebe Zajac, who did the slides for me. And Wolfgang Rosenberg and Alene Smith for doing the promotion and Eric Thiermann for filming both evenings. We’ll make a DVD or a CD from them. So they’ll be available. And thanks to all the rest of you that have made these two evenings a success. I did the math, and I figured if I did this every night, I could make a quarter of a million dollars in a year. But I was worried about running out of things to say, but then I thought, No, I can repeat some of them.

Continue reading Socrates and the Rise of Rational Self-consciousness in Ancient Greece