Home
Mary Antoinette's Pocket Watch
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Treasure
- Hits: 240
Read the history here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Antoinette_(watch)
On display in Versailles.
Bregeut has always been one of my favourite horologists. This, combined with the provenance...
Consciousness might hide in our brain's electric fields
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Ideas & Questions
- Hits: 268
Via Scientific American: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/consciousness-might-hide-in-our-brains-electric-fields/
Now, I've read a few of these theories, so just add this to the heap. While I certainly subscribe to the view that the entirety of our experience isn't contained within our body or heads, I haven't time to chase after every theory of everything that our consciousness hides in other dimensions, in quantum states, in the earth's magnetosphere, etc, etc. But it is something to think about.
A Short History of Myth - Karen Armstrong
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 156
Found in a "Books Everywhere" pile, everywhere but here, an ex-nun (8 years) writing about the history of world mythology, breaking it into eras of hunter/gatherer, agrarian, axial and post-axial, until finally we reach the "Great Western Transformation".
She's good, not - as you might suspect of a nun, obsessively "religious", she seems to have come to a reasoned understanding or series of epiphanies that explain world mythology.
These books aren't as common as you might think.
Nothing I didn't know, but - she does refer me to an abundance of myths and sources I haven't read. Worthwhile.
And I'm always curious - like minds we always are, we see things the same way, but divide and weigh them differently,
Blaise Cendrars - The Astonished Man (2)
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 216
In no ways did this disappoint, and I am thrilled there are yet a dozen books left out there by him to find...
(***N.B. I've ordered 4 more already, shipping, US Pricing, makes him an expensive addiction, but...)
Anyways, a couple of other scenes of interest (the whole damned book was fascinating), his description of Gustave Lerouge (and his domestic arrangements), his stay with Paquita, a Mexican Patroness who puts him up in an disused observatory filled with sexually ambiguous automatons and wax dolls of her own invention, furnishes him a library: "...contained nothing but mystical works on the left, and, on the right, illustrated works of eroticism..."
And - of especial amusement - one last description:
"I remember riding on horseback through the Cordillera of the Andes, searching for the ruins of an Inca Temple (or a fortress ?) in Western Bolivia, in a region where the mountains are most desolate, the most crumpled, the most barren, and the country is the most backward and desert-like in the world, and for a whole week watching a grand piano being manoeuvered across the terrain,"
And now he comes to the Piano, and the ruins of an Inca Temple are left far behind.
Fortunately he's several autobiographies, that each run different themes through his life, his style, his poetry, prose, characters, situations, well, first rate. 5 Stars. I'd retype the entire goddamned book here for your pleasure, only we value those things most we search out for ourselves...
(Note: those books ordered, well, Canada Post's Strike means I'll be waiting a while. An-tic-i-.......PATION!. And on that note the ferry strike is ongoing, 3 runs a day, the entire East Shore now forced to confront a voluntary exile they bought into and now are protesting. This will be the state of the US in a couple of years, the infrastructure crumbles, is sold off, cancelled, like the provinces with healthcare and any number of other public services, the times, they are a changing...This is not the beginning of the end, it's the beginning of our recognition of it...)
Page 44 of 875