[Music]
This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
And we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
[Music]
Well, here's the story, folks.
I was supposed to have with me in the studio Andrea Nightingale
from the classics department to talk about air-offs and beauty and play-doh,
but unfortunately, Professor Andrea Nightingale is not able to make it.
And so I am here on my own to on a log our way through the next hour on various topics.
Let me also mention that this is going to be the last show of entitled opinions for this season,
our third season.
We're going on hiatus for a few months through the summer,
and we will take up the show again in the autumn of 2008.
It's been a dynamic season, I would say.
I want to thank my assistant, Harris Fine-Sawd, for the job he's done,
taking over from David Lummis.
Thanks, Harris.
And those of you who just can't live without entitled opinions,
keep in mind that there are over 70 hours of shows in our archives,
either on our web page or in the iTunes Music Store.
So while we're on break, you can go in here those shows you haven't heard before,
even if you think you might not be interested in them,
or you can listen again to ones that you've already heard.
Most of them, I would say, very listening.
What I'd like to do today is speak about one or two,
perhaps even three of the authors that I know relatively well,
given that I am an Italianist by formation, medieval Italianist.
In particular, I'd like to talk as much as I can about Giovanni Bookcatchoe,
who in my opinion was one of the great storytellers of the Western tradition,
author of a book called The Decamaran, which was written in the middle of the 14th century,
which consists of a hundred short stories in which Bookcatchoe really perfects the art of the short story.
Indeed, in many ways, gives rise to modern art of storytelling,
and especially of the short story.
So we'll see in what that mastery of the art of narrative consists in,
as we look at one or two of the stories of the Decamaran.
The Decamaran came to mind, or Giovanni Bookcatchoe came to my mind
when Andrea Nightingale said that she wasn't going to be able to join me today,
because those of you who remember the show I did with her on Epicurus,
will remember that we talked about a number of Epicurean virtues,
a gratitude, friendship, conversation,
sociability, and so forth.
And there are not many descendants of Epicurus in the Western tradition,
but Giovanni Bookcatchoe certainly was an Epicurean in the best sense of that term.
And I think this has borne out in his master work, The Decamaran,
in the theories, or let's say, depictions of the phenomenon of pleasure that one finds at work there,
where, despite certain popular misconceptions, pleasure is not reducible to mere gratification of appetites,
neither for Bookcatchoe nor for Epicurus for that matter.
Rather, it's a cultivated phenomenon that is never divorced from forms of sociability,
and is something that requires a definite form as one of the characters of the narrator,
as one of the de-camera-on-puts.
Pleasure depends on a definite form if it's going to sustain itself and not just dissipate into thin air.
So, in his understanding of pleasure, as well as in his championing of the two virtues,
which for Bookcatchoe or Supreme, namely generosity and gratitude,
Bookcatchoe indeed reveals himself as an Epicurean.
We'll speak more about gratitude and compassion in a moment.
If you read the preface to the Decamaran, you'll find that he extols gratitude as the great human virtue.
Human and not divine virtue.
Indeed, the Decamaran's preface begins in Italian with the word human.
Human is a very quick sketch of what we call the frame of this book of short stories called the Decamaran.
It takes place in the year 1348 in the city of Florence.
And 1348 is not just one year among others.
It happened to be the year of the Black Death of the height of the plague,
which devastated so much of Europe and decimated its population.
I believe that half of the population of Florence,
if not two-thirds of the population of Florence perished in the Black Death of 1348.
And Bookcatchoe, who wrote the Decamaran about two or three years after the plague,
Situates, his book in this year where he has ten young men and women meet by chance on a Sunday Mass Service
and on their way out of the church, they speak with each other,
and all of them have lost their families.
And one of them suggests that they're in need of some kind of edification,
and why don't they remove themselves for a short period outside of the ravage city of Florence,
to the surrounding hills of Fiasole, where they can engage in some kind of sociable activity
and get away from the depressing realities of the plague.
That's exactly what they do.
They are what we might call upper class young men and women.
So they take themselves into a villa with beautiful gardens aroundings that are the countryside is mostly emptied of people due to the plague.
And for two weeks, they give themselves over to Mary making, dancing, feasting, and above all storytelling.
Each one of the ten storytellers who comprise the brigade, as it's called,
is a king or queen for one of the days, and the king or queen prescribes the theme for the storytelling.
So, as in fact, our word to camera on the word of the title means ten days.
And for ten days there will be ten stories per day, and it makes a total of a hundred stories.
All according to this architectonic, whereby a group of Florentines remove themselves,
and take flight, if you like. They take flight from the reality of the plague and Florence.
And this brings to my mind a quote from Hannah Arrad to Rodin Essay called "Dark Men in Dark Times."
And I'm quoting here now from memory. I don't have it under hand where she says that flight from reality can be excused as long as one acknowledges
that what it is that one is escaping from, namely reality.
And I would say that the brigade in their deliberate decision to remove themselves to the margins of reality, as it were,
engage in a escape from reality that never loses sight of the reality that they have a temporary reprieve from.
This is born out in story after story, which takes us back into the heart of the real, as it were.
But, you know, we won't get into that right now.
When I talk about storytelling, I think there's more than just entertainment value in stories.
There's a way in which human culture has its origins in the stories we tell, and a way in which the ongoing history of culture is one of endless storytelling.
So we have to ask ourselves, where would we be without stories, or without the art of recounting them, without their narrative organization of events and structuring of time?
So if you ask me where I'm from, or what happened at the gathering last night, or why is my friend so upset, I can hardly answer you without telling you a little story.
The fabric of life itself is woven into and by stories, so much so that the quality of human conversation depends to a very great extent, in my opinion, on our mastery of the
art of narrative.
Now, this art has been much neglected of late, and yet, nevertheless, it's something that we either bring or fail to bring day in and day out on our relations with others.
So one thing I'd like to argue, of course, of the next 30 to 40 minutes, is that there is an ethical imperative also to the art of life.
The art of storytelling.
Good storytelling is a way that we improve our relations with one another, and the time that we spend with one another.
And as Bocatran, you only too well, when he dedicates the decamaran to women in distress, or women who are cooped up in their rooms, not allowed to go out by their fathers and brothers and mothers,
that their sway which storytelling comes to the rescue of people in distress and helps them get through the day.
So this ethical element is something that Bocatran does not make a big fuss over.
Bocatran was not Dante. He'd never assumed the postures of a prophet or a reformer or a zealot, where he got up on his high horse or bullied his readers from a kind of high moral pulpit about obligations to one's fellow men.
But he makes it clear and very discreet ways that one could do a lot worse in life from the ethical point of view than telling good stories, or cultivating the art of conversation and the art of speech.
Many of the stories of the decamaran in which we find archetypical Bocatran heroes are about the way in which the proper use of language is something that serves a crucial therapeutic and aesthetic functions in social relations.
So, when we talk about literature or storytelling as something that can come to the rescue of people in distress, I'm brought to mind of a story in the decamaran that I'd like to read.
One of the reasons I want to read it, well, there are several reasons. One of them perhaps the least significant reason is that it's short enough that I can read the whole thing.
What I don't want to do is read part of a story or attempt to summarize other stories of the decamaran because Bocatran was such a master of storytelling that there's hardly a superfluous word or sentence in any of his stories, or if you try to give an account of it that's shorter than his version.
You're really going to not do a very good job of that. But the story I have in mind is short enough that I can read the whole thing. And it really is about a rescue operation.
Before I say more about it, I believe that I'll just read it for you.
Story is told on the sixth day, which is a day that has the shortest stories of all, and it's a day which is devoted to stories about precisely the proper use of language, the cultivation of eloquence,
and the learning of the art of narrative, and the virtues associated with the art of narrative.
But here we have a story about a historical figure named Guido Cabalas Canti.
He's one of the very few, but there's certainly not a whole lot of characters in the decamaran who were actually historically existing individuals, but Guido Cabalas Canti was one of them.
He belonged to Dante's generation. He was a poet, Florentine poet. In fact, he was a very good friend of Dante's for a while.
Dante dedicated his first book, the Vitan Wolvat, to Guido Cabalas Canti, who was about six or seven years his senior, Dante Senior, remarkable lyric poet, difficult poet, very philosophically minded, speculative, enigmatic, and he was flirting with a radical interpretation of Aristotelianism that gave him a
reputation in his own day, and after he died of perhaps being heretical or entertaining doctrines about associated with avaroys about the non immortality of the human soul.
Anyway, this story reads as follows. "I must, first of all, remind you," says the narrator, Emilia.
"That in days gone by, our city, Florence, was noted for certain excellent and commendable customs, all of which have now disappeared, thanks to the avarice which, increasing as it does with the growing prosperity of the world.
One of these customs was that in certain parts of Florence, a limited number of the gentleman in each quarter of the city would meet regularly in one another's houses for their common amusement.
Only those people who could afford to entertain on a suitably lavish scale were admitted to these coderries, and they took it in turn to play the host to their companions, each of them being allowed to be a
his own special day for the purpose. Distinguished visitors to Florence were frequently invited to these gatherings, and so too were a number of the citizens. At least once every year, they all wore the same kind of dress, while on all the more important anniversaries they rode together through the cities, and sometimes they tilted together, especially on the principal feasts, or when the news of some happy event had been
reached the city, such as a victory in the field. Among these various companies there was one that was led by
"Misser Beto Brunelleschi," into whose ranks Misser Beto and his associates had striven might and mane to attract Misser Cavalcante de Cavalcante's son, Guido.
And not without reason, for, apart from the fact that he was one of the finest logicians in the world, and an expert natural philosophy, to none of which Beto and his friends attributed very much importance,
Guido was an exceedingly charming and sophisticated man, with a marked gift for conversation, and he outshone all his contemporaries in every activity pertaining to a gentleman that he chose to undertake.
But above and beyond all this, he was extremely rich, and could entertain, most sumptuously, those people, whom he happened to consider worthy of his hospitality.
However, Misser Beto had never succeeded in winning him over, and he and his companions thought this was because of his passion for speculative reasoning, which occasionally made him appear somewhat remote from his fellow beings.
And since he tended to subscribe to the opinions of the Epic Koreans, it was said among the common herd that these speculations of his were exclusively concerned with whether it could be shown that God did not exist.
Now, one day Guido had walked from Oursan Miquelé along the Corso de la Di Marri as far as San Dravan, which was a favorite walk of his, because it took him past those great marble tombs now to be found in Santa de Paratha,
and the numerous other graves that lie all around San Dravan.
As he was threading his way among the tombs between the poor free columns that stand in that spot and the door of San Dravan, which was locked.
Mecet Beto and his friends came riding through the Piazza of Santa de Paratha, and on seeing Guido among all these tombs, they said, "Let's go and torment him."
And so, spurring their horses and making a mock charge, they were upon him almost before he had time to notice, and they began to taunt him, saying, "Guido, you spurn our company."
But supposing you find that God doesn't exist, what good will it do you?
Finding himself surrounded Guido promptly replied, "Gentlemen, in your own house, you may say whatever you like to me."
Then placing a hand on one of the tombstones, which were very tall, he vaulted over the top of it, being very light and nimble, and landed on the other side,
and went, having escaped from their clutches, he proceeded on his way.
Beto and his companions were left staring at one another.
Then they began to declare that Guido was out of his mind, and that his remark was meaningless, because neither they themselves nor any of the other citizens, Guido included, owned the ground on which they were standing.
But Miss. Beto turned to them and said, "You're the ones who are out of your minds if you can't see what he meant.
In a few words, he has neatly paid us the most backhanded compliment I ever heard, because when you come to consider it, these tombs are the houses of the dead, this being the place where the dead are laid to rest and where they take up their abode."
By describing it as our house, he wanted to show us that, by comparison with himself and other men of learning, all men who were as uncouth and unletered as ourselves are worse often the dead, so that being in a graveyard we are in our own house.
Now that Guido's meaning had been pointed out to them, they all felt suitably abashed, and they never taunted him again.
And from that day forth, they looked upon Miss. Beto as a paragon of shrewdness and intelligence.
This story has a subtext, what we call a literary studies of subtext.
In fact, it has many subtexts. One of them is in fair note 10, where Dante enters into the circle of the heretics,
who are punished precisely by being put into tombs that do not have their lids on them. The lids on these tombs are going to come down on the judgment day, but in the meantime they have open lids.
And Virgil and Dante, when they enter into this graveyard of the heretics, they meet two souls who share one tomb.
And those are the souls of Farinata and Kavas County, the Kavas County, namely Guido's father.
And those of you who have ever read in fair note 10, you'll remember there's one of the dramatic moments of Dante's in fair note.
Dante engages in a political discussion with Farinata, not even knowing that he shares that tomb with someone else.
And all of a sudden someone lifts himself up and piers over with his head the tomb and its Guido's father.
And he's looking around to find out if his son is with Dante. He doesn't see Guido.
And he says, "If because of your loftiness of intellect, you are traveling through this realm of hell, why is my son not with you?"
What happened to him?
The date on which this encounter takes place according to the dates of the poem is April, the year 1300.
This is what had happened.
Dante was the prior of Florence for a year and a half, two years prior to that date.
There was a lot of civil-factionalism in Florence between the white guffs and the black guffs and the seven priors of Florence, Dante, principle among them, decided that they were going to tear the city apart and they banished, exiled, the heads of the major magnate families that were fomenting this endless civil-factionalism.
One of these families was the Kalaz County family. Guido as a result was exiled in, at this period in 1300.
However, in April he was still alive.
He would subsequently die, however, in August of that same year due to malaria that he contracted during those few months of exile.
So when Dante is asked by Guido's father in April of 1300, where is my son, why is he not with you if because you are coming through this realm through your highness of intellect?
Dante knows that his son is still alive, but he answers Kalaz County with a very ambiguous tense.
What we call an Italian, the remote past tense, he said, "I do not come here on my own. I come here with someone, Virgil."
Well, slightly.
"Whom your Guido had held in contempt?"
Kalaz County hearing that use of the past remote rightly comes to the conclusion that his son is dead and he falls into a kind of despair and he says, "What do you mean?"
He had held him in contempt to his eyes no longer see the sweet light and so forth.
And in grief he falls back down into the tomb never to emerge again.
It's a very vicious moment in the divine comedy, and scholars have often asked, "Why is it that Dante is dealing so ambiguously with his one-time friend?"
Guido Kalaz County with whom he had subsequently estranged.
It's a good question.
What we do know is that Dante believed that Guido belonged in this sphere of the heretics, perhaps because he was a radical Aristotelian who didn't believe in the immortality of the individual soul.
But he did not have the courage to dam him so he dams him by proxy by putting his father in that place.
And at the same time, he leaves open the question of what was it in Guido's poetry and in Guido's doctrinal beliefs that would have constituted heresy?
And it is something that Book
Catcher was responding to when he puts Guido Kalaz County in the middle of a graveyard that by its very landscape is extremely reminiscent of the landscape of Inferno 10.
I'm going to get back to the story in an instant, but first I'd like to say a word about Guido Kalaz County the poet.
He was one of the most remarkable lyric poets in the Italian tradition, not only the Middle Ages, but the whole history of Italian poetry.
I think there's probably been no more exquisite lyric poet than Guido Kalaz County.
His poems have extraordinarily sophisticated, embroidered, and full of a kind of pathos.
And one doesn't know how to account for that pathos, but one has a palpable sense of it being something not fained at all, but endemic to Guido's personality.
It's-- Guido seemed to suffer his whole life long from a wound, the nature of which remains inscrutable to his readers.
Well, we have our poems that give us only partial insights into what that wound might have been.
And let me read you for just as an example, some verses of one of his longer poems, which is number 19 of his Kanzo Nierre.
I'll read a few lines in Italian and then read the English.
[speaking Spanish]
I beg of you who speak of sorrow that by dent of rare compassion, you not disdain to hear my woe.
Before my eyes I see the heart and the grieving soul that are slain that die from a blow that love gave them.
And at that point when it saw my lady, her noble spirit that laughs is the very one that makes itself heard by me that tells me you will have to die.
If you could sense how my heart grieves within your hearts you would tremble, for it says to me such sweet words that sighing you would invoke mercy, and only you would understand it for no other heart could think or tell how great is the sorrow I have to suffer.
Tears rise up from my mind as soon as it senses my lady, they make through the eyes a conduit through which passes the grieving spirit that enters through my eyes so weakly that it cannot reveal any color beyond that which imaging could complete from it.
I would love to go into a technical analysis of the poem. It's just really masterful that the numerical asymmetry of the rhymes scheme, the of these double,
Remed by Chatezer called an Italian that end each full stands as the dense but very casual assenances and alliterations and the rhythmic control and resolution of the verses and the manifold rhetorical figures that create this visualisation of an invisible psychic space of sensation and susceptibility.
The reason I read that is it just gives us a little glimpse into the state of unrest that this soul, Guido Cabacante puts into play in his poems.
Now, Itha look, Colvino, 20th century Italian writer once wrote a page about Colvino, about Guido Cabacante being the poet of lightness and I think there's something to the fact that he was a poet of lightness but for me he was above all the poet of the elusive.
And I think Dante understood that about Cabacante as well which is why even in the Divine Comedy where everything has its proper place, even there, Guido is elusive.
Dante cannot quite pin him down even though by association he's supposed to be trapped in the circle of the heretics.
But there was something fugitive about Guido's poetry and his personality and it's someone...
Well, let's say in Bocacos account, Bocacos seemed to have understood this brilliantly.
So in this story that I read, Guido figures as someone who can neither be enticed nor ensnared by those people who surround him.
This is a seemingly simple story but it's not at all simple. First we have the Jean-es deauche of Florence, these are the upper class of the nobles who live really only for pleasure and for partying and for distraction and they're called a bicata, a brigade.
In many ways this brigade led by Messe de Beto is the counterpart to the brigade of storytellers of the decamaran who also remove themselves to the gardens in order to tell stories and have fun and party and feast and so forth.
So in every respect we would say they're socialites and markedly superficial people.
But Bocacos is not a judge. He says that they had this custom of socializing together all the time and he laments the fact that there's no such customs left in Florence.
It's not for Bocacos to come out and condemn this bricata. They have a right to their pleasures by all means.
But the poet, the poet philosopher does not belong with them.
So Messe de Beto's bricata tried to invade and draw Guido into their social network and the scene in the cemetery merely confirms Guido's artistry of evasion.
And as I said we have to understand that evasion by reference to Bocacos because Bocacos knew that Dante ultimately failed really to ensnare his own one-time friend in the vast architect, Tonic of the Comedia.
Where Guido actually drifts in and out of Dante's poem like an uncontainable ghost. In fact Guido is present mostly by virtue of its absence in Dante's divine comedy.
So as I said Dante tried to seal Guido's posthumous fate by proxy in Fairnauten. He couldn't do it definitively because Guido had not died by April like 1300.
But with his agile leap over the tomb in the Decamorance 9th story of the 6th day, Guido escapes from the cemetery of heretics where Dante sought to confine him.
And this, I submit, makes of Bocacos no Vela one of the truly great rescue missions in literary history.
And here is a prime instance of that spirit of generosity which the preface of the Decamorance names as chief among all human virtues.
It's an act of generosity on Bocacos' part to come to the rescue of Guido in the cemetery of Santo de Padaata.
Now let's go back a minute to that line when Miss Ev bette says, "Guido, you've spurned our company, but supposing you find that God doesn't exist. What good will it do you?"
This is the typical Dasman, the Vave Self, misunderstanding of what the philosopher is up to.
No philosopher and certainly not Guido would spend all his time wandering around a cemetery trying to prove that God doesn't exist.
His speculations were directed elsewhere, but one can forgive this kind of vulgar understanding of what speculative philosophy is all about.
The important thing is, what does Guido mean when he answers Miss Ev bette to the effect?
Gentlemen, in your own house, you may say whatever you like to me.
That is a very elusive dictum. We don't know what to make of it.
Either as readers or by association, you know, Miss Ev bette and his associates. They don't know what to make of it.
Because it is famously enigmatic.
But there's one thing you don't want people like Miss Ev bette to do too much of, and that's to think.
And they don't want to think very too deeply either.
And so Miss Ev bette comes to their rescue.
They saying that Guido is out of his mind. The Italian word is "smemorato."
"smemorato" is an unusual word for "bookato" to use in this regard to me, out of your mind.
But he uses it for a very deliberate reason, I think, because it means literally de-memorized. You've lost your memory.
And I think that the reason he chose that word "smemorato" is because in Guido's most famous poem, called "Dona mípréga."
He defines love as residing in the place of memory.
In Prendesu was startling memoria.
However, he says you are the ones who are out of your mind, and then he gives this explanation of the hidden meaning of Guido's statement.
Now, one can argue, did he get him right?
And if he didn't get him right, what might Guido have meant?
According to Miss Eberto, it's because they are stupider than the stupid, and the dead that they belong that the graveyard is their home, and therefore they can say anything they want to him.
But that's not really what Guido has said.
It's just as possible that what he meant is that gentlemen, when I am in your house, or in your homes, you may say to me whatever you like.
But here, in this graveyard, you are in my home, and you cannot tell me what you like.
But Miss Eberto gives an interpretation, and everyone is very happy with it.
And as Bocatro writes, from that day forth, they looked upon Miss Eberto as a paragon of shrewdness and intelligence.
No, Miss Eberto.
And I have to make a confession here to the effect that, as a professor of literature, and as one who is commented on Guido
I feel uneasy and even a bash by the ending of this novella, which in the figure of Miss Eberto, holds up a mirror in which every professor of letters can or should see a reflection of him or herself.
See the interpreters of the poet's message, or the mediators between the Arcana of the philosophers and ordinary understanding.
We are the ones who provide a reduced and distorted, yet comprehensible account of the poet's otherwise cryptic words.
And this is not to leave those words in this very uncomfortable and unsettling state of ambiguity and ambivalence.
And just as Miss Eberto's restatement now stands in for Guido statement,
so too the commentators, expository brilliance, now stands in for the poet's wisdom.
So all those finally understood what Guido had meant, and henceforth considered Miss Eberto the shrewdest and most intelligent of people.
The university is founded on the likes of these kinds of knights, whose preemptive glosses become the object of admiration and provide the model of emulation for others.
I will not name names, but many of the exalted names among the professorial do fit in the hall of mirrors over which Miss Eberto presides.
The story I have been discussing is not a story that has a precedent in folklore or in the Novalino, which is one of the sources that Bookatro drew on for many of his stories.
It doesn't have any version anywhere.
It's one of the stories in the Decamarin that Bookatro himself has come up with on his own.
Many of the stories in the Decamarin do have previous sources.
There are the Fablio, the French tales.
There are certain romances, and I mentioned the Novalino, which is a collection of short tales of the 13th century in Italian.
There are also the thousand and one knights, which is another sort of story that has an important frame about a woman who marries a king who is highly disillusioned with women and kills his brides the morning after the first nuptual.
When she marries him, she tells him a story at night time with holding the ending, so he has to wait until the next day to find out how the story ends.
When she tells him the end of one story, she begins another and leaves that story unfinished night after night.
Again, somewhat like the Decamarin pointing to the fact that stories can ward off death on the menace of death, the way the story tellers of the Decamarin are also trying to distract themselves and put a distance between themselves and the death that's taking place in Florence.
This question of Bookcatro sources raises the question of whether there is really an original story, either in the Decamarin or anywhere else, because even though Bookcatro is the author of the Guido narrative, we've seen that he is retelling a story that Dante tells him in Fair no Ten in the Circle of the Epicureans.
Bookcatro's version of a story has been taken up by people like Colvino who I mentioned, it's been taken up by myself today and by others.
One could say that cultural history, the ongoing story of cultural history is one of the infinite retelling of stories.
The originals are lost in the night of time and all we have are the endless morphing versions, modifications of stories that constitute a sprawling kind of tradition.
Bookcatro was very well aware of this and what makes his Decamarin such a master work is the way he gives form to the infinite richness of narrative possibilities.
I'm very happy to have had the occasion today to talk about Bookcatro, who is really my favorite author in the attire, Italian canon of literary history.
I'm sorry that Andrea Nightingale was not able to join us to speak about Plato. She promised that she will be joining us next year when entitled opinions takes up again, but it's
to provide the occasion for me to talk about Bookcatro, which is always a pleasure for me and I want to urge those of you who haven't read the Decamarin to do so because pleasure is the dominant principle of the reading of that book.
So we're going to leave you with a song to carry you over the spring and the summer until we rejoin entitled opinions in the fall.
It's by a band called Arma virum quay. You have to love any band that has the name Arma virum quay, which are the first words of Virgil's a need.
Arma virum quay cano, I sing of arms and a man, a great story about the founding of Rome.
And this track here is called Gilgamesh Blues, and I'm not sure what the Blues have to do with Bookcatro or what Gilgamesh has to do with Bookcatro, except that the epic of Gilgamesh is the very oldest story to have come down to us.
In written form, but as I was just mentioning earlier, you can be sure that before it was fixed in the clay tablets of Sumer and Babylon, there were any number of previous oral versions of that story.
So here we go with Gilgamesh Blues. Bye bye.
Gilgamesh has blues, and we give you the Gilgamesh Blues.
[Music]