Ellopos Blog

According to a review published in the Observer by Peter Conrad, and republished by Guardian, concerning Barenboim’s effort to use music in order to promote friendship, “the snarled and lethal political mess remains and Barenboim’s reflections on the enterprise reveal that it was never more than a noble folly. … Does music actually have the power to sponsor brotherhood, as Beethoven claimed in the boisterous finale of his ninth symphony? … Beyond expressing pious hopes about Utopia, Barenboim has little progress to report.”

Related (automatic selection) :

• The Excellence of Daniel Barenboim
• Music is Sound with Thought
• Barenboim’s Beethoven
• Plato notes: Practicing Virtue (Timaeus 18b)
• Oligarchy is not the problem of our democracies

A research released last week shows that studying art can help students make up to 38 per cent more accurate observations. Dr. Khoshbin, who had a background in art analysis himself before taking a medical degree, said art classes seem to help train students in what he calls “visual literacy.”

Paul Collins, in a recent Slate article, cited a study showing “a stunning drop in semicolon usage between the 18th and 19th centuries, from 68.1 semicolons per thousand words to just 17.7.” This is a reference from another article, at Boston Globe, where Jan Freeman quotes views as these: the semicolon is “ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly,” “Real men, goes the unwritten rule of American punctuation, don’t use semi-colons”, the semicolon is “girly,” “odious,” and “the most pusillanimous, sissified, utterly useless mark of punctuation ever invented.”

Related (automatic selection) :

• This Singing Ground
• The Greek Identity
• St Symeon the New Theologian
• Misunderstanding the ancient Greeks
• Birthday in Ancient Greece