Book of Sand

What man dare, I dare. Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear, The armed rhinoceros, or th' Hyrcan tiger; Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves Shall never tremble. 'Macbeth' (1606) act 3, sc. 4, l. 99    ----------------------------------- ...

ghibli (in British English) or gibli (ˈɡɪblɪ IPA Pronunciation Guide )  noun, a fiercely hot wind of North Africa  Collins English Dictionary. Copyright © HarperCollins Publishers C20:  from Arabic gibliy south wind  hard G sounds like G in Gibson, giving, or gibbon, not Jenson, Gibraltar, or jib.

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 ...