Nepenthe

Edgar Allan Poe once wrote an essay called “The Philosophy of Composition,” to explain why he wrote “The Raven” backward. The poem tells the story of a man who, “once upon a midnight dreary,” while mourning his dead love, Lenore, answers a tapping at his chamber door, to find “darkness there and nothing more.” He peers into the darkness, “dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before,” and meets a silence broken only by his whispered word, “Lenore?” He closes the door. The tapping starts again. He flings open his shutter and, “with many a flirt and flutter,” in flies a raven, “grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore.” The bird speaks just one word: “Nevermore.” That word is the poem’s last, but it’s where Poe began. He started, he said, “at the end, where all works of art should begin,” and he “first put pen to paper” at what became the third-to-last stanza: “Prophet,” said I, “thing of evil! prophet still if bird or devil! By that heaven that bends above u...

«The monstrous homogenization of our world has now almost destroyed the map, any map, by making every place on it exactly like every other place, and leaving no blanks….As in the Mandelbrot fractal set, the enormously large and the infinitesimally small are exactly the same, and the same leads always to the same again; there is no other; there is no escape, because there is nowhere else. In reinventing the world of intense, unreproducible, local knowledge, seemingly by a denial or evasion of current reality, fantasists are perhaps trying to assert and explore a larger reality than we now allow ourselves. They are trying to restore the sense - to regain the knowledge - that there is somewhere else, anywhere else, where other people may live another kind of life. The literature of imagination, even when tragic, is reassuring, not necessarily in the sense of offering nostalgic comfort, but because it offers a world large enough to contain alternatives and therefore offers hope. » Ursula K...

The Portuguese novelist António Lobo Antunes discovered his literary vocation while delivering babies, performing amputations, and carving up corpses. Lobo Antunes trained as a doctor, and in the early nineteen-seventies, during military service, he was dispatched to Angola, near the end of a futile war in which the faltering Portuguese empire grappled to retain its African colony. In a makeshift infirmary, he lopped off limbs while a queasy quartermaster—disqualified from operating because the sight of blood made him sick—turned away and recited instructions from a textbook. Lobo Antunes also assisted a witch doctor who presided over births. As he recalls in a new volume of essays and short stories, “The Fat Man and Infinity” (translated by Margaret Jull Costa; Norton; $26.95), he spent hours struggling “to pull living babies from half-dead mothers” and sometimes emerged into the daylight “holding in my hands a small tremulous life,” while mango trees rustled overhead and mandrills lo...

Sat Apr 18, 2:32 pm ET ROME – Rita Levi Montalcini , a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, said Saturday that even though she is about to turn 100, her mind is sharper than it was she when she was 20. Levi Montalcini, who also serves as a senator for life in Italy, celebrates her 100th birthday on Wednesday, and she spoke at a ceremony held in her honor by the European Brain Research Institute . She shared the 1986 Nobel Prize for Medicine with American Stanley Cohen for discovering mechanisms that regulate the growth of cells and organs. "At 100, I have a mind that is superior — thanks to experience — than when I was 20," she told the party, complete with a large cake for her. The Turin-born Levi Montalcini recoun...

So says Empire magazine in its 20th anniversary edition: We’ve known for a while that Peter Jackson and Guillermo Del Toro’s eagerly-awaited adaptation of the Lord Of The Rings prequel, The Hobbit , would comprise two movies, due in December 2011 and 2012. But the make-up of those two movies has been up for debate… until now. We spoke exclusively to both Del Toro and Jackson for our birthday issue, and they told us the latest, which is… “We’ve decided to have The Hobbit span the two movies, including the White Council and the comings and goings of Gandalf to Dol Guldur,” says Del Toro. “We decided it would be a mistake to try to cram everything into one movie,” adds Jackson. “The essential brief was to do The Hobbit, and it allows us to make The Hobbit in a little more style, if you like, of the [LOTR] trilogy.” So there you go. The second film will not, as had previously been suggested, a film that will bridge the 60-year gap between The Hobbit and the start of Fellowship Of The Ri...

minus the typos, they came up with a worthy translation ;) (and I had to correct the typos) (and this thanx to Poison Ivy ) #1. Desenrascanço (Portuguese) Means: To pull a MacGyver. This is the art of slapping together a solution to a problem at the last minute, with no advanced planning, and no resources. It's the coat hanger you use to fish your car keys out of the toilet, the emergency mustache you hastily construct out of pubic hair. What's interesting about desenrascanço (literally "to disentangle" yourself out of a bad situation), the Portuguese word for these last-minute solutions, is what is says about their culture. Where most of us were taught the Boy Scout slogan "be prepared," and are constantly hassled if we don't plan every little thing ahead, the Portuguese value just the opposite. Coming up with frantic, last-minute improvisations that somehow work is considered one of the most valued skills there; they even teach it in universit...

1930-2009 (most interesting: The musicians inspired by Ballard ) His agent Margaret Hanbury said the author had been ill "for several years" and had died on Sunday morning. Despite being referred to as a science fiction writer, Jim Ballard said his books were instead "picturing the psychology of the future". His most acclaimed novel was Empire of the Sun, based on his childhood in a Japanese prison camp in China. I remember a lot of the casual brutality and beatings-up that went on JG Ballard ...

More from the Telegraph Gallery

One of the things that has always fascinated me about Viggo Mortensen is the way he does ambiguity. The way he can look cruel and gentle at the same time. The way he can embrace extremes of danger and empathy. In Good his ambiguity excels itself. He's a Nazi you can't hate because you understand him. You warm to him, even. He's vulnerable, he's vain. He has been gradually seduced into the Nazi movement. He couldn't help himself. Before we meet, in London, I see him in the street, outside the Charlotte Street Hotel. He's crouched over his phone. He's wearing the navy and red football shirt of his team, San Lorenzo, from Argentina. He grew up there. "So these are my heroes. The one group of people or thing I support unconditionally. They can do no wrong," he says with a half-smile and sits down in the cosy-chaired library. His hair is long. His eyes are piercing, kind. Full of fun, full of melancholy. "I don't like people who get into fights...

TAKEN BY STORM - The Album Art of Storm Thorgerson: 40th Anniversary Edition • ONLY 500 SETS WORLDWIDE SIGNED BY STORM THORGERSON • Includes 4 Fine Art silkscreen prints produced by the world-famous Coriander Studios Rest of the Gallery at Telegraph

ON the surface it was the perfect transaction. An intellectual playwright with an unfulfilled thirst for sexual experience and a sexually uninhibited movie star with a hunger for intellectual respectability. Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe may have been made for each other, in another life. The problem was that beneath the surface of complementary desires there lurked psychological monsters just waiting to destroy the liaison. As many have discovered, it is much harder to control the physical sexual impulse than it is to harness the intellectual creative one. To paraphrase Monroe’s final, uncompleted film, something had to give. Jeffrey Meyers’s new book The Genius And The Goddess offers an intriguing insight into his playwright friend’s fascination with the actress and charts the trajectory of a relationship doomed to self-destruct. Monroe met ...

Some of my favorites. Total Film (I've bought and read many of your magazines, but now the only time I seem to have on my hands is online, not IRL :)

All of Werner Herzog (which is to say much of Klaus Kinski) Nosferatu the Vampyre , Sunday, 26th, 10 pm at Fórum Lisboa

Aqui :-[

The days of judging a book by its cover are drawing to a close. Publishers have finally tapped into the MTV generation, and now it is possible to make your literary choices in advance online by watching a sequence of rapid-fire images accompanied by a thumping score, big flashing words and, if you're lucky, a deep-voiced American talking about 'one man' and 'his quest to find meaning in a world gone mad'. Yes: there are now trailers for books and soon, according to Steve Osgoode, director of online marketing at HarperCollins Canada, they will be everywhere. Turning literature into moving pictures is a risky business. So how does one go about representing a 400-page tome with delicate themes and complex characterisation in a 40-second video? 'It's a challenge,' admits Osgoode, who launched HarperCollins's internet-based 'book trailer' programme earlier in the year. 'Trailers work better for some titles than others, books that have r...

Found in my dearest friend Joanicas blog Van Gogh St. George's Day Roald Dahl's Birthday Magritte Braille LEGO Halloween Father's Day Eath Day (very hobbit-like, IMHO) And some for the Athens 2004 Olympics: Google Logos Collection (official and unofficial :)