The Obsessively Detailed Map of American Literature's Most Epic Road Trips. The above map is the result of a painstaking and admittedly quixotic effort to catalog the country as it has been described in the American road-tripping literature.
It includes every place-name reference in 12 books about cross-country travel, from Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872) to Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (2012), and maps the authors’ routes on top of one another. You can track an individual writer’s descriptions of the landscape as they traveled across it, or you can zoom in to see how different authors have written about the same place at different times. Most interestingly of all, for me at least, you can ruminate about what those differences say about American travel, American writing, American history. A word to close readers: I hand-typed most of these 1,500-plus entries and located their coordinates as best I could.
Some were difficult to track down. 25 Best Books on Self-Improvement You Need to Read Before You Die. I remember the first time I got my hands on a self-improvement book.
The Invention of Nature: adventures of Alexander Humboldt, lost hero of science. He didn't just want to know nature but to feel her too.
His passionate relationship with the natural world is a welcome antidote to the cold machine mind that still drives today's remorseless economic engine. Buckle up and prepare yourself for Andrea Wulf's hugely enjoyable voyage of discovery accompanying the extraordinary Alexander von Humboldt on his pioneering adventures into 19th century wilderness. Humboldt was, we are told, one of the last great polymaths. He spoke several languages, published extensively, painted, engaged in politics and accomplished a succession of scientific breakthroughs. Considered the most famous man of his time after Napoleon he talked and lectured incessantly holding entire rooms captive for hours. First and foremost though, he adored scientific field work, particularly botany and geology although his masterstroke was to see "this great chain of causes and effects" that connect diverse natural phenomena and to conceive of the concept of the web of life.
Making the Tarot Literary Again. In 1890, William Butler Yeats joined a recently founded magical fraternity called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
For years he remained a dedicated member. (When the Golden Dawn split up, about a decade later, he joined a splinter group called the Stella Matutina.) The Golden Dawn took the ritual finery of Freemasonry and synthesized it with a kind of mystical Christianity, Jewish Kabbalah, and the writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, an invented figure from late antiquity. The order’s tools for attaining spiritual insight included ceremonial magic and tarot cards; the latter were particularly important to Yeats. His poetry is full of tarot imagery—often hidden, the scholar Kathleen Raine argued, as the secret society would have expected.
Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are More Valuable to Our Lives than Read Ones. “It is our knowledge — the things we are sure of — that makes the world go wrong and keeps us from seeing and learning,” Lincoln Steffens wrote in his beautiful 1925 essay.
Piercingly true as this may be, we’ve known at least since Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave that “most people are not just comfortable in their ignorance, but hostile to anyone who points it out.”. Although science is driven by “thoroughly conscious ignorance” and the spiritual path paved with admonitions against the illusion of thorough understanding, we cling to our knowledge — our incomplete, imperfect, infinitesimal-in-absolute-terms knowledge — like we cling to life itself. And yet the contour of what we know is a mere silhouette cast by the infinite light of the unknown against the screen of the knowable.
Campanella's City of the Sun. The Alchemy web site on Levity.com The City of the Sun, by Tommaso Campanella [1568-1639], was originally written in Italian in 1602, just after he was condemned to life imprisonment for sedition and heresy.
The original manuscript is in the Bibliotheca Governativa, Lucca, Tuscany. It was later revised and a Latin version was written in 1613-14. Campanella's City of the Sun. Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are More Valuable to Our Lives than Read Ones. Letter A. Books sorted alphabetically. Letter A. Books sorted alphabetically.
Fifty Shades of Socialist Feminism. Yes, Mr Grey.
ALL men. Seattle, 2015. ‘He’s ready to see you now,’ says the well-dressed receptionist. I find myself wondering what she gets paid. Some people seem to get off on the constant presence of servile flunkies, and I make a note to actually talk to some of them later in this story. I have no idea why he has agreed to this interview with Red Rag – he must have had his people research our political leanings, and he knows we’re looking through his financial records, which are murky and confusing, just like Grey Holdings itself. They’ve got a point, though – Christian Grey is incredibly hot, and also really rich and successful, like Mark Zuckerberg if Mark Zuckerberg were incredibly hot. Bloody Jack Boards -> Bloody Jack Timeline. Okay......A while ago I finished the timeline, but I didn't type it up.....
Bloody Jack.