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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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

 
Christmas Light Shows (on YouTube)  
YouTube - El Paso Christmas Light Show 2007

"Over 120,000 lights in synch to the music of The Trans-Siberian Orchestra." (adrianh1969)

They say it's good to have a hobby. Hmmm. I'm amazed, but torn wondering if it'd be possible to put all this time, energy & expertise into something … "better"? … then, I guess it could have gone into something worse. And I suppose this is creating some kind of good in the world.

Does anyone else find the 'Birnham Wood moving to Dunsinane' moments rather disturbing?

El Paso Christmas Light Show 2006 (YouTube link) [www.youtube.com/ watch?v=qkmvkVtdUJg]
Music: Trans-Siberian Orchestra

El Paso Christmas Light Show 2008 (YouTube link). This is the shortest, and starts off fairly quietly. It's possible I like this version best. [www.youtube.com/ watch?v=JZJfWMva8Sk&NR=1]

An altogether different version of A Christmas Story. Or, rather, a [C]HannuKwanzSolstMas tale. Father Christmas: The Untold Story (Whip of the Red Hunter )

Labels: christmas, video, writing

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 10:22 am

 
Crystalline: ౯/౧౧ (9th November)  
Crystal Night, 1938

www.thelooniverse.com/ books/ kastner.html

When, on November 10 1938 at 3 o'clock in the morning, I drove up the Berlin Tauentzien in a taxi, I heard glass tinkling on both sides of the street. It sounded as if dozens of wagons full of glass were being turned over. I looked out and saw, on the left and right, a man standing in front of about every fifth house, each using an iron rod to smash store windows with mighty blows. The job done, he walked over to the next shop with a measured pace and, with powerful calmth, dedicated himself to that one's still intact window-pane.
Except for these men, wearing black breeches, riding boots and civil jackets, there was no human being in sight. The taxi turned into the Kurfürstendamm. Here, too, men were standing at regular distances and with long bars smashed "Jewish" show windows. Each one seemed to have some five to ten windows for a job. Cascades of glass fell down, crushing on the concrete. It sounded as if the entire town existed of nothing but crashing glass. It was a drive right through a madman's dream.
Between Uhlandstraße and Knesebeckstraße I asked to stop, opened the door and was just putting my right foot on the street, when a man emerged from the nearest tree and softly and energetically told me: "Don't get out! Drive on at once!" It was a man in hat and cloak. "But listen", I started, "I just wanted to…" "No", he interrupted threateningly. "Getting out is forbidden! Get on your way at once!" He pushed me back into the car, beckoned the driver, threw the door shut, and the driver obeyed. On we went through the ghostly "splinter night".

Labels: anniversaries, Germany, history, writing, జర్మనీ

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 7:55 pm

 
Life in a Temperate Climate: Autumn  
From Little Blog In The Big Woods :
The Last Dance (Wed, 24th Sep, 2008)
littlebloginthebigwoods.blogspot.com/ 2008/ 09/ last-dance.html

The turn of the year
There's a special autumn event I look for every year. It doesn't have a name.

Actually, I've never met anyone else who has seen it, or heard of it. A fact that makes me think, and wonder if that should worry me. Us.

It's quite a spectacular thing, when it happens. Spectacular as it is, though, it goes unnoticed; partly because at the best, it can only last for a half an hour. No more. And it doesn't happen every year, either.

It used to happen most years, at least in part. Now it happens less. That worries me, too ...

Repeated from 17-Sep-2007 (ittlebloginthebigwoods.blogspot.com/ 2007/ 09/ turn-of-year.html)

Labels: nature, writing

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 1:17 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