Enheduanna

Tags

Ancient History, ancient-history, creativity, poetry, women, writing

http://www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/Enheduanna.html

Did you think Sappho was the first poet?

It was Enheduanna. Who’s that?

It’s the last day of National Poetry month so…

From the page:
Writers know that voice must emerge from a strong persona. Without self-confidence, without a personal identification of self–some kind of self knowledge and confidence–the writer cannot create a persona and ultimately the ethos behind the essay or speech. The personas of Sappho and Enheduanna in their writing speak of their thoughts and their feelings and of their composing processes. Their voices are authoritative, powerful…and personal, voices women need to hear.

In ‘the Exaltation of Inanna, –more complete than the few surviving fragments of Sappho–a picture emerges of teaching and learning, of individuality and community that offers a model of writing and pedagogy among the most ancient in existence. Enheduanna lived, composed, and taught roughly two-thousand years before Aristotle and seventeen-hundred years prior to Sappho. She tells her own story of banishment and her ultimate restoration by Inanna.

The hymn became part of the cultural myths of Sumeria. For the next thousand years it existed as a component of the wisdom tradition of that civilization and the cultures that followed.

Enheduanna’s work as creator and priestess/teacher offers the view of a strong, powerful ethos. Her ethos is that of a wise woman and a powerful priestess. For Enheduanna the goddess Inanna’s power equals that of the gods. The feminine, then, is articulated in the ethos of Enheduanna as powerfully equal, necessary, and valuable in that particular world view.

In one of the most powerful passages in ancient history, Enheduanna steps forward and speaks in the first person of her own composing process. She reflects on how she has composed the hymn. At midnight, she says, she has heaped the coals in the censor and given birth to the hymn. Her composing process is one I read as collaborative with the goddess. She and Inanna become one for awhile and from the deep collaboration–an in-spiriting or in-fusing–she gives birth to the hymn. This collaborative process with the goddess foreshadows the relationship of the various authors of the Old Testament with Jehovah by a thousand years.

Allegro non Troppo – Valse Triste

Tags

animation, Animation, classical-music, foreign-films, movies, video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8Oc_J1Lu-o

Allegro Non Troppo (Italian musical instruction meaning, “cheerful, not too much” (1977) )

Description: A cat climbs from a crawlspace under a large house, and discovers it is a bombed ruin. His eyes glow when he remembers betters times when the house was full of life: a canary singing in its cage, a grandmother knitting in a sofa. His memories are colorful and rich and contrast with the near-monochromatic “reality” of the destruction.

Rambling Commentary: I know I thumbs’d this up before, and meant to review it. This is the best of a series of animations by Tutto Bozzetto, described as something of a Fantasia take-off, a multi-part set of animations set to classical music. Its technical structure is Fantasia-esque but it goes beyond that in this segment (the Sibelius segment), and falls short in others. And really, that’s overly simplistic because the style of animation is not really an imitation of Disney. It has its own genius and artistic statement, with occasional naked breasts and live footage cut into the animation. The animations talk about aging and loss of personal power, the desire to set oneself apart and how to deal with copycats and plagiarists, revenge and the desire to payback evil with evil.

I think current parenting practice is to protect our children from animations that might make them sad or where we think they will miss the “great message”. We protect them from Bambi, the Smurfs, the admittedly violent cartoons of the 50s, until they are much older than the original intended audience. We do that because they “don’t know the difference between what they see on the television screen and reality”. There may be something to that: I remember as a child when Johnny Balderstone had a plate broken over his head while playing with some neighbor children, that I was so surprised that he was actually hurt.

But today I think we have gone too far. Yes, we should protect children, and maybe ourselves, from objective violence of the “Clockwork Orange” sort, but not from all that is sad and painful. I am wondering if by waiting until children do know that television is not “real”, it makes it easier for them to objectify violence.

How do we teach compassion if we insulate them? My own daughter has never seen a child who hasn’t attended school, who sells sticks of gum on the street corner, who has never had a pair of shoes. But she knows cats (surprise!) and would have felt for the cat in this animation before we reached the “must have Clinique make-up like all the other girls on drill team” age. I think she still would, if she would take a recommendation from her mother.

Part 1Part 2Part 3

Part 4 (this segment)

Part 5Part 6

There is also an epilogue.

Tags

antarctica, environment, Filmmaking, filmmaking, movies, werner-herzog

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3107028429636758396

Encounters at the End of the World

See the entire movie (1 hour 41 minutes)

Letter from Roger Ebert to Werner Herzog

A letter to Werner Herzog:
In praise of rapturous truth

/ / / November 17, 2007

Dear Werner,

You have done me the astonishing honor of dedicating your new film, “Encounters at the End of the World,” to me. Since I have admired your work beyond measure for the almost 40 years since we first met, I do not need to explain how much this kindness means to me. When I saw the film at the Toronto Film Festival and wrote to thank you, I said I wondered if it would be a conflict of interest for me to review the film, even though of course you have made a film I could not possibly dislike. I said I thought perhaps the solution was to simply write you a letter.

But I will review the film, my friend, when it arrives in theaters on its way to airing on the Discovery Channel. I will review it, and I will challenge anyone to describe my praise as inaccurate.

I will review it because I love great films and must share my enthusiasm.

This is not that review. It is the letter. It is a letter to a man whose life and career have embodied a vision of the cinema that challenges moviegoers to ask themselves questions not only about films but about lives. About their lives, and the lives of the people in your films, and your own life.

Read the rest of Roger Ebert’s letter to Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog’s website

Take 10 | Life and style | guardian.co.uk

Tags

galleries, Photography, photography, sets

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/series/take-ten

Take 10

Bengal cat

Sometimes funny, sometimes touching sets of 10 photos in the weekly Guardian.

Some Favorites
Fancy Cats
Funeral Workers
Pigeon Racers

Celebrity Underwear
Historic Barbies
Everest hopefuls
Items from London Transport Lost Property

Tags

poetry, secret-box

http://xe4x.tumblr.com/post/73955515/to-mention-an-orchid-to-a-storm

to mention an orchid to a storm

by the long, cool dark of her hair, i am divided;
as if i were a yes torn between too many nos,
as if the night had a flavor all its own,
and it was of licorice and remorse,
and on my tongue it would melt like a snowflake.
between the streetlights and the sidewalk,
i am a stranger with no coat or gloves
and many whispers.
and the others are all strangled by scarves,
and from the side, glare and snarl,
and i am of another place,
though home is nowhere.

~Damien Caspar Frost

frenchtwists reviews – StumbleUpon

Tags

frenchtwist, Stumblers, stumblers

http://frenchtwist.stumbleupon.com/

Stumbler: FrenchTwist
Description: If I could subscribe to only one stumbler, this would be the page. She is the definition of classic good taste: Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience,and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern. ~Alfred North Whitehead
Pictures: Mostly black and white. Sensuality for girls who prefer to be naughty at home.
Main Themes: Irreverence, Insouciance, Incarnation.
Liked Best: Balance of form and content. If it isn’t worth her best presentation, she doesn’t bother. Superb poetry, and literature links alone would suffice, but she stumbles me the best cats, likes bears.
Liked Least: Not as much commentary from her, as I would like. For example…

Best Quote:
When two people have gained a measure of intimacy, there is usually, to some degree, an instinctive and fearful withdrawal that safeguards the emotions, only to hypnotically feel the inexorable pull of the other again. Each step forward, each backing away and the next inevitable step forward leaves them closer, the intimacy greater than before. Almost everything in some way can be paralleled with the physical self, the body, that most splendid dwelling place where we reside. This ancient universal circling of one another and the gained depth of knowing with each renewed contact is its own warmly sexual union. Entering, withdrawing, coming together, drawing apart. It is emotional desire and satisfaction that mirrors the freer nature of our physical selves.

Some favorites:
Divertissement for Performing Bears
The Kiss
Chinese Laws of Creativity
Sensuous Plants
Search for Non-Being
A Certain Slant of Light
Densho
Truro Bear
La Poupée

Anatomy of Melancholy
Life Ballet Gallery
French Kisses
Language of the Fan
Women’s Erotics
The Mirror and I
Cat Women of the Moon

Balkan Travellers – Balchik: Here Queen Marie Left Her Heart. In a Jar

Tags

arts, bizarre, Bizarre/Oddities, romania, travel

http://www.balkantravellers.com/en/read/article/697

Illustrations by Edmund Dulac to Stealers of Light


The light she had thought to extinguish had
escaped from her dying hands and floated always
farther across the desert, shedding its marvellous
radiance over rock and stone.

The man had his arm lightly laid across the tall
girl’s shoulders; they might have been lovers,
so tender was his touch.

Stealers of Light

I have a new book: Stealers of Light by Marie, Queen of Romania.

Marie was born an Englishwoman, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria; she agreed to an arranged marriage to Ferdinand I of Romania. She was the eldest daughter of Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh and Grand Duchess Marie Alexandrovna of Russia. Read her autobiography. And its review by Virginia Woolf.

The arranged marriage did not work out so well, as she confided to a friend in the states “the distaste, which grew to revulsion” she felt for her husband. She had six children; not surprisingly, not all were his. She wrote poetry, painted, and created botanical gardens at her summer palace, which is still a tourist attraction today. Her heart rests in a glass jar at her summer palace in Balchik. Balchik is no longer part of Romania, and the rest of her body was stolen back to Romania.

Marie’s official biographies say she died of internal hemorrhages after spending several months in hospitals, other sources claim it was during an argument between sons Carol and Nicholas that Marie perished. She died after being accidentally shot by her younger son while covering the elder one with her body.

Omen

Tags

Art, Photography

Omen – Christian Arrecis

Nesting Behaviors: Anne Sexton – Words

Tags

poetry, relationships

Words

Be careful of words,
even the miraculous ones.
For the miraculous we do our best,
sometimes they swarm like insects
and leave not a sting but a kiss.
They can be as good as fingers.
They can be as trusty as the rock
you stick your bottom on.
But they can be both daisies and bruises.
Yet I am in love with words.
They are doves falling out of the ceiling.
They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap.
They are the trees, the legs of summer,
and the sun, its passionate face.
Yet often they fail me.
I have so much I want to say,
so many stories, images, proverbs, etc.
But the words aren’t good enough,
the wrong ones kiss me.
Sometimes I fly like an eagle
but with the wings of a wren.
But I try to take care
and be gentle to them.
Words and eggs must be handled with care.
Once broken they are impossible
things to repair.

– Anne Sexton

The Brotherhood of Man

In point of fact what is interesting about people in good society–and M. Bourget rarely moves out of the Faubourg St. Germain, except to come to London,– is the mask that each one of them wears, not the reality that lies behind the mask. It is a humiliating confession, but we are all of us made out of the same stuff. In Falstaff, there is something of Hamlet; in Hamlet there is not a little of Falstaff. The fat knight has his moods of melancholy, and the young prince his moments of coarse humour. Where we differ from each other is purely in accidentals: in dress, manner, tone of voice, religious opinions, personal appearance, tricks of habit and the like. The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature. Indeed, as any one who has ever worked among the poor knows only too well, the brotherhood of man is no mere poet’s dream, it is a most depressing and humiliating reality….

~Oscar Wilde, Intentions

Kay Nielsen, East of the Sun, West of the Moon