#mandelbaum

[meisterdrucke]

The Almond Tree in Blossom by Pierre Bonnard (1947, oil on canvas)

[basicallyanotherwitchesthing]

Muriel Spark - The Mandelbaum Gate - Penguin - 1967

[steffengasp]

[reverie-quotes]

Is it the gods who put this fire in our minds, or is it that each man's relentless longing becomes a god to him?

— Virgil, The Aeneid (tr. Mandelbaum)

[henk-heijmans]

Wonderland, …leave your fears behind, 2017 - by Frau Mandelbaum, German

[bizarreauhavre]

Stéphane Mandelbaum

[thinkingimages]

Stéphane Mandelbaum, “Composition (Mishima, Bacon...),” 1980 via drawingcenter IG

[allieinarden]

Anyway contrary to popular belief the funniest Seinfeld plots are not about the main characters being willfully cruel to others, but about the main characters kinda just living their lives as people inexplicably and bizarrely run themselves aground on them like they’re a rocky British coast.

[the-ancient-comedy]

This is how my brain processed the scene for some reason.

Virgil: You got sum b*tches worried sick for you in Heaven. Get it together, man.

Or he's just jealous.

[cookinguptales]

By the way, if any of you really want to read and learn about Dante's Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, Columbia University has a free web course about it.

If you click that link, they have free versions of the text (in the original Italian but also both the Mandelbaum and Longfellow translations) that you can use to follow along with the lectures. They also have pretty extensive commentary on the text as well as galleries and audio recordings to help you understand things better.

It's a really excellent free resource!

[squawkoverflow]

A new variant has been added!

Line-cheeked Spinetail (Cranioleuca antisiensis) © Ryan F. Mandelbaum

It hatches from bright, brown, central, few, handsome, northern, sharp, southern, typical, vocal, and white eggs.

squawkoverflow - the ultimate bird collecting game          🥚 hatch    ❤️ collect     🤝 connect

[witchblood-if]

Story Ideas (TW: long post incoming but there's poll at the end and every participant gets a sticker)

As was decided by about 100 people: here are some ideas I had for IFs (all in different degrees of "worked-out" and at the end, you can vote on which ones you find the most interesting.

1

The first one basically makes the MC a teacher at a prestigious high school (although they might make you do classes at the also very prestigious elementary school) and it involves planning lessons and dealing with usual teenage shenanigans. The ROs would be other teachers, the odd parent maybe, and perhaps someone from maintenance? Who knows... It's meant to be a cute slice-of-life thing because I eat that shit up.

2

For this one, I pretty much only wrote down "It was a beautiful day at court and you are a horrible jester". ROs would be Prince/Princess, maybe a foreign visitor with Oberyn Martell vibe.

3

The MC is part of a big mafia family but is mostly trying to live a somewhat normal life. Now, you are acquainted with the family business but you don't play an active part in it. But if someone was to mess with you, well, your family would do anything for you. This one is inspired by the song "Bust Your Kneecaps" by Pomplamoose.

Now to my three favorites:

4

Are you familiar with the novel "Krabat"? We've read it in school and I thought it was really cool, even though it is a little dark, to be honest. It's based on a cluster of Sorbian legends and follows the story of Krabat, a poor orphan boy becoming an apprentice at a mill, where the miller is also practicing and teaching black magic to his twelve apprentices and every year one boy dies in mysterious circumstances. The title I'd give this would probably be "Rapaki", which is Sorbian for ravens, which play a role in the story as well. It could prove to be a challenge to make this historical setting as inclusive as I want it to be (and also since there's a specific character I'd love to have as a RO, but he's an adult and the apprentices are pretty much all teenagers).

5

You were kidnapped by aliens. Now, it's been a couple of months since you arrived at the space station. They don't really seem to want to do anything with you except study humans and you happen to be one of the subjects. You are given spacious living quarters, activities for enrichment, food (they sometimes test things by giving you weird stuff and see if you eat it or not) and even many opportunities for socialization with the other human subjects. Honestly, it's not bad. Beats scrambling for money to pay rent. The newest addition to the human sample group though seems to be very discontent with their new abode. Are you helping them to escape, are you just tagging along for the ride, or are determined to stay in your cozy lab?

6

You are perfect nobility. Your family is hosting a ball to which all the most important members of the ton are invited. There's good food and drink, entertainment and music. You socialize and dance. You even go for a secret midnight swim in the deep fountain in the gardens. Many days are like this and you enjoy it. But one day something very peculiar happens: The ball is in full swing when you notice a person in very strange clothes just striding through the dance hall, never acknowledging the guest or the music but looking at a strange... device in their hands. When they aim to go upstairs towards your private living spaces you decide to follow them but they simply disappear. Were they a ghost? Are you hallucinating? For several days you see more strange figures, some of them in strange clothing, some of them in garments from the past. They never seem as ... corporal as the first one and at this point you fear you have lost your mind. Then the first intruder comes back and you can confront them. They seem awfully aghast when you politely ask them to leave.

Turns out, you are a ghost, reliving the last day of your life, and they are a ghost hunter from the future. The whole manor as you know it seems to crumble, polished floors become broken wood, the furniture disappears and the big chandelier lies demolished on the ground. You learn that the other figures are ghosts, like yourself, former inhabitants of the manor before and after you. And you meet them. They are as flabbergasted by this revelation as you were. The ghost hunter explains that they've been chasing a haunting spirit for some time now and they actually weren't intending to call forward you or the others. Do you all help them catch the evil ghost?

Inspired a little by the bbc chow "Ghosts".

[fromthedust]

Ann Mandelbaum (American, b.1945)

Untitled #197 - original silver print - 20"x 30" - 1998

[reverie-quotes]

As long as I still have some breath of life, I'll try—and try again.

— Ovid, The Metamorphoses

[grandhotelabyss]

What is the best translation of the Divine Comedy?

Depends on what you're looking for and what your taste is in poetry. I'll recommend two:

1. Dorothy L. Sayers for a Dante brought over into classic-sounding English poetry, the English of Shelley and Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites, plus lavish annotations from a position sympathetic to Dante's theology.

2. Allen Mandelbaum for a modernist Dante, a Dante where the swift surface of the terza rima is gorgeously roughened by a more Anglo-medieval emphasis on alliteration, the whole intensified by the translator's troubled, wise apprehension of literary history.

I would probably recommend Mandelbaum, all else being equal, to the contemporary American reader. The (cheap) Bantam Classics paperbacks of the Mandelbaum also feature the Italian text on the facing page, which I recommend; you can get somewhere with the Italian even if you don't know the language fluently.

(Caveat: I haven't read everyone's beloved Hollander translation. I have tried and actively dislike Musa. Ciardi is fine, I guess, but didn't do much for me. For my next reading, I plan to use Pound's beloved Binyon, even more modernist than Mandelbaum, I can only assume.)

[grungecoded]

boy got some pretty new wings to spice up his boring human flesh suit