What is surrealist painting? What are its underlying rationales? In this podcast, I offer a few thoughts on surrealism in painting, and name a few of my favorite surrealist painters. This is a vast subject, but a lot can be gained by looking at the work of the very best artists: Giorgio de Chirico, Yves Tanguy, Joan Miro, Max Ernst, and Pablo Picasso.
The Battle of Zama essentially concluded the Second Punic War, that terrible contest waged by Rome and Carthage for control of the western Mediterranean. It took place in 202 B.C. near the town of Zama in what is now Tunisia. The commanding generals were Hannibal on the Carthaginian side, and Publius Cornelius Scipio on the Roman. The historian Livy (XXX.30) relates a fascinating exchange between these two great commanders that took place on the eve of the battle.
In this podcast we discuss some aspects of Martin Scorsese’s movie The Irishman. This movie seems to divide people into proponents and detractors. I think it is a great film, and very much worth seeing, as long as we approach it from the right perspective.
We spend most of lives in obedience to one form of authority or another. Rarely, if ever, is it counted as a virtue worthy of discussion by us moderns. On the contrary: we are expected to applaud disobedience, disorder, and challenges to authority, as if such disobedience were automatically exempt from scrutiny.
In this podcast we discuss some good movies and programs I’ve seen recently. “Dark Waters” (2019) is a legal drama dealing with corporate malfeasance, and “The Confession Killer” (2019) is a gripping documentary about how the Henry Lee Lucas serial killer investigation was handled. In some ways, the message of both of them is the same: justice does not come automatically, but has to be fought for by courageous people.
We have previously discussed the Book of Kalila and Dimna in these pages. Its source material can be traced to the Indian classic The Panchatantra of Vishnu Sarma. And it is from this book that the following fable originates.
A period of travel and overseas residence can transform a man from a plodding conformist to a free-thinking iconoclast. Travel is the expediter of dreams, the elixir of mental health, and the abolisher of parochial preconceptions. Nowhere is this truth more clearly demonstrated than in the life and career of scientist Charles Darwin, whose five-year voyage aboard HMS Beagle provided him with the raw materials from which he was able to formulate his earth-shaking doctrine of evolution by natural selection.
If you are not laughing, you are not fully enjoying life. It’s been a while since I’ve done a G Manifesto (Twitter: @MichaelPorfirio) tweet reading. But popular demand can’t be ignored, so I decided to put another podcast out with some of his most recent tweets. The laughter is nonstop…listen for yourself.
There are two things that a man must learn to accept in life: the inherent ambiguities in choosing between alternatives, and the omnipresence of suffering. Consider the story told about Socrates in Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the Philosophers (II.33): a young man asked the philosopher for his advice on whether he should get married. The old man told him that there were good arguments both for and against the proposition, and that he would regret whatever decision he made. “If you do not get married,” he said, “you may be lonely and your bloodline will die out; if you do get married, you may be henpecked, beset by financial strains, and dubious in-laws. You may also have to tolerate bad children.”
The birthdate of the philologist and grammarian Yacub Ibn Al-Sikkit (ابو يوسف يعقوب ابن السكيت) is not known with certainty, but 800 A.D. is a reliable estimate. His father enjoyed notoriety and prestige in court circles, and may have conferred on his son some access to the corridors of power. The sobriquet “Al-Sikkit” was given to him because of his taciturnity, for the Arabic verb sakata (سكت) means “to be silent.” However, as the reader will soon discover, he was evidently not silent enough.
Quintus Curtius 
You must be logged in to post a comment.