Homcker: BIO: The Unhappiness of Others

Sunday 10 April 2011

BIO: The Unhappiness of Others

"When I’m creating at the piano, I tend to feel happy; but - the eternal dilemma - how can we be happy amid the unhappiness of others? I'd do everything I could to give everyone a moment of happiness. That's what's at the heart of my music."

Nino Rota

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Scrapbooking is a method for preserving personal and family history in the form of a scrapbook. Typical memorabilia include photographs, printed media, and artwork. Scrapbook albums are often decorated and frequently contain extensive journaling. Scrapbooking is a widely and increasingly practiced pastime in most developed countries.
With the advent of affordable paper, precursors to modern scrapbooks became available to a wider array of people. Beginning in the 15th century, commonplace books, popular in England, emerged as a way to compile information that included recipes, quotes, letters, poems and more. Each commonplace book was unique to its creator's particular interests. Friendship albums became popular in the 16th century. These albums were used much like modern day yearbooks, where friends or patrons would enter their names, titles and short texts or illustrations at the request of the album's owner. These albums were often created as souvenirs of European tours and would contain local memorabilia including coats of arms or works of art commissioned by local artisans. Starting in 1570, it became fashionable to incorporate colored plates depicting popular scenes such as Venetian costumes or Carnival scenes. These provided affordable options as compared to original works and, as such, these plates were not sold to commemorate or document a specific event, but specifically as embellishments for albums. In 1775, James Granger published a history of England with several blank pages at the end of the book. The pages were designed to allow the book's owner to personalize the book with his own memorabilia. The practice of leaving pages to personalize at the end of books became known as grangerizing. Additionally, friendship albums and school yearbooks afforded girls in the 18th and 19th centuries an outlet through which to share their literary skills, and allowed girls an opportunity to document their own personalized historical record previously not readily available to them.
The advent of modern photography began with the first permanent photograph created by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826. Photography became available to an ever-widening population with the invention of George Eastman's paper photographs in the late 1880s and the mass production of the Kodak Brownie, a camera designed to be simple (and inexpensive) enough for a child, in 1900. This allowed the average person to begin to incorporate photographs into their scrapbooks.
Old scrapbooks tended to have photos mounted with photomounting corners and perhaps notations of who was in a photo or where and when it was taken. They often included bits of memorabilia like newspaper clippings, letters, etc.

A rhapsode (Greek: ῥαψῳδός, rhapsōdos) or, in modern usage, rhapsodist, refers to a classical Greek professional performer of epic poetry in the fifth and fourth centuries BC (and perhaps earlier). Rhapsodes notably performed the epics of Homer (Iliad and Odyssey) but also the wisdom and catalogue poetry of Hesiod and the satires of Archilochus and others. Plato's dialogue Ion, in which Socrates confronts a star player rhapsode, remains our richest source of information on these artists. Often, rhapsodes are depicted in Greek art, wearing their signature cloak and carrying a staff. This equipment is also characteristic of travellers in general, implying that rhapsodes were itinerant performers, moving from town to town.
The term "rhapsode" is derived from rhapsōidein (ῥαψῳδεῖν), meaning "to sew [songs] together".This word illustrates how the oral epic poet, or rhapsode, would build a repertoire of diverse myths, tales and jokes to include in the content of the epic poem. Thus it was possible, through experience and improvisatory skills, for him to shift the content of the epos according to the preferred taste of a specific location's audience. However, the outer framework of the epic would remain virtually the same in every "singing", thus securing the projection of underlying themes such as of morality or honour. The performance of epic poetry was called in classical Greek rhapsodia (ῥαψῳδία), and its performer rhapsodos. The word does not occur in the early epics, which use the word aoidos (ἀοιδός "singer") for performers in all genres including this one. It is unknown whether Hesiod and the poet(s) of the Iliad and Odyssey would have recognised and accepted the name of rhapsode; it has been argued by Walter Burkert, and is accepted by some recent scholars, that rhapsodos was by definition a performer of a fixed, written text.
The word rhapsodos was in use as early as Pindar (522–443 BC), who implies two different explanations of it, "singer of stitched verse", and "singer with the staff". Of these the first is etymologically correct (to be precise, it means "stitcher of verse"); the second was suggested by the fact, for which there is early evidence, that the reciter was accustomed to hold a staff (ῥάβδος rhabdos) in his hand, perhaps, like the sceptre in the Homeric assembly, as a symbol of the right to a hearing or to "emphasize the rhythm or to give grandeur to their gestures". The etymological meaning is interesting because it is an exact metaphor for what oral narrative poets do: they stitch together formulas, lines and type-scenes in the course of performance. There are indications in Pindar and other authors that oral epic was still a living and popular tradition in the early fifth century; all the later evidence, however, is that rhapsodes worked from written texts, and in some cases were compelled by law to do so.

hocker
n. a person who harangues, beseeches, or talks persuasively; a person who trades in information, gossip, or personal connections; someone who is (obnoxiously) ambitious.

hack
v. hacked, hack·ing, hacks
v.tr.
1. To let out (a horse) for hire.
2. To make banal or hackneyed with indiscriminate use.
v.intr.
1. To drive a taxicab for a living.
2. To work for hire as a writer.
3. To ride on horseback at an ordinary pace.
adj.
1. By, characteristic of, or designating routine or commercial writing: hack prose.
2. Hackneyed; banal.

"Homer" is a Greek name, attested in Aeolic-speaking areas, and although nothing definite is known about him, traditions arose purporting to give details of his birthplace and background. The satirist Lucian, in his True History, describes him as a Babylonian called Tigranes, who assumed the name Homer when taken "hostage" (homeros) by the Greeks. When the Emperor Hadrian asked the Oracle at Delphi about Homer, the Pythia proclaimed that he was Ithacan, the son of Epikaste and Telemachus, from the Odyssey. These stories were incorporated into the various Lives of Homer compiled from the Alexandrian period onwards. Homer is most frequently said to be born in the Ionian region of Asia Minor, at Smyrna, or on the island of Chios, dying on the Cycladic island of Ios. A connection with Smyrna seems to be alluded to in a legend that his original name was Melesigenes ("born of Meles", a river which flowed by that city), with his mother the nymph Kretheis. Internal evidence from the poems gives evidence of familiarity with the topography and place-names of this area of Asia Minor, for example Homer refers to meadow birds at the mouth of the Caystros (Iliad 2.459ff.), a storm in the Icarian sea (Iliad 2.144ff.), and mentions that women in Maeonia and Caria stain ivory with scarlet (Iliad 4.142).
The extant lives of Homer are ten in number. Eight of these are edited in Westermann's Vitarum Scriptores Graeci minores, including a piece called the Contest of Hesiod and Homer. The longest Life of Homer is written in the Ionic dialect, and claims to be the work of Herodotus, but is certainly spurious (pseudo-Herodotus). In all probability it belongs to the time which was fruitful beyond all others in literary forgeries; viz., the 2nd century AD. The other lives are certainly not more ancient.
The lives preserve some curious short poems or fragments of verse attributed to Homer, the so-called Epigrams, which used to be printed at the end of editions of Homer. They are numbered as they appear in Pseudo-Herodotus. These are easily recognized as Popular Rhymes, a form of folklore to be met with in most countries, treasured by the people as a kind of proverbs.
In the Homeric epigrams the interest turns sometimes on the characteristics of particular localities Smyrna and Cyme, Erythrae, Mt Ida; others relate to certain trades or occupations: potters, sailors, fishermen, goat herds, etc. Some may be fragments of longer poems, but evidently they are not the work of any one poet. The fact that they were all ascribed to Homer merely means that they belong to a period in the history of the Ionian and Aeolian colonies when Homer was a name which drew to itself all ancient and popular verse.
Again, comparing the epigrams with the legends and anecdotes told in the Lives of Homer, one can hardly doubt that they were the chief source from which these Lives were derived. Thus Epigram 4 mentions a blind poet, a native of Aeolian Smyrna, through which flows the water of the sacred Meles. Here is doubtless the source of the chief incident of the Herodotean Life, the birth of Homer, named Son of the Meles to conceal a scandalous affair between his mother and an older man who had been appointed her guardian. The epithet Aeolian implies high antiquity, inasmuch as according to Herodotus Smyrna became Ionian about 688 BC. Naturally the Ionians had their own version of the story, a version which made Homer come out with the first Athenian colonists.

Homer's Home

Sunday 10 April 2011

BIO: The Unhappiness of Others

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