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Aristophanes' gender myth
Aristophanes in Plato's most poetic work Symposium (or The Drinking Party) announced a night myth, that before love the world mud clod was populated by giant androgynes, these were torn apart and try to find one another as lovers. Androgynes composed of a man and woman, two men, two women. Perhaps the current fascination with erasing all traces of gender roles and adding new categories to the imbecilic drop down box of 50 genders in facebook has something to do with the dystopian world of pygmies who have found themselves at the end of love, the collapse of all balconies under caterpillar tractors for being 'kitsch" and 'inappropriate", poets buried in recycled coffin cedar-wood of crushed guitar, the rise of selfish androgynes who defeated the moon of love that pressed fear into their navels.
update: collaboration with Reynolds/Bryx in the JEMCS 14 vol. 2
Every so often I receive a skype-call from my friends the philosophers Bryan Reynolds and Adam Bryx , requesting that I draw a companion-piece to one of their essays on cultural and literary theory. One of these collaborations made the cover of the Journal of Deleuze Studies, edited by Gary Genosko, published by Edinburgh Press in 2012 (order the book here)
The most recent collaboration is for their provocative article criticizing the current state of Shakespeare Studies. Here on the blog you can see the drawings in full color, in the journal for some reason they appear in black and white . The diptych is titled "URLy Modern Conquests" At last minute I received notice from the manager-publisher that these drawings (despite the importance of color in the diptych) could now only be allowed to appear in black and white and not on the cover. This seeded a frustration at the technocracy that seeks to transmute a colorful painting into leaden grays which eventually led to this poem :
I envied Goya, who was scolded by obsidian-frocked Jesuit lectors, Catholic physicians and budget-fraud inspectors
who said Francisco, surely a Jew
needed paint over with black tar only the erect giant prick of his Saturn , in "Saturn devouring his son,"
as the cock of Father time-is-money Xhronos
might have angered constituencies
of monastic students concerned with identity politics,
conceptual martyrdom on their domes, with hysteria, flak, threat
strain the red pencil of campus president who budgets
the Vatican Bank's proud cashflow pipeline that penetrated
tamed asses of Valladollid and up learned
and nuanced hemorrhoids of Via Dolorosa.
I prefer to draw my own gallows
than to make myself useful to the unsmiling unvirile correctors
But then I felt obliged to sing surely it is about printing costs
and continue working for free, for my own exposure
in medieval village squares that are gray
under the false-oasis green of campuses
maintained by its gardeners turned editors
Look at the diptych below, then please rush to read our collaboration in the carefully crafted JEMCS 14 , Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies from Pennsylvania U Press 2014 available at most English department libraries.
Diptych lower half, lovers from the right: Iago, Othello, Desdemona, Tamara, Lavignia, URLy modern conquistadors/academic hipsters.Upper half: Romeo, Juliette, hidden merchant of Mantua, Cleopatra
Goya:003-1
One of my favorite paintings by Francisco Goya. It was recently discovered that the church later commissioned an auxiliary craftsman to carefully paint over the erection of Saturn with a black void in Goya's work.
Tagged as Adam Bryx, Bryan Reynolds, conquistador hipsters Tamara offerings Bulgarian sexodus xxx dirty dmp dp dirt anal smut xxx, Desdemona, Othello, Pennsylvania University admissions, sex, URLy Modern conquests, Vaclav Havel; Prague; Czech facials stars hunger cum, xxx
Azerbaijan article about Orientalism
My friend Ali Novruzov reposted my article on his blog after a young UK politician used threats of libel law suit to intimidate the editors of Meydan TV, (the Azerbaijan pro-democracy news network) into removing it from their website. Here the link to Ali's blog where you can read my article "Third Ways and New Orientalism" : http://blog.novruzov.az/2014/02/article-censored-by-meydan-tv-arturo.html
The poet Gunel Movlud wrote an article about my drawings and life-story after I made a drawing about the tragic death of a young Azerbaijani girl, Nilüfer: http://www.meydan.tv/+jezos
I have been translating Gunel's poems into English with the help of my Azeri friend.
Gassanli claims that he will send his lawyer to make a case against Ali Novruzov for having published my article on his blog. He warned me that he will also sue me for libel should I publish the article in any way, in any other place. Here I am electronically reprinting my article on my blog. I must add that my article never accused Gassanli of being a "homophobe"
Third Ways and New Orientalism
By Arturo Desimone
In recent weeks the politically-engaged youth of Azerbaijan, both inside their country and in the diaspora of exiles and expatriates has been shaken up in polemics and debates. It started when a gay Azeri activist, İsa Şahmarlı, committed suicide. The tragedy of his death caused an outcry in Azerbaijan's dissident movement, exile networks and the wider society. A young UK politician from Azerbaijan, Murad Gassanly, who is in the British Labor Party, issued a statement that such concern for homophobia in his home-country is uncalled for.
The Labor campaigner leveled the charge of Orientalism at the activists in Azerbaijan. According to Gassanly, Azerbaijan's being an Eastern country means it has an entirely different path and culture, one in which 'homophobia' can somehow be endemic. Gassanly's pronouncements on his country's "different path" is evocative of Third Way rhetoric which his party's former chairman Tony Blair introduced into Center-Liberal mainstream politics just before concretizing the alliance with the US in its 2003 Iraq War endeavor. Third Way rhetoric before Blairism had been more frequently invoked by more esoteric radical right groups around the globe.
If anything, the supposition that an Oriental country is innately "culturally homophobic" and finds natural expression of its non-Western identity through homophobic violence, the beating of women and other inferior behaviors, is an Orientalist conclusion. These seem echoes of the debates created within insular worlds of Western university departments, where it has long been argued that an exercise in overcoming Eurocentrism is to question rationality: many contemporary intellectual discourses that can be found within postmodernism and post-structuralism, innocently repeat the colonial fantasy that no country outside of Western Europe ever had a conservation, or a tradition of discussing rationality and reason within their culture.
An Oriental who is informed of both West and East, might know that Islamic, Indian and Far Eastern philosophy all have a highly valued place for the conception of rationality, and many centuries-old polemics as to what "reason" really means. In Islamic traditions of philosophy, reason and mystical revelation do not exclude each other (this is to be found in the works of Mollah Saddra, or the much earlier Ibn Sinna who wrote "Unified Theory of Prophecy;" or al-Farabi, who was from the Caucasus and whose medieval ideas on the state seemed to favor a kind of republic )
The progressive's idea that defending irrationality or deconstructing the importance of reason is a way of seeking alternatives to Eurocentric thought, has the very conservative implicit pre-supposition that rationality is Western, leading to the classically Orientalist belief, that only the Westerner is real and the West the only reality.
The political establishments in an East and in a South that have become alienated from themselves under the overwhelming domination of the world's leading societies have tried to find an essential identity in glib, disturbing patriotisms. One need not travel as far as Baku: In Italy, Berlusconi had marketed an anti-German patriotism, stressing the Italian self-image of warm families gathering to eat spaghetti and trusting one another, unlike the cold, stingy and individualistic Germans.
It is undeniable that Germany is conquering and humiliating the South and East of Europe by way of what the German economist and writer Ulrich Beck has argued is a fourth German attempt at imperialism, expressed by the seemingly non-violent means of economic expansion through debtocracy and structural violence. It is very arguable that, as Beck maintains, much of this new form of colonialism has to do with the German and Nordic culture of Protestant attitudes, strictness and contracts, and a sense of superiority to the countries of Southern and Eastern Europe (A sense superiority towards the rest of the world is a distinct part of the German culture to this day, though it does not fit conveniently into their discourses of postwar apologetics and PR.)
The reality of an emerging neocolonialism by Germany did not change the idiotic and manipulative nature of Berlusconi's patriotic propaganda which was a new front in his vast Pornocracia.
Germany's retro-imperialism, and the cultural prejudices of Germanic countries towards East and South are a reality experienced by many and an underlying force behind the policies of economic subjugation, which have been humorously called "Merkevelianism" even though they are more far reaching and of older origins than the superficial, though exemplary political personality of Merkel. This does not make innocent Berlusconi's attempt at a Southern cultural patriotism in awkward differentiation from the North of Europe.
Italy's own North is quite identical, culturally, to this image of cold and disciplinarian mercantile North, and has been an even more formidable oppressor of Italy's own South. Berlusconi's trickery might have helped create a fictitious unity by way of conservatism to only further justify the oppression of one class and ethnos of Italians towards another. Merkel has also used the rhetoric of a "third way" and under her presidency there has been a return to legitimacy within Germany of the pride of being German and having traditional values (of course, alongside a blossoming consumerism) The revival in traditional German attitudes probably has much to do with the public discourse for the "disciplinerung" of Greece, and their freedom to speak of Greece and its crisis in what are often ethnic terms.
Gassanli's defense of homophobia as inherent to Azerbaijan's popular culture and his calling Azerbaijan's dissidents "Orientalists" seems a stunning, prodigious contribution to the mechanism of public relations that justifies Northern European alliances with Azerbaijan's treasured petroleum regime, as Azerbaijan under the Aliyev dictatorship is marketed as a rising "financial miracle" in the Middle East. Gassanli in his statements shows qualities that are valued within Blairism: tact for businessman-like explanations, politically correct sales talk and public relations. A previous article on Median by Keli Cosby that defended this policy, cited the work of Homi K Babha's far-from-original ideas on 'hybridity", that being between cultures becomes a form of power and capital for the colonized as he knows various codes. In an era when more individuals act and emulate the behaviors of corporations and states, perhaps it is worth considering that corporations and states seek their own power in what postcolonials call "hybridity."
There is definitely a hybridity today between right wing parties who are meeting each other, learning from and imitating one another across the ancient barriers that were constructed between Orient and Occident, North and South, religious and secularist. This is visible in how the Third Wayism of a Labor Party is seeking to overcome contradictions and recognizes the Third Wayism of the Aliyev regime in Azerbaijan. If global capitalism has any specific ideology, it would involve mostly an authoritarianism of the Market: that the Market's power and authority is not to be challenged or confronted, regardless of whether a country has democratic elections or a police state. In this aspect, neither the parliamentary democratic Labor Party in the UK nor the dictatorship of Aliyev in Azerbaijan is in any major way contradicting the essence of this business-power ideology. A politician graduated within the two cultures and systems might have a knowledge of the Western system as well as the internal weaknesses of both the culture of Azerbaijan and its promising young dissident movement. For Blairism, there is an obvious weakness in the dissident movement that includes recent exiles who has left the country because of threats.
The obvious weakness of the dissident movement that launched alternative education and activism projects, in the eyes of the majority of powerful political parties, would have to be their lack of Machiavellianism, and their lack of opportunism.
The dissident movement perhaps naively uses terms like "Enlightenment" and does not polish its language or its thought according to ruling conventions of politically correct wisdom. Real political drives can be sublimated by participating in the aggression of the mine-field of politically correct identity politics the West have offered as a way to absorb and destroy those who would chance to become real opponents of the ruling system. Had the dissidents known how to conform in the satisfactory manner, it would have indeed been a sign of the kind of opportunism sadly preponderant in many "progressive" discourses in Western centers of power and academic institutions that prepare future coordinators of a prevailingly conservative order in society.
The use of "Orientalism" in this debate, and the fact that this accusation is called from Britain, presents an intelligent though unscrupulous weapon, a powerful propagandic tool which has been aptly named as "the New Oriental" by the philosopher and writer István Aranyosi, a resident of Turkey, in a recent article in Boston Review.
Aranyosi chose the specific example of the accusers against Richard Dawkins, who charged Dawkins' with being specifically an anti-Muslim racist rather than an all-round reactionary secularist pundit (he is obviously the latter). Aranyosi argued that "a significant part of what such bigotry usually involves—namely, viewing Muslims as a uniform, monolithic block, coupled with an attempt at racializing Islam—is more characteristic of Dawkins's accusers." The philosopher writes in a manner that strives and succeeds in echoing Edward Said more accurately than, for example, members of the Salafi pro-Saudi movement in the West who have begun to use Said as a new defense-mechanism by calling their critics "Orientalists" while they have achieved Salafism's normalization by aligning it with the current pro-business (therefore, pro-Western) Islamism.
It is today necessary to redefine Orientalism. To some extent the Orient has ceased to exist. The triumph of the West, of the liberal market values, of consumerism, the worship of mediocrity, the ambition to enter management: this is universally present from Iran, to Pakistan, from the former Soviet countries to ex-communist China. Organized Islam has ceased to be a religion, replaced by marketing by Saudi Arabia's new colonialism in the region. The more Islamism integrates into the Western economics and into the values of buyers, the more it pushes an oppressive morality in its schools and media and sets aside the great cultural legacy of Islamic art, literature and philosophy (all long forgotten by hipster Salafists who will angrily call out the "Orientalists" among their critics and enemies, and certainly forgotten by the unofficial functionaries of insular regimes calling "patriotism" and "traditional values")
The second Iraq war was a tragedy of immense proportions not only for its having devastated a country: Iraq of all the countries in the Arab world was then famous for its strong cultural life. Despite the state terror and abuses by Saddam Hussein, his regime was weak and nearing collapse; the population was educated and knew a secular life-style in which the culture was one of subversion. A popular saying, repeated by the singer and poet Kathem el Sahr, went that in the Arab world "books are written in Egypt, printed in Lebanon and read in Iraq" (perhaps a slightly patriotic sentiment)
According to Said, Baghdad's subversive and vibrant secular counterculture had been the hope for a pro-democracy movement toppling a decadent regime in the Middle East. Baghdad was then the place in the Arab world literature, music and art as well as pro-democracy activist movements and discussion. This was of course before the second gulf war of 2003, which destroyed the hope of secular overthrow of the military Baathist dictator. Had it not been for the "regime change" perhaps the Arab rebellions of 2011 would have started in Iraq and not in Tunis, which after the ruination of Iraq was the last remaining more literate country in the Arabic-speaking parts of the world, a country perhaps lucky to have no oil or natural resources of interest to the West.
Said had advocated that the Middle East also had a strong secular culture; that, for example, religious conformity and doctrines were not essential to Arabness. It was the Orientalist maintained that to be Middle Eastern was to be a religious fanatic of some form, "culturally patriarchal", homophobic and so on. Another important consideration when discussing Orientalism, is to address the question of how much of what is considered "traditional" national culture of an Eastern country might have been recently constructed, or even developed under colonialism.
Today Orientalism has a new way of working, in that it employs the Oriental to perform Orientalism.
There are many sides to Edward Said's legacy that need criticism, his considerable myopia had consequences that resonate today in the identity politics that has created a generally repressive and unfree way of simplifying and controlling discussions inside the realm of the universities. A rigid set of "progressive values" which are really conservative, are presented as obvious, natural and unarguable. Identity politics has always existed, but gained a new form in recent decades, where an environment of anti-intellectualism is fostered and where it is seen as justifiable to refuse to read or take seriously the writers of recent centuries on account that they are merely "dead white men." An Arab poet like Palestine's Mahmoud Darwish expressed profound appreciation for some dead white men such as Federico Garcia Lorca.
Today it is characteristic of academia to find a competitive appropriation and usage of identity politics to promote career or as a substitute for ideas. This insincerity and placebo politics has spilled over in the society outside the fortresses of learning, exemplified in the cunning PR of the British-Labor member from Azerbaijan who called dissidents "Orientalists" for wanting to challenge the traditionalist values in their society.
Tagged as Azerbaijan; Orientalism; harem xxx oasis; Ali Novruzov; Murad Gassanli elections UK forthcoming knock on door sell Rayon gas censorship threats Orientalist xxx
meditatio 377# reflecting on drawings, poems
Despite living in the modern age and not having any faith or religious morality, I am incapable of any disbelief in the existence of a soul.
My poems often concern a rebellion. They are often angry and at once archaic, of longing, political but of a politics that I feel and that I have heard belongs to a lost era and a future that should have arrived much sooner.
I believe anger is less interesting if it is denying that its undercurrent, its feeding earth is sadness, pure anger without acknowledgment of grief, even if artificially politicized can be uninteresting and immature.
A poet has to know feeling the same way a musician has to know his chords and melody (of course music and poetry both are essentially about feelings, yet coming from an invisible world) Poetry stresses musicality. Poetry by my understanding must have something always to do with rythm and musicality.
I am interested in the sadness of the defeated, in their reality and not in their patriotism or in upholding politicized illusions. The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish had said he is more interested in Troy, than in Athens; he wanted to find the lost poet of Troy. The rebellion of one who knows he was already defeated is interesting to me, the forceful rejection at once of cynicism and of pleasant delusions.
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Free Picks » College Basketball Picks » Florida Gators at Kentucky Wildcats Free College Basketball Picks & Odds 2-6-2016
Florida Gators at Kentucky Wildcats Free College Basketball Picks & Odds 2-6-2016
by Josh Schonwald - 2/5/2016
Rupp Arena
The Florida Gators travel to Rupp Arena to play the Kentucky Wildcats on Saturday, February 6, 2016. The opening line for this game has Kentucky as 6 point favorites and the over/under has been set at 145.
The Gators come into this game with an overall record of 15-7 and a road record of 2-5. They are 12-7 against the spread and their over/under record is 11-9. The Wildcats have an overall record of 16-6 and a home record of 12-0. They have an over/under record of 13-10 and they are 10-13 against the spread.
Dorian Finney-Smith comes into this contest averaging 15.1 points per game while playing 30.7 minutes per night so far this season for the Gators. He pulls down 8.2 rebounds per game and dishes out 2.2 assists per game as well. His field goal percentage is 47% while his free throw percentage is currently at 72%. KeVaughn Allen averages 11.8 points per game in 25.4 minutes per contest this season. He averages 1.5 assists per contest and 2.6 rebounds per game for Florida. His field goal percentage is 43% for the year while his free throw percentage is 88%.
Jamal Murray averages 17.5 points per game while playing 34.4 minutes per contest this year for the Wildcats. He grabs 4.9 rebounds per game and has 2.4 assists per contest on the year. His field goal percentage is 42% and his free throw percentage currently is at 76%. Tyler Ulis averages 16.2 points per game this season and he sees the court an average of 36.4 minutes per contest. He also averages 3.2 rebounds per contest and 6.1 assists per game. His field goal percentage is 43% and his free throw percentage is 88%.
Florida averages 75 points per contest this season which ranks them 117th in the nation. Their average scoring margin is 9.2 and their shooting percentage is 43% as a team which has them ranked 211th. Behind the arc they shoot 33% which is good for 251st in the country. They average 41.2 rebounds per game and 13.3 assists per game which ranks them 17th and 163rd in those offensive categories. In the turnover department they rank 76th with 11.7 per game. The Gators allow 65.8 points per game to their opponents which ranks them 36th in the nation. They also allow a 39% shooting percentage and a 31% average from behind the arc ranking them 19th and 34th in those defensive categories. Opponents average 37.7 rebounds a game which ranks 262nd and they give up 11 assists per contest which puts them in 36th place in the country. They force 13.6 turnovers per game which ranks them 100th in the Division 1.
Kentucky averages 78.1 points per game this year which ranks them 58th in Division 1 college basketball. Their average scoring margin is 9.9 and their shooting percentage is 47% as a team which has them sitting in the 33rd spot in the country. Behind the arc they shoot 32% which is good for 276th in the nation. They average 39.2 rebounds per game and 13.7 assists per contest which ranks them 51st and 138th respectively. In the turnover department the Wildcats rank 130th with 12.4 per game. The Wildcats allow 68.3 points per game to their opponents which ranks them 87th in the country. They also allow a 40% shooting percentage and a 33% average from behind the arc ranking them 46th and 102nd in those defensive statistics. Opponents average 32.8 rebounds a game which ranks 46th and they give up 9.1 assists per contest which puts them in 2nd place in the nation. The Wildcats force 12.9 turnovers per game which ranks them 166th in college basketball.
The Gators average 65.8 points per game on the road this season and they have scored 78 ppg in their past 3 contests. They have an average scoring differential of -1 on the road and in their past 3 games their difference is 6.7 per contest. The Gators have an offensive rating of 106.5 and they assist on 51% of their shots. In terms of pace they average 70.4 possessions per 40 minutes and their effective field goal percentage is 49%. As a team they have a true shooting percentage of 52% and they shoot 3 pointers on 36% of their shots. Florida turns the ball over an average of 14.1 times per 100 possessions and they get a steal on 9.8% of their opponents possessions. Their total rebound percentage is 52.2% while their offensive rebound percentage is 34.2%. The Gators give up 66.8 points per game on the road this season and they have surrendered 71.3 points per contest in their last 3 games.
The Wildcats score 80.2 ppg at home and they have averaged 83 points per contest in their last 3 games.They have an average scoring differential of 7 in their past 3 contests and at home this season they have a difference of 17.3 points per game. The Wildcats have a rating on offense of 112 and 48.4% of their shots are assisted. They possess the ball 69.4 times per 40 minutes and their effective field goal percentage for the year is 52%. As an offensive unit they have a true shooting percentage of 55% and they attempt 3 pointers on 30% of their shots. Kentucky turns it over an average of 14.9 times per 100 possessions and they steal the ball on 9.1% of their opponents possessions. Their total rebound percentage is 54.5% while their offensive rebound percentage for the season is 38.9%. The Wildcats give up 62.8 points per contest at home this year and they have given up 76 points per game in their past 3 contests.
Florida Gators Betting Trends
The Florida Gators are 12-7 against the spread
The Florida Gators are 11-9 against the over/under
Kentucky Wildcats Betting Trends
The Kentucky Wildcats are 10-13 against the spread
The Kentucky Wildcats are 13-10 against the over/under
Florida Gators Injuries
02/05/16 F Justin Leon Concussion "?" Saturday vs. Kentucky
02/05/16 F Kevarrius Hayes Arm "?" Saturday vs. Kentucky
01/18/16 F Alex Murphy Foot out indefinitely
Kentucky Wildcats Injuries
No key injuries to report
Josh's Pick: Take Florida

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


We as "Sister's" Andrea, Gladys and Pauline have decided to team up for this Woman's build with DuPage Habitat for Humanity in honor of all the strong women in our lives past and present who have helped us become the strong women that we are today. We will be volunteering our time helping to build a home for a family in need. We all have known someone in our lives that needed a hand up; we need your help in reaching our goal to help us fund this build. Encouraging words are heartfelt but a donation, any size is tax deductible!
Pauline has recently completed volunteering with the DuPage Habitat Dominican Republic build of five homes and works at the DuPage ReStore which funds the building of new homes to families in need. Gladys has been a volunteer at the Wheaton office providing office support, fundraising and researching prospective corporate sponsors. Andrea has numerous years of rehabbing homes and our MacGyver of creativity.
With your tax deductible support; your donation can help the Sisters reach our goal. Thank you!


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10 of the Best Poems about Stars by guest author Dr Oliver Tearle
Val Penny ♦ July 30, 2017 ♦ 1 Comment
This article was first published on the Site Interesting Literature founded and edited by Dr Oliver Tearle, Lecturer in English at Loughborough University and freelance writer. It appeared on 28 July 2017 at https://interestingliterature.com/2017/07/28/10-of-the-best-poems-about-stars/#more-12016.
The best starry poems
Stars, like flowers and the moon and sunsets, are part of the 'paint-by-numbers' poetry toolkit: if you want to write a passable poem that sounds consciously 'poetic', you can, as S Club 7 put it, reach for the stars. But poets throughout the centuries have put the stars to more thoughtful and interesting use than mere poetic decoration, offering songs in celebration of the starry firmament and more pessimistic takes on the stars in the sky and what they tell us about ourselves. Here are ten of the best poems about the stars.
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 14. Shakespeare's Sonnet 14 is one of his 'Procreation Sonnets', which urges the Fair Youth, the addressee of the early Sonnets, to marry and sire an heir. The poem takes astrology as its (rejected) trope, and begins with the line 'Not from the stars do I my judgement pluck'. Shakespeare rejects the idea of 'Astronomy' (which in Shakespeare's time was still used more or less interchangeably with 'astrology', or divining the future by the stars) as a way of making predictions about the future. But although he may not be able to predict any man's fortune by observing the real stars in the sky, he can prophesy the future by looking into the 'stars' that are the Fair Youth's eyes…
William Wordsworth, 'The Stars are Mansions Built by Nature's Hand'. In this example of the Italian sonnet, Wordsworth celebrates the beauty of the stars in the night sky, seeing them as the abode of 'the spirits of the blest'.
John Keats, 'Bright Star'. This sonnet muses upon the fragility and inconstancy of human life. It doesn't actually have a title, and instead is known by its first line, 'Bright star! Would I were stedfast as thou art', and sees Keats comparing his own condition with that of a star 'stedfast' in the night sky. Keats copied the finished version of the sonnet into a volume of The Poetical Works of William Shakespeare, placing his poem opposite Shakespeare's A Lover's Complaint. The first two words of the sonnet were used as the title of the 2009 biopic about Keats's life, Bright Star, starring Ben Whishaw as Keats.
Emily Dickinson, 'Ah Moon – and Star!' In this poem, Dickinson does a bit of star-gazing, and concludes that, far away from her though the moon and stars are, they are not as far away as her beloved. The end of the poem is ambiguous, allowing for us to interpret this unspecified beloved as Jesus Christ, making this a religious poem (or, more accurately, a poem about religious doubt) as well as a fine poem about the stars.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, 'The Starlight Night'. This sonnet by Victorian poetry's most idiosyncratic writer entreats the reader to look up at the stars on a 'starlight night'; Hopkins likens the stars to numerous things, from people or 'fire-folk' sitting in the night sky, to the eyes of elves, and to diamonds – 'diamond delves' likens the stars in the night sky to diamonds in dark mines or caves. 'The Starlight Night' was one of two poems which Hopkins sent to his mother as a birthday present, the other poem being 'God's Grandeur'. What a birthday present!
A. E. Housman, 'Stars, I Have Seen Them Fall'. Like many of Housman's poems, this one is untitled, so we've given its first line here. Although the stars seem to fall, they remain in the sky; although rain falls into the sea, the sea remains the same saltwater it has always been. Housman's poem is about futility, and offers a less celebratory take on the stars in the night sky.
T. E. Hulme, 'The Embankment'. In just seven lines, the father of English modernist poetry, T. E. Hulme, captures the mood of a 'fallen gentleman' sleeping rough by the Thames. Looking up at the beautiful night sky, the homeless and hapless man longs to grab the 'star-eaten blanket of the sky' and wrap himself in it for warmth. A sort of reversal of Oscar Wilde's famous line, 'We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars': here, we can all look at the stars, but some of us are in the gutter…
Louis MacNeice, 'Star-Gazer'. To look at the night sky is to look into the past: we are looking at stars, not as they are now, but as they were thousands, perhaps even millions of years ago. Written in 1967 but looking back to his eighteenth birthday some 42 years earlier, MacNeice's 'Star-Gazer' thinks bigger than man's three-score-and-ten, reflecting on the fact that some of the stars now bursting into life will never be seen by the poet, because they are so far away their light will only reach earth a long, long time in the future.
W. H. Auden, 'The More Loving One'. Like Dickinson's poem above, here we have another poem connecting the stars to unrequited love. Looking up at the stars, Auden says, he knows they are indifferent to him, but then if equal affection between two things – or between two people – is impossible, he would rather be 'the more loving one'.
Sylvia Plath, 'Stars Over the Dordogne'. 'Stars are dropping thick as stones': so begins Plath's poem about the stars, in which her speaker sits and watches the stars dropping into the landscape, prompting her to consider the universe, eternity, and other seemingly boundless things. A fine but lesser-known Plath poem that concludes our pick of the greatest poems about the stars.
Posted in: Articles ♦ Guest Authors ♦ Poetry
Tagged: A. E. Housman, Dr Oliver Tearle, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Keats, Louis MacNeice, Poetry Reviews, Sylvia Plath, T. E. Hulme, W. H. Auden, William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth
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Carolyn Grimm
July 30, 2017 – 11:41 am
They are all great. I love 'The Starlight Night' it's beautiful.


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HomeFREEDOMHoward Stern Calls For Israel To "Wipe Palestinians Off The Face Of The Earth"
Howard Stern Calls For Israel To "Wipe Palestinians Off The Face Of The Earth"
October 10, 2015 This article was posted by TLB Staff FREEDOM 0
Dr. David Duke. Phd
Howard Stern calls for Israel to "wipe Palestinians off the face of the earth" — That's ok, right?
Commentary —This article from the Times of Israel says it all about the double standard whereby Jewish privilege allows Howard Stern to call for the genocide of an entire people, yet any non-Jew who simply makes the factual statement that Jews exercise a great deal of power (think Rick Sanchez) immediately is denounced and fired.
Palestinian delegation to US decries Howard Stern's 'racism'
Disc jockey's comments about Palestinians would have been roundly condemned had they targeted another group, PLO office charges
By Times of Israel staff October 8, 2015, 9:39 am 24
The top representative body of the Palestinians in the US condemned recent comments by the Jewish radio host Howard Stern as "racist" and "baseless."
The PLO Delegation to the US was referring to a monologue aired earlier this week, during which Stern denounced former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters for his ongoing efforts to convince musicians to boycott Israel over its treatment of the Palestinians.
In a statement, the PLO delegation termed Waters a "human rights activist" and decried what it referred to as Stern's racism against Arabs, and Palestinians in particular.
"Mr. Stern's contention that Palestinians 'did not live there [Palestine]' is a claim grounded in racist assumptions that the indigenous Palestinian population does not exist. Such baseless allegations only serve to foment violence and hatred, and do little to promote the interests of peace and reconciliation," the statement, published on Wednesday, said.
The PLO delegation also quoted from a previous show during which Stern said, "The Arab world has to be taught a lesson, that we are the boss and you are going to be our dogs… let Israel loose… it could be taken care of in an hour; you could wipe them off the face of the earth…I'd blow up… the Palestinians… blow them all up and be done with them, and you won't miss a night's sleep."
If Stern were to make such comments about other ethnic groups, including Jews, the PLO delegation asserted, "the public outcry would rightly be fierce."
"We will not allow anyone, including Mr. Stern, to disseminate misguided, racist, or genocidal views into the public sphere without being held to account," the statement said, calling on the celebrity radio host to retract his statements and issue an apology.
During his expletive-laden rant against Waters, Stern called the singer to task for what he called Waters' preoccupation with the Jewish people.
"What is with Roger Waters and the Jews? …Where do you want the Jews to go, Roger? You want them to just go back to the concentration camp? What is it you want, fuckhead?
"It seems like you're a little too consumed with it," Stern added.
Stern's diatribe against Waters on Tuesday came just a days after the singer published an open letter calling on Jon Bon Jovi to cancel his show in Israel. Bon Jovi performed as planned.
See featured article here:
http://davidduke.com/52239-2/
TLB recommends that you read other pertinent articles at: davidduke.com
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text:
Lucy Dawidowicz, then Lucy Schildkret, in Munich, 1946.
The Anti-Intellectual
By Adam Kirsch
From Left to Right: Lucy Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History by Nancy Sinkoff
Intellectuals tend to have a briefer moment in the sun than novelists or poets; they are taking part in the arguments of the day rather than creating monuments for the ages. But for some reason, the reputation of the New York Intellectuals—a group of brilliant essayists, critics, and social observers who flourished in the mid-20th century—still endures, even as the last surviving members of the group enter their 90s.
Perhaps few people still actually read the literary essays of Lionel Trilling, the aesthetic theories of Clement Greenberg, the cultural criticism of Dwight Macdonald or the polemics of the dueling Irvings, Howe and Kristol, paladins of the left and right, respectively. But collectively, they stand for an ideal that still matters: the freelance thinker, unconstrained by academic dogmas, who has something insightful to say about any subject, whether it's a presidential election or the late style of Henry James.
Lucy S. Dawidowicz, who died in 1990 at the age of 75, seldom makes lists of the leading New York Intellectuals, even though she fits the type perfectly.
From Radical to Cold Warrior
A child of Jewish immigrants who grew up poor in the Bronx during the Great Depression, Dawidowicz went to one of New York City's free public colleges and became a radical, even joining the Young Communist League.
Communism was an important phase for all the New York Intellectuals, training them to think in big-picture terms about politics and ideas, as well as to argue with agility and passion. (A classic documentary about the group, by Joseph Dorman, is titled Arguing the World.) But what mattered most was the way all of them turned against the Party, realizing that the life of the mind was incompatible with Stalinist dogma. Some remained on the left, like Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin, but called themselves democratic socialists; others went all the way to the right, like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, who founded a new political movement, neoconservatism.
Dawidowicz was in the vanguard of this rightward march. She left Communism behind before she graduated from Hunter College, and as the years passed she became increasingly skeptical of liberalism, too. By the 1980s she had become an ardent Cold Warrior and Reaganite, views that informed her essays for magazines like Commentary, as well as her sociological studies for the American Jewish Committee, where she worked as a researcher for many years.
In her 60s, she achieved wider fame thanks to The War Against the Jews (1975), a highly influential history of the Holocaust, whose thesis is reflected in its title. Dawidowicz believed that the annihilation of the Jews was Hitler's chief goal and the driving purpose of Nazism from beginning to end. This "intentionalist" thesis was directed against the "functionalist" argument embraced by most academic historians, then and now, which sees the Holocaust as a product of wartime contingencies and the internal dynamics of Nazi rule, rather than a master plan.
Dawidowicz fits the New York Intellectual type perfectly.
So why isn't Dawidowicz as celebrated as the other New York intellectuals? That's one of the questions Nancy Sinkoff tries to answer in her biography, From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals and the Politics of Jewish History. Gender is one reason, of course. Only a few women were admitted to the male coterie around Partisan Review and Commentary, and Sinkoff argues that the role of what she calls "sexual capital" can't be ignored. Hannah Arendt had it, and so did Mary McCarthy and Susan Sontag, but not Dawidowicz.
But the more profound reason why Dawidowicz remained on her own, a school of one, had to do with her unfashionable interest in Jewishness. Most of the New York intellectuals were Jewish, but they shared an intellectual disdain for religion, as well as a discomfort with their own working-class, immigrant origins. If they grew up speaking Yiddish, most of them forgot it as quickly as possible. Their lodestars were Marxism and modernism—movements that appealed because they were universalist, welcoming thinkers of all backgrounds equally.
Dawidowicz, by contrast, embraced both the Yiddish language and yiddishkayt, the culture and spirit of Jewish Eastern Europe. The turning point in her life came in 1938, when she went to do graduate study in Vilna, then part of Poland, and was nearly caught there by the outbreak of World War II. She managed to escape only thanks to her American passport, but most of her friends and colleagues were murdered. The man she married, in 1948, was a survivor whose first wife and child had been killed by the Nazis. As a result, the Holocaust was a much more immediate reality to Dawidowicz than it was to most of the New York intellectuals, who took decades to come to terms with its scale and meaning.
The key to understanding Dawidowicz, Sinkoff persuasively argues, is that because of these experiences, she thought of herself as a Jew who happened to live in America, rather than an American whose ancestors happened to be Jewish. Half a century ago, this made her unclubbable among the New York intellectuals. Today, in a world less enamored of universalism, it might make her sound more like a prophet.
538 pages, Wayne State University Press, $34.99
From Left to Right is available at your local independent bookstore, on Bookshop, and on Amazon.
Adam Kirsch is a poet, critic, and editor based in New York whose books include Rocket and Lightship: Essays on Literature and Ideas
Photo courtesy of the American Jewish Historical Society.


text:
package influxql

type iteratorMapper struct {
	e         *Emitter
	buf       []interface{}
	fields    []IteratorMap // which iterator to use for an aux field
	auxFields []interface{}
}

type IteratorMap interface {
	Value(tags Tags, buf []interface{}) interface{}
}

type FieldMap int

func (i FieldMap) Value(tags Tags, buf []interface{}) interface{} { return buf[i] }

type TagMap string

func (s TagMap) Value(tags Tags, buf []interface{}) interface{} { return tags.Value(string(s)) }

func NewIteratorMapper(itrs []Iterator, fields []IteratorMap, opt IteratorOptions) Iterator {
	e := NewEmitter(itrs, opt.Ascending, 0)
	e.OmitTime = true
	return &iteratorMapper{
		e:         e,
		buf:       make([]interface{}, len(itrs)),
		fields:    fields,
		auxFields: make([]interface{}, len(fields)),
	}
}

func (itr *iteratorMapper) Next() (*FloatPoint, error) {
	t, name, tags, err := itr.e.loadBuf()
	if err != nil || t == ZeroTime {
		return nil, err
	}

	itr.e.readInto(t, name, tags, itr.buf)
	for i, f := range itr.fields {
		itr.auxFields[i] = f.Value(tags, itr.buf)
	}
	return &FloatPoint{
		Name: name,
		Tags: tags,
		Time: t,
		Aux:  itr.auxFields,
	}, nil
}

func (itr *iteratorMapper) Stats() IteratorStats {
	stats := IteratorStats{}
	for _, itr := range itr.e.itrs {
		stats.Add(itr.Stats())
	}
	return stats
}

func (itr *iteratorMapper) Close() error {
	return itr.e.Close()
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Incentive programs can be a powerful way to engage employees, improve performance and reach major corporate goals.
Research shows that incentive programs offering financial rewards can increase individual performance by 22 percent and team performance by 44 percent. Incentives also keep employees engaged over longer periods of time. When a reward is offered for reaching a given goal, performance increases by 15 percent. When employees are asked to continue in pursuit of a goal, performance increases by 27 percent.
Achieving these kinds of results requires a well-designed, carefully communicated plan. Here are four best practices for developing a successful incentive program.
Generally, incentive programs are instituted to solve a particular problem, such as low sales, caused by lack of motivation. But if performance is struggling due to other reasons—outdated technology, sub-par skills, inadequate resources—an incentive program won't be a cure-all.
Also take into consideration the makeup of your organization and its culture. A green start-up will have different needs than a well-established business of veteran employees. What will most effectively motivate your team?
Obviously for an incentive program to work, employees need to see the value and participate. Upper-level management also must be engaged in supporting the program and reinforcing its importance. You can create buy-in by reframing incentives and recognition not as a cost but as an investment—something to boost productivity and employee retention. Once the program is under way, be sure to track your progress.
Make it clear to employees what they need to do to win. When there's something tangible on the line, your teams are more likely to dig in and see the value of what you're asking them to do. To that end, the goals you set forth must be attainable and realistic; nothing is more demotivating than a so-called incentive for a goal you know you can never achieve! In setting up your program, ensure there are frequent opportunities for small victories that keep employees on track and inspired. Provide them a direct, uncomplicated path to success.
Of course, no incentive program makes sense without measurement to tell the success story. Outline your goals before kicking off the program, then measure progress continually—don't wait until the end of the campaign. As you see what's working and what's not, refine your program, either for the immediate future or for the next phase of your efforts. And communicate to your employees what you've concluded: what worked, what didn't, who won and what the next steps are.
A resource like *Paycor's Custom Reporting tool enables to you to create reports in an instant for any data you choose to track. With unlimited custom fields, Custom Reporting can power an incentive program or provide visibility into everyday details such as head count and compensation. Learn how Custom Reporting can work for your organization.