tagged w/ Literature
-
We’re in the beginning of an Arizona/Grand Canyon Western film set, so stop after just fifteen minutes down the piste to shoot some B roll. Bea discovers the key to the room at Gourma, so Abdul returns to Douentza while we shoot, crack jokes, get burrs in our pants, are visited by wandering Peuls, and…. finally our faithful driver returns and we’re on our way. Taking it easier. And of course today happens to be Tabaski here (it’s a locally defined thing), so still no food.
And as we move into Dogon country something happens. As if the cliffs are living. The Telems were here first. In the eleventh century. You can sense their world – veldt, savannahs, jungle with lions, buffalo, elephants. The wild dangers led the Telems to live in impossible-to-reach cliff houses, like Chaco Canyon or Mesa Verde. You can see these astonishing dwellings in a documentary of a Dogon cliff funeral made by Jean Rouch Cimetieres dans La Falaise . I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THAT YOU STOP whatever you are doing and spend 18 minutes with the Dogons. It’s in Dogon and French and awesome.
Bob Holman is the host of a new travel series focused on endangered languages called ON THE ROAD WITH BOB HOLMAN on LINK TV. He traveled to West Africa, Middle East and Asia and these are his blog stories from his travels. More information at http://www.rattapallax.com/blog/on_the_road/We’re in the beginning of an Arizona/Grand Canyon Western film set, so stop... more
-
-
Charles Dickens biographer Claire Tomalin has this week claimed that kids these days can no longer read his "amazingly relevant" works because their attention spans are ruined by "dreadful" TV. So to celebrate Charles Dickens 200th birthday British tabloid The Mirror have boiled down his books to 140-character easily understandable tweets.If you haven't read any Dickens don't read the below, spoiler alerts!
Barnaby RudgeMystery murder: Essex nutter with a pet raven conned into rioting in London, dodgy MPs, couple of hangings, murder solved. Lovers wed. #Aah!The Pickwick Papers Nice rich old man Sam Pickwick & chums travel round the UK countryside and write about findings. Cue funny scrapes inc Mr P getting jailed.A Tale of Two Cities French Revolution, boozy lawyer defends Brit toff spy, falls for his lover & helps her save him from guillotine. #Bestof timesworstoftimesNicholas Nickleby Nick's dad loses money & dies. Nick, ma & sis have to live with horrid rich uncle. Posh ppl cruel, but Nick comes out on top #HappyeverafterA Christmas Carol Miserly Scrooge mean to all inc Bob C who's got sick son Tim. Spooked by 3 ghosts on Xmas Eve. Wakes changed man, buys big bird. #happyxmas!The Old Curiosity Shop Nell lives in shop wiv grampy who gambles to save for her future. Loses shop to mean moneylender. They flee, get hunted down - and die. Sob.The Adventures of Oliver Twist Orphan flees workhouse, snared by villain Fagin, gets caught pickpocketing, old gent takes pity, gets kidnapped then rescued. #Happyending!Our Mutual Friend Bloke due to wed to ensure fortune "drowns". Cash goes to working class Boffins. Blackmail, villainy then dead hero returns to #wed and winThe Mystery of Edwin Drood Orphan falls foul of opium-soaked choirmaster who obsesses over his betrothed. Dickens dies before he finishes the story. #hence the mysteryDavid Copperfield Mean stepdad sends Dave to work in London, he flees to live with Aunt, becomes a lawyer, falls for boss's girl and defeats enemy Uriah Heep.
Bleak House Saintly Ester pressured to marry man she doesn't love. Murder, inheritance battle and case of spontaneous human combustion. #tons of twistsHard Times Dour milltown teacher tries to reform circus lass while own kids go off rails & get into robbery. Local worker tries to dump his drunk wife.Little Dorrit Amy Dorrit & dad Bill live in debtor's jail. He's freed, she falls for pauper Arthur. Strange secret and villain with two names in the mix.Great Expectations Pip's a gent cos of cash windfall. Gets greedy, disowns family, discovers benefactor is escaped con. Mad Miss Haversham fries, #he gets girl
Dickens in numbers
1812 .. born Charles John Huffam Dickens on Feb 7, PortsmouthTen ..children with Catherine Thomson Hogarth, who he married aged 2412 ..age he started work labelling polish for 6s989 characters in all his stories put together325 ..adaptations for film & TV (so far!)Six ..number of weeks it took to write A Christmas Carol to get it ready for festive season58..the age he died, following a strokeCharles Dickens biographer Claire Tomalin has this week claimed that kids these days... more
-
-
If you have a child currently enrolled in public school be warned: a heavy dose of religion may accompany his or her studies.
According to Kimberly Winston of Religion News Service, a number of state legislators are now pushing some legislation that would introduce studying the Bible as a choice in their state's public schools, and other legislation that would teach creationism as valid.
Bible courses, offered as elective "literature" classes, are being considered by lawmakers in Arizona and have already been approved in South Dakota, South Carolina, Texas, Georgia, Oklahoma, and Tennessee. Since these classes are not mandatory and are supposed to be taught with religious neutrality, there has not been a great deal of public opposition to them. Some school districts within the states where they are allowed still choose to not offer them at all.
To read the rest of this article by AHA Executive Director Roy Speckhardt, click here: http://hmn.st/xXKSCIIf you have a child currently enrolled in public school be warned: a heavy dose of... more
-
-
The author Thomas C. Foster has written a book called Twenty-five Books That Shaped America. While reading this book I agreed with some selections. However, I disagreed with about 75% of them. I don’t think the author took into account that the books that changed America should be transformative and not personal favorites. The criteria for books should be if the authors provoke social or philosophical change in the way we American’s view ourselves. Without further adieu, here is the 1Lovejoy’s list.The author Thomas C. Foster has written a book called Twenty-five Books That Shaped... more
-
-
I have been a bookworm all my life. Bookworm being the old fashioned word for what is now termed a pathology, bibliophile?, loner? I have only recently downloaded my
first e-book onto a cheap pad I got. It's Bleak House for free. I used to have a complete set of Dickens from about 1880. It yellowed and fell to pieces. Couldn't hold
the books at all. I collect antique books, nothing fancy just what I like. Bulwers Works, Ben Hur, almost all of Dauphne DeMurier. I would be one of those folks with
shelves cutting through the middle of the living room if I could get away with it, piles of books like towers everywhere. Now I suppose I could collect books on hard drives, but that lacks the aesthetic appeal; or the smell. The new soy inks don't have that lovely off gassing smell of chemical inks.
I remember the day I learned how to read, like lightening striking, like learning to breath under water. It was a fantastic, trippy experience as some part of my six year old brain exploded into awareness. When I would laugh at jokes about Dick and Jane, I would feel a little guilty sadness because they had done so much for me. I won prizes in second grade for reading the most books, could read college level by the age of 12. Granted I can read and comprehend well, but that doesn't translate into writing skills as my high school teachers hated teaching diagramming so any syntax or grammer I have is by accident. I don't know anyone who reads like I do. My daughters have to read
because they are in school but they don't rush home to read like I did, high in the magnolia tree like a strange monkey. I have never caught them reading with a
flashlight lost in a world of knights and poetry. They don't lie in bed all saturday morning finishing up the last of a book that they saved for a morning thrill. None
of my husbands read all that much, a magazine, internet. My second husband was a lawyer so he had to read and he did like Hunter S. Thompson, but other than that.
So for the New Year I wanted to list all the books I read in 2011. I can't make a reading list for 2012 as I don't know where my mind will take me. But I can tell you where I have been. Did you know you can get a list of all the books you have borrowed going back at least five years from your local library?
View my blog for the complete list and feel free to let me know what you have read this last year. Happy New Year
viewsfromanoldwhitewoman.blogspot.comI have been a bookworm all my life. Bookworm being the old fashioned word for what is... more
-
-
The death of Christopher Hitchens on Thursday night, of complications from esophageal cancer at the age of 62, ended one of the greater intellectual careers of the last 40 years. Born in Portsmouth, England, and educated at Balliol College, Oxford, Hitchens started his career as a Trotskyite at “The New Statesman,” working along with noted authors, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, who would become his lifelong friends. In the early 1980s, he moved to the United States, becoming a citizen in 2007, and began working for liberal magazine “The Nation,” writing some of his earliest attacks on the conservative government and American foreign policy.
A prolific author, Hitchens left behind a massive body of critical writing, with more than a dozen books and hundreds of essays targeting everyone from the British Monarchy to Bill Clinton to George Orwell to God, usually with wit and more often than not, vicious and cutting remarks. Even those who hated his politics could not help but admire his skill as a writer and ability to craft a sharp turn of phrase, and many called him a friend.
Perhaps his most famous book was “The Missionary Position,” a scathing attack on Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity church, an organization that he called a cult. Hitchens described Mother Teresa as a “fraud” and accused her of glorifying poverty to enrich herself and the Catholic church, rather than truly helping the poor. The book infuriated Roman Catholics around the world, as well as politicians and celebrities who he claimed had used the charity and her reputation to mask their own evil deeds.
A later work, “The Trial of Henry Kissinger,” accused the former Secretary of State of “war crimes,” and argued that Kissinger should be prosecuted for “crimes against humanity, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture” for his involvement in atrocities in Southeast Asia and Central America. As a critic of the Bush administration’s use of torture, Hitchens filmed himself being waterboarded to demonstrate the cruelty of the practice. Hitchens claimed that, “The official lie about this treatment … is that it 'simulates' the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning.”
Hitchens had an enviable career arc that began with his own brand of fiery journalism at Britain’s “New Statesman” and then made its way to America, where he wrote for everyone from “The Atlantic” and “Harper’s” to “Slate and “The New York Times Book Review.” He was a legend on the speakers’ circuit, could debate just about anyone on anything and won innumerable awards.
Christopher Hitchens was a wit, a charmer, a troublemaker and was a gift, if it dare be said, from God.
This piece includes color photographs, a photo-gallery and two documentary short films.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/12/16/remembering-christopher-hitchens-1949-2011/The death of Christopher Hitchens on Thursday night, of complications from... more
-
-
The night is weeping worms
And you must choose my steps: a careful
Bedouin rhythm, a rippling foreign tongue.The night is weeping worms
And you must choose my steps: a careful
Bedouin rhythm,... more
-
-
“The Picture of Dorian Gray” is an innovative and gripping literary adaptation, a graduation animated eight-minute short film by Thomas Beg at England’s UCA Rochester. Adapting the Oscar Wilde classic, Thomas Beg has crafted a short film that is in the running for best of the year. The visual presentation of this familiar story is what sets Beg’s adaptation apart: the use of beautiful, visually intricate black-and-white tableaus, the novel portrait mode framing and his choice of creating a story about human characters with no actual character animation.
For those who might be unfamiliar with the story, “The Picture of Dorian Gray” is Oscar Wilde’s only published novel, released in 1891. Dorian Gray is gazing upon a completed portrait of himself when it strikes him as tragic that he will grow old, while the portrait will forever capture him in the bloom of youth. If only it were reversed. Suddenly it is so, and the story follows the moral degradation of Gray after this supernatural event.
This piece includes a colorful illustration and the acclaimed animated short film.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/12/04/the-picture-of-dorian-gray/“The Picture of Dorian Gray” is an innovative and gripping literary... more
-
-
Famous fantasy novelist Anne McCaffrey had died at the age of 85, Random House confirmed Tuesday afternoon. Anne McCaffrey was much beloved for all of her fiction works, but most especially addored for her long-lived Dragonriders of Pern series.Famous fantasy novelist Anne McCaffrey had died at the age of 85, Random House... more
-
-
Disturbing. Great story, but disturbing.
"I still can’t believe I got a dude with a harelip for a roommate. And his name is Roger. Fucking Roger. I walk in and he’s already claimed the top bunk, his computer the only thing up and running besides my blood.
He introduces himself as Roger F. McAlister the Third, son of douche bag blah blah blah blah. I stop listening."Disturbing. Great story, but disturbing.
"I still can’t believe I got a... more
-
-
Milbrodt: I have always been fascinated by people who look different or those who don’t fit in. When I was a kid I was overweight and got teased a lot at school, so I often thought about people who were considered “different” or otherwise ended up on the margins of society. I also had a very independent streak from a young age, and was constantly asking why it was wrong to be different, and why I had to do things the same way everyone else did them.Milbrodt: I have always been fascinated by people who look different or those who... more
-
-
In the final analysis, the orcs and goblins seem to me to be in no way comparable to the 1%. On the contrary. It’s young Lord Rust who’s the 1% and the goblins are the 99% he’s selling into slavery.
Pratchett does, indeed, redeem the possibility inherent in every race and affords a space for redemption no matter what your station in life. On this point Gavin and I couldn’t agree more. Pratchett distinguishes between how we’re born and what we choose to do, and perhaps here is the nut of what I think is wrong with the argument Gavin frames out in his post. The 1% that Occupy Wall Street is protesting against is not a downtrodden minority and they are not the focus of prejudice in the way that Pratchett’s orcs and goblins are. The rage against them is rooted in law and evidence and the call is not for obliteration of a class but for a just and legal program of redress.
As presently constructed, the “orcs = the 1%” argument is like conflating armed robbers with African-Americans. Sure, both groups have their haters, but there’s no equivalency beyond that.In the final analysis, the orcs and goblins seem to me to be in no way comparable to... more
-
-
Painting on Papyrus
The blue feathered ibis
is a symbol of immortality;
the crescent-shaped lotus flowers,
symbols of immortality;
even the goggle-eyed asp
who sheds his skin,
symbol
of immortality.Painting on Papyrus
The blue feathered ibis
is a symbol of immortality;
the... more
-
-
To live in North Dakota you must like driving. You must value a landscape where there is never much between you and the horizon. The four of us grew up here so space is second nature. We are accustomed to towns such as Lost Point—six hundred people, a grocery store, a gas station, a bank, and a motel with one of those big orange flashing emergency road signs out front that no one uses because there are no road emergencies. The motel is full for two weeks every summer due to traffic to and from the Badlands and Montana rodeos. Fifteen or so years ago when we were still in high school we dreamed summer romances with young men from exotic places like Tampa and Fort Lauderdale, but we got sensible jobs at the bank and married people from here because everyone does.
The eyebrows, which might be considered our town’s only notable attraction, are not advertised in any tour book.To live in North Dakota you must like driving. You must value a landscape where there... more
-
-
“At barely more than 100 small (four and a half by seven inch) pages in Andrew Bromfield’s excellent English translation The Hall of the Singing Caryatids succeeds both as a novella of ideas and as a science fiction work of fantasy, and is recommended to all readers enamored of thought provoking fiction.”“At barely more than 100 small (four and a half by seven inch) pages in Andrew... more
-
-
-
To see or not to see, that is the question about the new conspiracy movie Anonymous that asserts William Shakespeare did not write the plays attributed to him. As a NY Times magazine piece by Stephen Marche puts it:
“Was Shakespeare a fraud?” That’s the question the promotional machinery for Roland Emmerich’s new film, “Anonymous,” wants to usher out of the tiny enclosure of fringe academic conferences into the wider pastures of a Hollywood audience. Shakespeare is finally getting the Oliver Stone/“Da Vinci Code” treatment, with a lurid conspiratorial melodrama involving incest in royal bedchambers, a vapidly simplistic version of court intrigue, nifty costumes and historically inaccurate nonsense. First they came for the Kennedy scholars, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Kennedy scholar. Then they came for Opus Dei, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Catholic scholar. Now they have come for me.
Professors of Shakespeare — and I was one once upon a time — are blissfully unaware of the impending disaster that this film means for their professional lives. Thanks to “Anonymous,” undergraduates will be confidently asserting that Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare for the next 10 years at least, and profs will have to waste countless hours explaining the obvious. “Anonymous” subscribes to the Oxfordian theory of authorship, the contention that Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford, wrote Shakespeare’s plays. Among Shakespeare scholars, the idea has roughly the same currency as the faked moon landing does among astronauts.
The good news is that “Anonymous” makes an extraordinarily poor case for the Oxfordian theory.
Yes, Shakespeare scholars, like climate scientists, must now suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and decide whether or not to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them.
Readers know that I am a long time Shakespeare buff — see “William Shakespeare special: Why deniers out-debate smart talkers.” Indeed, a quarter-century ago I even published a journal article on Hamlet, and I have an unpublished manuscript that explores how Shakespeare uses rhetoric and the figures of speech to communicate his meaning. So I’m well aware of the snobbish myth that Shakespeare was supposedly too uneducated to have written so many diverse masterpieces.
That merely reflects a complete lack of understanding of basic grammar school education in Shakespeare’s day — where students were taught rhetoric, the figures of speech, and Latin poetry and grammar hour after hour after hour year after year. That’s why they called it grammar school. The book I am intending to publish next year on messaging devotes a page on this very subject, how Elizabethans like Shakespeare and the authors of the King James Bible came to their mastery of the English language. Understanding how they did it is key to understanding how you can do it.
This new movie goes one step further and ascribes the plays to a person who simply could not have written them. I haven’t seen it yet — I’m quite conflicted since I’m confident it will be as head exploding as your typical denier movie. Marche actually makes a direct connection in his piece between Shakespeare deniers and climate science deniers. But first he briefly explains why no serious Shakespeare scholar buys the Oxford theory:
… the liberties with facts in “Anonymous” become serious when they enter our conception of real history. In scholarship, chronology does matter. And the fatal weakness of the Oxfordian theory is chronological, a weakness that “Anonymous” never addresses: the brute fact that Edward de Vere died in 1604, while Shakespeare continued to write, several times with partners, until 1613. “Macbeth” and “The Tempest” were inspired by events posthumous to the Earl of Oxford: the gunpowder plot in 1605 and George Somers’s misadventure to Bermuda in 1609. How can anyone be inspired by events that happened after his death?So, enough. It is impossible that Edward de Vere wrote Shakespeare. Notice that I am not saying improbable; it is impossible. Better scholars than I will ever be have articulated the scale of the idiocy. Jonathan Bate in a single chapter of “The Genius of Shakespeare” annihilated the Oxfordian thesis. If you want to read the definitive treatment, there is James Shapiro’s more recent “Contested Will,” although that book is nearly as absurd as its subject, because using a brain like Shapiro’s on the authorship question is like bringing an F-22 to an alley knife fight, and he kind of knows it. He ties his argument into the larger question of art and its relationship to the artist’s life, but even so the whole business is evidently a waste of his vast talent.
Scientists don’t generally use the world “impossible” — though they do use “unequivocal” and “settled fact” — but then this guy was a Shakespeare professor. He does draw compelling analogies between Shakespeare deniers and climate science deniers:
Besides, no argument could ever possibly sway the Oxfordian crowd. They are the prophets of truthiness. “It couldn’t have been Shakespeare,” they say. “How could a semiliterate country boy have composed works of such power?” Their snobbery is the surest sign of their ignorance. Many of the greatest English writers emerged from the middle or lower classes. Dickens worked in a shoe-polish factory as a child. Keats was attacked for belonging to the “cockney school.” Snobbery mingles with paranoia, particularly about the supposedly nefarious intrigues of Shakespeare professors to keep the identity secret. Let me assure everybody that Shakespeare professors are absolutely incapable of operating a conspiracy of any size whatsoever. They can’t agree on who gets which parking spot. That’s what they spend most of their time intriguing about.
Well, it’s certainly apparent that no argument and no fact can sway the hard-core disinformers — see Koch-Funded Berkeley Temperature Study Does “Confirm the Reality of Global Warming.”
And climate scientists are even less capable of operating a conspiracy than Shakespeare scholars. After all, they’d need to enlist all the major science journals and every major science organization and every member government of the IPCC….
Marche himself notes:
The original Oxfordian, the aptly named J. Thomas Looney, who proposed the theory in 1920, believed that Shakespeare’s true identity remained a secret because, he said, “it has been left mainly in the hands of literary men.” In his rejection of expertise, at least, Looney was far ahead of his time. This same antielitism is haunting every large intellectual question today. We hear politicians opine on their theories about climate change and evolution as a way of displaying how little they know. When Rick Perry compared climate-change skeptics like himself to Galileo in a Republican debate, I dearly wished that the next question had been “Can you explain Galileo’s theory of falling bodies?” Of all the candidates with their various rejections of the scientific establishment, how many could name the fundamental laws of thermodynamics that students learn in high school? Healthy skepticism about elites has devolved into an absence of basic literacy.
Precisely.
More at the linkTo see or not to see, that is the question about the new conspiracy movie Anonymous... more
-
-
Man went to the moon
Never asked what she wanted
Man drove his rocket straight into the Moon
She turned her face away
And let it happen
Because it was simpler...Man went to the moon
Never asked what she wanted
Man drove his rocket straight into... more
-
-
“To Die By Your Side” (Mourir Auprès de Toi) is a tragicomic stop-motion animated short film co-created by the celebrated filmmaker Spike Jonze and designer Olympia Le-Tan. After spending five years adapting Maurice Sendak’s “Where The Wild Things Are,” Jonze’s more recent short films include last year’s robot love story, “I’m Here,” and this year’s Arcade Fire collaboration, “Scenes From the Suburbs.” “To Die By Your Side” is his latest short film, which premiered at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival’s Critics’ Week.
A tale to pierce the heart, the star-crossed love story is set on the shelves of Paris’s storied Shakespeare and Co. bookstore. When night falls, an old Parisian bookseller closes the small shop, and a klutzy skeleton springs off the cover of “Macbeth” and falls for Mina, the flame-haired damsel from “Dracula.” Enlisting French filmmaker Simon Cahn to co-direct, the team wrote the script between Los Angeles and Paris over a six-month period of time, before working night and day animating the 3,000 pieces of felt that Le-Tan had cut by hand.
“To Die By Your Side” is a delightfully whimsical, humorous and poignant animated felt short film: Be sure to watch it to the end!
This piece includes a number of colorful illustrations, as well as the wonderful animated short film.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/10/19/spike-jonze-to-die-by-your-side/“To Die By Your Side” (Mourir Auprès de Toi) is a tragicomic... more
-
-
My essay comparing poems by Skelton and Auden appears on pp. 44-53 of this literary magazine: http://goo.gl/j6nbEMy essay comparing poems by Skelton and Auden appears on pp. 44-53 of this literary... more
-
