‘A child of the sun’: Katherine Mansfield, Orientalism and Gurdjieff

2017 ◽  
pp. 41-65
Author(s):  
Gerri Kimber
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Traditional Society ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Personal Writing ◽  
Modern Industry ◽  
At Home

Less than two years after KM’s arrival in London in 1908 to pursue her dream of becoming a writer, the enormous Japanese exhibition was held at in London from May to October 1910. It was a concerted and systematic attempt by Japan to explain its traditional society and arts, modern industry and empire to Great Britain, and over 8 million visitors attended. Mansfield took to wearing a kimono at home, read the poems of Yone Noguchi, and Okakura’s The Book of Tea, and talked about visiting Japan. There were Japanese allusions in both her fiction and her personal writing for the rest of her life. In addition, in 1922, Mansfield’s life was transformed by a book entitled Cosmic Anatomy and the Structure of the Ego, whose Eastern mystic philosophy she wholeheartedly embraced, and which drove her to seek a spiritual cure for her diseased body, since physical cures had proved worthless. The final three months of her life were spent at Gurdjieff’s Institute in Fontainebleau, immersed in eastern esoteric teaching.

Adapting to lockdown

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dr Simon Hudson
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Technical Term ◽  
Town Hall ◽  
Public Health Officials ◽  
Sun Also Rises ◽  
The Sun Also Rises ◽  
Global Population ◽  
Beer Drinking ◽  
At Home

By mid-April 2020, a third of the global population was under full or partial lockdown. While ‘lockdown’ was not a technical term used by public-health officials, it referred to anything from mandatory geographic quarantines to non- mandatory recommendations to stay at home, closures of certain types of businesses, or bans on events and gatherings. During this lockdown period, the travel sector worldwide continued to experience a loss of business. For example, Spain’s famous annual San Fermin bull-running festival, which usually draws thousands of participants, was canceled because of the coronavirus crisis. “As expected as it was, it still leaves us deeply sad,” said acting mayor Ana Elizalde in a statement from the local Pamplona town hall. The July festival, which was made famous in Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises, has seldom been canceled in its history. Other major European tourist events were canceled, including Oktoberfest, the famous annual German beer-drinking festival which traditionally sees six million people travel to Munich.

At Home Among the Russians: The Short Stories of Olive Garnett and Katherine Mansfield

2017 ◽  
pp. 107-124
Author(s):  
Frances Reading
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Common Interest ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Substantial Part ◽  
Great War ◽  
National Consciousness ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Russian People ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
At Home

The purpose of this article is to incorporate the little-studied writer, Olive Garnett, into the discussion surrounding Katherine Mansfield in relation to Russian themes. Both Mansfield and Garnett had a common interest in Russia and, writing in the same literary milieu, both wrote short stories about Russia and Russians. Where the interest in Russia comes from for Garnett and Mansfield forms a substantial part of this article. Both were influenced by various Russian radicals and philosophers, such as Nikolai Chernyshevsky who conceivably served to inspire the writing of both women. The context will stem from the ‘Russomania’ that took hold from the 1880s onwards, culminating in the subsequent fin-de-siècle and post-Great War paranoias within the British national consciousness which expressed itself in the form of prejudice towards the foreign Other. It will consider the influence Russia, and Russian people, had on the style and work of Mansfield and Garnett, and in turn reveal how both writers present Russia.

January: Of Rocks and Ice

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Wohl
Keyword(s):  
Cold Water ◽  
Main Channel ◽  
Frozen Soil ◽  
Pine Bark ◽  
The Sun ◽  
The South ◽  
Dark Green ◽  
Shallow Channel ◽  
Yellowish Orange ◽  
At Home

The beaver meadow is quiet in January. For many plants and animals, winter is a season of subdued activity, or of waiting. North St. Vrain Creek remains open along the main channel, the water flowing clear but tinted brown as pine bark between snowy banks. Densely growing thickets of willow closely line the banks. Each stem starts pale brown near the ground, then grades upward to shades of maroon or yellowish orange at the branch tips. In a bird’s-eye view, these startling colors make the meadow stand out distinctly from the dark green conifers that define the edges of the meadow. Spruce and fir trees grow sharply pointed as arrows; pines present a slightly more rounded outline. Snow falls silently in thick flakes from the low, gray sky. The upper edges of the valley walls fade into snow and clouds. The sun appears briefly as a small, pale spotlight behind the clouds to the south. Snow mounds on the patches of ice in the shallow channel. The water flowing beneath creates flickers through the translucent ice like a winter fire of subdued colors and no heat. Tussocks form humps of straw-colored grass above the dark, frozen soil. Rabbit tracks line the snowy bank, sets of four paw marks with a large gap between each set. Something small crossed the bank, leaping one to two feet at a bound, two paws with slight drag marks behind them. In places the powdery snow has drifted deeply, but mostly it is shallow over a frozen crust. Beaver-gnawed sticks and stumps poke up through the snow. A large flood came through four months ago, in mid-September, washing out dams that the beavers have not yet rebuilt. Chunks of wood deposited among the willow stems by the floodwaters stand far above the January flow of the creek. A dipper fishes the creek, wading rather than swimming, at home in the cold water. The slate-gray bird is the only visible animal, busily probing the bed with its short bill, then pausing to stand and bob up and down.

James Bradley, Sailing on the Thames

Lightspeed ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 49-57
Author(s):  
John C. H. Spence
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Theory Of Relativity ◽  
Speed Of Light ◽  
Astronomical Observations ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Independent Estimate ◽  
The Universe ◽  
At Home

The story of the astronomical observations of James Bradley in the eighteenth century, whose measurements of the small movements of a star throughout the year provided an independent estimate of the speed of the Earth around the Sun relative to the speed of light. His work provided the first experimental evidence in support of Copernicus’s theory that the earth is in motion, and against the idea that it is stationary at the center of the universe. His simple telescope at home, his brilliant idea and perseverance, and his life’s work and influence. The importance of his result for the development of Einstein’s theory of relativity and for theories of the Aether in the following centuries.

Ole Roemer, Who Started It All

Lightspeed ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 18-26
Author(s):  
John C. H. Spence
Keyword(s):  
Life Story ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Speed Of Light ◽  
The Earth ◽  
At Home

The story of the first measurement of the speed of light by Ole Roemer in 1676. Galileo had discovered the moons of Jupiter with his new telescope, and proposed using observations of their eclipse every forty-two hours as a universal clock for our planet, since they could be seen from practically anywhere. This would keep track of the time at home, and so give a traveller his or her local longitude. (The King of Spain had offered a prize for longitude determination to avoid disasterous shipwrecks.) Roemer noticed that the eclipses were sometimes a little late, which he concluded was due to the time it took light to get from Saturn to Earth and the movement of the Earth between eclipses. His estimate of the time for light to travel from the Sun to Earth was quite accurate. Roemer’s remarkable life story and many other achievements are told.

The Development of SRCM and the Application at Home and Abroad

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lifei Yang ◽  
Jiang Hong
Keyword(s):  
Nuclear Power ◽  
Power Plants ◽  
Nuclear Power Plants ◽  
Maintenance Strategy ◽  
Weak Points ◽  
New Situation ◽  
Modern Industry ◽  
At Home

It is well-known that RCM is an advanced and effective maintenance strategy in practice. With the development of the automation and mechanization in modern industry, RCM method turns to be complex and consumes more resources in real production. However, the development and application of the Streamline RCM (SRCM) has injected new vitality for the new situation, especially in the nuclear power plants. This paper firstly introduces the background, the characteristics of the SRCM and the differences from RCM, and then shows the process in detail as well as the application status of the SRCM in country and abroad. It is proved that SRCM is a unique available method which saves the time and resource consumed, ensuring the integrity and correctness of the classical RCM. Finally, the weak points and the prospect are reviewed and prospected.

All That Glittered

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Alborn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
International Monetary System ◽  
Social Hierarchy ◽  
British Society ◽  
Monetary System ◽  
The World ◽  
Origin Story ◽  
At Home

From the early eighteenth century into the 1830s, Great Britain was the only major country in the world to adopt gold as the sole basis of its currency, in the process absorbing much of the world’s supply of that metal into its pockets, cupboards, and coffers. During the same period, Britons forged a nation by distilling a heady brew of Protestantism, commerce, and military might, while preserving important features of its older social hierarchy. All That Glittered argues for a close connection between these occurrences, by linking justifications for gold’s role in British society—starting in the 1750s and running through the mid-nineteenth century gold rushes in California and Australia—to contemporary descriptions of that metal’s varied values at home and abroad. Most of these accounts attributed British commercial and military success to a credit economy pinned on gold, stigmatized southern European and subaltern peoples for their nonmonetary uses of gold, or tried to marginalize people at home for similar forms of alleged misconduct. This book tells a primarily cultural origin story about the gold standard’s emergence after 1850 as an international monetary system, while providing a new window on British exceptionalism during the previous century.

scholarly journals IX.—The Solar Spectrum in 1877–1878, with some practical idea of its probable temperature of Origination

1880 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 285-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piazzi Smyth
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Solar Spectrum ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Atmospheric Phenomena

Although the Spectrum whose linear record is now presented to the Royal Society, Edinburgh, is unfortunately not so perfect as it might have been with better apparatus (but which I did not possess)—yet it represents the labour and expense connected with two voyages in 1877–1878 to Portugal; and many weeks work there in both years, with the sun in a more favourable position for observing really solar, and not telluric, or atmospheric, phenomena, than is ever, at any time, obtainable in Great Britain.

Paper 1 Railway Electrification in the Twentieth Century

1966 ◽  
Vol 181 (6) ◽  
pp. 4-16
Author(s):  
S. B. Warder
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Single Phase ◽  
General Character ◽  
Present Position ◽  
The Future ◽  
East And West ◽  
Travel Abroad ◽  
Industrial Frequency ◽  
At Home

In this paper the author, having been responsible for the recommendation that 25 000 V single-phase electrification at industrial frequency should be adopted as standard for Great Britain, completes the story first unfolded at the previous Electrification Conference in 1960. The paper is of a general character and reviews the evolution of the art and the contribution made by British Railways and industry, giving historical reasons for the present position. Reference is made to electrification schemes outside the London Midland scheme, and because of the author's subsequent extensive travel abroad, it has been possible to include some interesting comparisons. Remarks are also presented on the peculiar situation of Great Britain, geographically located between countries East and West who hold divergent views on motive power policy, and the future of the industry at home and abroad is considered.

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