There are numerous genre of literature, yet more are the schools of criticism aiming at appreciating and analyzing literature. Like every poet and writer differs from each other, similarly every critic and school of criticism differs from the other. The basis of these differences for the poets and writers may be of that of temperament, style and other techniques; critics differ on the subject and method of appreciation. Even in each school of criticism every critic differs from the other due to the subjective elements and temperamental differences that come in. The focus in the present essay is on the method of appreciation more than the subject, the tool of appreciation being consciousness. We see how consciousness plays an important role in creation and reception of a text. The words, as they have power, create the corresponding vibrations and can deliver this vibration into the creation and subsequently into the recipient if he or she is prepared to receive it. We see how beautifully consciousness binds the author, the text and the reader. All the disputes and differences of opinions end when we find these three (the author, the text and the reader) as parts of a continuum and not as distinct entities.   more »

Reference that prompted this posting is Rich's The Origin of the Words check at http://www.sciy.org/blog/_archives/2008/6/25/3762846.html   more »

Using clues from stars and the Sun’s positions mentioned by the ancient Greek poet Homer, scholars think they have determined the date when King Odysseus returned from the Trojan War and slaughtered a group of suitors who had been pressing his wife to marry one of them. It was on April 16, 1178 B.C. that the warrior struck with arrows, swords and spears, killing those who sought to replace him, a pair of researchers said in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Experts have long debated whether the books of Homer reflect the actual history of the Trojan War and its aftermath. Marcelo O. Magnasco of Rockefeller University in New York and Constantino Baikouzis of the Astronomical Observatory in La Plata, Argentina, acknowledge they had to make some assumptions to determine the date Odysseus returned to his kingdom of Ithaca. But interpreting clues in Homer’s “Odyssey” as references to the positions of stars and a total eclipse of the Sun allowed them to determine when a particular set of conditions would have occurred. “What we’d like to achieve is to get the reader to pick up the ‘Odyssey’ and read it again, and ponder,” said Mr. Magnasco, adding: “And to realise that our understanding of these texts is quite imperfect, and even when entire libraries have been written about Homeric studies, there is still room for further investigation.” …    more »

The present narrative in 40 stanzas composed in August 1998 was first published in my book Passing Moments a selection from which appears here: http://www.sciy.org/blog/_archives/2008/5/12/3686764.html Opportunity is taken to lightly revise it before posting at the sciy. The extensive use and adaptation of Google Images to illustrate some of the themes is the added feature. The narrative concludes with the following stanzas describing the work the Protagonist came here to do.

Even his body’s cells shone
As if countless suns were lit;
The Transcendent’s powers he housed
Where purple majesties sit.

To him thoughts came in serene
Intuitions from the original fount;
Calm words he spoke were words
That had strength death to surmount.

Truth’s abidingnesses he affirmed
In mortality’s devious ways,—
Made his breast a diamond cup
To hold its bliss, its rain and rays.

Nightly aeons had elapsed
For the day of all-love to dawn;
Now in its great resplendence
The wonder of wonders moves on.

Mortal birth he lifted to the sun
And the Will of the High in it willed;
A presence leaned down and things
Promised long ago got fulfilled.
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Cool and Classic
Almost adjacent to the Notre Dame cathedral, across the Seine on the Left Bank in Paris, is a bookshop that could well have been an impressionist painting done by, say, Van Gogh himself. All the vivid colours are there and the dark lines that hold together the composition respond more readily to the imagination of the onlooker than to any classroom geometrical rules. Coming here is also paying homage to the Bard of Stratford-upon-Seine. The original Shakespeare & Co. was opened not far from here, near the Odeon theatre in this intellectual heartland of Europe, just after the First World War in 1919, by Sylvia Beach, a maverick American expatriate who had loved poetry, writers and France. The bookshop was an immediate success and attracted not only such luminaries of English literature as Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, but also French writers such as André Gide and the poet Paul Valéry, just to name a few for lack of space...   more »

The Ninth Gate was the film adaptation of The Dumas Club, written by Arturo Pérez-Reverte. The central quest of the film and the book is… another book: “The Nine Doors To the Kingdom of Shadows”, also known as “De Umbrarum Regis Novum Portis”, the "Nine Gates" for short. The book is written by one Aristide Torchia in Venice in 1666 and contains nine woodcut engravings rumoured to be copied from the apocryphal Delomelanicon, a book purportedly written by Lucifer himself. The Nine Doors to the Kingdom of Shadows is said to contain within its pages knowledge to raise the devil. The author was burned, along with all his works in 1667. Three copies are known to survive, one with Baroness Freida Ungern, one in the Fargas collection, and one last known to be in the possession of Enrique Taillefer, but recently sold to Boris Balkan. Whereas the latter characters will immediately be deemed fictional, more research is required to find out whether the book itself of the Delomelanicon is an invention of the author – or fact. In short, both are fictional, as is Torchia, the author of the Nine Gates. But such a quick classification of the core of the mystery would miss out on some major points of interest of both the book and the film...   more »

Donald Theall, Marshall McLuhan's first graduate student recently past away. Theall like McLuhan was also a brilliant Joyce scholar and saw much of what we now know as cyberspace prefigured in his works. - rc

The Gutenberg Galaxy, a book which redirected the way that artists, critics, scholars and communicators viewed the role of technological mediation in communication and expression, had its origin in Marshall McLuhan's desire to write a book called "The Road to _Finnegans Wake_." It has not been widely recognized just how important James Joyce's major writings were to McLuhan, or to other major figures (such as Jorge Luis Borges, John Cage, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, and Jacques Lacan) who have written about aspects of communication involving technological mediation, speech, writing, and electronics.

While all of these connections should be explored, the most enthusiastic Joycean of them all, McLuhan, provides the most specific bridge linking the work of Joyce and his modernist contemporaries to the development of electric communication and to the prehistory of cyberspace and virtual reality. McLuhan's scouting of "the Road to _Finnegans Wake_" established him as the first major disseminator of those Joycean insights which have become the unacknowledged basis for our thinking about technoculture, just as the pervasive McLuhanesque vocabulary has become a part, often an unconscious one, of our verbal heritage.  In the mid-80s, William Gibson first identified the emergence of cyberspace as the most recent moment in the development of electromechanical communications, telematics and virtual reality. Cyberspace, as Gibson saw it, is the simultaneous experience of time, space, and the flow of multi-dimensional, pan-sensory data: ...
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If the writing of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato had not contained so much truth about the human condition, his name would have been forgotten centuries ago. But one of his most famous stories—the cataclysmic destruction of the ancient civilization of Atlantis—is almost certainly false. So why is this story still repeated more than 2,300 years after Plato's death? "It's a story that captures the imagination," says James Romm, a professor of classics at Bard College in Annandale, New York. "It's a great myth. It has a lot of elements that people love to fantasize about." Plato told the story of Atlantis around 360 B.C. The founders of Atlantis, he said, were half god and half human. They created a utopian civilization and became a great naval power. Their home was made up of concentric islands separated by wide moats and linked by a canal that penetrated to the center. The lush islands contained gold, silver, and other precious metals and supported an abundance of rare, exotic wildlife. There was a great capital city on the central island.   more »

Passing Moments
Here is a set of poems selected from my book Passing Moments that was brought out by M/S Ultra Publications, Bangalore, India, in 2002, ISBN # 81-87544-03-1. These poems, totalling 49, were written during 19 June-18 July, 1998; another, a much longer narrative running into 40 stanzas, dated 18 August 1998, also followed generally the same style of composition but it has been kept aside from the present selection. While taking the opportunity of presenting these selected poems here I have touched them up lightly at places. But the important feature of this presentation is that of illustrations accompanying them. For this purpose I have capitalized on the Google Images quite extensively, Images with all their amazing variety and abundant creative excellence. But then at the same time there are also several limitations, they kind of putting rigid geometrical boundaries around what the swift and supple enthusiasm of inspiration can convey, they not seizing the much subtler and suggestive feeling of the poetic language. Yet it is believed that one can leap over this not really frozen sense of the image-phrases, even as they do possess a loaded multi-meaninged softness if one is insightful to see what lies behind them; the visual impact they provide can bring something of it when seen in inner association with what the hues and shades are trying to communicate. Perhaps in that respect the revelatory power itself can come out in another living and vivid language of sight and sound, each enhancing the sense more perceptively. But this is an attempt and I do not know how far it has succeeded or is going to be acceptable. In any case, I must express my silent but sincere gratitude to the numerous authors of the Images for this use of their works for my purposes, sometimes with free adaptations of their imaginative and artistic creations, a use which is not for any commercial gains. I hope in the process I’ve not infringed on any copyrights.   more »

I met Paul Lonely last night at a friend's gathering. When I told him a bit about SCIY, he said he was an admirer of Sri Aurobindo's epic poem Savitri, and graciously offered to send me a link to his own new book of "post post-modern" poetry: Suicide Dictionary. I've been looking over his website and his work is quite impressive. E.g., see below the words of one of his many enthusiastic reviewers, the artist-musician Michael Garfield.  ~ ronjon

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I am the voice of a generation starving for an adequate myth. Myths are the carriers and conduits of a vision - the metaphors and narratives around which we organize and accrete our understanding. Every generation has come together within a mythology, and used it to push forward into its fruition. In a way, we are nourished by our myths in return for fulfilling them.

It must be said that my generation has more mythology from which to choose than any before it. We stand before a global buffet of stories, food of all flavors, information crashing in from all sides, an unprecedented panoply of cultural richness. What we lack is an organizing directive, some way to handle all of this humanity without shrinking from its light or dissolving into incoherence at the spectacular diversity of it all. Imagine everyone in the cafe trying to force-feed you simultaneously, and you'll get the idea. In spite of our wealth of culture, we hunger for genuine, hopeful, reconstructive narratives that is, integral myths. Almost no one is telling my generation, or those to come, what to do with this orgiastic diversity of experience. Our myth has been one of dissipation, of dissolution the end of oil, the end of modernity, the end of the biosphere, the end of western hegemony, the end of science, the end of childhood. We are born into a world that has come together just in time to discover it is breaking apart.

But Paul Lonely is changing all of that. What Paul is doing for us - the generation growing up alongside the academic reconstruction of integral theory - is offering us a new mode of experiencing these truths. ... Freed from the conventional trappings of historical spiritual texts, blindingly aware of its own cultural embeddedness and laughing at it compassionately, Suicide Dictionary belongs in a thin pantheon with the paintings of Alex Grey as a message for and from our collective future. It is playful and colorful and fluid, in stark opposition to even the most inspiring theories of the world into which we walk with one eye open. That Paul has used language to communicate this utterly translinguistic vision is a testament to his cleverness his book is winking at all of us from behind the veil, like the Tao Te Ching or its formal predecessor, the Upanishads. Every page rings brightly with the cause to which he is devoted. ...   more »

I have been puzzling lately over a genre of film which is hard to situate: films which deal with forgetting and remembering, in which we ride shotgun with protagonists who are just as interested in character development as we are. While the genre itself has not been fully mapped out, potential candidates for inclusion include Abre Los Ojos (1997),  Vanilla Sky (2001), Memento (2000), Minority Report (2002), The Bourne Identity (2002), Paycheck (2003), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), and, most recently, A Scanner Darkly (2006). I call this genre the "Posthuman Bildungsroman."

The Bildungsroman label is commonly applied to "coming of age" tales or novels of education. For reasons discussed below, this common usage is not entirely accurate, but taken in the larger context of Western Literature such usage makes sense. The traditional questions associated with Western Literature can be summarized in this way: What is a story? An account of change. What is a good story? An account of change that all people can relate to. The assumption is that in order to be sufficiently engaging, change must center on "the human." And in practice, "the human" has overwhelmingly been depicted as an individual. [1] Outside of non-modern folk tales, children's stories, religious texts, and legends, there is little room in this essentialist construct for distributed cognition, nonhuman characters, and environmental agents. Philosophy, literature, and the self grow together/merge under the common characterization of the Bildungsroman. The result is a tradition of "good stories" about the formation of an identity that is rooted in interior personal growth.

In the Posthuman Bildungsroman, the individual is present not as the expression of a coherent self, but as the central problem of the story. Rather than triumph over external obstacles through force of will, the will itself is formed through the effects of outside forces. The story remains a tale of growth and education, but the end of this process is an attempt to stabilize the subject and construct a coherent representation of the self that is consistent with the expectations of its cultural milieu (or, perhaps, the genre). ...   more »

A new Salman Rushdie novel is always a big event, filled with the anticipation and the expectation of the momentous. It seems that Rushdie knows this — or maybe the disappointment of the last three novels has forced him to face this reality. So what does he do? He weaves the magic of storytelling, the expectation of the listener, and the hopelessness of the artiste all into his tenth novel, and let it be declared at the outset: it is an enchantment. In the way that once you enter a hall of mirrors, you see a multiplicity of reflections, so can you see a multiplicity of alter egos that are the loci of The Enchantress of Florence. You see Rushdie as a prestidigitator, a nimble-fingered writer able to produce dizzying tricks with the stroke of his pen/keyboard, much like Mogor dell’Amore, a yellow-haired, lozenge-coated foreigner who turns up at Emperor Akbar’s court, with a story to tell, and whose own identity is the final twist of his story-within-a-story...   more »

Imho, this is an important article about the pluses and minuses of religion, an interview with a former nun who has had many deep experiences of what she writes. Highly recommended. ~ ronjon

Karen Armstrong is a one-woman publishing industry, the author of nearly 20 books on religion. When her breakthrough book "A History of God" appeared in 1993, this British writer quickly became known as one of the world's leading historians of spiritual matters. Her work displays a wide-ranging knowledge of religious traditions -- from the monotheistic religions to Buddhism. What's most remarkable is how she carved out this career for herself after rejecting a life in the church.

At 17, Armstrong became a Catholic nun. She left the convent after seven years of torment. "I had failed to make a gift of myself to God," she wrote in her recent memoir, "The Spiral Staircase." While she despaired over never managing to feel the presence of God, Armstrong also bristled at the restrictive life imposed by the convent, which she described in her first book, "Through the Narrow Gate." When she left in 1969, she had never heard of the Beatles or the Vietnam War, and she'd lost her faith in God. ...   more »

New life for an old church in Maastricht: a lesson for all. What other store can boast ceiling paintings dating back so far? The dominant new element in the church is the high-rise bookshelf structure…    more »

In his copy of Arjava’s Poems, Amal Kiran has pasted as frontispiece the pencil impression of Arjava made by himself, Amal Kiran. He is shown clad in dhoti and a buttoned-up shortish kurta, with a walking stick in his hand. He is well-groomed, has a pointed nose and a pointed chin. In this copy of his Amal has, importantly, copied Sri Aurobindo’s comments on the poems. Amal writes about Arjava’s poetry as follows: “As we might expect of a mind trained to careful intellectuality, Chadwick—or Arjava, as he came to be known from the name Arjavananda (meaning "Joy of straightforwardness") given him by Sri Aurobindo—did not achieve closeness to the Ideal through a lavish spontaneity whose very breath is song. A deliberate self-critical compact perfection belonged to him. Instead of taking the Kingdom of Heaven by a stormy frontal assault, he laid slow siege to it and won its treasures by patient compulsion—a victory no less complete though differing in plan and technique. Here too is a superb energy of imagination expended not so much in a royal diffusion as in concentrated exquisiteness or magnificence. We feel, to quote the poet's own words from a sonnet, "a chaos-ending chisel-smite" in each work—a faultless statue emerges in which every line and curve has been traced by an inspired precision…” This is one of the deepest studies on the Ovehead poetry that has come after Sri Aurobindo and it must prove immensely helpful in our critical appreciation as well as creative effort. ...   more »

If we have seen the possibilities and pitfalls in Big Science given to us by the American model, we also notice its results in other places,—for example in Japan. Japan's first experience with high-level business and industrial development forms a good illustration to see how one can get trapped on the economic path when something alien enters into the system. Yoshiro Hoshino writes: “There is nothing worse than war for bringing about the destruction of nature, human beings, factories, housing, and transportation systems, and for causing starvation and sickness, the discharge of untreated factory wastes, and the destruction of farm lands. When environmental destruction is understood in its broadest and most fundamental sense, the original culprit is war.” America, after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, invaded Japan in another way. It looks as though the evil found another soil to grow and flourish in a vigorous manner. The present article Japan’s Second Defeat after the Second World War forms a chapter of my yet unpublished book Big Science and its Impact on Society....   more »