Patriots-Lifer
Live the life you've dreamed
- Joined
- Feb 25, 2007
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- Age
- 74
- Location
- Vermont and the Midwest
My friends here at PP
I'm writing very briefly because I only have limited time on the hotel computer (in the lobby) where I'm staying but wanted to keep you abreast of my comings and goings while I'm here.
As you know, I'm here in Salzburg, Austria, presenting a paper at a conference entitled, "The Erotic" - my paper is titled "Transgression as Transcendence: The 'Red Thread' Erotic Poetry of Ikkyu." As you know, one of my real research interests is mystical sensual poetry in the world's religions (for example, the bhajan poetry in India of Mirabai), and Ikkyu is a 15th century Zen Buddhist monk who breaks all kinds of taboos not only in his poetry but also in his life, yet is revered as a great Zen saint. He also is known for reforming the chado, the Zen tea ceremony, which coincidentally, fits in with his poetry.
Anyway, I speak tomorrow afternoon. Salzburg is a beautiful city, my first time here. Yesterday, sightseeing day, I spent about six hours touring the following sites: Mozartplatz, Mozart's birthplace, the Cathedral of Salzburg, St. Michael's Kirche, St. Peter's Kirche (my favorite, especially the cemetery behind the church), the Alter Markt and other shopping areas, Mirabell Gardens (right next to my hotel), and other places. I also had a wonderful lunch of wurst and then, for dinner, I ate at the oldest Bierkeller (beer cellar) in Salzburg, the Pitterkellar, and had the local brew, Stiegelbrau, a very good and light lager. Sometime yet in my stay, a visit to the castle at the top of the mountain, some "Sound of Music" sights, and a concert on Sunday evening with Mozart and Haydn.
Today the conference began with papers on the philosophy of the body found in Berdyaev and Karol Wojtila (Pope John Paul II); an African "Funk" center in Brooklyn that attempts to celebrate the African-American male through sexual exercises; a presentation by a Ph.D. student in film studies at the Chicago Art Institute on fragmentation and alienation in pornographic films; and from an Australian architect (who has befriended me), Steven Fleming, who is relating a 15th century Renaissance text on architecture to the sensual implications and embodiments of modern architecture (his thesis, which by the way, is commonly taken for granted in architectural circles, as well as in Religious Studies circles - I mean, we ALL know this - is that "buildings are bodies"). Architecture, whether carved out of nature (for example, we all know that caves and caverns are symbols of the goddess, embodiments of female sexual energies, the womb), or human-created (obelisks as phalluses) EMBODY unconscious sensual energies. The question that continues to be raised (as I raise it in my Women and Religion class) is "How is power transmitted in the relationship between the viewer of art, entertainment, and the art-object of the viewing, or in the living in a structure?" And (and here's the Marxist critique, the liberationist question) "Who benefits?"
Well, anyway, friends, if I was to be honest so far the papers are of middling quality, but the questions that they have raised in me have been good. Besides Steven Fleming, I've also made friends with young William Storm, a doctoral candidate at Marquette in Milwaukee who'll be speaking about a famous medieval mystical text, John Gower's Confessio Amantis (many of you don't recall that because of my doctoral studies I'm actually a medievalist), and Donald Hall, an English professor at University of West Virginia, who's recently written a textbook on "Reading Sexualities," and whose paper is applying Hans Georg Gadamer's ground-breaking work in hermeneutics to Queer Studies. I've also met a mother-daughter team from Boulder who do dance therapy with teens to help them, as they put it, "integrate their hearts with their wills." The two of them travel to Africa and India and the Caribbean to do this work with young people, and also many come to Boulder. So it's been quite a full first two days here in Salzburg.
I'm writing very briefly because I only have limited time on the hotel computer (in the lobby) where I'm staying but wanted to keep you abreast of my comings and goings while I'm here.
As you know, I'm here in Salzburg, Austria, presenting a paper at a conference entitled, "The Erotic" - my paper is titled "Transgression as Transcendence: The 'Red Thread' Erotic Poetry of Ikkyu." As you know, one of my real research interests is mystical sensual poetry in the world's religions (for example, the bhajan poetry in India of Mirabai), and Ikkyu is a 15th century Zen Buddhist monk who breaks all kinds of taboos not only in his poetry but also in his life, yet is revered as a great Zen saint. He also is known for reforming the chado, the Zen tea ceremony, which coincidentally, fits in with his poetry.
Anyway, I speak tomorrow afternoon. Salzburg is a beautiful city, my first time here. Yesterday, sightseeing day, I spent about six hours touring the following sites: Mozartplatz, Mozart's birthplace, the Cathedral of Salzburg, St. Michael's Kirche, St. Peter's Kirche (my favorite, especially the cemetery behind the church), the Alter Markt and other shopping areas, Mirabell Gardens (right next to my hotel), and other places. I also had a wonderful lunch of wurst and then, for dinner, I ate at the oldest Bierkeller (beer cellar) in Salzburg, the Pitterkellar, and had the local brew, Stiegelbrau, a very good and light lager. Sometime yet in my stay, a visit to the castle at the top of the mountain, some "Sound of Music" sights, and a concert on Sunday evening with Mozart and Haydn.
Today the conference began with papers on the philosophy of the body found in Berdyaev and Karol Wojtila (Pope John Paul II); an African "Funk" center in Brooklyn that attempts to celebrate the African-American male through sexual exercises; a presentation by a Ph.D. student in film studies at the Chicago Art Institute on fragmentation and alienation in pornographic films; and from an Australian architect (who has befriended me), Steven Fleming, who is relating a 15th century Renaissance text on architecture to the sensual implications and embodiments of modern architecture (his thesis, which by the way, is commonly taken for granted in architectural circles, as well as in Religious Studies circles - I mean, we ALL know this - is that "buildings are bodies"). Architecture, whether carved out of nature (for example, we all know that caves and caverns are symbols of the goddess, embodiments of female sexual energies, the womb), or human-created (obelisks as phalluses) EMBODY unconscious sensual energies. The question that continues to be raised (as I raise it in my Women and Religion class) is "How is power transmitted in the relationship between the viewer of art, entertainment, and the art-object of the viewing, or in the living in a structure?" And (and here's the Marxist critique, the liberationist question) "Who benefits?"
Well, anyway, friends, if I was to be honest so far the papers are of middling quality, but the questions that they have raised in me have been good. Besides Steven Fleming, I've also made friends with young William Storm, a doctoral candidate at Marquette in Milwaukee who'll be speaking about a famous medieval mystical text, John Gower's Confessio Amantis (many of you don't recall that because of my doctoral studies I'm actually a medievalist), and Donald Hall, an English professor at University of West Virginia, who's recently written a textbook on "Reading Sexualities," and whose paper is applying Hans Georg Gadamer's ground-breaking work in hermeneutics to Queer Studies. I've also met a mother-daughter team from Boulder who do dance therapy with teens to help them, as they put it, "integrate their hearts with their wills." The two of them travel to Africa and India and the Caribbean to do this work with young people, and also many come to Boulder. So it's been quite a full first two days here in Salzburg.
