Last login: 3 months agoHapax is a guy from Cork, Ireland.
Who watches the lion suffer in his cage rots in the lion's memory. (René Char) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
[Note: The text is always from the site reviewed, unless specifically indicated otherwise - hapax]
Lives don't come any more interesting than Bern Porter's.
In his 93 years on this Earth, he contributed to the invention of television, worked on the Manhattan Project and the Saturn V rocket, and made the acquaintances of Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Werner von Braun. He published Henry Miller, Kenneth Patchen, and Kenneth Rexroth, among others, and knew Gertrude Stein, Anaïs Nin, Allen Ginsberg, and many others you might name. He exerted a profound influence on the phenomenon known as mail art, traveled hundreds of thousands of miles on cruise ships, was married three times (once happily), spent several years in Guam, was an irascible crank, theorized a union of art and science called Sciart, was briefly committed to a mental institution, wrote more than 80 books including important bibliographies of Miller and F. Scott Fitzgerald, had a massive FBI file, lived and worked in Rhode Island, New York, Tennessee, California, Texas, Alabama, and Tasmania. At last he settled in Belfast, Maine, where he ran for governor, served on the Knox County Regional Planning Commission, called his house the Institute of Advanced Thinking, barraged the local paper with letters, and at the end of his life subsisted largely on soup kitchens and food gleaned from the munchie tables at art openings.
You'd think that biography would merit an obituary somewhere other than the Waldo Independent, a twice-weekly newspaper in Waldo County, Maine. Porter's passing, though, was largely unremarked; a few mentions in online poetry discussions and the single obit of a few hundred words. . . .
samuel beckett
hitherto unknown (i believe) video of him speaking
Paris '87
Beckett in Paris, in a room in the PLM hotel on boulevard St Jacques in Montparnasse, talking about the German television production of What Where. Filmed by John Reilly and included in the documentary Waiting For Beckett.
Stammberger was born in 1980 in Hamburg. He grew up in Hamburg and Frankfurt/ Main and is about to graduate from the Ostkreuzschule for Photography. He currently works in various countries on his Underground Landscapes series, but is also commited to other conceptual work. He lives and works in Berlin.
mouvement anti-utilitariste dans les sciences sociales
extrapolating from the gift
. . . What American academics expect from France is an intellectual high, the ability to feel one is participating in wild, radical ideas - demonstrating the inherent violence within Western conceptions of truth or humanity, that sort of thing - but in ways that do not imply any program of political action; or, usually, any responsibility to act at all. It's easy to see how a class of people who are considered almost entirely irrelevant both by political elites and by 99 percent of the general population might feel this way. In other words, while the U.S. media represent France as silly, U.S. academics seek out those French thinkers who seem to fit the bill.
As a result, some of the most interesting scholars in France today you never hear about at all. One such is a group of intellectuals who go by the rather unwieldy name of Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales, or MAUSS, and who have dedicated themselves to a systematic attack on the philosophical underpinnings of economic theory. The group take their inspiration from the great early-20th century French sociologist Marcel Mauss, whose most famous work, The Gift (1925), was perhaps the most magnificent refutation of the assumptions behind economic theory ever written. At a time when "the free market" is being rammed down everyone's throat as both a natural and inevitable product of human nature, Mauss' work - which demonstrated not only that most non-Western societies did not work on anything resembling market principles, but that neither do most modern Westerners - is more relevant than ever. While Francophile American scholars seem unable to come up with much of anything to say about the rise of global neoliberalism, the MAUSS group is attacking its very foundations. . . .
. . . Will shared resources always be misused and overused? Is community ownership of land, forests, and fisheries a guaranteed road to ecological disaster? Is privatization the only way to protect the environment and end Third World poverty? Most economists and development planners will answer "yes" -- and for proof they will point to the most influential article ever written on those important questions.
Since its publication in Science in December 1968, "The Tragedy of the Commons" has been anthologized in at least 111 books, making it one of the most-reprinted articles ever to appear in any scientific journal. It is also one of the most-quoted: a recent Google search found "about 302,000" results for the phrase "tragedy of the commons.". . .
The author of "The Tragedy of the Commons" was Garrett Hardin, a University of California professor who until then was best known as the author of a biology textbook that argued for "control of breeding" of "genetically defective" people (Hardin 1966: 707). In his 1968 essay he argued that communities that share resources inevitably pave the way for their own destruction; instead of wealth for all, there is wealth for none.
He based his argument on a story about the commons in rural England.
(The term "commons" was used in England to refer to the shared pastures, fields, forests, irrigation systems, and other resources that were found in many rural areas until well into the 1800s. Similar communal farming arrangements existed in most of Europe, and they still exist today in various forms around the world, particularly in indigenous communities.). . .
The truly appalling thing about "The Tragedy of the Commons" is not its lack of evidence or logic -- badly researched and argued articles are not unknown in academic journals. What's shocking is the fact that this piece of reactionary nonsense has been hailed as a brilliant analysis of the causes of human suffering and environmental destruction, and adopted as a basis for social policy by supposed experts ranging from economists and environmentalists to governments and United Nations agencies.
Despite being refuted again and again, it is still used today to support private ownership and uncontrolled markets as sure-fire roads to economic growth.
The success of Hardin's argument reflects its usefulness as a pseudo-scientific explanation of global poverty and inequality, an explanation that doesn't question the dominant social and political order. It confirms the prejudices of those in power: logical and factual errors are nothing compared to the very attractive (to the rich) claim that the poor are responsible for their own poverty. The fact that Hardin's argument also blames the poor for ecological destruction is a bonus. . . .
Born in Manchuria and educated in Japan, Koichiro Kurita made his commitment to photography early in life. First working in the 1960s for an advertising agency in Tokyo,He became an independent commercial photographer for such diverse client as Takashimaya, Sharp Electronics and Kanebo Cosmetics until 1983. Then, at age 40, Kurita began to emerge as a fine art photographer. In 1990, a grant from the Asian Cultural Council (part of the John D.Rockefeller Found) allowed him to concentrate on his artistic interests, and within the year he had his first solo exhibition in the United States. In 1993 Kurita moved from Japan to live permanently in New York, but he has traveled extensively, taking photographs throughout the US, Canada, the United Kingdom and later in France as well. Wherever he works, regardless of local or terrain, Kurita's vision remains focused on the elements of nature. He is not so much an enviormental advocate, intent on capturing and preserving the beauty of nature(though he dose so), but rather he is more a philosopher of life who finds solace in the contemplation of nature. "I believe that in nature, the smallest things, or seemingly most insignificant phenomena, have their reason and their role" he says. As Diogenes took his lantern, seeking an honest man, so Kurita uses his camera in his search for honest answers to life's enigmas.
giordano bruno
. . . the red drawstring of his underpants . . .
. . . In all these ideas, there seems to have been a single preoccupation: immensity--things incalculably large and incalculably tiny, and all joined together in a kind of choral exultation. I think that this mental image, more than any quarrel with the Church, underlay Bruno's philosophy. In an Italian dialogue that he wrote in his mid-thirties, he paints a fanciful portrait of his home town, Nola. There, he says, fate has decreed
that Vasta, wife of Albenzio Savolino, when she means to curl her hair at her temples, shall burn fifty-seven hairs for having let the curling iron get too hot, but she won't burn her scalp and hence shall not swear when she smells the stench, but shall endure it patiently. That from the dung of her ox fifty-two dung beetles shall be born, of which fourteen shall be trampled and killed by Albenzio's foot, twenty-six shall die upside down, twenty-two shall live in a hole, eighty shall make a pilgrim's progress around the yard, forty-two shall retire to live under the stone by the door, sixteen shall roll their ball of dung wherever they please, and the rest shall scurry around at random. . . . Antonio Savolino's bitch shall conceive five puppies, of which three shall live out their natural lifespan and two shall be thrown away, and of these three the first shall resemble its mother, the second shall be mongrel, and the third shall partly resemble the father and partly resemble Polidoro's dog. . . . Paulino, when he bends over to pick up a broken needle, shall snap the red drawstring of his underpants, and if he should blaspheme for that reason, I mean for him to be punished thus: tonight his soup shall be too salty and taste of smoke, he shall fall and break his wine flask.
Here the structural rule of Catholic theology, and of Western thought--hierarchy--is serenely discarded. The things of the world are numberless, and they are all equal, and interesting. In Bruno's cosmology, that rule applied not just to humble matters like the goings on in Nola but also to great and sacred things. In his book "The Song of Circe" (1582), the sorceress calls the universe to order, beginning with the sun: "Apollo, author of poetry, quiver bearer, bowman, of the powerful arrows, Pythian, laurel-crowned, prophetic, shepherd, seer, priest, and physician. Brilliant, rosy, long-haired, beautiful-locked, blond, bright, placid, bard, singer, teller of truth. . . . Reveal, I pray, your lions, your lynxes, goats, baboons, seagulls, calves, snakes, elephants. . . . The turtle, butterfish, tuna, ray, whale, and all your other creatures of that kind." To enumerate was Bruno's joy and, in some of his writings, such as these, the engine of his dizzying prose. . . .
I've traced the Bruno quotation to Lo Spaccio de la Bestia Trionfante (The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, 1584), pp 132-3 in my Imerti translation.
the schøyen collection
varieties of chinese script
The Schøyen Collection comprises most types of manuscripts from the whole world spanning over 5000 years. It is the largest private manuscript collection formed in the 20th century.
ORACLE BONE: CRACKING MADE ON THE XINHAI (DAY 48); NO QUICK VICTORY ON THE YIN (DAY 51?). APPROVED. IT WILL RAIN ON JIAHAI (?)
Nearly all known Chinese oracle bones derive from Xiaotun near the ancient capital of the Late Shang Dynasty of Anyang. The oracular use of the bones involved the interpretation of pattern of cracks which appeared on the bones after subjection to heat by the application of a heated metal rod. The text records the interpretation of the oracle and the date of its production. The oracle bones are so far the first preserved evidence of Chinese script in complete meaningful sentences.
DOCUMENT ADDRESSED TO THE MONK, SRONASENA, CONCERNING A FEMALE SLAVE OF HIS SISTER, RAMASRIA FROM THE CATISA DEVI ESTATE; REQUESTING THE SLAVE, NAMED SACGIA, TO BE SENT TO WORK ON THE CATISA ESTATE, THE PAYMENT FOR HER SERVICES WILL BE A FOUR-YEAR OLD CAMEL, GIVEN BY RAMASRIA TO SRONASENA. WITNESSED AND DATED TO YEAR 2 OF KING VISMANA, BY THE SCRIBE NANDASENA, WITH THE SEALS OF THE OGU (ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICER), PIDEYALYA AND THE COZBO (FUNCTIONARY), PUNASENA
The Gandhara language is a Prakrit or vernacular version of Indo-Aryan, which developed parallel to Sanskrit. It is thought to have been a very conservative language, preserving many of the features found in Vedic or Sanskrit but lost in other Prakrits. At this time it was written in Karosthi characters, an adaptation of Iranian Pehlevi script which was used throughout the Persian Empire. Karosthi is written from right to left. Buddhist merchants and missionaries spread the use of Gandhara language and Karosthi script into Central Asia and Chinese Turkestan where it was used for business, administration and religious purposes alongside Pehlevi, Bactrian, Khotanese and Chinese.
MAHAPRAJNAPARAMITA UPADESA; COMMENTARY ON THE GREATER PERFECTION OF WISDOM.
The text is attributed to the Indian philosopher Nagarjuna, translated from Sanskrit to Chinese by Kumarajiva, an Indian or Central Asian Buddhist missionary who settled in China in the 5th c. This is part of a luxury MS using gold ink on blue stained paper, also used in Europe from 4th c. to the Carolingian period, with gold script on purple or blue stained vellum, used for princely commissions.
1. REPORT OF A MONSTER SENT TO THE EMPEROR FROM E WEI, GOVERNOR OF SICHUAN PROVINCE
2. NARRATIVE BY MARTINO MARTINI CONFIRMING THE REPORT
From the report: Several soldiers, including Ding Wanghu, discovered in Guo Duoli a beast with a human body, but no head, and instead a hand growing from his neck. It has eyes on its belly and a mouth on its belly bottom. This beast came to the army camp and ate rice, but caused no harm to any people or animals. - Later the soldiers chased him to a place called La Ha Huo. There, in the valley, there were many deep caves, and the beast jumped into one of them, where the soldiers discovered hundreds of these beasts -. The Jesuit Martino Martini lived in China 1643-1661. A geographer, he prepared the first modern atlas of China.
The Ordnance Survey map of Tewkesbury shows much more detail than the Google map that you would find on the internet
Internet mapping is wiping the rich geography and history of Britain off the map, Britain's most senior cartographer warned yesterday.
Churches, cathedrals, stately homes, battlefields, ancient woodlands, rivers, eccentric landmarks and many more features which make up the tapestry of the British landscape are not being represented in online maps, which focus on merely providing driving directions, said Mary Spence, President of the British Cartographical Society.
As a result, such monuments could fade from public consciousness, she told a session on the Future of the Map at the annual conference in London of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers.
"Corporate cartographers are demolishing thousands of years of history, not to mention Britain's geography, at a stroke, by not including them on maps," she said. "We're in danger of losing what makes maps unique; giving us a feel for a place.". . .
The Ordnance Survey map shows Tewkesbury Abbey; the site of the 1471 Battle of Tewkesbury; the museum; the River Swilgate; various churches; the hospital, council offices, a weir and the cemetery. None are on the Google map. The only feature visible is the Tewkesbury Park Hotel Golf and Country Club.
"There is just a hole where the Abbey is," Ms Spence said. "This is tragic. They call this a map but it is so inadequate. It has not been interpreted in any way. It has no landmarks on it.". . .
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Sep 4, 2008 2:27pm
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