3 posts tagged “history”
1. Secret Societies
2. 1984
3. Animal Farm
4. Cicero
5. Catch-22
6. Dumb Witness
7. Lord of the Flies
8. The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights
9. Ulysses
10. Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
11. The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time
12. Girl With A Pearl Earring
13. Candide
14. For One More Day
15. Thomas Paine's Rights of Man
16. King Arthur by Norma Lorre Goodrich
-Arthur owned no land; he married Guinvere, a Queen and vast landowner in her own right.
-Lancelot was equal in stature to Arthur as a King himself, of the Scots.
-The Round Table was a place of worship for the early Celtic Christian church before Roman Catholicism.
-Arthur was a brilliant tactician, both on land and a sea.
-Guinevere was long dead when Arthur left to fight on the continent and he fought two battles against Mordred on his return.
-The Round Table Fellowship was Arthur's personal bodyguard and would have preceded him in death (thus, Lancelot and Gawain perish in the first battle).
-Arthur's kingdom was central England, on the edge of Scotland, not in Southern England.
There's a lot to this book. Unfortunately, it's not in novel form. Yet it does not read like a textbook. Rather, I feel it reads like a guidebook. And I do feel that the author a few times contradicts herself, first placing the Grail Castle on land, then placing it on Avalon. Upon rereading those passages, I think it's a very poor job of editing because at points I feel she's just writing reference notes down rather than piecing things together.
If you like the mythos of Arthur, I think you'll like this book. I think a lot of ideas here were used in the movie of King Arthur, but it was done terribly (as a movie and as a re-treatment of the characters).
I sat down this weekend, content in opening my mind to the vista of time that is
Still, it was an excellent show and I loved the way it ended.
First season favorite scene: The look on Mark Antony's face when he saw Brutus and Caesar's dead body.
Second season favorite scene: The most pitiful wail of agony from Antony when he learns Cleopatra killed herself.
Bravo, James Purefoy. You were at once hate and misery incarnate (respectively).
Oddly, both of these scenes are at the end of their respective seasons.
An mint condition Enigma machine showed up on eBay the other day. It made me think about the selling of pieces of the Berlin wall in very early 90's, which, in turn, got me to thinking: do you want to own a piece of history or be a piece of history? I'm not sure owning a piece of history amounts to much, if you're the only one who has it and no one else can view it (museums excepted, of course). A piece of history is debatable, as the "some crap on a plate from the Franklin Mint" would like you to believe that, in fact, you ARE getting a piece of history by buying a 'picture' of a moment in history, which ends up being a portrait, collage, or some made up imagery. And, arguably, some historical 'pieces' aren't pieces. A suit worn by Elvis isn't so important to me as the Enola Gay, for example. I suppose the impact of historical record is different from person to person. Did the guy standing there after Alexander the Great cut the Gordian Knot with his sword think "By Zeus, I have to have that knot. I'll be owning a piece of history!"
History is something to be studied, observed or lived, not "owned" like a DVD that comes on sale (ever notice they say that in the commercial? "Own it now, on DVD!" but you don't get any rights to the movie. Just a piece of aluminum and plastic that has digital 1's and 0's on it). Still, there are some cool historical things to have, if possessing such is your thing.
