Cultuur en Educatie – Buitenland

In Jerusalem of the year 1229, there lived a Greek Orthodox monk named Johannes Myronas. Needing some parchment for a prayer book, he grabbed some already-used pages, erased their existing content, and over them wrote down “prayers for the dead, prayers for repentance, blessings for the loaves at Easter, and... Read more »

Image via Wikimedia Commons It’s been a humanist truism for some time to say that Shakespeare speaks to every age, transcending his time and place through the sheer force of his universal genius. But any honest student first encountering the plays will tell you differently, as will many a seasoned... Read more »

One of my favorite Brian Eno quotes, or rather one that became an Oblique Strategy, is “Honor Your Mistake as a Hidden Intention.” (Or to be pedantic, the original version was “Honor Thy Error…”). As a teenager growing up and trying to make art (at that time music and comics)... Read more »

At the moment, the answer to the question of why we should read Homer’s Odyssey seems rather straightforward: so we can more intelligently voice our opinions on Christopher Nolan’s new blockbuster film adaptation. A quarter-century ago, the matter was somewhat less clear. Still, an occasion had presented itself in the form... Read more »

Maybe you’ve already seen Christopher Nolan’s new cinematic interpretation of the Odyssey more than once; maybe you don’t know whether you’ll ever get around to it at all. Either way, you’ve got to admit that the man makes films in a way very few living directors do. His combination of blockbuster-scale... Read more »

Filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki detests being referred to as the Japanese Walt Disney. The great animator and storyteller admires the gorgeous animation of classic Disney films, but finds them lacking in emotional complexity, the element he prizes above all else. Miyazaki’s films are celebrated for their mystical, supernatural elements, but they take... Read more »

The typical student traveling on a Eurail pass will stop in such lands as Österreich, Italia, Česko and Schweiz — also known as Suisse, Svizzera, and Svizra. If that student happens to hail from the English-speaking world, the names Austria, Italy, the Czech Republic (the recent movement for Czechia notwithstanding), and Switzerland... Read more »

Folks with a passing knowledge of ukiyo‑e, the Japanese woodblock print art form popular in the 17th through 19th centuries, will be familiar with its landscapes, as well as its portraits of courtesans and kabuki actors. But often these prints were educational, as demonstrated by these very odd anatomical prints... Read more »

Though it’s traditionally meant “last in a progression or series,” as Merriam-Webster puts it, the word ultimate has been more often used in recent decades to mean “the best or most extreme of its kind.” The name of a recently launched digital archive performs a rare inversion, labeling as last a creation marked not by finality... Read more »

We previously brought you the BBC series of short animated videos, A History of Ideas. Produced in collaboration with the UK’s Open University and narrated by Harry Shearer, these fun introductions to such philosophers as Simone de Beauvoir and Edmund Burke, and such weighty philosophical topics as free will and... Read more »

Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose sold so well that its English translator William Weaver could add an extension onto his Tuscan villa, which he called the “Eco Chamber.” The Biblioteca Eco, or Eco Library, whose ribbon-cutting earlier this month you can see in the Italian news clip just above,... Read more »

There are many ways to celebrate a new album from a band you admire. You can have a listening party alone. You can have a listening party with friends. You can learn the title track in a couple of days and play it onstage while the band you admire sits... Read more »

Norfolk is known for its network of rivers and lakes, its stock of medieval churches, and for being the home county of Alan Partridge. Last year, it quite literally unearthed another mark of distinction in the form of an iron age war trumpet. “The bronze trumpet or carnyx is only the third... Read more »

Not to diminish the nightmare of mortars and shrapnel, but as evidenced by Crow’s Eye Productions’ period-accurate dressing video above, one of the greatest horrors of WWI was wet wool. Decades before the invention of Gore-Tex, Polar Fleece, and other high-performance, all-weather gear, British soldiers relied on their woolies from... Read more »