Culture – Page 20 – Scripturient

The Thousand and One Nights

I had no idea it was this sexy. The Thousand Nights and One Nights, aka The Arabian Nights, aka The Thousand and One Nights – it’s really wonderful, steamy stuff. Every tale is a cliffhanger and you keep wanting to read just one more to see how it turns out. Of course, that was the point of the collection.* The backstory is rather complicated, but to simplify it: the Sultan beds a virgin one night, then kills her the next day. When Scheherazade’s turn comes, she asks for her sister to be able to say good bye. Then she begins to ……… click below for more ↓

Hell 2.2

2013-07-29 2013-07-29 Atheism & Spirituality / Books & Reviews / Critical Thinking / Culture / Faith / Literary pretensions / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

Might be time to recap my reasons for writing this series. New readers could get confused about the content in the Hell posts, of which this is the fourth. They’re all the result of a convergence of several recent themes and activities in my life; a lot of which have to do with recent reading and research. I started reading several books, more or less simultaneously this summer, some of which I’ve blogged about. One of them is Dante’s Inferno (I’m currently reading Mark Musa’s translation in the Penguin edition, but also have Pinsky’s and a few others). Another is ……… click below for more ↓

Kill the Apostrophe? Rubbish! Keep it!

2013-07-21 2013-07-21 Arts / Books & Reviews / Critical Thinking / Internet & Social Media / Language & Grammar / Memes; Internet & Social / My WritingLeave a comment

A site has popped up with one of the stupidest ideas about English I’ve read in the past decade or two. It’s called Kill the Apostrophe. Subtle. At first, I thought it was a joke, a spoof. After all, how can one realistically get rid of perhaps the most significant element of punctuation based on the rantings of a website lunatic? And some of the counterpoint sites like Humbleapostrophe seemed created in a sense of camaraderie humour. But no, on further reading, it’s as real as any of the other wingnut sites, from chemtrails to “psychic” readings to UFOs. Most ……… click below for more ↓

Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde

2013-07-12 2015-08-11 Arts / Books & Reviews / Language & Grammar / My WritingOne Comment

After reading the play by Shakespeare last week, I decided to tackle Chaucer’s epic 8,000-line poem about the Trojan lovers, Troilus and Cressida (or Criseyde as Chaucer writes it). It’s a long, somewhat meandering piece that begins, in the Online Medieval Classical Library version: The double sorwe of Troilus to tellen, That was the king Priamus sone of Troye, In lovinge, how his aventures fellen Fro wo to wele, and after out of Ioye, My purpos is, er that I parte fro ye. Thesiphone, thou help me for tendyte Thise woful vers, that wepen as I wryte! To thee clepe I, ……… click below for more ↓

A Sneak Peak Inside Our New Fire Hall

2013-07-09 2013-07-09 Collingwood / Municipal Politics / Personal Reminiscences / PhotographyLeave a comment

Councillor Lloyd and I took a tour through the new fire hall, at the corner of High and Third Streets, today. It’s still under construction, but the main components are finished and the firefighters have moved in. It’s an impressive place. Well-designed, well-built (using a lot of local builders and materials!). Make sure you attend the open house when the building is officially completed, this fall. We should all be proud of this place: it sets standards not only for this town, but for other fire services across the province. Here are some images to whet your appetite for visit. ……… click below for more ↓

Centennial Pool Gets Finishing Touches

2013-07-09 2013-07-09 Collingwood / Municipal Politics / Personal Reminiscences / PhotographyLeave a comment

A sneak peak into Centennial Pool a few weeks before it re-opens. Councillor Lloyd and I took a look around today (July 9) at how it’s progressing. We were very impressed. It’s going to be fabulous! Collingwood residents will love this place. It is really a stunning facility and we will be proud to host events here. The first image, at the top, shows the therapeutic pool at the bottom, with the ramp for accessibility, then the pool and the new electronic scoreboard. Feels like a cathedral inside, it’s so large! And light galore: bright and open. Warm, welcoming place. ……… click below for more ↓

The Decline in Media Credibility and Profitability

2013-07-03 2013-07-03 Critical Thinking / Culture / Internet & Social Media / Media Issues / My Writing / Social Order & Disorder6 Comments

Last August the Pew research Center released the results of its latest study on how much the American public trusts the media. This has been part of an ongoing study since at least 2002, and ever since the first report, the amount of trust in media has fallen. This has been a hot topic of discussion online ever since, and the source of much hand-wringing at each new release. Perhaps the mounting number of scandals in journalism has soured an audience accustomed to believing the media is honorable, trustworthy and upright. Perhaps it’s the growing politicization of (some) media that ……… click below for more ↓

A Little Uke on the Side

2013-06-28 2013-06-28 Arts / Musical Instruments / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

About 20 kilometres from home, while mentally playing the piece I had practiced all week, I asked myself if I had remembered to pack my tuner. I remembered taking it off the ukulele and placing it in my luggage. I had raced upstairs to put it away and grab a gig bag for the Boat Paddle uke, resting on its stand downstairs. Whew. Of course the tuner was safely stored in the luggage. And the uke was… my mental alarm sounded. Still sitting in its stand. Back home. I had been distracted, gathering my books for the trip, forgot about ……… click below for more ↓

Review: The Life of Pi

2013-06-23 2013-06-23 Arts / Atheism & Spirituality / Books & Reviews / Music & Reviews / Religion3 Comments

We watched Life of Pi last night, a film that has garnered much critical acclaim and won four coveted Oscar awards (although it has not been without controversies). I had struggled somewhat with the book (for reasons given below), but the lavish praise for the film made me decide to try again. I had read about the movie’s stunning camera work and CGI graphics, and these do not disappoint. It’s a beautiful film, and the CGI is amazingly lifelike. I puzzled over what was real and not in many scenes. But the story itself… While sometimes described as a “fantasy ……… click below for more ↓

More’s Speech to the Mob

2013-06-18 2013-06-18 Arts / Books & Reviews / Politics / Social Order & DisorderLeave a comment

The scene is a riot, on the first day of May, 1517. It would later be known as Evil May Day,or Ill May Day. An angry mob, mostly comprised of apprentices, marched through the streets of London, their passion inflamed by a xenophobic speech made the past Easter by Dr. Bell (or Beal) at St. Paul’s Cross. Bell railed against the foreigners living in London, especially the wealthy foreign merchants and bankers. He called on all “Englishmen to cherish and defend themselves, and to hurt and grieve aliens for the common weal.” His words spread and festered, as racism is ……… click below for more ↓

When did I become my parents?

2013-05-26 2013-05-26 Arts / Culture / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

I was driving down to Toronto, Saturday, listening to a CD with Tony Bennett, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, and several other singers of my parents’ generation, singing along, and I wondered aloud, “When did I become my parents?” When did I start buying and playing their music? When did I start choosing an Ella Fitzgerald or Louis Armstrong CD for a road trip instead of Bruce Springsteen or Blue Cheer? When did I get so old? Who’s the old guy staring back at me from the mirror? In the 1950s and 60s, when I was growing up, I would not ……… click below for more ↓

Midway in our Life’s Journey…

2013-05-23 2013-05-23 Arts / Books & Reviews / Culture / Literary pretensions / My Writing / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

So begins The Inferno, the first of the three books that comprise Dante’s magnificent and complex work, The Divine Comedy.* It’s a rich, complex and challenging read. I have to admit I have not read it all – all three books that is – but I have made a mighty effort to complete Inferno in several editions. My problem is not comprehension, but rather distraction. Were this a desert isle, it would make it much easier to finish. I read like a jackdaw. But back to Dante. The first lines (Canto I, trans. by John Ciardi, Norton edn.), continue: Midway in ……… click below for more ↓

Musing on Melville’s Poetry

2013-05-22 2013-05-22 Arts / Books & Reviews / Culture / Literary pretensions / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

I came across a poem last night that I had not read in the past (always a pleasant thing to discover something new in one of your books)*. It is by Herman Melville, an author I associate with novels and short stories rather than poetry. Yet he was surprisingly prolific as a poet, mostly in his later life. Poem Hunter lists 93 of his poems on its site (on PDF here). He wrote many more, it seems – many of them naval or related to the sea, others about the Civil War – and the collected works can be found ……… click below for more ↓

Appreciating B-Movies

2013-05-18 2013-05-19 Arts / Culture / Film & Reviews / Music & Reviews / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

It drives Susan to distraction that I love B-flicks. She squirms and fidgets if I put one into the DVD player and can seldom sit through an entire movie. They get cut off mid-film, and saved for me some time in the vague future when I might have an evening alone to finish watching it and the others in the category. Overacted, melodramatic, clumsily scripted, wooden dialogue, transparent effects, low budgets… what’s not to like? Okay, not all of them, but some fit that description. The range in B-flicks is great: from the truly abysmal to brilliancy (albeit usually unrecognized, ……… click below for more ↓