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Welcome
to
Our
Web-Community!
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You cannot depend on your eyes when your
imagination is out of focus.
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Mark Twain
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This journal is recording the
news of our community, giving members a voice and let the editor and
proprietor – me –
occasionally come out with a column. (Right now there are only my own
articles – as the Chinese say: “A man
past his forties is the proverbial rogue,” a wise old bird full
of stories, profanities and bawdy anecdotes – but this is going to
change. Not the anecdotes but me the only one telling them.)
I am an
archaeologist by
training and interested in the
sciences and anthropology. My outlook is metropolitan and
laissez-faire – you are OK, I am OK. The French statesman Clemenceau
noted: “Man has no soul, if only he
had manners.” So, no big messages, just mutual interest
and assistance between registered members, helping each other to make
themselves more
comfortable in this world as it is. Our best
hope of mutual understanding and global
unity is the ever-growing
Invisible City of the Worldwide Web. It’s still a construction site
with
all the customary dust, debris and rubbish; I am not saying it is an
unmixed blessing. The idea that everybody is wanting choices, the more
and unlimited the better, is against human nature. Constantly choosing
and then worrying whether one missed out on something better is a pain
in the neck, sometimes even debilitating. Google’s famous algorithm is
a value for the popularity of an information, not necessarily for its
quality. Yet
given the choice between a
parochial backwater where the sheep vie with the shepherd for the price
of naivety, and unlimited access to information and the stimuli of
culture and art,
there is really not much to choose. The trick is to find the right kind
of neighborhood, away from the dust and noise of the big building site
out there. A place among trusted friends who know stuff and lend a
helping hand and respect you for your own contributions of expertise.
It saves time to find the ropes and one day this is going to be a great
place to be. We all can make a difference.
In the
meantime we keep our alotment clean and clip the hedges. As for now
everything is still very much under construction but in August we
should be up and running.
[... How are we going
about this: ...]
The
design
of
this site may not strike you as particularly fancy, but it does read
well on handheld media like iPhones and the iPad.
Enjoy!
michael sympson
© –
August
2010 – all rights reserved
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I
see Jeremiah as a kindred spirit; he's also the best-documented
personality in the entire book. A rare fluke has the otherwise
fragmented sources and the archaeology from Mesopotamia, Judah and
Egypt falling in sync for the same period of his activity. Here is a
genuine voice speaking to us.
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Prophets
and
“saviors” come a
dime a dozen; we can reinvent Einstein and the infinitesimal calculus,
if we have to, but the combination of circumstance and character in
Sappho’s work gives testimony to a unique sensitivity, almost
obliterated by censorship and persecution of her work.
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“We did not see even one beautiful woman.”
Montaigne
wasn’t
exaggerating. His was the period of Lucas Cranach, Albrecht
Dürer and the incomparable Hans Holbein – exceptional artists who
had eyes to see and the training to accurately reproduce their vision.
Yet none of their erotic paintings is even remotely stimulating.
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Descartes
wrote in an age of thumbscrews and auto-da-fés for everybody who
had the temerity of thinking for himself. This could sometimes make him
giving the appearance of affirming what he didn't really believe.
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Laurence
Sterne had
his appointment with destiny rather late. At the age of forty-nine, he
offered his first and only novel to a publisher who of course knew
better than to risk his money on this nonsense. So Sterne paid for the
costs of printing and published himself. Publishers know nothing. |
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Many of his
critics
liked to denounce him as a provincial dullard, somehow granted a
magnificent writing talent, but too shallow ever to write anything of
importance. Only after his death the great Tolstoy gave Chekhov the
seal of approval: "With no false
modesty, Chekhov is technically far superior to me."
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Some
authors even
give classes on the critical appreciation of good fiction. Vladimir
Nabokov’s lectures in Cornell are readily accessible in print. Then,
how is it, that Nabokov, and so many other authors, are purblind when
it comes to the correct appreciation of their own work? |
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(2) I Beg to Differ
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Resentments
are the
forge of nation building. All it takes is a William of Orange or a
George Washington and a new nation is born out of the resentment
against the Spanish Inquisition or taxation without representation.
King Saul was the George Washington of the Hebrews when the tribes
began resenting the yoke of the Philistines.
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He demanded
to sever
all family ties: "No man, having put
his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of
God. If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and
wife, and children, yea, and his own life, he cannot be my companion.”
A
statement worthy of a mujahid with Semtex strapped to his chest! |
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Sabellianism
was probably the first unequivocal enunciation of consubstantiality for
the Christ and the Father. But there was a dilemma. If the Christ and
the Father were of identical substance then God the Father must have
suffered at the crucifixion just as badly as his son.
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What
has done more harm to the human race, the Bible, the Koran or the
Kama Sutra? After sixteen hundred years of a Christian sex “education,”
women in the west barely suspected that they, too, could have an orgasm.
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Never
before has
anybody of us been exposed to such intrusive surveillance, and never
before has the anxiety of failing the sales target given so much power
to the bigotry of the common philistine. Like in the film Spartacus everybody should rise and
shout “I am Big Brother!” |
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(3) About Me
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My
great-great Grandmother’s letter is a genuine document. She was in her
teens when she lost everything and became a fugitive because of the
religious turmoil of her time. I think it was an even greater loss for
the country she left behind.
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My
grandmother was a very down to earth person. I owe my existence to her
conceited ways. Yet all this common sense and survival skill didn’t
prepare her for this confrontation with the weird and wonderful.
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Her
husband was
shipped in a sealed boxcar to Auschwitz. The guards rushed him to
undress and he was told to deposit his belongings in a neat pile, so
that “later he could find it again.”
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People
have expressed their interest to actually lay money on the table if I
would publish my biography. Very flattering, but I am not sure I will
expand very much beyond this little sketch.
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Limited
shelf space can be a blessing. Most of my books are stored away in the
loft. So, from time to time I make a review of my references on shelf
and look what I really, really want. Then I climb upstairs.
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(4) Insights and Outsides
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“Love itself,” says
William Butler Yeats, “would be
barely more than an animal hunger without Sappho having given it shape
in her poetry before,” and this, I think, is true. All fiction
is escapist – no, I retract that – all good fiction
is escapist and embarks on a “dream,
and again follows the dream – and so – ewig – usque ad finem..."
(Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim).
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I
rather pull crumbs from the hairy chest
of a passing sailor, screaming and banging the headboard,” she
said. She tilted her head, inspecting the hair. She decided to color
it.Red,”she said, “it should be red.” |
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The
dominium of
Pachacuti came as a late arrival in South America, almost as late as
the Spanish. The
remaining quipus – strings and knots to aid the memory of a messenger –
tell us how this was achieved. They give us the time – four knots on a
scarlet thread, indicating the fourth year of the ruler – and the
number of subdued regions: ten small knots on a grey string. |
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Instead of
a linear
progression, Professor Hawking proposes a permanent one-off, something
beyond our cognitive categories of time and space. Hawking doesn’t mean
to say that expansion and contraction occur in a cycle of infinite
repetitions, but that the whole process is laid out and suspended in a
timeless hyper-dimension of simultaneous occurrences. |
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Personally
I think the Universe is teeming with life, perhaps even in the voids
between the galaxies. But if E.T. is out there, why doesn’t he visit
us? Is there an insurmountable barrier? And even if there isn’t and he
is capable, why should he be interested? |
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I
had a conversation with a very down to earth Yorkshire woman, a retired
nurse. For her every thought of an afterlife held the horrors of
prolonged infirmity, “and why should
anybody want this,” she said. Why indeed. But then she came up
with a surprise.
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I don't
question the
existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, but the existence of
extraterrestrial poetry is still an unproven proposition. Just to
arrange colored plastic chips, sniff a complex pheromone or the
inarticulate howl at the full moon, will not do.
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(5) How We Became what We are
From Our Library
(1)
Golden
Books
and
Classical
Texts
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“For
most of mankind’s history we have lived in very small communities, but
gradually our communities became too large and
disparate for us to be able to feel a part of them, and our
technologies were unequal to the task of drawing us together. But that
is changing” (Douglas Adams, How to stop Worrying
and Learn to Love the Internet). |
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Theophrastus’ Characters was written 2,300 years
ago, ages before the Freudian and Jungian claptrap, as an aid for the
aspiring playwright, and it is still as true as it was then. |
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In 1887
Oscar Wilde
wrote: “We have really everything in
common with America nowadays except, of course, the language.”
It’s a matter of thinking as well, not just of different words (Raymond Chandler, Notes on English and American Style). |
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My
wife believes she can recognize an American composer by certain
characteristics in his baseline and harmonics. The same could be said
about the American way with words. And it is a good way. William Strunk’s Elements of Style is more than a
manual of good expression, it is an education in democracy. |
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“Other things being equal, which they never
are, a more powerful theme will provoke a more powerful performance.
Yet some very dull books have been written about God, and some very
fine ones about how to make a living and stay fairly honest. It is
always a matter of who writes the stuff, and what he has in him to
write it with” (Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder). |
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(2) Translations
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"Everywhere, at home and abroad, the
younger generation, with a moving enthusiasm, gave in to the poet of
sentimentality and love, to the smart sound-bite and the tendentious
aphorism, to philosophy and humanitarianism." (Theodor Mommsen).
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Was
it a twitch of the upper lip or some indecisive fiddling with the
sleeve cuff that became the cause for the French Revolution?
Considering the way we manufacture Ideas as we speak, this is very
possible.
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“When the pot-roast was particularly bad,
we turned to debating the existence of God. The good Lord always was
with the majority. Only three at the table held atheistic views; yet
they too listened to reason if we had at least a good cheese for dessert”
(Heinrich Heine).
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On a Personal Note:
At present I am
writing at my novels. Of the finished copy
I shall put up a taster. If you like what you read you make the payment
and download the password protected PDF from the page that appears
after confirmation. I send you the password, and you can read to your
heart's content.
Live
well
and be happy.
michael
sympson
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