"In the nuclear world, the true enemy is war itself." - Crimson Tide (1995).
Video Title: German Tanks in Ukraine. Source: Vladimir Brovkin. Date Published: January 22, 2023. Description:
We discuss in this video the decision taken in Ramstein to deliver German tanks to Ukraine. What will be the consequences? What impact will it have on public opinion in Russia? Is the US willing to escalate the conflict with Russia to a higher degree? Will it end up with US crews manning the tanks? These are some of the questions we consider.
Video Title: David Constantine on Friedrich Hölderlin. Source: Bloodaxe Books. Date Published: Jan 17, 2019. Description:
Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) was one of Europe’s greatest poets. The strange and beautiful language of his late poems is recreated by David Constantine in the remarkable verse translations published in his new edition, Friedrich Hölderlin: Selected Poetry, published by Bloodaxe Books in November 2018 [https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/pro...].
This is an expanded edition of Constantine’s widely-praised Hölderlin Selected Poems (1990/1996), containing many new translations as well as the whole of Hölderlin's Sophocles (2001), in which he sought to create an equivalent English for Hölderlin's extraordinary German recreations of the classic Greek verse plays. Constantine won the European Poetry Translation Prize in 1997 for his translations of Hölderlin. This new volume presents a substantial selection from the work of a poet who, writing around 1800, addresses us ever more urgently two centuries later.
Hölderlin translated all his writing life. Through translation he reached a poetic language of his own, so that much of his best poetry reads like a translation from elsewhere. He was intensely occupied with Sophocles in the winter of 1803-04. His versions of Oedipus Rex and Antigone (he worked at but never finished Oedipus at Colonus and Ajax) came out in the spring of 1804 and were taken, by the learned, as conclusive proof of his insanity. He was by then very near to mental collapse, but no one now would dismiss his work for that. He translated in a radical and idiosyncratic way, cleaving close to the Greek yet at the same time striving to interpret these ancient, foreign and – as he thought – sacred originals, and so bring them home into the modern day and age.
In this short video, Constantine introduces Hölderlin and his poetry, discussing how translating Greek poetry (at first Pindar) helped Hölderlin evolve his own way of writing in German. Like Beethoven, Hölderlin was inspired by the French Revolution before it went wrong, and Constantine discusses the relevance also of Hölderlin to the times we live in, most particularly when there has been renewed interest in his work, such as during both world wars and during the period of social revolt in Germany in the 1960s. Hölderlin reads two poems from the book, ‘Once there were gods…’ (‘Götter wandelten einst…’), written in the spring of 1799 (but not published until 1909), and ‘The sun goes down’ (‘Geh unter, schöne Sonne…’), written some time before May 1800 but not published until 1846, three years after his death. Constantine was filmed at his home in Oxford by Neil Astley in June 2018.
Meanwhile, Cantor had been developing another interest—economics, specifically of the Austrian School, whose chief representatives were Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek—the great champions of the free market and classical liberalism in the twentieth century. Cantor’s brother Donald introduced him to this material, having learned about Mises from Sylvester Petro, one of his professors at NYU Law School. Cantor read many of Mises’s books, including his magnum opus Human Action, while still in high school, and some of Hayek’s works as well. Cantor was deeply impressed by Mises’ work—its axiomatic nature appealed to his inner Euclid. He and a friend, Alan Udoff, took the unusual step of calling Mises at his Manhattan apartment. This led to a meeting with Mises and his inviting them to attend his legendary seminar at the NYU Graduate School of Business Research. Cantor and Udoff regularly attended two semesters of the Mises seminar in fall 1961 and spring 1962 (Cantor’s senior year in high school). The experience of watching a great teacher like Mises in action was formative for Cantor.
Between attending this seminar and reading many books by Mises and Hayek, Cantor got a solid grounding in Austrian economics that fundamentally shaped his thinking. Coming out of high school, Cantor did not immediately pursue his interest in Austrian economics, but it never left him. In 1992, he submitted a paper on Thomas Mann and the German hyperinflation of the 1920s to an essay contest sponsored by the Mises Institute for its tenth anniversary. Cantor was one of the contest winners, thus beginning a long and productive association with the Mises Institute, which led to his attempt to apply Austrian economics to understanding literature, especially in Literature and the Economics of Liberty (co-edited with Stephen Cox) and his lecture series “Commerce and Culture.” Although Cantor found Austrian economics invaluable in understanding such phenomena as the serialization of the novel in 19th-century Britain, he has never thought of it as providing the master key to understanding all literary issues. Rather, he restricts his use of Austrian principles to specific questions of the relationship of literature to economics.
Video Title: Author Paul Cantor on The Economics of Literature. Source: ReasonTV. Date Published: October 8, 2010. Description:
Paul Cantor, professor of English at the University of Virginia, is an anomaly in world of literary criticism and the study of popular culture. While many academics employ an economic approach to the study of literature, they are invariably informed by Marxist critiques. Cantor, who attended the New York lectures of Ludwig von Mises as a teenager, argues that there is much to be learned from a pro-capitalist reading of literature. In August, Cantor sat down with Reason senior editor Michael C. Moynihan to discuss Literature and the Economics of Liberty, a new book of essays he edited with Stephen Cox, that looks at the work of Walt Whitman, Willa Cather, H.G. Wells, and others through the prism of Austrian economics.
Paul A. Cantor (October 25, 1945 – February 25, 2022) was an American literary and media critic. He taught for many years at the University of Virginia, where he was the Clifton Waller Barrett Professor of English.
Cantor published extensively on Shakespeare. In Shakespeare's Rome: Republic and Empire (1974), a revision of his doctoral thesis, he analyzed Shakespeare's Roman plays and contrasted the austere, republican mentality of Coriolanus with the bibulous and erotic energies of Antony and Cleopatra. He returned to the Roman plays in Shakespeare's Roman Trilogy: The Twilight of the Ancient World (2017).
In Shakespeare: Hamlet (1989), he depicted Hamlet as a man torn between pagan and Christian conceptions of heroism. In his articles on Macbeth, he analyzed "the Scottish play" using the same polarity.
A characteristic feature of Cantor's scholarship is his focus on various political regimes and their depiction in Shakespeare's plays. Cantor notes that different regimes promote different ideas about human beings, the good, and government. He compares and contrasts the early Roman regime as depicted in Coriolanus and the later Roman regime as depicted in Antony and Cleopatra, pagan values and Christian values, republican regimes and monarchical regimes.
Video Title: "William Shakespeare and the Roots of Western Civilization" - Paul Cantor. Source: Western Civilization, Texas Tech University. Date Published: May 29, 2018. Description:
In this lecture, Paul Cantor, who is the Clifton Waller Barrett Professor of English at the University of Virginia, talks about Shakespeare and his legacy. If Shakespeare's plays constitute some of the great monuments of Western civilization, one reason is that they are deeply rooted in its grand traditions. Shakespeare's imagination ranged widely in terms of both geography and history. His historical plays chronicle the evolution of the British regime, from the chaos of feudal monarchy to the order of a modern centralized kingship. In his Roman plays, Shakespeare goes back to the ancient world to uncover the contribution of the classical republican tradition to the modern world. As a figure of the Renaissance, Shakespeare was positioned to draw on both ancient and modern traditions, and his plays can help us understand how the confluence of those traditions helped create our world today.
