A FaustianBargain

year of the mandrake, apparently..

2012-01-31T14:21:00.001-08:00

they seem to be the same kind..but the leaves look different..

2012-01-17T09:38:00.001-08:00

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/eadweard-muybridge-an-eye-over-the-abyss/

2012-01-17T09:37:00.000-08:00

Literary away-days[...]When reading for relaxation, Mark Girouard explains in the introduction to this highly diverting collection of essays, “I have often come across something that has especially intrigued or irritated me: a clue that I wanted to follow up, a point that others seem to have overlooked, a misidentification that I long to correct, a neglected work that I would like to publicise, and so on”. Enthusiasms is the result of these promptings and is rather like a bumper issue of Notes and Queries. Is Arundel, rather than Carisbrooke, the setting for Charlotte Mew’s poem “Ken”? Is Edward Lear’s Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo really modelled on Oscar Wilde?These “literary excursions”, as he calls them – away-days from Girouard’s career as one of our leading architectural historians – sometimes turn out to be wild goose chases, but they are nonetheless entertaining for that. “It would be wearisome to go in any detail into my work in libraries, on the computer and in the National Archives, my trawling through Post Office directories, wills and censuses”, he writes about his attempts to uncover the identity of “Walter”, the anonymous author of My Secret Life (c.1882–94); but we are drawn into his dogged pursuit, which leads him to the streets of Camberwell in South London. If, as he at first deduces, Walter’s family house was on the corner of De Crespigny Terrace and Love Lane, then it is possible that the author’s real name was Horner. This all sounds too good to be true, and indeed it is: the essay is subtitled “a hunt but no kill”. [...]

2012-01-17T09:28:00.000-08:00

yea..

my fav display of 2011

2012-01-15T12:04:00.001-08:00

Learn Chinese in 5 Minutes

2012-01-14T15:41:00.001-08:00

2012-01-12T10:31:00.001-08:00

2012-01-12T10:29:00.001-08:00

2012-01-12T10:21:00.001-08:00

2012-01-12T10:14:00.000-08:00

more buds ready to blossom...they just wont stop!

2012-01-10T17:46:00.001-08:00

japan. respect.

2012-01-09T10:42:00.000-08:00

It is a Fucking Sale! 20%!!

The Man Who Started The Sexual Revolution

2012-01-06T20:33:00.000-08:00

The Man Who Started The Sexual Revolution.[...]Central Europeans of the fin de siècle thought a lot about sex. Nudist clubs multiplied to treat lust with sunshine, while sober doctors wrapped it up in medical taxonomy to file away with the rest of human knowledge. Richard Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) was widely read, even though parts of it were printed in Latin “to discourage lay readers”. Frank Wedekind’s Frühlings Erwachen (Spring Awakening) pictured the angst of pubescence, and Arthur Schnitzler’s Reigen (La Ronde) the poignancy of one-night stands, while Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character (1903), intrigued both Wittgenstein and Hitler (Freud hated it) with his argument that sexual restraint in men (women were incapable of it) accounted for the division of cultural labour between the sexes (“Man possesses a penis, but the vagina possesses woman”). By 1900, and the publication of his Interpretation of Dreams, Freud had won his professorship and put in place the ideas which set the nascent sexual revolution on its way. Twenty years later, his curia-like Vienna Psychoanalytical Society was attracting a new generation of followers after the war, among them an impecunious student from the provinces, Wilhelm Reich.[...]

Ballardian

2012-01-06T20:30:00.000-08:00

Ballard, Paul Delvaux and Surrealist Art[...]Ballard was a very strange man. He lived in this small house. He started writing downstairs first. And then in only one room. And finally in one half of the room. And then only in the corner of one half of the room. It was getting worse. And the didn’t clean his house, ever. He said, ‘After the first three years it doesn’t get any dirtier.’ It was really funny. He criticised the portrait all the time. He didn’t give much of himself, so it was extremely difficult to extract him. The fact was all the time I was trying to paint Ballard he was trying to write me. In other words, we were each trying to suck the other one into our own fantasy worlds. I was trying to do a surrealist one of him and he wouldn’t be sucked in. At the same time he was trying to write me in one of his bloody books, and I wouldn’t be sucked in. The two of us were at an impasse. It was very funny. The thing that really burned me up was he then published an article about the Delvaux pictures saying that he felt he’d done them [see quote at the end of the interview]. I thought, ‘Grr. You did not do it. I did it, and it was hard work!’[...]

2012-01-06T20:25:00.001-08:00

Candlemass, Bewitched(Nightfall)

2011-12-30T13:59:00.001-08:00

2011 has had two mandrake flowerings..jan 26 and dec 28th. 2012, you better be awesome!

cat and the owl

2011-12-30T13:57:00.001-08:00

2011-12-28T10:12:00.001-08:00

Mutter, Rammstein

2011-12-26T13:07:00.001-08:00

Amerika, Rammstein.

2011-12-25T19:12:00.001-08:00

Dirty, Grendel.

2011-12-25T18:46:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas! (also Chanukah, Newtonmas, Kwanzaa etc) Whatever it is that you celebrate, be happy, healthy and well.p.s. copyright of above photograph belongs to the photographer. who afaik is unknown to me.

2011-12-22T11:40:00.000-08:00

Not too long ago, I used to be able to read at least 4-5 books a week. It's all slowing down now. These days, I don't read books according to my moods or the time of the day. Earlier, only certain themes were suitable for reading at certain times of the day. I guess it was really my borderline OCD personality. I must be in a happier place inside my head because I don't care anymore about my rigid set of reading rules from the past. I am..however..flitting between Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry and Umberto Eco's Prague Cemetery. Since I am no longer manic or fucked up with reading habits, it is really about one being on paper and the other on Kindle. I love Kindle. There is no more room in my home for books or book shelves. Actually, that is not true. One doesnt really need furniture and the floor that I myself laid down is perfectly fine for sleeping. The truth is that I no longer have the energy or the time or the enthusiasm to hammer, transport and lug heavy furniture. I dont have it in my heart to buy books made from dead trees that we cannot afford to kill. Having said that, the experience is just not the same. To curl up and sink into an overstuffed, cat scratched armchair with a hairy blanket, cradling a mug of hot chocolate while flipping through the pages of a REAL book is a memory I cherish. Books have smells, you know. I buy used books all the time and each book seems to hold in it's pages some remnant of the previous owner. Maybe an imprint of their thoughts..maybe a smudged ring of the coffee cup..the faint aroma of roach eggs. The brittleness of it's age, I call it Biscuit Paper. I have held in my hands books so fragile and old that the pages literally crumbled under my fingertips as I turned them. And then, of course, there is the beloved smell of new books and crisp pages. Kindle doesn't compare. But I can't imagine books without my Kindle anymore. It was like a bastard child one doesnt really love, but hey!...it is still one's child. It was like a child that adored you with huge limpid eyes and was too eager to please. One learns to love.Anyways..I am just wool gathering. Niffenegger's book drags on. Reading it reminds me of London. I do miss London..very much. Perhaps when I am rich and retired, I will buy myself a little flat on Marylebone and a weekend cottage in Devon. The ghost wind is back outside. The fence is rattling and will probably need some fixing. It's cold, but bright. I just hung some bells outside the bedroom window. I can barely feel my fingertips. I need hot chocolate and I think the paper book will do today.On an entirely different note, I have been dreaming of Orwell..but he has a Kissingerish face without the voice. I think I went to bed thinking about Christopher Hitchens. He died, you know. It happens. De mortuis nil nisi bonum and all that.

2011-12-22T11:22:00.000-08:00

La Belle Dame Sans Merci - John Keats.

Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight,Alone and palely loitering;The sedge is wither'd from the lake,And no birds sing.Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight,So haggard and so woe-begone?The squirrel's granary is full,And the harvest's done.I see a lily on thy brow,With anguish moist and fever dew;And on thy cheek a fading roseFast withereth too.I met a lady in the meadsFull beautiful, a faery's child;Her hair was long, her foot was light,And her eyes were wild.I set her on my pacing steed,And nothing else saw all day long;For sideways would she lean, and singA faery's song.I made a garland for her head,And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;She look'd at me as she did love,And made sweet moan.She found me roots of relish sweet,And honey wild, and manna dew;And sure in language strange she said,I love thee true.She took me to her elfin grot,And there she gaz'd and sighed deep,And there I shut her wild sad eyes--So kiss'd to sleep.And there we slumber'd on the moss,And there I dream'd, ah woe betide,The latest dream I ever dream'dOn the cold hill side.I saw pale kings, and princes too,Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;Who cry'd--"La belle Dame sans merciHath thee in thrall!"I saw their starv'd lips in the gloamWith horrid warning gaped wide,And I awoke, and found me hereOn the cold hill side.And this is why I sojourn hereAlone and palely loitering,Though the sedge is wither'd from the lake,And no birds sing.

2011-11-28T14:05:00.001-08:00

Umberto Eco on Prague CemeteryThe Prague Cemetery is your sixth novel. Do you find it becomes easier to write a new book at this point in your career? Does it become harder to find new subjects to interest you?Every time that I write a novel I am convinced for at least two years that it is the last one, because a novel is like a child. It takes two years after its birth. You have to take care of it. It starts walking, and then speaking. In two months I will be eighty years old. Probably I will not write another novel, and so mankind will be safe.Did you enjoy writing this particular book?Less than the others. For me, the process of writing usually takes six years. In those years I collect material, I write, I rewrite. I am in a sort of a private world of myself with my characters. I don’t know what will happen. I discover it step by step. And I become very sad when the novel is finished because there is no more pleasure, no more surprise.With this novel, the material I was dealing with was so ugly that I felt a lot of embarrassment. I had to create an absolutely ugly character, a repugnant character, which can certainly be a challenge for a writer. Fortunately some of my colleagues had done the same. Shakespeare for instance, with Richard III.You said in your Paris Review interview in 2008, “When you imagine a character, you lend him or her some of your personal memories. You give part of yourself to character number one and another part to character number two.” That made me wonder if it was difficult to write a character like Simonini, who has such despicable and difficult views.Yes, but, you know, every time you are on the highway and another driver does something irritating, you could kill him. So when you have to invent somebody who hates other people, you can find the origin in your belly. In the worst part of you.I also endowed Simonini with a lot of clichés already in existence. You know, I just came back from Germany, and they gave public readings of the novel, and they read the section at the beginning ranting against Germans. And then I was obliged to explain, “Listen, I didn’t invent anything!” The first part, about the defecatory habits of the Germans, was written by a Frenchman at the beginning of the First World War for nationalistic purposes. He wanted to defame Germans. The last part was taken from Nietzsche, who was an anti-German German. We have people around us who are nurturing and sharing these clichés. It’s easy to build up a negative character because our real life is full of negative characters.Your note to the reader in The Prague Cemetery says that the reader will “look anxiously behind him, switch on all the lights, and suspect that these things could happen again today. In fact, they may be happening in that very moment.” What were you thinking of in terms of contemporary parallels to this plot, if any?It is clear that when you write a story that takes place in the past you try to show what really happened in those times. But you are always moved by the suspicion that you are also showing something about our contemporary world.Take a lot of WikiLeaks papers. I was very amused because I published the novel in Italy one year ago, exactly one month before the WikiLeaks affair blew up. Simonini is a forger, and understands that in order to tell secret information to a secret service you always have to tell what is already known. Otherwise they will not believe you. From what I have seen, all the WikiLeaks communications sent by the American embassies to Hillary Clinton were just saying exactly what was published in Newsweek the week before! So you see that there is a sometimes a slight difference between fiction and reality.What is it about forgery that interests you? It is a running theme throughout so much of your work.I have been interested in it for at least thirty or forty years, in part because I am a scholar of the problems of language and communication. And to lie is a typical human activity, sometimes more important than telling the truth. Because of lies we can produce and invent a possible world. And in order to understand whether something is a language or not, you have to see whether it can be used to lie. If so, it’s a language. A dog steals your food and hides, but he does not tell you it was another dog.I was interested in the Protocols not only because is it an important forgery, but because of the tragedy that it contributed to. It was in 1921 that the Times of London proved that they were fake. And after that they were more and more believed and published everywhere. So I was interested by such a phenomenon. Why were they so successful? The answer is that they were not creating new ideas. They were reinforcing previous prejudices.Alexander Dumas is an important character in the book and the spirit of his books pervades the novel. Is he an important writer to you as a novelist?I first read him in my youth. I was always fascinated by the nineteenth-century popular novels. In the book I created a sort of imitation or parody of these novels by choosing illustrations from novels of that era and by starting the story in the typical style of the nineteenth-century novel.I saw that many of the illustrations came from your personal collection. Did the pictures in any way inspire the writing?No, I collected the illustrations after having written the book, and I went to pains to find the right illustration for the right page. But obviously I had in mind the illustrations of those books. Except for the anti-Semitic material: for that I collected new material. Because the illustrations play a double role. On one side, there are illustrations referring to popular novels, so the reader says, “Ah, this is like a popular novel.” But suddenly there are real documents, anti-Semitic magazines, or a portrait of a real person. It should produce a shock, that this is not a fiction, there is something true about the characters. The illustrations have an oscillatory function, they create a double feeling.I was reading the vivid descriptions of Garibaldi in battle and I was wondering how you composed them—how much of it came from historical sources and how much came from your imagination?I should confess that except for the figure of Simonini, who committed too many crimes to be possible, and to whom I’ve attributed the crimes of different persons, everything is a quotation, or at least a paraphrase of something that was told at that moment. Apropos of Garibaldi, there are, even after all this time, a lot of debates in Italy. There is the pro-risorgimento literature in which Garibaldi is a splendid hero, and the anti-risorgimento literature, which sees the expedition of Garibaldi as a kind of colonial invasion of Sicilia, and Garibaldi as a brigand. My book appeared just when Italy was celebrating the sesquicentennial of its creation as a nation, and everyone was thinking about that, but I wrote those pages five years ago without imagining that it would be published at that moment.There are some beautiful descriptions of food in the book. Do you cook or are you particularly interested in food?No, I am a McDonald’s person. I am joking! But in this case, I gave Simonini food instead of sex. And I gave it in enormous quantities. The names of the dishes are so beautiful, even from a linguistic point of view, that a lot of people fell in love with those foods.You mentioned in your earlier Paris Review interview a number of television shows that you enjoyed. Is there anything recent on television or in the wider popular culture that has caught your eye?Here in Italy trash television is invading the screen. It is very painful to watch. You know, I started to work in television for three or four years, in 1954. There was one channel of television, black and white. But it could be entertaining and educational. During the evening they showed important plays, opera or Shakespeare’s tragedies. Today, especially on the Berlusconi television, you see only porno material. So I am more pessimistic than before. Sometimes after eleven o’clock you can find something interesting. But normal people go to sleep at eleven o’clock.

2011-11-28T14:04:00.001-08:00

Don DeLillo's "The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories"[..]When we say that we love a writer’s work, we are always stretching the truth: what we really mean is that we love about half of it. Sometimes rather more than half, sometimes rather less. The vast presence of Joyce relies pretty well entirely on “Ulysses,” with a little help from “Dubliners.” You could jettison Kafka’s three attempts at full-length fiction (unfinished by him, and unfinished by us) without muffling the impact of his seismic originality. George Eliot gave us one readable book, which turned out to be the central Anglophone novel. Every page of Dickens contains a paragraph to warm to and a paragraph to veer back from. Coleridge wrote a total of two major poems (and collaborated on a third). Milton consists of “Paradise Lost.” Even my favorite writer, William Shakespeare, who usually eludes all mortal limitations, succumbs to this law. Run your eye down the contents page and feel the slackness of your urge to reread the comedies (“As You Like It” is not as we like it); and who would voluntarily curl up with “King John” or “Henry VI, Part III”?Proustians will claim that “In Search of Lost Time” is unimprovable throughout, despite all the agonizing longueurs. And Janeites will never admit that three of the six novels are comparative weaklings (I mean “Sense and Sensibility,” “Mansfield Park,” and “Persuasion”). Perhaps the only true exceptions to the fifty-fifty model are Homer and Harper Lee. Our subject, here, is literary evaluation, so of course everything I say is mere opinion, unverifiable and also unfalsifiable, which makes the ground shakier still. But I stubbornly suspect that only the cultist, or the academic, is capable of swallowing an author whole. Writers are peculiar, readers are particular: it is just the way we are. One helplessly reaches for Kant’s dictum about the crooked timber of humanity, or for John Updike’s suggestion to the effect that we are all of us “mixed blessings.” Unlike the heroes and heroines of “Northanger Abbey,” “Pride and Prejudice,” and “Emma,” readers and writers are not expressly designed to be perfect for each other.I love the work of Don DeLillo. That is to say, I love “End Zone” (1972), “Running Dog” (1978), “White Noise” (1985), “Libra” (1988), “Mao II” (1991), and the first and last sections of “Underworld” (1997). The arc of this luminous talent, as I see it, reached its apogee toward the close of the millennium, and then partly withdrew into enigma and opacity. What happens, then, when I read “Ratner’s Star” (1976) or “The Names” (1982) or “Cosmopolis” (2003)? Novelists can be likened to omnicompetent tour guides—as they gloss and vivify the wonders of unfamiliar terrains, the marketplaces, the museums, the tearooms and wine cellars, the gardens, the houses of worship. Then, without warning, the suave cicerone becomes a garrulous rogue cabdriver, bearing you off on a series of sinister detours (out by the airport, and in the dead of night). The great writers can take us anywhere; but half the time they’re taking us where we don’t want to go.[..]etc etc..it's Martin Amis.

2011-11-28T14:03:00.001-08:00

"House of Pleasures"

Despite its title, Bertrand Bonello's House of Pleasures is anything but a come-hither film. Unfolding almost entirely within the perfumed, pillowy cocoon of a Paris brothel at the turn of the 20th century, the film flits from the innocent to the jaded — and from attraction to revulsion — with an ease that has nothing to do with salaciousness. Any hopes of a voyeuristic frisson are soon dashed: Here, watching prostitutes at work (and at rest, and at play) is about as erotic as watching plumbers unstop a drain.Which is not to say the film lacks sensuality; quite the reverse. While the director focuses on the girls' hygiene, work schedules and medical checkups (the poor things are forever being asked to spread their thighs), the costume and lighting departments pull out all the stops. Velvet and brocade, leather and lace drape every scene, the ripe opulence of the furnishings and the jewel-toned peignoirs framing abundant, uncorseted nudity. Generous hips and lively bosoms abound, the liberation of female flesh from constricting undergarments pleasing the clients and reminding us that its owners are far from liberated. This is, after all, a gilded prison, albeit one whose inmates seem particularly well-fed.That much is clear as the women fret over their declining beauty and escalating debts, most of them owed to Madame (Noemie Lvovsky), a maternal businesswoman facing rent increases and aging regulars. Her ladies are luscious and her clients contented — she can provide boys on request — but the downside is still disease and danger, and the film shies away from neither.In fact, there's something undeniably creepy in the director's obsession with The Woman Who Laughs (Alice Barnole), the horribly disfigured victim of a vicious customer. Returning again and again to her Joker smile, Bonello seems crassly determined to re-purpose her scars as symbols of all female suffering.Consoled by opium and champagne — but mostly by one another — the occupants of the house are sorrowful, spaced-out eye candy. Even the newest recruit, a 16-year-old virgin seeking financial independence, soon catches on to her sisters' languid hopelessness.But if the joy of sex is denied them, and us, the pleasures of photography are a fine substitute as Josee Deshaies' gorgeous images wash across the screen. Ornate public rooms give way to the peeling walls of the women's private quarters, and a day out in the countryside might have been painted by Renoir.Trusting more to atmosphere than to plot, House of Pleasures offers a decadent portrait of the end of an era. Within its walls, fiction and reality, old and young, master and servant coexist; and if the Moody Blues' Nights in White Satin seems oddly perfect for the soundtrack, maybe it's because the song, like the film, is a nightmare disguised as a dream.

2011-11-28T14:01:00.001-08:00

Shakespeare 'could help doctors become better'

[...]Reading William Shakespeare could give physicians a fresh insight into the links between emotion and illness, a retired doctor and scholar believes.Dr Kenneth Heaton says many doctors fail to connect psychological problems with physical symptoms - and argues the playwright could help them do it.He listed dozens of examples in which Shakespeare described these phenomena in his works."They could learn to be better doctors by studying Shakespeare," he said.While traditional medical school training never strays far from the science of diagnosis and treatment, there has been growing interest in recent years in including courses on health-related art, history or literature as part of the curriculum.Dr Heaton, from North Somerset, who studied Shakespeare after retiring from his post as a gastroenterologist, believes that a broader perspective could make it easier to understand the viewpoint and needs of a patient, particularly in general practice. [...]on the other hand, i have known rabid shakespeare fans who ended up being depressed and suicidal when they OD on the bard. just sayin'...

2011-11-05T22:50:00.000-07:00

Hubble spots disk around distant Black Hole.

Using the Hubble space telescope, astronomers have captured a direct image of the disk surrounding a black hole.The disk is made of gas and dust, slowly being consumed as it spirals down into the black hole’s center. As it falls in, the material spews out a tremendous amount of energy, forming what is known as a quasi-stellar radio source, or quasar.Among the brightest objects in the sky, quasars are short-lived phenomena that only existed during the earliest eras of the universe. They are known to be huge — most are around 60 billion miles across — yet they lie billions of light years from Earth, making them nothing but insignificant pinpricks in even the most powerful telescopes.Hubble was able to image the distant disk, which is approximately 18.5 billion light-years away, because a huge galaxy happens to sit between Earth and the quasar. The mass of the enormous galaxy bent light from the quasar and directed it toward our telescopes, acting like a gigantic gravitational lens.The technique allowed the Hubble telescope to see with unprecedented detail. Because of this, researchers were able to measure the disk’s size — between 60 and 180 billion miles across — and determine the temperature of different parts of the disk. They found that gas and dust from the imaged quasar became bluer and therefore hotter as it fell toward the central black hole.Update: Many of the commentors below have wondered how this quasar can be 18.5 billion light-years away when the universe is only 13.5 billion years old (and therefore nothing should be farther than the distance that light would travel in that time, namely 13.5 billion light-years). This is not a mistake. Though nothing traveling in the universe can move faster than light speed, the expansion of the universe itself can happen at any speed (including faster than light). Just one of the mind blowing facts about this strange universe we live in.In the 13.5 billion years since the Big Bang, space has expanded so much that the farthest object we can detect are in fact more than 30 billion light years away. You can find out more about the quasar at this link and you can calculate distance to objects at high redshifts using this online calculator.Image: NASA, ESA, J.A. Muñoz (University of Valencia)

2011-10-29T18:31:00.001-07:00

2011-10-29T18:30:00.001-07:00

2011-10-29T18:03:00.001-07:00