Author Archives: tpalaima

UPCOMING LECTURES BY TOM PALAIMA

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THE NEW YORK AEGEAN BRONZE AGE COLLOQUIUM
will meet at The Institute of Fine Arts One East 78th Street

Friday, October 12, 2012 @ 6:30 PM

Thomas Palaima
will speak on

"Gold into silver? 65 years of Mycenaean Palaeography"

 

Senior Fellows Honors Program School of Communications  BMC 5.208  TUESDAY NOVEMBER 13 12:30-1-45

“Second Last Thoughts on Bob Dylan’s ‘Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie'”

A talk by Tom Palaima, professor of Classics, University of Texas at Austin

On Jan. 29, 1961, Bob Dylan, 19 years old, took a bus to Morris Plains, New Jersey, where he met for the first time his idol and inspiration Woody Guthrie, 48 years of age, who, almost five years before, in May, 1956, had been ‘involuntarily checked into’ Greystone Park Hospital with advanced Huntington’s Chorea.

On Feb. 14, 1961, Dylan wrote “Song for Woody” (SFW). Two years later, on April 12, 1963, at New York’s Town Hall, before 900 people, Dylan recited a poem of five pages, “Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie” ((LTOWG). Guthrie would live four and a half more years after Dylan had his “last thoughts.”

In this talk, professor Palaima will examine these two tributes, considering the following questions: What would Woody Guthrie’s condition have been when Dylan met him?  What impact might Dylan’s finding out at this time about the range of Guthrie’s genius have had on Dylan? What might Guthrie’s end condition have taught Dylan about what is important in life with regard to fame, music, personal choices, creativity, society and the human heart and soul? And how might this have affected, in large or small ways, where Dylan was heading with his life and his music?

Tom Palaima is Robert M. Armstrong Centennial Professor of Classics and has written commentaries, reviews and articles about musical figures like Pinetop Perkins, Jimmy LaFave, Woody Guthrie, Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan. He teaches and writes about war song and music as social commentary.

See, for example:  http://www.texasobserver.org/archives/item/15265-2665-alive-and-singing-the-truth  and

http://sites.utexas.edu/pasp/songs-of-hard-travelers-from-homer-to-bob-dylan-and-dionysis-savvopoulos/

http://sites.utexas.edu/pasp/publications/dylanology/

Contact: Dave Junker, junker@austin.utexas.edu, 512-773-0673

See for other senior fellows talks: http://communication.utexas.edu/senior-fellows/public-events-and-lectures-2012-13

Palaima Article on kosmos in Mycenaean palatial culture

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—“Kosmos in the Mycenaean Texts: The Response of Mycenaean ‘Scribes’ to the Culture of Kosmos,” M.-L. Nosch and R. Laffineur eds., Kosmos: Jewellery, Adornment and Textile in the Aegean Bronze Age (Aegaeum 33, Leuven – Liège 2012) 697-703 + figures CLIX-CLX.

In this article I discuss the significance of the etymology of the word ‘kosmos’ and the importance of the principle of ‘order’ in Mycenaean palatial culture as understood in the organizational system worked out by the palatial centers and structures, in the aesthetics of the ‘order’ of palatial architecture, and in the texts of the Mycenaean scribes. The very process of recording information was an imposition of order. We discuss passages from Homer and Hesiod and make reference to Continue reading →

Songs of Hard Travelers from Homer to Bob Dylan (and Dionysis Savvopoulos)

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T. Palaima, “Songs of the ‘Hard Traveler’ from Odysseus to the Never-Ending Tourist,” Modern Greek Studies Yearbook 26/27 (2010/11) 189-206.

This article studies themes connected with traveling and existing away from home from the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer through the modern folk song tradition as performed and transformed by Bob Dylan, including songs by the Stanley Brothers, Charley Patton, Skip James, Muddy Waters, Stephen F. Foster, Martin Carthy and Dionysis Savvopoulos.

Access article here:
Songs of the ‘Hard Traveler’ from Odysseus to the Never-Ending Tourist

The dangers of rushing through life’s stages

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Palaima: The dangers of rushing through life’s stages

[On-line title: “The dangers of rushing into the working world”]

Posted: 2:04 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 27, 2012

http://www.statesman.com/news/news/opinion/palaima-the-dangers-of-rushing-into-the-working-wo/nSNSt/

By Tom Palaima  Special to the Austin American-Statesman

PRINT EDITION Friday, September 28, 2012

“There is a time to every purpose under heaven.” But is that time four or five years long and what is it for?

Several years ago, I heard my friend Ira Iscoe, Ashbel Smith Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, give a talk on Erik Erikson’s theories about the developmental stages of man. Iscoe’s talk was typically lucid. His and Erickson’s ideas have rattled around in my brain, heart and soul as I have thought about how what the ancient Greeks called a “teknon,” literally ‘birthed thing,” develops into a socialized adult.

The Greeks were not alone in emphasizing the “thing-ness” of young human beings. Continue reading →

Bill Powers and the University of Texas at Austin Board of Regents: Historical Perspective

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Marsha Miller/
COURTESY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS

 

“Powers’ comments about regents didn’t have to be ‘strong’ to be too much”
Tom Palaima, Regular Contributor

Austin American-Statesman Published: 7:14 p.m. Monday, May 14, 2012

Print edition May 15, 2012

http://www.statesman.com/opinion/powers-comments-about-regents-didnt-have-to-be-2356115.html

On his Burkablog on May 9, the senior executive editor of Texas Monthly, Paul Burka, who has long covered the governor’s office in Texas politics, reported that University of Texas President Bill Powers’ job might be in jeopardy because of his “strong opposition” to the decision of the UT System Board of Regents to freeze tuition at the UT flagship for the next two years. When I read Burka’s blog entry and the comments on it, I wondered what Powers said or did that would constitute “strong opposition.”

I kept in mind that, in Texas, presiding over the 29th-ranked university in the world, according to the most recent survey in the Times Higher Education, does not necessarily give the president a lot of what the Romans called auctoritas or dignitas.

To understand the UT System power hierarchy, just remember that etymologically a president sits, regents play at being kings, and the governor pilots the ship of state, often, it seems, without a rudder, map or sextant.

Lutcher Stark, who for 24 years (1919-1943) made being a regent his “outstanding hobby,” held this view: “The president of the University of Texas occupies the position to the board of regents as a general manager of a corporation does to its board of directors.” Indeed, according to Continue reading →

Zachary Fischer completes two digital projects in summer 2012: SMID and Alice E. Kober correspondence

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Zachary Fischer, a graduate student in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin, completed two valuable digitization projects in summer of 2012: making pdfs of the PASP-produced volumes of SMID and making available images of the correspondence of Alice E. Kober.  He describes these projects here below.

Report of Zachary Fischer on SMID and the letters of Alice E. Kober:

During the summer of 2012 I had the opportunity to work with the Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory (PASP) at the University of Texas at Austin. I conducted two digital projects: Studies in Mycenaean Inscriptions and Dialect (SMID) (https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/16096) and the Alice E. Kober Papers–Correspondence (https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/15875). Each project was unique, both in terms of technical challenges and intellectual content; however, the primary goal was the same: to provide free, persistent access to the materials in the University of Texas Digital Repository (UTDR). Continue reading →

Paul Woodruff’s Impact Is Deep and Wide at UT Austin

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http://www.statesman.com/opinion/woodruffs-impact-is-wide-and-deep-2440156.html

“Woodruff’s impact is wide and deep”

Tom Palaima, Regular Contributor

Austin American-Statesman

Published on-line: 6:25 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 22, 2012 print edition Thursday, August 23, 2012 p. A 6

I recall a conversation I had with Professor Paul Woodruff, a close friend and colleague at the University of Texas at Austin, about a dozen years ago. In retrospect I know that one person can make a difference.

Woodruff was then serving as director of the Liberal Arts Plan II Honors Program, a position he held from 1991-2006. He was more than the director of this rigorous program in the humanities and sciences. Woodruff was what Socrates was to his pupils, a resident  “genius”, the guiding spirit who embodied the values and ways of teaching, learning and living Continue reading →

Aurora Shooting: “Encourage all to nurture safer communities”

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Palaima: Encourage all to nurture safer communities

Tom Palaima, Local Contributor  Austin American-Statesman

Updated: 10:35 p.m. Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Published: 7:04 p.m. Tuesday, July 24, 2012  Print version July 25, 2012

Driving up to Denton on Friday afternoon I received a call from the Fox news station in Austin asking me whether the shooting in Aurora, Colo., was connected with “The Dark Knight Rises” Batman movie that was playing in the theater where James Holmes is suspected of killing 12 and wounding 59 people.

For more than two decades, I have studied how human beings respond to violent acts in different historical and cultural settings. On Saturday, Austin’s CBS affiliate asked me how to talk to children about the Aurora shooting.
Continue reading →