Odessa’s Oddities & Curiosities | Week of 1/22/24

Dear friends,

I just love the beginning of a semester. I have spent perhaps too much time organizing my Google Calendar, and thus subsequently organizing my brain. All my classes are exciting (and not yet, stressful). All the possibilities of a new semester await.

I’m going to give you a quick (hopefully!) run-down of my classes this semester. My plan is to secure an interesting tidbit from each one to report on each week. Then, of course, I’ll share my media recommendations!

1. The Epic in the European Literary Tradition

   In this class, we chart 2500 years of history, traversing land from India to Ireland, as we read from the great epic to the novel, from the realm of myth to the realm of humans and the here-and-now. We’ll read The Ramayana, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Dante’s Inferno, Don Quixote, & Ulysses. I share an interesting characterization of laughter from Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. He wrote about the role of laughter/humor in the novel and how laughter makes “an object come up close” — “laughter as a phenomenon of nearness.” In other news, I’m thoroughly enjoying the Ramayana, and I’m settling into the routine of reading hundreds of pages of thorough “vegetable-book” fare each week. Also!! My reading of the Ramayana has already served useful in understanding the news. Prime Minister Modi of India just made a politically contentious move in building a giant temple to Rama, the protagonist of the Ramayana, in Ayodha (the home of Rama in the epic!). This is part of Modi’s Hindu-first India agenda, sidelining the country’s Muslim population. Also, if the Ramayana were a YA fantasy novel, Ravana & Sita would most definitely have an enemies-to-lovers arc.

2. Multivariate Statistics in the Social Sciences

   I’m taking this class asynchronously because eating lunch is important! But I love this professor (it’s my third class with Prof Reuning Scherer!) No tidbits to report at the moment…we just reviewed a much of the multivariate methods we’ll cover this semester. I’m on the hunt for an interesting dataset to tackle this semester — let me know if you have a recommendation. Also! I’m feeling grateful that I was taught linear algebra in 10th grade (thank you Mr. Foster!), despite the fact that linear algebra is not usually a part of high school curricula.

3. The Social Body

   I first heard Prof. Wendy Berry Mendes speak in my Junior Colloquium in Cognitive Science last semester, and I knew pretty immediately that I both wanted to work in her lab AND take her new class. She just moved to Yale from UCSF (so a full-circle academic institution moment for me — the first lab I worked in was at UCSF my junior year summer). I’ll fill you all in more about my new lab in the coming weeks. In the meantime, you couldn’t have described a more perfect class for my research interests, diving deep into the many bidirectional influences of the brain & the rest of the body.

4. Modern Jewish Poets (taught by Professor Peter Cole)

   Not only is the class full of beloved Jewish friends, but I feel so concretely that to be in Professor Cole’s class is to be in the presence of a true genius of poetry and translation. The way he reads and teaches poetry is just astounding. Exquisite. In the past, I was used to parsing classes for Jewish and poetic elements, and so I feel so lucky that those elements are the goal of the class. We spent much of our first class discussing how to define a Modern Jewish Poet. Then immediately started analyzing some poems including Aharon Shabtai’s “Passover” (trans. by Prof Cole), and Hayim Nahman Bialik’s “On Slaughter” — both of which speak acutely to the Palestinian condition, both intentionally (Shabtai) and unintentionally (Bialik). We’re starting with reading Gertrude Stein (well, trying to read Stein), but at the moment, I’m just enjoying how her words feel so interesting on the tongue.

5. Daily Themes

   Daily Themes is one of those classic Yale classes (in fact, it’s “Yale’s oldest, continuously taught, longest-running class”) — you can read about it in the New Yorker in 1966. It was first taught at Yale in 1907 and requires that every student write 300 words to a unique prompt five days a week. And each student gets assigned a personal tutor whom with to discuss their themes each week. Our first reading included Fred Robinson’s “The History of English and its Practical Uses”, which discussed how English borrows prominently from German, French, and Latin, and how the source language affects the connotations of the words. Robinson describes “the directness and force” of Germanic words, and how they contrast with the “cool detachment” of French-derived words. The specific example that delighted me was that all our words for farm animals are Germanic, but our words from the corresponding foods/meats are French-derived. For example, pig is Germanic, but pork is French-derived. The German-speaking Anglo-Saxon peasants would be taking care of the livestock, then serving the food to the French-speaking Norman nobility, thus calling the presented food by the French name. Because of this linguistic-historical habit, English speakers have emotional distance from the meats they consume — Robinson proffers that perhaps more of us would be vegetarian if we called it cowmeat, sheep’s flesh, etc.

Apologies, perhaps that wasn’t as quick of a recap as I intended but please bear with me.

Daniella recommended the podcast Overthink to me. I haven’t quite decided how much I like it — I find the subject matter and discussion interesting but I do prefer a more highly produced podcast that moves tightly between subject matter. Anyway, while at the gym, I listened to their episode about the philosophy of exercise. They referenced an essay from Mark Greif called “Against Exercise”, and quoted:

“Modern exercise makes you acknowledge the machine operating inside yourself. Nothing can make you believe we harbor nostalgia for factory work but a modern gym. The lever of the die press no longer commands us at work. But with the gym we import vestiges of the leftover equipment of industry to our leisure. We leave the office, and put the conveyor belt under our feet, and run as if chased by devils.”

I’ll leave you that to chew on…certainly an interesting listen while at the gym.

At another workout, I listened to a podcast from Radiolab about how the human phenomenon of choking is also intrinsically related to the evolution of human speech. Many more interesting stories are contained in the episode!

I walked into my favorite spot on campus to avoid the rain/snow this week on the first day of class. Grey Matter Books feels deeply “college” to me with this superb array of second-hand books. I was browsing the aisles with my coffee when I came upon Jewish Magic & Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion by Jordan Trachtenberg. I’m savoring each chapter, because I’m deeply fascinated by how certain practices (deemed more “pagan” today) were tapered out of Judaism because of antisemitism and accusation of sorcery. But I plan on fully reclaiming Jewish sorcery allegations.

Speaking of older books, are you familiar with The Special Design That Makes Library Books Indestructible…highly recommend this episode of Half As Interesting (an offshoot of Wendover Productions if not a little more irreverent.

And here’s a jumble of other interesting media I consumed this week with less of a prelude: clown cardio (a form of exercise that I definitely want to try!), R’Sharon Brous’ brilliant essay in The Times about showing up for one another, how to face death without Gd, and the new awareness of bookshelf wealth.

Hoping you all had an excellent and curiosity-filled reentry to daily life in 2024!

With love & curiosity,

Odessa