Rip Torn vs Norman Mailer

Mailer concluded principal photography without resolving the final scene, and Rip Torn (playing his brother-in-law and assassin) allegedly decided to take it upon himself to "improvise" an attack by hitting Mailer on the head with a small hammer, drawing blood. Mailer retaliated by tackling and then nearly chewing Torn's ear off as they grappled viciously, and it rapidly escalated into an unhinged on-camera brawl as Mailer's horrified kids screamed in terror.

Egg McMahon

A Touch of Sin

Shang, Zhou, Qin, Han

Heidegger - What is Metaphysics?

J5 live

High Jump

Yi Sang

United Federation of Planets

Tupolev Tu-95

Tu-95, the ubiquitous Bear, the fastest propeller powered aircraft ever built (it was only about 50 kts slower than its U.S. turbojet powered contemporary, the B-52)

I can't get no sleep

The Pigs

My grey-eyed father kept pigs on his farm

In Tuscany. Like troubled bowels all night

They muttered in my childhood dreams, and grumbled

Slovenly in moonlight, sprawled in night-slush,

While chill winds dried the mud upon their hides.

I lay in the faint glow of oil-lamps,

In a musk-scented stillness,

And from the icy paddocks heard the pigs.

My thoughts were haunted by pig-greed, how pigs

Surge to their food-troughs, trample on each other,

And grunt and clamber swilling themselves full.

Often we emptied food on top of them,

So that they swam in muck. And then one day

When the wind splattered us with dust, my father

Heard a pig squealing, crushed beneath the press,

And we began to stone the pigs, and drew

Blood with our stones, but they just shook their buttocks,

And grunted, and still tore at cabbage leaves.

Passing a dozing boar one summer morning

My father pointed at two dead-pan eyes

Which rolled up quizzing me (and yet its head

And snout snoozed motionless, and flies

Fed and hopped undisturbed among the bristles).

Only a pig, my father now explained,

Could glance out of the corner of its eye.

I watch two bead-eyes turn and show

Their whites like death-flesh.

One dusk this huge old boar escaped and chased

Me through an olive-grove upon a hillside.

Dumpy, it thundered after me,

With murder in its eyes, like someone damned,

A glow of Hades perfuming the air.

That night my father took me in his arms

And told me that of all the animals

Only pigs knew of death

And knew we merely fattened them for slaughter.

Puddles of hatred against man, they wallowed

In greed, despair and viciousness,

Careless of clinging slops and vegetable scraps,

And the sows even eating their own young.

The knowledge of death made pigs into pigs.

Later that year this old boar ate

A peasant woman's baby and was burned

Alive one night by public ceremony.

My father stood there by my side,

His toga billowing in the rush of heat,

But in the flames my child-eyes saw

Not a pig, but myself,

Writhing with stump-legs and with envious eyes

Watching the men who calmly watched my death.

-Les Murray

The Pervert's Guide to Ideology

Selfoss, Iceland

Battles without Honour and Humanity

Punctuation Rules

The rules governing whether to place punctuation inside or outside speech marks are complicated. The quick summary is:

• Semicolons and colons – outside
• Exclamation marks and question marks – according to logic
• Commas and periods/full stops – inside in the US, outside in the UK.

True Detectives

Chinese History: A New Manual

No one seems to have measured exactly how old Chinese civilization is, but Endymion Wilkinson can probably give a more precise answer than anyone else. “1.6 billion minutes separate us from the Zhou conquest of the Shang,” he informs us at the beginning of his Chinese History: A New Manual. Undaunted, he then sets out to describe just about everything that has happened since.

Here he is, for example, on chopsticks: “The first ones used for placing food in the mouth may be the bronze pair excavated from an Anhui site dating from the late Chunqiu,” yet “many centuries were to go by before they replaced the use of hands at the table (and the forefinger and index finger is still called shizhi 食指, the eating or tasting finger).”

On names:

Because only a handful of lineage names were held by a large percentage of the population already 2,000 years ago, most of the population today shares the same few Chinese family names…. In 1998, in Beijing, 13,000 people had the name Zhang Shuzhen 张淑珍, 11,000 were called Wang Shuzhen 王淑珍, and 10,100 were named Li Shuzhen 李淑珍.

Or on hairstyles:

Children’s hairstyles in China have been remarkably consistent from the Zhou dynasty to the present day. By custom, children had their head shaved on a lucky day one month (or slightly less) after birth…Later both boys and girls might have two tufts plaited to curve down to the left and right like horns, hence their name, guan 丱, horn-like tufts….The shaved heads and tufts of infancy survived the reforms and revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and are still a common sight.

Before readers can thread a path through Wilkinson’s unparalleled collection of Chinese facts and analysis, reaching from the earliest recorded times to the late twentieth century, however, they must find a way to handle a book weighing well over five pounds. In the lap? On a table? On a stand? The 1.5 million words, enough for nine four-hundred-page books, appear in two columns on most pages and, if one is no longer young, require fresh eyes after only a few minutes of reading.

But soon what Wilkinson has done becomes clear. The New Manual, he says too modestly, is intended to “introduce students” to Chinese history. It comprises fourteen supremely learned “book-length parts” in seventy-six chapters, including entries on language, people, geography, and the environment, on ideas and beliefs, and on technology and science. This will save hard-pressed professors much time as they wave graduate students or extra-clever undergraduates towards the relevant sections of their research. If they have yet to learn enough Chinese, classical and modern, to plunge into this sea, they can get started with western-language sources, which Wilkinson also copiously lists. (I spotted only one error: the author of Ba Jin, cited twice, is Olga, not Olger, Lang.) Who beside Wilkinson could have the energy, patience, ambition, and skills to perform this feat? He reports that the current New Manual took him half a century of study, though an early version was first published in 1973. After learning Chinese at Cambridge in the 1960s Wilkinson did further graduate work, mostly in the US, and along the way became the EU’s Ambassador to Beijing for seven years (1994–2001).

What is most fascinating for me and, I suppose, older China hands, is Wilkinson’s passion for minutiae. I doubt whether many of the students for whom he intends his book want to know the origin of chopsticks; or the traditional way of placing one hand over the other when greeting an older, younger, or more important person; or how to arrange the rank order at a twelve-person dinner table. Self-deprecating in a Chinese way, Wilkinson says, “Only a small section of the many polite, derogatory, and self-deprecatory terms in use are provided in the following sections.” That small section, I am happy to say, takes up two and half columns of small print, including such endearing self-deprecations as rustic (bi 鄙), lowly (bei 卑), foolish (yu 愚), lacking ability (bucai 不才), and your slave (nu 奴). Particular attention is paid to the kowtow in which one kneels then knocks one’s head on the floor, “depending on the intensity of the salutation.” A Manchu prince, exiled in Taiwan, once demanded I do this if I wanted him to teach me, but chuckled indulgently when I refused.

For friendly greetings, when one cups the hands in front of the chest, “The height at which the clasped hands were held depended on the status of the person being greeted.” If the status was high the gesture must be “accompanied by a broad smile and a sharp, good-natured intake of breath.” I now see I got this wrong for years. I did know that in Taiwan, where I studied, boys were sometimes given girls’ names “to fool malignant spirits.” In any event, as noted above, names have always been different in China. (Wilkinson has further troubled himself to discover that whereas 6.7 percent of all Chinese—about 90 million people—have the surname Wang, only 0.15 percent of Americans are called the most common Smith.)

At the other end of the courtesy scale was, and often still is, Han—indigenous Chinese—contempt for non-Hans. This went back to early times. In the nineteenth century, there were foreigners fluent enough in Chinese to dislike the word yi 夷, a barbarian. Some objected to its use in diplomatic and business dealings. “During the early 1850s the British continued to request the Chinese authorities to desist using the term yi when referring to them.” The Qing government agreed in 1858 to stop using the word—at least in documents seen by the British—but was replaced by some other rude words that continue to be used today.

Many ambitious parents in the UK are now seeing to it that their children learn Chinese, which, Wilkinson reports, is now the mother tongue of 10 percent of the world’s population; it may soon be almost double that. English, meanwhile, is spoken by 25 to 30 percent, but this dominance is declining. Will Chinese replace English as the global language? Wilkinson thinks not. The same alphabet is used in hundreds of world languages, while Chinese characters, which must be memorized one by one, are used mostly in China. “The prestige of English as the language of the rich and powerful may still survive intact,” he concludes, “Chinese will gain in influence as a second language.” If Wilkinson, for whom spoken and written Chinese must be much like a second language, says so, that’s good enough for me.

Near the end of his mighty book, Wilkinson directly addresses aspiring students: “How many scholarly books or articles in your field published thirty years previously have you read in the last month?” Before the students cringe, he goes on: “The conclusion is that most scholarship has a shorter lifespan than the humans who produce it.” It is, therefore, “comforting to know that only a very few [articles] are of sufficient quality to be worth considering. The reason is that most spread rather than add to existing knowledge.” It is also comforting to know that the “very few” have found their way into Endymion Wilkinson’s magnificent 1.5 million words.

Robert Ashley - Perfect Lives

David Spindler's Great Wall

David Spindler is a self-motivated and self-funded scholar of the Great Wall, who has probably walked and climbed on more parts of the Wall around Beijing than any other living person.

Spindler first started hiking the Great Wall in 1994, when he was the only American studying for a master's degree at Peking University. He had always been athletic - at Dartmouth, he'd rowed varsity crew and was on the cross-country ski team - and he saw hiking as the perfect break from city life. At Peking University he wrote a master's thesis in Chinese about Dong Zhongshu, a philosopher in the Western Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 24).

After receiving his degree, Spindler decided against pursuing a career in academia. For a spell, he worked as an assistant in CNN's Beijing bureau, and then became a China market analyst for Turner Broadcasting. But neither journalism nor business felt right, and the only constant in those years was hiking the Great Wall.

In the first public exhibition of his research, Spindler has collaborated with photographer Jonathan Ball to produce a series of large-scale, historically-based photographs of the Great Wall.

The photographs show parts of the the Wall where important Mongol and Manchu raids occurred in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, taken on the anniversaries of the raids, at approximately the time of day when the fighting happened. Each photograph stands over three feet tall, and stretches from 9 feet to over 30 feet wide. They are captioned with stories about the battles, drawn from Spindler's research.

Spindler says “These photographs put you as close as possible in the modern era to the point of view of people who attacked or defended the Great Wall during these battles—the vegetation is the same, the light is the same, the time of year and even the time of day is the same."

Danwei asked Spindler some questions about the exhibition and his ongoing work:

Q: What happened at the place in the photograph above?

A: On the night of September 26, 1550, a group of Mongol warriors took picks and shovels and pushed apart the unmortared stone wall protecting the gully in this photograph.

They suddenly appeared behind the main Chinese defensive force just east of this spot, surprised them, routed the defenders, and for the next two weeks looted, burned, and pillaged the northern suburbs of Beijing. The only extant account that quantifies the casualties (though certainly an exaggerated one) mentions sixty thousand Chinese killed, forty thousand taken captive, and millions of head of livestock lost as a result of this raid. One of the main Chinese responses to this raid was to rebuild much of the eastern sections of the Great Wall with mortar over the following twenty or so years.

Praise the Sun!

Re-mapping Ptolemy

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/Periods/Roman/_Texts/Ptolemy/home.html

Claudius Ptolemy was an astronomer and mathematician of the 2c A.D., whose exact dates we do not know, but who must apparently have worked in Alexandria between A.D. 127 and 148 since some of his astronomical observations are consistent with those dates.

(Thus the Oxford Classical Dictionary. The Geography itself also provides at least one clue, listing the Egyptian city of Antinoöpolis, founded in A.D. 130.)

Ptolemy's most famous works are the Almagest, a 13‑book textbook of astronomy in which among many other things, he lays the foundations of modern trigonometry; the Tetrabiblos, a compendium of astrology; and the Geography. He also wrote many other works centered on applied mathematics: astronomy, optics, music, etc.; a small Canon of Latitudes and Longitudes may be his as well: it is a sort of abridged version of the Geography, although the coördinates for certain places are not the same — manuscript transmission problems, maybe.

Ptolemy's coördinates are in degrees and minutes (360 degrees to a circle, 60 minutes to a degree), just like our own. His North-South coördinates (latitudes) are measured like our own from the Equator. His East-West coördinates (longitudes) are measured eastward from a point somewhere W of the westernmost point he catalogues in the Geography, traditionally read as "east of the Blessed Isles": for that reason, in this Web edition I indicated latitudes with the familiar degree sign (e.g., 5°00N), but his longitudes with an asterisk instead (e.g., 25*00).

Ptolemy's Geography was what we would now call an atlas, the core of which were of course the maps, referred to in the text and table of contents below as "Fifth Map of Europe", "Third Map of Asia", etc. The manual copying of maps is fiendish work, however, and considerably less reliable than that of text — Ptolemy was well aware of this (Book I, Chapter 18) — and his maps have consequently disappeared: nothing remains but the index. Recognizing that the maps would be a sticking point, Ptolemy also suggested that people replot his data, and a good section of Book I of the Geography offers advice on how to draw the maps.

Various people at various times have redrawn the maps from the coördinates given in the work: the map appended to Prof. Stevenson's edition, for example, is a medieval version or copy of just such a replot, but both Planudes and Karl Müller have done it as well. Thus, in undertaking this Web edition at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, I found myself very moved to be, and in good company at that, following Claudius Ptolemy's instructions using instruments he would never have dreamt of: every once in a while, this would hit me for a few seconds and make the unspeakably tedious cartographic reproduction much easier.

in the depths of winter, I found in me, an invincible summer

The Hakushu Distillery

The King in Yellow

Along the shore the cloud waves break,

The twin suns sink behind the lake,

The shadows lengthen

In Carcosa

Strange is the night where black stars rise,

And strange moons circle through the skies,

But stranger still is

Lost Carcosa

Songs that the Hyades shall sing,

Where flap the tatters of the King,

Must die unheard in

Dim Carcosa.

Song of my soul, my voice is dead,

Die though, unsung, as tears unshed

Shall dry and die in

Lost Carcosa

Cassilda's Song in "The King in Yellow" Act 1, Scene 2.