"We are all latecomers": Martin Puchner's "Culture" (JP, EF)

Cave art: Chauvet cave "Meaning rather than utility" (cf Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams)

Recovery of Gilgamesh retold in David Damrosch's The Buried Book)

John Guillory's version of multiple forms of cultural transmission: "Monuments and Documents"

William Blake, "Drive your cart and plough over the bones of the dead"

Alex Ross writes eloquently in his book The Rest Is Noise about music's "pulverized modernity"; the revival of ancient culture in a reformulated, fragmented and reassembled from.

Creolization as distinctively Caribbean (cf Glissant's notion of creolite )

Orlando Paterson, Slavery and Social Death (cf also Vincent Brown on the syncretism and continuity in Carribean deathways, Reaper's Garden)

"Revenants of the past" as a way of understanding what scholars do: a phrase from Lorraine Daston's Rules--and was extensively discussed in the RTB conversation with Daston.

Peter Brown Through the Eye of the Needle on monastic wealth and the rise of "mangerial bishops"--a topic that came up in his conversation with RTB.

John presses the non-cenobitic tradition of the hermit monk, but Martin insists that most Church tradition shares his preference for the cenobitic or communal monastic tradition --even on Mt Athos.