The Real Tragedy Of Beth March
posted by Morgan Meis to 3 Quarks Daily: Carmen Maria Machado at The Paris Review:
ILLUSTRATION FROM LITTLE WOMEN, 1869. COURTESY OF HOUGHTON LIBRARY AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY. PUBLIC DOMAIN, VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS.
People who have studied anything about Little Women know that the novel is based, roughly, on Louisa’s family, a clan of thinkers, artists, and transcendentalists who rubbed elbows with some of the premier minds of their time: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller.
Continue reading
==============================
The hidden, magical, inclusive world of Fairytale Instagram
via ResearchBuzz Firehose: Jess Joho in Mashable
Fairytale Instagram doesn't pretend to be authentic, but it finds something real.
Instagram is usually built around blurring the line between fantasy and reality in all the wrong ways.
Scrolling through your feed now is like an endless barrage of monotonous everyday bullshit framed and filtered to look like perfect, impossible ideals of “authenticity”.
Here's this simple vegan meal you can make at home right now – if you've got all these specialised, expensive ingredients on hand!
Anyone can hike across this beautifully remote canyon – if you've got six months of hellish marathon training under your belt!
Spend your weekend getaway at this perfectly curated, artfully designed Airbnb – with no running water!
Then there's Fairytale Instagram.
Continue reading
==============================
Mysterious rolling balls of poop alarm authorities in Great Smoky Mountains
via Boing Boing by Xeni Jardin
In an extremely weird National Park Service notice, tourists are advised that these poop-y looking brown balls of mystery crap that have been observed rolling over trails in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park are indeed critter poop, and nothing is wrong.
Continue reading
==============================
10 of the Best Sad Poems to Make You Cry
via Interesting Literature
The greatest, saddest poems selected by Dr Oliver Tearle
Previously, we’ve considered poems of farewell and break-up poems, as well as classic elegies in English and poems about depression and melancholy. But what about ‘sad poems’: poems designed to make us cry? What makes a sad poem a good sad poem? What makes us shed a tear? Here, we’ve gathered together ten poems which we think are guaranteed to bring a lump to the throat and a tear to the eye.
Continue reading
and do make sure you have a box of tissues available!
==============================
How A Handful of Yamnaya Culture Nomads Became the Fathers of Europe
via Ancient Origins by Caleb Strom
The Yamnaya came to Europe from modern-day western Russia or the Ukraine.
Source: katiekk2 / Adobe Stock.The origins of modern Europeans are shrouded in mystery and wracked by controversy. Archaeologists and linguists have long debated the origins of the Indo-European language family as well as the origins of civilisation and settled life in Europe. Recent discoveries in past years suggest that the origin of European culture, as well as some central Asian cultures, is within an archaeological culture called the Yamnaya.
Continue reading
A fascinating story with maps and illustrations.
==============================
Sex, Flesh, God: Towards A Theology Of Carnal Life
post by Morgan Meis to 3 Quarks Daily: Wesley Hill at Marginalia Review:
Paul Griffiths. Christian Flesh. Stanford University Press, 2019. pp 176. Hardback. $25.00.
To put it mildly, Christianity has a complicated relationship with flesh.
The same Paul who declared the Lord’s ownership of the body also bequeathed to subsequent Christian history a disdain for physicality through his – misunderstood, as most interpreters now think, but no less influential for being so – sharp contrast between the life of the flesh and the new life bestowed by and in the Spirit of Jesus.
Stark affirmations such as the one he wrote to the Corinthians – “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” – at minimum lent confidence to later Christian denigrators of the body who imagined salvation as an escape from fleshly imprisonment and, at maximum, convinced generations of Christians that following Jesus ought to entail hating the body.
Continue reading
==============================
Scan of a 1921 book about insects
via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
Public Domain Review calls our attention to the gorgeously illustrated 1921 Fabre’s Book of Insects.
Continue reading
==============================
Well-Versed: Joe Nutt’s The Point of Poetry
via Interesting Literature
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews a fun new book about the point of reading and studying poetry
What is the point of poetry? Do we read it because we enjoy it? Some do; many are still waiting for that one poem to come along and transform their opinion; many more keep well away from it with the exception of funerals and buying greetings cards with emetic verses inscribed within.
Many claim it has saved their life, or at least made them feel a little less low during dark times (Stephen Fry once picked Philip Larkin’s depressing poem ‘Aubade’ as one of the poems he turns to when feeling down, because simply seeing your own grim feelings expressed so deftly and movingly lifts the spirits by showing you what human beings can achieve with words). Many hapless students struggle through Shakespearean iambic pentameter or Wilfred Owen’s war poems without ever having that moment where it all ‘clicks’ for them.
Continue reading
==============================
The Punctilious Planning, Design, and Construction of the Ancient Round City of Baghdad
via Ancient Origins by Dhwty
The ancient city Madinat al-Salam - Baghdad’s Round City. Source: histoireislamique.
Baghdad is the capital of Iraq but whereas the country of Iraq was founded only in 1958, the city of Baghdad had been established about 1200 years before by the Abbasids. Baghdad was built originally as a round city and was considered to be an architectural marvel at that time. It was soon overshadowed, however, by the settlement that was established on the opposite side of the river, which developed into the city’s core and remains so till this day.
Continue reading
==============================
Jealous stag beetles fight over girl friend
via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
Male stag beetles' horns are longer than their body, and these two boy beetles put them to use in a scuffle to win the heart of a girl beetle. The winner mates with the girl beetle of his dreams, but then makes a terrible mistake.
posted by Morgan Meis to 3 Quarks Daily: Carmen Maria Machado at The Paris Review:
ILLUSTRATION FROM LITTLE WOMEN, 1869. COURTESY OF HOUGHTON LIBRARY AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY. PUBLIC DOMAIN, VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS.
People who have studied anything about Little Women know that the novel is based, roughly, on Louisa’s family, a clan of thinkers, artists, and transcendentalists who rubbed elbows with some of the premier minds of their time: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller.
Continue reading
==============================
via ResearchBuzz Firehose: Jess Joho in Mashable
Fairytale Instagram doesn't pretend to be authentic, but it finds something real.
Instagram is usually built around blurring the line between fantasy and reality in all the wrong ways.
Scrolling through your feed now is like an endless barrage of monotonous everyday bullshit framed and filtered to look like perfect, impossible ideals of “authenticity”.
Here's this simple vegan meal you can make at home right now – if you've got all these specialised, expensive ingredients on hand!
Anyone can hike across this beautifully remote canyon – if you've got six months of hellish marathon training under your belt!
Spend your weekend getaway at this perfectly curated, artfully designed Airbnb – with no running water!
Then there's Fairytale Instagram.
Continue reading
==============================
via Boing Boing by Xeni Jardin
In an extremely weird National Park Service notice, tourists are advised that these poop-y looking brown balls of mystery crap that have been observed rolling over trails in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park are indeed critter poop, and nothing is wrong.
Continue reading
==============================
via Interesting Literature
The greatest, saddest poems selected by Dr Oliver Tearle
Previously, we’ve considered poems of farewell and break-up poems, as well as classic elegies in English and poems about depression and melancholy. But what about ‘sad poems’: poems designed to make us cry? What makes a sad poem a good sad poem? What makes us shed a tear? Here, we’ve gathered together ten poems which we think are guaranteed to bring a lump to the throat and a tear to the eye.
Continue reading
and do make sure you have a box of tissues available!
==============================
via Ancient Origins by Caleb Strom
The Yamnaya came to Europe from modern-day western Russia or the Ukraine.
Source: katiekk2 / Adobe Stock.The origins of modern Europeans are shrouded in mystery and wracked by controversy. Archaeologists and linguists have long debated the origins of the Indo-European language family as well as the origins of civilisation and settled life in Europe. Recent discoveries in past years suggest that the origin of European culture, as well as some central Asian cultures, is within an archaeological culture called the Yamnaya.
Continue reading
A fascinating story with maps and illustrations.
==============================
post by Morgan Meis to 3 Quarks Daily: Wesley Hill at Marginalia Review:
Paul Griffiths. Christian Flesh. Stanford University Press, 2019. pp 176. Hardback. $25.00.
To put it mildly, Christianity has a complicated relationship with flesh.
The same Paul who declared the Lord’s ownership of the body also bequeathed to subsequent Christian history a disdain for physicality through his – misunderstood, as most interpreters now think, but no less influential for being so – sharp contrast between the life of the flesh and the new life bestowed by and in the Spirit of Jesus.
Stark affirmations such as the one he wrote to the Corinthians – “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” – at minimum lent confidence to later Christian denigrators of the body who imagined salvation as an escape from fleshly imprisonment and, at maximum, convinced generations of Christians that following Jesus ought to entail hating the body.
Continue reading
==============================
via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
Public Domain Review calls our attention to the gorgeously illustrated 1921 Fabre’s Book of Insects.
Continue reading
==============================
via Interesting Literature
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews a fun new book about the point of reading and studying poetry
What is the point of poetry? Do we read it because we enjoy it? Some do; many are still waiting for that one poem to come along and transform their opinion; many more keep well away from it with the exception of funerals and buying greetings cards with emetic verses inscribed within.
Many claim it has saved their life, or at least made them feel a little less low during dark times (Stephen Fry once picked Philip Larkin’s depressing poem ‘Aubade’ as one of the poems he turns to when feeling down, because simply seeing your own grim feelings expressed so deftly and movingly lifts the spirits by showing you what human beings can achieve with words). Many hapless students struggle through Shakespearean iambic pentameter or Wilfred Owen’s war poems without ever having that moment where it all ‘clicks’ for them.
Continue reading
==============================
via Ancient Origins by Dhwty
The ancient city Madinat al-Salam - Baghdad’s Round City. Source: histoireislamique.
Baghdad is the capital of Iraq but whereas the country of Iraq was founded only in 1958, the city of Baghdad had been established about 1200 years before by the Abbasids. Baghdad was built originally as a round city and was considered to be an architectural marvel at that time. It was soon overshadowed, however, by the settlement that was established on the opposite side of the river, which developed into the city’s core and remains so till this day.
Continue reading
==============================
via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
Male stag beetles' horns are longer than their body, and these two boy beetles put them to use in a scuffle to win the heart of a girl beetle. The winner mates with the girl beetle of his dreams, but then makes a terrible mistake.
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