Maybe it’s just me but I can’t help but notice that the Armenian prime minister is suddenly found dead a few weeks after announcing that his country would start using a new gas pipeline from Iran by 2008 to lessen its dependence on Russia for power-generating facilities.
It seems the first section was reported to be open just last week.
The Armenia Diaspora complete story does not suggest any kind of foul play is suspected at all, although they do provide this rather awkward quote:
The U.S. charge d’affaires in Yerevan, Anthony Godfrey, issued a statement on the occasion, describing Markarian as a “valuable partner of the United States.”
Apparently he was expected to step down by mid-May, yet his influence over the upcoming elections probably was still considerable. A EurasiaNet writer in Yerevan posted some interesting analysis of the security dynamics of the region.
Analysts in Yerevan have long suggested that Tehran’s main motive for maintaining close links with its sole Christian neighbor is to limit the spread of Turkish influence in the region.
And likewise we probably can assume that US influence in “western-oriented” Armenia is to help limit the spread of Iranian influence, or perhaps facilitate intervention against nuclear proliferation.
The BBC has posted a special section regarding the 200th anniversary of Britain’s abolition of the slave trade, to be commemorated this Sunday, March 25th:
Nigerian poet Tolu Ogunlesi has written a poem for the BBC’s Weekend Network Africa programme to commemorate the passing of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act.
I love this description of poetry by the famous Science Fiction author Dan Simmons:
I don’t think I’ve ever seen it commented on, but there’s a great affinity between writing poetry and SF. As with poetry, quality speculative fiction demands great skill with language and invites linguistic invention. As with poetry, good SF delves deep into metaphor while sliding lightly on the surface of its own joy of telling. As with poetry, quality SF demands a much greater collaboration on the part of the reader — a greater sensitivity to detail, word-meaning, texture, and nuance, as well as a greater involvement in ferreting out meaning.
My favorite commentator on things literary — Harold Bloom — has said that the common element to all great literature, from Homer and Shakespeare and Goethe through Emily Dickinson to Mark Twain — is an ineffable quality of “strangeness.” By that he doesn’t mean deliberate post-modern weirdness or Ken Kesey wonkiness, but rather an indescribable, out-of-its-own-time, deep-to-the-literary-marrow differentness that great prose and poetry carries in itself and conveys to successive generations. It tends to mix the sacred and the profane, the profound and the entertaining, in a way that helps us to redefine ourselves and our cultures. The most ambitious of speculative fiction has a taste of that delicious strangeness, for both the writer and the reader.
Yeah, Bloom is definitely an insightful thinker on things literary. I often wonder about his hypothesis that the bible was just inspired writing and was never meant to be the basis for dogma.
A Whistler etching caught my eye the other day. It was sitting perched in a store window and after a moment I went inside to get a closer look. A simple, small and beautiful work, it showed the talent in Whistler’s hand for subtle and small details as well as his awkward disinterest or dabbling in the foreground.
Then the gallery directed me towards some other etchings, as well as the odd Ernst “Sign for a School for Pirates“, and I wandered a bit until I noticed an original and giant Winslow Homer etching titled “Eight Bells”.
Wow.
I could go on about the history of this work, and how hard it must have been to transfer to an etching, but it’s well documented on the web already. I just wanted to say I was completely blown away by the amazing detail he managed to capture in the water and clouds, and that I was really surprised to see how he supposedly hid the image of his father in a small section. Can you find it?
The effect in this work is so dramatic, steganography or not, it really has to be seen in person to be believed.
