Alright, let's try to do a little better this week. Getting it up earlier at least.
Quick review on this week's readings:
May 13 BUUUURNS: 0/5 Still bad.
May 14 Vaccination Against Smallpox by Jenner: 5/5 So cool to read a firsthand account of (one of?) the most important medical discoveries of all time. Jenner is decent writer, which helps.
May 15 The Divine Comedy by Dante: 3/5 Dante writes tentacle porn, and Elliot continues to pick weird sections of TDC to feature.
May 16 Poetry of The Celtic Races by Renan: 3/5 Renan continues to be an interest writer, but I continue to wonder why we read about the Mabinogion instead of just reading a translation of it. They'd been available for over 100 years when T5FSOB was pubished.
May 17 "The Apology" by Plato: 1/5 Plato/Socrates: Please reward my bad behavior. 1 instead of 0 only for its historic significance.
May 18 "Little Ida's Flowers" by Andersen: 2/5 Passable HCA story.
May 19 The Golden Sayings of Epictetus by Crossley: 0/5 A garbage translation that certainly doesn't belong in T5FSOB.
Weekly Average: 2 Without those two zeros, this could've been a great week.
Overall Thoughts on The Project:
Burns still sucks, Crossley can fuck right off. I don't understand why Elliot loves Burns so much, but I acknowledge that he's a reasonably famous poet. Crossley does not belong in here, full stop. I have no idea why Elliot decided to put someone actively butchering a classic in here. At this point, at least 3 other translations had been published. The oldest was in the public domain, and, while it received some criticism, was at least better than Crossley's by virtue of keeping the text intact. The Golden Sayings is like that shitty $5 editions on the bargain rack at Barnes & Noble.
Rounding out the low scorers today, we have Plato's Apology. I think Plato does a fantastic job of encapsulating all the worst of philosophy in his Allegory of The Cave, and this dovetails there nicely. Socrates, as far as I can tell, was basically just Ben Shapiro. He rolled around Athens getting into stupid debates with people while a bunch of teenage boys worshiped him. The Athenians put him on trial to kill him, which seems a little extreme. Until Socrates goes, "I could probably get exiled or just pay a fine, my friends would cover for it. But nah, either free room and board for life of death." Fuck that, off with his head-lock. Plato thinks everyone except for himself and Socrates are idiots who can't even begin to comprehend reality or how dumb they are. Any philosophy that can be boiled down to, "you're a moron and can't know anything" isn't a philosophy of any practical use. If nothing is real then nothing (including the philosophy) matters.
And lastly, as always, a quick shout out to Jenner and a love of the first person sciencey stuff.
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