Besides that, "wasn't written by Homer, but by another Greek by the same name" is a little crazy. All we know about Homer was that he was named Homer, wrote the Iliad and Odyssey (allegedly) and was blind. If this other Homer was blind, what kind of discovery is that? It's like saying: there was an historical Sinbad, but not the Sinbad you think, a different guy named Sinbad who did all the same stuff.
I think I'm taking a joke comment seriously, but the issue would be that one person wrote one play, and another person wrote another. Can two people be Shakespeare?
Similarly, the interesting thing about "Homer" which seems to be being asserted is that one person wrote the Odyssey, and another wrote the Illiad.
Oh, if text says this is all a joke I should delete this rather than hit post.
text -- unless one Homer wrote the Odyssey, and one wrote the Iliad. That would be a Krazy Koincidence. But maybe "Homer" was like Smith to those guys.
Well, the Balbulus Notker who wrote the life of Charlemagne may or may not be the same Balblus Notker who pioneered music notation. And there were two Jack Dempseys and two Howlin Wolfs / Wolves. So you see.
That impostor, Matt Weinere, never explains his references, but let's see if I can come up with something that explains Godel and Schmidt instead of just referencing it...
NB, "denial of Shakespeare follows exactly the same flawed reasoning as Holocaust denial", in Aug. 17, 2005, TLS, here. It'll probably go away after a while so read / dl it now if you're interested.
Bernard Knox's introduction to Fagles's recent translation of the Iliad has some nice, sober points on the identity and literacy of Homer. You can find it in print.google.com beginning on page 7.
I take it that this is a good (the original?) description of the Gödel/Schmidt scenario? I'm asking for personal edification, since I hadn't a clue what you meant when you first wrote it.
Wow, I've fallen way behind the thread, thank god for preview.
I thought the Shakespeare debate was about Shakespeare being real, but only a front for a noble who couldn't admit he was the author of the plays? And more, maybe that noble was famed philosopher Françis Bacon? I don't no about the plausibility of this at all, but at least there's something interesting about it.
I don't no much about it either, but wasn't Shakespeare a real person, and an actor in all of his plays? If someone like Bacon was using him as a front, wouldn't the beans eventually get spilled after, say, twenty or so plays?
I haven't even read the article yet, and I can tell you that it's messed up. The Iliad and the Odyssey were not initially written works, unlike, say, Shakespeare's plays. They were the product of an oral culture and can not, therefore, be attributed to any one author.
I thought the debate was about whether Shakespeare wrote "Romeo and Juliet" while he was himself in love with a Lady betrothed to another, with a broad, sharp nose, happy eyes, and pleasing figure, and whether he was experiencing a bit of writer's block beforehand, and whether, on opening night, he actually played Romeo, and the Lady Juliet, and Queen Elizabeth saw it, and everyone like it very much.
"All that the people of the Mineshaft know about 'Matt McGrattan' was that he was the first person to allude to* Kripke on the Homer thread. But in fact the first person to allude to Kripke was the someone whose birth name was Matt Weiner, who died shortly thereafter from a case of acute pot-kettlism, as reported by Medical Examiner Gary Farber. Furthermore, his allusion was posted under the mysterious name 'Matt Weinere'. When the people of the Mineshaft use 'Matt McGrattan,' are they talking about the pot-kettlist, or some other guy?"
w/d, Naming and Necessity is indeed where the Godel/Schmidt example comes from.
*alluse/mention, yes yes
[slol, I took your name of the Fontana Labs post because I was afraid that if you showed it to your students it would create a security breach.]
I don't remember this very well; it's been a long time since I studied it, but no. It's thought that a lot of people composed those poems.
It was orally improvised. That's why there are so many repetitive lines, for example. This is mostly based on Millman Parry's research in the 30's of Eastern European oral poets.
Tia--The late Emily Vermeule, a great archaeologist, used to say that Homer ought to be a verb and not a noun, because it really referred to the process of composition and not the person.
I was just under the (mistaken) impression that though they were orally composed, they had been originally compiled by one person, and there was a record (an oral one, of course), of his existence and his origination of the composition.
When you read Plato, you see that Homer is often called simply "The Poet." So, I think that that in a weird way Homer loomed too large over the Greek imagination to have been simply one actual person. (That's a totally non-scholarly impression.)
BG and Tia: due respect, but Bernard Knox disagrees, carefully, that there was no Homer and he didn't write; he concludes that "There seems to be only one possible explanation ... that the text was regarded as authentic, the exact words of Homer himself. And that can only mean that there was a written copy" -- that possibly dictated by Homer to a scribe. The quote's on p. 22 of Fagles's Iliad, which I own though don't have to hand. This is not incompatible with Parry's conclusions about Homer being heir to certain oral traditions.
58, 59: Thanks all--I was rereading 37, mourning my pointless LBery to so many parties (come back, Gary, all is forgiven), and I noticed that there was a sense-destroying typo as well. But then I was too depressed to continue.
One of slol's complaints is in the thread I pointed to, but my offer to help isn't (that's in the "Soy" thread). So my guess is that your students can't come to know that you are slol just by following my link. They might come to have a true belief, though, but only if they spend a lot of time thinking about it.
""All that the people of the Mineshaft know about 'Matt McGrattan' was that he was the first person to allude to* Kripke on the Homer thread. But in fact the first person to allude to Kripke was the someone whose birth name was Matt Weiner, who died shortly thereafter from a case of acute pot-kettlism...Furthermore, his allusion was posted under the mysterious name 'Matt Weinere'.""
Ah yes, I hadn't followed the link :) nor paid attention to the Godel/Schmidt allusion. Force of habit, I always end up using Nixon when explaining Kripke to people.
OK, nobody's asking the important question here. If they've found Odysseus' tomb, doesn't COBRA only need to find Attila the Hun's body before they can create their super-general from the combined DNA of all the world's great warriors?
I guess this was a wasted effort, then.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:02 AM
Besides that, "wasn't written by Homer, but by another Greek by the same name" is a little crazy. All we know about Homer was that he was named Homer, wrote the Iliad and Odyssey (allegedly) and was blind. If this other Homer was blind, what kind of discovery is that? It's like saying: there was an historical Sinbad, but not the Sinbad you think, a different guy named Sinbad who did all the same stuff.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:04 AM
now I see that it was a joke. Pwned by my own hand.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:05 AM
I think I'm taking a joke comment seriously, but the issue would be that one person wrote one play, and another person wrote another. Can two people be Shakespeare?
Similarly, the interesting thing about "Homer" which seems to be being asserted is that one person wrote the Odyssey, and another wrote the Illiad.
Oh, if text says this is all a joke I should delete this rather than hit post.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:06 AM
text -- unless one Homer wrote the Odyssey, and one wrote the Iliad. That would be a Krazy Koincidence. But maybe "Homer" was like Smith to those guys.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:06 AM
It seems we should all delete everything we wrote on this thread.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:07 AM
I dragged two down with me, which isn't so bad.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:08 AM
God, I'm so embarrassed.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:08 AM
7: but if the other two were also named "text", would we care?
Posted by mike d | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:10 AM
But BUT. In your defense, the joke was pinpointing the ridiculousness of the authorship debates, which was your point also.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:10 AM
It wasn't your best post ever, but that's nothing to be embarrassed about.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:10 AM
I have brought shame upon your house.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:11 AM
Pointy-headed pointallism on-point.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:11 AM
"Point taken, Joe," he remarked pointedly.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:15 AM
Well, the Balbulus Notker who wrote the life of Charlemagne may or may not be the same Balblus Notker who pioneered music notation. And there were two Jack Dempseys and two Howlin Wolfs / Wolves. So you see.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:15 AM
We care about IP because of our faith in divine Provenance.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:15 AM
Whoever wrote the plays, that was Shakespeare; what more do you need to know?
Godel/Schmidt alert!
Posted by Matt Weinere | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:16 AM
And it's the "No Homers Club." That's important.
Also, John, I'm pretty sure you mean "two Sonny Boy Williamsons."
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:17 AM
Il n'y a pas de hors-écrivain.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:17 AM
I hate it when the Frenching starts.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:18 AM
you've just got to relax, Joe. You're nervous is all.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:21 AM
That impostor, Matt Weinere, never explains his references, but let's see if I can come up with something that explains Godel and Schmidt instead of just referencing it...
Here.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:21 AM
You'd never heard that before?
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:22 AM
reference shift/reference failure/counterparts who instead of writing the iliad knitted woolen caps for goats/cala's brain melted.
I don't think I got the joke.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:22 AM
NB, "denial of Shakespeare follows exactly the same flawed reasoning as Holocaust denial", in Aug. 17, 2005, TLS, here. It'll probably go away after a while so read / dl it now if you're interested.
Bernard Knox's introduction to Fagles's recent translation of the Iliad has some nice, sober points on the identity and literacy of Homer. You can find it in print.google.com beginning on page 7.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:23 AM
you've just got to relax, Joe. You're nervous is all.
I've tried it myself on a few occasions, but I can't work my mouth properly; think I keep putting it too far back in the throat.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:25 AM
Someone's bound to mention Kripke at some point. So it might as well be me...
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:26 AM
I take it that this is a good (the original?) description of the Gödel/Schmidt scenario? I'm asking for personal edification, since I hadn't a clue what you meant when you first wrote it.
Wow, I've fallen way behind the thread, thank god for preview.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:29 AM
I thought the Shakespeare debate was about Shakespeare being real, but only a front for a noble who couldn't admit he was the author of the plays? And more, maybe that noble was famed philosopher Françis Bacon? I don't no about the plausibility of this at all, but at least there's something interesting about it.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:33 AM
I don't no much about it either, but wasn't Shakespeare a real person, and an actor in all of his plays? If someone like Bacon was using him as a front, wouldn't the beans eventually get spilled after, say, twenty or so plays?
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:37 AM
I haven't even read the article yet, and I can tell you that it's messed up. The Iliad and the Odyssey were not initially written works, unlike, say, Shakespeare's plays. They were the product of an oral culture and can not, therefore, be attributed to any one author.
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:37 AM
I thought the debate was about whether Shakespeare wrote "Romeo and Juliet" while he was himself in love with a Lady betrothed to another, with a broad, sharp nose, happy eyes, and pleasing figure, and whether he was experiencing a bit of writer's block beforehand, and whether, on opening night, he actually played Romeo, and the Lady Juliet, and Queen Elizabeth saw it, and everyone like it very much.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:37 AM
Not true, bg. Homer composed them, extemporaneous-like, inbued with the vapors of the muses, riding on a bed of hummingbirds.
After that, everyone remembered them like Homer had told them, and nobody changed a word.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:40 AM
I thought Homer composed them, but didn't write them, and it was only generations later that they were written down.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:40 AM
Text I think you are superfluousing me.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:41 AM
only when I sleep on my right side, Standpipe.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:42 AM
"All that the people of the Mineshaft know about 'Matt McGrattan' was that he was the first person to allude to* Kripke on the Homer thread. But in fact the first person to allude to Kripke was the someone whose birth name was Matt Weiner, who died shortly thereafter from a case of acute pot-kettlism, as reported by Medical Examiner Gary Farber. Furthermore, his allusion was posted under the mysterious name 'Matt Weinere'. When the people of the Mineshaft use 'Matt McGrattan,' are they talking about the pot-kettlist, or some other guy?"
w/d, Naming and Necessity is indeed where the Godel/Schmidt example comes from.
*alluse/mention, yes yes
[slol, I took your name of the Fontana Labs post because I was afraid that if you showed it to your students it would create a security breach.]
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:42 AM
What do you expect of the poor man? He was blind.
This was before blind people were expected to play piano and live inspirational lives, remember.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:42 AM
Re 25, do people read translations other than the Fagles? I can't recall the last time I saw another edition on a friend's bookshelf.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:44 AM
Oh, I see. Like BG says. So why does anyone ever even bother referring to "Homer" anymore?
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:45 AM
Tia,
I don't remember this very well; it's been a long time since I studied it, but no. It's thought that a lot of people composed those poems.
It was orally improvised. That's why there are so many repetitive lines, for example. This is mostly based on Millman Parry's research in the 30's of Eastern European oral poets.
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:49 AM
Armsmasher, that's because your friends are ignorant trend-followers who probably only bought any Homer when Fagles' translations came out.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:49 AM
Millman Parry's research in the 30's of Eastern European oral poets
I undertook similar research when I was in Europe, actually.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:50 AM
Wow, two days in grad school and Wolfson has already had the life and humor beat out of him.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:52 AM
Tia--The late Emily Vermeule, a great archaeologist, used to say that Homer ought to be a verb and not a noun, because it really referred to the process of composition and not the person.
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:52 AM
I was just under the (mistaken) impression that though they were orally composed, they had been originally compiled by one person, and there was a record (an oral one, of course), of his existence and his origination of the composition.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:52 AM
Better than sitting at home researching beat poetry.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:52 AM
Nice.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:53 AM
I'm not allowed to be pointlessly caustic anymore?
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:54 AM
Thank you, kind sir.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:55 AM
It could very well be that a person named Homer compiled the oral poems into a single written edition, for the first time, like the Brothers Grimm.
But it wasn't actually Homer, but another Greek who was also named Homer.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:56 AM
Well, what if his friends are ignorant trend-followers? You have to give people an out.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:56 AM
Armsmasher, that's because your friends are ignorant trend-followers who probably only bought any Homer when Fagles' translations came out.
Hey... that's a half-truth.
I'll have you know I don't own a copy of the Odyssey.
Posted by tom | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:57 AM
I'll just forego making a bitchy art comment.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 10:57 AM
When you read Plato, you see that Homer is often called simply "The Poet." So, I think that that in a weird way Homer loomed too large over the Greek imagination to have been simply one actual person. (That's a totally non-scholarly impression.)
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 11:00 AM
If I compiled Ben's pointlessly caustic comments for publication, I would call the resulting volume Causticles.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 11:00 AM
BG and Tia: due respect, but Bernard Knox disagrees, carefully, that there was no Homer and he didn't write; he concludes that "There seems to be only one possible explanation ... that the text was regarded as authentic, the exact words of Homer himself. And that can only mean that there was a written copy" -- that possibly dictated by Homer to a scribe. The quote's on p. 22 of Fagles's Iliad, which I own though don't have to hand. This is not incompatible with Parry's conclusions about Homer being heir to certain oral traditions.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 11:01 AM
slol, I took your name of the Fontana Labs post
Que?
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 11:03 AM
"off"
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 11:04 AM
Well, I'm no scholar. But I'd love to see Fagles go up against Greg Nagy. Fisticuffs would ensue, I'm sure.
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 11:06 AM
Thanks, SB. You are a fine upstanding citizen, MW.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 11:07 AM
Now lets hope your students don't follow Matt's link to the original thread and see your complaint paired with Matt's offer to help.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 11:15 AM
Yeah, I'm figuring out that I can in fact never mention anything I'm going to do / have done IRL.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 11:22 AM
In the "couldn't make it up" department, I note that the TLS records the name of one Shakespeare denier as Thomas J. Looney.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 11:23 AM
I've never liked the Fagles, collectively or individually, especially not Don Henley.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 11:27 AM
Whatever that's about, BW.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 11:34 AM
58, 59: Thanks all--I was rereading 37, mourning my pointless LBery to so many parties (come back, Gary, all is forgiven), and I noticed that there was a sense-destroying typo as well. But then I was too depressed to continue.
One of slol's complaints is in the thread I pointed to, but my offer to help isn't (that's in the "Soy" thread). So my guess is that your students can't come to know that you are slol just by following my link. They might come to have a true belief, though, but only if they spend a lot of time thinking about it.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 11:45 AM
Homer? What kind of a name is that? It doesn't even sound Greeek.
Anyway, all right-thinking folk know that Miguel Cervantes wrote the Iliad.
Posted by md 20/400 | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 12:18 PM
""All that the people of the Mineshaft know about 'Matt McGrattan' was that he was the first person to allude to* Kripke on the Homer thread. But in fact the first person to allude to Kripke was the someone whose birth name was Matt Weiner, who died shortly thereafter from a case of acute pot-kettlism...Furthermore, his allusion was posted under the mysterious name 'Matt Weinere'.""
Ah yes, I hadn't followed the link :) nor paid attention to the Godel/Schmidt allusion. Force of habit, I always end up using Nixon when explaining Kripke to people.
Anyway, Kripke's full of crap... :-)
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 12:20 PM
Never explain it if you can turn it into an in-joke, that's my motto.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 12:42 PM
OK, nobody's asking the important question here. If they've found Odysseus' tomb, doesn't COBRA only need to find Attila the Hun's body before they can create their super-general from the combined DNA of all the world's great warriors?
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 09-28-05 12:55 PM
the interesting thing about "Homer" which seems to be being asserted is that one person wrote the Odyssey, and another wrote the Illiad.
Yeah but which one of them lives on Evergreen Terrace?
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