I’ve found an interesting article the other day and thought that I should share, because as always, ‘sharing is caring’ people.

Dr. Evil

It is a much mentioned, but little understood concept. Any individual in the world is likely to have strong conceptions of “evil,” but very few could define it, or ascribe a cause to it.  Dictionary.com defines “evil” as “morally bad or wrong,” and also “causing ruin, injury or pain.” While the word “immoral” is more commonly used to connote the first definition (“morally bad or wrong”), colloquially, the word “evil” is most often used to convey the sense of the second definition (“causing ruin, injury or pain”). Realizing that the phrase “evil” is subjective and has many implications, in this essay I will use the word “evil” to convey the sense of the second definition.

From time immemorial, some humans have been perceived to have the tendency to cause harm to others for no apparent or rational reason. These humans, we assume, like to take pleasure in the pain of others.  Thus, what appears to be an alien sensibility to us, one which is characterized by an inexplicable perniciousness, is termed as evil.   Why “evil” humans are different from the rest of us is not understood by most people.  Evil, they assume, is just an inborn quality. And because it is inherent to the individuals who possess it, people believe that the only way to stop them is to their exterminate them, or at the very least incarcerate them, so that they remain away from a society that they could destroy if given free rein.

But is evil indeed an inherent characteristic? Or is it a mentality inculcated by way of the environment in which one is raised–the unique circumstances one had to deal with? More importantly, are good and evil concepts independent of one another, or inter-related to one another?

I believe that all actions perceived as evil are rooted in the desire for good in some way or the other.  I will explain.

The best analogy that illustrates the point was made by a TV evangelical named Ramesh Richard, who has been referred to by his website as, “a global spokesman for the Lord Jesus Christ.” While his show is cluttered with unsurprising references to the Bible and Jesus, his discussion of the nature of evil truly struck me. He showed the audience a piece of paper with a hole in it. He then compared the paper to “good” and the hole to “evil”. In the absence of the paper, there is no hole, just as in the absence of good, there is no evil. That was an ingenious way to get his point through. Evil, to me, simply does not exist as an independent concept. I view it more as an aberration from good, or to be more precise as a perverse reflection of the frustration at our inability to attain the good, the pure.

One characteristic shared by all human beings is jealousy. On a beach we may watch a young boy break down his brother’s sand-castle when it is better than his. In doing so, he is not exactly angry with his brother for building a better sand-castle than him. He is angry at a strange system, a happenstance, that appeared to reward someone else with a better sand-castle even though he himself had tried his level best to build one. All “evil” actions are marked by these very feelings of frustration. I do not think I need to provide any evidence to substantiate my assertion. Why don’t you, my readers look into your past and remember actions which had shades of so-called “evil” in them? Was it not the helplessness, frustration, and your want to gain power over the situation that caused you to commit the deed?

Read more: http://dangerousintersection.org

The Codex Seraphinianus is a book written and illustrated by the Italian artist, architect and industrial designer Luigi Serafini during thirty months, from 1976 to 1978. The book is approximately 360 pages long (depending on edition), and appears to be a visual encyclopedia of an unknown world, written in one of its languages, a thus-far undeciphered alphabetic writing.

Who were the people who had invented Tlön? The plural is unavoidable, because we have unanimously rejected the idea of a single creator, some transcendental Leibnitz working in modest obscurity. – Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”

Like a Borges story, this is as much about the quest for knowledge as it is about the knowledge itself. It involves books missing from libraries, lost translations, and people not answering letters.

The Codex is divided into eleven chapters, partitioned into two sections. The first section appears to describe the natural world, dealing with flora, fauna, and physics. The second deals with the humanities, the various aspects of human life: clothing, history, cuisine, architecture and so on. Each chapter seems to treat a general encyclopedic topic.

The illustrations are often surreal parodies of things in our world: bleeding fruit; a plant that grows into roughly the shape of a chair and is subsequently made into one; a lovemaking couple that metamorphoses into an alligator; etc. Others depict odd, apparently senseless machines, often with a delicate appearance, kept together by tiny filaments. There are also illustrations readily recognizable, as maps or human faces. On the other hand, especially in the “physics” chapter, many images look almost completely abstract. Practically all figures are brightly coloured and rich in detail.

The writing system (possibly a false writing system) appears modelled on ordinary Western-style writing systems (left-to-right writing in rows; an alphabet with uppercase and lowercase letters, some of which double as numerals) but is much more curvilinear, not unlike cursive Georgian in appearance. Some letters appear only at the beginning or at the end of words, a feature shared with Semitic writing systems. The language of the codex has defied complete analysis by linguists for decades. The number system used for numbering the pages, however, has been cracked (apparently independently) by Allan C. Wechsler and Bulgarian linguist Ivan Derzhanski, among others. It is a variation of base 21. In a talk at the Oxford University Society of Bibliophiles held on May 8, 2009, Serafini has stated that the script of the Codex is asemic, that his own experience in writing it was closely similar to automatic writing, and that what he wanted his alphabet to convey to the ‘reader’ is the sensation that children feel in front of books they cannot yet understand, although they see that their writing does make sense for grown-ups.

From a review by Baird Searles in Asimov’s Science Fiction, April, 1984:

What we have, is an encyclopedia guide, only partially comprehensible, to an alien universe. It’s really an art book, but don’t expect the slick illustrative pictures of a Boris or Rowena. The artwork has the odd quality of textbook illustrations, except for the magnificent color. The artist’s work has been compared to Escher, and that’s partly valid; the book lies in the uneasy boundary between surrealism and fantasy, given an odd literary status by its masquerade as a book of fact.

http://en.wikipedia.org

http://www.believermag.com

Best known for his children’s books, Where The Wild Things Are and In The Night Kitchen, Maurice Sendak has spent the past fifty years bringing to life a world of fantasy and imagination. His unique vision is loved around the globe by both young and old. Beyond his award-winning work as a writer and illustrator of children’s books, Sendak has produced both operas and ballets for television and the stage.

Maurice Sendak

Born in Brooklyn, New York (June 10, 1928), to Polish-Jewish immigrant parents, Sendak was a frail and sickly child. Spending much of his young life indoors, he turned to books at an early age. His view of the outside world was often limited to the family that came to visit him and the little that he could see from his window. It was during this time that he began to draw and to allow his imagination to run free. At age twelve, he went with his family to see Walt Disney’s Fantasia. This animated world, constructed completely of invented characters and fantasy, had a great influence on him.

Throughout high school, Sendak continued to draw, and after graduating, published a handful of illustrations in the textbook Atomics For The Millions. In 1948, he began working for F.A.O. Schwartz as a window dresser and continued there for four years while taking night classes at the New York Art Students League. After finding work illustrating Marcel Ayme’s The Wonderful Farm and Ruth Krauss’s A Hole Is To Dig, Sendak left F.A.O. Schwartz to become a full-time, freelance children’s book illustrator.

Throughout the 1950s, Sendak worked regularly, producing nearly fifty illustrated children’s books. He saw in book illustration the opportunity to expand the imaginary world of the reader. While many illustrators had concentrated on clarifying the images in the text, Sendak believed that an illustration should add to the mystery of the work. His oddly grotesque characters seemed strangely inviting in their imperfections. Unlike much of the Disney cartoons and the illustration that followed it, Sendak’s artistic imagery brought a self-conscious attention to its origin and its maker.

Where The Wild Things Are

By the early 1960s, Sendak had already gained a following as one of the more expressive and interesting illustrators in the business. In 1963, his book, Where The Wild Things Are brought him international acclaim and a place among the world’s great illustrators. For this project, Sendak worked as both the illustrator and the writer. It is the story of a young boy named Max, who is sent to his room only to find his imagination has created a new world there, populated by wild geographies and monsters of all kinds. Initially, its graphic portrayal of the toothy wild things concerned parents, but before long it was a favorite among children everywhere, having been translated into fifteen languages and selling more than two million copies.

Over the following years, Sendak created dozens of popular children’s books including one of his best known, IN THE NIGHT KITCHEN (1970). In the late 1970s, Sendak turned his attention to other forms. While continuing to write and illustrate, Sendak began producing and designing performances. Incorporating much of the same imaginative design that had made his books so popular, Sendak put on a number of operas, including Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” and Prokofiev’s “Love for Three Oranges”. In 1979, he turned his book, Where The Wild Things Are into a popular opera, and four years later designed a winning production of Tchaikovsky’s ballet “The Nutcracker”.

Throughout the past fifty years, Maurice Sendak has been one of the most consistently inventive and challenging voices in children’s literature. His books and productions are among the best-loved imaginative works of their time. Like the Grimm brothers before him, Sendak has created a body of work both entertaining and educational, which will continue to be popular for generations.

http://www.pbs.org

#7 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein

Stranger in a Strange Land is a pro-religion, anti-theist book about free love and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and was controversial even when it was published in 1962.

Fahrenheit 451

So naturally it was challenged as part of the curriculum of a summer “Science Academy” course in Texas.

#6 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

In a textbook example of “missing the point,” in 1981 Jackson County, Florida challenged the presence of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in its schools and libraries, claiming that the book was pro-communism, anti-Semitic, and had sexual references.

While that last one is certainly true, it still sounds like somebody only read the first twenty pages before doing their book report.

#5 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

In 1998, Fahrenheit 451 was removed from the curriculum in a Mississippi high school because a parent objected to the use of the phrase “god damn.”

Is it ironic if you suppress a book that condemns the suppression of print information?

#4 A Wrinkle In Time By Madeline L’Engle

A target that seems to be ripe for the ban hammer is any book that stands firmly on the line between children’s and adult fiction.

A Wrinkle in Time is the beginning of a four part series by Madeline L’Engle that tackles the the vastness of time and the universe, the nature of evil, and the dangers of blind belief. But, it’s got characters known as “witches” in it, so it was the 22nd most frequently challenged book of the 90′s.

10 great science fiction novels that have been banned

Believe the hype. The History of Love is one of the most imaginative and engaging pieces of literary fiction! It is the second novel by the American writer Nicole Krauss, published in 2005. The book was a 2006 finalist for the Orange Prize for Fiction.

The History of Love is a novel in the form of a homage to things lost, as well as to unsolved mysteries. The novel within the novel, also named The History of Love is the basis for all these questions.

Nicole Krauss

Leo Gursky is an old man who feels as though he is disappearing. He tries at all costs to draw attention to himself, but he still feels he has a void in his life. Eventually, he goes on a quest to find his long-lost son and the novel that he wrote as a young man, now published in Chile under the name of Zvi Litvinoff.

Alma Singer is a teenage girl who is trying to keep her family together after the loss of her father. Named after the heroine of The History of Love, Alma tries to console her widowed mother (who has recently been requested to translate the novel from Spanish) as well as keep her younger brother Bird (who believes he is a lamed vovnik) from becoming a social pariah.

The main characters are: Leo Gursky, Alma Singer, Bird Singer, Zvi Litvinoff, Bruno, Isaac Moritz, Alma Mereminksi, Misha.

There are many thematically significant literary allusions in The History of Love. The writer Isaac Babel (1894–1940), as eulogized by Leo Gursky, has unmistakable affinities with Zvi Litvinoff’s description of Leo’s own writing style, and the description of Rosa Litvinoff‘s writing style in the early chapter “Forgive Me“. The Polish writer Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) and his classic The Street of Crocodiles, is mentioned several times in the novel, as is Nicanor Parra (1914-), whose 1954 book of antipoems is translated by Charlotte Singer and read by the mysterious Jacob Marcus. A passing reference to Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) is also significant because Don Quixote is a novel that contains stand-alone stories within it, much in the same way that The History of Love contains excerpts of a mysterious book called The History of Love. Other important literary allusions in the novel include references to James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Leo Tolstoy, Rubén Dario and Pablo Neruda.

In some ways, The History of Love is a celebration of the power writing and of the imagination, so it is hardly surprising that it would be so full of literary references.

The book was optioned by Warner Bros, in early 2005, and is set to be directed by Alfonso Cuarón.

The movie is currently scheduled for release in 2011: http://www.imdb.com

Available for purchase here:

http://www.google.com/products

“I often wonder who will be the last person to see me alive. If I had to bet, I’d bet on the delivery boy from the Chinese take-out. I order in four nights out of seven. Whenever he comes I make a big production of finding my wallet. He stands in the door holding the greasy bag while I wonder if this is the night I’ll finish off my spring roll, climb into bed, and have a heart attack in my sleep.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

http://www.mostlyfiction.com

In honor of Banned Books Week, Geekosystem’s Susana Polo looks at 10 great science fiction novels that have been banned, or at least threatened with removal from libraries and schools. Including some major classics of the genre!

Book

These titles are among the most popular and beloved science fiction works of the last century. They’ve told us how bad the future might be before we get there, how free you can be if you don’t follow blind belief, and that children are perfectly capable of digesting some pretty heavy concepts, actually. But they’ve all been banned or threatened with banning.

#10 Shade’s Children by Garth Nix

Shade’s Children is filled with a creeping dread that the computer intelligence that leads the teenage main characters (through the hellish wasteland of our world filled with terrifying robot soldiers with grafted human body parts who fight over territory in a decades long war-game played by three alien tyrants) does not have their best interests in mind.

Yes, all that other stuff is creepy, including the fact that one of the kids didn’t escape the prisoner camps until after he was castrated, but the real slow horror of the book is that eventually Shade is going to betray the children who trust him and learned from him, and no one taught them to think critically enough to see it coming.

Trusted caregivers put Shade’s Children on the top 100 banned and challenged books of the nineties.

#9 The Giver by Lois Lowry

The Giver features a dystopian setting where citizens have their sex drive removed, certain women are given the “job” of bearing artificially inseminated children, and where babies are euthanized for developing at a different pace than others. All ideas and memories, history, and art that would help in the governance of a society but at the same time cause inconvenient emotions are held in the mind of the community’s Giver, who begins to pass on his gift to the main character Jonas, beginning his eventual disillusionment with the status quo. It makes the point that history, memories, and art; no matter how painful or difficult, are still necessary for a functioning humane society.

A staple of many, many middle and high school curriculums, it was also the 11th most frequently challenged book of the 1990s, in school districts in South Carolina, Florida, Texas, Ohio, and Colorado.

#8 The His Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman

Says Phillip Pullman on the reaction to his trilogy of children’s books: “I’ve been surprised by how little criticism I’ve got. Harry Potter’s been taking all the flak… Meanwhile, I’ve been flying under the radar, saying things that are far more subversive than anything poor old Harry has said. My books are about killing God.”

The Golden Compass was the 4th most frequently challenged book of 2007. It rose to 2nd place in 2008, probably because of the “organized campaign that the anti-defamation group the Catholic League launched against the film version of The Golden Compass.” Their president called it “atheism for kids.”

Robert Donat as Dr. Andrew Manson

A.J.Cronin (1896-1981) was born in Scotland. He wrote over 30 books, several of which were filmed or televised, a recent example being Dr. Finlay’s Case Book. He trained in various hospitals, finding himself a naval surgeon as World War One dragged on, and finally graduating from the University of Glasgow in 1919. He then moved to a mining town in South Wales.

The Citadel, a tremendously popular book from 1937, is semi-autobiographical in its first sections.

It is an episodic sort of novel, unified by the passage of one life over time, and with a trajectory through suffering into a kind of grace. It works as a forum for Cronin’s political, socialistic conceptions of medicine, and has been credited with stimulating the creation of the famed National Health Service of the United Kingdom.

The brand new Dr. Andrew Manson arrives in a bleak Welsh mining town. His first case for Drineffy Haematite Mine and Ore Works is beautifully described, as only an author who has been ‘there’ can do. He soon meets one of his colleagues, Denny, a sarcastic and bitter drunkard who is nevertheless friendly and helpful, like his dog Hawkins.

Cronin uses humor to take the sting out of his story, which is one of almost inconceivable neglect of the workers in a powerfully class-driven society.  After only 3 months on the job our restless hero questions the pharmacopoeia.

The fragment below demonstrates two things: the vision and influence of this book; and the considerable time it has taken for the profession to acquiesce. CME (Continuing Medical Education) has only recently been formalised:

“Ignorance, ignorance, pure damned ignorance. There ought to be a law to make doctors keep up to date. It’s all the fault of our rotten system. There ought to be compulsory post-graduate classes- to be taken every five years.“

Eventually Andrew Manson breaks his principles for money, injecting ‘Glickert’s Eptone’ into wealthy and gullible patients. He neglects serious cases among the poor in his practice for easy money from rich neurotics; and his wife Chris dispenses for him now, anything, like the poisons he used to rail against. She withdraws into herself: there is unhappiness creeping in to their lives because of the drive to money.

All these themes make The Citadel as relevant today as it was in the 1930s, and The Citadel is still a “great read”. Much has changed in the practice of medicine since this wonderful novel was originally published; however, what will never change are Cronin’s most basic points: that medicine is not merely a business whose goal is to enrich its practitioners materially; and that the essence of being a doctor is the use of one’s senses, knowledge, and experience to reduce suffering and improve people’s lives.

There has been a radio dramatization by The Campbell Playhouse, starring Orson Welles, and also a movie adaptation. The movie was directed by King Vidor and produced by Victor Saville.

The film was nominated for Oscars and also won the Best Picture Award from both the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Board of Review. It is a New York Times Critics’ Pick and is also listed in The New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made.

Here’s the trailer:

http://timmetcalf.com.au

http://xnet.kp.org

http://en.wikipedia.org

Del Rey publishing Deus Ex: The Icarus Effect novel set for 2011 in Europe and North America; will be set in the universe of the upcoming action RPG.

Read the book, or play the video game? Now you have a choice.

Del Rey books today announced it will publish a novel set in the universe of the upcoming video game Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The Icarus Effect is currently pegged for a 2011 release, which is the same time window the Square Enix-published title is slated to arrive on Xbox 360, PC, and PS3 at retail.

The book, which delves deep into the cyberpunk dystopia of the game, will be penned by James Swallow, whose previous science-fiction literary efforts include work in the Warhammer, 40K, Star Trek and Stargate franchises.

As for the novel, it is set in the not-too-distant future, a time when great innovation and technology mesh with chaos and conspiracy.

The narrative will center around two “unlikely heroes”: Anna Kelso, a Secret Service agent, and Ben Saxon, a special-ops soldier. Additionally, some of the novel’s characters and story elements will overlap both the novel and the video game. Neither Deus Ex: Human Revolution nor The Icarus Effect have a release date more specific than 2011.

For more on Deus Ex: Human Revolution, check out the game’s E3 2010 (embedded below):

http://uk.gamespot.com

Eclipse is the third novel in Stephenie Meyer’s popular Twilight series.You really want to have read Twilight and New Moon (in that order) first before reading Eclipse, because the author doesn’t spend too much time expounding the story-lines of the previous novels but rather drops the reader straight in to the story.  You also want to read Twilight and New Moon because they are both excellent novels and, trust me, you are missing out if you haven’t read them.

Eclipse carries on not long after New Moon left off.  Bella’s high school graduation is approaching and she will soon be leaving Forks forever, ostensibly to go to college – but in reality she is planning to join her boyfriend in his vampire existence and will therefore be unable to return home, due to being dead and possessed by a terrible blood lust for the first few years. Not that the reader is actually taken that far in this story, we make it through graduation but then the dangerous vampires from Seattle come to Forks and dealing with them dominates the rest of the novel.

This is only one part of the story though. Eclipse is primarily a romantic saga, so Bella and Edward’s relationship is the primary focus of the novel.  Or as I should say Bella, Edward and Jacob’s relationship – because there is a love triangle in the plot of this novel.

Bella and Jacob have always been friends, at least they were – right up until Jacob became a werewolf.  Then the enmity between vampires and werewolves put a huge strain on their friendship.  Besides which, Jacob is in love with Bella, who is in love with Edward so this is going to make things awkward between them.

At this point, Eclipse descends into soap opera territory – Bella has found her soul mate in Edward but Jacob is the soul mate she should have / could have / would have had if Edward didn’t exist.  She loves him too but not as much as Edward.  Why she loves Jacob is beyond me – he knows that she loves Edward but Jacob still tries to make her feel guilty that she can’t love him like he wants her too. Blatant emotional blackmail is unattractive whatever way you serve it up and it detracted from his otherwise fine character.  Worse, it lead to a large proportion of this book being devoted to teenage angst and with this book being 628 pages long that a substantial amount of angst!

For teens already hooked on the series, Eclipse is another solid instalment of Forks goodness.  Adult readers may be put off by the teenage relationship angst in this novel but if you have already enjoyed the author’s previous offerings I think there is still plenty here to entertain.

This is romantic fantasy – enjoy it!

http://lovevampires.com

Orice carte așezată într-un raft de bibliotecă nu este decît un obiect atâta vreme cît nimeni nu o deschide.

Fiecare volum prinde viață abia atunci cînd este luat în mînă și citit, iar soarta actuală a cărților nu este aceea de a fi vii, ci mai degrabă de a rămâne în stadiul de obiecte. Pentru că lumea, și vorbim în primul rând de intelectuali, neavînd prea multe mijloace materiale la dispoziție, cumpără tot mai puțin din librării. Un alt loc special în care poposesc cărțile sînt anticariatele.

Nu în număr prea mare în Iași, acestea nu mai fac față afluxului de clienți care vin să-și vindă cărțile. Tarabagiii cărților.

Nu toți anticarii din Iași știu să prețuiască ceea ce vind. În anticariatul “Sophia”, de pe strada Cuza Vodă, de exemplu, cărțile stau claie peste grămadă într-un spațiu relativ mic, în care, pe canicula de acum, adăugînd mirosul de carte veche, atmosfera devine irespirabilă. Patronii de aici, doi la număr, par mai degrabă negustori decît oameni care înțeleg adevărata menire a cărții. Aici totul e afacere: cei care aduc cartea primesc bani foarte puțini, dar aceasta ajunge în raft cu un preț incomparabil mai mare. Sărăcia aduce cărțile la anticariat.

Dumitru Grumăzescu, de la Galeriile Anticariat, știe cu exactitate ce anume îi determină pe intelectuali, dar nu numai, să-și vîndă cărțile sau alte obiecte valoroase. “Sînt cîteva categorii distincte care vin să le achizționam cărțile. În primul rînd, pensionarii, care trebuie să trăiască dintr-o pensie foarte mică și atunci vînd cărți vechi, păstrate de mai multe generații în familie. E foarte trist să-i vezi pe acești oameni cum sînt siliți să se despartă, cu durere în suflet, de obiecte valoroase de familie”, ne-a spus dl Grumăzescu.

Tot oameni în vîrstă sînt și aceia care, pentru că nu mai fac față cheltuielilor de întreținere la apartamente cu trei sau patru camere, decid să se mute la garsonieră și atunci trebuie să scape de “excedentul” de lucruri. O altă categorie care frecventează anticariatul din strada Lăpușneanu sînt tinerii. Cei mai mulți își vind biblioteca cu totul, pentru că emigrează și au nevoie de bani. “Am avut foarte multe situații de tinere familii care părăsesc țara și care își vînd tot ce au în casă, de la bibliotecă la lucruri de valoare. Adică își vînd trecutul. Și asta e la fel de trist ca și pentru cei mai în vîrstă”, ne-a mai spus dl Grumăzescu.

Anticariatul este frecventat și de moștenitorii unor familii de mari cărturari, care nu cunosc sau nu apreciază valoarea a ceea ce au în bibliotecă. Pentru aceștia este mult mai important banul și, atunci, cărți de mare valoare, de cele mai multe ori și cu valoare sentimentală, pentru că au dedicații, autografe sau alte adnotări, ajung în rafturi de anticariat.

Copiii își vînd cărțile pentru bani de vacanță. Cei care vînd carte veche la chioșcurile din Piața Unirii spun că la ei vin foarte mulți copii care aduc din bibliotecile de acasă albume de artă sau dicționare, fără știrea părinților, pentru a face cîțiva bănuți pentru vacanță. Iar vechiul anticariat de la Casa Cărții, care s-a mutat pe strada Gării, nu mai face deloc achiziții, deoarece a intrat în lichidare.

Situația materială grea în care trăiesc cei care cunosc valoarea unei cărți îi determină nu numai să nu mai cumpere carte, ci și să vîndă ceea ce mai au prin biblioteci.

Sărăcia transformă cartea într-un simplu obiect.

http://www.evenimentul.ro