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Today in History
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February 15, 1564. On this date, Italian astronomer, mathematician, and physicist Galileo Galilei was born.He is one of the first people on Earth to have aimed a telescope at the heavens, where he found – among many other things – phases for the planet Venus and four starry points of light orbiting the planet Jupiter. In Galileo’s time, educated people subscribed to the Aristotelian view that Earth lay fixed in the center of a more or less unchanging universe. Thus the discovery of moons orbiting Jupiter (now called the Galilean satellites) and revelation that Venus must orbit the sun, not the Earth, were considered heresy by the Roman Inquisition. In 1633, the Inquisition forced Galileo to recant. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest.
Afterwards, famously, he’s said to have said:
E pur si muove (and yet it moves).
The phrase is still used today as a retort, implying it doesn’t matter what you believe; these are the facts.
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
February 16, 1740I was born into a family of printers in the ancient Valley of Pompei.
It’s the birthday of the printer Giambattista Bodoni, born in Saluzzo, Italy (1740-1813). He came from a family of engravers, and by the time he died, he had opened his own publishing house that reprinted classical texts, and he had personally designed almost 300 typefaces. His typeface Bodoni is still available on almost any word processing program.
The son of a printer, Bodoni left home as a boy to go to Rome, where he served an apprenticeship at the press of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, the missionary arm of the Roman Catholic church. In 1768 he was asked to assume management of the Royal Press (Stamperia Reale), the press of the Duke of Parma. There he produced Italian, Greek, and Latin books and printed materials for court use.
Bodoni at first employed old-style typefaces with much decorative detail. He was gradually won over to the typographical theories of a French printer, Pierre Didot, however, and by 1787 was printing pages almost devoid of decoration and containing modern typefaces of his own design. The typeface that retained the Bodoni name appeared in 1790. Of the many books that he produced during this period, the best known is his Manuale tipografico (1788; “Inventory of Types”), a folio collection of 291 roman and italic typefaces, along with samples of Russian, Greek, and other types.
A second edition of his book was published by his widow in 1818. By 1790 Bodoni had become widely known; important travelers visited his press, and collectors sought his books. The Duke of Parma gave him a larger press and more independence; he no longer had to confine himself to the duke’s projects. Although his books were better known for their beauty and typographical excellence than for textual accuracy, he printed many important works, the most famous of which were his fine editions of the writings of Horace and Virgil in 1791 and 1793, respectively, and Homer’s Iliad in 1808. The last years of his life brought Bodoni international fame. He received compliments from the pope and was honoured with a pension by Napoleon Bonaparte.
Source: britannica.com
Giambattista Bodoni: His Life and His World
February 17, 1600 Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake.Born: 1548, Nola, near Naples/Italy (a place very near where I live)
Died: February 17, 1600, Rome/Italy
Giordano Bruno, born Filippo Bruno, was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician and astronomer, who is best known as a proponent of the infinity of the universe. His cosmological theories went beyond the Copernican model in identifying the Sun as just one of an infinite number of independently moving heavenly bodies: he is the first European man to have conceptualized the universe as a continuum where the stars we see at night are identical in nature to the Sun.
He was burned at the stake by authorities in 1600 after the Roman Inquisition found him guilty of heresy. After his death he gained considerable fame; in the 19th and early 20th centuries, commentators focusing on his astronomical beliefs regarded him as a martyr for free thought and modern scientific ideas. Recent assessments suggest that his ideas about the universe played a smaller role in his trial than his pantheist beliefs, which differed from the interpretations and scope of God held by Catholicism.
In addition to his cosmological writings, Bruno also wrote extensive works on the art of memory, a loosely organized group of mnemonic techniques and principles. More recent assessments, beginning with the pioneering work of Frances Yates, suggest that Bruno was deeply influenced by the astronomical facts of the universe inherited from Arab astrology, Neoplatonism and Renaissance Hermeticism. Other recent studies of Bruno have focused on his qualitative approach to mathematics and his application of the spatial paradigms of geometry to language. For this effort, Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 in a Roman market square.
“We must place ourselves, I say, first in the intellectual heaven which is within us, and then in this sensible and corporeal heaven which presents itself to our eyes.” – Giordano Bruno, ‘The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast’ (1584)
Sources:
The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast
Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic
18th February will be Pluto Day. The planet was discovered on February 18th, 1930."NINTH PLANET DISCOVERED ON EDGE OF SOLAR SYSTEM: FIRST FOUND IN 84 YEARS"
--The New York Times- March 14, 1930
Behind this headline is one of the most thrilling adventures of scientific discovery in the 20th century. It is a story that actually begins with the development of telescopes powerful enough to reveal first Uranus, then Neptune, and finally Pluto, the outermost planets of our solar system, which cannot be seen with the naked eye. Thanks to the clues provided by the identification of Uranus and Neptune, and the lucky chance that saw young, self-taught astronomer Clyde Tombaugh working with a new telescope at the Lowell Observatory -one of the few centers where an active planet-seeking program was brewing carried on- Pluto was discovered on February 18th, 1930. Sweet within the larger context of the history and evolution of astronomy, OUT OF THE DARKNESS recaptures all of the tension and excitement of the search for and discovery of Pluto, and explores the controversy about the true nature of this planet, which is still going on today.
Source:
Out of the Darkness, the Planet PlutoIf you’re like us, you grew up with a solar system that had nine planets in it. You also grew up in world that didn’t teach new math, but that’s a rant for a different day. Then one day they suddenly decided that designating Pluto as a planet was just wrong, and our most distant friend in the solar system suddenly was told he wasn’t good enough for the planet club anymore, and would forever be considered a ‘dwarf planet’. Kind of a consolation prize for those not cool enough for the big planets club. Pluto Day celebrates the discovery of Pluto in 1930, when it was designated as a planet, and that’s how it should have stayed!
The story of how Pluto was discovered actually starts in the 1840’s, when one Urbain Le Verrier determined that there was a planet outside of Uranus, but that planet obviously wasn’t Pluto, it was Neptune. But the same methods by which Neptune was discovered led to another beyond it. You see, Uranus was demonstrating some oddities in its orbit, oddities caused by its nearest, yet undiscovered, neighbor, Neptune. Once they were able to actually observe Neptune, they realized that another planet must be disturbing Uranus’s orbit as well, what they were seeing couldn’t be explained merely by Neptune.
This led to a search for Planet X (an Amazing name that we think Pluto should have kept, but we’re not able to do anything about that, obviously) headed by Percival Lowell. Unfortunately Powell would pass from this mortal coil (and into the hands of Pluto, God of the Dead) before Pluto was discovered… At least, before he would know about it. You see, during their surveys of the deep sky in search of ‘Planet X’, two faint smudges would appear that were later to be revealed to be Pluto.
The actual discovery of Pluto happened in February of 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh. After so many years and so many lives spent searching for it, we think that Pluto deserves to remain a planet, don’t you?
The best way to celebrate Pluto Day is to learn as much about this planet (yes we said PLANET) as you can. It’s got an interesting history, and a composition of some familiar substances. Oh yes, for those who’d like to know? Pluto was named by Venetia Burney, an 11 year old who had a fascination with classical mythology.
Source: www.daysoftheyear.com
20TH FEBRUARY 1895 - THE DEATH OF FREDERICK DOUGLASSToday we pay tribute to a true colossus – the abolitionist, writer, orator and America’s first black leader of national stature, the inimitable Frederick Douglass. Born into slavery, separated in infancy from his mother and shunted from one pitiless Maryland plantation to another, Douglass never even knew what day or year he was born. But through luck, pluck and bona fide brilliance, Douglass would cast off the shackles of his slave roots to become one of the most important Americans – black or white – in the whole of the 19th century.
As a young man, Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) escaped from slavery in Baltimore, Maryland. He was fortunate to have been taught to read by his slave owner mistress, and he would go on to become one of the major literary figures of his time. His very existence gave the lie to slave owners: with dignity and great intelligence he bore witness to the brutality of slavery.
Initially mentored by William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass spoke widely, using his own story to condemn slavery. By the Civil War, Douglass had become the most famed and widely travelled orator in the nation. In his unique and eloquent voice, written and spoken, Douglass was a fierce critic of the United States as well as a radical patriot. After the war he sometimes argued politically with younger African Americans, but he never forsook either the Republican party or the cause of black civil and political rights. In this biography, David Blight has drawn on new information held in a private collection that few other historian have consulted, as well as recently discovered issues of Douglass’s newspapers.
“Why am I a slave? Why are some people slaves, and others masters? Was there ever a time when this was not so? How did the relation commence? Once, however, engaged in the inquiry, I was not very long in finding out a solution to the matter. It was not color, but crime, not God, but man that afforded the true explanation of slavery; nor was I long in finding out another important truth, viz: what man can make, man can unmake.”
“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.”
Source:
Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
22nd February 1943, today, three German students were executed by guillotine in Munich’s Stadelheim Prison for their crimes of high treason against Hitler’s Third Reich. Just four days earlier, 24-year-old Hans Scholl and his 21-year-old sister Sophie were arrested after they’d been caught throwing hundreds of anti-Nazi leaflets from the third floor of the main building of their Munich University campus. Upon interrogation, the Gestapo were shocked to discover that these young Germans – the very essence of the Hitler Youth ideal – were, in fact, the leaders of the infamous White Rose resistance movement whose unfathomably bold clandestine actions since the summer of 1942 had caused shockwaves throughout Germany.
In the darkest moment of humanity, here was a beacon of light! Non-violent and rooted in intellectualism, this impudent movement that had so outraged and outwitted the Gestapo was no more than a handful of Munich University students in their early twenties – inspired and aided by their professor of philosophy, Kurt Huber. Many had even once been members of the Hitler Youth and German Youth Organization, seduced by Hitler’s promises to rebuild and revitalise Germany.
But once exposed to the horrors of the Nazi’s monolithic war machine and genocidal mania, these students refused to turn a blind eye and risked all to form an underground resistance. The White Rose mass-printed a total of six ingenious propagandist leaflets, in which they called for the active opposition of the German people to Nazi fascism and tyranny.
Quoting Goethe, Schiller, Aristotle and the Bible, these fiery missives targeted Germany’s intelligentsia – imploring them to “rip off their cloak of indifference”:
“Why do German people behave so apathetically in the face of all these abominable crimes, crimes so unworthy of the human race? … The German people slumber on in their dull, stupid sleep and encourage these fascist criminals … through his apathetic behaviour he gives these evil men the opportunity to act as they do … he himself is to blame for the fact that it came about at all! Each man wants to be exonerated … But he cannot be exonerated; he is guilty, guilty, guilty! … Now that we have recognized [the Nazis] for what they are, it must be the sole and first duty, the holiest duty of every German to destroy these beasts.”
The sixth and final leaflet was triggered by the news of the German defeat at Stalingrad on 3rd February 1943. “Fellow students! The day of reckoning has come for the most contemptible tyrant our people has ever endured … The dead of Stalingrad adjure us!” Hans and Sophie Scholl volunteered to distribute this incendiary message around the university, intending for it to be discovered by students as they exited their classrooms. But when Sophie impulsively threw the remaining leaflets over the side of the 3rd-floor railing, the siblings were observed by a custodian who blew the whistle.
The Scholls, along with their fellow White Rose member Christoph Probst – a 24-year-old father of three – stood trial before the Third Reich’s notorious Volksgerichtshof, or “People’s Court”, on 22nd February 1943. In the face of certain death, the defendants displayed a beatitude-like composure and defiance. “Somebody, after all, had to make a start,” Sophie Scholl calmly responded when asked to explain her actions. “What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just do not dare express themselves as we did.” Judge Roland Freisler sentenced all three to death and gave them just three more hours to live. But the courage and righteousness of these young students even managed to touch the prison guards, who defied prison rules to allow them to share a final cigarette together. Sophie was the first to be led to the guillotine. She went without a whimper. As the blade was about to fall on Hans, he cried out: “Let freedom live!” The White Rose, however, had the last word when their final leaflet was smuggled to the Allies, who air-dropped millions of copies over Germany.
The White Rose lives on as a symbol of righteousness – its members remarkable and courageous young people whose example of honour is a radiant page in the darkest chapter of the 20th century. It is a grave insult that the academic Daniel Jonah Goldhagen cynically omitted their heroism from his would-be authoritative Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust – for these ordinary Germans were not willing. Martyrs for all humanity, they dared to resist and made the ultimate sacrifice. While we continue to recoil at the forever-shocking memory of Hitler and the depths to which humanity can sink, the White Rose is a poignant and powerful reminder of what we all can and should be.
We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace!
Source: onthisdaity.com
We Will Not Be Silent: The White Rose Student Resistance Movement That Defied Adolf Hitler
February 23, 1954The first mass inoculation of the Salk vaccine against polio began on this date in 1954, at the Arsenal Elementary School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The year before, there had been 35,000 reported cases of the highly contagious disease, and by 1962, after the vaccine came into general usage, there were 161. On February 23, 1954, a group of children receive the first injections of the new polio vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas Salk.
Though not as devastating as the plague or influenza, poliomyelitis was a highly contagious disease that emerged in terrifying outbreaks and seemed impossible to stop. Attacking the nerve cells and sometimes the central nervous system, polio caused muscle deterioration, paralysis and even death. Even as medicine vastly improved in the first half of the 20th century in the Western world, polio still struck, affecting mostly children but sometimes adults as well. The most famous victim of a 1921 outbreak in America was future President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then a young politician. The disease spread quickly, leaving his legs permanently paralyzed.
In the late 1940s, the March of Dimes, a grassroots organization founded with President Roosevelt’s help to find a way to defend against polio, enlisted Dr. Jonas Salk, head of the Virus Research Lab at the University of Pittsburgh. Salk found that polio had as many as 125 strains of three basic types, and that an effective vaccine needed to combat all three. By growing samples of the polio virus and then deactivating, or “killing” them by adding a chemical called formalin, Salk developed his vaccine, which was able to immunize without infecting the patient.
After mass inoculations began in 1954, everyone marveled at the high success rate–some 60-70 percent–until the vaccine caused a sudden outbreak of some 200 cases. After it was determined that the cases were all caused by one faulty batch of the vaccine, production standards were improved, and by August 1955 some 4 million shots had been given. Cases of polio in the U.S. dropped from 14,647 in 1955 to 5,894 in 1956, and by 1959 some 90 other countries were using Salk’s vaccine.
Source:
Jonas Salk: A Life
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5th March will be World Book DaySome people like to read the biographies of the most influential people in history, like Martin Luther King or Mahatma Ghandi. Some people like novels that send chills down their spines, from goth horror novels like Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” to Stephen King’s epistolary novel, “Carrie”.
Some prefer the classics, like “Pride and Prejudice” or the “Old Man and the Sea”. But regardless of the kind of books you like the most, the indisputable truth is that the world would not be the same without books. Books have been educating and inspiring us for thousands of years, so it should go without saying that World Book Day is a more than well-deserved holiday.
Books did not always look the way they do today, with their glossy covers and creamy pages. When writing systems were invented in ancient civilizations thousands of years ago, clay tablets were used. Later, humanity moved on to using papyrus. In the 3rd century, the Chinese were the first to make something that resembled today’s books in that they consisted of numerous thick, bamboo pages sewn together.
Then, in the mid-15th century, Johannes Gutenburg’s printing press brought books into the industrial age, making them readily available to anyone who wanted to read them. It is thanks to than ingenious invention that we are all able to enjoy the works of Shakespeare, Tolstoy and many others in the comfort of our own homes today.
World Book Day was created on April 23rd, 1995, by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The connection between that date and books, however, was made in Spain in 1923, as it is the anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, prominent Spanish Chronicler.
The absolute best way to celebrate this day would be find the time to do some reading. Do you have a book you just can’t get around to finishing? Today’s the time to curl up on the couch or a blanket outside with a cup of coffee or tea and enjoy every last page.
If you have children, this could be the perfect day to teach them about the joys of reading. In today’s world, we are so flooded with images and videos that we run a very real risk of abandoning reading entirely–why bother, if we can just watch a movie? Imagination is a child’s best friend, so make sure you contribute to keeping that little imagination as active as possible. Pick a topic your child is interested in, and spend part of this day exploring the magical world of literature together!
Yet another way to go about celebrating this day would be to get together with some friends for a reading of a book you all love. Hearing someone read aloud sentences you have only ever murmured to yourself could cause you to see them in a whole new way by adding feeling or emphasis of some certain elements.
Furthermore, varied interpretations of a book could make for animated discussions about who did what and why they did it. Whichever way you choose to celebrate World Book Day, make sure it’s an educational experience for you and those you care about.
As acclaimed author Alan Bennett once said: “A book is a device to ignite the imagination.”
Source: Days of the Year
What Is the History of the Book?
Tomorrow, May 31, it will be Meditation Day. In a world like this, there is always something to meditate about. Start now!!!When the world around you is ensconced in madness, and you can’t quite seem to find a moment of peace in the storm of the day, it’s time to step back and remember those blissful moments as a child where we merely lost ourselves in the world. World Meditation Day is a call to the world to take time to participate in this millennia-old practice and clear our minds, remembering that we are people first, and workers second.
The History of World Meditation Day can be traced through the History of Meditation itself. Meditation has been an integral part of many religions and was first found spoken of in written form in about 1500 BCE in India.
It plays a prominent role in many religions throughout the world, especially Buddhism and other Eastern faiths, but is also practised by those who are neither spiritual nor religious as a way of easing stress and clearing their mind.
In today’s world meditation is vital regardless of whether you’re a spiritual person or not, the frantic hustle and bustle of daily activity prevent many of us from ever having a moment’s peace.
While extremist religious groups have sometimes villainized meditation, it has in fact been scientifically proven to have positive mental and physical effects when practiced regularly. Some of the key benefits of meditation include:
Across the world, anxiety remains one of the leading mental health conditions. Although in severe cases doctors may prescribe medication to help people with their anxiety, they often tend to try a more holistic approach first. Meditation is one of the most common holistic ways to treat the symptoms of anxiety, helping individuals to slow their heart rate, control harmful thoughts and prevent anxiety episodes.
There’s no doubt that the world we live in can be stressful. Although stress is a completely normal bodily response, we shouldn’t be feeling stressed regularly as constant stress can cause serious problems in the body. Meditation is a great way to take time out from the busy world and to focus inwardly on yourself. The breathing exercises conducted while meditating can reduce blood pressure and lower stress levels, calming the mind and giving the body time to recover from periods of prolonged stress.
The human brain has more things than ever to keep up with and these combined with the internet and our access to smartphones means that many of us struggle with concentration. Practicing meditation and mindfulness encourages you to think about the present, to live in the current moment and to dismiss distractions, helping you to remain focused when you need to be and to improve your overall productivity.
One of the great things about meditation is that anyone can do it, and they can do it from anywhere. Whether you’re seated, standing, lying in bed or sitting in the bath, simply close your eyes, focus on taking deep breaths in and out and allow your mind to empty of thoughts. If thoughts pop up, simply acknowledge them and wave them on their way. Continue to breathe deeply and use your breathing to deepen your inner sense of calm, until you are ready to open your eyes and continue with your day.
Celebrating World Meditation Day is best done by setting some time aside for yourself to clear your mind and relax. How meditation looks can vary broadly from person to person, with some preferring physical activity accompanying their practice (often Yoga or other exercise-oriented activities) while others prefer to sit and take their ease.
For your own World Meditation Day celebration, find a place where you feel at ease and relaxed, whether that’s in the bath, at the gym, or even overlooking a natural environment like the ocean or forest. Then simply put yourself in a comfortable position, close your eyes, breathing steadily, and let all thoughts wander clear from your mind. If you’ve never tried to meditate before then it can be difficult to clear wandering thoughts from your mind and you may benefit from trying a guided meditation tutorial in which an experienced individual will gently talk you through the process.
Whichever way you choose to celebrate World Meditation Day, just remember that Meditation is most beneficial when practised regularly, so why not set yourself a reminder to meditate once a day, every day for the rest of the week and see how you feel.
Source: www.daysoftheyear.com
Meditations
Antonio wrote: "Tomorrow, May 31, it will be Meditation Day. In a world like this, there is always something to meditate about. Start now!!!When the world around you is ensconced in madness, and you can’t quite ..."
I didn't know that it was meditation day! Considering everything happening in the world it's def needed! Thanks for the info.
Today in HistoryThomas Hardy, (born June 2, 1840, Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, England, died January 11, 1928, Dorchester, Dorset), English novelist and poet who set much of his work in Wessex, his name for the counties of southwestern England.
“The Darkling Thrush” is a poem by the English poet and novelist Thomas Hardy. The poem describes a desolate world, which the poem’s speaker takes as cause for despair and hopelessness. However, a bird (the “thrush”) bursts onto the scene, singing a beautiful and hopeful song, so hopeful that the speaker wonders whether the bird knows something that the speaker doesn’t. Written in December 1900, the poem reflects on the end of the 19th century and the state of Western civilization. The desolation of the scene the speaker sees serves as an extended metaphor for the decay of Western civilization, while the thrush is a symbol for its possible rebirth through religious faith.
The Darkling Thrush
I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.
Thomas Hardy: The Poems
Today in HistoryFranz Kafka was born into a middle-class, German-speaking Jewish family on July 3, 1883 in Prague, Bohemia, now the Czech Republic. He was one of the major fiction writers of the 20th century. His unique body of writing, much of which is incomplete and which was mainly published posthumously, is considered to be among the most influential in Western literature ...
The Metamorphosis
by Franz Kafka
Translation by Ian Johnston
One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug. He lay on his armour-hard back and saw, as he lifted his head up a little, his brown, arched abdomen divided up into rigid bow-like sections. From this height the blanket, just about ready to slide off completely, could hardly stay in place. His numerous legs, pitifully thin in comparison to the rest of his circumference, flickered helplessly before his eyes.
‘What’s happened to me,’ he thought. It was no dream. His room, a proper room for a human being, only somewhat too small, lay quietly between the four well-known walls. Above the table, on which an unpacked collection of sample cloth goods was spread out (Samsa was a traveling salesman) hung the picture which he had cut out of an illustrated magazine a little while ago and set in a pretty gilt frame. It was a picture of a woman with a fur hat and a fur boa. She sat erect there, lifting up in the direction of the viewer a solid fur muff into which her entire forearm disappeared.
Gregor’s glance then turned to the window. The dreary weather (the rain drops were falling audibly down on the metal window ledge) made him quite melancholy. ‘Why don’t I keep sleeping for a little while longer and forget all this foolishness,’ he thought. But this was entirely impractical, for he was used to sleeping on his right side, and in his present state he couldn’t get himself into this position. No matter how hard he threw himself onto his right side, he always rolled again onto his back. He must have tried it a hundred times, closing his eyes, so that he would not have to see the wriggling legs, and gave up only when he began to feel a light, dull pain in his side which he had never felt before.
‘O God,’ he thought, ‘what a demanding job I’ve chosen! Day in, day out on the road. The stresses of trade are much greater than the work going on at head office, and, in addition to that, I have to deal with the problems of traveling, the worries about train connections, irregular bad food, temporary and constantly changing human relationships which never come from the heart. To hell with it all!’ He felt a slight itching on the top of his abdomen. He slowly pushed himself on his back closer to the bed post so that he could lift his head more easily, found the itchy part, which was entirely covered with small white spots (he did not know what to make of them), and wanted to feel the place with a leg. But he retracted it immediately, for the contact felt like a cold shower all over him.
He slid back again into his earlier position. ‘This getting up early,’ he thought, ‘makes a man quite idiotic. A man must have his sleep. Other traveling salesmen live like harem women ...
The Metamorphosis and Other Stories
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Buona festa della Repubblica!
Today in History. Giacomo Casanova died on June 4, 1798Giacomo Girolamo Casanova de Seingalt was a Venetian adventurer and author. His main book Histoire de ma vie (Story of My Life), part autobiography and part memoir, is regarded as one of the most authentic sources of the customs and norms of European social life during the 18th century.
He was so famous as a womanizer that his name remains synonymous with the art of seduction and he is sometimes called "the world's greatest lover". He associated with European royalty, popes and cardinals, along with men such as Voltaire, Goethe and Mozart; but if he had not been obliged to spend some years as a librarian in the household of Count Waldstein of Bohemia (where he relieved his boredom by writing the story of his life), it is possible that he would be forgotten today
Giacomo Casanova was an adventurer, writer and a spy, born in eighteenth century Venice. He is probably one of the most misunderstood men in history. Thanks to his amorous escapades his name has long being associated with womanizers and libertines. Indeed, he had his first taste of sexual pleasure when he was just a kid and from then on it had become a passion for him. Over the time, he also became an ardent gambler. Later, he travelled all over Europe and at each place managed to get entry into the highest social circle. Although he himself did not have any social standing at each place he managed to associate with monarchs, aristocrats and cardinals. He also had close connection with people like Voltaire, Goethe, and Mozart. Besides, he was a successful spy and later introduced the lottery system in France. He would also have been a good physician if he were allowed to pursue medicine. His memoire ‘Histoire de ma vie’, written at the end of his life, provides one of the most authentic documentation of European society of that era.
Source: thefamouspeople.com
The Story of My Life
June 5, 1898 It’s the birthday of Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca born in Fuente Vaqueros, in the province of Granada.
His father was a successful farmer, and his mother was a gifted pianist. García Lorca published his first book, Impressions and Landscapes, in 1918, and then moved to Madrid the following year, enrolling in the Residencia de Estudiantes (Student Residence), a cultural center that provided a stimulating, dynamic, and progressive environment for university students. It was at the Residencia that García Lorca met and befriended a group of artists, including composer Manuel de Falla, filmmaker Luis Buñuel, and painter Salvador Dalí; he also became interested in Surrealism and the avant-garde. During the 1920s, he wrote and staged a couple of plays; the first (The Butterfly’s Evil Spell [1920]) was laughed off the stage, and the second (Mariana Pineda [1927]) received mixed reviews. He also collected folk songs and wrote a great deal of poetry; much of it — like Poem of the Deep Song, published in 1931, and Gypsy Ballads, 1928 — inspired by Andalusian or gypsy culture and music.
He also had an intense relationship with Salvador Dalí from 1925 to 1928, which forced him to acknowledge his homosexuality. He became a national celebrity upon the publication of Gypsy Ballads, and was distressed at the loss of privacy this caused; he chafed at the conflict between his public persona and his private self. He grew depressed, and a falling out with Dalí and the end of another love affair with a sculptor only made things worse. In 1929, his family arranged for him to take an extended trip to the United States. It was in New York that he began to break out of his pigeonhole as a “gypsy poet.” He wrote A Poet in New York (published posthumously in 1942), a collection that was critical of capitalism and obsessed with urban decay and social injustice.
He turned back to drama when he returned to Spain in 1930. He wrote and premiered the first two plays in his Rural Trilogy: Blood Wedding (1933) and Yerma (1934), and completed the first draft of the third, The House of Bernarda Alba (1945).
In 1936, the Spanish Civil War broke out, and the Nationalists didn’t look favorably on his work or his liberal views. They dragged him from his home on August 16 and imprisoned him without a trial; two or three days later, they drove him to a hill outside of town and shot him. His body was never found.
Source: writersalmanac.org
Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter, four-part poem by Federico García Lorca, written in Spanish as “Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías” (“Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías”) and published in 1935. Each part of the poem is written in a different poetic metre, and each addresses a different aspect of the goring and death of a bullfighter who had been Lorca’s friend. A haunting and powerful elegy, it is Lorca’s greatest poem. It contains the famous insistent refrain “A las cinco de la tarde” (“At five in the afternoon”).
Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías
The Goring and the Death
La Cogida y La Muerte
A las cinco de la tarde.
Eran las cinco en punto de la tarde.
Un niño trajo la blanca sábana
a las cinco de la tarde.
Una espuerta de cal ya prevenida
a las cinco de la tarde.
Lo demás era muerte y sólo muerte
a las cinco de la tarde.
El viento se llevó los algodones
a las cinco de la tarde.
Y el óxido sembró cristal y níquel
a las cinco de la tarde.
Ya luchan la paloma y el leopardo
a las cinco de la tarde.
Y un muslo con un asta desolada
a las cinco de la tarde.
Comenzaron los sones de bordón
a las cinco de la tarde.
Las campanas de arsénico y el humo
a las cinco de la tarde.
En las esquinas grupos de silencio
a las cinco de la tarde.
¡Y el toro solo corazón arriba!
a las cinco de la tarde.
Cuando el sudor de nieve fue llegando
a las cinco de la tarde
cuando la plaza se cubrió de yodo
a las cinco de la tarde,
la muerte puso huevos en la herida
a las cinco de la tarde.
A las cinco de la tarde.
A las cinco en Punto de la tarde.
Un ataúd con ruedas es la cama
a las cinco de la tarde.
Huesos y flautas suenan en su oído
a las cinco de la tarde.
El toro ya mugía por su frente
a las cinco de la tarde.
El cuarto se irisaba de agonía
a las cinco de la tarde.
A lo lejos ya viene la gangrena
a las cinco de la tarde.
Trompa de lirio por las verdes ingles
a las cinco de la tarde.
Las heridas quemaban como soles
a las cinco de la tarde,
y el gentío rompía las ventanas
a las cinco de la tarde.
A las cinco de la tarde.
¡Ay, qué terribles cinco de la tarde!
¡Eran las cinco en todos los relojes!
¡Eran las cinco en sombra de la tarde!
----
At five in the afternoon.
It was just five in the afternoon.
A boy brought the white sheet
at five in the afternoon.
A basket of lime made ready
at five in the afternoon.
The rest was death and only death
at five in the afternoon.
The wind blew the cotton wool away
at five in the afternoon.
And oxide scattered nickel and glass
at five in the afternoon.
Now the dove and the leopard fight
at five in the afternoon.
And a thigh with a desolate horn
at five in the afternoon.
The bass-pipe sound began
at five in the afternoon.
The bells of arsenic, the smoke
at five in the afternoon.
Silent crowds on corners
at five in the afternoon.
And only the bull with risen heart!
at five in the afternoon.
When the snow-sweat appeared
at five in the afternoon.
when the arena was splashed with iodine
at five in the afternoon.
death laid its eggs in the wound
at five in the afternoon.
At five in the afternoon.
At just five in the afternoon.
A coffin on wheels for his bed
at five in the afternoon.
Bones and flutes sound in his ear
at five in the afternoon.
Now the bull bellows on his brow
at five in the afternoon.
The room glows with agony
at five in the afternoon.
Now out of distance gangrene comes
at five in the afternoon.
Trumpets of lilies for the green groin
at five in the afternoon.
Wounds burning like suns
at five in the afternoon,
and the people smashing windows
at five in the afternoon.
At five in the afternoon.
Ay, what a fearful five in the afternoon!
It was five on every clock!
It was five of a dark afternoon!
Source: Poetry in Translation
At Five in the Afternoon: Poems
Mod
It’s the birthday of Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca born in Fuente Vaqueros, in the province of Granada.
His father was a successful farmer, and his mother was a..."
I LOVE this poem by Gargia Lorca Antonio!!!!
LauraT wrote: "Antonio wrote: "June 5, 1898 It’s the birthday of Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca born in Fuente Vaqueros, in the province of Granada.
His father was a successful farmer, and ..."
Thanks Laura. I love it, too. One of the strongest poems ever written ...
Today in History - June 6, 2020UN Russian Language Day coincides with the birthday of Aleksandr Pushkin on June 6, a Russian poet considered the father of modern Russian literature. Russian is a Slavic language, whose closest relatives are Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Rusyn (Ukraine and Slovenia). In the 19th century, what we now classify as modern Russian was known as “Great Russian.” Belarusian was called “White Russian,” and Ukrainian was “Little Russian.” Today over 170 million people speak Russian. UNESCO established this day in 2010.
Two russian poems:
Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799-1837) is Russia's greatest poet, and he is considered the Shakespeare of Russia. One of Pushkin's most famous poems is “Winter morning”, which he wrote in 1824 for a woman.
Winter morning
Cold frost and sunshine: day of wonder!
But you, my friend, are still in slumber--
Wake up, my beauty, time belies:
You dormant eyes, I beg you, broaden
Toward the northerly Aurora,
As though a northern star arise!
Recall last night, the snow was whirling,
Across the sky, the haze was twirling,
The moon, as though a pale dye,
Emerged with yellow through faint clouds.
And there you sat, immersed in doubts,
And now, -- just take a look outside:
The snow below the bluish skies,
Like a majestic carpet lies,
And in the light of day it shimmers.
The woods are dusky. Through the frost
The greenish fir-trees are exposed;
And under ice, a river glitters.
The room is lit with amber light.
And bursting, popping in delight
Hot stove still rattles in a fray.
While it is nice to hear its clatter,
Perhaps, we should command to saddle
A fervent mare into the sleight?
And sliding on the morning snow
Dear friend, we'll let our worries go,
And with the zealous mare we'll flee.
We'll visit empty ranges, thence,
The woods, which used to be so dense
And then the shore, so dear to me.
© Translation to English by Mikhail Kneller
--------
Silentium
by Fëdor Ivanovič Tjutčev (December 5, 1803 – July 27, 1873) was a Russian poet and diplomat.
Speak not, lie hidden, and conceal
the way you dream, the things you feel.
Deep in your spirit let them rise
akin to stars in crystal skies
that set before the night is blurred:
delight in them and speak no word.
How can a heart expression find?
How should another know your mind?
Will he discern what quickens you?
A thought, once uttered, is untrue.
Dimmed is the fountainhead when stirred:
drink at the source and speak no word.
Live in your inner self alone
within your soul a world has grown,
the magic of veiled thoughts that might
be blinded by the outer light,
drowned in the noise of day, unheard...
take in their song and speak no word.
Speak not, lie hidden, and conceal
the way you dream, the things you feel.
Deep in your spirit let them rise
akin to stars in crystal skies
that set before the night is blurred:
delight in them and speak no word.
How can a heart expression find?
How should another know your mind?
Will he discern what quickens you?
A thought, once uttered, is untrue.
Dimmed is the fountainhead when stirred:
drink at the source and speak no word.
Live in your inner self alone
within your soul a world has grown,
the magic of veiled thoughts that might
be blinded by the outer light,
drowned in the noise of day, unheard...
take in their song and speak no word.
(trans. by Vladimir Nabokov)
Source: shorturl.at/sBFRU
On June 7, 2017Would You Believe?
Police warn bald men against attacks in Mozambique after 5 men murdered for the gold believed in their heads. Bald men in Mozambique could be targets of ritual attacks, police have warned, after the recent killing of five men for their body parts.
Two suspects have been arrested in the central district of Milange, where the killings occurred. "The belief is that the head of a bald man contains gold," said Afonso Dias, a police commander in Mozambique's central Zambezia province. Albino people have also been killed in the region for ritual purposes. Three men have been killed in the past week alone.
The BBC's Jose Tembe in the capital, Maputo, says police think the notion of a bald head containing gold is a ruse by witchdoctors to get clients to take a person's head to them.
"Their motive comes from superstition and culture - the local community thinks bald individuals are rich," Commander Dias is reported as having told a press conference in Maputo.
The suspects are two young Mozambicans aged around 20, the AFP news agency reports. A regional security spokesman, Miguel Caetano, told AFP that one of the victims had his head cut off and his organs removed.
The organs were to be used in rituals to advance the wealth of clients in Tanzania and Malawi, Mr Caetano said, citing the suspects. There has been a spate of killings of people with albinism in East Africa in recent years, with their body parts used to make charms and potions by witchdoctors.
Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa...
Baldness: A Social History
African Witchcraft and Otherness: A Philosophical and Theological Critique of Intersubjective Relations
June 8, 1949 George Orwell publishes “Nineteen Eighty-Four”Orwell's nightmarish description of a totalitarian society set in the year 1984 is one of the most significant works of English literature and one of the best-known novels of all time. The phrase, “Big Brother is watching you”, stems from this work.
Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on 8 June 1949 (five days later in the US) and was almost universally recognised as a masterpiece, even by Winston Churchill, who told his doctor that he had read it twice. Orwell's health continued to decline. In October 1949, in his room at University College hospital, he married Sonia Brownell, with David Astor as best man. It was a fleeting moment of happiness; he lingered into the new year of 1950. In the small hours of 21 January he suffered a massive haemorrhage in hospital and died alone.
The news was broadcast on the BBC the next morning. Avril Blair and her nephew, still up on Jura, heard the report on the little battery radio in Barnhill. Richard Blair does not recall whether the day was bright or cold but remembers the shock of the news: his father was dead, aged 46.
David Astor arranged for Orwell's burial in the churchyard at Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire. He lies there now, as Eric Blair, between HH Asquith and a local family of Gypsies.
Why '1984'?
Orwell's title remains a mystery. Some say he was alluding to the centenary of the Fabian Society, founded in 1884. Others suggest a nod to Jack London's novel The Iron Heel (in which a political movement comes to power in 1984), or perhaps to one of his favourite writer GK Chesterton's story, "The Napoleon of Notting Hill", which is set in 1984.
In his edition of the Collected Works (20 volumes), Peter Davison notes that Orwell's American publisher claimed that the title derived from reversing the date, 1948, though there's no documentary evidence for this. Davison also argues that the date 1984 is linked to the year of Richard Blair's birth, 1944, and notes that in the manuscript of the novel, the narrative occurs, successively, in 1980, 1982 and finally, 1984. There's no mystery about the decision to abandon "The Last Man in Europe". Orwell himself was always unsure of it. It was his publisher, Fred Warburg who suggested that Nineteen Eighty-Four was a more commercial title.
Freedom of speech: How '1984' has entrusted our culture
The effect of Nineteen Eighty-Four on our cultural and linguistic landscape has not been limited to either the film adaptation starring John Hurt and Richard Burton, with its Nazi-esque rallies and chilling soundtrack, nor the earlier one with Michael Redgrave and Edmond O'Brien.
It is likely, however, that many people watching the Big Brother series on television (in the UK, let alone in Angola, Oman or Sweden, or any of the other countries whose TV networks broadcast programmes in the same format) have no idea where the title comes from or that Big Brother himself, whose role in the reality show is mostly to keep the peace between scrapping, swearing contestants like a wise uncle, is not so benign in his original incarnation.
Apart from pop-culture renditions of some of the novel's themes, aspects of its language have been leapt upon by libertarians to describe the curtailment of freedom in the real world by politicians and officials - alarmingly, nowhere and never more often than in contemporary Britain.
Orwellian
George owes his own adjective to this book alone and his idea that wellbeing is crushed by restrictive, authoritarian and untruthful government.
Big Brother (is watching you)
A term in common usage for a scarily omniscient ruler long before the worldwide smash-hit reality-TV show was even a twinkle in its producers' eyes. The irony of societal hounding of Big Brother contestants would not have been lost on George Orwell.
Room 101
Some hotels have refused to call a guest bedroom number 101 - rather like those tower blocks that don't have a 13th floor - thanks to the ingenious Orwellian concept of a room that contains whatever its occupant finds most impossible to endure. Like Big Brother, this has spawned a modern TV show: in this case, celebrities are invited to name the people or objects they hate most in the world.
Thought Police
An accusation often levelled at the current government by those who like it least is that they are trying to tell us what we can and cannot think is right and wrong. People who believe that there are correct ways to think find themselves named after Orwell's enforcement brigade.
Thoughtcrime
See "Thought Police" above. The act or fact of transgressing enforced wisdom.
Newspeak
For Orwell, freedom of expression was not just about freedom of thought but also linguistic freedom. This term, denoting the narrow and diminishing official vocabulary, has been used ever since to denote jargon currently in vogue with those in power.
Doublethink
Hypocrisy, but with a twist. Rather than choosing to disregard a contradiction in your opinion, if you are double thinking, you are deliberately forgetting that the contradiction is there. This subtlety is mostly overlooked by people using the accusation of "doublethink" when trying to accuse an adversary of being hypocritical - but it is a very popular word with people who like a good debate along with their pints in the pub.
Source: The Guardian (shorturl.at/mrEQR)
The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell's "1984"
Today in History. On June 9th, 1790the ‘Philadelphia Spelling Book’, a book penned by John Barry, became the first American literary work to get a copyright, after it was registered in the U.S. District Court of Pennsylvania. Barry began his career as a naval captain and belonged to an Irish tenant farming family, which immigrated to Philadelphia.
The first copyright, passed by the UK, was less of an intellectual property protection than an effort to suppress unfavorable opinion. A government-controlled printing company was given the exclusive right to print all publications, thus allowing the Crown to control the content of those books. In the United States, the newly-written Constitution addressed copyright in Article 1, Section 8 stating “Congress shall have the power to protect,” which some took to mean they must appeal to Congress directly to gain protection for their work. Congress was flooded with private requests for copyright almost immediately after the passage of the Constitution.
On this day, June 9, just over a week after President George Washington signed the Copyright Act of 1790, The Philadelphia Spelling Book, Arranged Upon a Plan Entirely New by John Barry entered the records as the first book granted copy protection.
President Washington added his own preamble to the 1790 bill just before signing it into law, calling it “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Securing the Copies of Maps, Charts, and Books, to the Authors and Proprietors of Such Copies, during the Times Therein Mentioned.” Individuals were given 14 years of exclusive rights to publish and profit off their creation, renewable once for another 14.
The Copyright Book: A Practical Guide
Today in History. National Ballpoint Pen DayOn June 10th of 1943, Hungarian brothers Laszlo and Gyorgy Biro walked into a European patent office to declare ownership of their new writing pen design. From this day on, countless ballpoint pens have been enjoyed by writers around the world, and this date has grown into the holiday National Ballpoint Pen Day to celebrate the achievements of these ingenious brothers.
While the British government quickly swooped in and bought the rights to the newly-patented pens, today’s ballpoint pens are used the world over and continue to represent an affordable and reliable means for writing on any standard surface. There’s even more to the story! Hera are some interesting facts about this incredibly popular pen type:
Each second of every day, more than 125 ballpoint pens are sold
An average ballpoint pen will write approximately 50,000 words – or about 100 pages of text
4.3 pens are used, on average, by each person in the United States each year
Ballpoint pens range from about 7-cents each, to over $730,000 for the Mont Blanc ballpoint
Before acquiring the rights to the ballpoint pen, RAF flyers used feather pens in the cockpit
The first ballpoint pens sold in New York (1945) cost $12 each – or about a day’s wages
3.4 billion ballpoint pens are imported into the USA each year
56% of individuals own a logoed or customized ballpoint pen
95% of the time, when a person receives a new pen, the first word they write is their name
Source: www.pens.com
Ballpoint: A Tale of Genius and Grit, Perilous Times, and the Invention that Changed the Way We Write
Mod
June in HistoryWhat is the meaning of the poem "There is a June when Corn is cut" written by Emily Dickinson? (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886)
There Is A June When Corn Is Cut
There is a June when Corn is cut
And Roses in the Seed—
A Summer briefer than the first
But tenderer indeed
As should a Face supposed the Grave’s
Emerge a single Noon
In the Vermilion that it wore
Affect us, and return—
Two Seasons, it is said, exist—
The Summer of the Just,
And this of Ours, diversified
With Prospect, and with Frost—
May not our Second with its First
So infinite compare
That We but recollect the one
The other to prefer?
This is a very interesting poem. Emily Dickinson starts by contemplating the corn being cut in Summer and thinking about nature. However, this leads her to compare what she sees with our own lives and to contemplate the two ages that we experience as humans. Note how the third stanza makes this link clear when she says:
Two Seasons, it is said, exist —
The Summer of the Just,
And this of Ours, diversified
With Prospect, and with Frost —
"The Summer of the Just" obviously refers to the afterlife that Christians have to look forward to, and the other "Season" that exists is our present one, that is characterised by "Prospect" and "Frost," obviously symbolising the opportunities but also the hardships that we face. However, the final stanza makes clear the point of the poem. As the speaker of the poem considers both of these "Seasons," she considers their relationship to each other:
May not our Second with its First
So infinite compare
That We but recollect the one
The other to prefer?
Viewed from the second season, we will remember the first season but only so we can appreciate the way that the second season compares so much better with the first. The speaker thus moves us to a time beyond the first season of our lives on this earth, just as the reaping of the corn makes her think of the different seasons, and she thus compares the two different seasons of our lives and wonders how we will think of our lives here and now when we are enjoying the afterlife.
Source:
The Emily Dickinson Reader: An English-to-English Translation of Emily Dickinson's Complete Poems
LauraT wrote: "Who knows..."Emily seems she did know it all ...
Today in HistoryJune 12, 1929 is the birthday of Anne Frank.
A poem by Linda Pastan
IT IS RAINING ON THE HOUSE OF ANNE FRANK
It is raining on the house
of Anne Frank
and on the tourists
herded together under the shadow
of their umbrellas,
on the perfectly silent
tourists who would rather be
somewhere else
but who wait here on stairs
so steep they must rise
to some occasion
high in the empty loft,
in the quaint toilet,
in the skeleton
of a kitchen
or on the map—
each of its arrows
a barb of wire—
with all the dates, the expulsions,
the forbidding shapes
of continents.
And across Amsterdam it is raining
on the Van Gogh Museum
where we will hurry next
to see how someone else
could find the pure
center of light
within the dark circle
of his demons.
“It Is Raining on the House of Anne Frank” by Linda Pastan from Carnival Evening. © Norton, 1998.
Linda Pastan (born May 27, 1932) is an American poet of Jewish background that is best known for her short poems. In this poem, Pastan analyzes the experience of tourists visiting two iconic buildings in the city of Amsterdam: the Anne Frank House and the Van Gogh Museum. Anne Frank was a young girl when her entire family lived in a hidden compartment of a house to hide from the Nazis during the The Holocaust. Vincent Van Gogh was a painter famous for using art to express his own personal struggles in life. As you read, take notes on the ways in which the experiences of the tourists compare and contrast to those of Anne Frank.
Source: www.CommonLit.org
Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems, 1968-1998
Mod
Emily seems she did know it all ..."
Each of us knows for ourself, I hope...
June 13, 1865: William Butler Yeats is born.‘Leda and the Swan’ (published in 1924) is one of W. B. Yeats’s most widely anthologised poems. The poem, which somewhat unusually for Yeats is a sonnet, is about the rape of the Greek girl Leda by the god Zeus, who has assumed the form of a swan. Here is ‘Leda and the Swan’ and some notes towards an analysis of this intriguing and enigmatic Yeats poem.
Leda and the Swan
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
The sonnet that focuses on the story from Greek myth in which Zeus, having adopted the form of a swan, rapes the girl Leda and impregnates her with the child who will become Helen of Troy. This single act, Yeats tells us, brings about the Trojan War and, with it, the end of Greek civilisation and the dawn of a new (largely Christian) age. Because in raping Leda, Zeus made her conceive Helen of Troy, whose beauty would bring about the outbreak of the Trojan War. This is a great cataclysmic moment in history (merging history with myth) for Yeats.
Source:
The Collected Poetry of William Butler Yeats
Salvatore Quasimodo, (born Aug. 20, 1901, Modica, Italy—died June 14, 1968, Naples), Italian poet, critic, and translator. Originally a leader of the Hermetic poets, he became, after World War II, a powerful poet commenting on modern social issues. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1959.Summer
(Cicale, sorelle, nel sole)
Cicadas, sisters, in the sun
amongst you I hide,
in the heights of poplars
and gaze at the stars…
---
Man of My Time
(Sei ancora quello della pietra e della fionda)
You are the creature still of stone and sling,
man of my time. Yours was the cockpit
of malignant wings, the gnomons of death,
– I saw you – in the fiery chariot, at the gallows,
at the torturer’s wheel. I saw you: it was you,
your exact science devoted to extermination,
without love, or saviour. Again you kill,
as ever, as your fathers did, as the creatures
that saw you for the first time, killed.
And the blood still smells of that day
when one brother said to the other:
‘Let us go to the field.’ And that echo, chill,
tenacious, reaches down to you, in your day.
Forget, o sons, the clouds born of blood
risen from the earth, forget the fathers:
their tombs sink down deep in the ashes,
dark birds, the wind, cover their hearts.
---
Suddenly It’s Evening
(Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra)
Everyone is alone at the heart of the earth,
pierced by a ray of sunshine;
and suddenly it’s evening.
Complete Poems: Salvatore Quasimodo
June 15, 1479 Mona Lisa's birthday... is the birthday of the Italian model Lisa del Giocondo, born Lisa Gherardini in Florence (1479).
We don’t know much about her childhood, but we know that when she was 15, she married a wealthy silk merchant nearly twice her age. She didn’t have a rich dowry, and most girls in her situation would not have found husbands but would have been sent to a convent, unless her family had political connections or other advantages.
Lisa’s advantage was that she was beautiful, and Francesco del Giocondo was captivated by her. He arranged to marry her for a piece of her father’s farmland, and their marriage seems to have been a happy one. Francesco’s will specifically mentions her noble spirit and her faithfulness, and speaks of his love and affection for her.
In about 1503, Francesco commissioned an esteemed local artist named Leonardo to paint his wife’s portrait — possibly because the couple had just bought their house, or perhaps it was to commemorate the birth of their second son. Leonardo usually painted aristocrats, but he was between jobs at that time, and was hopeful that Francesco’s political connections could help him get some big commissions.
The canvas he selected was quite large for a portrait of this type, and he also made the decision to “zoom in” pretty closely on the sitter. It seems like a small thing, but was actually revolutionary, and his choice had an immediate influence on other artists of the region. Leonardo was working on the portrait when he received a lucrative commission to paint The Battle of Anghiari — a joint project with Michelangelo to decorate the Palazzo Vecchio — so he set it aside.
He took the unfinished portrait with him when he left Florence, and never delivered it to Francesco and Lisa — possibly because Francesco never paid him. Leonardo finished the portrait eventually, and it wound up in the hands of the French king Francis I.
That portrait was, of course, the Mona Lisa, and 6 million people view it at the Louvre every year. We didn’t know anything about its subject until 2005, when an expert at the University Library of Heidelberg discovered a note in the margins of a record book. The note referred to a portrait that Leonardo da Vinci was painting of Lisa del Giocondo, around the time that the Mona Lisa was known to have been painted.
It gave investigators something to go on, but women’s lives were mostly unremarked upon in the early 16th century — their births, marriages, and deaths were recorded, and the baptisms of their children, but that’s about it.
Journalist Dianne Hales took up the challenge and found out everything she could about the mysterious Lisa. She published her findings in Mona Lisa: A Life Discovered (2014). Hales writes: “Lisa’s life spanned the most tumultuous chapters in the history of Florence, decades of war, rebellion, invasion, siege, and conquest — and of the greatest artistic outpouring the world has ever seen.”
Francesco died in 1528, and Lisa died about four years later. She is reportedly buried at the convent of Sant’Orsola, where her daughter Marietta was a nun.
Sources: The Writer's Almanac
www.telegraph.co.uk - shorturl.at/otXZ1
Mona Lisa: A Life Discovered
Today in HistoryJune 16, 1904, is "Bloomsday." All the events of James Joyce's (1882-1941) landmark novel Ulysses (1922) take place on June 16, 1904, in Dublin. "Bloomsday" is derived from the name of the protagonist of the novel, Leopold Bloom. It is celebrated with great enthusiasm by Joyce's fans all over the world, especially in Dublin.
Thursday, June 16, 1904 was also the date of Joyce's first outing with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid. They walked to the Dublin urban village of Ringsend. Joyce had met her on June 10th on Nassau Street.
"Bloomsday" was first celebrated in 1954. On "Bloomsday," a range of cultural activities--including sometimes a marathon reading of the entire novel--are organised by the fans of James Joyce.
The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses
Today in HistoryJune 17 2020. Do you know that today is Tessellation Day? Do you know what is Tessellation?
Surely, there’s little more in the world more visually pleasing than tessellation – that wonderful, perfect effect when the same shapes can be repeated again and again to fit perfectly against themselves. Your standard tiled kitchen floor is a tessellation – but the patterns that can fit together get much more complicated than that!
Even if you’re not a maths buff, you might be a sucker for pretty patterns – and if so, then today is for you! This day was started up for all pattern-lovers by a bunch of math fans, and a children’s book author. Emily Grosvenor, author of the kids’ book Tessellation! took it upon herself to make this a day to celebrate shapes and patterns of the repeated, tiling kind. Tessellations have been celebrated for a long time – tessellating patterns can be found in scores of ancient art and interior designs. Their beauty comes from their exactness of repetitiveness, and the fact that there is no space between the interlocking patterns.
The earliest known example currently of tessellating patterns being used is from the Sumerians in about 4000 BC, who made snazzy wall designs using repeating patterns made from clay tiles.
Tessellating patterns can also be seen in mosaic form in ancient eras, usually used in borders of friezes and to decorate floors of temples for that ‘wow’ factor. Repeating patterns are usually used today for tiled floors, such as in your kitchen or hallway.
Tessellations didn’t start to become part of mathematical study until 1891 when crystallographer Yevgraf Fyodorov proved that every possible tiling of a flat surface will feature at least one of seventeen different groups of isometries. Learning about tessellations and how they work is a great way to get to grips with mathematics, no matter how young or old you are!
Why not take a look at the incredible designs and patterns created by tessellation in classic artwork and structures? Or try to wrap your mind around the mathematical side of this satisfying visual work? You could try to make some tessellations of your own, using computer artwork programs – or, of course, good old-fashioned pen and paper. If you have young children, today is a great excuse to get them thinking about patterns and how they fit together – they will be sure to want to try out making their own. Make sure you get the word out there that you’re observing this day by posting your creations on social media!
Source: daysoftheyear.com
Tessalation!
Mod
And I love Quasimodo's poems!!!!
Thanks Laura. I like rambling on discovery. Quasimodo is my most loved poet ... Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra
trafitto da un raggio di sole
ed è subito sera
----
Everyone stands alone at the heart of the world,
pierced by a ray of sunlight,
and suddenly it’s evening.
June 19 1623It’s the birthday of religious philosopher, physicist, and mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623) born in Clermont-Ferrand, France.
He was a child prodigy, and by the time he was 19 he had already perfected the first mechanical calculator for sale to the public. In the field of physics, he discovered that air has weight, and proved that vacuums are possible in nature. In mathematics, he founded the theory of probabilities and developed an early form of integral calculus. He invented the syringe and the hydraulic press, and gave the world the principle that would come to be known as “Pascal’s Law”: pressure applied to a confined liquid is transmitted undiminished through the liquid in all directions regardless of the area to which the pressure is applied.
He was often conflicted, torn between a spiritual life and a scientific one. When he was 23, he began to feel the need to withdraw from the world and devote his life to God, and he did for a while, but soon threw himself back into his scientific pursuits, working so hard he made himself ill. He returned to religion for good after a mystical conversion experience, which he called the “night of fire,” in 1654, and entered the Abbey of Port-Royal in January 1655. Although he never formally joined the Solitaires — the hermits at the abbey — he never again published under his own name, writing only materials that they requested. He produced two great works of religious philosophy, Les Provinciales (Provincial Letters, 1657), and Pensées (Thoughts, 1658). He wrote: “Man is to himself the most wonderful object in nature; for he cannot conceive what the body is, still less what the mind is, and least of all how a body should be united to a mind. This is the consummation of his difficulties, and yet it is his very being.”
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Pascal’s Wager about God
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) offers a pragmatic reason for believing in God: even under the assumption that God’s existence is unlikely, the potential benefits of believing are so vast as to make betting on theism rational. The super-dominance form of the argument conveys the basic Pascalian idea, the expectations argument refines it, and the dominating expectations argument gives a more sophisticated version still.
Critics in turn have raised a number of now-classic challenges. (i) According to intellectualism, deliberately choosing which beliefs to hold is practically impossible. Intellectualism, however, appears to be not only questionable but irrelevant. (ii) According to the many-gods objection, Pascal’s wager begs the question and hence is irrational. It assumes that if God exists then God must take a rather specific form, which few open-minded agnostics would accept. Pascalians reply by invoking the notion of a genuine option (which is not defined), by devising run-off decision theory (which is not justified), by claiming that Pascal was understandably unaware of other cultures (which is not true), and by appealing to generic theism (which does not solve the problem).
(iii) According to evidentialism, Pascalian reasoning is epistemically irresponsible and hence immoral. One development of this argument, suggesting that God is an evidentialist, amounts to a variant of the many-gods objection. Another development, suggesting that we should be evidentialists, hinges on the outcome of larger moral theory. (iv) According to various paradoxes, reference to infinite values is decision-theoretic non-sense … (cont.)
Source: I.E.P. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy - https://www.iep.utm.edu/pasc-wag/
Pascal's Wager: The Man Who Played Dice with God
June 21 - Today in HistoryJune 21 is officially the first day of summer, also known as the Summer Solstice. Today holds symbolic importance, as it marks the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, and the point after which the sun starts rising later and setting earlier. The solstice has been celebrated for its astronomical significance all over the world for hundreds of years. There are plenty of different ways to ring in the occasion, from performing some sun salutations to partying with thousands of other revelers at Stonehenge. But why not start off the celebration with something simple and easy, like reading a little seasonally themed poetry? Whose poems are these? I give you only their initials ...
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date: Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm’d; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d; But thy eternal summer shall not fade Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou growest: So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
W.S.
----
A something in a summer's Day
As slow her flambeaux burn away
Which solemnizes me.
A something in a summer's noon -
A depth - an Azure - a perfume -
Transcending ecstasy.
And still within a summer's night
A something so transporting bright
I clap my hands to see -
Then veil my too inspecting face
Lets such a subtle - shimmering grace
Flutter too far for me -
The wizard fingers never rest -
The purple brook within the breast
Still chafes it narrow bed -
Still rears the East her amber Flag -
Guides still the sun along the Crag
His Caravan of Red -
So looking on - the night - the morn
Conclude the wonder gay -
And I meet, coming thro' the dews
Another summer's Day!
E.D.
----
I love to see the summer beaming forth
And white wool sack clouds sailing to the north
I love to see the wild flowers come again
And mare blobs stain with gold the meadow drain
And water lilies whiten on the floods
Where reed clumps rustle like a wind shook wood
Where from her hiding place the Moor Hen pushes
And seeks her flag nest floating in bull rushes
I like the willow leaning half way o’er
The clear deep lake to stand upon its shore
I love the hay grass when the flower head swings
To summer winds and insects happy wings
That sport about the meadow the bright day
And see bright beetles in the clear lake play
J.C.
National Geographic Book of Nature Poetry: More than 200 Poems With Photographs That Float, Zoom, and Bloom!
June 22, 1949 Today in HistoryIt is the birthday of the “greatest-living actress,” Meryl Streep, born in New Jersey. Streep has more Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations than any other actor. She has also won two film-industry lifetime achievement awards and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
After college, Streep did not have plans to become an actor. But Robert De Niro’s performance in Taxi Driver convinced her that it was what she wanted to be. One of her earliest auditions for a film role was for the lead in Dino De Laurentiis’s King Kong. Laurentiis — in Italian — said to his son about Streep, “This is so ugly. Why did you bring me this?” Streep understood the language, however, and replied, “I’m very sorry that I’m not as beautiful as I should be but, you know — this is it. This is what you get.”
In the end, it was the man who inspired her to begin, Robert De Niro, who also gave her the first big break, recommending her for the role of his girlfriend in The Deer Hunter (1978).
Streep has become known for her masterful ability to pick up the proper accents of her characters. In the Holocaust movie Sophie’s Choice, Streep spoke in English, German, and Polish — all with a consistent Polish accent. She took elocution lessons to master the vocal style of Margaret Thatcher for her role in The Iron Lady, a particular challenge because the real Thatcher had curated a unique accent as part of her political persona. Lin-Manuel Miranda recently consulted her for advice on his cockney accent for when the two star in an upcoming remake of Mary Poppins.
Source: The Writer’s Almanac
Queen Meryl: The Iconic Roles, Heroic Deeds, and Legendary Life of Meryl Streep
Today in History - June 23Today is the birthday of Russian poet Anna Akhmatova.
Anna Akhmatova (June 23, 1889 - March 5, 1966) is considered by many to be one of the greatest Russian poets of the Silver Age. One of the forefront leaders of the Acmeism movement, which focused on rigorous form and directness of words, she was a master of conveying raw emotion in her portrayals of everyday situations. Her works range from short lyric love poetry to longer, more complex cycles, such as Requiem, a tragic depiction of the Stalinist terror. During the time of heavy censorship and persecution, her poetry gave voice to the Russian people. To this day, she remains one of Russia’s most beloved poets and has left a lasting impression on generations of poets that came after her.
Rosary, published in 1914, is Akhmatova's second book, and one of her most popular collections. After its publication, Akhmatova became a household name and further established her place among the greatest Russian poets.
Source:
Rosary: Poetry of Anna Akhmatova
Mod
It is the birthday of the “greatest-living actress,” Meryl Streep, born in New Jersey. Streep has more Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations than any other acto..."
She is indeed the Greated living actress!!!!
Today in History - June 24, 2020 is International Fairy DayToday is a day for fairy believers young and old to celebrate the stories, magic, and history of the Fair Folk. For centuries, fairies have been an important part of human culture. In all of the ancient legends, these mythological creatures are described as intelligent, mischievous, and magical.
They have the ability to fly and cast spells, and they live in “Tír na nóg,” the land of eternal youth. Some say that humans don’t often see fairies because of the division between the two worlds, but sightings can occur at twilight or during Beltane, Mid-Summer’s Eve, or All Hallow’s Eve.
In his 1904 play Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie wrote that when the first baby laughed, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and that was the beginning of fairies. International Fairy Day is the perfect opportunity to relive your childhood fantasies and celebrate the joy and magic of the fairy world.
Source:
The Real Peter Pan: J. M. Barrie and the Boy Who Inspired Him
In History Today June 26, 1997 the first 'Harry Potter' book was released 20 years ago today in the United Kingdom. Fans who grew up on the series are now sharing it with their own children.Joanne Rowling was an unemployed, single mother waiting for a delayed train, when an idea suddenly came to her. “I did not have a functioning pen with me,” she said. “I simply sat and thought for four hours, while all the details bubbled up in my brain, and this scrawny, black-haired, bespectacled boy who didn’t know he was a wizard became more and more real to me ... I began to write that very evening.” The seven Harry Potter books have sold 450 million copies worldwide and spawned a successful movie franchise. The character of Harry Potter earns J.K. Rowling, as she is now known, an estimated $10,000 every hour.
The Hidden Key to Harry Potter: Understanding the Meaning, Genius, and Popularity of Joanne Rowling's Harry Potter Novels
Today in HistoryJune 28, 1867 Luigi Pirandello was born in Caos, near Girgenti, on the island of Sicily, which was to be the inspiration of his writings. “I am a child of Chaos and not only allegorically,” he said in his biographical sketch.. Pirandello’s father, Stefano Ricci-Gramitto, owned a prosperous sulfur mine. His childhood Pirandello spent in modest weath in Girgenti (today called Agrigento) and Palermo, surrounded by nurses and servants, and enjoying the adoration of his mother. From his teens Pirandello showed literary talents, but he first planned to study law. However, his father, intended his son to become a businessman.
Italian author, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934 for his “bold and brilliant renovation of the drama and the stage.” Pirandello’s works include novels, hundreds of short stories, and c. 40 plays, some of which are written in Sicilian dialect. Typical for Pirandello is to show how art or illusion mixes with reality and how people see things in very different way – words are unrealiable and reality is at the same time true and false. Pirandello’s tragic farces are often seen as forerunners for theatre of the absurd. A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die! And to be able to to live for ever you don’t need to have extraordinary gifts or be able to do miracles. Who was Sancho Panza? Who was Prospero? But they will live for ever because – living seeds – they had the luck to find a fruitful soil, an imagination which knew how to grow them and feed them, so that they will live for ever.” (from Six Characters in Search of an Author, 1921).
Pirandello once said: “I hate symbolic art in which the presentation loses all spontaneous movement in order to become a machine, an allegory – a vain and misconceived effort because the very fact of giving an allegorical sense to a presentation clearly shows that we have to do with a fable which by itself has no truth either fantastic or direct; it was made for the demonstration of some moral truth.” (from Playwrights on Playwriting, ed. by Toby Cole, 1961).
Pirandello’s central themes, the problem of identity, the ambiguity of truth and reality, has been compared to explorations of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, but he also anticipated Beckett and Ionesco. One of the earliest formulations of his relativist position Pirandello presented in the essay ‘Art and Consciousness Today‘ (1893), in which he argued that the old norms have crumbled and the idea of relativity deprives “almost altogether of the faculty for judgment.” A central concepts in his work is “naked mask“, referring our social roles and on the stage the dialectic relationship between the actor and the character portrayed. In Six Characters the father points out, that a fictional figure has a permanence that comes from an unchanging text, but a real-life person may well be “a nobody“. Pirandello did not only restrict his ideas to theatre acting, but noted in his novel SI GIRA (1915), that the film actor “feels as if in exile – exiled not only from the stage, but also from himself.“
Source: www.pirandelloweb.com
The Works of Luigi Pirandello
Today in History - June 29On this day in 1613, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre burned to the ground. The thatched roof caught on fire after a theatrical cannon misfired during a production of Henry VIII. Only one man was hurt; his breeches caught on fire, but the quick-thinking fellow put them out with a bottle of ale.
The Globe had been the home of Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, since 1599; previously, his plays had been performed in a house known simply as The Theatre, but their lease expired in 1598. The troupe found a loophole: the lease was for the land only, and the company owned the building, so the Lord Chamberlain’s Men dismantled the old theater while the landlord was away for Christmas and brought it with them across the Thames from Shoreditch to Southwark. They used its timbers to build the framework of the Globe, which was also unique in being the first theater built to house a specific theatrical company, and to be paid for by the company itself.
After the fire, the Globe was rebuilt in 1614, and it was in use until 1642, when the Puritans closed all the theaters in London. The building was pulled down two years later to make room for tenements. It was rebuilt in the 1990s, and except for concessions made for fire safety, it is as close to the original Globe as scholars and architects were able to make it.
Source:
The Globe: Shakespeare's London Theatre
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A commercial garage on the north side of Chicago was the setting for the most horrific shooting in Mob history, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. On February 14, 1929, seven members and associates of George “Bugs” Moran’s bootlegging gang were lined up against a wall and shot dead inside the garage at 2122 North Clark Street. Al Capone’s Chicago Outfit was widely suspected of ordering the hit, but no one was ever prosecuted.
The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre shocked the world on February 14, 1929, when Chicago’s North Side erupted in gang violence. Gang warfare ruled the streets of Chicago during the late 1920s, as chief gangster Al Capone sought to consolidate control by eliminating his rivals in the illegal trades of bootlegging, gambling and prostitution. This rash of gang violence reached its bloody climax in a garage on the city’s North Side on February 14, 1929, when seven men associated with the Irish gangster George “Bugs” Moran, one of Capone’s longtime enemies, were shot to death by several men dressed as policemen. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, as it was known, remains an unsolved crime and was never officially linked to Capone, but he was generally considered to have been responsible for the murders.
The untold story …