Thursday, December 31, 2009

Medieval Europe Lives Again In the American Desert

I am going to try to go to this conference in February:

http://www.acmrs.org/conferences/2010/conferences.html

I had no idea that Arizona was a hotbed of medieval studies. Maybe the dry climate is good for preserving manuscripts? I found out about this conference through the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at UCLA. I also want to go to one of their upcoming events, a lecture from a manuscript specialist at the Getty Museum:

19th History of the Book Lecture
“Searching for the Origins of Secular Imagery in Thirteenth-Century France”
Friday, January 29, 2010

The mid-thirteenth century in northern France saw an explosion in the production of books in the vernacular. Most art historians have seen the illumination of romances and histories of the period as a rather thoughtless adaptation of sacred painting models. In this lecture, however, Dr. Elizabeth Morrison (Curator, Department of Manuscripts, J. Paul Getty Museum) explores how artists adapted and ultimately broke away from their religiously inspired beginnings in order to create new formats and compositions more suited to their needs and the needs of a new breed of manuscript- the illuminated secular book.

From here:

http://www.cmrs.ucla.edu/programs/calendar.html#1-29

It's part of this series:

http://www.cmrs.ucla.edu/programs/history_book.html

It's good to live in a large town where you have access to resources like this. I'd be even happier if I lived somewhere like London, but I always try to use every place I live to its fullest.

Rotten to the Core

Well, I thought that my Apple computer was fixed when the Genius tech removed a faulty RAM module before Christmas, but when I took it back into the store to have the replacement installed, it crashed again. They ran a diagnostic, and based on that, they just gave up and replaced my hard drive. The model I had was no longer available, so they gave me a free upgrade to a more powerful drive and sent me home. All of this happened right before the holiday break, so I have not had a chance to fire it up again and re-do all of my settings and make sure it's back on the right track, but I plan to do that this weekend. I have to say, it's really been getting me down. I invested a lot in this computer, and it's a been a huge holdup for me this past year. I hope this solved the problem. The Apple techs were very kind, and have been awesome about addressing my concerns, it's just been awful to have so many things go wrong with what is supposed to be such a good machine.

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Book By Its Cover

This year has seemed to be one of delay and disruption. I shared below how my computer has been giving me fits, and so has the economy. There have also been some personal things that have required quite a bit of processing on my part to come to terms with. I've taken some of the slow time to get mundane parts of my life in order, but I feel like the hour is approaching for me to move forward with my creative projects again. My first book is about ready to go as an e-book, but I've had a holdup with the cover artwork, because my artist friend who is doing it for me has recently had a quite serious illness. I am hoping he recovers soon because he's been through a lot the last few years and truly does not deserve this. I think his state has come mostly from stress due to unpleasant stuff he has had to deal with, which amounts to being unfairly punished for being unfairly punished. I can relate to that, it's certainly happened to me in the past, but I feel very sorry for him because he's sick enough to have taken disability time off from his day job and I know he feels physically awful. I am sharing this because I write this blog to share my experiences with developing my writing, and this kind of thing is part of the process. Reality is something that must be dealt with.

More Scribd

I've gotten about one thousand hits on Scribd since I posted a sample of The Flower of Knighthood there, so I'd say it's definitely a success. I want to write some essays and put them up there as well to generate more traffic.

Poisoned Apple

I wrote on here back in February how I finally was able to buy an Apple computer after months of saving. Alas, I have been having problems with it ever since, issues which escalated recently. It's been giving me one kernel panic after another, a state where the operating system is not communicating with the requested application and the machine freezes and shuts down. I took it to the Apple Genius Bar twice over the summer, and they could not find anything wrong with it because, as often happens, it not do exactly its same breakdown for them as it did for me at home. I then went online and researched the failure and its possible causes, and went so far as to erase the OS and reinstall it from scratch. I thought that had fixed the bad seed, but this weekend it failed more spectacularly than ever, so I took it in again. It finally did its screaming, seizing collapse in full glory for the tech, who realized it must have a faulty RAM module. He removed half its brain (one chip) to check, and it instantly worked better. It's still under warranty, so he ordered a replacement at no charge and told me it should be here in a week or so. It's operational even with one good chip, and it's working better than it has in months. I am very pleased, because I thought my Apple was a lemon and feared that I would have to return it. I was so happy to get it, and it's been so frustrating to me to have it be such a problem when it was supposed to solve problems. I've been stalled out on developing my music because of it and the drain on me from trying to fix it has slowed me down on my editing and writing, too, but hopefully now it can live up to its promise. I think my Apple has been expressing a metaphysical problem as well as a technical one - I've also written some about crossing Da'ath, the Abyss, in the Tree of Life over the last few months, and in the very center of the primal waste stands the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, with a serpent coiled around its base. Maybe I had to get past the poison of the snake in order to be able to apply the wisdom of the Apple. The doorway to the Qliphoth, the reverse Tree of Life, is in the Abyss as well, and makes its influence known through brokenness and corruption, often of a psychological nature. My RAM module, clearly a symbol of thought and memory, was corrupt, but through serious effort towards systems integrity it is in the process of being repaired. It's like a redemption of the Fall enacted in cyberspace, which is not a bad metaphor for the archetypal realm from which this process of spiritual initiation originates.

The Holy Grail


"How at the Castle of Corbin a Maiden Bare in the Sangreal and Foretold the Achievements of Galahad" by Arthur Rackham. From Alfred Pollard's The Romance of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table (1917).