Senses of Cinema: an online journal devoted to the serious and eclectic discussion of cinema.
Articles, festival reports, DVD reviews, book reviews, links, lists.
The great directors archive is stashed full of information, as is the annotations for films screening at the Melbourne Cinémathèque.
e.g.
Comments on David Lynch’s Eraserhead by Catherine S. Cox.
Alfred Hitchcock by Ken Mogg
Hitchcockian articles in Senses
[found while I was looking for something Hitchcockian ...]
From the Making of America collection comes a link to An elementary dictionary of the English language. By Joseph E. Worcester, LL. D. (1865).
I love old dictionaries. The actual wordstuff for this one begins at page 31, after all the frontal matter regarding pronunciation and all that.
Seeing how a word was used in 1865 gives one a glimpse at how the current day definition evolved. Some words in Worcester’s dictionary have evolved beyond recognition. Some no longer exist.
e.g. p 168 (lacerable – lapful)
laconism – pithy phrase or expression
Lady-Day – 25th March. The Annunciation.
laic- a layman; — opposed to clergyman.
lamantine – an animal; manatee or sea-cow.
lambative – a medicine taken by licking
laniate – to tear in pieces; to lacerate
lanuginous – downy; covered with soft thin hair
Some of those words are still in use today, although perhaps not in as common use as they were 142 years ago. “lanuginous” was used in the 2006 Scripps National Spelling Bee finals.
Fun stuff, words.
Found a link to this site from someone I know who is working through the Japanese language course and thinks highly of the experience.
a free and open educational resource (OER) for educators, students, and self-learners around the world.
MIT OCW:
Japanese, German, Chinese (Mandarin), Spanish, French, tralala come under “Foreign Languages and Literatures” as do classes about cultures and texts written in those languages such as “A Passage to India: Introduction to Modern Indian Culture and Society,” “Twentieth and Twentyfirst-Century Spanish American Literature,” “East Asian Cultures: From Zen to Pop.”
The Chinese I class, f’rex, includes a downloadable textbook and other study materials. The course assumes you know absolutely NOTHING about the language.
The purpose of this course is to develop:
Or you could take Introduction to Aerospace Engineering and Design, Computational Cognitive Science, Urban Design Politics, or Special Seminar in Applied Probability and Stochastic Processes.
The list of Readings for Bestsellers: Detective Fiction changes each time the class is given but the Fall 2006 session uses the following books:
The world is my oyster and MIT Open Courseware is a pearl.
News from Internet Resources for Writers:
Checked and updated all links on Business/Submissions.
The page includes subsections:
I also added a separate header for our Miss Snark’s blog.
Occurs to me that at some point I need to port all the content over to a CSS-driven revamped site.
sigh
Not today.
Making of America — 19th c primary sources (and some 20th c too)
Making of America (MoA) is a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. The collection currently contains approximately 10,000 books and 50,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints. For more details about the project, see About MoA.
Amazing collection of stuff.
I was wandering around today trying to see if I could find some written context for “The man who doesn’t read books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them” (and variations), attributed to Mark Twain — a discussion that popped up yesterday on Project Wombat (formerly, the Stumpers list).
I never did find confirmation or attribution for the alleged Twain quote, but I did find an essay — patronizing to say the least — explaining to the dear little women what sorts of books they should be asking for their husband’s permission to buy and read: a six-page article titled, “Reading,” by L.L. Hamline, found in “The Ladies’ repository: a monthly periodical, devoted to literature, arts, and religion.”
Whoo boy.
With the thousands of books and thousands of articles the MOA folks have scanned and continued to scan, you could spend a long while in these archives.
Maneuverability is good. The search is FAST and can be simple, Boolean, &c. MOA pulls up matches giving title &c. and number of pages your search terms are on. You can wend through the pages of a given work or ask for those specific pages within the work that have your search term(s).
The app doesn’t highlight the found word on the page, which is unfortunate when you have a dense page filled with tiny print.
Interesting stuff. A peek into where we’ve come from.
Christopher Lockhart, Executive Story Editor at ICM has a blog called THE INSIDE PITCH: a Hollywood Executive answers questions from screenwriters.
What applies to screenwriters can also apply to writers.
Take a look-see, if screenwriting or fiction writing be your smack.
How to leak a secret and not get caught – WikiLeaks from New Scientist Tech, 12 Jan 2007.
Good? Worthwhile?
Wikileaks opens leaked documents up to a much more exacting scrutiny than any media organization or intelligence agency could provide. Wikileaks will provide a forum for the entire global community to examine any document for credibility, plausibility, veracity and falsifiability. They will be able to interpret documents and explain their relevance to the public. If a document comes from the Chinese government, the entire Chinese dissident community can freely scrutinize and discuss it; if a document arrives from Iran, the entire Farsi community can analyze it and put it in context.
I give it a month before WikiLeaks is either so full of garbage as to be useless or the able meta monitors start shutting down “undesirable” wiks and creating WikiLeaks’ own form of censorship.
(Cool logo, though …)
APOD: 2007 January 13 – Comet Over Krakow
Almost caught it this morning, but the sun had already tipped up above the eastern foothills by the time I got out of bed. Headed off to Liguria Bakery for rosemary focaccia and rosemary/garlic focaccia in lieu. Ym.
Frederic Larson caught an interesting glimpse of the McNaught a couple days ago.
Update: Keera snapped it too!
Update 2: More on McNaught from msnbc.
Mathematical Quotation Server from Mark Woodward and the Furman University (SC) mathematics department.
Keyword Search – Alpha by Author – Browse – Download – Random
Text references given when known.
From WSU, the archived coursework and resources for the university freshman-level World Cultures class.
Texts, maps, &c. Ignore the “available for distance learning registation” [sic] notices and the links to discussion areas. This site is archival only.
Want to read up on Bhagavad-Gita? You’ll find yourself here. Click “contents” and you’ll get to an online text (a downloadable version is also available) or click “resources” and you’ll get a list of hyperlinks to other online texts, essays, commentaries and such like.
While away the afternoon.
No search functionality, alas.
(Found when searching for the etymology of “no retreat, no surrender” — the title of DeLay’s new book– which drew me toward Sparta, which brought me here. Could any of the erudite readers reading this tell me whether there was a Spartan rule which translated as “no retreat, no surrender”? Thanks much.)
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