Satrap of Saturn

curriculum of MA in Liberal Arts at St. John's College originally posted on ywns, 10/6/07  Curriculum - Literature Literature Seminar Homer: Iliad, Odyssey Aeschylus: Agamemnon, Choephoroe, Eumenides Sophocles: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone Euripides: Hippolytus, Bacchae, Electra Aristophanes: Frogs Literature Tutorial Chaucer: Canterbury Tales in Middle English Shakespeare: King Lear Aristotle: Poetics Selected English lyric poetry Literature Preceptorial (samples) Cervantes: Don Quixote Joyce: Ulysses Virgil: Aeneid Eliot: Middlemarch Dostoevski: The Brothers Karamazov Curriculum - Politics and Society ........................................................................... Politics and Society Seminar Plutarch: Lives: Lycurgus and Solon Plato: Republic Aristotle: Politics Machiavelli: The Prince Locke: Second Treatise of Civil Government Rousseau: On the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Marx: 1844 Manuscripts Tocqueville: Democracy in America Politics and Soci...

It took four months for my mouth to heal, almost a year before i could use my new tongue for everything the old one had been capable of. While i waited there was much to distract me from the pain, the silence and the entirely new approach to food. Lessons in dance and stillness with the Sisters Aeikinatai, observing those of the rites as i was permitted, training in and without weapons under the Sisters Eupsilikai, and much menial labor. Goats to milk, wool to spin, pilgrims to bless on the holy days (which duty seemed to me little different from caring for goats), and shifts in the kitchen and workshops. As a novice, my primary exercise was that of self-restraint: i was a Glossariodas in physique alone, and trying the gifts of a full sister too soon is unpredictable. Some Sisters have early facility with their tongues, and understand its mysteries well before their second year. Once it has surely grown one with our own flesh, we may practice the hand, the serpent-lash, the arrow and o...

Adepts, give heart and ear to Harry Crosby and the memory palaces that he and his woman, Caresse, hid in the Dreamlands, accessed by a projection through past operations, impaled their every faculty on the hypometrics between the bubble demesnes they limned by their combined efforts, and thus survived the payment of the debt.  They did not satisfy the Crosby blood with the usual toil at secret arts and obscure colloquy, nor with their unusual degree of telepathy, but foremost through obsessive desire to expunge the visions from their minds, sights that so forced themselves upon the pair after their dabbling revealed long-dead horrors wreaked by Harry's wizard ancestor. His blood-born authority to enter the old sites also marked him as the blood-bonded holder of an obligation, a commission... What they did to complete and discharge the centuries-delayed obligation, they did only by compulsion, and only with the operational knowledge their witless trespass into the saturated space of...

All over Mars the terraforming crews cautiously tinker with new rhythms. Ravens and barrowrats, podrats and b-kats and mites, j-dogs and a hundred kinds of gaussian and non-gaussian humans. In only a few centuries no colonist can fully claim to have *adapted*; that's generational work. Several among the postterrestrial daughter species hibernate each winter, sharing dreams along their webworked nervous systems. Their deep slow sleep, filled with shared locations and artefacts held in common, spreads across the months of cold like landscape. Congenetics of the Martian colonists, estranged in small bands and barrios across the solar system occasionally dip, too, into the homelanders' vision. Each spring, the barrowrats emerge from their tunnels in the arctic zone to attend to their waking affairs. They monitor the solar collectors and windtraps, play in the glacial ravines, every spring a different landscape. While the barrowrats work above ground, migratory podrats extend the tu...

The Pharos could be seen halfway to Kupros: a mechanical star, a fire focused through the largest lenses ever cast. Sailors whispered that its beam could be directed down in a ship-smashing spear should invaders ever threaten Alexandreia's harbor. I saw no ships broken by the Pharos, only men: philosophers, castrated holy men, a hundred kinds of charlatan fluttered to the halls rooted at the base of the tower. Every text in every language of the civilized world was to be found there, or so it was said, and every kind of nonsense could be heard in the agora, old lies in new robes, new lies dancing naked, myriad whispers of secret techniques, jealous muttering after quick power. The scholars of the Pharos produced mostly lists — the five greatest tragedies, biographies of the seven mightiest kings, collections the 10 noblest poets — and these too found their places in the library. Every Ptolemaios lavished funds on the library, seeking to increase its holdings beyond those hoarded by...