via Interesting Literature
The best poems by Poe, selected by Dr Oliver Tearle
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) was a pioneer of the short story form, but he was also an accomplished poet. Below, we’ve selected ten of Poe’s very best poems and offered a short introduction to each of them.
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via Arts and Letters Daily: Martin Tyrrell in Dublin Review of Books
The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984by Dorian Lynskey, Picador, 368 pp, £16.99, 978-1509890736
“It wouldn’t have been so gloomy if I had not been so ill,” Orwell supposedly said of Nineteen Eighty-Four. And even on the closest reading the novel seems a relentlessly cheerless affair. Airstrip One ‑ previously England ‑ is shabby and neglected, a grim place: “underfed people … in leaky shoes … patched up nineteenth century houses that smelt always of cabbage and bad lavatories”. Winston Smith ends up not so much defeated as effaced. The Party’s rule seems total. It can snoop into your house and scan your face for symptoms of dissent ‑ anything less than the compulsory look of “quiet optimism”. Not only that, it can make you doubt your own memory, question the very evidence of your senses, reject that most basic a priori: 2+2=4. And if it hasn’t got you, chances are it has your child, schooled to dob you in without a second thought.
Nor will things improve. Big Brother and co are systematically rewriting the past, the better to tighten their grip on the present and thereby predetermine the ghastly future: “a boot stamping on a human face ‑ for ever”.
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via Boing Boing by Rob Beschizza
Enjoy this video collection of hot rivets being put in. I must say, from beginning to end, I was ... engrossed.
Hot riveting is an efficient joining method in which two materials are permanently joined at specific points by a form-closing process. This process is also known as heat staking or hot forming.
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via Ancient Origins by Ashely Cowie
Yazilikaya, Hittite sanctuary and astronomical observatory , Chamber B. Source: Kpisimon / CC BY-SA 3.0 .
Yazılıkaya is a 3,200-year-old building that was known to have been central in religious ceremonies in the capital city of the ancient Hittite Empire , but according to a new scientific theory, it might have served as a working calendar and a sacred clock.
In Turkish, Yazılıkaya means “inscribed rock" and while this expansive Bronze Age site with its incredible incised carvings has been studied for several decades, a team of experts now proposes that it was a functional tool serving as a time keeping device . A massive 3D shadow-clock, if you will.
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via Interesting Literature
‘Prelude’ is one of Katherine Mansfield’s longest, and finest, short stories. Centring on the Burnell family as they move house in New Zealand, ‘Prelude’ is the opening story in Katherine Mansfield’s first ‘mature’ collection of fiction, Bliss and Other Stories (1920), although the story had first been published two years earlier. Below, we attempt a brief summary of the ‘plot’ of ‘Prelude’, which can be read in full here.
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via 3 Quarks Daily by Anitra Pavlico
Most of the modern revival of Stoicism has centred on the works of Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius–all from the “Late Stoa,” or the third phase in the history of Stoicism. No complete works survive from either the early or middle period.
Chrysippus (c. 279-206 B.C.E.) was one of the most influential early Stoics. He studied with Cleanthes, who studied directly with Zeno, who founded the school in 262 B.C.E. You won’t see his quotes on any inspirational desktop art, but Chrysippus was perhaps the one most responsible for keeping Stoicism alive in its early years. A later Stoic saying was, “If Chrysippus had not existed, neither would the Stoa.”
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via Arts and Letters Daily: Craig Raine in The Spectator
Charm, good looks and fearlessness apparently enabled him to seduce any woman at a party — to the fury of attendant boyfriends
Freud in Dublin, aged 30; and Lady Caroline Blackwood, his second wife, photographed by Evelyn Hofer at the time of their divorce
Amedeo Modigliani thought Nina Hamnett, muse, painter, memoirist, had ‘the best tits in Europe’. She fell 40 feet from a window and was impaled on the basement railings. Not suicide. She was peeing out of the window, the shared lodging-house lavatory being too distant. On her deathbed, her breathing was like a harmonica. The collector Roland Penrose liked being tied up by a dominatrix, a woman wrestler, whom he and his photographer wife, Lee Miller, brought to England and shared. The busy philosopher A. J. Ayer was known as Juan Don. When Isabel Rawsthorne finally had sex with the persistent, overweight sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, she reported that it was ‘exhausting’. She had to do all the work. Auden predicted that his last words would be: ‘I’ve never done this before.’ Michael Tree, who married Anne Cavendish, the Duke of Devonshire’s daughter, was a rattle known as Radio Belgravia — which might be an appropriate subtitle for The Lives of Lucian Freud.
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via Ancient Origins by B. B. Wagner
The Amazons were a tribe of warrior women. ( Atelier Sommerland / Adobe Stock).
Famous ancient Greek historian Herodotus once wrote of the Amazons - or as he called them Oier Pata (‘Killers of Men’) – a tribe of fierce warrior women. Though in today’s world, the name ‘Amazon’ is strongly associated with Jeff Bezos’s mighty online delivery empire; it still carries a heavy association with these gender-role breaking, fist fighting, sword swinging, arrow shooting, single-breasted warrior woman of antiquity. For centuries, they were dismissed as mere legend, but in the last decades, detailed investigations have revealed that the Amazons were very real, and they were a fearsome force to be reckoned with.
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via Interesting Literature
Anne Bradstreet
Poets often concern themselves with abstract notions such as love and desire, but what about something as physical and tangible as the human body? Many poets have sung its praises over the centuries, pondering the link between the body and the soul, admiring the beauty of the human form, or reflecting upon the changes that a human body undergoes. Here are ten of the very best poems about the body, and bodies.
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via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
Founded in 1623 in Turkey and now based in Norwell, Massachusetts, Zildjian has manufactured cymbals continuously for almost 400 years. This is how they do it now
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