Now, all I have to do is add some dialogue and an ending, and I'll have a nice little story...if only it was that easy.
I had an amazing dream last night; one of the rare ones that possessed a narrative structure. I was wearing the armor of a 14th-century knight, much like this picture of Bertrand du Guesclin, except that the jupon was a plain dark blue. As I was riding along an amazing landscape (more on that in a moment), I encountered a medieval lady who sent me on a quest. As in most dreams, it followed dream logic. That is, I did not hear her speak, or remember what the quest entailed; I simply found myself galloping across the countryside knowing she had sent me on my way. During the dream, I returned to her several times, and she always had another quest for me. The end of the dream has already faded from my memory, but I remember waking up happy. I mentioned the landscape. It had this hyper-reality about it. I remember thinking while in the dream that I was in some Pre-Raphaelite painting come to life. I rode across rolling hills sparsely covered with trees. The leaves on the trees were golden, but I had the feeling they were very much in their prime - these were not autumn colors. And the light. The dream world was bathed in a perpetual golden light, the kind you sometimes see at dawn or twilight. After I awoke, I was positive I had been dreaming about a specific Pre-Raphaelite painting, and I scoured the books on my bookshelves and the internet to find it. The closest I found was this painting, Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones' The Mirror of Venus. While the trees and light are very similar to those in my dream, the steep slopes are completely wrong. I guess the dream, as often happens, took pieces of various paintings I've seen, and it put them together to create its vivid visual element.
Now, all I have to do is add some dialogue and an ending, and I'll have a nice little story...if only it was that easy.
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Some days it's hard being an English teacher. Grammar rules can seem as useful to the teenage mind as sand toys in the Arctic. Of course they do matter. I might accumulate some bad Karma for laughing at the grammar mistakes of others, but I'm going to take the risk. Here's a video that shows why things like punctuation matter. It shows the funny confusion not following the rules can cause, but it also eloquently argues that words matter, and that we should value those who use words well. The Bronze Age in Europe by Jean-Pierre Mohen & Christiane Eluere More than 3000 years ago, chariots carried bronze-armored warriors into battle, the sprawling palace of Knossos was a center of trade and worship, and the Trojan War - which would provide inspiration for The Iliad and The Odyssey - was fought. This slim volume provides a wonderfully-illustrated history of this intriguing era of European history. It is packed with full-color maps and pictures of artifacts from this period. However, it is not just a book of pretty pictures. It coherently lays out the history of the period, its political and social structures, its material culture, its religious beliefs, and how these things changed between 3000 and 1200 BC. Moreover, it notes where scholars disagree. This is exceptional in a popular title and should be be commended. The truth is rarely pure and never simple, and this book acknowledges the mysteries that remain about this period of history. I highly recommend this book. |
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