Homegrown pot threatens Mexican cartels

Posted in Contemporary on November 25th, 2009 by Swany – Be the first to comment

CBS News: “Stiff competition from thousands of mom-and-pop marijuana farmers in the United States threatens the bottom line for powerful Mexican drug organizations in a way that decades of arrests and seizures have not, according to law enforcement officials and pot growers in the United States and Mexico.”

Chinese knotweed

Posted in Botany on November 9th, 2009 by Swany – Be the first to comment

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Shanghai Daily: “ZHENG Dexun shows off a humanshaped heshouwu, or Chinese knotweed, yesterday in Langzhong in southwest China’s Sichuan Province. The herb, weighing 5.8 kilograms and standing 62 centimeters high, resembles a naked child. Zheng, 63, a farmer in Datianba Village, discovered the oddity five days ago while digging for the herb, which is used as a tonic for the kidneys and to treat weak bones and hair loss.”

Le disciple de Pantagruel

Posted in Texts on August 15th, 2009 by Swany – Be the first to comment

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Navigation: Le disciple de Pantagruel, s.l., 1538 [Lyons, Denis de Harsy]

NRB 131: Listed under spurious works. Similar image in other editions of the Navigation.

Les Songes Drolatiques de Pantagruel

Posted in Texts on August 14th, 2009 by Swany – Be the first to comment

Listed as spurious in New Rabelais Bibliography [NRB 113 (p. 560): the bulk of the book is made up of woodcuts of grotesque figures. Manifestly pseudo-Rabelaisian.]

Rabelais astrologer?

Posted in Rabelais, aequinoctial on August 14th, 2009 by Swany – Be the first to comment

NRB 94: Almanach pour l’an 1553, calculé sur le Meridional de la noble Cité de Lyon, et sur le climat de royaume de France. Composé par moy François Rabelais, Docteur en Medecine, et Professeur en astrologie.

“Despite the fragmentary nature of what survives, there is no doubt as to the authenticity of the two almanacs which he [Antoine Le Roy,Rabelaesina Elogia, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS lat., no 8704] quotesl in particular, regarding this edition, the extracts given describe the state of the sky as it was for the years to which they apply: for instance the conjunctions of the moon and the planets.

“While Rabelais did not sign the first two books of his giant story, he was legally obliged to state his responsibility for his Almanachs.

“It is not known whether Rabelais was indeed ‘professeur en astrologie,’ although his astrological knowledge was evidently highly regarded, for instance, in a poem of Salmon Macrin cited by Marcel de Grève, L’Interprétation de Rabelais au XVIe siècle, ER, 3, 1961.”

A New Rabelais Bibliography, Stephen Rawles and M.A. Screech, Librarie Droz, 1987. p. 499

Portraits from NRB 93 — Oeuvres, 1626

Posted in portraits on August 14th, 2009 by Swany – Be the first to comment

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“The engraved portrait mentioned by Plan [P.-P. Plan, Bibliographie rabelaisienne: les éditions de Rabelais de 1532 à 1711, Paris, 1904] and reproduced by him appears in only one of the copies [of NRB 93, Les Oeuvres de Maistre François Rabelais Docteur in Medecine, s.l., 1626] we have examined (at Tours). Porcher’s catalogue, no 358, lists a copy with this large portrait (which is sometimes confused with the small portrait figuring in most copies, below) belonging to the collection J.B. (Jacques Boulenger?).”

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A New Rabelais Bibliography, Stephen Rawles and M.A. Screech, Librarie Droz, 1987

Google Books: Pantagruelion

Posted in Scholia on July 22nd, 2009 by Swany – Be the first to comment

Rabelaisian Dialectic and the Platonic-Hermetic Tradition, George Mallary Masters

Seeds of virtue and knowledge by Maryanne Cline Horowitz

A New Rabelais bibliography

Posted in Scholia, Texts on July 22nd, 2009 by Swany – Be the first to comment

Google Books:

A New Rabelais Bibliography: Editions of Rabelais Before 1626 (Etudes Rabelaisiennes Tome XX)

Rawles, Stephen and Screech, M.A. et al

Bookseller: BWB Antiquarian, Rare, and Collectable (Mishawaka, IN, U.S.A.)

Price: US$ 156.60, Quantity Available:: 1

Book Description: Librairie Droz. Book Condition: Used – Good. Sm 4to. Cloth Hardcover, 1987. . The usual ex-library treatments are present. xvi + 696pp. Text is in French. Bound in red cloth with gold lettering on the side. Corners very gently bumped; cover in overall good condition. The joints and hinges are strong, and the textblock is sturdy. Pages are clean and intact, with facsimile figures throughout, as well as a frontispiece. Offered by the Antiquarian, Rare, and Collectable Books section at Better World Books.

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The design of Rabelais’s Tiers livre

Posted in Contemporary, Rabelais, Scholia on July 22nd, 2009 by Swany – Be the first to comment

Google Books: By Edwin M. Duval, 1997

Publisher: Droz, (Travaux d’humanisme et Renaissance)

Pub. Date: January 1997

ISBN-13: 9782600002288

Fragments from a search for pantagruelion:

210: Increasingly thoughout the Pantagruelion chapters he hints that the “mot de l’enigme” is itself an enigma to be deciphered, that “flax-hemp” is merely a …

211. But the polyvalence and indeterminacy of Pantagruelion are not ends in themselves. Like all hermeneutic aporias in the Tiers Livre…

218. His ill-concieved, anticlamctic excursus on Pantagruelion is more futile tub-rolling by the same author who has already confessed his imperfections and …

212. On this level the only entirely correct interpretation of the Pantagruelion enigma is the one Pantagruel himself offered in the corresponding episode of …

219. It is highly significant that as he progresses through the Pantagruelion chapters “M. Fran. Rabelais docteur en Medicine” sounds more and more line “feu…

130. The ecstasies of the praise of Pantagruelion, no less than those of the praise of debts, are a deceptive and self-deluding error.

209. The Tiers Livre ends — appropriately for a book about interpretation — with an interpretive crux, the enigma of Pantagruelion. On one level this enigma is a …

213. In one of the most compelling readings of these final chapters to date David Quint has linked Pantagruelion to tnterpretation in …

Thales

Posted in Scholia on July 20th, 2009 by Swany – Be the first to comment

Montaigne, Essays, 40: ” And when you ask Thales why he does not marry, he tells you, because he has no mind to leave any posterity behind him.”