It was a dark, cold day today in Ithaca. I spent it sitting at a graduate student carrell inside Cornell’s Olin Library, on the sixth floor, in my favorite call number: PA 3800, the Greeks. (Cornell lets you walk into their library without an ID card, a guest pass, or anyone checking any bags at all, unlike Stanford.) The new deadline from R&C has encouraged me to get it together and pick my four favorite choruses to work with. It wasn’t easy, but I did end up with mostly what I was expecting:

Sophocles – OEDIPUS AT COLONNUS (am still flirting with ANTIGONE, and using OAC as a kind of umbrella chorus for the entire project)
Euripides – MEDEA
Aeschylus – THE PERSIANS
Aristophanes – THE WASPS

It’s hard for me to let go of ANTIGONE because I so vividly remember Professor Ginsburg and Professor Abel, my Cornell classics professors from my TASP (Telluride Association Summer Program) analyzing those choruses with us. To this day, I refer to “May he never share my hearth – may he never think my thoughts” as an example of the chorus using the singular pronoun, the collective character of it.

I took the bus in, but I walked back to stay warm – and I swang by 217 West Avenue, the Telluride House, on the way back.

Professors Ginsburg and Abel are both dead now. I never saw Judy Ginsburg again after our TASP. I did see Lynne Abel in 2003, before I went to Germany, when Christian and I co-led a TASP at Cornell. I went to her house at the lake and she gave me advice, some of which I took. I never let her know how the play in Berlin went, and I heard she had died before I could.

At least I’m still working on the Greeks, and still with the ideas they gave me.