Book of Sand

Samhain is a Gaelic festival marking the end of the harvest season and beginning of winter or " darker half " of the year. It begins at sunset on 31 October and continues into the early hours of 1 November, since the Celtic day began and ended at sunset. This is about halfway between the autumn equinox and winter solstice . It is one of the four Gaelic seasonal festivals along with Imbolc , Beltaine and Lughnasa . The early literature says Samhain was marked by great gatherings and feasts and was when the ancient burial mounds were open, which were seen as portals to the Otherworld . Some of the literature also associates Samhain with bonfires and sacrifices. Samhain was a liminal or threshold festival, when the boundary between this world and the Otherworld thinned, meaning the Aos Sí (the 'spirits' or ' fairies ') could more easily come into our world. Most scholars see the Aos Sí as remnants of pagan gods. At Samhain, they were appeased with offe...

  Though the general consensus until fairly recently was that Ovid was exiled for undermining Augustus’ agenda of moral reform in Rome, there are two major problems with this position. The first issue is: why would Augustus wait for nine years before banishing Ovid? If the Ars Amatoria were that disruptive, surely Augustus would have taken action before 8 AD, the date of Ovid’s banishment. The second issue is textual; Ovid specifically mentions two reasons for offending Augustus:        Perdiderint cum me duo crimina, carmen et error ,             alterius facti culpa silenda mihi:        nam non sum tanti, renovem ut tua vulnera, Caesar, ( Tr. 2.207-209)        Though two crimes, a poem and a blunder have brought me ruin,        of my fault in the one I must keep silent,      ...

 <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/evmBFOalsaE" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>   Michael Wood explores the life, works and influence of one of the world's greatest storytellers who died 2,000 years ago. When an Elizabethan literary critic said that the witty soul of Ovid lived on in 'honey tongued Shakespeare', they were just stating the obvious. Ovid, everyone knew, was simply the most clever, sexy and funny poet in the western tradition. His Metamorphoses, it has often been said, is the most influential secular book in European literature. Unique among ancient poets, Ovid left us an autobiography, full of riveting intimacy, as well as ironical and slippery self-justification. Using Ovid's own ...

I watched two interesting programs recently; one a documentary by Adam Curtis and the other a tv drama starring Rory Kinnear. Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone is a found footage documentary showing life in Russia during the fall of communism and then the subsequent fall of democracy. It was a turbulent decade that even with the benefit of hindsight seems confusing and contentious.  Largely showing the rise of Yeltin as the president of Russia and then the Russian Federation, the doc features short view of the first Chechen War and the destruction of Grozny, as well as the rise of the oligarchs and the establishment of the private banking network that is the infrastructure of the klept class. This is an impressionistic work, that shows, not tells, how life was and what things looked like. It does not spend much time explaining the things it shows.  I feel that I know far more about this period than the average person, having watched Commanding Heights the Daniel Yergin documentary ...

  "The Sassanian king Bahram ibn Bahram, on hearing the cry of an owl, asked the Mobedhan, the chief religious dignitary among the Persians, what the cry meant. The priest replied with a fable: when a male owl wanted to marry a female owl, she demanded twenty ruined villages, so that she could hoot in them. But the male replied that that would be no problem as long as King Bahram continued to rule in the way that he was doing, since the owl would be able to give her a thousand villages. Hearing this, the ashamed King resolved to manage the affairs of his kingdom better." From The trackless wastes: Writing history without hope in fourteenth-century North Africa Link Author: Robert Irwin ...

 I recently watched a few suspense thrillers on NetFlix; The Sinner, (Seasons 1 and 2) starring Jessica Biel and Bill Pullman, Behind Her Eyes, The Watcher. I was reminded of Limetown because of Jessica Biel, and The Tall Man , but also Archive 81. Contemplating watching the new Ryan Murphy Dahlmer drama, but still on the fence.  Thinking about Ryan Murphy's American Horror Story, of which I was a pretty consistent viewer until about season 5.  I really liked Season 1 - Murder House, although it had some problems. I watched all of the next three seasons - Asylum, Coven and Freak Show.  I struggled with season 5 - Hotel, and didn't finished it.  I watched most of Roanoke I think, but skipped season 7-10 and now season 11, NYC is dropping.  Should I go back and revisit them? I recently rewatched Channel Zero, season 2, No End House (2017), and thought about going back to Butcher's Block and The Dream Door again.   Also, was reminded that True Detect...

Marionet Teatro Theatre about Science Conference University of Coimbra, Portugal November 25-27, 2021 Edwin Wong Probability Theory, Moral Certainty, and Bayes’ Theorem in Shakespeare’s Othello Thank you to the organizers for putting this wonderful event together and thank you everyone for coming. It’s great to be here. I’m Edwin Wong. I specialize in dramatic theory based on chance, uncertainty, and the impact of the highly improbable. My first book, The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy , presents a new theory of tragedy where risk is the dramatic fulcrum of the action. The book launched The Risk Theatre Modern Tragedy Playwriting Competition, the world’s largest competition for the writing of tragedy, now in its fourth year (risktheatre.com). Today, I’ve come all the way from Victoria, on the west coast of Canada, to talk about the intersection between theatre and probability theory in a play we all know and love: Shakespeare’s Othello . Now, the first thing people ask ...

https://www.thecut.com/2022/10/the-watcher-657-boulevard-update.html The closest literary connection anyone could draw was a short story from the 19th century by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, an Irish author of Gothic mysteries. The story follows a Mr. Barton who goes mad after receiving a series of threatening letters at his home sent by a writer using the same pen name: Mr. Barton … is warned of danger. He will do wisely to avoid —— Street … if he walks there as usual, he will meet with something bad. Let him take warning, once for all, for he has good reason to dread. The Watcher   The story is The Watcher, read it here: https://www.online-literature.com/lefanu/the-watcher/1/    

  'Tis a shrewd doubt, though it be but a dream. And this may help to thicken other proofs That do demonstrate thinly .  by Iago, Othello, Act 3, Scene 3. “Trifles light as air are to the jealous confirmations strong as proofs of holy writ.” ― William Shakespeare, Othello

 

 Currently reading: Shakespeare by Another Name: The life of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford by Mark Anderson   The debate over the true author of Shakespeare's body of work (some of which was published under the name “Shake-speare”) began not long after the death of William Shakespeare, the obscure actor and entrepreneur from Stratford-upon-Avon who was conventionally assumed to be the author. There were natural doubts that an uneducated son of a glover who never left England and apparently owned no books could have produced some of the greatest works of Western literature. Early investigators into the mystery argued for such eminent figures as Christopher Marlowe or Francis Bacon as possible authors, but recent scholarship has turned to Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, as the true Shakespeare. The Lodger Shakespeare: His life on Silver Street by Charles Nicholl   In 1612 Shakespeare gave evidence at the Court of Requests in Westminster – it is the only oc...

Historia de los ángeles La imaginación de los hombres ha figurado tandas de monstruos (tritones, hipogrifos, quimeras, serpientes de mar, unicornios, diablos, dragones, lobizones, cíclopes, faunos, basiliscos, semidioses, leviatanes y otros que son caterva) y todos ellos han desaparecido, salvo los ángeles. ¿Qué verso de hoy se atrevería a mentar la fénix o a ser paseo de un centauro? Ninguno; pero a cualquier poesía, por moderna que sea, no le desplace ser nidal de ángeles y resplandecerse con ellos. Yo me los imagino siempre al anochecer, en la tardecita de los arrabales o de los descampados, en ese largo y quieto instante en que se van quedando solas las cosas a espaldas del ocaso y en que los colores distintos parecen recuerdos o presentimientos de otros colores. No hay que gastarlos mucho a los ángeles; son las divinidades últimas que hospedamos y a lo mejor se vuelan.   Jorge Luis Borges. El tamaño de mi esperanza .   ----------------------------- Story of ...

When I use the term “worldbuilding fiction” I refer to immersive fiction, in any medium, in which an attempt is made to rationalise the fiction by exhaustive grounding, or by making it “logical in its own terms”, so that it becomes less an act of imagination than the literalisation of one. The whole idea of worldbuilding is a bad idea about the world as much as it is a bad idea about fiction. It’s a secularised, narcissised version of the fundamentalist Christian view that the world’s a watch & God’s the watchmaker. It reveals the bad old underpinnings of the humanist stance. It centralises the author, who hands down her mechanical toy to a complaisant audience (which rarely thinks to ask itself if language can deliver on any of the representational promises it is assumed to make), as a little god. And it flatters everyone further into the illusions of anthropocentric demiurgy which have already brought the real world to the edge of ecological disaster. My feeling is t...

 In the 2022 film The Northman , the main character Amleth ( Alexander Skarsgård ) is raised as part of a group of berserkers. A berserker ritual is also featured in the film. [54]  Screenrant review : The Northman is a gruesome drama that sees its titular character wanting nothing but revenge. The film is packed with Norse mythology, a Viking legend that directly influenced William Shakespeare’s Hamlet , and brutal battles that are waged in the name of vengeance. To be sure, the film has something in it for everyone. The Northman takes its cues from the legend of Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård) , the Viking prince who vowed to avenge his father after he’s murdered by Amleth’s uncle Fjölnir (Claes Bang). The story itself is fueled by Amleth’s open rage; he’s a man on a mission, aided by the supernatural to finish his job. It’s one he will stop at nothing to complete.   The Northman ends with Amleth killing Fjölnir and ascending to Valhalla himself, having been f...

 In the Old Norse written corpus, berserker were those who were said to have fought in a trance -like fury, a characteristic which later gave rise to the modern English word berserk (meaning "furiously violent or out of control"). Berserkers are attested to in numerous Old Norse sources.  It is proposed by some authors that the berserkers drew their power from the bear and were devoted to the bear cult , which was once widespread across the northern hemisphere. [6] [11] The bodies of dead berserkers were laid out in bearskins prior to their funeral rites. [12] The bear-warrior symbolism survives to this day in the form of the bearskin caps worn by the guards of the Danish monarchs. [5] In battle, the berserkers were subject to fits of frenzy. They would howl like wild beasts, foam at the mouth, and gnaw the rims of their shields . According to belief, during these fits they were immune to steel and fire, and made great havoc in the ranks of the enemy. When the fev...

 DAKAR Dakar is at the crossroads of the sun, the desert and the sea. The sun covers the firmament, the sand lurks on the roads, the                                                                                      [sea is a bitterness. I have seen a chief in whose blanket the blue was hotter than in the                                                                                      [sky on fire. The mosque near the biographer shines with a clarity of prayer. The sun shines...

 THAT NOTHING IS KNOWN The moon ignores that it is calm and clear and he doesn't even know it's the moon; The sand, what is the sand. There won't be one thing that knows that its form is rare. The ivory pieces are so foreign to the abstract chess as the hand that governs them. Perhaps human destiny of brief joys and long sorrows it is an instrument of the Other. We ignore it; giving him God's name does not help us. Vain are also the fear, the doubt and the truncated prayer that we started. What bow will this arrow have thrown that I am? What summit can be the goal?

 Went to see Avatar in 3d at Savoy16 with Ben, we both really enjoyed it, but we had wanted to cuddle in the theater, but there were a few people there.  I thought it might be empty. I bought the tickets and he offered to buy me some snacks, since I had not had dinner. He got me chicken tenders, fries and a large diet coke. We talked about the movie a bit afterward, and he came back to my place to hang, although it was getting late. We chatted about many things,  He told me about his godmother sending him Guatemalan coffee grounds. He likes to try different kinds of 'ethnic beverages' like the Indian beer at Himalayan Chimney. I suggested we go to Columbia Street Roastery sometime and sample their exotic coffees. He asked if one date night a week was enough, and I suggested two.  He thought he would have to persuade me, lol.   We were watching a show about Troy, and I started telling him about the Illiad.  He said you read a lot of books that most CS m...

Most scholars, including Harold Bloom, [38] dismiss the idea that Hamlet is in any way connected with Shakespeare's only son, Hamnet Shakespeare , who died at age eleven. Conventional wisdom holds that Hamlet is too obviously connected to legend, and the name Hamnet was quite popular at the time. [39] However, Stephen Greenblatt has argued that the coincidence of the names and Shakespeare's grief for the loss of his son may lie at the heart of the tragedy. He notes that the name of Hamnet Sadler, the Stratford neighbor after whom Hamnet was named, was often written as Hamlet Sadler and that, in the loose orthography of the time, the names were virtually interchangeable. [40] [41] ============================================================ Currently reading Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague by Maggie O'Farrell Set in Stratford, England, in the late 16th century, Hamnet imagines the emotional, domestic, and artistic repercussions after the world's most famous (t...

No author exercised a wider or deeper influence upon the Elizabethan mind or upon the Elizabethan form of tragedy than did Seneca. – T. S. Eliot. ================================== Seneca's plays were widely read in medieval and Renaissance European universities and strongly influenced tragic drama in that time, such as Elizabethan England ( William Shakespeare and other playwrights), France ( Corneille and Racine ), and the Netherlands ( Joost van den Vondel ). [65] English translations of Seneca's tragedies appeared in print in the mid-16th century, with all ten published collectively in 1581. [66]   He is regarded as the source and inspiration for what is known as "Revenge Tragedy", starting with Thomas Kyd 's The Spanish Tragedy and continuing well into the Jacobean era . [67] Thyestes is considered Seneca's masterpiece, [68] and has been described by scholar Dana Gioia as "one of the most influential plays ever written". [69] Medea is...

For a brief visit with his gf, he will be back later this month for her birthday. He is doing well at Harvard.  We went to lunch at Black Dog in Champaign. Talked a lot about his classes, structure, materials, methods. He told me about a breakthrough in reinforcement learning by AlphaTensor/Deepmind using RL to solve a matrix multiplication problem that is much more efficient. Also talked about the difficulties in China with the lockdowns and why Chinese students are not coming here as much. All his classmates are Chinese, about 100 in his program.  He suggested that FE is one of the most difficult subjects because of the need for coding, math, prob and fin.  Data science just needs coding/DS. I told him about my new puppy and he was very happy for me.  Shared some of the pics, which he liked. Forgot to get a pic with him.  He was wearing a white Harvard sweatshirt, that looked really good.  His hair is shorter and his skin is better, he looked healthy and ...

 Sent her the Lego Taj Mahal, which she says she loved!

   Another symbol of resurrection is the White Tree , the symbol of Gondor . It stood dry and lifeless in the Court of the Fountain at the top of the city of Minas Tirith throughout the centuries that Gondor was ruled by the Stewards; Aragorn brought a sapling of the White Tree into the city on his return as King. [39] The White Tree has been likened to the Dry Tree of the 14th century Travels of Sir John Mandeville . [40] [33] The tale runs that the Dry Tree has been lifeless since the crucifixion of Christ , but that it will flower afresh when "a prince of the west side of the world should sing a mass beneath it", [33] while the apples of the trees allow people to live for 500 years. [34] The Dry Tree (or Solitary tree) is a legendary tree. It was first recorded by Marco Polo , somewhere in the wastelands of northern Persia . According to Polo, it was the only tree within hundreds of kilometres of desert. According to legend, the Dry Tree marked the exact spot of...

Went to Wild Wings again and then came home, played with the puppy, and watched Infinity Train (s01).

 On Fairy Stories, J.R.R.Tolkien I would also exclude, or rule out of order, any story that uses the machinery of Dream, the dreaming of actual human sleep, to explain the apparent occurrence of its marvels. At the least, even if the reported dream was in other respects in itself a fairy-story, I would condemn the whole as gravely defective: like a good picture in a disfiguring frame. It is true that Dream is not unconnected with Faerie. In dreams strange powers of the mind may be unlocked. In some of them a man may for a space wield the power of Faerie, that power which, even as it conceives the story, causes it to take living form and colour before the eyes. A real dream may indeed sometimes be a fairy-story of almost elvish ease and skill - while it is being dreamed. But if a waking writer tells you that his tale is only a thing imagined in his sleep, he cheats deliberately the primal desire at the heart of Faerie: the realisation, independent of the conceiving mind, of imagined...

  EL DON En una página de Plinio se lee que en todo el orbe no hay dos caras iguales. Una mujer le dio a un ciego la imagen de su rostro, sin duda único. Eligió la fotografía entre muchas; descartó y acertó. El acto fue significativo para ella y también lo es para él. Ella sabía que él no podía ver el regalo y sabía que era un regalo. Un invisible don es un hecho mágico. Dar a un ciego una imagen es dar algo tan tenue que bien puede ser infinito, es dar algo tan vago que puede ser el universo. La inútil mano toca y no reconoce la inalcanzable cara. Revista Maldoror, Montevideo, 1985 Textos recobrados 1956-1986.   ========================= Google Translate   In a page of Pliny it is read that in the whole world there are no two equal faces. A woman gave a blind man the image of her face, undoubtedly unique. She chose photography among many; she discarded and hit. The act was significant for her and it is also for him. She knew he couldn't see the gift and she knew it was...

 In Rings of Power, the character Adar is presumably a corrupted elf, who thinks of himself as an Uruk, and is called "Father."  He admits to being one of the first such produced by Morgoth.  The show is gaining some comments regarding the fact that the orcs are not presented simply as faceness nameless evil drones.  But Tolkien never presented them this way.  When encountered they often had names, disputes, grievances, appetites, preferences, a chain of command, a hierarchy. Goblintown in the Hobbit had a king. I remember thinking when I was an undergrad studying history, that the presentation of the goblins and orcs in Tolkien were a case of history written by the victors.  Since they are depicted so loathsomely, the true appearance had to be something much more humanlike. Tolkien says he imagined something like the Mongol hoardes.  Mongol soldiers were described as dog-faced when first encountered by Europeans. The spoke an incomprehensible language...

Found a 5 month old long-haired dachshund puppy, (named Cassian by the Rescue) at the Bloomington-Normal shelter.  Brought him home at 5 pm on Saturday, 10/1. Feeding: Science diet says for puppies 4-9 months (he is just 5 months); 10 lbs body weight:          1 1/2 cups 20 lbs body weight:            2 1/2 cups So if he is 14 lbs, than his target is 1.9 cups per day, until Feb 2, 2023. (when he turns 9 months). ================================================= Sun 10/2 - 1.4 cups, pee'd inside a few times, 3 or 4, poop'd once Mon 10/3 - >1 cup, eats through out the day, but usually around noon and 5pm, 2 BM/d, pee'd inside once or twice, wakes up around 6:15 am Tuesday 10/4 - 1 cup, eats through out the day, but usually around noon and 5pm, 2 BM/d, no accidents Wednesday 10/5 -  < 1 cup at dinner, around 7pm, 2 BM per day, may have eaten goose poop in the park in the morning, no accidents. Thursday 10/6 - ...