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 Posted: Thu Nov 15, 2007 11:21 am Post subject: |
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Damned
An Illustrated History of the Devil
Hardcover
By Robert Muchembled
| Quote: | Herri met de Bles, detail from The Inferno,
first half of the sixteenth century. Oil on panel.
Venice, Palazzo ducale.
The condemned gambler is held by a demon on top of a giant die and surrounded by large insects. Medicine of the time, in particular the theory of spontaneous generation, permits us to understand their presence in Hell. Certain animals, such as caterpillars or butterflies, were believed to be born out of thin air, while others came from refuse or putrefaction. Infection, pestilential odors, and foul air were, of course, attributes of the Devil. Among the insects born by spontaneous generation, those which came directly out of droppings, such as bumblebees and wasps, were reputed to be satanic par excellence. (-- pgs. 44-45) |
View the poster.
Another irresistible remainder added to our ever-increasing collection.
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| Posted: Thu Nov 29, 2007 3:06 pm Post subject: |
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Where There's a Will
Hardcover
By John Mortimer
| Quote: | ... One of the miracles of life is that few people pass through it without finding someone to love them. Awkward, even impossible people find love and it's a great convenience if they find it with each other. As someone said, it was very kind of God to arrange for Thomas Carlyle to marry Jane Carlyle, because 'it meant that only two people were unhappy instead of four.'
The mysterious forces which compel the most unlikely to dedicate their lives to each other can't be explained. I can only repeat that missed opportunities, in life and love, may haunt you for ever. Opportunities should be taken gratefully, even if the results may be somewhat bizarre. Long ago, in the distant days of Angus Steak Houses and Mateus Rose and Frankie Vaughan singing 'Give Me the Moonlight,' I took a new-found friend out to dinner. Later I drove her back to her flat in a London square in which the front doors were flanked by rows of bells for different apartments. She suggested I come up to hers after I'd parked the car. Before she left me she touched her hair and said, 'I'd better warn you. All this comes off.'
Left alone in the car, I came to the conclusion that what she had told me meant that she was bald. Did I want to go to bed with a bald-headed woman? No, I did not. Should I not then turn the car around and drive straight home without any further explanation? Perhaps. But wouldn't that be a cowardly, even a mean and unkind thing to do? It wasn't, after all, her fault that she was bald and it would be dreadful to remind her of the fact in such a dramatic fashion. I hit on another solution. I'd take my glasses off. My sight is so short that I wouldn't be able to see how bald she was.
... After I'd parked the car I rang the top bell, as I had seen her do beside the front door, and was rewarded by a deeply sexy voice saying, 'Come upstairs.' I obeyed, with my glasses off, and found the top flat's door opened by a blurred but distinctly bald figure wearing a dressing gown. I threw my arms round it, only to discover it was a bald-headed, quite elderly man and I was in the wrong house.
Having beaten a hasty retreat and apologetic retreat, I finally got to the right flat and found that my companion had perfectly acceptable hair which had been covered with a wig. It was, as I say, a bizarre evening but not one I've lived to regret. (From Chapter 22, Missed Opportunities, at pgs. 128-129) |
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| Posted: Sat Dec 01, 2007 12:11 pm Post subject: |
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Empire of Blue Water
Captain Morgan's Great Pirate Army,
the Epic Battle for the Americas,
and the Catastrophe
That Ended the Outlaws' Bloody Reign
Hardcover
By Stephan Talty
| Quote: | The promised land of the Americas turned out to be far different from what he expected. Instead of fighting for God's kingdom, he'd found the friars drunk and living like pashas. As he'd traveled through the empire, he'd seen up close how its religious men lived; here he writes about the disparity between how another order, the Franciscans, were supposed to dress and what they actually wore:
| Quote: | | The rules of the order of the Franciscans demanded that they wear sackcloth and shirts of coarse wool, and that they go bare legged, shod with wood or hemp; but these friars wore beneath their habits (which they sometimes tucked up to the waist, the better to display such splendor), shoes of find Cordovan leather, fine silk stockings, drawers with three inches of lace at the knee, Holland shirts and doublets quilted with silk. They were fond of gambling, and acquainted with gambler's oaths. |
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| Quote: | | Everywhere he found the religious orders were feasting off the Indians, getting fat and rich; he called them lupi rapaces, "ravenous wolves." One young prior in particular, whom he met nearly straight off the boat, drove him wild. While his books of theology collected dust on a high shelf, this "gallant and amorous young spark" had a Spanish lute within easy reach, which he took down and strummed to a song about one of the local lovelies, "adding scandal to scandal, looseness to liberty." (Thomas) Gage was among the first witnesses to the corrosive effects of the New World's great riches on the Spanish and their divine kingdom. The truth was that the living faith of their forefathers had hardened into corruption, hypocrisy, and bureaucratic form. (From "I Offer a New World," pgs. 15-16) |
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| Posted: Wed Dec 19, 2007 4:39 pm Post subject: |
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Passionate Minds
The great love affair of the Englightenment, featuring the scientist Émilie du Châtelet, the poet Voltaire, sword fights, book burnings, assorted kings, seditious verse, and the birth of the modern world
Hardcover
By David Bodanis
| Quote: | It was not quite as expected, for the Flanders population, they soon found on their trip north, was not known for its intellectual curiosity. Spanish troops had spent over a hundred years closing Protestant schools, burning Protestant churches, and torturing very many Protestant individuals - especially any intellectually or politically curious ones - in the Flemish lands. Their labors had been intermittently interrupted by British, Dutch, and other northern troops, who'd repaid the favor by closing Catholic schools, burning Catholic churches, and torturing very many Catholic individuals - especially intellectually curious ones - whenever they'd had the chance. Fighting had ended since the Austrian Habsburgs had taken over twenty-five years before, but from it all most survivors had wisely concluded that venturing opinions, or reading too much, was not a wise course of action.
The result - as when Emilie and Voltaire stayed at a castle that had no books whatsoever - was to bring them closer together, since each saw how much they really did have in common. When they reached Brussels they decided to throw a fireworks party to see if that might attract some more interesting locals. Card games were apparently the main social draw in Brussels, so Voltaire, ingenious as ever, arranged fireworks that would light up to resemble playing cards, three hearts, and so on. The plotting worked, and they did meet a few locals they stayed sociable with.
Once they settled, Voltaire took out his essays and poems and plays but he didn't achieve much. He needed Emilie's enthusiastic support, but she was distracted, busy now with learning law, taking Flemish lessons, supervising legal strategy, improving her calculus, relaxing by writing a translation of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, and attending church regularly. (From Liebniz's World, pgs. 172-173) |
| Quote: | | She was restless in the carriage with Voltaire, and at a stop they made halfway to Cirey for the horses to be watered and fed, she climbed down to investigate the town. When she found several locals and a priest amenable to some gambling, she sat down to take them on at cards. She didn't let it finish when the horses were ready, but instead insisted on playing more, almost as if she needed the intensity of that concentration, that diversion from what was going to come next. (From Chapter 25, Pregnancy, at p. 265) |
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| Posted: Fri Dec 28, 2007 5:54 pm Post subject: |
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Crimson Rivers 2
Angels of the Apocalypse
DVD
| Quote: | Marie: A summary?
Pierre Niemans: Yes.
Marie: The Apocalypse is divided into seven seals enclosing the sacred book. Each stage holds a message, which then opens the next seal, the seals Jesus spoke of. First, horsemen. Four of them. The first awakens the dead all clad in white. The sixth seal, the earth rebels and rumbles. Half an hour follows then the seven angels of the Apocalypse.
Reda: Looks like guy I chased.
Niemans: Was he alone?
Reda: Yes, I think so.
Marie: Finally, the book wrtten by God's hand. The one who breaks the seventh seal can commune with God. It's pretty simple. |
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| Posted: Mon Jan 14, 2008 9:11 am Post subject: |
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Death Comes to the Archbishop
Paperback
By PokerPulse favorite, Willa Cather
| Quote: | ... They were discussing the road back to Santa Fe, and when the missionary remarked that he would stop at Santo Domingo, the host asked him why he did not get a horse there. "I am afraid you will hardly get back to Santa Fe on your own. The pueblo is famous for breeding good horses. You might make a trade."
"No," said Father Vaillant. "Those Indians are of a sullen disposition. If I were to have dealings with them, they would suspect my motives. If we are to save their souls, we must make it clear that we want no profit for ourselves, as I told Father Gallegos in Albuguerque."
Manuel Lujon laughed and glanced down the table at his men, who were all showing their white teeth. "You said that to the Padre at Albuquerque? You have courage. He is a rich man, Padre Gallegos. All the same, I respect him. I have played poker with him. He is a great gambler and takes his losses like a man. He stops at nothing, plays like an American."
"And I," retorted Father Joseph, "I have not much respect for a pirest who either plays cards or manages to get rich."[/b]
"Then you do not play?" asked Lujon. "I am disappointed. I had hoped we could have a game after supper. The evenings are dull enough here. You do not even play dominoes?"
"Ah, that is another matter!" Father Joseph declared. "A game of dominoes, there by the fire, with coffee, or some of that excellent grape brandy you allowed me to taste, that I would find refreshing. And tell me, Manuelito, where do you get that brandy? It is like a French liqueur."
"It is well seasoned. It was made at Bernalillo in my grandfather's time. They make it there still, but it is not as good." (From Missionary Journeys, pgs. 58-59) |
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| Posted: Sat Jan 26, 2008 12:02 pm Post subject: |
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The Chess Artist
Genius, Obsession and the World's Oldest Game
Hardcover
By J.C. Hallman
| Quote: | My family had a pool table in the basement when I was a boy. I spent a lot of time down there. I didn't really play pool so much as use the table as a kind of fortune-telling device. If I broke and ran off nine balls in a row, I thought, good things would happen. Much later, in my chess research, I learned that the chance mechanisms of many games - dice, lotteries - had their origin in religious rites. As a boy attempting to participate in my own oracle, I acted out an age-old transition from pagan augury to ancient ritual.
In college, I played pool for money, which approximated another transition of chance mechanisms - from organized religion to gambling. Gambling inaugurated for me a fascination with games that was half indulgence half anthropological investigation. I became competent in poker, gin, bridge, and pool.
It was my interest in games that eventually led me to seek work as a casino dealer - another subculture to investigate, another seamy facet of my personality to indulge. I went to dealer
s school, received "degrees" in several gambling games, and started work in Atlantic City. It was fallacy. Whatever hypothesis I had thought to test mutated so badly that it needn't have existed at all. Play was fiction, I came to learn. Play was alternate space. Puppies and children know intuitevely that play matters, and to mature is to simply confuse play with nonplay, to assign seriousness to that which is still whimsical. Casino dealers understood this, I learned. They appeared to be playing but were not. They occupied the same space as players, but were wholly outside the universe of the game. (From Chapter 3, Writing Sonnets in Public, pg.s 25-26) |
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| Posted: Sun Jan 27, 2008 5:28 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | Only one fragment of our conversation drifts back to me through the medium of a letter written to Edward during the War:
"But what is God, then?"
"Well, of course, if we're going to discuss the nature of the Deity..."
But that he had not resented anything I said nor the way in which I said it, I discovered long afterwards from a poem - one of the very few that he did not consign to the wastepaper basket - which he had called "Nachklang," and dated April 19th, 1914:
Down the long white road we walked together,
Down between the grey hills and the heather,
Where the tawny-crested
Plover cries.
You seemed all brown and soft, just like a linnet,
Your errant hair had shadowed sunbeams in it,
And there shone all April
In your eyes.
With your golden voice of tears and laughter
Softened into song: "Does naught come after
Life," you asked, "When life is
Laboured through?
What is God, and all for which we're striving?"
"Sweetest sceptic, we were born for living.
Life is Love, and Love is -
You, dear, you."
... "I think it is harder now the spring days are beginning to come," I wrote in reply to Roland's letter, " to keep the thought of war before one's mind - especially here, where there is always a kind of dreamy spell which makes one feel that nothing poignant and terrible can ever come near. Winter departs so early here" (I was comparing Oxford with Buxton, where it lasts until May) "and during the calm and beautiful days we have had lately it seems so much more appropriate to imagine that you and Edward are actually here enjoying the spring than to think that before long you may be in the trenches fighting men you do not really hate. In the churches in Oxford, where so many of the congregation are soldiers, we are always having it impressed upon us that 'the call of our country is the call God.' Is it? I wish I could feel sure that it was. At this time of the year it seems that everything ought to be creative, not destructive, and that we should encourage things to live and not die." (-- pgs. 83-127) |
A few words about Roland A. Leighton:
| Quote: | Late one night the previous holidays, my mother, noticing the light still burning in Edward's room, had gone up to see if anything was the matter. She found Edward, flushed and absorbed, sitting on the bed in his pyjamas surrounded by loose sheets of ruled manuscript. He was setting to music, he told her, a poem called "L'Envoi," which the captain of his House had written for last summer's school magazine in honour of the boys who were leaving Uppingham. (music and text included)
... In April 1914, Edward invited the author of the poem to Buxton to say with us for part of the Easter holidays. He looked forward to his friend's coming with definite pleasure but also with a little trepidation, for Roland, besides being captain of their House, was considerably Edward's senior, and had an enormous school reputation for brilliance and unapproachableness; he was head of Uppingham in work, and editor of the school magazine. Like Edward, he was destined for Oxford in the autumn, and had recently won the Senior Open Classical Postmastership at Merton College.
... Armed with my Somerville exhibition and my few months' seniority, I refused to be prospectively impressed by this person, but such equanimity was difficult to achieve, for to Roland's family attached the glamour which Bohemia always possesses for aspiring provincials. His father, a popular writer of stories for boys, who had been on the literary staff of a great daily newspaper, and his mother, the celebrated author of many romantic novels and feuilletons, had once lived amid a famous circle of writers and artists in St. John's Wood, but now they moved to a pleasant house on the coast at Lowestoft. In those days neither Roland nor his parents as realised the full potentialities of his gifted schoolgirl sister Clare, who was to be known seventeed years later as one of the best of young woodcut artists.
... As the Headmaster strode, berobed and majestic, on to the platform of the School Hall, I was in the midst of examining with appreciation my Speech Day programme, and especially the page headed "Prizemen July, 1914," of which the first seven items ran as follows:
Nettleship Prize for English Essay R.A. Leighton
Holden Prize for Latin Prose 1st R.A. Leighton
Greek Prose Composition R.A. Leighton
Latin Hexameters R.A. Leighton
Greek Epigram R.A. Leighton
Captain in Classics R.A. Leighton
(From Provincial Young-Ladyhood, pgs. 77-88) |
The book as a survey course of World War I poetry:
| Quote: | One chilly May evening the English tutor invited Marjorie and myself into her room at Micklem to see hier Milton manuscripts. When we had looked at them we moved closer to the fire and she showed us her latest acquisition from Blackwell's - the newly published first edition of Rupert Brooke's 1914. Those famous sonnets, brought into prominence by the poet's death on the eve of the Dardanelles campaign, were then only just beginning to take the world's breath away, and I asked our tutor if she would read us one or two.
For the young to whom Rupert Brooke's poems are now familiar as classics, it must be impossible to imagine how it felt to hear them for the first time just after they were written. With my grief and anxiety then so new, I found the experience so moving that I should not have sought it had I struggled for it as I listened to the English tutor's grave, deliberate voice reading the sonnets, unhackneyed, courageous and almost shattering in their passionate, relevant idealism:
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,
Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,
And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary -
But not, oh, surely not,
all the little emptiness of love?
Was that really what Rupert Brooke had felt? Was it what Roland would come to feel? Almost more bearable was the sonnet on the "The Dead," with what might become its terribly personal application:
These laid the world away; poured out the red
Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
Off work and joy ...
How would Rupert Brooke have written, I wonder, had he lived until 1933? ... (From Learning Versus Life, pgs. 154-155) |
| Quote: | 1914 and Other Poems
Paperback
By Rupert Brooke
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The BBC miniseries:
| Quote: | Testament of Youth
Four Video Cassettes
VHS only!
| Quote: | | Not for the feint of heart, this excellent series based on Vera Brittain's eloquent autobiography provides a rich historical monument to the tragedy of that war, including the devastating effects of mustard gas. |
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PokerPulse recommended listening for foreign affairs offices worldwide:
| Quote: | Lest We Forget
A collection of poetry & music dedicated
to the memory of those who fell in two
world wars
Audio CD
Featuring Derek Jacobi, John Gielgud and the
BBC Symphony Orchestra
| Quote: | Pomp & circumstance: March no. 4 in G major / Elgar -- Lines from For the fallen / Binyon -- On the idle hill of summer / Housman -- In time of the breaking nations / Hardy -- Salut d'amour / Elgar -- The autumn of the world / Read -- The planets: Mars, the bringer of war / Holst -- Attack ; The general / Sassoon -- For the fallen / Binyon -- In memoriam / Thomas -- The dead (IV) / Brooker -- Returning, we hear the larks / Rosenberg -- Everyone sing / Sassoon -- Chanson de matin / Elgar -- On the dead in Gallipoli / Maserfield -- Elegy / Elgar -- Before action / Hodgson -- The soldier / Brooke -- Futility / Owen -- In Flanders Fields / McCree -- Chanson de nuit / Elgar -- The hand that signed the paper / Thomas -- Summer night on the river / Delius -- To a conscript of 1940 / Read -- Watching post / Lewis -- Naming of parts / Reed -- All day it has rained / Lewis -- Peter Grimes: Dawn / Britten -- Song of the dying gunner / Causley -- For Johnny / Pudney -- Planets: Venus, the bringer of peace / Holst -- Midnight, May 7th, 1945 / Dickinson -- Will it be so again? / Lewis -- At the British war cemetery, Bayeux / Causley -- Enigma Variations: Nimrod / Elgar -- And death shall have no dominion / Thomas -- Pomp & circumstance: March no 1 in D major / Elgar -- Lines from For the fallen / Binyon.
Elgard, Edward, 1857-1934.
Holst, Gustav, 1874-1934.
Delius, Frederick, 1862-1934.
Calvert, Phyllis.
Gielgud, John, Sir, 1904-
Orr, Peter.
Jacobi, Derek.
Davis, Andrew, 1944-
BBC Symphony Orchestra.
Includes readings of poetry by Laurence Binyon; A.E. Housman; Thomas Hardy; Herbert Read; Edward Thomas; Rupert Brooke and others.
Should be required listening by governments everywhere contemplating the unoriginal and uncreative decision to go to war. Beautifully edited and executed, this CD must have been a labor of love for all concerned. |
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editor
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| Posted: Tue Feb 12, 2008 11:52 am Post subject: |
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Art & Love
An Illustrated Anthology
of Love Poetry
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Selected by Kate Farrell
| Quote: | A CHILD IS SOMETHING ELSE AGAIN
A child is something else again. Wakes up
in the afternoon and in an instant he's full
of words,
in an instant he's humming, in an instant warm,
instant light, instant darkness.
A child is Job. They've already placed their
bets on him
but he doesn't know it. He scratches his body
for pleasure. Nothing hurts yet.
They're training him to be a polite Job,
to say "Thank you" when the Lord has given,
to say "You're welcome" when the Lord has
taken away.
A child is vengeance.
A child is a missile into the coming generations.
I launched him: I'm still trembling.
A child is something else again: on a rainy
spring day
glimpsing the Garden of Eden through the
fence,
kissing him in his sleep,
hearing footsteps in the wet pine needles.
A child delivers you from death.
Child, Garden, Rain, Fate.
Yehuda Amichai, Israeli. b. 1924
(-- p. 19, adjacent to First Steps. Vincent Van Gogh, Dutch, 1853-1890. Oil on canvas, 1890) |
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| Posted: Mon Feb 25, 2008 12:30 pm Post subject: |
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The Last Revolution
1688 and the Creation of
the Modern World
Paperback
By Patrick Dillon
| Quote: | Once, the future had been God's realm. After the Battle of Mont Cassel in 1677, where a Dutch regiment broke and ran from the French, the survivors drew lots to select nine men for execution. The drawing of lots was a solemn ritual carried out to divine God's will. Gambling was confined to religious holidays. The future belonged to God and he ruled it with absolute authority. Proabability challenged that dominance. The Moderns did not claim to be able to predict the future, but with this new mathematical tool they could at least measure it. Probability stretched man's sight in time, just as the telescope and microscope allowed his weak vision to penetrate the great and small. Like microscopists peering at seeds or astronomers at the stars, mathematicians had focused a lens on the future, and glimpsed the hidden uplands of Providence.
What they saw in the future was not always welcome, of course. In the financial, risque could mean disaster as well as good fortune. On the morning of 15/25 August 1688 even the most uninitiated passerby must have realised that something unusual was happening on the Dam, for the fered trading in VOC shares reached an extra pitch of frenzy. By the end of the next day their value had dropped nearly 15 per cent. News had leaked out that William intended to invade England. The Amsterdam stock market had crashed. (From 'Among Spectators,' pgs. 133-134) |
| Quote: | | If death itself could be tamed by risk theory, then the possibilities of risque were far-reaching indeed. Speculation showed how it could transform wealth, insurance, how it could smooth the vagaries of fate. But risk, once familiar, became addictive. It became a filter through which all the world's chances could be observed and calculated. Wherever they looked, people saw alternative outcomes, eventualities governed not by God but by raw chance. And they speculated on them. Nothing so well illustrates the growing popularity of risk as the craze for gambling which continued to overtake London in the 1690s as it had conquered Paris before. If the emblematic figure of England's last revolution had been the Puritan in his long black coat, the Revolution of 1688 raised a new standard-bearer in his place. He was that incorrigible hunter of probabilities, that baiter of chance, the gambler. (From 'One Hundred Per Cent Immediately!', p. 284) |
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editor
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| Posted: Tue Mar 04, 2008 2:18 pm Post subject: |
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Ten Thousand Scorpions
The Search for the Queen of Sheba's gold
Hardcover
By Larry Frolick
| Quote: | The man who plays to an inside straight ain't no cardplayer. He's either a fool, or he knows somethin' you don't.
-- Johnny Harrison, gold prospector
(Quotation opening the book) |
| Quote: | "Could it be," I postulated as we sat in the army canteen drinking warm Pepsi and closely following the evidently warmer bare belly of our statuesque hostess, she with the dour, unapoligetic eyes, "could it be that that's all there is at the bottom of religion? A screamer in a tutu?"
Now the bar-girl cleverly turned and stretched, so that we could see her bare navel. Our server had an impressive navel, indeed.
"Have you ever smelt the money?" Jason suddenly thrust a stinky one-birr note right in my face.
"Please, not while I'm dreaming."
"It's got a peculiar smell; oddly familiar and yet curiously ghastly."
"That could be my next book: Smelling the World's Currencies: The Definitive Guidebook."
We got back in the Toyota truck and barricaded ourselves behind our personal thoughts.
Finally Jason spoke out.
"So what's the answer then?"
I knew, of course, he was referring to our original conversation about the traveller's dilemma. Whether to go alone, or with somebody. And this, a metaphor for a whole life:
Which to bet? Black or red?
"Are we alone?" Jason said, fixing me with one opalescent eye.
"Perhaps there are no answers, only questions?" I volunteered after a moment.
"You mean everything?" he nodded.
"The whole nine yards. Maybe the answer is a question?"
"The world is a big question mark?"
"There's religion for you: Asking yourself big, hard questions, bigger and harder all the time."
"You think God might be a question, then?"
"The biggest," I replied.
"Could It Be?" He tugged his beard.
It was easy to talk like that. The brown mountains dwarfed the green hills and the blue Ethiopian sky dwarfedf everything. All of us were motes, passengers and drivers, all lost somewhere in the clouds of rad dust dancing aorund us, coating, coating everything, blinding us with the dust of centuries. (From Chapter 16, The Virtual Ethiopian, pgs. 197-198) |
Which would be worse - being the author or the editor of this drivel? Honestly, why do people publish this stuff? Why are we made to read it? More great mysteries.
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editor
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| Posted: Fri Mar 07, 2008 9:39 am Post subject: |
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I Heard the Owl Call My Name
Hardcover
By Margaret Craven
| Quote: | "It is an old village - nobody knows how old. According to the myth, after the great flood two brothers were the only human beings left alive in the world, and they heard a voice speak and it said, 'Come, Wolf, lend them your skin that they may go fleetly and find themselves a home.' And in the wolf's skin the brothers moved south until they came to a small and lovely valley on a river's edge, surrounded by high mountains, and here they returned the skin to their friend, the wolf, and they threw a magic stone to see which one would build his village here, and Quelele, the younger, moved on, and Khawadelugha, the elder, built his house, and in his dances he moved right as even now the dancers moved right because the wolf moved right, and on his totem he carved a wolf as one of the crests of his tribe.
"The Indian name of the village is Quee which means 'inside place,' and according to the tribal history its site was chosen wisely because the river, its access, is treacherous and easily defended. But the enemy was wise also, and in the great tribal wars it came through a mountain pass and down the river, and the spirit that lives in Whoop-Szo, the Noisy Mountain, that is across the river and towers over the village, heard the enemy coming and sent down a slide and buried it.
"Now Kingcome is known as a compact, Christian village, and this means that to run smoothly the elected chief, the vicar and the agent from the Indian Affairs Dpartment must be co-operative and wise, and though I am sure the Lord could pass a small miracle and manage this, He seldom does. Once there was a chief who agreed with anyone on anything. Once there was an agent who said there was no use educating the Indian because if you did, you'd have to find him a job, and he was bound to die off anyway. And once the church sent a man to Kingcome who had never worked out well anywhere because it was sure here he could do no harm. All were wrong, and the village survived them.
"The Indian knows his village and feels for his village as no white man for his country, his town, or even for his own bit of land. His village is not the strip of land four miles long and three miles wide that is his as long as the sun rises and the moon sets. The myths are the village and the winds and the rains. The river is the village, and the black and white killer whales that herd the fish to the end of the inlet the better to gobble them. The village is the salmon who comes up the river to spawn the seal who follows the salmon and bites off his head, the bluejay whose name is like the sound he makes - 'Kwiss-Kwiss.' The villlage is the talking bird, the owl, who calls the name of the man who is going to die, and the silver-tipped grizzly who ambles into the village, and the little white speck that is the mountain goat on Whoop-Szo.
"The fifty-foot totem by the church is the village, and the Cedar-man who stands at the bottom holding up the eagle, the wolf and the raven! And a voice said to the great cedar tree in Bond Sound, 'Come forth, Tzakamayi and be a man,' and he came forth to be the Cedar-man, the first mangod of the people and more powerful than all others."(From Chapter 1, pgs. 11-13) |
About Tsawateniuk (Kingcombe Inlet) Kwakwaka'wakw immortalized in the novel:
| Quote: | Harper, John (with Bob Sam and Chief Adam Dick) Coastal & Ocean Resources Inc., Sidney, B.C.
Clam Gardens of the Pacific Northwest: Sitka to Puget Sound
Clam gardens are areas of the intertidal zone that were cleared by aboriginal peoples for the purpose of clam harvesting and culturing. To date, several hundred of these clam gardens have been identified and mapped. The most southerly site identified to date is in Brentwood Bay near Victoria BC. The most northerly site is in Sitka Sound. Traditional knowledge indicates that construction of a clam garden entitled its creator to ownership and that such ownership would ensure sustainable harvesting at the site. (From Sharing our Knowledge: A Conference of Tsimshian, Haida and Tlingit Tribes and Clans, 2007). |
| Quote: | I Heard the Owl Call My Name
Audio CD
Narrated by popular U.S. reader, Frank Muller
Muller's reading is adequate, but we're open to new possibilities for this small, classic tale - one of few that portray First Nations as respectfully and lyrically as they richly deserve. |
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editor
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| Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2008 2:21 pm Post subject: |
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Villa Air-Bel
World War II, Escape, and
a House in Marseille
Hardcover
By U of T English Professor Rosemary Sullivan
| Quote: | On the 10th of June, the French government, after announcing that it was leaving Paris in order to save France, began its ramshackle retreat to Tours, where its ministers were scattered among the chateaux in the Loire Valley. Before leaving, they declared Paris an open city - it would not be defended. The Germans could take it without firing a shot.
Hypnotized by the swiftness of the German advance, France had already accepted defeat. When the British prime minister Winston Churchill flew to the Loire Valley to meet Reynaud on June 11 to try to invigorate the French war effort, he spoke dramatically of defending Paris street by street. "The French perceptibly froze," he reported. The thought of mounting a fight in Paris was inconceivable to them.
Ignorant, like everyone else, of the goings-on in the corridors of power, (Victor) Serge also decided to abandon Paris that evening of June 10. With Laurette and his son, Vlady, he set out for the gare de Lyon, but immediately he sensed violence in the air. Restless crowds milled around the outside of the station. There was no more room inside, and in any case there were no more trains. By astonishing luck, he found an empty taxi for himself, Laurette, his son, and a Spanish friend who had joined them. The driver, also fleeing Paris, was willing to take them south, away from the German advance. "That's how salvation comes when it comes," he thought. "Simply." You have to "trust in chance, but with a rational tenacious till." (From The Fall of Paris, p. 135) |
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editor
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| Posted: Thu May 01, 2008 1:12 pm Post subject: |
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Galileo's Daughter
A Historical Memoir of
Science, Faith and Love
Hardcover
By Dava Sobel
| Quote: | Galileo, now fifty-nine, also stood boldly alone in his worldview, as Suor Maria Celeste (*his equally brilliant daughter whom he cloistered in a nunnery because despite his 'genius' he lacked the foresight to imagine what hell his decision not to marry his mistress would cause his subsequent children - esp the girls!) knew from reading the books he wrote and the letters he shared with her from colleagues and critics all over Italy, as well as from across the continent beyond the Alps. Although her father had started his career as a professor of mathematics, teaching frist at Pisa and then at Padua, every philosopher in Europe tied Galileo's name to the msot startling series of astronomical discoveries ever claimed by a single individual.
In 1969, when Suor Maria Celeste was still a child in Padua, Galileo had set a telescope in the garden behind his house and turned it skyward. Never-before-seen stars leaped out of the darkness to enhance familiar constellations; the nebulous Milky Way resolved into a swath of densely packed star; mountains and valleys pockmarked the storied perfection of the Moon; and a retinue of four attendant bodies traveled regularly around Jupiter like a planetary system in miniature.
"I render infinte thanks to God," Galileo intoned after those nights of wonder, "for being so kind as to make me alone the first observer of marvels kept hidden in obscurity for all previous centuries."
The newfound worlds transformed Galileo's life. He won appointment as chief mathematician and philosopher to the grand duke in 1610, and moved to Florence to assume his position at the court of Cosimo de' Medici. He took along with him his two daughters, then ten and nine years old, but he left Vincenzio, who was only four when greatness descended on the family, to live awhile longer in Padua with Marina (his mistress).
Galileo found himself lionized as another Columbus for his conquests. Even as he attained the height of his glory, however, he attracted enmity and suspicion. For instead of opening a distant land dominated by heathens, Galileo trespassed on holy ground. Hardly had his first spate of findings stunned the populace of Durope before a new wave followed: He saw dark spots creeping continuously across the face of the Sun, and "the mother of loves," as he called the planet Venus, cycling through phases from full to crescent, just as the moon did. ...
... In 1616, a pope and a cardinal inquisitor reprimanded Galileo, warning him to curtail his forays into the supernal realms. The motions of the heavenly bodies, they said, having been touched upon in the Psalms, the Book of Joshua, and elsewhere in the Bible, were matters best left to the Holy Fathers of the Church.
Galileo obeyed their orders, silencing himself on the subject. For seven cautious years he turned his efforts to less periolous pursuits, such as harnessing his Jovian satellites in the service of navigation, to help sailors discover their longitude at sea. He studied poetry and wrote literary ciriticism. Modifying his telescope, he developed a compound microscope. "I have observed many tiny animals with great admiration," he reported, "among which the flea is quite horrible, the gnat and the moth very beautiful; and with great satisfaction I have seen how flies and other little animals can walk attached to mirrors, upside down." (From She Who Was So Precious to You, pgs. 6-7) |
* Reason 4, 3444, 119, 567, 689 why many of us have a hard time admiring the 'genius' men of science - PU!
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| Posted: Sun Jul 13, 2008 12:31 pm Post subject: |
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From Omens and Lucky Charms:
Deadeye Dick
Paperback
By Kurt Vonnegut
| Quote: | According to Fred T. Barry, a Jew named Joseph of Arimathea took Christ's goblet when the Last Supper was over. He believed Christ to be divine.
Joseph brought the goblet to the Crucifixion, and some of Christ's blood fell into it. Joseph was arrested for his Christian sympathies. He was thrown into prison without food or water, but he survived for several years. He had the goblet with him, and every day it filled up with food and drink.
So the Romans let him go. They couldn't have known about the goblet, or they surely would have taken it from him. And Joseph went to England to spread the word about Christ. The goblet fed him on the way. And this wandering Jew founded the first Christian church in England - at Glastonbury. He stuck his staff into the ground and there, it became a tree which bloomed every Christmas Eve.
Imagine that.
Joseph had children, who inherited the goblet, which came to be known as the "Holy Grail."
But sometime during the next five hundred years, the Holy Grail was lost. King Arthur and his knights would become obsessed with finding it again - the most sacred relic in England. Knight after knight failed. Supernatural messages indicated that their hearts weren't pure enough for them to find the Grail.
But then Sir Galahad presented himself at Camelot, and it was evident to everyone that his heart was perfectly pure. And he did find the Grail. He was not only spiritually entitled to it. He was legally entitled to it as well, since he was the last living descendant of that wandering Jew, Joseph of Arimathea. (From Chapter 20, pgs. 173-174) |
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