All Philoctetes events are free and open to the public. Roundtables and Courses may also be seen in real time via streaming video. Simply visit the Home page during a scheduled event.
Coming up at Philoctetes...
This roundtable will survey some of the different ways our imagination is exercised when we think about mathematics...
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Course
May 13, 2008
7:00 PM, at the Center
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“When I'm really in the zone, I'm not thinking about if I'm putting the right keys down. I'm not thinking about the fact that I'm playing a soprano saxophone. I'm not thinking any of those technical things that you hear. When things are happening right, it feels as if the instrument is disappearing and the voice that's in here is just coming through.”
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Jane Ira Bloom
Panelist
October 13, 2007
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“The Inuit are actually suing the United States under the Organization of American States, saying that their rights are being violated and that they have a right to be cold. 'We don't want to be warm. Our whole culture, our whole way of life, our whole mythology, our cosmology, who we are as a people is fundamentally based on the fact that it's cold here.' And as that's changing obviously many aspects of society, from the practical to the cosmological, are being transformed right underneath them.”
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Anthony Leiserowitz
Panelist
January 12, 2008
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“If Mabel Loomis Todd and Wentworth Higginson had not smoothed out these poems and given them thematic titles and arranged them according to weather and sentimental topics, there would have been no popularity for them. Harvard would never have invested all that money in that very long 1955 edition, which changed the whole reception of Dickinson. For instance, Elizabeth Bishop thought Dickinson really wasn't much until she read the 1955 three-volume set, and then said, 'She's the best that we have.'”
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Alice Quinn
Panelist
January 08, 2008
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“In order for us to take care of patients—to play our role, whatever that role is—there has to be this bond of trust. I don't imagine there's anybody in this room who hasn't been a patient at some time. I know when I go to my car mechanic, I say to myself, 'Do I trust this person?' You were talking about how they profit from changing my tires and axles. Imagine how you feel if you don't trust your physician, or feel the whole system is out to get you. I'm shocked how this play resonates with us at this point in time.”
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Louis Pangaro
Panelist
December 08, 2007
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“I never wanted to deny the magic qualities of painting, which I consider to be the most magical of the mediums. I mean, as much as I love sculpture, it occupies real space like you or I. I could roll around you or roll around a piece of sculpture and I'll understand it by doing that. But a painting is this magic window, this rectangle on the wall, with just colored dirt smeared on a flat surface. It's the most transcendent because it transcends its physical reality and makes space where there is no space.”
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Chuck Close
Panelist
December 01, 2007
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“When we take the idealized patterns and rhythms of music into our movement, our voice, and our speech in an integrated way, it becomes a teacher, and it can teach us better, more efficient, more functional ways to go about our rhythmic processes of mind. Ultimately, developmentally, this can have an impact on the neurological processes of the brain.”
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Eric Barnhill
Panelist
January 14, 2008
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“If you look at one of the great urges of humankind or of any living thing, it's to spread your genes and your DNA and to have sex and have your genes be all over the place. What Facebook and other things are allowing you to do is to spread your virtual genes. It's your name, your presence, your photos, all over the place, not necessarily in conversation, but just to multiply your presence. You could argue that it ranges from bizarre or novel to obsessive and weird.”
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Esther Dyson
Panelist
December 15, 2007
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“I think we would be imprisoned, we would not be able to live with ourselves if we remembered everything. We would be overwhelmed with all of these bad memories, all of these good memories. It would be very inconsistent with our present attitude. And also socially—if we all had our own initial individual rendering of past objects, we’d be living in a Rashomon film our entire life, in which everybody had different renderings of exactly the same thing. There would be no social bonding between us.”
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William Hirst
Panelist
November 10, 2007
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Photographic Visions: The Art of Seeing
Art Exhibition
March 20 - June 08, 2008
Works by: Margaret Bourke-White, Edward Burtynsky, Mark Citret, Bruce Davidson, Bedrich Grunzweig, Eikoh Hosoe, Peter Keetman, William Klein, Eric Lindbloom, H.K. Shigeta, Minor White
The Story of Philoctetes
On the way to Troy, Philoctetes is bitten by a serpent. The pain is so extreme and the wound so foul smelling that Philoctetes is exiled to the island of Lemnos... More
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