Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Diana

Diana
Die
Data
Psalm 20:1-9
(To the chief Musician, A Psalm of David.)
"The LORD hear thee in the day of trouble; the name of the God of Jacob defend thee;
Send thee help from the sanctuary, and strengthen thee out of Zion; 
Remember all thy offerings, and accept thy burnt sacrifice; Selah. 
Grant thee according to thine own heart, and fulfil all thy counsel.
We will rejoice in thy salvation, and in the name of our God we will set up our banners: the LORD fulfil all thy petitions. 
Now know I that the LORD saveth his anointed; he will hear him from his holy heaven with the saving strength of his right hand.  
Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will remember the name of the LORD our God.
They are brought down and fallen: but we are risen, and stand upright.  
Save, LORD: let the king hear us when we call.
 Stars and Stripes, Annin & Co. American Flag Manufacturing Plant, Pennsylvania
© David Brabyn / Corbis

 View of "North Bookend" of Grant Park, Chicago, Illinois
© Ocean / Corbis


Puerta de Alcala at Dusk, Madrid, Spain
© Rudy Sulgan / Corbis


Chess:  "Diana" "Die" "Data"


                                                         "Queen and huntress, chaste and fair,
                                                           Now the sun is laid to sleep,
                                                           Seated in thy silver chair,
                                                           State in wonted manner keep."
                                                                                BEN JONSON: Hymn to Diana.


                                                         "I have set my life upon a cast,
                                                          And I will stand the hazard of  the die."
                                                                                SHAKESPEARE: Richard III, V, iv 



                                                          "From harmony, from heavenly harmony 
                                                            This universal frame began;
                                                            From harmony to harmony
                                                            Through all the compass of the notes it ran,
                                                            The diapason closing full in man.
                                                                                   DRYDEN: Song for St. Cecilia's Day.               
                    

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Cambridge

Cambridge
Pilot
Tenochtitlan
Pittsburgh Steelers
Luke 13:4
"Or those eighteen, upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem? "
Jer.31:31
"Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah:"



A Partial Solar Eclipse over Texas 

Punts at Cambridge university, which has the best-rated courses in medicine, biosciences, maths and computer science, among others. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images


Chess: "Cambridge" "Pilot" "Tenochtitlan" "Pittsburgh Steelers"

Cambridge tops Guardian University Guide league table again



Cambridge has topped the Guardian University Guide league table for the second year running, while Oxford has come second and the London School of Economics has climbed a place to third.
St Andrews, rated third last year, is now in fourth place, while Warwick rises a place to fifth. University College London (UCL), Durham, Lancaster, Bath and Exeter make up the top 10.
The guide is accompanied by rankings showing how universities perform across the main subject areas, published in full on Tuesday. Cambridge dominates across the board, coming top in 16 out of 47 subjects including biosciences, chemical engineering, computer science, maths, medicine and veterinary science.
Oxford came top in seven subjects including business studies, chemistry, economics, law and physics.
In the subject tables, there was a strong performance by UCL, which ranked top in six subjects including archaeology, architecture and English. But UCL dropped a place in the overall table to sixth due to a poor ranking in mechanical engineering and a few other subjects.
Universities are ranked according to spending per student; their student/staff ratio; graduate career prospects; what grades applicants need; a value-added score that compares students' entry qualifications with their final degree results; and how happy final-year students are with their courses, based on the annual National Student Survey.
The tables are compiled by an independent consultancy, Intelligent Metrix.
Brian Oldham, a financial analyst at King's College London and a member of the review group for the tables, acknowledged that the NSS is subjective. He said: "Students at a university that generally has a high reputation may be more demanding in the quality of teaching they expect.
"On the other hand, students that are at a university that it is lower down in the pecking order may receive teaching that exceeds their prior expectations and give marks higher than would be achieved under any objective measure."
The use of entry grades implies that students with the strongest qualifications will go to the university that is best for their subject. It also means that some institutions with access programmes – admitting lower-performing candidates on the basis of potential – score less highly. The use of a value-added score, measuring the impact of teaching, offers a counterweight.
Most of the shifts in this year's league table are due to changing levels of student satisfaction. Sussex dropped to 27th place from 11th after students in English and geography became significantly less happy with their departments. Stirling dropped from 44th to 67th after value-added scores in business and law declined.
Aberystwyth fell in six subjects, with declines in all performance measures. It drops from 50th place to 81st.
Among the climbers is Brunel, up from 82nd to 44th, taking the top spot for social work. Chester went from 80th to 52nd, with student satisfaction results driving improved ratings in biosciences, history, law and psychology. The career prospects of its biosciences graduates also improved. Coventry rose from 63rd to 46th, with student survey results a major factor.
Bolton, the University of Abertay, Dundee and London Met are the lowest ranked universities in the overall table. Bolton will charge a range of fees up to a maximum of £8,400.
Cambridge is not listed in the tables for physics or chemistry because it offers a natural sciences tripos, and the data could not be adequately split according to the constituent parts of this inter-disciplinary course.
All of the public English universities in the Guardian's top 20 will charge the maximum fee of £9,000 for new undergraduates from this September, except for the LSE, which will charge £8,500.
Dr Wendy Piatt, director general of the Russell Group, said: "Our universities do well in these and other tables but students should remember all league tables have their limitations and should look beyond rankings when choosing a degree course.
"Russell Group universities excel at research but even though this is not measured in these tables our universities have still performed well. Teaching is one of our top priorities and we believe the combination of world-class teaching and research excellence in our universities creates the ideal learning environment. Our universities offer a broad range of study options from Arabic to Zoology and Mechanical Engineering to Medicine.
"Our students work with their field's leading experts, have access to first-rate libraries and facilities, are part of a highly motivated and talented peer group and often engage in cutting-edge research themselves.
"Employability is particularly important to potential students in the current climate. Employers rank six Russell Group universities in the top 13 universities in the world, and Russell Group graduates receive on average a 10 per cent salary 'top-up' over those from other universities.
"Our universities have higher than average levels of student satisfaction and the lowest drop-out rates – and we are constantly working to improve the student experience."
There are 16 English universities in the top 20: Cambridge, Oxford, LSE, Warwick, UCL, Durham, Lancaster, Bath, Exeter, Loughborough, Surrey, Imperial College, Buckingham, York, Bristol and Leicester.
Buckingham is a private university, which will charge £22,500 for a two-year degree. Students eligible for a government-backed loan will be able to borrow up to £12,000 over the two years.The Guardian University Guide 2013 league table of universities is published today. Subject tables will be available from Tuesday morning.
• For more details on the methodology used for the Guardian University Guide tables, please read our methodology guide. Individual queries should be sent to data@intelligentmetrix.co.uk

MA

MA
Mark 
Maat
Mac
Macabro
Macabre
Macaw
Luke 13:1
"There were present at that season some that told him of the Galilaeans, whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices." 



 African Lion Mother and Cub at Dawn, Serengeti National Park, Tanzania.
© Iwago / Minden


 Salt Mounds at Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia
© Theo Allofs / Corbis

Chess: "MA" "Mark""Maat" "Mac""Macabro" "Macabre" "Macaw" "Mac"

"The old Fort Prince George now bears no marks of a fortress, but is used as a trading house." (William Bartram)
"Mark what radiant state she spreads." (Milton)
"I grew familiarly acquainted with...the best mariners of our nation." (Richard Hakluyt)

Saturday, May 19, 2012

Mercury

DO
Mercury
Marshall McLuhan
Rainbow
Mess
Chac Mol
Redwood

Luke 13:11
"And, behold, there was a woman which had a spirit of infirmity eighteen years, and was bowed together, and could in no wise lift up herself." 























Stout Grove, Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park, California.
© Sean Bagshaw
Chess: "DO" "Mercury" Rainbow" "Marshall McLuhan" "Gutter" "Mess" "Chac Mol" "Redwood"

 "Merchandizing was a at a full stop, for very few ships ventured to come up the river, and none at all went out" (Daniel Defoe)

Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger : A Biography

 

Consider,for example,the(synchronic)fact that English, when compared with other languages,has some rather infrequent or unusual characteristics.Thus, in the area of vocabulary, English has an exceptionally high number of words borrowed from other languages(French, theScandinavian languages,American Indian  languages,Italian, the languages of northern India and so on); in syntaxcommonconstruction is the use ofdo in forming questions (e.g.Do you likecheese?), a type of construction not often found in other languages;in morphology English has relatively few inflexions, at least comparedwith the majority of other European languages; in phonology thenumber of diphthongs as against the number of vowels in EnglishEnglish is notably high. In other words, synchronically, English can beseen to be in some respects rather unusual. But in order to understandsuch facts we need to look at the history of the language; it is often onlythere that an explanation can be found. And that is what this workattempts to do.

Friday, May 4, 2012

Paris

Veracruz
Paris
Castrol
City Lights
Prov.18:19
"A brother offended is harder to be won than a strong city: and their contentions are like the bars of a castle."

                         Paris Along the River Seine, France 
© SuperStock


Chess: "Veracruz" "Paris" "Castrol" "City Lights"

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Maple Leaf

Maple Leaf
Kroes
Valle del General 
Cross
Prov.14:23
"In all labour there is profit: but the talk of the lips tendeth only to penury."



Lone Tree, County Tipperary, Ireland
© Trish Punch / Corbis


Chess: "Maple Leaf" "Kroes" "Valle del General""Cross"

THE LIMITATIONS OF DICKENS

A review of Our Mutual Friend. By Charles Dickens. New York: Harper Brothers. 1865. Originally published in The Nation, December 21, 1865.

THE LIMITATIONS OF DICKENS

OUR Mutual Friend is, to our perception, the poorest of Mr. Dickens's works. And it is poor with the poverty not of momentary embarrassment, but of permanent exhaustion. It is wanting in inspiration. For the last ten years it has seemed to us that Mr. Dickens has been unmistakeably forcing himself. Bleak House was forced; Little Dorrit was laboured; the present work is dug out as with a spade and pickaxe.
Of course—to anticipate the usual argument—who but Dickens could have written it? Who, indeed? Who else would have established a lady in business in a novel on the admirably solid basis of her always putting on gloves and tying a handkerchief around her head in moments of grief, and of her habitually addressing her family with "Peace! hold!" It is needless to say that Mrs. Reginald Wilfer is first and last the occasion of considerable true humour. When, after conducting her daughter to Mrs. Boffin's carriage, in sight of all the envious neighbours, she is described as enjoying her triumph during the next quarter of an hour by airing herself on the doorstep "in a kind of splendidly serene trance," we laugh with as uncritical a laugh as could be desired of us. We pay the same tribute to her assertions, as she narrates the glories of the society she enjoyed at her father's table, that she has known as many as three copper-plate engravers exchanging the most exquisite sallies and retorts there at one time. But when to these we have added a dozen more happy examples of the humour which was exhaled from every line of Mr. Dickens's earlier writings, we shall have closed the list of the merits of the work before us.
To say that the conduct of the story, with all its complications, betrays a long-practised hand, is to pay no compliment worthy the author. If this were, indeed, a compliment, we should be inclined to carry it further, and congratulate him on his success in what we should call the manufacture of fiction; for in so doing we should express a feeling that has attended us throughout the book. Seldom, we reflected, had we read a book so intensely written, so little seen, known, or felt.
In all Mr. Dickens's works the fantastic has been his great resource; and while his fancy was lively and vigorous it accomplished great things. But the fantastic, when the fancy is dead, is a very poor business. The movement of Mr. Dickens's fancy in Mr. Wilfer and Mr. Boffin and Lady Tippins, and the Lammles and Miss Wren, and even in Eugene Wrayburn, is, to our mind, a movement lifeless, forced, mechanical. It is the letter of his old humour without the spirit. It is hardly too much to say that every character here put before us is a mere bundle of eccentricities, animated by no principle of nature whatever.
In former days there reigned in Mr. Dickens's extravagances a comparative consistency; they were exaggerated statements of types that really existed. We had, perhaps, never known a Newman Noggs, nor a Pecksniff, nor a Micawber; but we had known persons of whom these figures were but the strictly logical consummation. But among the grotesque creatures who occupy the pages before us, there is not one whom we can refer to as an existing type. In all Mr. Dickens's stories, indeed, the reader has been called upon, and has willingly consented, to accept a certain number of figures or creatures of pure fancy, for this was the author's poetry. He was, moreover, always repaid for his concession by a peculiar beauty or power in these exceptional characters. But he is now expected to make the same concession, with a very inadequate reward.
What do we get in return for accepting Miss Jenny Wren as a possible person? This young lady is the type of a certain class of characters of which Mr. Dickens has made a specialty, and with which he has been accustomed to draw alternate smiles and tears, according as he pressed one spring or another. But this is very cheap merriment and very cheap pathos. Miss Jenny Wren is a poor little dwarf, afflicted as she constantly reiterates, with a "bad back" and "queer legs," who makes doll's dresses, and is for ever pricking at those with whom she converses in the air, with her needle, and assuring them that she knows their "tricks and their manners." Like all Mr. Dickens's pathetic characters, she is a little monster; she is deformed, unhealthy, unnatural; she belongs to the troop of hunchbacks, imbeciles, and precocious children who have carried on the sentimental business in all Mr. Dickens's novels; the little Nells, the Smikes, the Paul Dombeys.
Mr. Dickens goes as far out of the way for his wicked people as he does for his good ones. Rogue Riderhood, indeed, in the present story, is villainous with a sufficiently natural villainy; he belongs to that quarter of society in which the author is most at his ease. But was there ever such wickedness as that of the Lammles and Mr. Fledgeby? Not that people have not been as mischievous as they; but was any one ever mischievous in that singular fashion? Did a couple of elegant swindlers ever take such particular pains to be aggressively inhuman?—for we can find no other word for the gratuitous distortions to which they are subjected. The word humanity strikes us as strangely discordant, in the midst of these pages; for, let us boldly declare it, there is no humanity here.
Humanity is nearer home than the Boffins, and the Lammles, and the Wilfers, and the Veneerings. It is in what men have in common with each other, and not what they have in distinction. The people just named have nothing in common with each other, except the fact that they have nothing in common with mankind at large. What a world were this world if the world of Our Mutual Friend were an honest reflection of it! But a community of eccentrics is impossible. Rules alone are consistent with each other; exceptions are inconsistent. Society is maintained by natural sense and natural feeling. We cannot conceive a society in which these principles are not in some manner represented. Where in these pages are the depositaries of that intelligence without which the movement of life would cease? Who represents nature?
Accepting half of Mr. Dickens's persons as intentionally grotesque, where are those examplars of sound humanity who should afford us the proper measure of their companions' variations? We ought not, in justice to the author, to seek them among his weaker—that is, his mere conventional—characters; in John Harmon, Lizzie Hexam, or Mortimer Lightwood; but we assuredly cannot find them among his stronger—that is, his artificial creations.
Suppose we take Eugene Wrayburn and Bradley Headstone. They occupy a half-way position between the habitual probable of nature and the habitual impossible of Mr. Dickens. A large portion of the story rests upon the enmity borne by Headstone to Wrayburn, both being in love with the same woman. Wrayburn is a gentleman, and Headstone is one of the people. Wrayburn is well-bred, careless, elegant, sceptical, and idle: Headstone is a high-tempered, hard-working, ambitious young schoolmaster. There lay in the opposition of these two characters a very good story. But the prime requisite was that they should be characters: Mr. Dickens, according to his usual plan, has made them simply figures, and between them the story that was to be, the story that should have been, has evaporated. Wrayburn lounges about with his hands in his pockets, smoking a cigar, and talking nonsense. Headstone strides about, clenching his fists and biting his lips and grasping his stick.
There is one scene in which Wrayburn chaffs the schoolmaster with easy insolence, while the latter writhes impotently under his well-bred sarcasm. This scene is very clever, but it is very insufficient. If the majority of readers were not so very timid in the use of words we should call it vulgar. By this we do not mean to indicate the conventional impropriety of two gentlemen exchanging lively personalities; we mean to emphasise the essentially small character of these personalities. In other words, the moment, dramatically, is great, while the author's conception is weak. The friction of two men, of two characters, of two passions, produces stronger sparks than Wrayburn's boyish repartees and Headstone's melodramatic commonplaces.
Such scenes as this are useful in fixing the limits of Mr. Dickens's insight. Insight is, perhaps, too strong a word; for we are convinced that it is one of the chief conditions of his genius not to see beneath the surface of things. If we might hazard a definition of his literary character, we should, accordingly, call him the greatest of superficial novelists. We are aware that this definition confines him to an inferior rank in the department of letters which he adorns; but we accept this consequence of our proposition. It were, in our opinion, an offence against humanity to place Mr. Dickens among the greatest novelists. For, to repeat what we have already intimated, he has created nothing but figure. He has added nothing to our understanding of human character. He is master of but two alternatives: he reconciles us to what is commonplace, and he reconciles us to what is odd. The value of the former service is questionable; and the manner in which Mr. Dickens performs it sometimes conveys a certain impression of charlatanism. The value of the latter service is incontestable, and here Mr. Dickens is an honest, an admirable artist.
But what is the condition of the truly great novelist? For him there are no alternatives, for him there are no oddities, for him there is nothing outside of humanity. He cannot shirk it; it imposes itself upon him. For him alone, therefore, there is a true and a false; for him alone, it is possible to be right, because it is possible to be wrong. Mr. Dickens is a great observer and a great humourist, but he is nothing of a philosopher.
Some people may hereupon say, so much the better; we say, so much the worse. For a novelist very soon has need of a little philosophy. In treating of Micawber, and Boffin, and Pickwick, et hoc genus omne, he can, indeed, dispense with it, for this—we say it with all deference—is not serious writing. But when he comes to tell the story of a passion, a story like that of Headstone and Wrayburn, he becomes a moralist as well as an artist. He must know man as well as men, and to know man is to be a philosopher.
The writer who knows men alone, if he have Mr. Dickens's humour and fancy, will give us figures and pictures for which we cannot be too grateful, for he will enlarge our knowledge of the world. But when he introduces men and women whose interest is preconceived to lie not in the poverty, the weakness, the drollery of their natures, but in their complete and unconscious subjection to ordinary and healthy human emotions, all his humour, all his fancy, will avail him nothing if, out of the fullness of his sympathy, he is unable to prosecute those generalisations in which alone consists the real greatness of a work of art.
This may sound like very subtle talk about a very simple matter. It is rather very simple talk about a very subtle matter. A story based upon those elementary passions in which alone we seek the true and final manifestation of character must be told in a spirit of intellectual superiority to those passions. That is, the author must understand what he is talking about. The perusal of a story so told is one of the most elevating experiences within the reach of the human mind. The perusal of a story which is not so told is infinitely depressing and unprofitable.