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| Summer haircut |
A new haircut is always a good time for a new post (even if laptop pictures are a little dodgy) and even though summer is still hiding behind April showers that came and never left sometimes you just have to hope that the sun will eventually warm the back of your neck. I live in hope. Yesterday I had a fine day in London with the very fine PEN folk who do a very good job supporting writers in oppressed situations.We are planning to bring PEN to Winchester and I know this will be a good thing to do. But this also brings me to an old friend in Icarus. I am planning an inter-continental book where we will consider myths olds hey fold themselves into ideas on intimacy, passion, jealousy, love, hate and so on. Of course biblical studies have been doing this for years but we will also be trying to understand 'mythical hauntings' and the reality of longstanding tropes and their contemporary manifestations as ways of revealing something significant about media, art and literature in the contemporary world. It is already looking to be an exciting project - and of course we began exploring intimacy here: http://www.axonjournal.com.au/issue-1/intimacy-and-icarus-effect And it takes research into strange territories, perhaps like Matthew Arnold's, 'science of origins' as a foundation of 'all real knowledge of the actual world' begging the question, is there any scientific explanation of origin, for example, there are many Icarusies (such an odd plural) by Ovid, Virgil, Apollodorus, Pausanias and Diodorus for example and the story flies unsteadily over Aegean seas, the boy, legs occasionally dangling in the water, as passing ships ignore him staring at them. And then there is Aristotle's proposal of entelechy to consider, the condition of a thing whose essence is fully realised, but is it really because the shadow of James Macpherson's Poems of Ossian's (though a damn fine hoax it was) looms over us - and the tale only has to tell what we will it to. But that is just the musings of a new haircut which are not yet making sense. I had a hankering to hear this, Toumani Diabate - Cantelowes live at El Real Alcazar:
