Revolving Word

I was thumbing through Borges’ Collected Fictions this afternoon when I came across one of my favorite stories by the great Argentine fabulist, Inferno, I, 32. Its profundity is matched only by its brevity, so here it is in toto: “From the half-light of dawn to the half-light of evening, the eyes of a leopard, in the last years of the twelfth century, looked upon a few wooden boards, some vertical iron bars, some varying men and women, a blank wall, and perhaps a stone gutter littered with dry leaves. The leopard did not know, could not know, that it yearned for love and cruelty and the hot pleasure of tearing flesh and a breeze with the scent of deer, but something inside it was suffocating and howling in rebellion, and God spoke to it in a dream…”

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From the article:

“In all works of science fiction, there are ten hidden assumptions regarding alien races. None of these assumptions is a necessity. None of them makes immanent or inevitable sense. Yet, when we read a sci-fi novel or watch a sci-fi movie we tend to accept all of them as inescapable. They amount to a frame of reference and to a language without which we seem to be unable to relate to all manner of exobiology. We evidently believe that life on Earth is a representative sample and that we can extrapolate its properties and mechanisms of action wide and far across the Universe. The principles of symmetry, isotropy, and homogeneity apply to the physical cosmos: Hydrogen behaves identically in our local galactic neighbourhood as it does in the furthest reaches of the Cosmos. Why shouldn’t life be the same?”

http://www.globalpolitician.com/26483-aliens-extraterrestrials-seti

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From the website:

“Vanishing Georgia comprises nearly 18,000 photographs. Ranging from daguerreotypes to Kodachrome prints, the images span over 100 years of Georgia history. The broad subject matter of these photographs, shot by both amateurs and professionals, includes, but is not limited to, family and business life, street scenes and architecture, agriculture, school and civic activities, important individuals and events in Georgia history, and landscapes. The wide variety of the collected visual images results from efforts by archivists from the Georgia Division of Archives and History who sought, between 1975 and 1996, to preserve Georgia’s endangered historical photographs. Designed primarily for preservation, the project located, selected, and copied historically significant photographs held by individuals who wanted to share their pieces of the past with future generations.”

http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/vanga/html/vanga_basic_search_default.html

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When you think of boxing, what famous names immediately jump to mind? Muhammad Ali? Check. Rocky Marciano? Sure. Oscar Wilde? Eh, not so much. But the sweet science and famous 19th century aesthete do have something of a historical — and quite unhappy — connection. For the man who forever changed the nature of boxing by insisting upon the adoption of new rules designed to make the brutal sport somewhat more civilized — John Sholto Douglas, known by title as the ninth Marquess of Queensberry — was also the man directly responsible for destroying Oscar Wilde’s life and career.

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On September 9th, 1653, bookseller Humphrey Moseley paid 21 shillings and six pence to scribble the titles of forty-two books and plays into the Register of the Stationers Company, a London trade guild charged with regulating printed material throughout England. The fee and written entry constituted the precursor to the legal appearance of any literary work, and gave the buyer sole rights of publication.

Of the many entries that Moseley made on that fall day, one in particular was destined to tantalize and frustrate the admirers of no one less than William Shakespeare for hundreds of years afterward. It read, simply: “The History of Cardenio, by Mr. Fletcher and Shakespeare.“

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Even though it’s a cultural movement barely thirty years old, it’s difficult to identify a precise moment in history in which what we might definitively call ‘hip-hop’ was born. It was, like Rock’n’Roll before it, the product of varied cultural, historical and sociological influences, whose constituent parts are sometimes traceable, but whose final synthesis is shrouded in mystery.

Birthed in the hearts and heads of people who existed on society’s fringes, it had its immediate origins in everything from a Greek kid’s bored tagging [PDF] of his name on New York City subway trains to the Godfather of Soul’s choice in drummers to the building of the Cross Bronx Expressway.

But if any one man can be termed the “father of hip hop”, that man would almost certainly be Clive Campbell, AKA DJ Kool Herc. Born in Jamaica in 1955, Campbell moved to the South Bronx in 1967, where he began deejaying at neighborhood parties. In his sets, Herc incorporated two major influences from the land of his birth — the enormous sound systems then prevalent in Jamaican dancehalls (Herc later called his the “Herculoids” — to get an idea of their size check out this YouTube clip) and “toasting” an oral tradition with its roots in Africa that involved the DJ rhythmically chanting or boasting over the music — it, along with other African-American rhyming/singing customs [PDF], laid the groundwork for what would become Rap.

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C.S. Lewis called it “the most embarrassing verse in the Bible” — the words attributed to Jesus Christ in the synoptic gospels that concerned the timing of his eventual return. Taken at face value, it seems apparent that Jesus believed he would be back within the lifetimes of his followers. That, needless to say, did not happen. Or maybe it already happened. Or maybe he came back as one of these guys.

Of course the possibility also exists that, now perched in a timeless heaven and looking down upon the many earthly horrors that were to be committed in his name, he just got pissed and decided that humanity wasn’t worth the effort.

Not that you could blame him. His adherents, certainly, seemed to forget the gist of his teaching almost immediately, officially kicking off the bloodletting with the execution of Priscillian of Avila — a Spanish bishop who founded an ascetic, Gnostic-influenced movement in the late 4^th century, and who had the unhappy distinction of being the first person in the history of Christianity to be executed for heresy. The Church thus began a long history of getting its man — even when its man happened to be dead. And a Pope.

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