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Chris Harman - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 23:04:39 -0800

Chris Harman (1942-2009)

Marxist thinker of modern times

Chris Harman, a leader of the Socialist Workers Party died 7th November 2009 in Cairo of a cardiac arrest, where he was speaking at a Congress of Socialist Revolutionaries.

Chris Harman was not only an intellectual, a writer and a theorist of the most extraordinary quality He had something much more. Harman took Marx out of the hands of academics. This explains why attending a public meeting when he was speaking was a great experience. Chris Harman could write so well precisely because he had grasped the full wealth of Marxist ideas. He has produced numerous books, pamphlets and articles on a wide variety of topics: on the state capitalist tyrannies of the former Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe, how the Russian revolution was lost, the failed German revolutions, the dynamics of modern capitalism, on the 1968 revolts, on political Islam, on Imperialism and many more. His writings comprised a valuable tool for revolutionaries wanting to intervene in the every day political and worker's struggles with clarity of ideas, strategy and tactics.

Harman was a towering figure in Britain and he made an immense theoretical and personal contribution to the Socialist Workers Party He edited the International Socialism journal, and had written an accessible critique of mainstream economic theory, Zombie Capitalism In addition, his historical work, culminating in the magisterial A People's History of the World, provided an invaluable introduction to the topics. Chris inspired our generation to be revolutionaries. His commitment to the building of a revolutionary party internationally was unflinching. He had nothing insular. He had that trait of the real revolutionary that would not allow him or her to be indifferent to people's predicament wherever they may be confronting oppression and injustice. Harman's writings, his efforts and contribution have played a significant part in germinating the seeds of revolutionary Marxist groups and organizations in whatever part of the world. He will remain an inspiration to successive generations of socialists.

Born into a working class family, Harman attended the London School of Economics (LSE) where he joined the International Socialists. He was instrumental in publishing the magazine of the LSE Socialist Society, The Agitator, and was a leading member of the IS by 1968. He was involved in the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign and outraged many leftists when, at a meeting in the Conway Hall, he denounced Ho Chi Minh for murdering the leader of the Vietnamese Trotskyist movement, Ta Thu Thau, in 1945 after crushing the workers' rising of that year in Saigon.

His main role in the IS (from 1978 the Socialist Workers Party (SWP)) was as a theorist and he has produced numerous books and articles on a wide variety of topics. Almost all his writing has appeared in the publications of the IS and SWP or has been published by related publishing houses, such as Bookmarks. He was first editor of Socialist Worker in 1976-77 and returned to the role after a break in 1982, remaining in the post until 2004, when he started editing the SWP's theoretical quarterly International Socialism Journal.

Harman has left behind his wife Talat and children Seth and Sinead.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2009 - Bio-bibliography

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 04:34:47 -0700

HERTA MULLER

(1953 - Present)

Herta Muller is a Romanian-born German novelist, poet and essayist noted for her works depicting the harsh conditions of life in Communist Romania under the repressive Nicolae Ceau�...�...¸escu regime, the history of the Germans in Transylvania, and the persecution of Romanian ethnic Germans by Soviet forces in Romania. On October 8th, 2009, it was announced she would be awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature.

The decision was expected to keep alive the controversy surrounding the academy's pattern of awarding the prize to European writers. Muller, a member of Romania's ethnic German minority, was honored for work that "with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed," the Swedish Academy said.

Muller was born in Ni�...�,£chidorf (German: Nitzkydorf), a historically German-speaking town in the Banat. The daughter of Banat Swabian farmers, her family was part of Romania's German minority; her father had served in the Waffen SS and her mother served five years (1944-1949) in a labour camp in the Soviet Union during and after World War II Her grandfather had been a wealthy farmer and merchant. While she speaks German as a native language, she is also fluent in Romanian.

She studied German studies and Romanian literature at the Timi�...�...¸oara University. She was a member of Aktionsgruppe Banat, a German-speaking literary society.

In 1976, M��,¼ller began working as a translator for an engineering factory, but was dismissed in 1979 for her refusal to cooperate with the Securitate, the Communist regime's secret police. Initially, she made a living by teaching kindergarten and giving private German lessons. Her first book was published in Romania (in German) in 1982, and appeared only in a censored version, as with most publications of the time.

Muller left for Wualler received membership of the German Academy for Writing and Poetry in 1995, and other positions followed. In 1997 she withdrew from the PEN centre of Germany in protest of its merger with the former German Democratic Republic branch. In July 2008, Muller sent a critical open letter to Horia-Roman Patapievici, president of the Romanian Cultural Institute in reaction to the support given by the institute to a Romanian-German Summer School involving two former informants of the Securitate.

Irving Penn - Biography.com Biography - Biography.com

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 06:04:46 -0700

IRVING PENN

(1907 - 2009 )

Irving Penn, Fashion Photographer Is Dead. Irving Penn, one of the 20th century's most prolific and influential photographers of fashion and the famous, whose signature blend of classical elegance and cool minimalism was recognizable to magazine readers and museumgoers worldwide, died Wednesday morning at his home in Manhattan. He was 92.

Penn, the brother of the motion-picture director Arthur Penn, initially intended to become a painter, but at age 26 he took a job designing photographic covers for the fashion magazine Vogue. He began photographing his own ideas for covers and soon established himself as a fashion photographer.

Irving Penn studied under Alexey Brodovitch at the Philadelphia Museum School from which he graduated 1938. Penn's drawings were published by Harper's Bazaar and he also painted. As his career in photography blossomed, he became known for post World War II feminine chic and glamour photography.

His austere fashion images communicated elegance and luxury through compositional refinement and clarity of line rather than through the use of elaborate props and backdrops. Penn also became an influential portraitist. He photographed a large number of celebrities, engaging each subject to sit for hours and to reveal his or her personality to the camera. In his portraits the subject is usually posed before a bare backdrop and photographed in natural northern light. The resulting images combine simplicity and directness with great formal sophistication.

He was among the first photographers to pose subjects against a simple grey or white backdrop and used this simplicity more effectively than other photographers. Expanding his austere studio surroundings, Penn constructed a set of upright angled backdrops, to form a stark, acute corner. Posing his subjects within this tight, unorthodox space, Penn brought an unprecedented sense of drama to his portraits, driving the viewer's focus onto the person and their expression. In many photos, the subjects appeared wedged into the corner. Subjects photographed with this technique included Martha Graham, Marcel Duchamp, Georgia O'Keeffe, W. H. Auden, Igor Stravinsky and Marlene Dietrich.

While a master of the studio flash, most of Penn's portraits are lighted with window light. For travelling to New Guinea and other locations to photograph indigenous people, Penn created a portable studio with a skylight deployed facing north with impressive results.

Dirac biography

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:24:57 -0700

PAUL DIRAC

(1902 -1984)

The mathematician Mark Kac divided geniuses into two classes. Ordinary ones whose achievements others will emulate, and magicians whose inventions are so astounding that it is hard to see how any human could have imagined them. Paul Dirac was one of these magicians.

When he went to Cambridge in 1923, at the age of 21, the world of physics was in turmoil. Experiments had shown that classical physicists could not explain the behaviour of atoms. The old principles of Isaac Newton didn't seem to apply to the microscopic world. Dirac soon developed his own widely-acclaimed theory of quantum mechanics. His theory included wave mechanics, the version of uantum mechanics developed by Erwin Schrodinger, and matrix mechanics, the theory put forward by Werner Heisenberg.

At the time, it seemed miraculous. Albert Einstein described Dirac's theory as "the most logically perfect of quantum mechanics". Perfect as it was, the theory was only a reformulation of a newly-discovered branch of physics. In 1928, Dirac made a breakthrough. He combined the theories of quantum mechanics and Einstein's special relativity. The resulting Dirac equation, still widely used today, was able to explain the mysterious magnetic and "spin" properties of the electron. Like so many great discoveries, it required an extraordinary leap of imagination.

But there was a conundrum. The equation had two solutions, one representing the electron, the other representing its opposite, a particle with negative energy and positive charge, that had never been seen or suspected before. Dirac concluded that each electron had an "anti-particle". The two could be created or destroyed in matching pairs. Dirac had predicted the existence of anti-matter, which makes up, at least in principle, half the universe.
Heisenberg judged this to be the supreme achievement of 20th Century physics.

Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was born in Bristol, England and grew up in the Bishopston area of the city. His father, Charles Dirac, was an immigrant from Saint-Maurice in the Canton of Valais, Switzerland. His mother was originally from Cornwall and the daughter of a mariner. Paul had an elder brother, F�lix, who committed suicide in March 1925, and a younger sister, B�atrice. His early family life appears to have been unhappy due to his father's unusually strict and authoritarian nature.

He was educated first at Bishop Road Primary School and then at Merchant Venturers' Technical College , where his father was a French teacher.

Norman Borlaug - Biography

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 03:24:43 -0700

(1914 -2009)

Borlaug, the icon of war on hunger, is no more

The death of crop scientist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug, an enduring icon for the war on hunger who had helped steer India away from recurrent famines towards self- sufficiency in food, has compelled me to return to SU after 2 months, to pen a tribute.

Borlaug, whose research to improve wheat varieties, initiated in Mexico in 1945, led to the Green Revolution and helped save millions of people from starvation worldwide, died from cancer complications in Texas on 12th.of September 2009. He was 95.

M.S. Swami- nathan, the Indian scientist who had taken the first steps to initiate Borlaug's lasting association with India 48 years ago, was today in a hotel in Blacksburg, Virginia, in transit to visit the ailing scientist for a final meeting on Wednesday.

He was the greatest hunger fighter of all time," said Swaminathan, who had in 1961 proposed to the government that it invite Borlaug to apply his ideas of developing high-yielding wheat varieties in India.The country faced the threat of recurrent famines during the 1960s and pulled through with food aid brought in by ships. "It was a ship-to-mouth existence," said Swaminathan, who was at the time a scientist in the genetics division at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI).But Borlaug, who arrived at the IARI, New Delhi, in 1963, helped India develop high-yielding and disease-resistant varieties of wheat that quickly doubled wheat productivity.

In Mexico, Borlaug had developed a dwarf variety with substantially increased grain yields. "This trait was passed on to Indian wheat varieties and our yields began to rise," said Kailash Bansal, a plant biotechnologist at the IARI. Scientists also applied the technology to rice and India's grain production soared, allowing the nation to export grains. Wheat yields increased from 800kg per hectare in the 1960s to 2,800kg per hectare by the early 2000s. Rice yields have shown similar gains.

Borlaug, who received the Nobel in 1970 for his work to increase crop productivity among other honours including Padma Vibhushan in 2006, was born on a farm in Iowa where he spent his childhood attending a one-room school. Borlaug failed his first attempt to enter the University of Minnesota where he was told his high school education had not prepared him properly in Science and Maths.

Amitav Ghosh Biography

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 06:00:00 -0700

AMITAV GHOSH

(1956-Present)

Amitav Ghosh, a pioneer of English literature in India, was born in Calcutta (Kolkata) in the year 1956.

His father was in the Indian army. It was mainly because of this reason that Amitav Ghosh has been raised and educated at the same time, in as different locations as Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Iran, Egypt, India and the United Kingdom. Amitav Ghosh did schooling from the Doon School, Dehra Dun. He completed his graduation from St. Stephens College, Delhi University. After leaving St. Stephen's with a B.A. in History in 1976, he obtained an M.A. in Sociology from the Delhi University in 1978. He went to St. Edmund Hall, Oxford pursue Postgraduate work and in 1979 obtained a Diploma in social anthropology. He also spent some time at Tunis where he learnt Arabic. Amitav Ghosh was awarded his Oxford D. Phil. in Social Anthropology in 1981.

Amitav Ghosh is acclaimed in the literary world for his works on fiction, travel writing and journalism. His long list of accomplishment includes books like The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In an Antique Land and Dancing in Cambodia. His previous work, The Glass Palace, was an international bestseller that sold more than a half-million copies in Britain. The Hungry Tide has been sold for translation in twelve foreign countries and is also a bestseller abroad.

Among awards, Ghosh has won France's Prix Medicis Etranger for The Circle of Reason (1986), the Sahitya Akademi Award for The Shadow Lines (1988), the Arthur C. Clarke Prize for science fiction for The Calcutta Chromosome (1996), the Pushcart Prize for his essay, "The March of the Novel through History: My Father's Bookcase" and the Grand Prize for Fiction at the Frankfurt International e-Book Awards for The Glass Palace.

The fictions of Amitav Ghosh are marked by extreme themes that go side by side with post-colonialismIt can be added here that his topics are much more unique and personal. The appeal of Amitav' s work lies in his ability to weave "Indo-nostalgic" elements into more serious, heavier themes. The Government of India conferred Amitav Ghosh with Padma Bhushan. He now divides his time between Harvard University, where he is a visiting professor, and his homes in India and Brooklyn, New York. He is planning to shift back to India.

Odysseus Elytis - Biography

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 04:00:05 -0700

Odysseus Elytis

(1911-1996)

Greek poet and winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Elytis's poems are written in rich language, full of images from history and myths. The lines are long and musical. Inspired by the 'sanctity of the perceiving senses' Elytis celebrated in his early poems the mystery of the Greek light, the sea, and the air. Later themes are grief, suffering, and search for a paradise.

Odysseus Elytis (Odysseas Alepoudhelis) was born in Iráklion, Crete, into a prosperous Cretan family. His parents and ancestors came from the island of Lesbos, home of the ancient Greek poet Sappho. Elytis studied law at Athens University from 1930 to 1935 without taking a degree. He worked periodically in the family's soap manufacturing business.

Inspired by French Surrealism and especially Paul Éluard, Elytis started to write verse. His first poems appeared in 1935 in magazine Ta Nea Grammata, which also published George Seferis's workshe won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1963. Orientations (1940), Elytis's first collection, combined themes of Eros and beauty with the timeless nature of the Aegean world.

During WW II when Nazis occupied Greece, Elytis joined the resistance movement and served as a second lieutenant in Albania in 1940-41. In 1943 appeared Asma iroiko ke penthimo ghia ton hameno anthipolochago tis Alvanias (Heroic and Elegiac Song for the Lost Second Lieutenant of the Albanian Campaign). In it Elytis's joyful visions of youth and the sun-drenched Aegean nature changed into acknowlegmenet of violence and sudden death. In the poem the youthful hero is killed on the battlefield and miraculously resurrected throught his youth and heroism.

After the war Elytis wrote critics for the newspaper Kathimerini and worked for the National Broadcasting Institute in Athens in 1945-46 and again 1953-54. In 1948 he moved to Paris, where he studied literature at the Sorbonne. During this time he became acquainted with Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and other figures of the Parisian art scene.

In 1953 Elytis returned to Greece and took an active role in cultural affairs. He served as member of the Greek critical and prize-awarding Group of the Twelve. He was president and governing-board member of Karolos Koun's Art Theater and of the Greek Ballet. His silence as a poet ended in 1959 with To Axion Esti, reminiscent of Walt Whitman's Song of Myself.

All Michael Jackson Biography History Bio

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 03:03:39 -0700

MICHAEL JACKSON

(1958 -2009)

Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009, aged 50. The specific cause of death has yet to be determined.

Michael Jackson discovered India in 1996 but some Indians used to go the extra mile to not discover him.An unstated but perceptible cultural ceiling made many "discerning" lovers of music in India view him with affected disinterest.

If Jackson's moonwalk and the corkscrew strand of hair over the forehead smashed language barriers and made countless hot-blooded young Indians "do the break dance" at the drop of a hat in classrooms, canteens and dead-end alleys, another class went into a deep denial mode. To be honest , I was a part of that denial group.

A group of college alumni recalled how they would make it a point to steer clear of the Jackson hype, at its peak then with his album Thriller. "Brought up on a staple of Jethro Tull, ELP and Styx, and of course Floyd and Zeppelin, we would sneer at folks who seemed to have discovered `western music' via the break-dancing of MJ," said a one-time drummer for the college band.

Gradually, as the Jackson style struck deep roots and "beat-it" posters in teenager's rooms became the symbol of cool in the eighties, without the angst of Vietnam and a million other revolution that vexed the preceding generation, there seemed to be grudging admiration for some of his songs. But it was never meant to be articulated.

Jackson was an American recording artist, entertainer, and businessman. The seventh child of the Jackson family, he made his début onto the professional music scene at the age of 11 as a member of The Jackson 5 in 1969, and later began a solo career in 1971 while still a member of the group. Referred to as the "King of Pop"in subsequent years, his 1982 album Thriller remains the world's best-selling record of all time[3] and four of his other solo studio albums are among the world's best-selling records: Off the Wall (1979), Bad (1987), Dangerous (1991) and HIStory (1995).

In the early 1980s, he became a dominant figure in popular music and the first African American entertainer to amass a strong crossover following on MTV. The popularity of his music videos airing on MTV, such as "Beat It", "Billie Jean" and "Thriller"--widely credited with transforming the music video from a promotional tool into an art form--helped bring the relatively new channel to fame. Videos such as "Black or White" and "Scream" made Jackson an enduring staple on MTV in the 1990s.

The TV Paige

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 03:46:55 -0700

FARRAH FAWCETT

(1947--2009)

Farrah Fawcett, an actress and television star whose good looks and signature flowing hairstyle influenced a generation of women and, beginning with a celebrated pin-up poster, bewitched a generation of men, died on June 25 2009,in California. She was 62.

Fawcett had been battling intestinal cancer since late 2006, and to an extraordinary degree that fight was played out in public, generating enormous interest worldwide.

Farrah Fawcett was born Ferrah Leni Fawcett in 1947 . Her mother, Pauline Alice (n�e Evans), was a homemaker, and her father, James William Fawcett, was an oil field contractor. She was of French, English, and Choctaw Native American ancestry.

A Roman Catholic, Fawcett's early education was at the parish school of the church her family attended, St. Patrick's Roman Catholic Church in Corpus Christi. She graduated from W.B. Ray High School in Corpus Christi in 1965. From 1966-1969, Fawcett attended the University of Texas at Austin, living one semester in Jester Center, and became a sister of Delta Delta Delta Sorority. She appeared in a photo of the "Ten Most Beautiful Coeds" from the university, which ran in Cashbox magazine. A Hollywood publicist saw the photo, called Farrah and urged her to move to Los Angeles, which she did in 1969, leaving after her junior year with her parents' permission to "try her luck" in Hollywood.

Fawcett's career was a patchwork of positives and negatives, fine dramatic performances on television and on stage as well as missed opportunities. She first became famous when a poster of her in a red bathing suit, leonine mane flying, sold more than twice as many copies as posters of Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable combined.

Fawcett won praise for her serious acting later in her career, typically as a victimised woman. But she remained best known for the hit 1970s television show Charlie's Angels, in which she played Jill Munroe, one of three beautiful female private detectives employed by an unseen male boss. Her pin-up fame had led the producers to cast her.

In 1978 Playboy magazine called Fawcett "the first mass visual symbol of post-neurotic fresh-air sexuality".

The Parthenon Marbles (or Elgin Marbles) Restoration to Athens, Greece - Welcome to the BCRPM

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 05:07:19 -0700

THE PARTHENON

(447BC - present)

It was built by the famous architects Iktinos and Kallikrates under the general supervision of the sculptor Pheidias .

The Parthenon was the first monument of the Periclean programme for the Acropolis in classical times. It was a wondrous building because of its proportions and its excellent construction, but also because of the brilliant decision to place it at the top of the Sacred Rock. It is preserved with pronaos, cella and opisthonaos (room at the rear of the temple), with a door opening into the opisthonaos. It is of the Doric order, but it has features characteristic of the Ionic order too, such as the sculptured frieze, the Ionic columns that supported the ceiling of the opisthodomos, and others. Within the cella, surrounded by a double-storeyed colonnade, stood the colossal chryselephantine (gold and ivory) statue of the goddess Athena Parthenos, splendid creation of the sculptor Pheidias.

As an architectural work, the Parthenon was famous for the so-called refinements or curves through which, rather than being static and lifeless, the building resembled a living thing breathing an inner life. Yet above all it was the sculptural decoration of the Parthenon that made it famous, its pediments, metopes and frieze.

When the Parthenon was built between 447BC and 432BC, three sets of sculptures, the metopes, the frieze and the pediments, were created to adorn it. Of these, the metopes and the frieze were part of the structure of the Parthenon itself. They were not carved first and then put in place, high up on the Parthenon, but were carved on the sides of the Parthenon itself after it had been constructed.

The metopes were individual sculptures in high relief. There were 92 metopes, 32 on each side and 14 at each end and each metope was separated from its neighbours by a simple archtitectural decoration called a triglyph, The metopes were placed around the building, above the outside row of columns and showed various mythical battles. The north side showed scenes from the Trojan war; the south side showed a battle between the Greeks and the Centaurs -- part man, part horse; the east side showed the Olympian gods fighting giants and the west side showed a battle between Greeks and Amazons.

The frieze , 160 metres long, was placed above the inner row of columns, so it was not so prominently displayed. It is one long, continuous sculpture in low relief, showing the procession to the temple at the Panathenaic festival.