George Bernard Shaw
1856-1950
Playwright, born in Dublin into a loveless and genteely poor household overshadowed by his father's tippling, but filled with music and musicians by his mother. Shaw was educated both at Wesley Connexional School, in the National Gallery of Ireland, and by his own wide reading. In 1876 he joined his mother who had moved to London as a music teacher.
From 1878 to 1883 Shaw wrote but failed to publish five novels, but in subsequent years made remarkable intellectual progress, acheived conquest over his shyness, and made many important friendships. In 1884 Shaw joined the Fabian Society, and over the next decade wrote as a book reviewer for the Pall Mall Gazette, an art critic for the World, a music critic for the Star under the pseudonym Corno di Bassetto, and dramatic critic for the Saturday Review.
By 1925, Shaw's work earned him the Nobel Prize. He established the Anglo-Swedish Literary Foundation and left residue of an estate to institute a British alphabet of at least forty letters (12).
Sunday, 29 July 2007
The Rossettis................
Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894), poet.
Christina Rossetti's first productions were printed privately, 1842 and 1847. She contributed to the Germ under the pseudonym "Ellen Alleyne" in 1850. She also published Goblin Market (1862), Commonplace (1870), Sing Song (1872), and subsequently composed mainly devotional literature.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), painter and poet.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti studied at the Royal Academy 1846, and later under Ford Madox Brown. He met Woolner, Holman Hunt and Millais, and founded the Pre-Raphaelite school of Painting. After the death of his wife in 1862, D.G. Rossetti lived with his brother William, Mr. Swinburne, and George Meredith.
William Michael Rossetti (1829-1919), writer and critic.
A pre-Raphaelite writer and art critic, William Rossetti also edited the works of his brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He edited four editions of D.G. Rossetti's collected works, Memoir (1895), and Christina Rossetti's New and Collected Poems (1904).
Rossetti, Christina Georgina.
The Prince's Progress and Other Poems.
Macmillan, 1866.
Contents Introduction Publishers Writers Periodicals Notes Next Page
UBC Library Special Collections & University Archives
Select image to view
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel.
The House of Life ... Being Now for the First Time Given in Its Full Text.
Boston: Copeland & Day, 1894.
Select image to view
Rossetti, William Michael.
Swineburne's Poems and Ballads: A Criticism.
J.C. Hotten, 1866.
Christina Rossetti's first productions were printed privately, 1842 and 1847. She contributed to the Germ under the pseudonym "Ellen Alleyne" in 1850. She also published Goblin Market (1862), Commonplace (1870), Sing Song (1872), and subsequently composed mainly devotional literature.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), painter and poet.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti studied at the Royal Academy 1846, and later under Ford Madox Brown. He met Woolner, Holman Hunt and Millais, and founded the Pre-Raphaelite school of Painting. After the death of his wife in 1862, D.G. Rossetti lived with his brother William, Mr. Swinburne, and George Meredith.
William Michael Rossetti (1829-1919), writer and critic.
A pre-Raphaelite writer and art critic, William Rossetti also edited the works of his brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He edited four editions of D.G. Rossetti's collected works, Memoir (1895), and Christina Rossetti's New and Collected Poems (1904).
Rossetti, Christina Georgina.
The Prince's Progress and Other Poems.
Macmillan, 1866.
Contents Introduction Publishers Writers Periodicals Notes Next Page
UBC Library Special Collections & University Archives
Select image to view
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel.
The House of Life ... Being Now for the First Time Given in Its Full Text.
Boston: Copeland & Day, 1894.
Select image to view
Rossetti, William Michael.
Swineburne's Poems and Ballads: A Criticism.
J.C. Hotten, 1866.
Arthur Symons ~ Things you need to know
Arthur Symons
1865-1945
Arthur Symons was a poet, translator, critic and editor who captured Colbeck's attention like no other writer. Educated in Devonshire, Symons befriended many artists and writers of the nineties in England and France. He published several volumes of verse and criticism, notably "Symbolist Movement in Literature" (1899), contributed regularly to Athenaeum, Saturday, and Fortnightly reviews, wrote plays, edited, and translated from six languages (7).
Colbeck proclaimed: "Arthur Symon's prose writings fascinated me, an uncritical youth, more than sixty years ago. When I first read that remarkable essay 'Fact in Literature,' I realized I was in communion with a mind I would venerate and love always. Perhaps we could recapture the first paragraph of that work:
The invention of printing helped to destroy literature. Scribes, and memories not yet spoilt by over-cramming, preserved all the literature that was worth preserving. Books that had to be remembered by heart, or copied with slow, elaborate penmanship, were not thrown away on people who did not want them. They remained in the hands of people of taste. The first book pointed the way to the first newspaper, and a newspaper is a thing meant to be not only forgotten but destroyed. With the deliberate destruction of print, the respect for printed literature vanished, and a single term came to be used for the poem and the "news item." What had once been an art for the few became a trade for the many.
"Symons was a great deal more than a writer of the Nineties, and is completely mis-classified with poets of the Decadence. He had his brief moment with the Rhymer's Club, and, as editor of The Savoy appeared to dominate the scene for those few months of 1896, but he lived aside from any movement.
Contents Introduction Publishers Writers Periodicals Notes Next Page
UBC Library Special Collections & University Archives
"Symons was straightway in a distinguished company, and one can imagine the astonishment of his fellow editors, had they learned the age of the newcomer. Time passed, and Symons became a familiar of nearly all the writers of his time, accepted equally in Paris as in London, and found a ready market for his prose in the Quarterlies and Monthlys: but Editors, more often than not, returned his verse submissions with polite thanks, declining to publish. Days and Nights, 1889, his first book of poems, had a limited success, but Macmillans never had any call for a reprint; and his next three volumes of verse might not have seen the light of day but for the enterprise of a young, almost unknown, Leonard Smithers. Silhouettes and London Nights survived into second editions, each with a new preface which renders it permanently valuable, but it is true to say that the poet had no assured market for his work until the turn of the century, when a newly arrived publisher - William Heinemann - took him up (8).
1865-1945
Arthur Symons was a poet, translator, critic and editor who captured Colbeck's attention like no other writer. Educated in Devonshire, Symons befriended many artists and writers of the nineties in England and France. He published several volumes of verse and criticism, notably "Symbolist Movement in Literature" (1899), contributed regularly to Athenaeum, Saturday, and Fortnightly reviews, wrote plays, edited, and translated from six languages (7).
Colbeck proclaimed: "Arthur Symon's prose writings fascinated me, an uncritical youth, more than sixty years ago. When I first read that remarkable essay 'Fact in Literature,' I realized I was in communion with a mind I would venerate and love always. Perhaps we could recapture the first paragraph of that work:
The invention of printing helped to destroy literature. Scribes, and memories not yet spoilt by over-cramming, preserved all the literature that was worth preserving. Books that had to be remembered by heart, or copied with slow, elaborate penmanship, were not thrown away on people who did not want them. They remained in the hands of people of taste. The first book pointed the way to the first newspaper, and a newspaper is a thing meant to be not only forgotten but destroyed. With the deliberate destruction of print, the respect for printed literature vanished, and a single term came to be used for the poem and the "news item." What had once been an art for the few became a trade for the many.
"Symons was a great deal more than a writer of the Nineties, and is completely mis-classified with poets of the Decadence. He had his brief moment with the Rhymer's Club, and, as editor of The Savoy appeared to dominate the scene for those few months of 1896, but he lived aside from any movement.
Contents Introduction Publishers Writers Periodicals Notes Next Page
UBC Library Special Collections & University Archives
"Symons was straightway in a distinguished company, and one can imagine the astonishment of his fellow editors, had they learned the age of the newcomer. Time passed, and Symons became a familiar of nearly all the writers of his time, accepted equally in Paris as in London, and found a ready market for his prose in the Quarterlies and Monthlys: but Editors, more often than not, returned his verse submissions with polite thanks, declining to publish. Days and Nights, 1889, his first book of poems, had a limited success, but Macmillans never had any call for a reprint; and his next three volumes of verse might not have seen the light of day but for the enterprise of a young, almost unknown, Leonard Smithers. Silhouettes and London Nights survived into second editions, each with a new preface which renders it permanently valuable, but it is true to say that the poet had no assured market for his work until the turn of the century, when a newly arrived publisher - William Heinemann - took him up (8).
Poetry by Barbara Helfgott Hyett
The Inlet
Here again, the rough-cut jetty, the ridge
worn flat by men trolling bass and bluefish
and boys with plastic buckets full of porgies.
The hooks are taut in their mouths.
I comb the crevices for mussels, find
a baby flounder, stiff and gray, a shell.
Right side down a huge crab bakes on a rock.
Behind me, vacant, boarded up, the tenements
where I was born. Beige bricks, three or four stories
crammed with families, fathers who delivered milk
or sold potato chips from tall tin cans -
I scooped them into brown bags, watched the oil seep through.
In summer, mothers gave up unemployment
to work in tourist places hawking beach chairs,
vegematics, tickets to Ripley's Believe It or Not.
Mothers didn't swim. They sent us to stay
at the lifeguard stand with a quarter for lunch.
We'd swim past the jetty to the rotted pilings, then back
to the shallows and the puckered seaweed. I'd open my eyes
underwater, watch the silversides skimming my cheek.
When my towel underneath the boardwalk was all in shadow
and the sand had turned quartz cold, I went home.
At Zwiebacks, after dinner, I'd read comic books
or else I'd buy one used. Later, at Altman Field
the boys from Philly who stayed at the guest house
would start to shoot some baskets.
Sometimes I'd just sit on the bleachers
licking salt from the back of my hand.
Everything was like that then: crisp, expectable,
a silent movie, the ocean and the hoop disappearing
gradually from the end of the playground
until I couldn't see the ball anymore.
In my bed, I'd watch the sway of the clotheslines
on the rooftop outside my window and listen
to the men playing pinochle at the dining-room table,
the stogie smoke gray and small-winged down the hall.
The women swept the floors, laid roach traps,
ate chocolate at the mahjongg game downstairs.
They'd laugh, and clack the bone faced tiles,
a sound of summer when summer wasn't time
but place, ordinary as the low cry of a loon
diving at night, the voice of a beach block,
its muggy rhythm, the click of the tide
just before it turns.
Barbara Helfgott Hyett
Here again, the rough-cut jetty, the ridge
worn flat by men trolling bass and bluefish
and boys with plastic buckets full of porgies.
The hooks are taut in their mouths.
I comb the crevices for mussels, find
a baby flounder, stiff and gray, a shell.
Right side down a huge crab bakes on a rock.
Behind me, vacant, boarded up, the tenements
where I was born. Beige bricks, three or four stories
crammed with families, fathers who delivered milk
or sold potato chips from tall tin cans -
I scooped them into brown bags, watched the oil seep through.
In summer, mothers gave up unemployment
to work in tourist places hawking beach chairs,
vegematics, tickets to Ripley's Believe It or Not.
Mothers didn't swim. They sent us to stay
at the lifeguard stand with a quarter for lunch.
We'd swim past the jetty to the rotted pilings, then back
to the shallows and the puckered seaweed. I'd open my eyes
underwater, watch the silversides skimming my cheek.
When my towel underneath the boardwalk was all in shadow
and the sand had turned quartz cold, I went home.
At Zwiebacks, after dinner, I'd read comic books
or else I'd buy one used. Later, at Altman Field
the boys from Philly who stayed at the guest house
would start to shoot some baskets.
Sometimes I'd just sit on the bleachers
licking salt from the back of my hand.
Everything was like that then: crisp, expectable,
a silent movie, the ocean and the hoop disappearing
gradually from the end of the playground
until I couldn't see the ball anymore.
In my bed, I'd watch the sway of the clotheslines
on the rooftop outside my window and listen
to the men playing pinochle at the dining-room table,
the stogie smoke gray and small-winged down the hall.
The women swept the floors, laid roach traps,
ate chocolate at the mahjongg game downstairs.
They'd laugh, and clack the bone faced tiles,
a sound of summer when summer wasn't time
but place, ordinary as the low cry of a loon
diving at night, the voice of a beach block,
its muggy rhythm, the click of the tide
just before it turns.
Barbara Helfgott Hyett
Monday, 23 July 2007
Harry Potter ~ The end???
Epilogue
In the story's epilogue, set nineteen years later, Ginny Weasley and Harry have three children named James, Albus Severus, and Lily. Ron and Hermione have two children named Rose and Hugo. The two families meet at King's Cross Station when they are taking their children to Platform Nine and Three Quarters for their departure to Hogwarts. Lily is too young to attend Hogwarts just yet, Albus is entering his first year at the school, and James is already an experienced Gryffindor. James finds Teddy Lupin, the son of Lupin and Tonks, kissing a girl named Victoire, who James says is his cousin and so can be assumed to be the daughter of Bill Weasley and Fleur Delacour. Neville Longbottom is now the Herbology professor at the school and is close friends with Harry. At the station, Harry, Ginny, Ron, and Hermione spot Draco Malfoy across the platform with his unnamed wife and their son Scorpius; it is suggested that the former rivals have reconciled their differences. The book ends with the line: "The scar had not pained Harry for nineteen years. All was well."
In the story's epilogue, set nineteen years later, Ginny Weasley and Harry have three children named James, Albus Severus, and Lily. Ron and Hermione have two children named Rose and Hugo. The two families meet at King's Cross Station when they are taking their children to Platform Nine and Three Quarters for their departure to Hogwarts. Lily is too young to attend Hogwarts just yet, Albus is entering his first year at the school, and James is already an experienced Gryffindor. James finds Teddy Lupin, the son of Lupin and Tonks, kissing a girl named Victoire, who James says is his cousin and so can be assumed to be the daughter of Bill Weasley and Fleur Delacour. Neville Longbottom is now the Herbology professor at the school and is close friends with Harry. At the station, Harry, Ginny, Ron, and Hermione spot Draco Malfoy across the platform with his unnamed wife and their son Scorpius; it is suggested that the former rivals have reconciled their differences. The book ends with the line: "The scar had not pained Harry for nineteen years. All was well."
Tuesday, 3 July 2007
Are you interested in Global Warming?
Sun to Blame for Global Warming
by John Carlisle
Those looking for the culprit responsible for global warming have missed the obvious choice - the sun. While it may come as a newsflash to some, scientific evidence conclusively shows that the sun plays a far more important role in causing global warming and global cooling than any other factor, natural or man-made. In fact, what may very well be the ultimate ironic twist in the global warming controversy is that the same solar forces that caused 150 years of warming are on the verge of producing a prolonged period of cooling.
The evidence for future cooling is supported by considerable scientific research that has only recently begun to come to light. It wasn't until 1980, with the aid of NASA satellites, that scientists definitively proved that the sun's brightness - or radiance - varies in intensity, and that these variations occur in predictable cyclical patterns. This was a crucial discovery because the climate models used by greenhouse theory proponents always assumed that the sun's radiance was constant. With that assumption in hand, they could ignore solar influences and focus on other influences, including human.
That turned out to be a reckless assumption. Further investigation revealed that there is a strong correlation between the variations in solar irradiance and fluctuations in the Earth's temperature. When the sun gets dimmer, the Earth gets cooler; when the sun gets brighter, the Earth gets hotter. So important is the sun in climate change that half of the 1.5° F temperature increase since 1850 is directly attributable to changes in the sun. According to NASA scientists David Lind and Judith Lean, only one-quarter of a degree can be ascribed to other causes, such as greenhouse gases, through which human activities can theoretically exert some influence.
The correlation between major changes in the Earth's temperature and changes in solar radiance is quite compelling. A perfect example is the Little Ice Age that lasted from 1650 to 1850. Temperatures in this era fell to as much as 2° F below today's temperature, causing the glaciers to advance, the canals in Venice to freeze and major crop failures. Interestingly, this dramatic cooling happened in a period when the sun's radiance had fallen to exceptionally low levels. Between 1645 and 1715, the sun was in a stage that scientists refer to as the Maunder Minimum. In this minimum, the sun has few sunspots and low magnetism which automatically indicates a lower radiance level. When the sun began to emerge from the minimum, radiance increased and by 1850 the temperature had warmed up enough for the Little Ice Age to end.
The Maunder Minimum is not an isolated event: it is a cyclical phenomenon that typically appears for 70 years following 200-300 years of warming. With only a few exceptions, whenever there is a solar minimum, the Earth gets colder. For example, Europe in the 13th and 15th Centuries experienced significantly lower temperatures and in both cases the cold spells coincided with a minimum. Similar correlations were found in the 9th Century and again in the 7th Century. Since 8700 B.C., there have been at least ten major cold periods similar to the Little Ice Age. Nine of those ten cold spells coincided with Maunder Minima.
There is no reason to believe that this 10,000-year-old cycle of solar-induced warming and cooling will change. Dr. Sallie Baliunas, an astrophysicist with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and one of the nation's leading experts on global climate change, believes that we may be nearing the end of a solar warming cycle. Since the last minimum ended in 1715, Baliunas says there is a strong possibility that the Earth will start cooling off in the early part of the 21st Century.
Indeed, it could already be happening. Of the 1.5° F in warming the planet experienced over the last 150 years, two-thirds of that increase, or one degree, occurred between 1850 and 1940. In the last 50 years, the planetary temperature increased at a significantly slower rate of 0.5° F - precisely when dramatically increasing amounts of man-made carbon dioxide emissions should have been accelerating warming. Further buttressing the arguments for future cooling is the evidence from NASA satellites that the global temperature has actually fallen 0.04° F since 1979.
Of course, it is impossible to precisely predict when solar radiance will drop and global temperatures will begin falling. But one thing is certain: There is little evidence that mankind is responsible for global warming. There is considerable evidence that the sun causes warming and will most likely stimulate cooling in the not so distant future.
# # #
John K. Carlisle is the Director of The National Center for Public Policy Research's Environmental Policy Task Force. Comments may be sent to JCarlisle@nationalcenter.org.
by John Carlisle
Those looking for the culprit responsible for global warming have missed the obvious choice - the sun. While it may come as a newsflash to some, scientific evidence conclusively shows that the sun plays a far more important role in causing global warming and global cooling than any other factor, natural or man-made. In fact, what may very well be the ultimate ironic twist in the global warming controversy is that the same solar forces that caused 150 years of warming are on the verge of producing a prolonged period of cooling.
The evidence for future cooling is supported by considerable scientific research that has only recently begun to come to light. It wasn't until 1980, with the aid of NASA satellites, that scientists definitively proved that the sun's brightness - or radiance - varies in intensity, and that these variations occur in predictable cyclical patterns. This was a crucial discovery because the climate models used by greenhouse theory proponents always assumed that the sun's radiance was constant. With that assumption in hand, they could ignore solar influences and focus on other influences, including human.
That turned out to be a reckless assumption. Further investigation revealed that there is a strong correlation between the variations in solar irradiance and fluctuations in the Earth's temperature. When the sun gets dimmer, the Earth gets cooler; when the sun gets brighter, the Earth gets hotter. So important is the sun in climate change that half of the 1.5° F temperature increase since 1850 is directly attributable to changes in the sun. According to NASA scientists David Lind and Judith Lean, only one-quarter of a degree can be ascribed to other causes, such as greenhouse gases, through which human activities can theoretically exert some influence.
The correlation between major changes in the Earth's temperature and changes in solar radiance is quite compelling. A perfect example is the Little Ice Age that lasted from 1650 to 1850. Temperatures in this era fell to as much as 2° F below today's temperature, causing the glaciers to advance, the canals in Venice to freeze and major crop failures. Interestingly, this dramatic cooling happened in a period when the sun's radiance had fallen to exceptionally low levels. Between 1645 and 1715, the sun was in a stage that scientists refer to as the Maunder Minimum. In this minimum, the sun has few sunspots and low magnetism which automatically indicates a lower radiance level. When the sun began to emerge from the minimum, radiance increased and by 1850 the temperature had warmed up enough for the Little Ice Age to end.
The Maunder Minimum is not an isolated event: it is a cyclical phenomenon that typically appears for 70 years following 200-300 years of warming. With only a few exceptions, whenever there is a solar minimum, the Earth gets colder. For example, Europe in the 13th and 15th Centuries experienced significantly lower temperatures and in both cases the cold spells coincided with a minimum. Similar correlations were found in the 9th Century and again in the 7th Century. Since 8700 B.C., there have been at least ten major cold periods similar to the Little Ice Age. Nine of those ten cold spells coincided with Maunder Minima.
There is no reason to believe that this 10,000-year-old cycle of solar-induced warming and cooling will change. Dr. Sallie Baliunas, an astrophysicist with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and one of the nation's leading experts on global climate change, believes that we may be nearing the end of a solar warming cycle. Since the last minimum ended in 1715, Baliunas says there is a strong possibility that the Earth will start cooling off in the early part of the 21st Century.
Indeed, it could already be happening. Of the 1.5° F in warming the planet experienced over the last 150 years, two-thirds of that increase, or one degree, occurred between 1850 and 1940. In the last 50 years, the planetary temperature increased at a significantly slower rate of 0.5° F - precisely when dramatically increasing amounts of man-made carbon dioxide emissions should have been accelerating warming. Further buttressing the arguments for future cooling is the evidence from NASA satellites that the global temperature has actually fallen 0.04° F since 1979.
Of course, it is impossible to precisely predict when solar radiance will drop and global temperatures will begin falling. But one thing is certain: There is little evidence that mankind is responsible for global warming. There is considerable evidence that the sun causes warming and will most likely stimulate cooling in the not so distant future.
# # #
John K. Carlisle is the Director of The National Center for Public Policy Research's Environmental Policy Task Force. Comments may be sent to JCarlisle@nationalcenter.org.
Monday, 2 July 2007
Martin Bell
Martin Bell, in his trademark white suit, stood out from the crowd at a recent party for independent publishers and booksellers. His new book, The Truth That Sticks - about the loss of trust between the government and the electorate and how it can be re-established - will be published by Icon Books in September.
Mr Bell is soon to return to a danger zone of a different sort in Iraq. One hopes, when he does, that he will wear something a little less conspicuous.
Mr Bell is soon to return to a danger zone of a different sort in Iraq. One hopes, when he does, that he will wear something a little less conspicuous.
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