fer_i_at_us

Cats came under suspicion for a variety of reasons. Unlike dogs, they did not behave subserviently toward humans. This was considered unnatural, because it violated the biblical view that humans should have dominion over animals. Also, cats were very active at night and engaged in loud, raucous mating rituals. Though cats had always behaved in this manner, to the superstitious minds of the Middle Ages, cats were practicing supernatural powers and witchcraft. Most accused witches were older peasant women who lived alone, often keeping cats as pets for companionship. This guilt by association meant that roughly a million cats were burned at the stake, along with their owners, on suspicion of being witches.

На запрос Loose lips sink ships нам предложили это среди прочего.



Очень в тему и на любые случаи, я считаю.

Defending the academicians
By Gordon S. Wood
Tuesday, November 17, 2009

The writing of academic history seems to be in crisis. Historical monographs -- scholarly works on highly specific subjects -- pour from the university presses (at least 1,200 or so a year) and yet have very few readers. Sometimes, sales of academic history books number only in the hundreds; if it weren't for library purchases, their sales might be measured in the dozens. Most people, it seems, are not interested in reading history, at least not the history written by academic historians. Although some blame this situation on the poor teaching of history in the schools, most critics seem to think that the problem lies with the academic historians themselves. They don't know how to write history, at least the kind of history that people want to read. After all, David McCullough, Walter Isaacson, Jon Meacham and other popular historians sell hundreds of thousands of books. If they can do it, why can't the academic historians write better, more readable, more accessible history?( Read more... )

I [...] started through The Holly Jolly Book of Christmas Songs. It was amazing how many carols, which I’d always thought were about peace and good will, had violent lyrics. “Coventry Carol” wasn’t the only one with child-slaying in it. “Christmas Day is Come” did, too, along with references to sin, strife, and militants. “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” had strife, too, and envy and quarrels. “The Holly and the Ivy” had bones, blood, and bears, and “Good King Wenceslas” talked about cruelty, bringing people flesh, freezing their blood, and heart failure.

“I had no idea Christmas carols were so grim,” I said.

“You should hear Easter”.

A true historian, writing in the empty church, surrounded by graves. I, seeing so many evils, have put into writing all the things that I have witnessed. Lest things which should be remembered perish with time.

Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds. Under certain emotional circumstances I can stand the spasms of a rich violin, but the concert piano and all wind instruments bore me in small doses and flay me in larger ones. Despite the number of operas I was exposed to every winter (I must have attended Ruslan and Pikovaya Dama at least a dozen times in the course of half as many years), my weak responsiveness to music was completely overrun by the visual torment of not being able to read over Pimen’s shoulder or of trying in vain to imagine the hawkmoths in the dim bloom of Juliet’s garden.

"Дорогу" прочитал запоем.
All things apocalyptic - это мое совершенно. Порекомендуйте еще что-нибудь.

She suggested some elegant improvements in his manuscript. Where Matt had written that “the people who had to handle a drunken Fitzgerald usually forgave his misconduct,” Scottie added the next sentence: “Talent and charm, perhaps unfortunately for him, usually pulled him out of the social morasses he created for himself.”

...he lives by facts, like any good historian and any good intelligence man should; lives with them, eats them and sleeps with them.

...urgency is no friend to the historian—urgency is for the journalist[...] For the historian what is required is time and tranquillity, for the slow sifting of the facts, and for the gradual and hesitant advance towards glimpses of truth — that is the historian's art.

And that's what makes the historian [...] — the sudden fertilisation of knowledge by intelligence, to breed some tiny embryo of truth!

feriatus

...that rare blend of intelligence and experience and instinct which passed for luck among lesser mortals. [Sip.] Найти-найт.
3 minutes ago from web( Read more... )

The man in the dark raincoat arrived in German Corners at two-thirty that Friday afternoon. He walked across the bus station to a counter behind which a plump, grey-haired woman was polishing glasses.
'Please,' he said, 'Where might I find authority?'
( Read more... )

Отсюда.

Напомнило, кстати.

Since Mr. Nabokov is in the habit of introducing any job of this kind which he undertakes by an announcement that he is unique and incomparable and that everybody else who has attempted it is an oaf and an ignoramus, incompetent as a linguist and scholar, usually with the implication that he is also a low-class person and a ridiculous personality, Nabokov ought not to complain if the reviewer, though trying not to imitate his bad literary manners, does not hesitate to underline his weaknesses.

The Third Man’s murky, familiar mood springs chiefly from Graham Greene's script, which proves again that he is an uncinematic snob who has robbed the early Hitchcock of everything but his genius. Living off tension maneuvers which Hitchcock wore out, Greene crosses each event with one bothersome nonentity (A crisco-hipped porter, schmoo-faced child) tossed in without insight, so that the script crawls with annoying bugs. While a moony, honest American (Joe Cotten), unearths facts of Welles's death, Greene is up to his old trick of showing a city's lonely strays blown about the terrain by vague, evil forces. Greene's famous low sociology always suggests a square's condescension and ignorance. He sets Cotten up for quaint laughs by characterizing him as a pulp-writer, having the educated snipe at him in unlikely fashion ("I never knew there were snake-charmers in Texas") and the uneducated drool over him; every allusion to Cotten's Westerns, from their titles to their format, proves that no one behind the movie ever read one. Greene's story, a string of odd-sized talky scenes with no flow within or between them, is like a wheelless freight train.

Мэнни Фарбер (via Ehsan Khoshbakht - особенно прелестном на парси), там же про нуары как "ugly melodramas", "термитное искусство" - а также лучшие фильмы по мнению иранских киноведов.

Следом в твиттер-ленте ссылка на пост про Кена Лоуча, Тель-Авив и Тегеран. В смешном мире живем, действительно.

There is a nagging sense with Twitter that it is the highwater mark of our ADHD civilisation, the final symptom of a malaise that does not allow for any intellectual stasis; we cannot sit with any story, any song, any idea — it’s all précis.

The other way of looking at it, though, is that brevity is still the soul of wit, and that 140 characters provokes only the most economical of utterance.

Двух не дано, собственно - эс-эм-эски или хайку.

Для меня ЖЖ был таким же симптомом - дискоммуникации и нарциссизма, например ("мой огород - что хочу" - вас удалю, вам нахамлю) - в свое время. Не говоря о том, что многих я бы насильственно на ограничивающий графоманию формат пересадил.

Ну и "get a life" вообще.)

But wait! What’s that Nabokov’s doing with his hands? He’s turning over index cards. He’s glancing at notes. He’s reading. Fluent in three languages, he relies on prefabricated responses to talk about his work. Am I disappointed?

When Writers Speak

Some years ago a television company made a film [Dandelion Dead] of the murder and Joyce [Flack, a friend] saw the actor who played [Herbert Rowse] Armstrong [Michael Kitchen], looking very like pictures of the man, walking in his 1920s suit up Bear Street. Joyce greeted him and he swept off his hat in salute. She said the moment was uncanny. One can imagine what this little town was like in the 1920s: claustrophobic, remote, everyone knowing the business of everyone else, the same gossip, the same tea parties, the same tennis afternoons at Armstrong's house, where his wife would imperiously call him in to remind him that it was bath night.

PD James, Time to be in Earnest

With all this in mind one can construct what would be, from a News of the World reader's point of view, the ‘perfect’ murder. The murderer should be a little man of the professional class — a dentist or a solicitor, say — living an intensely respectable life somewhere in the suburbs, and preferably in a semi-detached house, which will allow the neighbours to hear suspicious sounds through the wall. He should be either chairman of the local Conservative Party branch, or a leading Nonconformist and strong Temperance advocate. He should go astray through cherishing a guilty passion for his secretary or the wife of a rival professional man, and should only bring himself to the point of murder after long and terrible wrestles with his conscience. Having decided on murder, he should plan it all with the utmost cunning, and only slip up over some tiny unforeseeable detail. The means chosen should, of course, be poison. In the last analysis he should commit murder because this seems to him less disgraceful, and less damaging to his career, than being detected in adultery. With this kind of background, a crime can have dramatic and even tragic qualities which make it memorable and excite pity for both victim and murderer.

Orwell, Decline of the English Murder

feriatus

...Anyway, sleep well. (Пространная) статья о грядущей публикации ""Красной Книги" Юнга. http://is.gd/3uhlW (via @MaudNewton)
less than 20 seconds ago from web( Read more... )

Что любим мы? Monster movies (и тут "инопланетные бяки" или простые насекомые скорее чем вампиры - которые почти всегда смешны & silly), body horror (мутации, болезни и прочие отвратительные метаморфозы человеческого тела, в том числе посредством внедрения в него существ из типа первого), slasher (искусное истребление группы привлекательных тинейджеров доставляет нам сладчайшее). Psychological horror часто трудно дифференцировать от триллера. Готика и сверхъестественное, чаще приближающиеся к уровню высокого, как ни странно, в персональных аутсайдерах. (Gore не бывает слишком много!, так что torture porn скорее - но важная оговорка касается теологического хоррора, так что "Легион" ждем). "Зомби-апокалипсис" - пожалуй, любимая из популярных текущих подразновидностей.

И, конечно, лучшие хорроры, это очень-очень серьезно. (В идеале - мрачный splatterfest).
Хотя мы никогда не откажемся от хорошего веселья. (The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies в наше понимание такового не входят.)

...his choice of tennis no mere tribute to Strangers on a Train; neither is the mention of Don Budge, one of only two players to win the coveted grand slam within a single year. Tennis is a highly competitive game governed by rules in which the player who wins does so by overpowering his opponent with backhand, drop shot, passing shot, lobs, and aces designed to outpace his opponent, techniques that find their analogue in the trickster’s bag of tricks. Played either by one player in opposition to another or by doubles, speed, strategy, and superior power dictate success while those who follow the game are forced to keep shifting their eyes back and forth to keep the ball in view.

The Art of Crime: The Plays and Films of Harold Pinter and David Mamet. Suckered Again: The Perfect Patsy and The Spanish Prisoner.