Enjoyed reading this—I hadn’t encountered Bernadetes before but now I’m going to dig that essay up and see what I can make of it, thank you!
Funny thing: I always despised Clytemnestra, just a knee-jerk reaction to reading the Orestia early on as a high-schooler. Then I was re-reading and teaching the play to a book club online in 2021. I began to have intense, vivid, horrifying dreams that I was Clytemnestra and that snakes were sucking blood from my left breast. I’d wake up gasping in terror, relieved it was “only a nightmare.” But strangely, the pain in my breast, where the snakes had been, lingered long into each day after I awoke. Finally, I decided to get a mammogram “just in case.” They found the first tumor there and the rest … well, lol. And thus my newsletter was born. Bernadette’s sentence—“mothers must not be given the right to question that”—wow, I feel I could easily turn that into a central question of what I’ve been trying to write through all these years!!!
Also my favorite Augustine factoid is that Rudolph Steiner believed he was Augustine reincarnated!
That’s a wild story!! Benardete is great, he’s probably the best Straussian in the sense that he mostly eschews the elaborate esoteric justification for being a Republican and does these very intense, deep readings of classical texts that seem totally believable even when I raise my eyebrow a bit or don’t fully understand what he’s saying. Paul Franz reminded me to check him out last month and I’ve been reading that essay collection ever since. His book on the Odyssey is great too.
I very much agree with your observation that the tracks from “American dream” take a while to reach their climaxes. I kinda like that about them, myself. Kinda reminds me of certain Björk songs. They kinda assemble and then disassemble right before your very ears! Like they just fell outta the ether and then have to return back home after a while🥹
Enjoyed reading this—I hadn’t encountered Bernadetes before but now I’m going to dig that essay up and see what I can make of it, thank you!
Funny thing: I always despised Clytemnestra, just a knee-jerk reaction to reading the Orestia early on as a high-schooler. Then I was re-reading and teaching the play to a book club online in 2021. I began to have intense, vivid, horrifying dreams that I was Clytemnestra and that snakes were sucking blood from my left breast. I’d wake up gasping in terror, relieved it was “only a nightmare.” But strangely, the pain in my breast, where the snakes had been, lingered long into each day after I awoke. Finally, I decided to get a mammogram “just in case.” They found the first tumor there and the rest … well, lol. And thus my newsletter was born. Bernadette’s sentence—“mothers must not be given the right to question that”—wow, I feel I could easily turn that into a central question of what I’ve been trying to write through all these years!!!
Also my favorite Augustine factoid is that Rudolph Steiner believed he was Augustine reincarnated!
That’s a wild story!! Benardete is great, he’s probably the best Straussian in the sense that he mostly eschews the elaborate esoteric justification for being a Republican and does these very intense, deep readings of classical texts that seem totally believable even when I raise my eyebrow a bit or don’t fully understand what he’s saying. Paul Franz reminded me to check him out last month and I’ve been reading that essay collection ever since. His book on the Odyssey is great too.
I very much agree with your observation that the tracks from “American dream” take a while to reach their climaxes. I kinda like that about them, myself. Kinda reminds me of certain Björk songs. They kinda assemble and then disassemble right before your very ears! Like they just fell outta the ether and then have to return back home after a while🥹