The young generation, diminished by their parents’ crimes, will hear how citizens sharpened the sword which should rather have slain the deadly Parthians, and will hear the wars they fought.

What divinity are the people to call upon to restore the fortunes of their crumbling power?

Marvell's Cromwell as



’Tis madness to resist or blame

The force of angry Heaven’s flame;

Horace's Octavius

Or Hannibal



To Italy an Hannibal,

And to all states not free,

Shall climacteric be.

Hi all, long time no speak.
I will not apologise because, well, it is not as if you guys have been posting or PMing demanding an update. With that small petulant huf out of the way.

So back to the future - I have had, and still have (I suppose), a choice in front of me as to what my Research thesis will be on.

Largely the choice was between something in Modernism (particularly Late Modernist and contemporary writers) or early modern 17th century writers connected with the poetic responses or examples in the genealogy of ideas.

Informing this choice was, not only what is of interest to me, but also who would I be supervised by and what impact that supervision would have on my enjoying and succeeding in my thesis.

Ultimately, I am strongly leaning towards doing a thesis on an early modern satirical poet Samuel Butler. I have chosen it because it seems like he has been overlooked and so my research would actually contribute to (or at least attempt to) a better standing for this poet. It also will be timely given that Oxford is putting out a new work on Francis Bacon which is topical for my research focus area. Their work might provide opportunities that might not otherwise be there.
Finally, I trust my early modern professors judgement and temperament over and above the alternatives - which have left me somewhat hanging with no strong guidance.


Given the late switch in my research topic, I have been (more so than usual) kinda swamped with reading. Hence, my silence here.

I have been considering whether or not - this blog is past its utility. Although, I have a large number of views - I have no idea what that number means - it prolly just shows how many times I have looked in upon my own work. Furthermore, no one seems to actually want to interact with the blog in anything but, I presume, a passive way. That is all well and good, who is it for me to say what you should or should not do, but the silence does make it hard to keep up the enthusiasm to post.


Anyway....I guess I will speak to you soon.

Hope all is well.

'To Penshurst'

Thou art not, Penshurst, built to envious show,

Of touch or marble; nor canst boast a row

Of polished pillars, or a roof of gold;

Thou hast no lantern, whereof tales are told,

Or stair, or courts; but stand’st an ancient pile,

And, these grudged at, art reverenced the while.

Thou joy’st in better marks, of soil, of air,

Of wood, of water; therein thou art fair.

Thou hast thy walks for health, as well as sport;

Thy mount, to which the dryads do resort,

Where Pan and Bacchus their high feasts have made,

Beneath the broad beech and the chestnut shade;

That taller tree, which of a nut was set

At his great birth where all the Muses met.

There in the writhèd bark are cut the names

Of many a sylvan, taken with his flames;

And thence the ruddy satyrs oft provoke

The lighter fauns to reach thy Lady’s Oak.

Thy copse too, named of Gamage, thou hast there,

That never fails to serve thee seasoned deer

When thou wouldst feast or exercise thy friends.

The lower land, that to the river bends,

Thy sheep, thy bullocks, kine, and calves do feed;

The middle grounds thy mares and horses breed.

Each bank doth yield thee conies; and the tops,

Fertile of wood, Ashore and Sidney’s copse,

To crown thy open table, doth provide

The purpled pheasant with the speckled side;

The painted partridge lies in every field,

And for thy mess is willing to be killed.

And if the high-swollen Medway fail thy dish,

Thou hast thy ponds, that pay thee tribute fish,

Fat aged carps that run into thy net,

And pikes, now weary their own kind to eat,

As loath the second draught or cast to stay,

Officiously at first themselves betray;

Bright eels that emulate them, and leap on land

Before the fisher, or into his hand.

Then hath thy orchard fruit, thy garden flowers,

Fresh as the air, and new as are the hours.

The early cherry, with the later plum,

Fig, grape, and quince, each in his time doth come;

The blushing apricot and woolly peach

Hang on thy walls, that every child may reach.

And though thy walls be of the country stone,

They’re reared with no man’s ruin, no man’s groan;

There’s none that dwell about them wish them down;

But all come in, the farmer and the clown,

And no one empty-handed, to salute

Thy lord and lady, though they have no suit.

Some bring a capon, some a rural cake,

Some nuts, some apples; some that think they make

The better cheeses bring them, or else send

By their ripe daughters, whom they would commend

This way to husbands, and whose baskets bear

An emblem of themselves in plum or pear.

But what can this (more than express their love)

Add to thy free provisions, far above

The need of such? whose liberal board doth flow

With all that hospitality doth know;

Where comes no guest but is allowed to eat,

Without his fear, and of thy lord’s own meat;

Where the same beer and bread, and selfsame wine,

This is his lordship’s shall be also mine,

And I not fain to sit (as some this day

At great men’s tables), and yet dine away.

Here no man tells my cups; nor, standing by,

A waiter doth my gluttony envy,

But gives me what I call, and lets me eat;

He knows below he shall find plenty of meat.

The tables hoard not up for the next day;

Nor, when I take my lodging, need I pray

For fire, or lights, or livery; all is there,

As if thou then wert mine, or I reigned here:

There’s nothing I can wish, for which I stay.

That found King James when, hunting late this way

With his brave son, the prince, they saw thy fires

Shine bright on every hearth, as the desires

Of thy Penates had been set on flame

To entertain them; or the country came

With all their zeal to warm their welcome here.

What (great I will not say, but) sudden cheer

Didst thou then make ’em! and what praise was heaped

On thy good lady then, who therein reaped

The just reward of her high housewifery;

To have her linen, plate, and all things nigh,

When she was far; and not a room but dressed

As if it had expected such a guest!
These, Penshurst, are thy praise, and yet not all.

Thy lady’s noble, fruitful, chaste withal.

His children thy great lord may call his own,

A fortune in this age but rarely known.

They are, and have been, taught religion; thence

Their gentler spirits have sucked innocence.

Each morn and even they are taught to pray,

With the whole household, and may, every day,

Read in their virtuous parents’ noble parts

The mysteries of manners, arms, and arts.

Now, Penshurst, they that will proportion thee

With other edifices, when they see

Those proud, ambitious heaps, and nothing else,

May say their lords have built, but thy lord dwells.

Ben Jonson
Benjamin Jonson (c. 11 June 1572 – 6 August 1637) was an English playwright, poet, actor, and literary critic of the seventeenth century, whose artistry exerted a lasting impact upon English poetry and stage comedy. He popularised the comedy of humours. He is best known for the satirical plays Every Man in His Humour (1598), Volpone, or The Foxe (1605), The Alchemist (1610), and Bartholomew Fayre: A Comedy (1614), and for his lyric poetry; he is generally regarded as the second most important English dramatist, after William Shakespeare, during the reign of James I.[1]

Jonson was a classically educated, well-read, and cultured man of the English Renaissance with an appetite for controversy (personal and political, artistic and intellectual) whose cultural influence was of unparalleled breadth upon the playwrights and the poets of the Jacobean era (1603–1625) and of the Caroline era (1625–1642)


About the poem

The surface reading of this poem is that it is a eutopian 'homage' poem celebrating the Sidney estate. An estate of Sir Robert, brother of Elizabethan hero Sir Philip, a prominent Jacobean family who were strong supporters of poets.
Below the surface, in brief, Jonson is exploring the problem of a growing trend during this time, of prominent Lords spending more time in London at the Royal Court. What we see is Jonson actually problematizing the abundance of the eutopia. Rather than abundance just bringing a harmony it renders the need for social hierarchy dissolve - the peasants bear 'no suit', the poet 'reigns here' and thy lord is not there when the king arrives as only ''thy lady' gets the praise.
Jonson is begging the question - what is the implication for the kingdom when the good times run out and the lord is NOT dwelling there as the final line argues. He is also suggesting to King James (a poet and reader of Jonson) one remedy to alleviate the cost of Lords populating his Court, which was a stress on the royal finances, by arguing that he should do as Elizabeth did and tour friendly estates as they are abundant.


Anyhow - I am basically less than a month and 3 assignments away from clear passage toward my research thesis beginning. I hope my marks stay up for the scholarship threshold.
I will outline my thesis in the near future.

Speak to you soon and I hope this post helps you appreciate the subtlety of Ben Jonson's social criticism.

don't be discouraged by lack of responses. That is somehow the nature of blogging that it is mainly one way communication. I don't comment because I am as dumb as possible in most of the things you write about. Many names I never read anything about. So for me it is educationally interesting.

I read your blog and i find it interesting. But im about as far removed from the world of academia as you can get. And especially your discipline. I couldn't provide a remotely intelligent comment on any of your posts. But that doesnt mean i dont read them or find them interesting.

Melancholia I by Albrecht Durer

Albrecht Dürer (/ˈdʊərər, ˈdjʊərər/;[1] German: [ˈalbʁɛçt ˈdyːʁɐ]; 21 May 1471 – 6 April 1528)[2] was a painter, printmaker and theorist of the German Renaissance. Born in Nuremberg, Dürer established his reputation and influence across Europe when he was still in his twenties, due to his high-quality woodcut prints. He was in communication with the major Italian artists of his time, including Raphael, Giovanni Bellini and Leonardo da Vinci, and from 1512 he was patronized by emperor Maximilian I.

His vast body of work includes engravings, his preferred technique in his later prints, altarpieces, portraits and self-portraits, watercolours and books. The woodcuts, such as the Apocalypse series (1498), retain a more Gothic flavour than the rest of his work. His well-known engravings include the Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513), Saint Jerome in his Study (1514) and Melencolia I (1514), which has been the subject of extensive analysis and interpretation. His watercolours also mark him as one of the first European landscape artists, while his ambitious woodcuts revolutionized the potential of that medium.

Dürer's introduction of classical motifs into Northern art, through his knowledge of Italian artists and German humanists, has secured his reputation as one of the most important figures of the Northern Renaissance. This is reinforced by his theoretical treatises, which involve principles of mathematics, perspective and ideal proportions.

The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp is a 1632 oil painting on canvas by Rembrandt housed in the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, the Netherlands. Dr. Nicolaes Tulp is pictured explaining the musculature of the arm to medical professionals. Some of the spectators are various doctors who paid commissions to be included in the painting. The painting is signed in the top-left hand corner Rembrandt. f[ecit] 1632. This may be the first instance of Rembrandt signing a painting with his forename (in its original form) as opposed to the monogramme RHL (Rembrandt Harmenszoon of Leiden), and is thus a sign of his growing artistic confidence.

The event can be dated to 31 January 1632: the Amsterdam Guild of Surgeons, of which Tulp was official City Anatomist, permitted only one public dissection a year, and the body would have to be that of an executed criminal.[1]

Anatomy lessons were a social event in the 17th century, taking place in lecture rooms that were actual theatres, with students, colleagues and the general public being permitted to attend on payment of an entrance fee. The spectators are appropriately dressed for this social occasion. It is thought that the uppermost (not holding the paper) and farthest left figures were added to the picture later.


Nicolaes Tulp (9 October 1593 – 12 September 1674) was a Dutch surgeon and mayor of Amsterdam. Tulp was well known for his upstanding moral character[1] and as the subject of Rembrandt's famous painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp.

"Book of Monsters"
His most impressive work on medicine was his Observationes Medicae,[5] published in 1641 and again in 1652 by Lodewijk Elzevir. He wrote the first version for his son who had just graduated from Leiden and dedicated the second edition to him after his death. The book comprises minute descriptions of his work, including 231 cases of disease and death. Some called it the "book of monsters", because Tulp dissected animals brought back from the Dutch East India Company's ships, but also because of the fantastic stories that he relates. An example; Jan de Doot, a blacksmith in Amsterdam, was in such pain from a kidney stone, that he sharpened a knife and removed it himself, because he refused to be the victim of the 'stone cutters'. These were the barber-surgeons who performed such procedures but had a high death rate. To everyone's surprise, Jan de Doot survived this operation which was said to produce a stone the size of an egg. A painting illustrating this story is in the collection of the Anatomy Museum of Leiden.

Tulp minutely described the condition we know as migraine, the devastating effects to the lungs caused by tobacco smoking, and reveals an understanding of human psychology in a description of the placebo effect. Tulp also discovered the ileocecal valve at the junction of the large and small intestines, still known as Tulp's valve.

While Tulp made observations of various diseases, treatment often continued in the age-old way. His description of the symptoms of Beriberi in a Dutch seaman, for example, went unnoticed until the cause (vitamin B1 deficiency) was recognized two hundred years later by Christiaan Eijkman.

Thank you bigger.
Welcome lapka.

Winfried Georg Sebald (18 May 1944 – 14 December 2001) — known as W.G. Sebald or Max Sebald — was a German writer and academic. At the time of his death at the age of 57, he was being cited by many literary critics as one of the greatest living authors[citation needed] and had been tipped as a possible future winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature[citation needed]. In a 2007 interview, Horace Engdahl, former secretary of the Swedish Academy, mentioned Sebald, Ryszard Kapuściński and Jacques Derrida as three recently deceased writers who would have been worthy laureates.[



Finished Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald.

Where to begin. Well, there is no discernible plot. It is basically an avatar of the author walking around a series of coastal communities and landscapes of Eastern England. They are really only a staging platform for a meditation on history, memory and imagination. Sebald's vision is a dystopic narrative of the present and past which he presents through anecdotes of personal memory, biographical memories and histories of connected writers and political figures that switch in and out of genres in not always clear ways. (I say dystopic because temporality begins to collapse within his construct and whilst dystopias are more often future orientated here the future looms like a leitmotif of pallid corpse, shadows of debris and further decay). Which makes it sound depressing but not in a suffocating way but in a captivating way much like a need to slumber when in a profound, distant grief.

Having describe its Modernist narrative features, it is important to underline that once you give up on the idea that you should have a linear plot and you accept that it is a rumination on decay and death; there is a lot to be said to recommend Sebald's style to readers with a traditional taste for story and plot. Specifically, Sebald tells these vignettes in an accessible way - yes there will be a lot of cultural references that you may not be familiar with - but if you either like looking up cultural artefacts say when reading non-fiction or you do not mind using kindle dictionaries if you have the e-version - then every other part of his writing style is very easy to follow within each story.
Think of it as a patchwork of stories that each make sense but may not quite aesthetically makes sense immediately as a sequence.

Strong influences are Sir Thomas Browne (Early Modern), Conrad, Proust and Borges (modern/ist) from my first reading.

Well worth a read and worth persisting with if it does not immediately grab you.

Hi diggeridoo, how are you?

I am well, I have brief respite from all the reading and writing of my course.
Just posting abit to catch up with this blog. I am thinking about what to do with this blog.
Whether I want to keep it up or not. If I abandon it, how will I replace it?
If I continue, then I will need to think how I should best use it with my thesis writing.
Given that my thesis writing will be increasingly dealing with detail rather than the wandering of my reading in my courses - it seems like just dealing with that process might be an order of obscurity beyond even this blog.

Andrew Marvell (/ˈmɑrvəl/; 31 March 1621 – 16 August 1678) was an English metaphysical poet, satirist and politician who sat in the House of Commons at various times between 1659 and 1678. During the Commonwealth period he was a colleague and friend of John Milton. His poems range from the love-song "To His Coy Mistress", to evocations of an aristocratic country house and garden in "Upon Appleton House" and "The Garden", the political address "An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland", and the later personal and political satires "Flecknoe" and "The Character of Holland".

Body and Soul

SOUL

O who shall, from this dungeon, raise

A soul enslav’d so many ways?

With bolts of bones, that fetter’d stands

In feet, and manacled in hands;

Here blinded with an eye, and there

Deaf with the drumming of an ear;

A soul hung up, as ’twere, in chains

Of nerves, and arteries, and veins;

Tortur’d, besides each other part,

In a vain head, and double heart.

BODY

O who shall me deliver whole

From bonds of this tyrannic soul?

Which, stretch’d upright, impales me so

That mine own precipice I go;

And warms and moves this needless frame,

(A fever could but do the same)

And, wanting where its spite to try,

Has made me live to let me die.

A body that could never rest,

Since this ill spirit it possest.

SOUL

What magic could me thus confine

Within another’s grief to pine?

Where whatsoever it complain,

I feel, that cannot feel, the pain;

And all my care itself employs;

That to preserve which me destroys;

Constrain’d not only to endure

Diseases, but, what’s worse, the cure;

And ready oft the port to gain,

Am shipwreck’d into health again.

BODY

But physic yet could never reach

The maladies thou me dost teach;

Whom first the cramp of hope does tear,

And then the palsy shakes of fear;

The pestilence of love does heat,

Or hatred’s hidden ulcer eat;

Joy’s cheerful madness does perplex,

Or sorrow’s other madness vex;

Which knowledge forces me to know,

And memory will not forego.

What but a soul could have the wit

To build me up for sin so fit?

So architects do square and hew

Green trees that in the forest grew.

If processing your thoughts itt helps you to form a thesis or essay ideas, then that seems like the most important thing, and you should continue posting. It's also possible (however unlikely) that readers with a specialized knowledge of your subject area will stumble onto this blog and offer advice.

Hi all.

Yes I am still alive.
Been writing consistently for weeks. I have one more research essay to go, due in a week.

The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Wallace Stevens, 1879 - 1955


Will speak in a week or so and I will give you are full update when I have finished the first year of my Masters.

Paris violence and its coverage;
The insidious ways violence and its representations entangle us

I was watching merely a grab of images from the Paris shootings of the last 24 hours, today. And a familiar sense of unease came over me.
Without sidelining the deaths of the 100 people it involves. However, one thing that these acts of violence also do, at least to me, is that I feel that it compromises and implicates me involuntarily.
What do I mean by that?

Well - the act of violence demands your attention. If you watch the coverage: you are forced to confront the images and in watching them it provokes a sense of voyeurism that I am not comfortable with. Even merely listening to reports of them, demands you to make a judgement about it - between those that are the victims and those that are the perpetrators. If, you do not see things in simple black and white terms, then sometimes the mere judgement of these acts brings you into a logic of violence and its responses.
Of course, as all of you guys would appreciate of my objections, there is a sense of escapism if you avoid it all. A casting off of responsibility that is, itself, a political judgment.
Either way, neither are a comfortable fit for me. But, it is what it is.

The compromise I have come up with, is to restrict myself to radio reports where possible.
I think the world can live with me not bearing witness to the debris of history. Yes, it means I only consider the violence in abstraction but that seems like the best option to me.

Stay safe and be kind to your fellow man.

Digger.

In drear nighted December

In drear nighted December,
Too happy, happy tree,
Thy branches ne’er remember
Their green felicity—
The north cannot undo them
With a sleety whistle through them
Nor frozen thawings glue them
From budding at the prime.

In drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy brook,
Thy bubblings ne’er remember
Apollo’s summer look;
But with a sweet forgetting,
They stay their crystal fretting,
Never, never petting
About the frozen time.

Ah! would ‘twere so with many
A gentle girl and boy—
But were there ever any
Writh’d not of passed joy?
The feel of not to feel it,
When there is none to heal it
Nor numbed sense to steel it,
Was never said in rhyme

John Keats

Finished final assignment for first year of my Master of Research.

Will do a full catch up and write up in the next 24 to 48 hours.



Temperatures rose to 42c here in Sydney today....
A related song....sort of. An oldie but a goodie.



Speak to later.

My year doing the Masters course

Sometimes it is actually better not to know what you are in for. Now I am not exactly saying that I would not have done my masters if I had had known what I was in for, but I cannot imagine that I would have been better prepared emotionally knowing precisely how much work I was in for. So, part boast/part reflection I thought I would put down approximately what my past 9 months have been like.

Two 13 week semesters.
8 contact hours 1st semester
10 contact hours 2nd semester

8 units altogether.
Whilst there were variations between most units.
The average unit had ~5000 words of written assignments + one oral assignment.
40000 thousand words + 8 20 min verbal presentations
Usually there were 12 weeks of textual studies for 6 of the units.
35 novels
20 films
30 poems
8 plays
40 short stories
3 background articles per week.

There were something like 20 written assignments. I had on average 10 secondary references in my work cited lists. Often it would take 2 or 3 scholarly articles to find 1 good article.
Which is just to indicate how many academic articles, book chapters etc that go into each assignment.

Door to door my commute was an hour each way....so with the reading, writing and travelling you can see how only 8-10 contact hours masks the actual working week.
The university had me sign a 15 hour maximum paid labour outside of university work. I ended up doing about 18 hours a week: 15 hours manual labour + some tutoring.
I estimate that I spent double the amount of time reading and writing for every contact hour. Although, this was not evenly distributed each working week.
Thus, my guess is my average working was approaching 50 hours excluding commutes.

Notably, all of that university work assumes that I did everything once. Well, of course each assignment requires drafts and readings are not just once...and it all builds and builds up in time and effort. Now, as anyone who has done an Arts, Fine Arts or 'Liberal' Arts degree knows you do not have to read every set text. When I did my first Arts degree, I cut back on boring weeks and with some courses only did the weeks where I was required to write on or present. The last two qualifications my teaching degree and this one, however, I made it a rule not to miss a thing: a lecture, a tute, a set text or additional reading. The only thing I sacrificed was some of the overall background reading for some of the courses.
I think doing everything has contributed to a significant improvement in my marks. Although, clearly age and experience helps - university education was wasted on the late teenage and early 20s man or boy that I was.
From what I know of Arts assessments it is very rare to get marks in the 90s for any essay yet not unheard of.

My guess for all my first year will be
2 High distinctions 85+
1 could be high distinctions
5 distinctions
HD = 1st class honours
D 2nd class honours

All indications would suggest that I will get my scholarship for next year.
From what I understand of university marking - each year the marking gets harder. And from undergraduate to graduate to post-graduate work - the level of marking gets harder.

My guess is that the increasing difficulty between 1st and 2nd year will also occur. However, I think the brutal schedule of first year is a means for preparing Master of research candidates for best success within my university. Whilst a 20,000 thesis is a order of magnitude greater than a 3000 word essay - this will be offset by the fact it is a singular project. I will need to produce an HD standard thesis to get funding for a Ph.D. You can do a Ph.D without it but you need to be able to afford to do it and convince someone to supervise your research. Which means it is impractical to do one without an H.D. (or at least it will be for me).

Submission date for my thesis will be October next year (assuming I get the scholarship).

My thesis is broadly speaking a textual analysis of Baconian ideas during Restoration debates of the 1660-1680s using 4 texts.
The research will be substantial.
The textual analysis will be a critical element to my work being significant.
The quality of my writing will have a significant impact between whether I get a D or an HD.
My first couple of ports of call will be to talk through where to begin and how to structure the research/reading part of the thesis with my Professor in the next couple of weeks.


Anyway - this is the first weekend where I am doing absolutely nothing. Not even thinking about my thesis apart from this post. I hope to decompress until Dec. 1.

A lot of you would not have been surprised, having followed the blog, by some if not all of the above. But I thought if you read it all within one post, you might have been as surprised as I was when I realised what I had done in total.

Finally got around to reading for pleasure: First cab off the rank was-->

Disgrace is a novel by J. M. Coetzee, published in 1999. It won the Booker Prize. The writer was also awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature four years after its publication.



The problems of interpreting the rape scene in Disgrace coalesces around how you construct your equivalencies. Within any act of interpretation we look at one representation and equate it with another representation or a set of moral values which can be crudely be described as drawing an equivalence between the two. What can often occur in complex and nuanced representations, like novels, is that there are intersecting and conflicting moral systems being explored by an author which can allow for multiple interpretations. Clearly, if you carry a strong set of pre-existing values with you as you interpret a literary object - the values can obscure or supplant alternative possibilities being presented in the text. When a work deals with gendered, class and racial discourses in acts of rape; then the moral hazard for the author and reader alike can reach crisis point.
Now I am not going to deconstruct the narrative implications of key parts of the rape scene here, but I would like put forward to a reader of Disgrace to consider the follow elements before passing judgement on Coetzee:
1) Why did he not show the rape itself?
2) Why do you think he depicts Lucy responding the way she does?
3) Rarely are Coetzee's main characters in most respects the standard by which you should seek the author's views.

Next book I am going to read is C by Tom McCarthy.

Stephanie Lynn "Stevie" Nicks (born May 26, 1948) is an American singer and songwriter, best known for her work with Fleetwood Mac and an extensive solo career, which collectively have produced over forty Top 50 hits and sold over 140 million albums. She was deemed "The Reigning Queen of Rock and Roll" and one of the "100 Greatest Singers of All Time" by Rolling Stone,[1][2] and, as a member of Fleetwood Mac, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998. As a solo artist, she has garnered eight Grammy Award nominations[3] and, with Fleetwood Mac, a further five.

FWIW, my experience is that expectations rise, but so does achievement, and overall there tends to be a rise in the marks awarded.

GJ.

C

Opening in England at the turn of the twentieth century, C is the story of a boy named Serge Carrefax, whose father spends his time experimenting with wireless communication while running a school for deaf children. Serge grows up amid the noise and silence with his brilliant but troubled older sister, Sophie: an intense sibling relationship that stays with him as he heads off into an equally troubled larger world. After a fling with a nurse at a Bohemian spa, Serge serves in World War I as a radio operator for reconnaissance planes. When his plane is shot down, Serge is taken to a German prison camp, from which he escapes. Back in London, he’s recruited for a mission to Cairo on behalf of the shadowy Empire Wireless Chain.

The figure of Hamlet haunts our culture like the Ghost haunts him. Arguably, no literary work, not even the Bible, is more familiar to us than Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Everyone knows at least six words from the play; often people know many more. Yet the play—Shakespeare’s longest—is more than “passing strange” and becomes deeply unfamiliar when considered closely. Reading Hamlet alongside other writers, philosophers, and psychoanalysts—Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Freud, Lacan, Nietzsche, Melville, and Joyce—Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster consider the political context and stakes of Shakespeare’s play, its relation to religion, the movement of desire, and the incapacity to love.


Simon Critchley (born 27 February 1960) is an English philosopher. He writes about the history of philosophy, political theory, religion, ethics, aesthetics, literature and theatre.[2] He studied philosophy and has held visiting professorship at numerous universities. He has authored many books, and his work has been acknowledged. He argues that religious disappointment raises the question of meaning and has to, as he sees it, deal with the problem of nihilism; political disappointment provokes the question of justice and raises the need for a coherent ethics.

Democritus (/dɪˈmɒkrɪtəs/; Greek: Δημόκριτος Dēmókritos, meaning "chosen of the people"; c. 460 – c. 370 BC) was an influential Ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher primarily remembered today for his formulation of an atomic theory of the universe.[3]

Democritus was born in Abdera, Thrace[4] around 460 BC, although, some thought it was 490 BC. His exact contributions are difficult to disentangle from those of his mentor Leucippus, as they are often mentioned together in texts. Their speculation on atoms, taken from Leucippus, bears a passing and partial resemblance to the nineteenth-century understanding of atomic structure that has led some to regard Democritus as more of a scientist than other Greek philosophers; however, their ideas rested on very different bases.[5] Largely ignored in ancient Athens, Democritus was nevertheless well known to his fellow northern-born philosopher Aristotle. Plato is said to have disliked him so much that he wished all his books burned.[6] Many consider Democritus to be the "father of modern science".[



Rembrandt, The Young Rembrandt as Democritus the Laughing Philosopher (1628-1629).