Saturday 31 December 2022
Thursday 15 December 2022
Friday 9 December 2022
Sunday 4 December 2022
Saturday 3 December 2022
Sunday 27 November 2022
Saturday 26 November 2022
Wednesday 23 November 2022
Friday 18 November 2022
Thursday 17 November 2022
Monday 14 November 2022
Tuesday 8 November 2022
Sunday 6 November 2022
Saturday 5 November 2022
Friday 4 November 2022
Monday 31 October 2022
Sunday 30 October 2022
Saturday 29 October 2022
Friday 28 October 2022
Wednesday 26 October 2022
Tuesday 25 October 2022
It Doesn't Matter Anymore
Friday 21 October 2022
Dear Mr. Fantasy
While the Franklin claims in his prologue that his story is in the form of a Breton lai, it is actually based on two closely related tales by the Italian poet and author Boccaccio. These appear in Book 4 of Il Filocolo, 1336, and as the 5th tale on the 10th day of the Decameron. In both stories, a young knight is in love with a lady married to another knight. He persuades her to promise to satisfy his desire if he can create a flowering Maytime garden in winter, which he achieves with the help of a magician, but releases her from her rash promise when he learns that her husband has nobly approved her keeping it. [3] In Chaucer's telling, the setting and style are radically altered. The relationship between the knight and his wife is explored, continuing the theme of marriage which runs through many of the pilgrims' tales. Although the Tale has a Breton setting, it differs from traditional 'Breton lais'. Whereas these mostly involved the fairy supernatural, here magic is presented as a learned business performed by clerks with university training.
This is fitting for a writer like Chaucer who wrote a book (for his son Lewis) on the use of the astrolabe, was reported by Holinshed to be "a man so exquisitely learned in al sciences, that hys matche was not lightly founde anye where in those dayes" and was even considered one of the "secret masters" of alchemy.[4]
While the idea of the magical disappearance of rocks has a variety of potential sources, there is no direct source for the rest of the story. The rocks possibly come from the legends of Merlin performing a similar feat, or might stem from an actual event that happened around the time of Chaucer's birth. In a recent paper, Olson et al. analyzed the Franklin's Tale in terms of medieval astronomy. He noted that on 19 December 1340 the sun and moon were each at their closest possible distance to earth while simultaneously the sun, moon and earth were in a linear alignment; a rare configuration which causes massive high tides. This configuration could be predicted using the astronomical tables and the types of calculations cited in the tale.[5] The theme of the story, though, is less obscure—that of the "rash promise", in which an oath is made that the person does not envisage having to fulfil. The earliest examples of the "rash promise" motif are found in the Sanskrit stories of the Vetala as well as Bojardo's Orlando Innamorto and Don Juan Manuel's Tales of Count Lucanor.[6] There are also rash promises in the Breton lays 'Sir Orfeo' and 'Sir Launfal', which Chaucer may have known.
[wikipedia]
BLACKROCK IS BUYING THE WORLD.
BlackRock tells employees to report affairs with staff at related firms
The asset management giant has ordered all employees to disclose platonic or sexual relationships with members of any business that have any form of dealings with it.
Wednesday 12 October 2022
Monday 10 October 2022
Sunday 9 October 2022
Friday 7 October 2022
Tuesday 4 October 2022
The Premature Anti Fascist
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jul-15-bk-22387-story.html
I first heard the remarkable phrase “premature anti-Fascist” in 1946 when, fresh out of the U.S. Army, I went up to New Haven, Conn., for an interview with the chairman of the Yale classics department, to which, taking advantage of the generous provisions of what was popularly known as the GI Bill, I had applied for admission to the graduate program for the PhD. in classics. I had submitted a copy of my certificate of the bachelor’s degree I had received from St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1936. I did not make any mention of the fact that I had made rather a mediocre showing in the final part of the Tripos, ending up with a second class (at least, I comforted myself, I did better than Auden, who got a third). To jazz up my application a bit, I had included my record in the U.S. Army, private to captain 1942 to ’45. The Professor, who had served in the U.S. Army in 1917 to ’18, was very interested and remarked on the fact that, in addition to the usual battle stars for service in the European Theater, I had been awarded a Croix de Guerre a l’Ordre de l’Armee, the highest category for that decoration. Asked how I got it, I explained that, in July 1944, I hadparachuted, in uniform, behind the Allied lines in Brittany to arm and organize French Resistance forces and hold them ready for action at the moment most useful for the Allied advance. “Why were you selected for that operation?” he asked, and I told him that I was one of the few people in the U.S. Army who could speak fluent, idiomatic and (if necessary) pungently coarse French. When he asked me where I had learned it, I told him that I had fought in 1936 on the northwest sector of the Madrid front in the French Battalion of the XIth International Brigade. “Oh,” he said, “you were a premature anti-Fascist.”
click on link above [or put in browser] to read the rest of this
Friday 9 September 2022
Wednesday 7 September 2022
Tuesday 6 September 2022
Sunday 4 September 2022
Wednesday 31 August 2022
Tuesday 23 August 2022
Here Comes That Rainy Day Feeling Again
First autumn morning
the mirror I stare into
shows my father's face.
- Murakami Kijo
Saturday 20 August 2022
Tuesday 16 August 2022
Sunday 14 August 2022
Saturday 13 August 2022
Saturday 6 August 2022
HOPE
- To Buddhism's first noble truth, that all life is full with suffering, Schopenhauer adds that the entire experienced world is not fully and entirely real. It is mere representation (Vorstellung) and has only the kind of phenomenal reality that the shadows have in Plato's cave.
- To the second noble truth, that all suffering is rooted in desire, Schopenhauer adds two things:
a) Suffering is actually rooted in both desire and fear (the inclinations to approach or avoid), the two primary motivators of all actions. Both of these inclinations are, for Schopenhauer, included in the concept of will. Thus, all suffering is rooted in willing.
b) The true underlying nature of the entire phenomenal universe is Will (urge, force, energy, drive). Der Wille is what everything actually is beneath its surface appearances. - There is hope, despite the fact that life is full of suffering and that the world is all an illusion. There may not actually be very much hope because a) most people do not realize the real situation we are in (Noble Truths #1 & #2), and b) even if they did realize it, most people would not have the wisdom or strength to undertake what is necessary to get beyond the illusion and suffering.
- The two ways to salvation from the suffering and illusion are
- aesthetic encounter with The Beautiful
- the practice of asceticism
Friday 5 August 2022
Wednesday 3 August 2022
Sunday 31 July 2022
Saturday 30 July 2022
Friday 29 July 2022
Thursday 28 July 2022
Wednesday 27 July 2022
Monday 25 July 2022
Saturday 23 July 2022
The Specials - You're Wondering Now
"The Hollow Men"
What is the point of this scene of Kurtz reciting T. S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men?" It serves the same function as the Gardenia speech: reversal of expectations. Kurtz is reading poetry in the midst of this savage war. And the kind of poetry he reads is extremely important because it reveals his character.Coppola adds another level of complexity in relationship to Heart of Darkness. Kurtz also reads poetry to the Russian who was mesmerized by Kurtz' eloquence. But the poetry Kurtz reads is very different from the poetry Colonel Kurtz reads. The distinction is crucial in understanding how fundamentally different the two Kurtzs turn out to be.
Conrad's Kurtz reads love poetry and his own poetry. We never hear any of it but we can imagine the kind that is consistent with his character: romantic poety full of high sounding but empty phrases. Remember Marlow points out that Kurtz is blind to the emptiness of his beautiful rhetoric about bringing enlightenment and civilization to the savage Africans. Kurtz is "hollow at the core." So imagine the kind of poetry he reads.
Colonel Kurtz reads a different kind of poetry. We know that he read T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J.F. Prufrock" and Rudyard Kipling's "If" to the Photojournalist. And in this scene he reads the first stanza of "The Hollow Men." As the title and the first stanza indicate, the poem is a withering indictment of the moral emptiness of the modern world: the empty heads and the empty speech. So what kind of a man reads these kinds of poems? A man who has self-awareness and an acute sense of the ironies and contradictions of the world. Certainly not the Kurtz of Heart of Darkness.
The final bit of cleverness that Coppola adds to the scene is a nice in-joke for anyone who has read the Eliot poem. The poem is Eliot's meditation on Heart of Darkness. The epigraph to the poem is a line from the novella: "Mistah Kurtz he dead." The fundamental image of the poem--hollow men--is taken from Marlow's words: Kurtz was "hollow at the core." Coppola has his Kurtz reading the poem about Conrad's Kurtz.
http://hartzog.org/j/apocalypsenowkurtzwillard.html
Wednesday 20 July 2022
Tuesday 19 July 2022
Saturday 16 July 2022
Liverpool Packet
― Herman Melville, Redburn
Friday 15 July 2022
Thursday 14 July 2022
Tuesday 12 July 2022
Monday 11 July 2022
Sunday 10 July 2022
Saturday 9 July 2022
Friday 8 July 2022
Thursday 7 July 2022
Wednesday 6 July 2022
Friday 1 July 2022
Thursday 30 June 2022
Tuesday 28 June 2022
Monday 27 June 2022
Sunday 26 June 2022
Thursday 23 June 2022
Wednesday 22 June 2022
Tuesday 21 June 2022
When Will You (Make My Telephone Ring) ?
Sunday 19 June 2022
Thursday 16 June 2022
Wednesday 15 June 2022
Sunday 12 June 2022
Sunday 5 June 2022
Saturday 4 June 2022
Friday 3 June 2022
Thursday 2 June 2022
Wednesday 1 June 2022
Thursday 19 May 2022
Wednesday 18 May 2022
Tuesday 17 May 2022
Saturday 14 May 2022
Sunday 8 May 2022
Monday 2 May 2022
Sunday 24 April 2022
Wednesday 20 April 2022
Saturday 16 April 2022
Friday 15 April 2022
Tuesday 12 April 2022
Saturday 26 March 2022
Tuesday 22 March 2022
Sunday 20 March 2022
Tuesday 15 March 2022
Sunday 13 March 2022
Saturday 12 March 2022
Friday 11 March 2022
Wednesday 9 March 2022
Tuesday 8 March 2022
End War Now!.
Friday 18 February 2022
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If I had my life to live over, I'd try to make more mistakes next time. I would relax. I would be sillier than I have been this trip. I ...