It’s been a busy two months, December 2017 and January 2018, two months during which I finally put to work the fast internet connection activated in October and I started my online courses. Two months during which the first phase of the AMARNA project started, and of course the first two months on Patreon.
With this post, I will try to give a brief overview of these two months, focusing on Patreon in particular. Continue reading
Two-months review
A Pulp Fiction Handbook
I have to admit that it feels weird to read James Scott Bell’s How to Write Pulp Fiction back to back to Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft.
And yet, I could easily say the two books complement each other – Le Guin’s a blueprint for a writers’ workshop (even a solo writer’s workshop, if so the reader wishes), while How to Write Pulp Fiction, that’s full of suggestions and straightforward advice, appears to be more of a guide to a mindset.
Both books are excellent, and having written a post about Le Guin’s, let me now praise James Scott Ball’s handbook. Continue reading
Exploring the Axial Age
Jasper’s Axial Age – now that’s something that always fascinated me, ever since I stumbled on the idea while I was setting up my first course in Taoist philosophy.
Karl T. Jaspers was a German psychiatrist, philosopher and thinker that noticed how, between the 8th and the 3rd century BCE, a lot of new ways of thinking emerged all over the world.
Confucius and Lao-Tse were living in China, all the schools of Chinese philosophy came into being, including those of Mo Ti, Chuang Tse, Lieh Tzu and a host of others; India produced the Upanishads and Buddha and, like China, ran the whole gamut of philosophical possibilities down to materialism, scepticism and nihilism; in Iran Zarathustra taught a challenging view of the world as a struggle between good and evil; in Palestine the prophets made their appearance from Elijah by way of Isaiah and Jeremiah to Deutero-Isaiah; Greece witnessed the appearance of Homer, of the philosophers – Parmenides, Heraclitus and Plato, – of the tragedians, of Thucydides and Archimedes. Everything implied by these names developed during these few centuries almost simultaneously in China, India and the West.
(Karl Jaspers, Origin and Goal of History, p. 2)
Now, of course, “simultaneously” and a span of five/six centuries are two notions somewhat at odds, and indeed Jasper’s theory is considered mostly bogus – an exaggeration at best, an abomination at worst. Continue reading
The Lost City of the Mayan Snake Kings
“A vast, hidden network of cities, fortifications, farms and highways has been found hidden beneath the trees of the remote Guatemalan jungle.”
You can read the whole article here.
Now, this is the sort of news that really make me feel good. I was 18 when a lecturer in my high school told me and my mates
“in the Real World anything worth discovering has been discovered already… the future is in stock trading, not in archaeology or geology.”
It was 1985.
I hope the guy is still alive, but he’s probably in some nursing home eating apple puree and watching all-afternoon reality shows and he won’t get the news about the recent discovery of (get this)
the lost jungle city of the Mayan Snake Kings
Say it out loud, let the syllables roll on your tongue…
the lost jungle city of the Mayan Snake Kings
The world is still large, and uncharted and full of surprises. We have bandits and warlords on the Silk Road, lost cities in the Amazon, strange beasts from the oceanic depths and the looming menace of runaway Artificial Intelligence.
And they are starting to market sex bots.
So here’s a toast to all those that sneered and acted superior, and rambled on about The Real World(TM). May they never wake up – the shock would kill’em.
Karavansara 