Song Zuying – The Bright Moon above the Miao Mountain

Thank you Beijing!

The Forbidden World

In 1600, Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori, now a nice plaza lined with cafés, was one of the city’s execution grounds, and on Ash Wednesday of that year Giordano Bruno, a philosopher and former priest accused of heresy by the Inquisition, was taken there and burned. The event was carefully timed. AshWednesday is the primary day [...]

Bolt claims 200m gold with record

Jamaica’s Usain Bolt added the 200m crown to his Olympic 100m title in an incredible new world record time of 19.30 seconds in Beijing.
The 21-year-old, who won the 100m title in a world mark of 9.69 secs, powered past the field to cross the line and smash Michael Johnson’s mark of 19.32.
B R A [...]

The Human Image in Yeats

Reading Yeats we find a poet intensely and often painfully preoccupied with the irreconcilable claims of Soul and Body: ‘body and soul/Estranged amid the strangeness of themselves’. Intensely and painfully, because being a poet he was driven toward images of ‘wholeness’, unity, and ‘perfection’. There seemed no possibility of realizing ‘Unity of Being’; the poetic [...]

Cecilia Bartoli – Exsultate Jubilate – Alleluja

Han Shaogong: A Dictionary of Maqiao

The best novel of the year isn’t that DeLillo-on-automatic-pilot thing that broke out, along with SARS, this spring; nor the smutty, anti-Islamic screed by the superannuated French juvenile delinquent; nor even Jane Smiley’s excellent investigation of the unlikely souls of real estate agents. Rather, it is this “dictionary” of the dialect of a fictitious village, [...]

Chinese Music – Zhoushan Ensemble of Gongs & Drums

Performed by the China Traditional Orchestra Zhejiang at the Culture and Congress Centre Lucene of Swiss in early 2006.
Spectacular opening for Olympics

Her Own Society – A new reading of Emily Dickinson

In April of 1862, Emily Dickinson wrote to a stranger, initiating a fervent twenty-four-year correspondence, in the course of which they managed to meet only twice. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, thirty-eight, was a man of letters, a clergyman, a fitness enthusiast, a celebrated abolitionist, and a champion of women’s rights, whose essays on slavery and suffrage, [...]

Alexander Solzhenitsyn died in Moscow

Prominent Russian writer, Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn, died in Moscow tonight.
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1970
Autobiography
I was born at Kislovodsk on 11th December, 1918. My father had studied philological subjects at Moscow University, but did not complete his studies, as he enlisted as a volunteer when war broke out in 1914. He became [...]