This excerpt from the forward of Sappho's Lyre, by W.R Johnson was worth noting: The verses in this volume are different from other collections of lyric poetry in numerous ways , but in two particular ways they are especially different. First in their initial function: whom the poets wrote for, and, early on sang their poems for, what audiences wanted from these poems and apparently got from them; second, in what became of Greek lyric poems,: how they entered the European lyric canon (to the extent that they did) and what the later fortunes tell us about them and us.
To the audiences for all the poems [in this book], ...the readers of this volume would seem at best barbarians. Most of them, if male, were, had to be, skilled soldiers and athletes, and not a few of them, make and female alike, played stringed instruments well enough to be perform at a drop of the hat before an audience of peers with rather high standards, accompanying themselves as they sang either songs to which they might possibly have written both music and lyrics or the golden oldies which they and their audiences knew by heart... The fact they most of us do not have numerous physical and intellectual skills of higher order and a high polish, the fact that , truth to tell, most of us are pretty narrowly "specialized," would seem to them to indicate that, radically deficient as we were in the aristocratic versatilities they gloried in, whatever our legal status, we were essentially slaves, fit only for a few simple chores, badly educated, clumsy unable to protect ourselves, totally useless when it comes to sailing a tricky ship in a Mediterranean storm, ignorant (most of us) of the gods and their ways -- so which of them would want to invite many or any of us to a symposium? We would seem to them not merely inferior and uneducated and conveniently barbaric, we would sound to them -- well beyond the primitive or the savage -- barely human. Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs, Sally Mann
The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, Rod Dreher Studio: Remembering Chris Marker, Adam Bartos and Colin MacCabe Logicomic: An Epic Search for Truth, Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou Also been reading lots of James Wright in Above the River and Rilke in Selected Poems of Ranier Maria Rilke trans. Robert Bly. When we went to Texas recently, I got the opportunity to take some drone footage. This was a project I just did using OpenSFM to develop a 3D point cloud using a set of images taken of an object. I first walked down a street, taking pictures of a church nearby. The point cloud does a decent job representing the "structure" of the church on that walk. The second attempt was of my daughter's cello. Its harder to see, but it creates a good 3d shape of both the cello and the table it is propped up against. Original images (3 out of 55 total): The cello: I also did a full panorama of the inside courtyard of the church. The poet located on the lower left corner of the image is Robert Fernandez.
This was a deep learning application that uses convolutional neural networks to train and drive a car in a simulator. The only thing being fed to the algorithm are images of the road ahead. The car has learned to stay on the road after only two laps of training. |
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