Showing posts with label Sappho. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sappho. Show all posts
22 July 2012
Sappho's Broom
Goldfinches in winter.
Surprised by Time began four years ago today. This is the 250th post -- at least 398,000 words -- and I am more surprised. I've loved this work these four years. Surprised is linked to by nearly 150 other blogs, websites, and university research sites, and has had, as of writing this sentence, 140,135 (削除) readers (削除ここまで) page loads. The past week has averaged 140 page loads a day. (Other than the total number of (削除) readers (削除ここまで) page loads. I only know the statistics for the most recent 500.) I don't really know what 140 a day means in the blog world, but it seems generous when you consider that Wikipedia reports 156,000,000 blogs in existence a year ago.
A strong number of readers look in regularly, and have for most of the four years. Usually the largest percentage of readers is from Greece. But readers baffle me. Someone from Paris loads the same page 38 times, then comes back and looks at the same page a dozen times more. Someone from Athens loads up 78 pages about Cleofe. (Everything I do here can be Copied and Pasted into your own document.) Someone from Bulgaria or Greece or North Carolina or Algeria finds the blog, makes 40 -120 page loads in a single day -- do these people have no diapers to change? no kitchens to clean? no gardens to weed? -- and disappears. I have been awed to find readers from St. Helena and Reunion Islands.
Many readers arrive, clearly looking for something else -- "second-hand hats," "sophie's corner painting" -- and apparently a great many restaurants in US cities have names I thought were stratioti names. It was a mistake to have titled one post "Dating." Many people have ended up there looking for women, and I hope they have been crushingly disappointed. I remind readers again that my software tracks readers of the site, where they have come from, what they do on my site, and in most cases identifies their specific organization or university.
Most of the entries in this blog are work-in-progress, background notes for my book. I write as part of trying to solve problems I encounter. Opinions have shifted. More sources have been found. Corrections are needed. Fine-tuning. Readers should be wary of what they collect. I do try to go back and correct facts as I identify them, but interpretations are more difficult. Do not assume that I still hold a conclusion from a year or three years ago -- but I might. Should you want to make use of material here, my work is available under a Creative Commons Copyright which you should read.
Many readers arrive, clearly looking for something else -- "second-hand hats," "sophie's corner painting" -- and apparently a great many restaurants in US cities have names I thought were stratioti names. It was a mistake to have titled one post "Dating." Many people have ended up there looking for women, and I hope they have been crushingly disappointed. I remind readers again that my software tracks readers of the site, where they have come from, what they do on my site, and in most cases identifies their specific organization or university.
Most of the entries in this blog are work-in-progress, background notes for my book. I write as part of trying to solve problems I encounter. Opinions have shifted. More sources have been found. Corrections are needed. Fine-tuning. Readers should be wary of what they collect. I do try to go back and correct facts as I identify them, but interpretations are more difficult. Do not assume that I still hold a conclusion from a year or three years ago -- but I might. Should you want to make use of material here, my work is available under a Creative Commons Copyright which you should read.
Stellar's Jay
The garden is fine, thanks to all the time Alexandra spent getting it into something we can just about maintain. The five species of red poppies suppressed the pink, white, yellow, and orange poppies, and a good feed of horse manure pushed the Greek poppies 4 feet tall. We added a new rose. a second Just Joey, a Christmas present from Rosalind bought from a local garden shop, but otherwise the roses were very slow, held back by exceptionally cool weather. Rose buds prevented from blooming when they should will open out deformed -- this is important to remember whether you raise children or roses.
Previously questionable, and cheap, no-name roses have done well, while half the catalog roses have done abysmally. Three name David Austin roses -- a Winchester (stunning the first year, and never again), an Abraham Darby, and a Just Joey - - died off, and their root stock produced shoots with quite different roses. Two of them are beautiful, but not what I had paid for. David Austin's Pat Austin (no petals ever had a lovelier curve, but its stems were too weak for the blooms) died. Or so we thought, but two shoots appeared overnight last week, so we are waiting. Altissimo has been spectacular. A friend's gift of Rosa Mullaganii (from the UW Horticulture Center) has become huge, striking out in different directions and pushing a white tunnel through the pink cascades beside it. It must have had several hundred blooms scenting the whole front yard on the one day of sun when the lavender beneath began to bloom. (The lavender harvest will be this afternoon.)
Our aged broom with the sculptural twisting wood died, but the new broom plants I abducted from Sa
There is a place near Sa
The pictures here are my attempts to record our birds. We have six bird feeders now, plus the squirrel feeder, plus the upstairs balcony for the crows, plus salvia, penstemon, and Hot Lips sage for the hummingbirds and butterflies. All June we had baby birds around the feeders, fluffy untidy things with blurry markings -- from the chickadee nest in the bathroom window frame, from the nuthatch nest in the lilacs, from the wren nest in the hawthorn, and chestnut-sided chickadees from the far side of the yard. A baby would land -- on the suet or sunflower seed feeder -- and then look around, not knowing what to do until a parent arrived and demonstrated. The little nuthatches took turns handing each other the seeds they pecked out of the suet, clearly aware that a beak should have food put into it. The baby house finches arrived in early May and caused great anguish by their tendency to take food to the ground to eat. The cat was severely reproached.
One squirrel has learned to come around the house to the power line in the hawthorn tree 20 feet from the window where I work. He looks at me with an air of quiet desperation until I bring him a walnut. The crows get up before I do, and fly over the skylight over the bed cawing if they see no food. There is always one on watch for me to come onto the balcony who announces when I appear with food. Another flies back and forth in front of the study window cawing when more food is required. There is always a crow watching us . . .
Crows have strong food choices. Walnuts and meat are preferred. Beef cat treats are good, but chicken cat treats are rejected. Pizza crusts, but not toast crusts. Occasional suet, but not daily. My hairdresser said her neighbor fed his crows corn meal. My crows spilt out the corn meal and shrieked criticism until they had adolescents to feed, and then it was acceptable. They have learned to eat dry cat food, as have the jays. From the kitchen, we hear the steady thumps of crows landing above, the rattle of beaks in the metal food pan.
Female Anna's Hummingbird.
The crows used to cluster above the yard and caw at the black cat. After four years of that, they seemed to have accepted that he was part of the yard, and left off. Yesterday I heard a mob of crows shrieking danger, swirling up and down the street in their carmagnole. It turned out that they had spotted Pierre a block away, wearing his big floppy black sun hat, and had been diving into his head. Did they think him a stranger wearing a dead crow on his head?
One crow has started dropping pine cones in the yard. Gifts in exchange for food?
Early in the spring, I started another blog -- Firesteel. I did not know the word until I was looking for an explanation of the Palaiologos flag with a B in each quarter and read that the emblem was derived from firesteels. I became obsessed with the word, have identified a blacksmith who can make me one, and finally reserved a blog address for the name -- firesteel was taken for all the servers I tried, but not pyrekbolo, the Greek version. The word linked in my mind with the translucent grey sphere that covers The Garden of Earthly Delights when the side panels of the triptych are closed, a grey world humming with the first evidence of the creation of light. Today's poem is "The Creation" by James Weldon Johnson, and I have never lost the thrill of hearing it on a 78 rpm recording when I was nine years old.
Firesteel is a blog for poetry and the occasional prose that thrills, that make chills run along my neck, or sparks shimmer inside my head -- a blog for words that strike fire. It appears on Sundays, and has a modest core of faithful readers.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Townsend's Warbler
25 September 2008
Sappho, Cleopatra, and the Pope
I see how fine he is, how rare, this creature called Lung Book or Mortal Book because of his strange organs of breath. His lungs are holes in his body, which open and close. And inside the holes are stiffened membranes, arranged like the pages of a book — imagine that! And when the holes open, the pages rise up and unfold, and the blood
that circles through them touches the air, and by this bath of air the blood is made pure . . . He is a house of books, my shy scorpion, carrying in his belly all the
perishable manuscripts — a little mirror of the library at Alexandria,
which burned.
that circles through them touches the air, and by this bath of air the blood is made pure . . . He is a house of books, my shy scorpion, carrying in his belly all the
perishable manuscripts — a little mirror of the library at Alexandria,
which burned.
BRIGIT PEGEEN KELLY
We were having a drink under the platan trees by the trout ponds in Naousa. A man joined us, we exchanged introductions, and he said, "You think you are scholars and you know everything about history. But you don't know what really happened to the Library of Alexandria." And then he explained that the library had never burned, as everyone assumed, but that the Pope had taken it away, and all the priceless Greek manuscripts were locked away in the Secret Archives of the Vatican. This sounded like good news to us: it meant that priceless manuscripts still survived, but for him it was the crowning proof of papal perfidy. Considering the Fourth Crusade and Ferrara-Florence, a fragile case might be made for his view, but not here.
It might be thought a bit of perfidy that Alexandria had some of its Greek manuscripts at all. Ancient Athens required that a copy of each play presented at the Dionysia be deposited in the Metroön, the building that housed official city archives. That would have been nearly 400 plays collected across the century under which the system of drama was maintained. A hundred years after that century was over, Athens became involved in the Chremonidian War, an effort of Greek states to throw off Macedonian control. Athens was not what she had once been, and asked to borrow war funding from Ptolemy II of Alexandria, who agreed in exchange for receiving the complete collection of plays as pledge on the loan.
In an act that can only chill the stomach of anyone who has sailed in the Mediterranean, Athens put the manuscripts of a thousand plays on a galley and sent them across the water to Egypt. Ptolemy sent the money. In time, Athens asked to redeem the pledge. Ptolemy, in effect, said, "Keep the money."
More history happened. In the course of Julius Caesar's siege of Alexandria in 48BC, warehouses in the harbor area in which books were stored caught fire. There was much outrage about burning the library -- if the books did indeed belong to the library.
A patriarch named Theophilos is said to have burned the library in 391 AD on the grounds that if the books contradicted Holy Writ, they should be destroyed, and if they agreed with it, they were extraneous and unnecessary. In 640, the Calif Omar took over the city of Alexandria and when asked what should be done about the library, made, by the most amazing coincidence, the same response as Theophilos. These burnings of the library cannot be demonstrated to have happened although there were burnings, and in the course of conquests and revenge books do get burned.
There may have been other burnings that did or did not happen. The real problem is, we cannot establish that there was actually a Library of Alexandria in the time of Caesar, let alone by the time of Theophilos or Omar.
What we do know is that over the course of the 8th and 9th centuries, mathmatical and medical documents from Alexandria ended up in Persia. And we know that Egyptians took manuscript rolls, sliced them like jelly rolls into little strips, and wrapped their mummies with them. Most of the Sappho that exists today comes in partial lines from fragmented ribbons of mummy wrappings, although not the poem above.
In that fragment neatly copied on papyrus, Sappho says to a group of young girls that they have the gifts of the Muses, and ends by saying that, being human, there is no way not to grow old. Cleopatra of Egypt, who loved Caesar for a while and could not have loved a book-burner, given the choice, would have gladly responded to that with her famous "Make it so!"
In an act that can only chill the stomach of anyone who has sailed in the Mediterranean, Athens put the manuscripts of a thousand plays on a galley and sent them across the water to Egypt. Ptolemy sent the money. In time, Athens asked to redeem the pledge. Ptolemy, in effect, said, "Keep the money."
More history happened. In the course of Julius Caesar's siege of Alexandria in 48BC, warehouses in the harbor area in which books were stored caught fire. There was much outrage about burning the library -- if the books did indeed belong to the library.
A patriarch named Theophilos is said to have burned the library in 391 AD on the grounds that if the books contradicted Holy Writ, they should be destroyed, and if they agreed with it, they were extraneous and unnecessary. In 640, the Calif Omar took over the city of Alexandria and when asked what should be done about the library, made, by the most amazing coincidence, the same response as Theophilos. These burnings of the library cannot be demonstrated to have happened although there were burnings, and in the course of conquests and revenge books do get burned.
There may have been other burnings that did or did not happen. The real problem is, we cannot establish that there was actually a Library of Alexandria in the time of Caesar, let alone by the time of Theophilos or Omar.
What we do know is that over the course of the 8th and 9th centuries, mathmatical and medical documents from Alexandria ended up in Persia. And we know that Egyptians took manuscript rolls, sliced them like jelly rolls into little strips, and wrapped their mummies with them. Most of the Sappho that exists today comes in partial lines from fragmented ribbons of mummy wrappings, although not the poem above.
In that fragment neatly copied on papyrus, Sappho says to a group of young girls that they have the gifts of the Muses, and ends by saying that, being human, there is no way not to grow old. Cleopatra of Egypt, who loved Caesar for a while and could not have loved a book-burner, given the choice, would have gladly responded to that with her famous "Make it so!"
For the whole poem about the scorpion, http://nauplion.net/Diana.html
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