[Edu-sig] setting the stage (short essay)

[kirby urner]

Here's some literary criticism regarding my little essay above:

Today's reading is finding relatively less of a direct Athena-Apollo
tension as that's not her Python he killed.  She had a twisted
"son" (he'd have to be, given her virginity -- at least the story is
twisted) who looked like serpent when Pandora opened the box,
but that was a different monster.  Or was it?   As you read
version after version you realize they're all just making it up
(duh) so the temptation is to just join in.

The thing is:  Monty Python is a serious bridge in British
comedy becoming more edgy.  We think about the BBC TV
as innocuous but forget about 'Life of Brian', which George
Harrison (of The Beatles fame) had to risk his personal fortune
on (he mortgaged his favorite property, his castle), to see
produced, after the original big name distributor got scared.
But then it's not just "nasty snake stuff" after that, meaning
the Python connotations are also rich and interesting, and
I will be taking a peek at those my upcoming workshop, with
lots of people signed up already (Chicago DjangoCon).

So for Python the language, the PR prospects continue to look
promising, even as a smaller minority keeps the Monty alive (and
well I might add).  Peter Seller's was part of the same network
of British comics.  I hold them in high regard (The Beatles too,
though I cannot be regarded as a "serious fan"-- my scores on
'Beatle mania' quizzes 'd be too low).

What we need is for humanities teachers to be less shy
about this stuff, all this AJAX and JSON.  Greek mythology
is an orphaned topic right now, begging for relevance,
whereas the anthropologists tell us we need shared stories
to cohere our cultures.  Do want to disconnect with the
ancestors completely?

Disney remade Hercules and otherwise flirted with parts
of Classical Western Culture in Fantasia and so on.  Now
in the movies we're doing DC and Marvel Comic superheros
on the big screen.  But with all our new-found computer
power ("special effects") why not do the Greek stuff again?

But lets give it more mnemonic value by marrying it with
the world of Tron, i.e. the landscape of "cyperspace" (or
Cyberia).   This invisible landscape has a need to be more
concrete in peoples' thinking, as it comprises our global
infrastructure, and is in constant need of upgrading and
maintenance.

There's already software called Python, and Athena.  Lets
reignite the Greek stage and teach our new Logic, still
awesomely geometric.  The stage is the screen, the browser,
and the cartoons explain virtual machines, what they are and
where they fit.  Didactic cartoons needn't be boring.

Interestingly, our mnemonics go even deeper than that.
Asynchronous programming, ala Twisted, traces to older
modules: asyncore and Medusa.  The idea of a hydra-headed
beast, a multi-processor or multi-tasker, need not be made
to frighten.  "Think of Medusa as gorgeous" say the cultural
therapist mythographers.  They're not so shy anymore.
They've found a way to leverage their training in the
humanities.  They know Athena helped Perseus cope with
Medusa, as a kind of interpreter of females to males and
vice versa (she's good at that), and they now know Python
is cutting new edges in the form of Tulip, a next take on
generative / asynchronous programming (asynch i/o
rebooted)

http://docs.python.org/2/library/asyncore.html
http://www.nightmare.com/medusa/
http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3156/

So were Apollo and Athena best of friends?  Those who took
liberal arts courses about Nietzsche or listened to a lot of
Joseph Campbell probably remember the Apollo-Dionysus
feud.  The whole soap goes back to Delphi by Mt. Parnassus,
where the Python once lived.

There's a STEM (geology / chemistry) angle, in that they now
think a kind of "laughing gas" maybe *did* steam up from beneath
those tripods, where the women oracles sat.  For a long period
scholars said "no way" but at the moment the mountainous
vapors school holds sway (says Google today).

A lot of scholars say those hallucinogenic gases were the rotting
Python smell and that "python" means "rot" in Greek.  Others say
there's a confusion of identities here and the Python actually lives
on.  So much depends on who is doing the telling.

In any case, this was the institution Apollo took over, and in recent
tellings I could swear it was Athena's own staff he was displacing.
But today those links were not found.  The Google god (or portal
to a great engine) has other things on its mind today.  Python's
mommy was Gaia.  You should learn a new vocabulary word
while you're at it:  "Chthonic" as in "the Python of the Pythians
was chthonic" (not that easy to say).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chthonic

The practice of oracles making pronouncements at Delphi
was officially squelched by a Byzantine dictator sometime in
the first 500 years after Jesus.  He was a Christian himself and
the whole Greek spiel was just not getting the same traction.  You
could say he closed it, but in today's language it probably more
just "ran out of money".  Like Coney Island someday.  The
carnival was over.  No cults last forever.  Plus they say the
laughing gas dried up.  The whole infrastructure had become
untenable and was allowed to crumble.  Today, it's all tourist
sites and museums, with skiing on Mt. Parnassus.  Today we
have PyLadies.

Kirby
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