Classics & Virtues

@classicvirtues

Left-Lib w/ White Guelph characteristics || Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Film, and Politics.

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Classics & Virtues @classicvirtues· 19d

In light of being able to finally watch The Odyssey tonight, here’s one of my favorite Odyssey-inspired poems, written by George Seferis and translated by @aestallings.bsky.social

GEORGE SEFERIS
Upon a Line of Foreign Verse
To Elli, Christmas 1931
Happy is he who has made the journey of Odysseus. Happy if,
as the journey loomed,
He felt the sturdy rigging of a love, stretched taut inside his body like
the veins where the blood booms,
Of a love with unbroken rhythm, invincible as music and undying, because it was born when we were born, and whether it dies when we do,
we do not know, and it is no use trying.
God help me to say, in a moment of great joy, what is this love?
I sit sometimes surrounded by an alien land, and I hear its distant roar, like the boom of the sea mingled with an inexplicable whirlwind from above.
And again and again, the shade of Odysseus appears before me, with eyes red from the brine of the waves, and from a ripe yearning to see once more
the smoke wafting from the warmth of his house, and the dog grown
old waiting at the door.
There he stands, tall, whispering through his whitened beard words of our tongue, as it was spoken three thousand years ago.
He holds out a palm calloused from the ropes and the tiller, with skin weathered by the dry north wind, by the scorching heat and the snow.
It's as though he wants to banish from our midst the superhuman
Cyclops, who watches with one eye, the Sirens, whose song makes you forget, and Scylla and Charybdis, who swallow you whole, so many elaborate monsters that keep us from reflecting how he was a man who strove in the world, with his body and his soul.
He is the great Odysseus, the one who directed them to build the
wooden horse, and the Achaeans won Troy;

imagine he is coming to tell me how to build a wooden horse so
I may win my own Troy.
Because he speaks humbly and serenely, without effort, he seems to
know me like a father,
or like the old mariners, who, leaning on their nets, at the hour of
winter and the wind's anger,
would sing to me in my childhood the song of Erotókritos, with their
eyes full of tears,
and in my sleep, still thinking of the unjust fate of Arete descending
the marble staircase, I was seized with fears.
He tells me how hard the pain is, to feel the sails of your ship belly
with memory and your soul become the helm,
to be alone and rudderless as chaff on the threshing floor, when the
shadows overwhelm,
The bitterness of seeing your companions sunk into the elements,
scattered, one by one,
and how strange it is to become a man by speaking with the Dead, when the Living who remain are no longer sufficient unto you -none.
He speaks... I still see his hands, that knew how to test if the mermaid on the prow was well-carven, without splinter,
giving me the unruffled blue sea in the heart of winter.
Translated from the Modern Greek by A. E. Stallings

Classics & Virtues @classicvirtues· 19d

What is this woke shit?!? The guy making justified complaints about the lazy poor is a villain? Looks like Nolan is not the only problem; that old blind bastard, Homer, caught the woke mind virus as well!

Hand him
over to me, I'll make a farmhand of him, a stall scraper, a fodder carrier! Whey for drink will put good muscle on his shank!
No chance: he learned his dodges long ago-no honest sweat. He'd rather tramp the country begging, to keep his hoggish belly full.
Well, I can tell you this for sure: in King Odysseus' hall, if he goes there, footstools will fly around his head-good shots from strong hands. Back and side, his ribs will catch on the way out!"

Classics & Virtues @classicvirtues· 22d

Randomly came across this post from a relatively small account but man… Equating the success of Nolan’s Odyssey to China’s First Five-Year Plan is elite poasting

Let's not kid ourselves, guys. The Odyssey is a success. Frankly, all it needed to do was not flop. Thus, it paves the way for a Great Leap Forward in media, where the bedrock of western storytelling is fundamentally remade to suit modern sensibilities.
End of an era.

Classics & Virtues @classicvirtues· 23d

Nickel Boys

Classics & Virtues @classicvirtues· 23d

I mean he even kinda looks like Dante:

Classics & Virtues @classicvirtues· 23d

Hearing word that Nolan wants to make a horror film but doesn’t have an idea for it yet. I have one and he can stay with the Epic Poetry tradition too:

Opened to Dante picture and title page of the Cary translated/Dore illustrated Dante’s Inferno

Classics & Virtues @classicvirtues· Jul 9

Go Morocco!

Rick as played by Humphrey Bogart in front of his cafe

Classics & Virtues @classicvirtues· Jul 9

Why yes!

And he said to me, "Son of man, eat what is before you, eat this scroll; then go and speak to the people of Israel." 2 So I opened my mouth, and he gave me the scroll to eat.
3 Then he said to me, "Son of man, eat this scroll 1 am giving you and fill your stomach with it." So I ate it, and it tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth.

Ezekiel 3:1-3

Classics & Virtues @classicvirtues· Jul 7

Haaland on Saturday in Miami:

Actor Matt Smith in long blonde hair next to a lion’s head on a pike in House of the Dragon

Classics & Virtues @classicvirtues· Jul 6

Katz retweeted this Bouie post not knowing it was about him

@jamellebouie.net
let this be a lesson to deal with your feelings of gender anxiety and masculine inadequacy with a hobby or therapy or something and not a high stakes senate election
5:11 PM • Jul 6, 2026 8: Some people can reply
29 saves
632 reposts 3.6K likes 29 saves
70
632
3.6K
jamelle •@jamellebouie.net • 17m
(this is less about the candidate than some of his most vocal advocates)

Classics & Virtues @classicvirtues· Jul 6

Character still matters

Jonathan M. Katz
@katz.theracket.news
The Moral Majority lives
Flying Squid is always ve... @flyingsq... • 1d
I'd say at least part of the scandal is: if he can't be honest with his own wife, why should we expect him to be honest with anything he claims he'll do in the senate?

Classics & Virtues @classicvirtues· Jul 6

Sheinbaum put in the call

Classics & Virtues @classicvirtues· Jul 6

I’ll say one nice thing about the Belgium team before tomorrow night: I am a sucker for their René Magritte-inspired away kits with Ceci n’est pas un maillot (“This is not a jersey”) on the back

Belgium’s Away Kits

The middle guy has an apple in front of the guy wearing the jersey’s face, a staple of Magritte’s paintings

On the left shows the back of the jersey with Ceci n’est pas un maillot (“This is not a jersey”) written on the back, inspired by his treachery of images painting of a pipe with Ceci n’est pas une pipe (“This is not a pipe”) beneath it

Classics & Virtues @classicvirtues· Jul 5

I don’t think the flag is just for the cattle

Classics & Virtues @classicvirtues· Jul 2

Good to see Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point get some love (it was made 16 years before Baudillard’s America but it’s as if they were made with one another in mind) Out of films I have not seen mentioned, I would say ‘Do the Right Thing”

Still of Do the Right Thing with Spike Lee looking at the audience

Classics & Virtues @classicvirtues· Jun 30

This is what “moderate” conservatism is these days, incrementalism towards taking away constitutional rights…

What about all the children born here who, by now, have been raised to believe they are citizens? The Fourteenth Amendment creates a floor, not a ceiling. Recall that Congress changed the status of Native tribes, as it had the right to do under law. Morally speaking, it would be wrong to kick out people who have regarded themselves as citizens and who have been treated by our governments as citizens. Fortunately, as public reaction to President Trump's actions suggests (support for ending illegal immigration, and for kicking out illegal immigrants who have committed felonies, but anger at actions beyond that), the American people, being a generous people, are likely to support, even demand, that Congress create a legal mechanism to ensure that we do the right thing by them.

Classics & Virtues @classicvirtues· Jun 30

UT’s Civitas Institute ran an article yesterday saying the main problem is that they should have slow played it so yeah, this is not the end unfortunately www.civitasoutlook.com/research/bir...

But that does not mean the American people would not support an effort to change the rule moving forward, nor does it necessarily mean that the Fourteenth Amendment, as understood by the men who wrote and ratified it, would prohibit such a change. To that end, and to truly reopen debate on this issue, it is important to recognize that neither "birthright citizenship" nor "jus soli" was part of the legal world that gave rise to the Fourteenth Amendment. Given the strong presumption that "birthright citizenship" exists, the Trump Administration's move to limit the scope of soil as the basis of citizenship is likely to fail.
Had the administration only begun small, perhaps only raised the issue with regard to the children of tourists on a short stay, then the discussion might have been "how far does birthright citizenship extend," rather than "does birthright citizenship exist." In other words, the executive order is too broad in scope, and too little legal and historical legwork has been done to carry a majority on the Court against a strong consensus at the bar.

Classics & Virtues @classicvirtues· Jun 17

One of the critics mentioned in this article was posting like this in mid-April:

@Willchamberlain
0 ...
We're getting the enriched uranium.
We're getting a stop to enrichment.
We're getting an end to the funding of proxies.
We destroyed their Air Force, navy, air defenses, defense industrial base, and senior leadership.
All done in 6 weeks.
Geopolitical masterstroke

Classics & Virtues @classicvirtues· Jun 15

Somehow he’s back

Classics & Virtues @classicvirtues· Jun 14

Spike still got it!

Spike Lee writing at a table with notebooks

Classics & Virtues @classicvirtues· Jun 11

Julio César Strassera referencing Dante and Oliver Wendell Holmes in his closing argument for the Trial of the Juntas in 1985:

Your Honors, this process has meant, for those of us who have had the painful privilege of knowing it intimately, a sort of descent into dark areas of the human soul, where misery, abjection, and horror register profundities difficult to imagine before and to understand afterwards.
In The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri reserved the seventh circle of hell for the violent: for all
those who harm others using force. And within that same enclosure, he submerged in a river of boiling and nauseating blood a certain genre of condemned, thus described by the poet: "These are the tyrants who lived on blood and robbery.
Here their merciless faults are mourned."
I do not come now to promote such a tremendous sentence for the defendants, although I cannot rule out that another court, of even higher rank than the present one, will take care of it in due course.
I will limit myself to briefly substantiating the human convenience and necessity of punishment. I follow Oliver Wendell Holmes when he states: "The law threatens certain pains if one does certain things. If one persists in doing them, the law must inflict these pains in order that its threats will continue to be believed."

Classics & Virtues @classicvirtues· Jun 10

Even the Jansenists were like “unless you want to live in a dysfunctional hellscape, virtue signaling is necessary”:

For the French Jansenists as for Hobbes, when men traded services and civilities with one another, it was not due to any innate capacity to practice liberality, but always out of self-interest.
Curiously, however, the Jansenists did not deny the importance of liberality. What they did instead was to describe liberality as a false but nevertheless necessary virtue. In their minds, it was something akin to politeness, a way that men hid their natural sinfulness. In his Falsity of Human Virtues of 1678, Jacques Esprit summed up the Jansenists' way of thinking when he said that the most human beings could ever do was to "pass themselves off as liberal."33 It is noteworthy, however, that several of these Jansenist thinkers, and Nicole in particu-lar, came to the conclusion that even such hypocrisy was necessary for human society to function. Liberality need not be sincere for society to cohere.

The Lost History of Liberalism, Helen Rosenblatt

Classics & Virtues @classicvirtues· Jun 8

Open your eyes! They’re indoctrination our kids!

Pinkish Red and Light Blue sour gummy worms

Classics & Virtues @classicvirtues· Jun 8

And another one of your favorite movies… we’ve been indoctrinated, my friend…

All pictures are stills from the movie Birdman

Classics & Virtues @classicvirtues· Jun 7

I love when these guys try to appear level headed by qualifying their “stolen election” post with “I’m not one to question the results of an election”… Look, it must be tough realizing you are no better than Catturd but come on, you’re losing your mind bc LA doesn’t want a Trump-loving, GOP mayor

@AGHamilton29
12m
I am someone who has spent a lot of time debunking and pushing back on false fraud claims, but there is just no reasonable explanation for the way and speed at which California counts ballots.
Rob Pyers
@rpyers
42m
JUST IN: Los Angeles County has processed ~1.4 million ballots and estimates it has around 713, 180 ballots left to count.

Classics & Virtues @classicvirtues· Jun 6

And a few favorite 🏳️‍🌈 books:

Memoirs of Hadrian by MARGUERITE YOURCENAR book cover

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin Bookcover

Classics & Virtues @classicvirtues· Jun 6

Favorite Pride-Theme Films 🏳️‍🌈: -A Special Day -Midnight Cowboy -The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant -Desert Hearts -Carol -The Handmaiden -Moonlight -Portrait of a Lady on Fire -I Saw the TV Glow -Queer

Still from The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant

Classics & Virtues @classicvirtues· Jun 6

Something tells me the Knicks crowd is not going to be as welcoming as the last time he was there:

Classics & Virtues @classicvirtues· Jun 5

And as I’ve said before, if a man is into a woman and she doesn’t reciprocate on more than a friends level and he feels disappointed, he can channel that into an even deeper love, instead of posting on a incel chan board:

When You are Old (Yeats)

When you are old and gray and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty will love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
And bending down beside the glowing bars Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Classics & Virtues @classicvirtues· Jun 3

Remember who you are, liberal