Thomas Pynchon's V. (1963)
Read Professor Irwin Corey's acceptance speech for Pynchon's 1974 National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow.
Also, have a look at Douglas Kløvedal Lannark's exhaustive documenting of "love" in Gravity's Rainbow.
Malta
Maltese Falcon: Charles V's generous lease terms for the Knights of Malta was one falcon a year; what he got was a military barrier against the Turks from Syracuse to Tripoli.
Elephants on Malta?
There are no elephants on Malta, though there are fossilized remains of dwarf elephants at Ghar Dalam, near Birzebbuga. These remains prove that during the Pleistocene period the island was still connected to Sicily but cut off from North Africa. Apparently the animals got "trapped" on the island as they retreated towards warmer regions.
Malta's early history
From Baedeker's Mediterranean:
Malta is supposed to be identical with the island of Ogygia described by Homer, where Odysseus is fabled to have been enslaved by the nymph Calypso, whose alleged cavern is still pointed out on the N. coast of Malta, and also in the island of Gozo. Between 3000 and 2000 B.C. a prehistoric race (Hamitic?), probably from Libya, settled in Malta. Of their stage of civilization which lasted a thousand years, traces are still found in the massive stone structures in the cyclopean style, which reveal, especially in their circular ground-plan, an affinity with the sesi of Pantelleria, the nuraghi of Sardinia [...] and the megalithic monuments of Barbary, S.E. Spain, and the Balearic Islands, and fall within the sphere of influence of pre-Mycenæan ('insular') and Mycenæan culture. Later the Phoenicians of Sidon founded a colony here, which soon became important enough to send forth settlers to Acholla [...] on the Tunisian coast. Next, in 736 B.C., came Greek immigrants, and two centuries later the Carthaginians, who took possession of the island. They now called it Melita and had a capital of that name (now Notabile), but they in their turn were ousted by the Romans in 218 B.C. It was on the N. coast of Melita that St. Paul was shipwrecked in 62 A.D. (p.398)
September 26, 2011
Malta - V., Thomas Pynchon | SPAMArts
pro cheerleaders
Bordellet
poemcss
A Poem Element for HTML5
Twinkle Twinkle Little Star
by Jane Taylor, 1806
************************ A Poem Element for HTML5 ************************ *************************** Twinkle Twinkle Little Star *************************** -------------------- by Jane Taylor, 1806 -------------------- Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are! Up above the world so high, Like a diamond in the sky! When the blazing sun is gone, When he nothing shines upon, Then you show your little light, Twinkle, twinkle, all the night. Then the traveller in the dark, Thanks you for your tiny spark, He could not see which way to go, If you did not twinkle so. In the dark blue sky you keep, And often through my curtains peep, For you never shut your eye, Till the sun is in the sky. As your bright and tiny spark, Lights the traveller in the dark,— Though I know not what you are, Twinkle, twinkle, little star. Sorry Dr Hoffmann. Maybe we should all stick to prose. Twinkle Twinkle Little Star by Jane Taylor, 1806 Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are! Up above the world so high, Like a diamond in the sky! When the blazing sun is gone, When he nothing shines upon, Then you show your little light, Twinkle, twinkle, all the night. Then the traveller in the dark, Thanks you for your tiny spark, He could not see which way to go, If you did not twinkle so. In the dark blue sky you keep, And often through my curtains peep, For you never shut your eye, Till the sun is in the sky. As your bright and tiny spark, Lights the traveller in the dark,— Though I know not what you are, Twinkle, twinkle, little star. What I missed so many years in (X)HTML is some useful markup for poems. The result we can see in the 'real web life' - a lot of meaningless tag soup around, disoriented authors lost between silence and semantically meaningless markup... Obviously poem markup is still not available in 'HTML 5'. Why not? Can this be added to the 'HTML 5' draft? It is pretty nice to have something like 'section, 'article', 'header' in 'HTML 5' (why not a generic heading element as h from XHTML2 by the way? This would be pretty useful for poems as well as for larger projects as anthologies, books or general content fragments joint together for example with server sided scripts as PHP). Some useful and usable markup for poetry is still missing. If someone really tries to markup a poem today, one ends up with a div-class-tag-soup-nonsense. And there are many authors out there publishing poetry only in the web, currently without having any sufficient markup elements in (X)HTML for this. According to my observation readers of poetry and general literature have a wide range of capabilities (a lot of readers of poetry are robots from search engine for example ;o) Therefore it is quite useful to markup those type of literature to make elements with a semantic meaning accessible for authors in (X)HTML and to simplify the identification of poetry for readers. I think, it is the main purpose of a 'Text Markup Language' as (X)HTML to markup text in a semantic way, isn't it? Poems are text - lets markup it now ;o) Some useful elements (block elements): 'poem' - container for a poem, similar to a section, may contain header, footer, div, p (maybe useful for modern poetry), strophe, line, h 'strophe' - stanza or strophe of a classical poem, may contain either line or (inline elements or CDATA) 'line' - a line or row of a poem, may contain inline elements or CDATA 'h' - a heading of a poem I think such a construction covers already many types of poems. For non-classical as for example concrete poetry this is maybe sufficient too, still div or p can be used to realize non-conventional content.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)