moon phases

Started this before change to "New Blogger", as backup in case of trouble with digiphoto blog "In a Small Dark Room", or rants & links blog "Hello Cruel World" . Useful - at one stage Dark Room was there, but like the astrophysical Dark Matter, we could't see it ... better now, but kept Just In Case.

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There is nothing. There is no God and no universe, there is only empty space, and in it a lost and homeless and wandering and companionless and indestructible Thought. And I am that thought. And God, and the Universe, and Time, and Life, and Death, and Joy and Sorrow and Pain only a grotesque and brutal dream, evolved from the frantic imagination of that same Thought.
Mark Twain (letter to Joseph Twichell after his wife's death)
[me, on a bad day]

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(and my Wish List)

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Man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams  
Between ANZAC Day and Mother's Day, as April turns over into May, Sydney feels the breath of winter approaching. There are birthdays and anniversaries important to me in the first week of May, immovably connected with the memory of walking out in the chill of dawn, watching puffs of breath mist out into the air. Daylight saving's ended; dark closes in earlier & earlier; thoughts can turn towards larger themes.
From Bartleby, an excellent & useful site:
Modern Essays, 1921. (Christopher Morley, ed.) 30. Beyond Life by James Branch Cabell:

… romance tricks him, but not to his harm. For, be it remembered that man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams. Romance it is undoubtedly who whispers to every man that life is not a blind and aimless business, not all a hopeless waste and confusion; and that his existence is a pageant (appreciatively observed by divine spectators), and that he is strong and excellent and wise: and to romance he listens, willing and thrice willing to be cheated by the honeyed fiction. The things of which romance assures him are very far from true: yet it is solely by believing himself a creature but little lower than the cherubim that man has by interminable small degrees become, upon the whole, distinctly superior to the chimpanzee …
And it is this will that stirs in us to have the creatures of earth and the affairs of earth, not as they are, but “as they ought to be,” which we call romance …

Labels: annual cycle, aspirations, literature, quotes, thoughts

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 9:30 pm

 
One of my favourite book titles:  
Things you see when you haven't got a gun by Harry (Henry Arthur) Hooton | National Library of Australia catalogue entry for this 1943 self-published poetry book by one of Oz's turbulent poets.

Things you see when you haven't got a gun by Harry (Henry Arthur) Hooton | National Library of Australia catalogue entry for this 1943 self-published poetry book by one of Oz's turbulent poets.
Review in 'Southerly' magazine (www.archive.org/ stream/ southerlymagass05howarich/ southerlymagass05howarich_djvu.txt)

(See also King's Cross)

Labels: Australia, history, language, literature, poetry, రైటర్స్

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 11:58 pm

 
Influence, plagiarism: myths, legends, folk stories, ఓరల్ history  
I think I've mentioned my theory/feeling about myths & folk stories & such traditions being mostly what we'd now call 'fanfic'. Here are two people dealing with some of the ideas in that. (Most of Jonathon's Harper's article isn't so sesquipedalian <ahem>)
The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism,
by Jonathan Lethem
Harper's Magazine, February 2007:

www.harpers.org/ archive/ 2007/ 02/ 0081387LOVE AND THEFT …
consider the remarkable series of “plagiarisms” that links Ovid's “Pyramus and Thisbe” with Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story, or Shakespeare's description of Cleopatra, copied nearly verbatim from Plutarch's life of Mark Antony and also later nicked by T. S. Eliot for The Waste Land. If these are examples of plagiarism, then we want more plagiarism.

Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one's voice isn't just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing.

Bellatrys at Nothing New Under the Sun started discussing a set of examples at the turn of 2008/2009 with the post A Quest that begins in a Tavern...

bellatrys.livejournal.com/ 413660.html
a) an example of "PC gone mad™" in the fantasy genre today;

b) the sort of insane mish-mash of cliches, anachronisms, mythology rip-offs and proper nouns improperly used that gives gaming a bad name;

c) taken directly from an internationally-bestselling work of serio-comic epic fantasy itself derived from earlier popular fantasy tales, which the author reworked and polished for decades, that was first published under the d'Estes in Renaissance Italy and ripped off subsequently by everybody from Edmund Spenser to Georg Friedrich Händel.

and continues with two more entries so far, with quite a bit of interesting discussion in the comments to them all.

Labels: art, history, literature, writing

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 12:56 pm

 
War Prayer  
Checking out some things about TV series Babylon 5 (parts of which reflect current subjects of interest) [In-depth analysis:
www.midwinter.com/lurk/toc.html;
www-theory.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~aaa/B5.Ref.html;
www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon_5],
I was intrigued to find episode title "The War Prayer" (www.midwinter.com/lurk/making/warprayer.html) came from a short Mark Twain (Samuel Longhorn Clemens) story. Pertinent whenever & wherever someone is whipping up bellicose feeling, e.g. India v Pakistan, etc, etc, etc. He also is an interesting writer in several ways. Here we are rather fond of his comments about Australia when he visited. Will have to look them up for you.

This is a short biography, with links to several stories:
www.underthesun.cc/Classics/Twain
and a more 'literary' discussion of him, especially his skepticism: www.yorku.ca/twainweb/filelist/skeptic.html

The War Prayer links (It's been used recently too, about current subjects:):
www.boondocksnet.com/ai/twain/war_prayer.html
http://mez-at-the.blogspot.com/2002/10/checking-out-some-things-about-tv.html
www.libertystory.net/LSDOCTWAINWARPRAYER.htm
www.classicalfencing.com/sorrow/warprayer.html
www.classicalfencing.com/sorrow/sorrow.html
www.spcworks.org/msg7-3-00.html
www.westbynorthwest.org/winter01/warprayer.shtml
www.fcpj.org/warperspectives.asp

Labels: history, literature, USA, writing

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 11:45 am