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Map of Paliki (now) & surroundings: Homer said his Ithaca was "to the west, the furthest out to sea", and "low-lying"... (click the image to enlarge) |
Michel Melot puts it best, in his remarkable new book, Livre,: [tr. JK]
"Digital information does not perform the same services for text as are performed by the book. The links which digital technique enables have nothing obligatory about them, and no 'a priori' limits. These powers in many respects are much superior to those of the book, which can appear stupid by comparison. But links assembled at leisure on the computer screen of any reader, even the least sophisticated reader, no longer work within established systems..."
There is a dynamic balance, nowadays, between the immense capacities of the new digital information, and the firm discipline of traditional printed text -- "The form itself, of the book, creates a system", Melot observes -- it is now clear here that the world can do without either novelty or discipline, entirely, as Melot's ambivalent description suggests. The world does need novelty, always; but, "if something is everything then maybe it's nothing" -- something "new", or otherwise.
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The first Webserver: |
So online links here are suggested. Some of them are highly-recommended. But so are books, and other media which have brought, and continue to bring, the classical stories of Odysseus and their lessons to us. So I hope whoever clicks easily, here, on the interesting links which follow below, also will glance through the Resource List which shows many other things of interest too, books & articles & lectures & videos & films among them: and the story of Odysseus started out in life as an oral tale -- so to understand fully why this man's departure from his Ithacan home, and his return to it many years later, have so fascinated European people for so many years, perhaps one must hear the tale recited by someone, as well... "Andra moi ennepe, mousa, polutropon..."
Several sites online which offer good information, then, on Paliki and "Ithaca" and Odysseus:
* Wikipedia -- in spite of differences I have personally with one of their Administrators (editors!... grrr... "Criticism is prejudice made plausible"... per Mencken...), plus some more basic misgivings I have generally about Wikipedia's politics or supposed lack thereof (there is no "wertfrei"), Wikipedia is in fact an excellent resource -- to be "double-checked" against other resources, certainly, but then any information resource should be double-checked...
Wikipedia articles:
Wikipedia images:
Wikipedia online fulltexts:
Wikipedia "categories": groupings of related articles --
* Other interesting links:
Perseus at Tufts, Greek & Roman materials
Perseus at Tufts, search on "homer*" -- at Perseus at Tufts, a search on "homer*" currently reaches 77 results, including "homeric": Art objects (1), Images (8), Reference articles (6), Text sections (19), Source citations (30), Texts (13).
Sunday 19 March 2006 21:30-22:15 (Radio 3): Sunday Feature, "School of Illumination"
"Writer and singer Shusha Guppy tells the fascinating story of how Islamic philosophers brought the treasures of classical Greek thought to the West. By the 9th Century, the works of philosophers like Plato and Aristotle had largely been lost in the Latin West. In the Islamic East it was a very different story. For centuries they had been translating these and other Greek philosophical school works, harvesting the knowledge they contained and in turn, writing their own commentaries. As the Islamic empire spread to Europe, that knowledge travelled with it."
"The present compilation of the Geological Map of Greece at a scale of 1:1,000,000 is based on recent geological information and the existing geological map at a scale of 1:500,000 and all geological maps at a scale of 1:50,000, which cover almost the whole Hellenic territory.
"This map presents the complete geological picture of Greece, an area constituting a significant geological junction in the folded alpine arc of the Dhinarides--Hellenides--Taurides, Iranides, and other mountain ranges.
"The map shows the subdivision into geotectonic zones, the lithostratigraphic succession of the geological formations including the basic tectonic structures, and specifically the nappes, which are a characteristic feature of the Hellenic mountain ranges. Younger volcanic rocks, which are related to the Aegean volcanic arc, are also recognizable within the Hellenides.
"The Hellenides mountain ranges belong to the Dinaric branch. They are mainly of alpine age and were formed from the folding of formations deposited in the Tethys Ocean during the Mesozoic and Paleogene. In this area, rocks of Paleozoic and older occur that have been deformed by older folding episodes and are considered to be prealpine. There are also rocks of younger age, Lower Miocene, considered to be post-alpine excluding the molassic sediments of older age (mid-Eocene to Miocene)."
* And some sites in French -- The Odyssey is their foundational cultural epic, too... as it is of the Spaniards, and the Italians, and the Greeks and the Germans and so many others, in the non-"anglosaxon" world... And both the superficial consideration of the Homeric epics, and the deep study of them, are approached very differently, in different cultures and using different languages: a difference between the "Victor Hugo's 'Quatre-vingt-treize / Ninety-Three'" & "The Scarlet Pimpernel" readings of the French Revolution, as the président of the Bibliothèque nationale de France recently pointed out to Google Inc.... "Le Mouron Rouge écrasant Quatre-Vingt-Treize"... Try reading through a few of the following sites, and you'll see for yourself : vive la différence --
"Dis-moi, Muse, cet homme subtil qui erra si longtemps, après qu'il eut renversé la citadelle sacrée de Troiè..."
"J'habite la très-illustre Ithakè, où se trouve le mont Néritos aux arbres battus des vents. Et plusieurs autres'iles sont autour, et voisines, Doulikhios, et Samé, et Zakynthos couverte de forêts. Et Ithakè est la plus éloignée de la terre ferme et sort de la mer du côté de la nuit ; mais les autres sont du côté d'Éôs et de Hélios. Elle est âpre, mais bonne nourrice de jeunes hommes, et il n'est point d'autre terre qu'il me soit plus doux de contempler..."
--oOo--
From here you can,
Jump back to the top of this page ,
or,
Jump to the Paliki, Homer's "Ithaca" home page,
and,
please send any suggestion: any & all suggestions for improvements, additions, deletions,
or anything else well-intended,
will be gratefully appreciated
-- on parle français, l'español, l'anglais, l'américain... --
via email to kessler@well.com
Merci!
(Apologies and thanks to Sergey Ayukov.)
--oOo--
And, want to see these pages in rough-but-serviceable French? Click =>
http://www.google.com/language_tools
and enter "http://www.well.com/~kessler/paliki.html"... & bonne chance... "Nous sommes tryin' juste notre meilleur, ici..."
(More apologies and a big merci infiniement,
this time to Emmanuelle Richard.)
--oOo--
The legal stuff:
And re. permissions: This file has been updated and expanded since versions of two articles which I wrote originally on Wikipedia: and I was sole author of those, until March 12, 2006 anyway. So I am not certain what copyright or license permissions are necessary, or can be claimed against me by Wikipedia or anyone else, for the March 12 contents of the original two articles there, as that now appears here -- content which people there, particularly one official "Administrator", later altered, abridged, otherwise changed, re-focussed, re-named, etc., and I think finally may have obliterated entirely (I lost track) -- or certainly for the substantially altered & expanded & otherwise much-changed webpage(s) which appear here. But just in case they do, the Wikipedia license statements which I understand they feel are necessary appear below, and the Wikipedia code / HTML of the versions there as written by me and last seen there by me on March 12, and used here, appear here in the following files: paliki0312.html, hithaca0312.html. If folks at Wikipedia wish to discuss any of this with me I wish they would do so, per their brave statement, "Wikipedia is not a democracy, we seek consensus through discussion", at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:NOT: which they do not do in practice, in my experience -- not the "discussion" part of it, anyway -- their "Administrators" just wade in arbitrarily, and change things, or even take them over entirely and run them however they personally and arbitrarily wish, and then let authors try to fight them about it post facto. So here I am sort of giving up on writing this "for" Wikipedia, and instead am writing it "with" Wikipedia... which may be a Good Thing, ultimately, for all concerned, and actually one of the best "next-step" developments of the overall Wikipedia effort, now that I think about it...
Copyright (c)2006- , by Jack Kessler, kessler@well.com.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2
or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation;
with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.
A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".
And for anything else here not covered, legally, by the above license
-- and you'll have to ask your own "experienced copyright practitioner" lawyer, about that --
please see the following:
Copyright © 2006- by Jack Kessler, all rights reserved.
(It's easy to get my permission to copy and distribute the things I write,
if you need it: just ask me -- email address appears below -- generally I
have no objection, so long as my name and email address appear,
but only if I'm asked in advance.)
W3 site maintained at http://www.well.com/~kessler/paliki.html
Document maintained by: Jack Kessler, kessler@well.com
Last update: July 2, 2008