“Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell,’ Holly advised him. ‘That was Doc’s mistake. He was always lugging home wild things. A hawk with a hurt wing. One time it was a full-grown bobcat with a broken leg. But you can’t give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they’re strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. That’s how you’ll end up, Mr. Bell. If you let yourself love a wild thing. You’ll end up looking at the sky.” — from Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote
Archive for juni, 2014
dynamite
If your brains were dynamite there wouldn’t be enough to blow your hat off. (Kurt Vonnegut)
good movie bad movie
People see so many movies that when they finally see one not so bad as the others, they think it’s great. (Charles Bukowski)
religion
“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.” (Seneca the Younger)
fejlfindingsværktøj
Hvad skal man med et fejlfindingsværktøj, når man er gift med et? (Walther F. Lake)
codex borgia
At a dark portal between cosmic realms
A wizard found himself stood up by the Morning Star —
Evening his element as the Rain God’s is water.
She who has the power of giving flowers
Promises everything is alive
As long as the night sky stays fresh and new.
“Only a moment here on earth.
It is untrue that we have come
To live here on earth.”
On a golden dais laid over the broken stones
In the declining shadow
Between the rising of the Morning Star
And the setting of the Evening Star
The palace of the Smoking Mirror is built.
The second temple is not like the first.
| WIKIPEDIA |
med og uden arme
Hvis det kunne betale sig at arbejde, blev de fattige født uden arme. (Walther F. Lake)
faldstyrke
– har du tænkt over hvor mange trin man sparer ved at falde ned ad trappen ..?
– nej, det har jeg i grunden ikke …
kurt vonnegut
What is flirtatiousness but an argument that life must go on and on and on? (Kurt Vonnegut)
erindring
Of course I think of the past and of Paris, what else is there to remember? (Djuna Barnes)
the iron man
The Iron Man came to the top of the cliff. How far had he walked? Nobody knows. Where did he come from? Nobody knows. How was he made? Nobody knows. Taller than a house the Iron Man stood at the top of the cliff, at the very brink, in the darkness. (Ted Hughes, “The Iron Man”)
naturlige fjender
Hvad skal man med naturlige fjender, når man har tilsætningsstoffer? (Walther F. Lake)
PORIUS
The setting is the Kingdom of Edeyrnion in North Wales, where the indigenous Forest people have ruled by the Brythonic Celts on behalf of Rome. Prince Einion, ruler of Edeyrnion, owes allegiance to the Emperor Arthur, who rules Britain for Rome. While historians tells us that Rome withdrew its army from Britain around 410 AD, Roman influence is still strong in Powys’s late 5th century. But in the autumn of 499 AD the Saxons, under their leader Colgrim, are advancing on Edeyrnion and the Forest people have joined with them against their Brythonic rulers.
The main plot follows the various experiences of Porius, the heir to the throne of Edeyrnion, the novel’s eponymous protagonist, and his struggle to gain freedom from the influence of his parents. This in particular involves resolving his divided loyalties between Rome and the indigenous peoples of Wales. Porius himself not only has Roman, Brythonic, ancestors but an ancestor who was an aboriginal giant as well as relatives amongst the Forest people. Porius gains maturity, and with it personal freedom, through a number of significant experiences, including especially this encounter with the aboriginal giants of Wales, as well as the profound influence of the magician, prophet, and possibly the god Chronos/Saturn, Myrddin, who reinforces the values, and develops on, the teachings of Porius’s earlier teacher, the Christian heretic Pelagius. A major climax in the novel comes when Porius mates with the young giantess, he names Creiddylad, one of two surviving Cewri, or giants, the true aboriginals of Britain. This is immediately followed by the violent deaths of Creiddyladd and her father.
However, this novel goes beyond Porius’s experience, at times focusing on other characters. This includes the highly significant scene involving Myrddin’s magical transformation of the owl Blodeuwedd into a young girl. Another important episode occurs when Morfydd, and Euronwy, Porius’s mother, unite “to aid the endangered House of Cunedda”. This involves Morfydd “sacrificing her love for Rhun” by agreeing to a political marriage with Porius, “in order to create harmony between the Roman and aboriginal peoples”. Then there is the scene which involves Brochvael, Morfydd’s scholarly father, who represents classical Roman culture, confronting the aboriginal worlds of Sibylla and the Druids, which dramatizes the novel’s central political conflict in yet another way.
The novel’s final climax comes with Porius’s “rescue” of Myrddin from his entombment by the enchantress Nineue on the summit of Snowdon, Wales’ highest mountain. A scene where, according to Powys scholar C. A. Coates, Porius saves “the good magician” by resisting “the temptation of the bad fairy”. However, the ending is ambiguous, and “Merlin’s stature at the end of the novel is such to preclude any sense that his is not in fact the ultimate power”. Powys provides invaluable commentary on Nineue in his “The Characters of the Book”. However, by freeing Myrddin Porius makes possible Myrddin’s return in two thousand years to re-establish the Saturnian Age of Gold.
At the end of the novel Ederynion remains free from Saxon domination, a freedom that it will retain and which will shape the subsequent history of the Welsh: “The new nation, the Cymry, is to be born as a result of the Saxon invasion”. And Porius himself has also gained the necessary personal freedom and maturity he that will need as the future ruler of Edeyrnion. | WIKIPEDIA |
JOHN COWPER POWYS
In Powys’s words this novel’s “heroine is the Grail”, and its central concern is with the various myths and legends along with history associated with Glastonbury. It is also possible to see most of the main characters, John Geard, Sam Dekker, John Crow, and Owen Evans as undertaking a Grail quest. Not only is A Glastonbury Romance concerned with the legend that Joseph of Arimathea brought the Grail, a vessel containing the blood of Christ, to the town, but the further tradition that King Arthur was buried there. In addition one of the novels main characters, the Welshman Owen Evans, introduces the idea that the Grail has a Welsh (Celtic), pagan pre-Christian origin. The main sources for Powys’s ideas on mythology and the Grail legend are Sir John Rhys’s Studies in the Arthurian Legend, R. S. Loomis’s Celtic Myth and Arthurian Romance, and the works of Jessie L. Weston, including From Ritual to Romance. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is another probable influence. A central aspect of A Glastonbury Romance is the attempt by John Geard, ex-minister now the mayor of Glastonbury, to restore Glastonbury to its medieval glory as a place of religious pilgrimage. On the other hand, the Glastonbury industrialist Philip Crow, along with John and Mary Crow, and Tom Barter, who are like him are from Norfolk, view the myths and legends of the town with contempt. Philip’s vision is of a future with more mines and more factories. John Crow, however, as he is penniless, takes on the task of organizing a pageant for Geard. At the same time an alliance of Anarchists, Marxists, and Jacobins try to turn Glastonbury into a commune. | WIKIPEDIA |
advarsel!
Hvis gedebukken har en af sine dårlige dage, kan han finde på at stange. Hvis han har en af sine gode dage, rammer han!
enjoy
Enjoy the little things in life, for one day you’ll look back and realize they were big things. (Kurt Vonnegut)
VISIONS OF CODY
Visions of Cody is derived from experimental spontaneous prose inserts that Kerouac added to the original manuscript of On the Road in 1951-52. Part of the novel is a fast-forward recapitulation of the events described in On the Road, which was also about Kerouac and Cassady. When Kerouac appeared on The Steve Allen Show in 1959, he secretly read from the introduction to the then-unpublished Visions of Cody although he was supposedly reading from On The Road, the book he was holding.
The first section of the book is essentially a collection of short stream-of-consciousness essays, which Kerouac called “sketches”, many simply describing elements of Duluoz’s (Kerouac’s) post-World War II New York City environment, from the texture and smells of a lunch counter to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, or minor events like the decision to masturbate in a public restroom—all interlaced with Kerouac’s internal dialogue. Along the way through these descriptions, Duluoz meanders towards a decision to go visit Cody in San Francisco.
The second section consists mainly of the transcription of taped conversations between Kerouac and Cassady (and occasionally “Evelyn”—Cassady’s last wife, Carolyn and various friends) that extended over five nights as they drank and smoked marijuana. This is followed by a brief section entitled “Imitation of the Tape,” a writing experiment by Kerouac in which he attempted to work from the spontaneity and speech patterns of the tape. The remainder of the book contains Kerouac’s recounting of his travels with Cassady and the effect they had on their spiraling relationship. WIKIPEDIA
erindringer til tiden
“Hvis jeg ikke husker meget forkert.” Det sagde han altid, når han var i tvivl om noget. (Walther F. Lake)
luftguitar og fluer
Man kan ikke leve af at spille luftguitar, men det holder fluerne væk. (Walther F. Lake)
MAINSPRING
Clockpunk is similar to steampunk in that it portrays Renaissance-era science and technology based on pre-modern designs, in the vein of Mainspring by Jay Lake, and Whitechapel Gods by S. M. Peters. | RETRO-FUTURISME |
A sub-genre of the speculative historical fiction genre called Steampunk. Clockpunk is characterized by modern technologies accomplished using clockwork mechanisms and generally excluding steam power, electricity, and the internal combustion engine. The chronological setting for Clockpunk fiction is pre-Industrial Revoluion, whereas steampunk is late 19th or early 20th century. A Clockpunk novel might include a world, Earth or another planet, which has been so dramatically revolutionized by DaVinci’s mechanical inventions that its technology rivals our computers, phones, etc., while most other factors (some combination of social structure, ploitics, customs, clothing, etc.) would remail relatively true to the 15th century. | URBAN DICTIONARY |
high blood pressure
“Her blood pressure is so high there is snow on it.” (Dorothy Parker)