By RINKER BUCK, The Hartford Courant
Baltimore Sun
July 19, 2009

Frank McCourt, the Irish-American storyteller who parlayed the miseries of a Limerick upbringing into an extraordinary late-life literary blooming, died of cancer Sunday in New York City.

McCourt, 78, had spent the past 13 years buoyantly touring the globe on reading tours and writing two sequels to his 1996 best-seller, "Angela's Ashes," which sold more than 5 million copies and was translated into more than 20 languages.

He had been undergoing treatment for skin cancer in recent years and been released in early June from New York's Memorial Sloan Kettering Center to recuperate at his Roxbury home. Two weeks ago he was diagnosed with meningitis, a frequent complication of patients whose immune systems are compromised by cancer treatment, and McCourt was moved to a New York hospice where over the past few days family and friends from around the world had gathered at his bedside.

During the past decade McCourt had become a familiar, popular figure and a kind of permanent cultural resource around Connecticut.

In 1999 he spent $1.2 million of his "Angela's Ashes" proceeds on a converted, eight-room barn on Roxbury's Tophet Road, in the heart of the Litchfield County arts community, comfortably settling in and making friends with neighbors such as Bill and Rose Styron, Arthur Miller and Candace Bushnell. At Marty's Café in nearby Washington Depot, McCourt loved to dawdle over coffee and swap tales with friends, astonishing tourists who dropped in and saw the famous writer holding court.

He considered his public speaking prowess inseparable from his role as a writer and accepted several invitations a year to appear at charitable fund-raisers and writing workshops at Connecticut's community college campuses. His name on the marquee of the Warner Theater in Torrington or Hartford's Bushnell guaranteed a sellout audience. ( >>Continue reading )

By Susan Smith
Scotsman
06 July 2009

http://www.codex-sinaiticus.net/en

THE oldest surviving Christian Bible can now been viewed online after a painstaking conservation project involving institutions in the UK, Germany, Egypt and Russia.

About half of the 1,600-year-old Codex Sinaiticus, meaning The Sinai Book, was analysed and treated before high-resolution digital images of the pages were created.

The fourth-century book is considered to be one of the most important texts in the world and this is the first time in centuries scholars have been able to view so much of it in one place.

Dr Scot McKendrick, head of Western manuscripts at the British Library, which is home to a large part of the original book, said the wide availability of the document presented many research opportunities.

"The Codex Sinaiticus is one of the world's greatest written treasures," said Dr McKendrick. "This 1,600-year-old manuscript offers a window into the development of early Christianity and first-hand evidence of how the text of the Bible was transmitted from generation to generation."

He added: "The availability of the virtual manuscript for study by scholars around the world creates opportunities for collaborative research that would not have been possible just a few years ago."

The Codex Sinaiticus contains the oldest complete New Testament and one of the oldest Greek translations of the parts of the Old Testament.

Named after the Monastery of St Catherine on Mount Sinai, where the book was preserved for many centuries, the Codex Sinaiticus was moved on three occasions after it was discovered by the German biblical scholar Constantine Tischendorf in the mid-19th century.

The British Library has 347 leaves, after it purchased them from the Soviet government in 1933.

A further 43 leaves are held at the University Library in Leipzig, Germany, parts of six leaves are in the National Library of Russia in St Petersburg and a final 12 leaves and 40 fragments remain at the Monastery of St Catherine, where monks uncovered them in part of the northern wall in 1975. The book is considered to be too delicate to move from any of its locations, so work had to be carried out in all four places before the project could be completed.

Professor Timothy Lim, of Edinburgh University, an expert on biblical manuscripts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, said that because scholars previously had to visit four different libraries to study the text – handwritten by three different scribes – the new arrangement will significantly improve understanding of the New Testament.

"Gathering all the parts together will allow people to talk about it as a whole and learn more about it and improve speed of access," he said. "The actual pages are not that difficult to read so now if you are holding a lecture, you can display a page and examine it there and then."

To mark the online launch, the British Library is staging an exhibition which runs until 7 September.

Richard Brooks, Arts Editor
The Sunday Times
March 8, 2009



Picture painted during his lifetime

A PORTRAIT owned for nearly 300 years by a family will tomorrow be claimed as the only known picture of William Shakespeare painted during his lifetime.

No other image, executed at first hand, is thought to exist of Britain’s greatest writer.

The claim will be supported by the world’s foremost expert on Shakespeare, Stanley Wells, emeritus professor of Shakespeare studies at Birmingham University and general editor of the Oxford Shakespeare series for 30 years.

The portrait, which was painted in 1610, six years before the playwright’s death, has been in the possession of the Cobbe family since the early 18th century. It was initially kept at a property in Hampshire but more recently in Hatchlands, the family house in Surrey, which is run by the National Trust. ( >>Read on )

By Tim Cornwell
The Scotsman
31 January 2009

IT WAS a second home for one of the greats of 20th-century literature but, due to its frosty diplomatic relations with the United States, Ernest Hemingway's time in Cuba has remained something of a mystery.

But now, in a rare break in the long-standing international feud, copies of a mostly unseen archive of Hemingway's years in Cuba, including thousands of letters, notes and other documents, have been sent to the US.

The documents, which have been delivered to the John F Kennedy Library in Massachusetts, include a tantalising, abandoned epilogue to For Whom the Bell Tolls, revealing whether Robert Jordan's warning message to a Spanish general ever got through.

Ernest Hemingway (Photo)

There are several pages discarded from the final manuscript, and a letter Hemingway wrote to the Casablanca actress Ingrid Bergman, telling her how he hoped she would get the part of Maria (she did).

The papers provide extraordinary insight into Hemingway's years in Cuba. They run from notes to his Spanish cook and instructions on how he liked his carrots boiled to intimate letters to his fourth wife, Mary.

The papers were long hidden away in the basement of Hemingway's estate at Finca Vigia, Cuba.

"It's a wonderful treasure trove and it's wonderful it will be available," said Professor Sandra Spanier, editor of the Hemingway Letters Project at Pennsylvania State University. "There has never really been a biographer who had access to the materials of Hemingway's life in Cuba.

"That was a third of his life, a half of his writing life, and this is tremendously important."

The materials include corrected proofs of The Old Man and the Sea, a film script based on the novel and correspondence from fellow authors Sinclair Lewis and John Dos Passos.

"There are letters among these documents that have been in Cuba since 1961," Prof Spanier added. "It is tremendously intriguing and exciting. This will enable us to fill in the picture of his correspondence."


Hemingway's Cuban estate, Finca Vigia

The Kennedy library deal was agreed between the Cuban government and US Congressman James McGovern, who is respected in the island for his prolonged campaign to lift American sanctions and ease relations.

The papers will begin to be available to researchers in the spring.

"It's a turning point toward a more rational, mature relationship between our two countries," Mr McGovern said. "I think Hemingway can be the bridge to help move both sides to a point where we can have a good, solid relationship."

The papers include a letter to Hemingway's third wife, the legendary war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, which he wrote and never sent.

There are pieces of letters that he cut out with scissors and curiosities such as a letter he wrote in Spanish to the family cook, ostensibly from fourth wife Mary – who spoke no Spanish – saying: "If you have any questions, ask me and don't bother my husband."

Others specify what salads would be served on which day of the week to the Nobel Prize winner. There are also love letters written to Mary, also a reporter, in 1944, while Hemingway was still married to Gellhorn.

However, the archive also features documents which make it clear Hemingway's Cuba was not all mojitos and marlin fishing.

"A letter to Mary in 1953 outlines all the troubles of their marriage, lamenting how she has become so scalding," said Prof Spanier. "It is a document of a marriage in disintegration.

"He wrote on it, 'Please read this and return to me'. There are these very intimate glimpses."

The JFK Library already has an extensive collection of Hemingway material – 100,000 pages of writings and 10,000 photographs, paintings and personal objects such as his passports, flasks and wallet – thanks to a connection between the writer's wife Mary and the Kennedys.

Where more than the writer's soul was left behind

ERNEST Hemingway lived in Cuba for 21 years, half his writing life, at the famous Finca Vigia outside Havana from 1939 until 1960, where For Whom The Bell Tolls was partly written.

He left the island in the summer of 1960 to follow bull-fights in Spain. When his health failed, he moved to the US for treatment at the Mayo Clinic.

After the Bay of Pigs incident, in which the CIA tried to launch a counter-revolution in Cuba, it became clear Hemingway could not return.

In July 1961, he shot himself at his home in Ketchum, Idaho.

Mary Hemingway, his fourth wife and widow, then returned to the island. She was allowed to collect much of his archive, putting 200lb of papers on board a shrimp boat bound for Tampa, Florida. They included the posthumously published manuscript of A Moveable Feast.

From the mid-1990s, American scholars became concerned over what remained in Cuba, and the effect the humid climate could have on it, without knowing exactly what remained there.

The turning point came in 2001 when Jenny Phillips, granddaughter of Max Perkins, Hemingway's editor, visited the Finca. She learned there were letters in the basement from her grandfather, and negotiations to conserve and copy them began.

'How is it that people who experience terrible suffering can find their religious faith strengthened rather than weakened?'

This afternoon I read an opinion piece in the Guardian called God on trial by Dr Justin Thackery, who is head of theology at the Evangelical Alliance, and it purported to explain why a supposedly loving God would allow unspeakable cruelty and suffering in his created world. I always read these things because I would genuinely like to know the same thing.

In fact the other day I bought a new paperback called The Shack written by William P. Young. It sounded intriguing, and the first page got my attention. The back of the book explains the premise:

'Mackenzie Allen Philips' youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation and evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later in the midst of his Great Sadness, Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently from God, inviting him back to that shack for a weekend.

Against his better judgment he arrives as the shack on a wintry afternoon and walk back into his darkest nightmare. What he finds there will change Mack's world forever.

In a world where religion seems to grow increasingly irrelevant The Shack wrestles with the timeless question, Where is God in a world so filled with unspeakable pain? The answers Mack gets will astound you and perhaps transform you as much as it did him. You'll want everyone you know to read this book.'

So I will read this book. But I read Dr Thackery's piece, and the conclusion he reached is that people who have the God experience put their suffering into a wider context so that they also remember the blessings and good things and love they believe God has bestowed upon them, much as a loving parent gives his child. Atheists, on the other hand, have no such God experience and so consequently, eartly suffering only hardens their hearts more against the concept of a loving God.

Whilst I agree to some extent with Thacker's main premise about why faith is strengthened, I feel there is a far more logical reason for it in the face of extreme suffering such as during what happened in the Holocaust, for example, and that is that I believe the human condition requires a belief in something stronger than oneself in order to continue to have HOPE. If you have NO faith, then what hope do you have? I know people who think that once this life is over, you die and become dirt and that is it. I personally cannot go along with this--and that would apply no matter what I consider God to be. I have read something that explains Near-Death-Experiences to nothing more than what the US Air Force puts its fliers through in air pressure chambers. *sigh*

Just thought I would throw this out here to see if anyone had any thoughts on the matter. :)


Irish rainbow

From 'The Prophet':

And a youth said, "Speak to us of Friendship."
Your friend is your needs answered.
He is your field which you sow with love and reap with thanksgiving.
And he is your board and your fireside.
For you come to him with your hunger, and you seek him for peace.
When your friend speaks his mind you fear not the "nay" in your own mind, nor do you withhold the "ay."
And when he is silent your heart ceases not to listen to his heart...


Photo

Al Jazeera
10 August 2008

**See also Darwish laid to rest in Ramallah

Mahmoud Darwish, the renowned Palestinian poet, has died after open heart surgery at the Memorial Hermann medical centre in Texas (Saturday, 9 August 2008).

Ann Brimberry, Memorial Hermann's spokeswoman, confirmed to Al Jazeera that Darwish died at 1.35pm (18:35 GMT).

Siham Daoud, a fellow poet and friend of the 67-year-old, had asked not to be resuscitated if the surgery did not succeed.

She said Darwish departed for the US ten days ago for the surgery, and he had undergone two operations for heart problems before Saturday's surgery.

Best known for his work describing the Palestinian struggle for independence, the experience of exile and factional infighting, Darwish was a vocal critic of Israeli policy and the occupation of Palestinian lands.

Many of his poems have also been put into music - most notably Rita, Birds of Galilee and I yearn for my mother's bread, becoming anthems for at least two generations of Arabs.

"He felt the pulse of Palestinians in beautiful poetry. He was a mirror of the Palestinian society," Ali Qleibo, a Palestinian anthropologist and lecturer in cultural studies at Al Quds University in Jerusalem said.

Last year, Darwish recited a poem damning the deadly infighting between rival Palestinian groups Hamas and Fatah, describing it as "a public attempt at suicide in the streets".

Early life

He was born in the village of Barweh in Galilee, a village that was razed during the establishment of Israel in 1948.

He joined the Israeli Communist Party after high school and began writing poems for leftist newspapers.

He was put under house arrest and imprisoned for his political activities, after which he worked as editor of Ittihad newspaper before leaving to study in the USSR in 1971.

Originally a member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), Darwish resigned in 1993 in protest over the interim peace accords that Yasser Arafat, the late Palestinian leader, signed with Israel.

As a journalist, he worked for al-Ahram newspaper in Cairo and later became director of the Palestinian Research Centre.

In 2000, Yossi Sarid, Israel's education minister, suggested including some of Darwish's poems in the Israeli high school curriculum.

But Ehud Barak, the Israeli prime minister overruled him, saying Israel was not ready yet for his ideas in the school system.

In 2001, he won the Lannan prize for cultural freedom.

Leaves of Olives was published in 1964 when Darwish was 22-years old. Since then more than 20 volumes of his works of poetry have been published in many languages.


I Come From There

--Mahmoud Darwish

I come from there and I have memories
Born as mortals are, I have a mother
And a house with many windows,
I have brothers, friends,
And a prison cell with a cold window.
Mine is the wave, snatched by sea-gulls,
I have my own view,
And an extra blade of grass.
Mine is the moon at the far edge of the words,
And the bounty of birds,
And the immortal olive tree.
I walked this land before the swords
Turned its living body into a laden table.

I come from there. I render the sky unto her mother,
When the sky weeps for her mother.
And I weep to make myself known
To a returning cloud.
I learnt all the words worthy of the court of blood,
So that I could break the rule.
I learnt all the words and broke them up,
To make a single word: Homeland....

mahmouddarwish.com

Very first entry: August-9-1938

Explanation and introduction from: Orwell Diaries

‘When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page’, wrote George Orwell, in his 1939 essay on Charles Dickens.

From 9th August 2008, you will be able to gather your own impression of Orwell’s face from reading his most strongly individual piece of writing: his diaries. The Orwell Prize is delighted to announce that, to mark the 70th anniversary of the diaries, each diary entry will be published on this blog exactly seventy years after it was written, allowing you to follow Orwell’s recuperation in Morocco, his return to the UK, and his opinions on the descent of Europe into war in real time. The diaries end in 1942, three years into the conflict.

What impression of Orwell will emerge? From his domestic diaries (which start on 9th August), it may be a largely unknown Orwell, whose great curiosity is focused on plants, animals, woodwork, and – above all – how many eggs his chickens have laid. From his political diaries (from 7th September), it may be the Orwell whose political observations and critical thinking have enthralled and inspired generations since his death in 1950. Whether writing about the Spanish Civil War or sloe gin, geraniums or Germany, Orwell’s perceptive eye and rebellion against the ‘gramophone mind’ he so despised are obvious.

Orwell wrote of what he saw in Dickens: ‘He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.’

What will you see in the Orwell diaries?

I was going to tell you about this morning's events in my neighbourhood, but it was so depressing and scary, involving gunshot wounds, police helicopters, sirens and such that I decided not to. :(

But I do have something cheerful and wonderful to write about. There was a time in my life when I had all the books I ever wanted, but I had to give most of them away. Now I find that many of them are available from various sites for the taking. I have spent the rest of the morning finding and downloading the grandest books for free. I have read most of them, but I wanted to reread them again. These are just some of the ones I got this morning:

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry [plus the other 3 books in this series]

Shogun by James Clavell

Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by Richard Shirer

Little Drummer Girl by John LeCarré

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough

Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

I the internet!


*P.S. Oh great! Now I have someone named oneragingbull wanting to be my friend on that Scribd site I told you about. :O

"You are my night, my day, my universe...
You are the air I breath, the nourishment
that keeps me alive and well...
You are all that keeps me in harmony
between Heaven and Earth...
You mean more to me than life itself."


Poem from here
Image of 'Deidre' from Timeless Myths