Enlightenment by iPod

[lindyhop]

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. What else is out there? What podcasts should I check out?