Taos: All The Elements

If you are in the American Southwest in early July, you might check out this event: a workshop celebrating the beauty of the desert in artistry with books, metal, wood, stone, found objects. Here is a poster for the workshop (aren't those artifacts in the poster breathtaking?):


And here is what artist Edward Abbey has to say about his workshop:

In my case it was love at first sight. This desert, all deserts, any desert.

What draws us to this place? A magical thread winds through the desert southwest and pulls us in. This landscape offers bounty for the artist, and we will use those offerings as an inspiration for the art we create in this class.

For more of the desert's bounty, check out the work of Trix Press, which both chapbooks of desert poetry, as well as postcards and photography inspired by that landscape that is a house made of dawn:

The Pyramids: Seashells in the Desert

A recent article in Discovery News reveals that archeologists have just discovered great quantities of intact fossils in the limestone blocks that make up the pyramids at Giza. The fossils are seashells and the remains of extinct organisms, including ancient starfish and sand dollars. This discovery adds fuel to the debate over the origins of the pyramids and deepens the mystery surrounding them.


Recently, the leading theory among Egyptologists has been that the blocks that make up the pyramids were created by casting limestone in vast molds. This theory allows us to accept that the peoples of ancient Kemet, which we call Egypt, could cast the limestone at each layer of the construction, allowing them to make the blocks on the spot and maneuver them into place without the need to first lift the blocks up the wall of the pyramid. However, the presence of intact fossils in the limestone lends credence to an older theory, and suggests that the limestone was actually carved from natural rock (rock that had once been at the bottom of the sea).


This leaves us back at the riddle we started with: if the ancient Egyptians did carve the stones out of natural rock, then how did these people, who had no cranes, lift those massive stones up the walls of the great pyramids? Some of these stones exceeded 200,000 tons in weight. How did they manage this wonder of the ancient world?

Durwaigh fairy tale Ebay Sale

Dear readers, in honor of the start of spring season, yard sales, and auctions, here' a dispatch from one of our fiction editors:

Duirwaigh, "An Inspired Artist Agency," represents many of the artists creating iconic images of new and classical fantastical worlds. In anticipation of their upcoming move, they are hosting a special eBay sale, inviting you to "ADOPT OUR FRIENDS!"


The owners write:

"Being the wild bohemian revolutionaries we are, our friends are a colorful, diverse lot. Among them you'll find Cheshire cats and frog footmen, drag queen roosters, high heeled teapots, flitting faeries, fuzzy-brained bears, and divas of all shapes and sizes. They hale from places like Wonderland, Narnia, Oz, the Hundred Acre Wood, Lothlorien, Neverland, Fairyland and the Duirwaigh forest.

"If you're even the remotest bit fanciful, there's something for you in this auction. Even those of you with rampant practical natures will find something pressing its face against your computer screen begging to come home with you. From May 1 to May 14 we'll be listing an assortment of paintings, posters, drawings, dolls, chess sets, signed prints, sculptures, tea services, figurines, puzzles, christmas ornaments, housewares, fabrics, dresses, shoes, books, garden statues and elsewares!"

It looks like fun fraught with delicious danger. Why not have a look? Start here.

A Minotaur Opera

Now here is something intriguing and very bold: the tale of Theseus' battle with the Minotaur deep in the Minoan Labyrinth - and of his ill-fated romance with Ariadne daughter of the king of Crete - translated into opera, by renowned British composer Harrison Birtwistle.

Our top Anglophile on the Dante's Heart staff forwarded several reviews of the opera The Minotaur to me today, with some excitement. Here is how the International Herald Tribune describes Birtwistle's opus:

The earliest opera composers looked to Greek myths for the substance of their operas. Four hundred years later, the British composer Harrison Birtwistle obviously thinks they knew what they were doing. Not for him is the practice of basing an opera on a popular play or novel, with its inherent invitation to the audience to measure the new work against its source. Myth, Birtwistle recognizes, can supply just what the opera composer requires: psychological depth and bloodcurdling violence, a point made grippingly clear by his opera "The Minotaur," which had its world premiere at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, last week....

Birtwistle's score is relentlessly modernistic, its astringency serving to underscore the opera's violence and unremitting tension. One did not expect this crusty composer to turn mellow at 73 and he has not done so. His large orchestra includes an enormous percussion section that spills out of the pit with mallet-struck instruments, tom-toms, woodblocks and the like doing heavy duty. This is not music from which one derives much sheer pleasure, but it is intently theatrical.

The opera is not for the faint-hearted, and it is also not for audience members who suffer from histories of violence or traumatic memory, for whom a more triggering production could scarcely be imagined. The opera has all the raw energy and unremitting and insistent tension that one finds in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus or Cormac MacCarthy's Blood Meridian. According to a Reuters article that dubbed the opera (honestly but perhaps reductively) "blood-drenched":

A group of Innocents is sacrificed to the beast in his lair as a crowd around the bull ring bays for blood. One is raped, and vulture-like, screaming Keres tear the hearts from the victims."I think it's a very dark piece," Birtwistle told Reuters before the curtains went up on the eagerly anticipated work.

Most interesting to me is librettist David Harsent's interpretation of the legend, a look at heroes and monsters that is as unflinching as Birtwistle's music:

Harsent wanted to challenge the assumption that the human Minotaur was preferable to the animal in light of the suffering caused by conflicts the world over.

"When he identifies the human side of himself he is not certain he's found something worthy and virtuous," he said.

"I think there are other ways of looking at this -- you might well have it the wrong way around. Look at the man, not the beast. I think the myth stays relevant and stays modern."

He also casts Ariadne as a woman prepared to do anything to escape Crete and Theseus as someone scheming to get rid of her even before he agrees to her plan.

"I don't believe in heroes," Harsent said. "There might be moments of heroism but I don't really believe in heroes."

For more information about the opera, you can read an intelligent review of The Minotaur here at MusicalCriticism.com.

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(On an entirely different note, this is our 100th post on the Dante's Heart blog. We hope that many of those posts were interesting or useful, and we hope that for those of you who have been with us for a while, the journey has been a good one. May we go to many strange and unexpected places together in the coming months!)

50,000 cupcakes, and a Zebra in Seney Hall

I know that this is only barely on topic for our blog, but these two incidents in the news are such marvels that I think they qualify.

First - the University of Maryland is baking 50,000 cupcakes in preparation for this Saturday's Maryland Day festival. The effort of transporting and arranging the cupcakes will require over 200 staff and volunteers. You can read about it here.

Second - Students at Oxford College of Emory University performed a really remarkable prank Tuesday night, stealing a zebra from a nearby farm and giving the zebra the free rein of historic Seney Hall on campus. Apparently the zebra spent the night munching on the campus furniture. Campus security had a shock the next morning when they opened the doors to be find a zebra flitting through the building's shadows. You can read about the prank here.

The sudden appearance of a zebra in an unexpected (and indeed, revered) place - that is a marvel indeed, something to talk about all morning over coffee at the station, a burst of fresh energy in a dull working day.

Snow White and Mah-Pishooni in Isfahan, Iran

Dear readers, today's Tehran Times, a leading newspaper of Iran, reports that a group of German and Iranian school-children have just collaborated on a two-part theatre project. In the first part, the schoolchildren have brought a theatrical version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to Naqsh-e Jahan Square in the city of Isfahan, Iran.



In turn, the Iranian students performed their own folktale, Mah-Pishuni (or Mah-Pishooni), for the visiting German children. Mah-Pishuni is a story relatively unknown in the West. Mah-Pishuni, whose name means Girl With a Face Like The Moon, is an Iranian princess, whose prince searches all of Iran for her, having fallen in love at a glimpse of her beautiful, moon-like face. To come together, they have to thwart the machinations of Mah-Pishuni's embittered sister-in-law.

I find this a beautiful moment - these two groups of schoolchildren have chosen these fairy tales to try and convey to each other some of the depth and beauty of their two cultures.

You can glimpse some echo of the beauty and energy of Mah-Pishuni through this song based on the story (forgive that the video component is a slideshow and not a clip of the singer, GooGoosh - it is difficult to find any of this in the West, so we must make do; fortunately the slideshow is very compelling itself):



Think of it! We may have Snow White, and Cinderella with her glass slipper and her prince seeking her, but we do not have the Girl With A Face Like the Moon. How blessed these students are to be sharing their stories, stories that have been told and retold in each of their cultures until they have fermented with their age like fine wine. Think of the beauty and ideas we get each time we encounter a new story, especially a story from a different part of the world. If only there were more opportunity for this kind of sharing, and if only more newspapers than the Tehran Times will recognize this event for the occasion it is, and make mention of it. This is a very beautiful thing that the children have done, and I hope that it enriches their lives.

And I must try to learn more of Mah-Pishuni.

You can read the article in the Tehran Times here - it is very brief.

Mimicking Neanderthal Voices

Anthropologists led by Professor Robert McCarthy at Florida Atlantic University have just begun simulating neanderthal speech (meaning their vowel sounds). It's a fascinating and appealing project to anyone who has ever been inflicted with what fantasy writer Elizabeth Kerner has called ferrinshadik - that is, the desire to speak with sentient species other than one's own (J.R.R. Tolkien cited a similar impulse behind the longing of readers for tales of elves and dwarves). The neanderthals, so similar to us and yet so apart, have not been around for 30,000 years. None of us and none of our remembered ancestors ever got to speak with them or learn how they perceived the world we shared.

The speech mimicking remains quite controversial, as anthropologists debate the level of sophistication of neanderthal vocalization (who we once assumed could only grunt). A lot of the debate is summarized for laymen in this British news article which nonetheless falls prey to exactly the assumptions that underlie the debate. Our friendly journalist declares with surprising haughtiness:

They became extinct around 30,000 years ago after failing to compete with the brighter and more adaptable Homo sapiens.

Actually, we have no idea why neanderthals became extinct. Theories include climate shift, a decline in game (neanderthals were aggressively carnivorous, whereas early homo sapiens were omnivorous), or increased need for long-distance migration. There is no evidence that early homo sapiens were necessarily brighter or better. (In fact, had we remained locked in an Ice Age, neanderthals would have proven far better adapted to the extreme cold and probably far brighter about their means of surviving and thriving under those conditions.) We continue to perpetuate one of our most beloved and most erroneous myths: that of the caveman and of the heroic upward evolutionary climb of the human species. The myth runs something like this: We are the heroes, we dragged ourselves out of the primordial goo by our bootstraps and we dominate the world, and we were the only ones who managed it. Is anyone else struck by the subtle malignancy of this myth that continues to pervade both our scientific journalism and our scientific journals - that distracts us from either objective study of our past or from looking upon our genetic relatives with compassion)?

Recent primatological studies of plains chimpanzees in Senegal, Africa reveal that these chimpanzees have learned to hunt their prey with sharpened spears. If the Senegal chimpanzees become extinct at some point (all too possible), will our descendant journalists 30,000 years from now be writing about how they died out because homo sapiens was brighter and more adaptable? Of course nothing could be further from the truth. If the chimpanzees do die out, it will be not because we are brighter but because we were earlier: we beat them to the punch.

Hopefully in 30,000 years we will be a wiser species - but that supposition would itself be a subscription to the evolutionary hero myth.