Josh Beer
“Rage, rage against the dying of the light” – senile thoughts and memories from a lucky life- Part I (stay tuned for Part II coming in November 2023).

A famous Greek maxim said: “Count no man happy until he has passed the boundary of life free from pain.” In this talk Josh Beer will tempt fate by claiming that his life has been lucky. Born in WW II to working class parents who had no more conception of the inside of a university than the far side of Jupiter, Josh seemed destined to leave school at 15 and inherit a Victorian bakery which provided a kind of education unavailable to most people.  Still scarcely literate at the age of 14, what preserved him for a different fate were two things: Latin and his fantasies about 19th century Russian literature.  All his life he has been conscious of being a divided self: a traitor to his origins and his inadequacies as a scholar. Only in retirement has he been able to find voice to reconcile these contradictions. It is also a story of love and madness.

Josh Beer is an adjunct professor at Carleton University, after having taught there for 50 years. On his retirement he founded and is currently a co-chair of OSFAS. His book Sophocles and the Tragedy of Athenian Democracy was published in 2004 and his article “Tradition and Ambiguity: Deceit and Heroic Action in Sophocles’ Electra” in 2020.  His latest article on the influence of the Athenian plague on Euripides’ Hippolytus was published in October 2022 in the magazine of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, Argo.  For over twelve years, he directed students of the College of Humanities in dramatic readings of Greek tragedy which were highly praised, not least by His Excellency Eleftherios Anghelopoulos, the former Greek Ambassador to Canada.