Nepenthe

and the art of Chris Madden ;)

From Oatmeal , god bless ;)                      

Thanx to Mawalien

It takes six people to lift it and has been recorded as the largest book in the world, yet the splendid Klencke Atlas, presented to Charles II on his restoration and now 350 years old, has never been publicly displayed with its pages open. That glaring omission is to be rectified, it was announced by the British Library today, when it will be displayed as one of the stars of its big summer exhibition about maps. The summer show will feature about 100 maps, considered some of the greatest in the world, with three-quarters of them going on display for the first time. At the exhibition's core will be wall maps, many of them huge, which tell a story that is much more than geography . Many of them, said the library's head of map collections, Peter Barber: "Hold their own with great works of art." He added: "This is the first map exhibition of its type because, normally, when you think of maps you think of geography, or measurement or accuracy." The exhibition ai...

“Catcher in the Rye,” J. D. Salinger’s most famous book, has been a pop-culture icon for a half-century, for better and for worse. Rock-and-roll bands have been particularly attracted to it and to its anti-hero, Holden Caulfield, who has what can only be called a rock-and-roll personality: both passionate and cynical, protective of innocence and drawn to beauty. Artists like Billy Joel, the Offspring, and Old 97s have mentioned the book in their lyrics. Green Day even recorded a song called “Who Wrote Holden Caulfield” on its second album, “Kerplunk.” Of all the songs written about, against, or in thrall to the work of J. D. Salinger, one of the strangest is one of the most straightforward: “Catcher in the Rye,” by Guns N’ Roses, which appeared on the band’s almost infinitely delayed “Chinese Democracy.” The song appears to be about childhood abuse and the loss of innocence, both themes in the novel, and also about the way that shattered innocence can trigger a cycle of violence. A...

Website Image courtesy of BoingBoing During Napoleon’s retreat from Russia in the War of 1812, cavalry officers Valentine and Oscar are separated from the main army by a brutal blizzard. They think the worst thing waiting out there in the snow for them is Death. They could not be more wrong. The two soldiers stumble across an ancient conflict between beings more powerful than humanity can imagine, a conflict which now threatens to consume the Earth and all upon it – because those who have stood in the horror’s path, the few bastions of light, are going home. Valentine is a fantasy / thriller graphic novel series by writer Alex de Campi and artist Christine Larsen . It is available in 14 languages and counting. You can’t buy it in a comic book shop because it’s not a traditional comic; it’s a project which has been tailored specifically to be enjoyed on wireless devices: iPhone, Android, e-Readers and of course your laptop. This means rather than pages, we have screens – all the b...

Viking festival in Lerwick, Shetland Islands, gallery at The Guardian

Opening in April 2010, Magnificent Maps showcases the British Library's unique collection of large-scale display maps, many of which have never been exhibited before. Here the show's curators focus on some of the show's highlights – and explain why maps are about far more than geography Nazi propaganda, in French! Diogo Homem , A Chart of the Mediterranean Sea, 1570 Nicolo Longobardi / Manuel Dias , Chinese Terrestrial Globe, 1623, wood, lacquer and paint: This, the earliest Chinese globe, was constructed by leading Jesuits for the Chinese Ming rulers, and is believed to have come from an Imperial palace near Beijing. In the collections of western monarchs it would have appeared an exotic and unusual object. But in China too, it would have been very unusual, since it contained western concepts of geography quite at variance with the China-centric nature of contemporary cartography. In its treatment of eclipses and meridians, however, the globe draws on ideas dev...

No, please, just look at that Table of Contents ;)

A postcard from Taiwan - 谢谢, Ihsin ;)

Now featuring even more Subjects to play with: ART Famous Paintings CHEMISTRY Chemical Symbols (Basic) Chemical Symbols (Full List) ENGLISH English Grammar English Vocabulary GEOGRAPHY Identify Countries on the Map World Capitals LANGUAGE LEARNING French German Italian Spanish MATH Basic Math (Pre-Algebra) Multiplication Table

Priceless, from Jezebel (and do not miss the comments ;) Yahoo's Shine decided to publish a humor column about the sad realities of working from home . The writers promise "hysterical yet truthful tips to help you stay sane," but their "truths" are generic warnings against getting fat. Number one is the doozy: For the love of God and everything we hold dear in this world, do not, I repeat, do not buy sweat pants for comfort while working. You can be just as brilliant in your own damn trousers! I fell under the spell of "well, they are kind of cool black sweats and I did not buy them at Wal-Mart and I could even go walking with them on" line of crap. I don't care if Giorgio Armani designed sweats for his couture line. Do not wear them at home while working. They do have their place – putting laundry in, cleaning out a litter box or 5 but if you sit in front of your computer for 8 to 12 hours a day, you will have develop a HUGE butt and don...

The opening film at Sundance is a prestigious position to be in: Robert Redford introduces the film, stars are in attendance, and as a result it can be difficult to score tickets. This year was no different with people lining the sidewalk to the theater holding signs asking for extra tickets. However, if you look back at the opening night film for the past few years, you can see that it has never ended up being the most buzzed-about film at the festival: Riding Giants (2004), Happy Endings (2005), Friends With Money (2006), Chicago 10 (2007), In Bruges (2008), and Mary & Max (2009). Unfortunately, HOWL is in the same boat. And to paraphrase Ginsberg himself: There is no HOWL ... it's just a bunch of scenes trying to be a movie. Directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman ( The Times of Harvey Milk , The Celluloid Closet ) have moved beyond their normal documentary subjects and tackled the dubious task of turning a classic poem into a feature film, and it falls far...

From Ben , commenting on a post at The Millions : All your remarks about the film’s various failings seem accurate. You must be aware, though, that 95% of the human race–specifically the 95% with magic in their souls–will disagree with you. I think Avatar might better be described as a ride than a film. Our investment in the outcome of on-screen conflict and struggle derives less from identification with fleshed-out characters and politically nuanced themes (the classical tools) than from a very physical, embodied sense of placement in the action, which ends up yielding powerful emotional identification anyway. The sacrificed element, and the element on which you concentrate most of your review, is memorability. There is very little, afterward, to talk about. Narrative, dialogue, anything that persists in word-memory, which is mostly what we’ve got. This is a film of pure sensation. But it seems clear to me–it’s borne out both by the critical reception the film has received and its...

In 1984, William Gibson coined a word—“cyberspace”— and used it in a science fiction novel. At the time, few people had a concept of what such a term could mean. And yet, thanks to Gibson’s use of it, especially in his epochal cyberpunk book Neuromancer , “cyberspace” gradually gained enough cultural credence to become the de facto name for the emerging World Wide Web. Today we unthinkingly use the word to refer to an everyday experience that didn’t even exist when Neuromancer was penned—but one which is arguably similar to Gibson’s vision of a “consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators.” Of course, it’s unclear whether Gibson primed the pump for the widespread acceptance of advanced communications technologies, or if he merely pointed out the tip of an iceberg ready to emerge from the waters of a high-tech subculture. What is clear is that science fiction plays an essential role in the dissemination and popularization of science’s most nas...

Telegraph

It’s craft Saturday here at TheNextWeb. Given that there is probably nothing more to do than wait for new Daily Show episodes to come out, why not give your creative hand a shake? Let’s make a font. The process is actually quite simple, and free. FontCapture is a great little app that will allow you to do this in less than ten minutes, if you have a scanner. Head to FontCapture.com , and print out the form .pdf. Then fill in all the boxes on the form with your own handwriting. Quick warning, use a felt pen of some sort. Pens did not work well in my testing. Once you have filled out the form, scan it, then name and upload the image. Once you submit the scanned page, it should take around a minute for the font to be generated. On Windows 7, download and open the file, and then just click install. Wordpad will find it right away.

He was the hero of hopeless causes and the defender of imaginary damsels. Now fans of Don Quixote, the Spanish literary character who tilted at windmills, are embarking on an appropriately quixotic challenge – to put the entire contents of Don Quixote de La Mancha on the Twitter microblogging site. The Twijote project, as it is known, aims to publish the 470-odd pages of the first volume of Don Quixote's adventures using just the 140-character blocks of text allowed by Twitter. It has set itself strict rules, of the honourable but potentially foolish kind that Don Quixote and his creator, Miguel de Cervantes, might have approved of. The 8,200-odd tweets needed to get to the end of the first volume must come from one-off visitors to the Twijote site. They are given the next block of 140 characters of text to put on Twitter. "We reckon it will take about a year, if people stick with it," said Pablo López, a web designer from the north-western Spanish city of Vigo w...

Via: Online Schools

Ukrainian artist Oksana Mas has created an unusual mosaic portrait of the Virgin Mary, using 15,000 painted Easter Eggs. Unveiled yesterday, inside the gorgeous Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv, the giant mosaic weighs 2.5 tons and is made out of 15,000 wooden Easter Eggs. Oksana Mas started working on her masterpiece nine months ago, painting the eggs all by herself, but later children from all across the country got involved and helped out with the painting. The Easter-egg portrait of the Virgin Mary, by Oksana Mas, measures 7×7 meters. Damn Cool Pics

BoingBoing, always ;)

WITH 'values' on everyone's lips, this book provides some much-needed background, from the Stone Age onwards. Cultural context has always determined our moral habits, which is why prescribing them without serious thought can end in upset. What, for example, are we to make of Oliver Thomson's example of the 300 French prostitutes who, accompanying the Third Crusades, 'dedicated as a holy offering what they kept between their thighs'? Or the Spartan code which called for 'the early practical application of eugenics' to cull offspring unsuitable for military service? Or the sect which believed chewing cannabis brought them closer to God? It is easy to find legitimating examples of things disapproved of today. And this bears out Thomson's main point, that 'morality is subject to fashion'. The catalogue of the purportedly sinful is enormous, and it would be easy for readers of this book to be bogged down, had Thomson not first provided a ...

Thanx to The Guardian , Éric Rohmer's career in clips: Rohmer's first feature was a pure-blood product of the burgeoning French New Wave; a loose-limbed, low-budget tale of poverty-row Paris, evocatively played out in the Latin Quarter as its hero rattles between the houses in search of loot. The film was destined to be eclipsed by the likes of Breathless and The 400 Blows – but Rohmer had yet to find his perfect rhythm. The third of Rohmer's six "moral tales" offers a wry and playful battle of the sexes, as the nymphet of the title makes a point of bedding a different man each night – and dances constantly away from the two male friends who try to tame her. Its St Tropez setting showed how Rohmer was as comfortable in France's wide open spaces as in the bustling metropolis. Jean-Louis Trintignant gives a superb performance as the Catholic engineer who finds himself mentally and emotionally (if not quite physically) undone by the smart, cerebral...

Did I say that ? ON BEING VOTED THE SEXIEST MAN ALIVE So there are a lot of dead men who are sexier? (2006) ON TREES I look at them as I look at people. I get along well with most trees. If I get into arguments with them, it's probably my own fault (2008) ON BEING HOT PROPERTY I've been told I've arrived so many times, I don't know where I ever went (1999) ON NOT WINNING AN OSCAR FOR "EASTERN PROMISES" Ninety-nine per cent of the [other] losers didn't want to do the losers' dance with me. They also sort of ran from me like I was some shitfaced drunk (2009) ON HIS PAINTINGS A couple of days ago, l looked at all of them and I was like, "I don't know what these are." Then it snowballed: "What kind of actor am I anyway? What kind of father? God, I'm such a vain, self-involved creature, and I should just stop making these things and inflicting them on people!" I can see why people jump out of windows (1999) ON MI...

Thanx to JC on FB ;)

Bernardo Atxaga writes in Basque and Spanish. The Accordionist’s Son was published in Basque in 2003 as Soinujolearen Semea and then translated into Spanish as El hijo del acordeonista by Asun Garikano and the author. This is the version that Margaret Jull Costa , the winner of the Premio Valle Inclán, has rendered into fluent colloquial English. Reviewing the Basque edition (TLS, August 13, 2004), Amaia Gabantxo described it as a “self-referential, multilayered work” that “offers a lyrical yet harsh view of what happened in the Basque country after the Spanish Civil War”, when the men of the new generation were driven into the arms of ETA. The book is, in Gabantxo’s estimation, “the first great Basque novel”. Earlier Peninsular history is the theme of Miguel Sousa Tavares’s novel, Equator . The book is partly set on the Portuguese island colony of São Tomé, to which the hero has been sent, in 1905, by King Dom Carlos as its new governor. [Sousa] Tavares concocts a b...

From the comments to an interview with writer and translator Chris Andrews, already posted here : - Question for Chris: You mentioned “Wild Detectives,” and I’ve wondered about that, because I know Borges translated Faulkner’s “The Wild Palms” as “Las Palmeras Salvajes.” Do you think that’s a better translation than “Savage” and do you have any inside scoop about why they went with “Savage Detectives”?» - Hi Damion, I’m not sure Chris Andrews checks this blog regularly or even if he comes here any more. I’d like to think he does in between translating more Aira, but maybe not. Because you might not get a response from him, I’ll invite anyone with knowledge to answer your questions. And I’ll try to answer it in my own way as well — I’m fluent in Portuguese and proficient in Spanish, though I’m no translator. Any other thoughts are very welcome. I’ve never read The Savage Detectives , so this is not my opinion on whether “savage” or “wild” is more correct when applied to Bolaño’s...

A misguiding post title, since those Nobel winners didn't translate anything themselves... Three Percent ( 3% of books published in the US are works in translation): After months and months (twelve to be exact) and books upon books, our nine fiction panelists finally came up with the 25-title fiction longlist for this year’s Best Translated Book Award. It was a rather difficult decision—it always is, and for me, there’s always a moment where it seems like 30 books would be a better number than 25 . . . —but I’m personally really happy with the list that we came up with. There are some classic authors (Robert Walser, Robert Bolano), some relative unknowns (Wolf Haas, Ferenc Barnas, Cao Naiqian), and a nice geographical mix (including books from Egypt and Djibouti). Over the next few days, we’ll be highlighting some anthologies, retranslations/reprints, and honorable mentions that didn’t make the longlist. Then, starting next Monday and running for 25-consecutive business days...

My bold formatting - and why? Because Lisbon was and is the true continental Finisterre :) Leroy 01 En 1876, une montre extra-compliquée fut construit, pour M. le comte Nicolas Nostitz, de Moscou, et fut vivement admirée à l'Exposition universelle de Paris (1878). Elle comportait onze complications mécaniques dont voici l'énumération: 1° Le quantième des jours; 2° Le quantième des dates; 3° Le quantième des mois et années bissextiles; 4° Les phases et l'âge de la lune; 5° La seconde indépendante et rattrapante; 6° Le compteur d'heures; 7° Le compteur de minutes 8° La seconde foudroyante; 9° La répétition des heures, quarts et minutes; 10° Les longitudes des principales villes d'Europe et d'Asie; 11° Les longitudes des principales villes d'Europe et d'Amérique, visibles sur un cadran de rechange. Lorsque M. le comte Nicolas Nostitz mourut, cette belle montre échut en héritage à M. le général comte Nostitz, son frère, qui la céda, en 1896, à M. A...