Enlightenment by iPod
 

I've started to get bored with my usual podcasts. What I really want is more Radio Lab but they tease me with only five episodes a year.

So before looking for some new podcasts I decided to check out iTunes U. I downloaded a lecture from Yale and another from Stanford. The one from Yale is the first class of a course taught by Harold Bloom called The Art of Reading a Poem. I listened to it over two days on my way to work. At first it was a little strange because it's just a recording of the class with nothing cleaned up. It sounded like the classroom was next door to a loading dock because there was a "beep beep beep" like trucks backing up off and on through the whole thing. Harold Bloom managed to spend an hour and fifty minutes talking about just one poem. If I was an actual student in the class I would have been tearing my hair out because part of the reason it took so long was he kept wandering off topic. Since all I had to do was listen I enjoyed it but I got my fill of Harold Bloom.

Over the past two days I listened to the Stanford lecture. This one was exactly what I was looking for. It was the introduction to a course on Virgil's Aeneid. (Every once in a while I need to return to my Comparative Literature roots.) I drove to work hearing about Roman history and epic poetry and had a lovely time. I was ready to grab a copy of the book and start reading. I'm definitely going to download the other lectures of this particular course.

This was an exciting find for me.:snap: What else is out there? What podcasts should I check out?