The Inquisitor Cycle

A Polish book series written by Jacek Piekara revolving around the adventures of Mordimer Madderdin, a Inquisitor of the Holy Office. In this universe, Christianity took a radical turn where Jesus Christ didn't die for our sins, but became a ruthless warlord that conquered the Roman Empire by force and since then, the world has been ruled by the Inquisitors. Mordimer is a rookie Inquisitor that just acquired his license to operate, considers himself a man of faith, a servant of God and a hammer of witches. Soon he becomes involved in political intrigue, conflict with the forces of darkness and the enemies of the Empire.

A Great Wagon

Written by Rumi


When I see your face, the stones start spinning!
You appear; all studying wanders.
I lose my place.

Water turns pearly.
Fire dies down and doesn’t destroy.

In your presence I don’t want what I thought
I wanted, those three little hanging lamps.

Inside your face the ancient manuscripts
Seem like rusty mirrors.

You breathe; new shapes appear,
and the music of a desire as widespread
as Spring begins to move
like a great wagon.
Drive slowly.
Some of us walking alongside
are lame!

~

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

~

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.

~

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.

I would love to kiss you.
The price of kissing is your life.

Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,
What a bargain, let’s buy it.

~

Daylight, full of small dancing particles
and the one great turning, our souls
are dancing with you, without feet, they dance.
Can you see them when I whisper in your ear?

~

They try to say what you are, spiritual or sexual?
They wonder about Solomon and all his wives.

In the body of the world, they say, there is a soul
and you are that.

But we have ways within each other
that will never be said by anyone.

~

Come to the orchard in Spring.
There is light and wine, and sweethearts
in the pomegranate flowers.

If you do not come, these do not matter.
If you do come, these do not matter.

Fox and the Hedgehog

This is Erasmus' Adagia commentary on the one-skilled Hedgehog vs the many-skilled Fox. The original adage (likely a fragment from a fable) was written by Greek lyric poet Archilochus of Paros (ca. 680-640 BC) "The fox knows many tricks, the hedgehog only one. One good one."

It's Time!

 

It's Time

 

Enigma

 

Machi Tawara

 http://www.gtpweb.net/twr/indexe.htm

Machi Tawara, one of Japan's most popular tanka poet. Also well known as a critic, author and translator of Japanese classic literature into contemporary Japanese.

She was born in Osaka, and raised there and later in Fukui. In 1981, as she entered Waseda University, she began to write tanka under her mentor, the respected poet Yukitsuna Sasaki. After graduating Waseda with a BA in Japanese Literature in 1985, Ms.Tawara started teaching at Hashimoto Highschool in Kanagawa, where she taught Japanese until 1989. While she was teaching, she continued her activities as a poet and received the 32nd Kadokawa Tanka Award(1986). Her first volume of tanka, Salad Anniversary, was published in 1987 and became an immediate bestseller with nearly three million copies in print. With this outstanding debut publication, she recieved the Modern Japanese Poets Association Award(1988). Her third collection of tanka, Chocolate Revolution, was published in 1997. Ms. Tawara is also a well-known critic and translator of Japanese classic literature into contemporary Japanese, including the Man'yoshu(Collection of 10,000 leaves), Taketori Monogatari(The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter), and Midare Gami(Tangled Hair). In addition, she has published a number of popular travel and photography books and has written a series of essays for newspapers and magazines such as Asahi Shimbun Newspaper, Asahi Weekly and Bungei Shunju. Aside from her work as a poet and writer, Ms. Tawara has served as a member of various committees including the Commitee for Japanese Language and the Central Committee for Education.

---

- Below is quoted from the English version of "Salad Anniversary"(published bu Kodansha International, 1989)translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter. I deeply appreciate Juliette for letting me reproduce her comments on this page.

Machi Tawara, a shy, 26-year-old high school teacher living in Tokyo, took Japan by storm with the publication of her maiden work: a book of poetry called Sarada kinenbi, here translated as Salad Anniversary. In six months the book sailed through countless printings and has sold to date a mind-boggling 2,500,000 copies and more, making it one of the nation's all-time bestsellers. Such a record is remarkable enough for any book, in any genre; for a book of modern poetry it is unprecedented.

"Salad Phenomenon" is the phrase coined to describe the impact of this book on Japanese society. Tawara herself became an instant celebrity, besieged with requests for autographs, interviews, public lectures, guest columns in newspapers and magazines, and TV and radio appearances--all the while keeping up a busy eight-to-five teaching schedule, Mondays through Saturdays. She has had two weekly television shows. There have also been a couple of televised serial dramas and a musical revue based loosely on Salad Anniversary, not to mention a full-length movie.

Critical reaction has also been highly favorable, despite cavils from purists offended by Tawara's modern adaptation of a classical verse form. "August Morning," the book's opening 50-poem sequence, was awarded the coveted Kadokawa Tanka Prize--an unheard-of achievement for a young woman fresh out of college. The entire book was also named by the Association of Modern Poets as the outstanding poetry collection of 1987.

Besides producing a book of essays and a second slender collection of poems, Tawara came up with a sort of telephone version of the "Prairie Home Companion" : touched by the massive outpouring of fan mail she began to receive, and determined somehow to respond, she made short, semimonthly recordings to chat about her latest doings and announce to upcoming events. Meanwhile, the Salad Phenomenon has also brought us comics, choral works by a distinguished composer, and even a CD of "Salad Classics" --Chopin and Debussy-- to play while leafing through the book.

Perhaps the most amazing response to Tawara's work has come directly from reader themselves: inspired by Tawara's seemingly effortless sketches of modern life and love, done in an age-old form, many have decided to try their own hand at poetry. Letters have come pouring in by the tens of thousands--and with them, well over 200,000 tanka. Nearly 1,500 of these, selected by Tawara, have also been published in a book form. The oldest contributor is a 91-year-old man; the youngest, an 11-year-old girl. One struggles to think of a comparable level of response to any other single work of literature: an identification so complete that readers--people from all walks of life--do not stop at passive enjoyment, but begin a spontaneous creative outpouring of their own.

What is all the fuss about? Tanka(short poems of thirty-one syllables in a 5-7-5-7-7 pattern) have a venerable history of at least 1,300 years in Japan. In modern times, however, they have suffered from an image problem: dealing traditionally with set themes ( the beauties of nature, confessions of emotion), tanka tended to become stale and conventional; this difficulty was compounded by poets' continued use of outmoded "literary" language which made the poems hard to understand and kept them seemingly remote from daily experience. Poets who sought to revitalize tanka by avoiding classical formulas, on the other hand, often seemed to achieve modernity at the expense of rythm and grace. Part of Tawara's achievement lies in her ability to use fresh, contemporary language--skillfully incorporating bits of natural comversation, borrowed words from English like "photographer," and modern icons like McDonald's--without sacrificing the traditional tanka virtues of concision, evocativeness, and musicality.

But Tawara does not limit herself exclusively to the vernacular. She avails herself of a widerange of Japanese, including classical words("ones I particulary like"). Sevecral makura-kotoba, or "pillow words"--traditional poetic modifiers--appear, and there are allusions to indivisual older poems and to the eight-century Man'yoshu, Japan's oldest poetry anthology. The language employed is thus not mere "young people's Japanese" but a literate, sophisticated mixture of old and new--with emphasis, throughout, on new.
This combination of old and new is present in the opening poem (though impossible, alas, to suggest in translation):

kono kyoku to kimete kaigan zoi no michi
tobasu kimi nari
"hoteru kariforunia"

Always playing this song
you race along the seacoast road--
"Hotel California"

Here the word nari is a classical copula, contrasting with the modern, American flavor of the song title.

The same poem illustrates another feature of her work--the tendency for meaning to straddle, not coincide exactly with, the 5-7-5-7-7 syllabic groupings. "Ki-me-te-ka-i-ga-n"(literally, "deciding seacoast") is a 7-syllable cluster in the poem above, but decidedly not a unit of meaning in itself. Tanka are often described as "five-line" poems, but this is misleading in several respects--not least being the fact that they are almost always written in a single line in Japanese. All of the poems in Salad Anniversary appear in the original as a single vertical line, three to a page; however, several are interrupted with a space to mark a major break in the poem--a break which may appear at any point. In her second tanka collection, Toritate no tanka desu ("Fresh-picked tanka"), Tawara has experimented with writing tanka in two and three lines of various lengths(although she claims that "in her heart" she still thinks of tanka as a single line). In my translations I have generally adhered to a three-line format, and have aimed at brevity without attempting to dupilicate syllable counts.

What has so endeared these poems to the Japanese public? One answer seems to be the cheerful, light tone--perfectly suited to the fresh, crisp, "salad" image. The emotions are genuine and deeply felt, but never bitter or overwhelming. The sadness of ending a relationshio is balanced by relief, the decision swift and clean

Like getting up to leave
a hamburger place--
that's how I'll leave
that man

She seems to be standing at a slight remove from herself, never totally lost in an emotion, but always partly outside it, observing herself and those around her with a light and coolly objective eye.

Although love, or the lack of it, is the main focus of Tawara's poetry, she writes also of home and family; of life in a big city; of her experiences teaching; of music and cooking and baseball and the sea; of travels in China; of odd moments of sudden insight or whimsy, premonition, or surprise:

The day I left for Tokyo
Mother looked older by all the years
of separation ahead

As in the title poem, she values the ordinary things in life, the small events, finding beauty in them and in a life where every moment is intensely, fully lived:

"This tastes great," you said and so
the sixth of July--
our salad anniversary

Writing on the blackboard,
I pause to rest my hand--
in those seconds
think meltingly of you

Ultimately the appeal of her poem rests on their universality, on our recognizing as we read them "Yes that's just how it is!" or "I know that feeling, too". She says she seeks to express the "swaying of the heart"(kokoro no yure); that she succeeds is clear from the reverberations she sets up in our hearts. In her own afterword to her poems she sums up by saying that " to live is to creat poetry, to create poetry is to live."

It is ironic that(if we may believe her) Machi Tawara has no real lover; these real-sounding love poems spring largely from imagination, based(she says shyly) not on a particular longing for any one person so much as a general longing for human contact. That her poems have moved the hearts of so many, touching the lives of millions of people with whom she would never otherwise have had communication, seems to please her enormously.

Eurovision 2022

 

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Great Lakes profile

 

Leonid Tishkov

 https://leonidtishkov.com/

Roguetech

 

Timeline of History

 

ANTONINVS AVG PIVS P P,

ANTONINUS PIUS, (A.D. 138-161), gold aureus, Rome mint, issued 144, (7.28 g), obv. ANTONINVS AVG PIVS P P, bare bust to right draped and cuirassed, rev. TR P COS III DES IIII, Victory alighting to right, wings spread, holding trophy with both hands, (cf.S.4022, cf.RIC 121a, cf.C.838, Calico 1638).



Head of Antoninus Pius, laureate, right.



Lettering: ANTONINVS AVG PIVS P P



Translation:

Antoninus Augustus Pius, Pater Patriae.

Antoninus Pius, emperor (Augustus) father of the nation.



Reverse

Jupiter, naked to waist, seated on throne, left, holding thunderbolt in right hand and vertical sceptre in left.



Lettering: TR P COS III DES IIII



Translation:

Tribunicia Potestate, Consul Tertium, Designatus Quartum.

Holder of tribunician power, consul for the third time, elect for the fourth time.

Field of Glory: Medieval

 

The Hedgehog and the Fox

Chinese Classics in English

 http://bs.dayabook.com/home

The book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian : concerning the kingdoms and marvels of the East

Dorohedoro - Manga

 

GOING BACK TO WARLORDS Max Lavergne

"We're going back to warlords," declared the American president as he signed into law the bill making every governor, every mayor a warlord of their locality and forever disbanding the continent-spanning experiment in cooperation that had been popular for a short while. From ruthless farmer barons in the South to the ice fortresses in the North, the new America embraced its warlords. They killed, they bred, they demanded excise from their vassals. They married their offspring with the offspring of other warlords to increase the size of their territories. But it was only ever temporary. They sat in their huts in robes of fur from beaver, bear and raccoon and scowled at their fires. They listened to Louise and Wade in the duplex next door fighting about selling his golf clubs. They schemed and brooded about how to mend the stitches of their empires while Louise walked to her job at the hospital. They murdered brother and betrayed father-in-law and leaned heads pounding with madness against the wall while Wade sobbed over the Ford Focus he'd totaled on a wet road. They wrote the baseball scores in paint on butcher's paper and stuck them in the windows of the closed stores. They threw themselves off bridges in waves and waves. They're still doing it. Another one just did it then.

Hegel's Philosophy of right

Diary of a plague week

Jarrtt

Knight Moves

 

Kotsuki River in Kagoshima, by Kawase Hasui, 1922

 

Hill of Dead Pets

 https://stilgherrian.com/essay/revealed-where-is-the-hill-of-dead-pets/