Acer XB270HU

Marek Bieńczyk

Born in Warsaw in 1956. He is a novelist, essayist, translator of Kundera and Cioran, a literary historian at Literary Research Institute of Polish Academy of Sciences and Letters, and a contributor to the French quarterly "L'atelier du roman". He studied Romance Languages and Literatures at Warsaw University.

His reputation was established by his novel Terminal (1994), a "post-modernist" love story of two scholarship winners who arrive in France from the opposite ends of the world. "Time's scholarship winner," as the male lover and narrator auto-ironically describes himself, is a contemporary troubadour - and the game that he must play is the contemplation of the vacuity and emptiness into which he is driven by self-knowledge and his role as a character in a tale of impossible love. After all, everything that happens is make-believe, in quotation marks, an intermezzo - for such is the nature of a scholarship. As a lover and as an author, he is fated to remain unsatisfied, to re- enact the gestures and rituals imposed by culture, language and memory. Bieńczyk's novel is full of delicate humor and elegant literary games, hidden quotations, allusions and digressions. It is complemented byMelancholy. Those Who Never Recover What They've Lost (1998), an essay on the melancholy sensibility and its presentation in contemporary literature.

In 1999 Bieńczyk has published his second novel Tworki, set in a psychiatric hospital during Second World War. It has received a prize from the Culture Foundation. It is a story about the proper name (the main protagonist Sonia doesn't survive the Holocaust, but she leaves a letter signed with the first letter of her name), which is both the closest and the most foreign thing in the world, since it is shared with so many other people. That is the definition of literature according to Bieńczyk: a signature asking for salvation, a trail of writing in need to be cared for.

A characteristic feature of Marek Bieńczyk's works is the obliteration of borders between genres - he fills his novels with essayist cogitation and in his collection of essays he puts fictional excerpts - or rather, excerpts in which the narrator reveals himself and his privacy - real or imagined. It's hard to define the genre of his prose - what's certain is that the author's individuality and the tenderness with which he looks around, are very strong. Possibly it's because in his essays he mostly writes about things important to him, it's almost impossible to distinguish the 'objective self' from the 'subjective self'. The way in which he reads reality before writing, a lecture that consists in collecting data (or: treasures) is very personal and also placed in-between genres. Bieńczyk reads both great novels and essays, and architecture, flavours, scents, movement.

Przezroczystość / Transparency (2007) is a collection of essays on the subject and at the same time a beautiful fable, a story of a dream (the word rêve - dream in French - is an anagram of the word verre, glass). In the book the author teaches us a beautiful Greek word diaphanes, which 'in French is used to describe a permeability of light, not total, but noticeable. Porcelain can be diaphane, as well as an autumn leaf, parchemenet, aristocratic skin on someone's hands'. Marek Bieńczyk also quotes Sartre: 'the sun was clear and diaphane: as white wine'. The quote indicates another characteristic property of his texts: synesthesia, the crucial role of reading the world through senses.

The Rock

Courtyard

The Ice Pirates

Year of the Dogs

Saki

Map of the China India Border Region

Codex Regius

The Primary Manuscript of the Poetic Eddahe Primary Manuscript of the Poetic Eddamary Manuscript of the Poetic Edda


A Complete Reproduction of
Codex Regius [R] or Konungsbók, The King's Book [K]


http://www.germanicmythology.com/works/CODEXREGIUS.html

A. J. Raffles - Cricketer and Criminal

Lisztomania

Seinfeld Season 8 outtakes

The Nerdwriter

http://thenerdwriter.tumblr.com/

Leavenworth - Beijing photos

 

The Craig Charles Funk and Soul Show

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0072ky7/episodes/player

The Three Pure Ones

Lake Peipus - the Battle on the Ice

On April 5, 1242. Alexander, intending to fight in a place of his own choosing, retreated in an attempt to draw the often over-confident Crusaders onto the frozen lake. The crusader forces likely numbered around 2,600, including 800 Danish and German knights, 100 Teutonic knights, 300 Danes, 400 Germans and 1,000 Estonian infantry. The Russians fielded around 5,000 men: Alexander and his brother Andrei's bodyguards (druzhina), totalling around 1,000, plus 2000 militia of Novgorod, 1400 Finno-Ugrian tribesman and 600 horse archers.

The Teutonic knights and crusaders charged across the lake and reached the enemy, but were held up by the infantry of the Novgorod militia. This caused the momentum of the crusader attack to slow. The battle was fierce, with the allied Russians fighting the Teutonic and crusader troops on the frozen surface of the lake. A little after two hours of close quarters fighting, Alexander ordered the left and right wings of his army (including cavalry) to enter the battle. The Teutonic and crusader troops by that time were exhausted from the constant struggle on the slippery surface of the frozen lake. The Crusaders started to retreat in disarray deeper onto the ice, and the appearance of the fresh Novgorod cavalry made them retreat in panic.

It is commonly said that "the Teutonic knights and crusaders attempted to rally and regroup at the far side of the lake, however, the thin ice began to give way and cracked under the weight of their heavy armour, and many knights and crusaders drowned"; but Donald Ostrowski in Alexander Nevskii’s "Battle on the Ice": The Creation of a Legend contends that the part about the ice breaking and people drowning was a relatively recent embellishment to the original historical story. He cites a large number of scholars who have written about the battle, Karamzin, Solovev, Petrushevskii, Khitrov, Platonov, Grekov, Vernadsky, Razin, Myakotin, Pashuto, Fennell and Kirpichnikov, none of whom mention the ice breaking up or anyone drowning when discussing the battle on the ice. After analysing all the sources Ostrowski concludes that the part about ice breaking and drowning appeared first in the 1938 film Alexander Nevsky by Sergei Eisenstein.

Xie Bingxin

Bingxin, a distinguished contemporary writer, poet, translator, and social activist, was born Xie Wanying on Oct.5, 1900, in Fuzhou, Fujian Province, to the family of a patriotic naval officer. During the May Fourth Movement, a patriotic student movement against foreign aggression and for new culture, she was a student at Yanjing University, was elected secretary of the Students’ Union, and took an active part in the publicity work for the Beijing Federation of Women Students. Greatly inspired by the movement, she began contributing to the newspaper Chenbao (Morning Paper). After she graduated from Yanjing University in 1923 with a Bachelor’s Degree, Phi-Beta-Kappa, she went to the United States to further her study in literature at Wellesley College and finished her postgraduate study with a Master’s Degree. Her M.A. Thesis was An English Translation and Edition of the Poems of Lady Li I-an (1926), a distinguished woman poet of the Sung Dynasty. In 1926, Bingxin returned to China to teach Chinese Literature at Yanjing University, a post she held until 1936. In 1929, she married Wu Wenzao, one of the founders of anthropology in China and widely respected in that field.

Bingxin had never stopped writing, contributing all her life to various papers and journals. She wrote a lot about her life and experience in the United States, from her journey there to the end of her stay. Those essays were later collected and published under the title of Letters to Young Readers, which has won her great popularity. As well as being educated in America, in 1947,Bingxin went with her husband to Japan where she taught a course on the New Chinese Literature at Tokyo University. She returned to China in 1951.1n 1960,as a member of the Chinese Writers Association, she paid visits to various countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa to promote international cultural exchanges.

Bingxin’s literary involvement covers a wide spectrum. Her achievements in writing for children are the most significant and her influence has been widespread. Letter to Young Readers in the 192Os,More Letters to Young Readers in the 1950s and Still More Letters in the 1970s have stimulated and educated generation after generation of young 20th century readers.

Her most salient literary achievements are in prose, which constitutes the bulk of her writing, A Smile in the 1920s, A Little Orange Lantern in the 1950s, Ode to Cherry Blossoms in the 1960s are modern prose classics. In the spirit of" Life Begins at 80", she had continued her writing into her later years. In the 1980s,she completed a series of prose writings, for example, About Men. Since 1985 she had been writing reminiscences, short stories, prose, essays, which have stimulated great interest and response on the part of her many readers.

The Scofield 2.1 - Clarice Lispector

The Waste Land - Notated

http://eliotswasteland.tripod.com/

Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston's book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance (Macmillan). Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston's book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do; and I recommend it (apart from the great interest of the book itself) to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble. To another work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has influenced our generation profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough; I have used especially the two volumes Adonis, Attis, Osiris. Anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognize in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies.

Streets of Rogue

Is antimatter just matter that is moving backwards in time?

I think the public at large usually sees time as the flow of information. An antiparticle doesn't contain any information about the future. If I create an antiparticle now, I don't gain any information about the future aside from the reasonable guess that at some point it will annihilate. So I think that's what people are really asking when they ask about "backwards traveling antiparticles."

If we want to get all metaphysical on this, it seems to me that the best representation of reality has no "flow" of time at all. It's a big set block. Just like a wave equation encodes past present and future behaviour (it merely needs to be evaluated for different values of t), it seems to me that our universe is one big block, some big universal wave equation. At any point in time, we occupy our local time T, and we only have memories of times for t
So in that regard nothing "flows" through time at all. Everything just... is. There's no real difference, in this block time model, considering the "perspective" of an anti-particle traveling back in time from its annihilation to its creation (as we label them in our "forward in time" perspective). So a pair-production creation/annihilation pair is really, in this model, just one electron looping around through time, going forward along the electron's worldline, then returning via the positron's worldline. Physics doesn't seem to care a whole lot which one of those lines we pick until we ask questions about information.

The Metabarons

Yoshida Hiroshi (1876-1950)

the most prominent artist of the Shin Hanga new print movement in Japan

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)