As Marie-Laure Ryan has noted, the term virtualtends to oscillate between two poles of meaning in contemporary parlance—the “fake” and the “potential.”Understood
as the fake, the virtual is closely associated with the optical image, where
it often—as in Plato’s cave—carries connotations of the double, the illusion, and the simulacrum. By contrast, the virtual as potential—the meaning closer to my usage—originates with Aristotle and medieval scholastic philosophers and designates not the absence of existence, but the potential or force to come into existence. The acorn, to cite Aristotle’s example, contains a virtual oak. As Ryan points out, the virtual-as-potential, in contrast to the virtual-as-fake, carries largely positive connotations of “productivity, openness, and diversity.”Most important, neither definition is equivalent to the digital.


Aristotle's acorn and Virtual

As regards temporal priority, by contrast, potentiality may well seem to be prior to actuality, since the wood precedes the table that is built from it, and the acorn precedes the oak that it grows into. Nevertheless, Aristotle finds that even temporally there is a sense in which actuality is prior to potentiality: “the actual which is identical in species though not in number with a potentially existing thing is prior to it” (1049b18–19). A particular acorn is, of course, temporally prior to the particular oak tree that it grows into, but it is preceded in time by the actual oak tree that produced it, with which it is identical in species. The seed (potential substance) must have been preceded by an adult (actual substance). So in this sense actuality is prior even in time.

Anancy1. (Anthropology & Ethnology) a character in Caribbean folklore, a cunning trickster generally depicted as a spider with a human head; the subject of many Anancy stories, the character has its origins among the Ashanti of W Africa

Collins English Dictionary

Anansi (/əˈnɑːnsi/ ə-NAHN-see) is a African folktale character. He often takes the shape of a spider and is considered to be the spirit of all knowledge of stories. He is also one of the most important characters of West African and Caribbean folklore.

He is also known as Ananse, Kwaku Ananse, and Anancy; and in the southern United States he has evolved into Aunt Nancy. He is a spider, but often acts and appears as a man.

The AnansI tales originated from the Ashanti people of present-day Ghana. The word Ananse is Akan and means "spider". They later spread to other Akan groups and then to the West Indies, Suriname, and the Netherlands Antilles. On Curaçao, Aruba, and Bonaire he is known as Nanzi, and his wife as Shi Maria.

Anansi is depicted in many different ways. Sometimes he looks like an ordinary spider, sometimes he is a spider wearing clothes or with a human face and sometimes he looks much more like a human with spider elements, such as eight legs.

The Founder is a looming presence over the Edenic setting of the college campus in Invisible Man. It is without question a direct parallel to the historic figure in the Afro-American emancipatory movement of the early 20th century, Booker T Washington.



Booker Taliaferro Washington (April 5, 1856 – November 14, 1915) was an African-American educator, author, orator, and advisor to presidents of the United States. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the dominant leader in the African-American community.

Washington was from the last generation of black American leaders born into slavery and became the leading voice of the former slaves and their descendants, who were newly oppressed by disfranchisement and the Jim Crow discriminatory laws enacted in the post-Reconstruction Southern states in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1895 his Atlanta compromise called for avoiding confrontation over segregation and instead putting more reliance on long-term educational and economic advancement in the black community.

His base was the Tuskegee Institute, a historically black college in Alabama. As lynchings in the South reached a peak in 1895, Washington gave a speech in Atlanta that made him nationally famous. The speech called for black progress through education and entrepreneurship. His message was that it was not the time to challenge Jim Crow segregation and the disfranchisement of black voters in the South. Washington mobilized a nationwide coalition of middle-class blacks, church leaders, and white philanthropists and politicians, with a long-term goal of building the community's economic strength and pride by a focus on self-help and schooling. Secretly, he supported court challenges to segregation.[1] Black militants in the North, led by W. E. B. Du Bois, at first supported the Atlanta compromise but after 1909 they set up the NAACP and tried with little success to challenge Washington's political machine for leadership in the black community.[2] Decades after Washington's death in 1915, the Civil Rights movement generally moved away from his policies to take the more militant NAACP approach.

Booker T. Washington mastered the nuances of the political arena in the late 19th century which enabled him to manipulate the media, raise money, strategize, network, pressure, reward friends and distribute funds while punishing those who opposed his plans for uplifting blacks. His long-term goal was to end the disfranchisement of the vast majority of African Americans living in southern states, where most of the millions of black Americans still lived.


Context today

Chapter 5 is the extended sermon about the "Founder" by Rev. Homer A Barbee. Within this sermon, we see the totemic figure that the "Founder" and his mythologising of him has had on I.M. (the narrator) and his fictional world. Washington's influence is also felt today. Perhaps it might be surprising for those that do not know the changes in 20th century American politics but prior to FDR - the Republican party was actually the party most closely aligned to the African American community. Yet since Goldwater, and more particularly Richard Nixon and his Southern Strategy, Republicans in opposing Johnson's civil rights legislation won the South but lost the African American vote.
Yet, when you hear Gov Rick Perry outreach to African American voters you might be surprised. However, his pitch is very much in both the tradition of the Republican party and the tradition of Booker T Washington. It is, in todays terms, still very conservative - say in comparison to the NAACP. However, if you want context for Perry's line on race, poverty and education then look no further than the legacy of Booker T Washington.

Some of the tensions in the Greek case.

IF they were to stay:

(a) The dislocation of political decision making from important economic policy arms.
There is a disjunction between the aspiration of the Greek people for European standards of living and the capacity of the Greek economy under the Euro to achieve those standards. So, if they were to stay in the union - there does not appear to be a way for the EU to fulfil the aspirations of the Greek people if they want the Greek economy to provide for the vast bulk of the economic fruits for its people. Which is to say, unless the EU wants to continually subsidise the Greeks or to employ investments of a large scale to increase Greek productivity - then it is unlikely that the inherent structural problems that cause the crisis will disappear. That is - the high value of the Euro, the high social demands of the Greek populace are not likely to disappear and the structural deficit that the Greek 'lifestyle' has on the Greek budget is going to persist even if you forgive the debt.
(b) But lets say they stumble on through or they receive some grand transfer payment arrangement that is permanent - what about the political priorities that other nation states populaces have for themselves? If the European political powers that be decide, in their wisdom (no matter which way we actually judge the merits of or success will be), to sustain Greece they will have to convince their populations that cross-subsidisation of Greece is of (or near) the highest priority. This appears unlikely given what we know of current popular opinion on the topic as of right now. But say the Euro elites decided to put a concerted and united effort to convince their varied populaces that a Greek investment was prudent - what chances are they of being successful? I would say unlikely for a number of reasons. This sort of cross-subsidisation is not particularly popular even in smaller and more culturally tightly bound political units. For example, one part of the reasons Federal power in the UK and the US is unpopular is precisely over too much or too little subsidisation within those unions. Politically, it is a very hard sell to get right. It is particularly hard to sell when the dominant discourse of the late 20th and 21st century has been increasingly consumption base, individual and user-pays modes of economic rhetoric. Has the EU been culturally integrative in its few decades of existence to carry the burden of holding up the cross-cultural economic subsidisation? I doubt it.

IF they were to leave:

(a) If the Greeks were to leave - then I do not think that will solve many problems for the Greeks or the Europeans. There will be a persistent problem for the Greek economy, if it defaults, in meeting the social demands of its populace. Even if they get a dramatically better terms of trade via a lower exchange rate with a free floating drachma - they still face a huge problem meeting their aging population with high social security demands with very few natural resources, almost no manufacturing base and very few economic sectors other than tourism. Indeed, with their decimated financial system and their highly likely exclusion from global capital markets for (what?) at least a decade - their capacity to invest and attract investment to change their economy's profile will be extremely limited. Furthermore, the leaving of the Euro will also mean that they leave the political union which will likely exacerbate the 'brain drain' with talented emigration accelerating with the closing of the relatively open borders to other EU economies.
There will be continuing tensions for the European's core itself if Greece leaves. Whilst, on the surface, the tough monetarist line by the ECB and the Euro core will assuage the financial center of the EU - e.g. Netherlands, France and Germany - it will highlight to the periphery of the EU how lop-sided some of the economic problems that a unified currency and monetarist union has upon less advanced member states.
A similar stress that caused the Greek crisis is also holding true in larger EU states particularly Italy. Chronic fiscal deficits, structurally imbalanced budget and poor trade balance alongside an aging population should continue to worry EU bosses as well as global bond-holders. Whilst the Italian economy is far more diverse than the Greeks and is far more advanced in many ways - there is a garguatuan amount of debt to GDP present there which will get worse as the high cost of social security and aged/health care bites in the next two decades.
Italy unlike Greece cannot be let go of.


All of which suggests to me that the EU probably needs to undergo a radical rethink of its configuration if it is to be here in 2065 let alone 2115.

1992

18 is when a boy becomes a man in my culture. As arbitrary choice of time as any, to my mind. Could just as well be 21 or 25 or 30. I have no idea what differentiates a man from a boy. By saying that I am being somewhat disingenuous. Of course, I know what I am told are the differences between a man and a boy, I just no longer choose to have faith in what I am told. This obviously has to do with personal experience - as someone who has passed from 'boyhood' to 'manhood'. It also has a lot to do with how I view the consensus view being espoused to me. I distrust it.

Anyway it was 1992 when I turned 18 and there was only really one band of that year, in my opinion anyway.



Nirvana was an American rock band that was formed by singer and guitarist Kurt Cobain and bassist Krist Novoselic in Aberdeen, Washington, in 1987. Nirvana went through a succession of drummers, the longest-lasting being Dave Grohl, who joined the band in 1990. Despite releasing only three full-length studio albums in their seven-year career, Nirvana has come to be regarded as one of the most influential and important rock bands of the modern era.


The word nirvāṇa is from the verbal root √vā 'blow' in the form of past participle vāna 'blown'; prefixed with the preverb nis which means 'out'. Hence the original meaning of the word is 'blown out, extinguished'. Sandhi changes the spelling: the v of vāna causes nis to become nir, and then the r of nir causes retroflexion of the following n: nis+vāna > nirvāṇa It is used in the sense of 'dead' in the Mahābhārata (i.e. life extinguished). [Monier-Williams Sanskrit English Dictionary sv nirvāṇa]

Buckeye the Rabbit
Shake it, shake it
Buckeye the Rabbit
Break it, break it...
(Invisible Man 242)



Br'er Rabbit

The Br'er Rabbit stories can be traced back to trickster figures in Africa, particularly the hare that figures prominently in the storytelling traditions in West, Central, and Southern Africa. These tales continue to be part of the traditional folklore of numerous peoples throughout those regions. In the Akan traditions of West Africa, the trickster is usually the spider Anansi, though the plots in his tales are often identical with those of stories of Br'er Rabbit.[1] However, Anansi does encounter a tricky rabbit called "Adanko" (Asante-Twi to mean "Hare") in some stories. The Jamaican character with the same name "Brer Rabbit", is an adaption from the Ananse stories of the Akan people.[2]

Some scholars have suggested that in his American incarnation, Br'er Rabbit represented the enslaved Africans who used their wits to overcome adversity and to exact revenge on their adversaries, the White slave-owners.[3] Though not always successful, the efforts of Br'er Rabbit made him a folk hero. However, the trickster is a multi-dimensional character. While he can be a hero, his amoral nature and his lack of any positive restraint can make him into a villain as well.[4]

For both Africans and African Americans, the animal trickster represents an extreme form of behavior that people may be forced to adopt in extreme circumstances in order to survive. The trickster is not to be admired in every situation. He is an example of what to do, but also an example of what not to do. The trickster's behavior can be summed up in the common African proverb: "It's trouble that makes the monkey chew on hot peppers." In other words, sometimes people must use extreme measures in extreme circumstances.[5]

Folklorists in the late 19th century first documented evidence that the American versions of the stories originated among enslaved West Africans based on connections between Br'er Rabbit and Leuk, a rabbit trickster in Senegalese folklore.[4][6] The stories of Br'er Rabbit were written down by Robert Roosevelt, an uncle of US President Theodore Roosevelt. Theodore Roosevelt wrote in his autobiography about his aunt from the State of Georgia, that "She knew all the 'Br'er Rabbit' stories, and I was brought up on them. One of my uncles, Robert Roosevelt, was much struck with them, and took them down from her dictation, publishing them in Harper's, where they fell flat. This was a good many years before a genius arose who, in 'Uncle Remus', made the stories immortal."

These stories were popularized for the mainstream audience in the late 19th century by Joel Chandler Harris (1845–1908), who wrote down and published many such stories that had been passed down by oral tradition. Harris also attributed the birth name Riley to Br'er Rabbit. Harris heard these tales in Georgia. Very similar versions of the same stories were recorded independently at the same time by the folklorist Alcée Fortier in southern Louisiana, where the Rabbit character was known as Compair Lapin in Creole French. Enid Blyton, the English writer of children's fiction, retold the stories for children.


Uncle Remus and Race

The animal stories were conveyed in such a manner that they were not seen as racist by many among the audiences of the time. By the mid-20th century, however, the dialect and the "old Uncle" stereotype of the narrator was considered overly demeaning by many African-American people, on account of what they considered to be racist and patronizing attitudes toward African-Americans. Providing additional controversy is the story's context that takes place on a former slave owning plantation, a setting that is portrayed in a passive and even docile manner. Nevertheless, Harris' work was, according to himself, an accurate account of the stories he heard from the slaves when he worked on a plantation as a young man. He claimed to have listened to, and memorized, the African American animal stories told by Uncle George Terrell, Old Harbert, and Aunt Crissy at the plantation; he wrote them down some years later. He acknowledged his debt to these storytellers in his fictionalized autobiography, 'On the Plantation' (1892). Many of the stories that he recorded have direct equivalents in the African oral tradition, and it is thanks to Harris that their African-American form is preserved.

Harris himself said, in the introduction to Uncle Remus, that he hoped his book would be considered:


...a sympathetic supplement to Mrs. Stowe's [author of Uncle Tom's Cabin] wonderful defense of slavery as it existed in the South. Mrs. Stowe, let me hasten to say, attacked the possibilities of slavery with all the eloquence of genius; but the same genius painted the portrait of the Southern slave-owner, and defended him.[3]

Mark Twain read the Uncle Remus stories to his children, who were awed to meet Harris himself. In his Autobiography Twain describes him thus:


He was the bashfulest grown person I have ever met. When there were people about he stayed silent, and seemed to suffer until they were gone. But he was lovely, nevertheless; for the sweetness and benignity of the immortal Remus looked out from his eyes, and the graces and sincerities of his character shone in his face.

Twain wrote that "It may be that Jim Wolf was as bashful as Harris. It hardly seems possible...." Jim Wolf being a person from the first humorous story Twain ever told—the story recorded in "Jim Wolf and the Cats".

Another Trickster figure in Americana from Invisible Man

Figurine in the evicted old lady's possession of Chapter 13...
High John The Conqueror

John the Conqueror was an African prince who was sold as a slave in the Americas. Despite his enslavement, his spirit was never broken and he survived in folklore as a sort of a trickster figure, because of the tricks he played to evade his masters. Joel Chandler Harris's Br'er Rabbit of the Uncle Remus stories is said to be patterned after High John the Conqueror. Zora Neale Hurston wrote of his adventures ("High John de Conquer") in her collection of folklore, The Sanctified Church.

In one traditional John the Conqueror story told by Virginia Hamilton, and probably based on "Jean, the Soldier, and Eulalie, the Devil's Daughter", John falls in love with the Devil's daughter. The Devil sets John a number of impossible tasks: he must clear sixty acres (25 ha) of land in half a day, and then sow it with corn and reap it in the other half a day. The Devil's daughter furnishes John with a magical axe and plow that get these impossible tasks done, but warns John that her father the Devil means to kill him even if he performs them. John and the Devil's daughter steal the Devil's own horses; the Devil pursues them, but they escape his clutches by shape-shifting.

In "High John De Conquer", Zora Neale Hurston reports that:


like King Arthur of England, he has served his people. And, like King Arthur, he is not dead. He waits to return when his people shall call him again ... High John de Conquer went back to Africa, but he left his power here, and placed his American dwelling in the root of a certain plant. Only possess that root, and he can be summoned at any time.

The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade is the ninth book and final novel by American writer Herman Melville, first published in New York in 1857. The book was published on April 1, presumably the exact day of the novel's setting. The Confidence-Man portrays a Canterbury Tales–style group of steamboat passengers whose interlocking stories are told as they travel down the Mississippi River toward New Orleans. According to scholar Robert Milder its reputation has been rising: "Long mistaken for a flawed novel, the book is now admired as a masterpiece of irony and control, though it continues to resist interpretive consensus."[1] After the novel's publication, Melville turned from professional writing and became a professional lecturer, mainly addressing his worldwide travels, and later for nineteen years a federal government employee.




Herman Melville[a] (August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, writer of short stories, and poet from the American Renaissance period. Most of his writings were published between 1846 and 1857. Best known for his sea adventure Typee (1846) and his whaling novel Moby-Dick (1851), he was almost forgotten during the last thirty years of his life. Melville's writing draws on his experience at sea as a common sailor, exploration of literature and philosophy, and engagement in the contradictions of American society in a period of rapid change. The main characteristic of his style is probably its heavy allusiveness, a reflection of his use of written sources. Melville's way of adapting what he read for his own new purposes, scholar Stanley T. Williams wrote, "was a transforming power comparable to Shakespeare's".[1]

Semester 1 Summary Master of Research
Pass - 50-65 Credit 65-75 Distinction 75-85 High Distinction 85+

It is rare to get 90+ in Liberal Arts courses.
And as a post-graduate course - the higher the expectation to reach each level of mark.

Digger's final mark notification received today.

Narrative Theory in Children's Literature: Final Mark 82 which is mid-level Distinction.
Film and the Folktale: Final 80 again mid-level Distinction
Gender and Genre: Final 80 again mid-level Distinction
Film, Image and Screen: 83 almost High Distinction

I need to maintain Distinction level to maintain scholarship for next year - so I am on course for that.
I do need to improve my writing style and some structural elements to my essay writing - to get to HD level. Understandably the English department is amongst the hardest judges on writing style and essay presentation. The importance of HD level is not just that that is the level of writing I would need to get to be published in future. But also, the HD level is the measure for my Masters thesis to receive PhD subsistence from the Australian government - as the Australian government only subsidises fully the highest standard candidatures.

All of the feedback I have received suggests my research is comprehensive and my ideas are incisive and pertinent. Thus, my goal for 2nd semester will be to allocate more time to essay preparation and editing as opposed to close reading/research. Which means that I will have to begin my essay writing earlier by cutting back my research time. One strategy I am going to employ is to write out close reading commentary at the conclusion of these holidays on all the texts I have read to get my thoughts down prior to reading the critical literature. The impact I hope to achieve from this strategy is to get a more focussed approach to my research and to cut down time citing and seeking citations within the texts to support my ideas.

Django Unchained (/ˈdʒæŋɡoʊ/, JANG-oh) is a 2012 American western film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. Set in the Old West and Antebellum South, it is a highly stylized variation of the spaghetti Western. The film stars Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kerry Washington, and Samuel L. Jackson.

The story is set in early winter and the following spring, during the antebellum era of the Deep South, with preliminary scenes taking place in Old West Texas. The film follows Django (Foxx), an African-American slave, and Dr. King Schultz (Waltz), an English-speaking German bounty hunter posing as a traveling dentist. Schultz buys and then promises to free Django in exchange for his help in collecting a large bounty on three outlaws. Schultz subsequently promises to teach Django bounty hunting, and split the bounties with him, if Django assists him in hunting down other outlaws throughout the winter. Django agrees – on the condition that they also locate and free his long-lost wife (Washington) from her cruel plantation owner (DiCaprio).



Django is a 1966 Italian Spaghetti Western film directed by Sergio Corbucci and starring Franco Nero in the eponymous role.[3][4]

The film earned a reputation as being one of the most violent films ever made up to that point and was subsequently refused a certificate in the UK until 1993, when it was eventually issued an 18 certificate. The film was downgraded to a 15 certificate in 2004.

Although the name is referenced in over thirty "sequels" from the time of the film's release until the early 1970s in an effort to capitalize on the success of the original, most of these films were unofficial, featuring neither Corbucci nor Nero.

Nero did reprise his role as Django in 1987's Django 2: Il Grande Ritorno (Django Strikes Again), in the only official sequel to be written by Corbucci.[5] Nero also has a cameo role in Quentin Tarantino's 2012 film Django Unchained, a homage to Corbucci's original. An English-language televised remake of the film is currently in development.


Digger's thoughts

I watched Django Unchained last night. The film provoked a moral ambivalence within me. Ultimately, I felt that I had been emotionally and sensually manipulated by this film. Although, my response to violence in film has been gradually changing in the last couple of years from indifference/enjoyment in the spectacle to being more repulsed and critically engaged - I do not think I am blindly set against violence in film. Which is to say, I tried to be open-minded as a consumed my popcorn and watched Django with some friends last night.

I think the central problem of this film is located on the borderline between satire/homage with spectacle and violence. The film, at least ostensibly, struggles to deal with two major metanarratives of American film - the Western Heroic cowboy and the slave narrative. By tackling these metanarratives explicitly simultaneously - the ambition of Tarantino is unquestioned. I also think that his critical sensibility is sincere - I think he wants to critically engage with the history of ideas about film and his culture. Ultimately, despite his sincerity, I think the film falls on the wrong side of a number of ethical inflexion points.

I think the most critically engaged film makers have been struggling with the ethics of the presentation of violence and trauma. I think Tarantino in Django fails in the same way that Coppola fails in Apocalypse Now. In trying to represent the violence of slavery - there is a pressing issue that must be confronted - how to represent the brutality of the system without positioning viewers as passive consumers of spectacular representations of violence? Whilst Tarantino does differentiate the spectacular killings of the slavers from the realist depiction of the violence towards the Afro-American slaves - the context of each does inform and affect each other. Just as Coppella's re- imagination of Conrad's Heart of Darkness has the spectacle overshadow the moral crisis at the core of the tale - so to does the spectacular violence obscure and overwhelm the central critical issues surrounding both the Western and issues on slavery.

Technically - it is a display of a superior talent. But the compensations of technical mastery do not make up for some huge moral blind spots on the issue of the impacts of imaginary violence in contemporary modernity nor the ongoing crisis of authorship and agency in representing historical traumas.

[INDENT]In the end, both colonial slavery and the contemporary context of the global war have economic roots, so maybe a high-budget, high grossing film is just the way to take them on. The former used dehumanized bodies as capital, the latter engages systematic brutality for politico-economic ends. The global war and the global prison complex rely on celling black and brown bodies, a process that emerges from the ideological sustenance of both black passivity and racialized violence. Can we even imagine a film that depicts Muslims successfully killing (white) Americans in a passionate, rageful way as a redemptive-glorified operation that reveals the white imperial state and nationalized racism? I suspect such a film will never be made. Historical and contemporary patterns of racialized punishment reveal Django’s absurdity rather easily. This film is not only a transparent attempt at moral elevation, but an act of bad conscience: a way to lick the wounds of the past by disarming contemporary black and brown rage through fictional vindication.[/INDENT] M Charania

There's Many a Thousand Gone

Song at the funeral of Brother Clifton c pg 452-453 Invisible Man.


Otherwise known as No More Auction Block.

Odetta


Odetta Holmes (December 31, 1930 – December 2, 2008), known as Odetta, was an American singer, actress, guitarist, songwriter, and a civil and human rights activist, often referred to as "The Voice of the Civil Rights Movement".[4] Her musical repertoire consisted largely of American folk music, blues, jazz, and spirituals. An important figure in the American folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s, she was influential to many of the key figures of the folk-revival of that time, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Mavis Staples, and Janis Joplin. Time included her song "Take This Hammer" on its list of the All-Time 100 Songs, stating that "Rosa Parks was her No. 1 fan, and Martin Luther King Jr. called her the queen of American folk music."

White Noise is the eighth novel by Don DeLillo, published by Viking Press in 1985. It won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.[1]

White Noise is an example of postmodern literature. It is widely considered DeLillo's "breakout" work and brought him to the attention of a much larger audience. Time included the novel in its Time 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.[2] DeLillo originally wanted to call the book Panasonic, but the Panasonic Corporation objected.[3]

White Noise explores several themes that emerged during the mid-to-late twentieth century, e.g., rampant consumerism, media saturation, novelty academic intellectualism, underground conspiracies, the disintegration and reintegration of the family, human-made disasters, and the potentially regenerative nature of human violence. The novel's style is characterized by a heterogeneity that utilizes "montages of tones, styles, and voices that have the effect of yoking together terror and wild humor as the essential tone of contemporary America."[


Donald Richard "Don" DeLillo (born November 20, 1936) is an American novelist, playwright and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, sports, the complexities of language, performance art, the Cold War, mathematics, the advent of the digital age, politics, economics, and global terrorism. Initially a well-regarded cult writer, the publication in 1985 of White Noise brought him widespread recognition, and was followed in 1988 by Libra, a bestseller. DeLillo has twice been a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist (for Mao II in 1992 and for Underworld in 1998[1]), won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II in 1992 (receiving a further PEN/Faulkner Award nomination for The Angel Esmeralda in 2012), was granted the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2010, and won the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction in 2013.[2]

DeLillo has described his fiction as being concerned with "living in dangerous times",[3] and in a 2005 interview declared, "Writers must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments [...] I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us."[

The Koch snowflake (also known as the Koch curve, star. or island[1]) is a mathematical curve and one of the earliest fractal curves to have been described. It is based on the Koch curve, which appeared in a 1904 paper titled "On a continuous curve without tangents, constructible from elementary geometry" (original French title: Sur une courbe continue sans tangente, obtenue par une construction géométrique élémentaire) by the Swedish mathematician Helge von Koch.

The Koch snowflake can be constructed by starting with an equilateral triangle, then recursively altering each line segment as follows:
1.divide the line segment into three segments of equal length.
2.draw an equilateral triangle that has the middle segment from step 1 as its base and points outward.
3.remove the line segment that is the base of the triangle from step 2.

After one iteration of this process, the resulting shape is the outline of a hexagram.

The Koch snowflake is the limit approached as the above steps are followed over and over again. The Koch curve originally described by Koch is constructed with only one of the three sides of the original triangle. In other words, three Koch curves make a Koch snowflake.


Niels Fabian Helge von Koch (25 January 1870 – 11 March 1924) was a Swedish mathematician who gave his name to the famous fractal known as the Koch snowflake, one of the earliest fractal curves to be described.

He was born into a family of Swedish nobility. His grandfather, Nils Samuel von Koch (1801–1881), was the Attorney-General of Sweden. His father, Richert Vogt von Koch (1838–1913) was a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Royal Horse Guards of Sweden. He was enrolled at the newly created Stockholm University College in 1887 (studying under Gösta Mittag-Leffler), and at Uppsala University in 1888, where he also received his bachelor's degree (filsofie kandidat) since non-governmental college in Stockholm had not yet received the rights to issue degrees. He received his Ph.D. in Uppsala in 1892. He was appointed professor of mathematics at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in 1905, succeeding Ivar Bendixson, and became professor of pure mathematics at Stockholm University College in 1911.

Von Koch wrote several papers on number theory. One of his results was a 1901 theorem proving that the Riemann hypothesis is equivalent to a stronger form of the prime number theorem.

He described the Koch curve in a 1904 paper entitled "On a continuous curve without tangents constructible from elementary geometry" (original French title: "Sur une courbe continue sans tangente, obtenue par une construction géométrique élémentaire").

AGreekment

My other course for Semester II I have been looking forward to is: Shakespeare and the Renaissance.
Reading List
Marlowe: Hero and Leander; Spenser: Amoretti
Marlowe: Doctor Faustus
Shakespeare: The Sonnets
Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra; Donne: The Sun Rising
Shakespeare: Hamlet; Donne: SatireIII
Shakespeare: Macbeth
Shakespeare: King Lear
Shakespeare: Othello
Jonson: Volpone and To Penshurst
Bacon: New Atlantis and Essays
Marvell: Poems



Christopher Marlowe[1] (baptised 26 February 1564 – 30 May 1593) was an English playwright, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. Marlowe was the foremost Elizabethan tragedian of his day.[2] He greatly influenced William Shakespeare, who was born in the same year as Marlowe and who rose to become the pre-eminent Elizabethan playwright after Marlowe's mysterious early death. Marlowe's plays are known for the use of blank verse and their overreaching protagonists.

A warrant was issued for Marlowe's arrest on 18 May 1593. No reason was given for it, though it was thought to be connected to allegations of blasphemy—a manuscript believed to have been written by Marlowe was said to contain "vile heretical conceipts". On 20 May he was brought to the court to attend upon the Privy Council for questioning. There is no record of their having met that day, however, and he was commanded to attend upon them each day thereafter until "licensed to the contrary." Ten days later, he was stabbed to death by Ingram Frizer. Whether the stabbing was connected to his arrest has never been resolved.




Hero and Leander is a poem by Christopher Marlowe that retells the Greek myth of Hero and Leander. After Marlowe's untimely death it was completed by George Chapman. The minor poet Henry Petowe published an alternative completion to the poem. The poem was first published posthumously, five years after Marlowe's demise.

First few lines

On Hellespont, guilty of true love's blood,

In view and opposite two cities stood,

Sea-borderers, disjoin'd by Neptune's might;

The one Abydos, the other Sestos hight.

At Sestos Hero dwelt; Hero the fair,

Whom young Apollo courted for her hair,

And offer'd as a dower his burning throne,

Where she could sit for men to gaze upon.

The outside of her garments were of lawn,

The lining purple silk, with gilt stars drawn;

Her wide sleeves green, and border'd with a grove,

Where Venus in her naked glory strove

To please the careless and disdainful eyes

Of proud Adonis, that before her lies;

Her kirtle blue, whereon was many a stain,

Made with the blood of wretched lovers slain.

The Modern in popular music

I think there are very few popular musicians who have tried to push the cultural possibilities of music like David Bowie. Whilst I did not really get into Bowie when I was a young man, I have come to appreciate the value of looking at things askew. Obviously Androgynity is one radical aspect of Bowie's self-representation that challenged cultural values and the expanded the possibilities for idolatry in popular culture. After Bowie, there was and still is a possibility that the concerns of a musician as 'artist' can have an affect upon cultural possibilities. Of course, the rise of popular hyper-masculinity of the 'cock rock star' that immediately accompanied/followed was a different response the shifting sands of 2nd wave feminism and the challenge to gender identity.





David Bowie (/ˈboʊ.i/;[1] born David Robert Jones, 8 January 1947) is an English singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, record producer, arranger, and actor. He is also a painter and collector of fine art.[2] Bowie has been a major figure in the world of popular music for over four decades, and is renowned as an innovator, particularly for his work in the 1970s. He is known for his distinctive baritone voice as well as the intellectual depth and eclecticism of his work. Aside from his musical abilities, he is recognised for his androgynous beauty, which was an iconic element to his image, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s.[3][4]

Bowie first caught the eye and ear of the public in July 1969 when his song "Space Oddity" reached the top five of the UK Singles Chart. After a three-year period of experimentation he re-emerged in 1972 during the glam rock era with the flamboyant, androgynous alter ego Ziggy Stardust, spearheaded by the hit single "Starman" and the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Bowie's impact at that time, as described by biographer David Buckley, "challenged the core belief of the rock music of its day" and "created perhaps the biggest cult in popular culture."[5] The relatively short-lived Ziggy persona proved merely one facet of a career marked by continual reinvention, musical innovation and striking visual presentation.


Queer theory is a field of post-structuralist critical theory that emerged in the early 1990s out of the fields of queer studies and women's studies. Queer theory includes both queer readings of texts and the theorisation of 'queerness' itself. Heavily influenced by the work of Lauren Berlant, Leo Bersani, Judith Butler, Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam,[1] David Halperin, José Esteban Muñoz, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, queer theory builds both upon feminist challenges to the idea that gender is part of the essential self and upon gay/lesbian studies' close examination of the socially constructed nature of sexual acts and identities. Whereas gay/lesbian studies focused its inquiries into natural and unnatural behaviour with respect to homosexual behaviour, queer theory expands its focus to encompass any kind of sexual activity or identity that falls into normative and deviant categories. Italian feminist and film theorist Teresa de Lauretis coined the term "queer theory" for a conference she organized at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1990 and a special issue of Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies she edited based on that conference.

Queer theory focuses on "mismatches" between sex, gender and desire. Queer has been associated most prominently with bisexual, lesbian and gay subjects, but its analytic framework also includes such topics as cross-dressing, intersex, gender ambiguity and gender-corrective surgery. Queer theory's attempted debunking of stable (and correlated) sexes, genders, and sexualities develops out of the specifically lesbian and gay reworking of the post-structuralist figuring of identity as a constellation of multiple and unstable positions. Queer theory examines the constitutive discourses of homosexuality developed in the last century in order to place "queer" in its historical context, and surveys contemporary arguments both for and against this latest terminology.



Judith Butler (born February 24, 1956) is an American philosopher and gender theorist whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics and the fields of feminist, queer[2] and literary theory.[3] Since 1993, she has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is now Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory. She is also the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School.[4]

Academically, Butler is most well known for her books Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex", which challenge notions of gender and develop her theory of gender performativity. This theory now plays a major role in feminist and queer scholarship.[5] Her works are often implemented in film studies courses emphasizing gender studies and the performativity in discourse. She has also actively supported lesbian and gay rights movements and been outspoken on many contemporary political issues.[6] In particular, she is a vocal critic of Israeli politics[7] and its effect on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, emphasizing that Israel does not and should not be taken to represent all Jews or Jewish opinion.[8] She is also well known for her difficult prose.[

The Ashes

The Ashes is one of the longest national sporting rivalries in modern sport. It also is the most important rivalry in the history of the game of cricket. Cricket, at it heart, is a simple game. The most important characteristic of Test cricket is discipline. Whether batting, bowling or fielding - discipline is required to succeed over the course of any day or over the five days of a Test Match.
Communicating the heart of what is important in a cricket match is deceptively simple. There are hours to fill and sometimes commentators can travel down irrelevant rabbit holes of speculation about the state of any given gamestate. If I was to suggest a newcomer to cricket a person to listen to, so that they can understand the game - then I believe that you should look no further than....



Geoffrey Boycott OBE (born 21 October 1940) is a former Yorkshire and England cricketer. In a prolific and sometimes controversial playing career from 1962 to 1986, Boycott established himself as one of England's most successful opening batsmen[3] and since retiring as a player, he has found further success as a cricket commentator. Boycott made his international debut in a 1964 Test match against Australia.[4][5] He was noted for his ability to occupy the crease and became a key feature of England's Test batting line up for many years, although he was less successful in his limited One Day International (ODI) appearances.[6] He accumulated large scores – he is the equal fifth highest accumulator of first-class centuries in history, eighth in career runs and the first English player to average over 100 in a season (1971 and 1979) – but often encountered friction with his team mates.[4][7][8] Journalist Ian Wooldridge commented that "Boycott, in short, walks alone",[9] while cricket writer John Arlott wrote that Boycott had a "lonely" career.[10] Others, however, have stated that the extent of his introverted nature has been exaggerated, and that while he was "obsessed with success" he was not a selfish player

Cryptic Clue
Doctor of note trained at first in America twice (7)

I thought I would revive the Cryptic clue posts of my thread for abit during my holiday, despite the fact it is not much of a holiday with work and my reading list. Anyway...

Doctor might suggest that we should amend what follows. But logic tells us that there is not much meaning in the end of the clue.

Hence, our first inclination when interpreting this clue is that, in fact, doctor is the answer. So, it could be a synonym for Doctor but most likely it will be a historic doctor given there will be more names than synonyms hence making it harder.

So we look at the rest of the clue for the answer building blocks.

of note: note is often in cryptic building blocks musical


trained at first - the first of trained T

in America twice - America = US

Answer = FA US T US

Doctor Faustus
The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, commonly referred to simply as Doctor Faustus, is a play by Christopher Marlowe, based on the German story Faust, in which a man sells his soul to the devil for power, experience, pleasure and knowledge. Doctor Faustus was first published in 1604, eleven years after Marlowe's death and at least 10 years after the first performance of the play. It is the most controversial Elizabethan play outside of Shakespeare, with few critics coming to any agreement as to the date or the nature of the text.

The Book of the Dead is an ancient Egyptian funerary text, used from the beginning of the New Kingdom (around 1550 BCE) to around 50 BCE.[1] The original Egyptian name for the text, transliterated rw nw prt m hrw[2] is translated as "Book of Coming Forth by Day".[3] Another translation would be "Book of emerging forth into the Light". "Book" is the closest term to describe the loose collection of texts[4] consisting of a number of magic spells intended to assist a dead person's journey through the Duat, or underworld, and into the afterlife and written by many priests over a period of about 1000 years.

The Book of the Dead was part of a tradition of funerary texts which includes the earlier Pyramid Texts and Coffin Texts, which were painted onto objects, not papyrus. Some of the spells included were drawn from these older works and date to the 3rd millennium BCE. Other spells were composed later in Egyptian history, dating to the Third Intermediate Period (11th to 7th centuries BCE). A number of the spells which made up the Book continued to be inscribed on tomb walls and sarcophagi, as had always been the spells from which they originated. The Book of the Dead was placed in the coffin or burial chamber of the deceased.

There was no single or canonical Book of the Dead. The surviving papyri contain a varying selection of religious and magical texts and vary considerably in their illustration. Some people seem to have commissioned their own copies of the Book of the Dead, perhaps choosing the spells they thought most vital in their own progression to the afterlife. The Book of the Dead was most commonly written in hieroglyphic or hieratic script on a papyrus scroll, and often illustrated with vignettes depicting the deceased and their journey into the afterlife.

Reading Update

I do not think I will get through all of my reading before semester starts on the 27th. I still have 100 pages left of White Noise, half of The Sound and the Fury, I have not started Rings of Saturn and lets not even mention Cormac McCarthey's epic by name.

Given all except The Sound and the Fury are studied in the second half of the semester, I will be returning to read Faulkner and setting aside Delilo.

I will also have to start reading: Amoretti and Dr Faustus soon.

Analogy of an Old Roman who keeps a Vase by his bedside who wears it away by kissing it.


“I had made myself a vase, but I suppose I knew all the
time that I could not live forever inside of it. . . . It’s fine to think that you
will leave something behind you when you die, but it’s better to have made
something you can die with." William Faulkner



Tyrrhenian amphorae are a specific shape of Attic black-figure neck amphorae. Tyrrhenian amphorae were only produced during a short period, about 565 to 550 BC. They are ovoid in shape and bear striking decorations. The handle is usually decorated with a lotus-palmette cross or vegetal tendrils. It always terminates in a red-painted ridge. The vase body is painted with several friezes. The uppermost of these, on the shoulder, is usually especially notable. It often contains mythological scenes, but the first erotic motifs in Attic vase painting also occur here. Unique motifs include the sacrifice of Polyene. Often, the figures are explained by added inscriptions. The other friezes, usually two to three in number, are often decorated with animals. At times, a frieze is replaced with a vegetal band.

Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself

At the earliest ending of winter,

In March, a scrawny cry from outside

Seemed like a sound in his mind.


He knew that he heard it,

A bird’s cry at daylight or before,

In the early March wind


The sun was rising at six,

No longer a battered panache above snow . . .

It would have been outside.


It was not from the vast ventriloquism

Of sleep’s faded papier mâché . . .

The sun was coming from outside.


That scrawny cry—it was

A chorister whose c preceded the choir.

It was part of the colossal sun,


Surrounded by its choral rings,

Still far away. It was like

A new knowledge of reality.



Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and he spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems in 1955.

Modernism in music: Urban decay


Husker Du

Beyond the Threshold
It's a one-horse town
One big desert
Asphalt desert
Asphalt jungle

Beyond the threshold, beyond the threshold

Change for the worse
Change nonetheless
Hey hey hey
Got no place to stay

I hear machines
They burst at the seams
But tar and feather
All stick together

Greetings from home
I wish you were here
Hear what I say but
You can't hear me at all



Hüsker Dü /ˈhʊskər ˈduː/ was an American rock band formed in Saint Paul, Minnesota in 1979. The band's continual members were guitarist/vocalist Bob Mould, bassist Greg Norton, and drummer/vocalist Grant Hart.

Hüsker Dü first gained notability as a hardcore punk band, later crossing over into alternative rock. Mould and Hart split the songwriting and singing duties.

Following an EP and three LPs on independent label SST Records, including the critically acclaimed Zen Arcade (1984), the band signed to Warner Bros. Records in 1986 to release their final two studio albums.

Mould released two solo albums before forming Sugar in the early 1990s, while Hart released a solo album on SST and later formed Nova Mob. Norton was initially less active musically after Hüsker Dü's demise and focused on being a restaurateur instead. He returned to the recording industry in 2006.

Edmund Spenser (/ˈspɛnsər/; 1552/1553 – 13 January 1599) was an English poet best known for The Faerie Queene, an epic poem and fantastical allegory celebrating the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I. He is recognised as one of the premier craftsmen of Modern English verse in its infancy, and is often considered one of the greatest poets in the English language.

Amoretti Sonnet 75
One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Again I write it with a second hand,
But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.
Vain man, said she, that doest in vain assay,
A mortal thing so to immortalize,
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eek my name be wiped out likewise.
Not so, (quod I) let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse, your virtues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your glorious name.
Where whenas death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew.
1594

Spenser's political master and controversial figure of English colonialism.

Arthur Grey, 14th Baron Grey de Wilton (1536–1593) was a baron in the Peerage of England, remembered mainly for his memoir of his father, and for participating in the last defence of Calais.

The Second Desmond rebellion (1579–1583) was the more widespread and bloody of the two Desmond Rebellions launched by the FitzGerald dynasty of Desmond in Munster, Ireland, against English rule in Ireland. The second rebellion began in July 1579 when James FitzMaurice FitzGerald, landed in Ireland with a force of Papal troops, triggering an insurrection across the south of Ireland on the part of the Desmond dynasty, their allies and others who were dissatisfied for various reasons with English government of the country. The rebellion ended with the 1583 death of Gerald FitzGerald, 15th Earl of Desmond and the defeat of the rebels.

The rebellion was in equal part a protest by feudal lords against the intrusion of central government into their domains, a conservative Irish reaction to English policies that were altering traditional Gaelic society; and a religious conflict, in which the rebels claimed that they were upholding Catholicism against a Protestant queen who had been pronounced a heretic in 1570 by the papal bull Regnans in Excelsis.

The result of the rebellions was the destruction of the Desmond dynasty and the subsequent Munster Plantations – the colonisation of Munster with English settlers. In addition the fighting laid waste to a large part of the south of Ireland. War-related famine and disease are thought to have killed up to a third of Munster's pre-war population.