National Library, Open Books

National Library of Pakistan is a legal depository for all published literary heritage of Pakistan . It serves as top most knowledge resource centre of the nation as well as fountain head of Library developments in the country. The library strives to develop significant collection of human knowledge, comprehensive collection of national literary heritsage and deliver excellent Library services for promotion of knowledge based society in Pakistan . The Library is responsible for National bibliographic control and preserves the literary heritage of the country for the use of present as well as future generations. A vast collection of publications about Pakistan, its culture, people and books authored by Pakistanis living abroad forms a major portion of National Library of Pakistan's main collection. A significant part of collection consists on manuscripts and rare books. National Library of Pakistan is an active member of many library communities in the world such as PLA, IFLA, CDNL and CDNLAO.

National Library of Pakistan serves as depository of some international organizations like Asian development bank, International labor organization, and US department of Publications etc. The Library is National ISBN Agency for Pakistani Publications.

http://www.nlp.gov.pk/

The Art to Ispahan

Avec l’installation de la capitale à Ispahan à la fin du XVIe siècle, le kitab khana royal déménage. Se développe alors une importante activité de peinture et de calligraphie, dominée par la figure de Reza ’Abbassi (v. 1565 - v. 1635), l’un des rares artistes protégés par Shah ’Abbas. Cette école marque une rupture complète avec les œuvres produites antérieurement : à la place de grands manuscrits illustrés sont réalisées des pages d’albums (moraqqa'), destinées à être collectionnées.

De nouvelles techniques sont employées, notamment le dessin à la plume et les lavis légers. Le style est tout d’abord largement marqué par l’influence de Reza ’Abbassi : la peinture typique représente un personnage en pied, anonyme, à la silhouette élégante et longiligne. Mais dans la seconde moitié du XVIIe siècle, les artistes d’Ispahan subissent de nombreuses influences européennes et mogholes. Leur peinture évolue vers une forte européanisation, avec notamment l’arrivée de la perspective et un traitement renouvelé des volumes.

L’école de peinture d’Ispahan à l’époque qajare est parfois considérée comme la meilleure d’Iran et la ville est un grand centre de production de qalamdān (boîtes laquées en papier mâché, généralement destinées à contenir des calames).

Meggie's Theme

THE THORN BIRDS

Music by Henry Mancini
Lyrics by Will Jennings

You know I will follow
Anywhere the heart goes
I will go until I know
All life can be

Love can hurt when you go
Anywhere the heart goes
Don't you know it isn't easy
Being me
I hold you inside where my love never dies
And you will always live somewhere in me

If you want to follow
Anywhere the heart goes
I will be here when you want me
Any way you want me
And good years bad years
Would all fall away
If I knew that your heart
Would follow my heart
Someday...

M.

Out Of Africa

Karen Blixen Museum was once the centre piece of a farm at the foot of the Ngong Hills owned by Danish Author Karen and her Swedish Husband, Baron Bror von Blixen Fincke. Located 10km from the city centre, the Museum belongs to a different time period in the history of Kenya. The farm house gained international fame with the release of the movie ‘Out of Africa’ an Oscar winning film based on Karen’s an autobiography by the same title.

The Museum is open to the Public every day (9.30 am to 6pm) including weekends and public holidays. Visitors are encouraged to be at the Museum by 5.30.  Guided tours are offered continuously.  A museum shop offers handicrafts, posters and postcards, the Movie ‘Out of Africa’, books and other Kenyan souvenirs.  The grounds may be rented for wedding receptions, corporate functions and other events.

Baroness Karen BlixenThe Museum was built in 1912 by Swedish Engineer Ake Sjogren. Karen and her husband bought the Museum house in 1917 and it become the farm house for their 4500 acre farm, of which 600 acres was used for coffee farming.  The house was sporadically occupied until purchased in 1964 by the Danish government and given to the Kenyan government as an independence gift.

The government set up a college of nutrition and the Museum was initially used as the principal’s house. In 1985 the shooting of a movie based on Karen’s autobiography began and the National Museums of Kenya expressed acquired the house for the purpose of establishing a Museum. The Museum was opened in 1986.

Distant View of Karen BlixenKaren also known by her pen name Isak Dinesen was born at Rungstedlund in Denmark on 17th of April 1885 as the second child of Wilhelm and Ingeborg Dinesen’s five children. She came to Africa in 1914 to marry her half cousin and carry out dairy farming in the then British Colony of Kenya. Her husband had however changed his mind and wanted to farm coffee. Her uncle Aage Westenholz financed the farm and members of both families were share holders. The coffee farm did not do well, suffering various tragedies including factory fire and continuous bad harvest. After her divorce, Karen was left to run the financially troubled farm on her own, a daunting task for a woman of that generation. She fell in love with an English man, Denis Finch Hatton, and his death in Tsavo in 1930 coupled with the failed farming left Karen little choice but to return to Denmark. She turned to writing as a career following her departure from Africa and published to increasing acclaim such works as Seven Gothic Tales(1934) Out of Africa(1937) and Babette Feat (1950).  She died on her family estate, Rungsted, in 1962 at the age of 77.

The Karen Blixen house meets three of thecustomary criteria for  historical significance.  First, it isassociated with the broad historical pattern of European settlement andcultivation of East Africa. Second, it is associated with the life of aperson significant to our past as the home of  Baroness Karen Blixenfrom 1917 -1931.  As such, it served as the setting and basis of herwell known book Out of Africa, written under the pseudonym Isak Dinesenand as a gathering place for other well known personalities of theperiod.  Third, the building embodies the distinctive characteristicsof its type, period and method of construction.  The house'sarchitecture is typical of late 19th century bungalow architecture,including the spacious rooms, horizontal layout verandas, tile roof andstone construction typical of scores of residences built throughoutEuropean suburbs of Nairobi in early decades.

Thechronology of the house begins with its construction in 1912 by thewealthy Swedish civil engineer, later honorary Swedish consul to Kenya, Ake Sjogren.  It served as the main residence on his Swedo-Africancoffee company , an estate of over 6,000 acres.  The house was soonvisited while on safari by the Danish count Mojen Frijs, who upon hisreturn to Denmark persuaded his cousin to seek their fortune in Kenya.Baron Blixen acquired part of the estate in 1913 and the remainder in1916.    Karen Blixen called the house "Bogani" or "Mbogani" meaning ahouse in the woods, and occupied it until 1931.


By 1985, with renewed interest in Karen Blixen occasioned by the filmproduction of Out of Africa, an agreement was reach with the collagefor the house to become part of the National Museums of Kenya. Manypieces of furniture that Karen Blixen sold to Lady McMillan on herdeparture were acquired back and constitute part of the exhibition inthe Museum. The Museum house remains a serene environment that seems tobelong to the past, surrounded by a tranquil garden and indigenousforest, with a splendid view of Karen’s beloved Ngong Hills. Shehonours the hills with the phrase ‘I had a farm in Africa at the footof the Ngong Hills’.


For further information contact.
The Curator (Ms. Damaris Rotich)
Karen Blixen Museum
P.O Box 40658- 00100 GPO, Nairobi.
Tel: 020- 8002139


 

In Gjirokastër...In this City

Without a doubt, this is the best book by an Albanian author that I’ve ever read. Is that trivially because it was my first? Only time will tell…

Ismail Kadare’s ‘Chronicle in Stone’ is the tale of a city, more than anything else. The city, Gjirokastër, is a city whose buildings are constructed primarily of stone. Living in this city is a strange fellow named Xivo Gavo, who keeps a chronicle of everything that happens in (and to) the city. Thus, we have the “chronicle” “in” “stone” (get it?).

Fortunately, we’re not subjected entirely to the point of view of the chronicler, whose work, appearing in snippets between chapters, is uninteresting, at best. In his place, we learn of the fate of hoary Gjirokastër through the small adventures of a young, nameless boy, likely patterned after the author himself. In this way, we get to see life amidst the horrors of World War II through the eyes of a child. If this sounds fascinating, I apologize for misleading you.

The main problem with ‘Chronicle in Stone’ is that the writing itself is rather unexciting. Kadare makes a few attempts to set up something interesting, and some of the inner musings of the narrator show promise (e.g. when, in the first chapter, he personifies the rain, imagining that each drop “plummet[s] into a deep prison”, which is the cistern below their house), but the inconsistency of these authorial in(ter?)ventions keeps them from becoming patterns the reader can latch onto. Consequently, when they reappear (such as the occasional and ultimately pointless references to Macbeth), the reader is left to wonder what meaning, if any, is to be taken away. All in all, the hand of the author is ever-present, and rarely is the reader allowed to get “lost” in the story.

The plot, by and large, moves between conversations between characters about the status of the city or the other characters. There’s nothing wrong with this, per se, but many of the characters are simply undercharacterized. For example, I dare you to read this book and say anything about the narrator’s father and mother. Do they have names? I can’t honestly say. We learn a fair bit about his grandmothers, his grandfather, his neighbors, some of his friends, and some miscellaneous characters about the town. Of the characters we’re introduced to, there are two types: those that are interesting (the narrator; Suzana, a young girl with whom the narrator begins to experiment romantically; Ilir, the narrator’s friend and coconspirator), and those that can be described as “the one that…” (e.g. Kako Pino is the one that does brides’ make-up and constantly claims it’s “the end of the world”; Javer is the one that aspires to be a radical; Nazo’s daughter-in-law is the one that’s pretty; Qani Kekezi is the one that dissects cats, etc.). The result is a mess of characters that do little to distinguish themselves tangled up with a host of mere caricatures.

So, the big question is this: What are we left with? Oddly enough, what you get is a surprisingly realistic–and effective–portrayal of an ancient city at the mercy of foreign powers. In a way, the relative lack of literary devices lends authenticity to some of the more bizarre and disturbing moments in the book. When, for example, an English plane is shot down, and the crowd parades through the streets with the pilot’s severed arm, as a reader, I didn’t think, “Wow, what a bizarre episode this author has created”: that happened. The townspeople’s varied reactions to being occupied first by the Italians, then by the Greeks (and then the Italians, and then the Greeks, and then the Italians, ad infinitum), and finally the Germans, are too realistic to be treated as merely fiction. What we have, then, in ‘Chronicle in Stone’, is an account of a little-discussed society ravaged by war.

The last six decades have supplied us with innumerable stories of the second World War from France, Germany, Japan, the US, Italy, North Africa, China–but Albania? Who outside of Albania even knew they were in it! As such, ‘Chronicle in Stone’ fills a void, and is a worthy addition to the rich literary landscape of World War II–and, for that reason, worth reading.

David Peterson

Cocoon, in Ice

Ghostly Illumination designed by Sofia Borges and Danika Voorhees enhances the sensory potentials of the Orthodox church through the strategic alignment of spatial boundaries. Through a series of pulls and pinches, spaces that once maintained rigid edge conditions begin to erode. This spatial erosion provides for a more dynamic and engaged experience for the user as sight lines collapse and extend and programmatic hierarchy dissolves, allowing for wider range of opportunities to intermingle between the priests and their patrons.

Inspired by the meandering nature of traditional Orthodox services, Ghostly Illumination heightens the fluidity of the interior through increased spatial and visual connectivity. The dynamic surfaces of the church negotiate between abstraction and figure, channeling the Orthodox onion dome (or eternal flame) as a central yet illusory figure. Appearing in both interior and exterior surface conditions, the figure emerges, flickers, and fades in an ongoing dialogue between icon and the ephemeral.

e Volo

Hals in Rijksmuseum Amsterdam

Hals is best known for his portraits, mainly of wealthy citizens, like Pieter van den Broecke and Isaac Massa, whom he painted three times. He also painted large group portraits, many of which showed civil guards. He was a Baroque painter who practiced an intimate realism with a radically free approach. His pictures illustrate the various strata of society; banquets or meetings of officers, sharpshooters, guildsmen, admirals, generals, burgomasters, merchants, lawyers, and clerks, itinerant players and singers, gentlefolk, fishwives and tavern heroes.

In group portraits, such as the Archers of St. Hadrian, Hals captures each character in a different manner. The faces are not idealized and are clearly distinguishable, with their personalities revealed in a variety of poses and facial expressions.

He studied under the painter and historian Karel van Mander (Hals owned some paintings by van Mander that were amongst the items sold to pay his bakery debt in 1652).

Hals was fond of daylight and silvery sheen, while Rembrandt used golden glow effects based upon artificial contrasts of low light in immeasurable gloom. Both men were painters of touch, but of touch on different keys — Rembrandt was the bass, Hals the treble. Hals seized, with rare intuition, a moment in the life of his subjects. What nature displayed in that moment he reproduced thoroughly in a delicate scale of color, and with mastery over every form of expression. He became so clever that exact tone, light and shade, and modeling were obtained with a few marked and fluid strokes of the brush.

Open Minds to Art

Established in 2003 with the aid of a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Research Forum is located at the heart of the Courtauld. The Research Forum offers an extensive programme of lectures, conferences, workshops and seminars supporting advanced inquiry in the history of art, conservation and museum studies.

Committed to inspiring dialogue and collaboration between sections of the Institute, the Research Forum has also created links with a wide range of national and international partners through jointly organised events and through its invitations to visiting professors, curators and conservators. Building contacts among researchers of all generations, the Forum seeks to enrich their experience of art history by facilitating debate and discussion. The Research Forum offers an extensive programme of lectures, conferences, workshops and seminars supporting advanced inquiry in the history of art, conservation and museum studies. Details of the Research Forum’s activities, fellowships and grants can be found by following the links below. You can also subscribe to the Research Forum’s email list by sending an email to researchforum@courtauld.ac.uk.




 

Φιλολογία στο Ταράς Σεβτσένκο

Το Ινστιτούτο Φιλολογίας του Εθνικού Πανεπιστημίου Κιέβου «Ταράς Σεβτσένκο» από κοινού με το Ινστιτούτο της Ουκρανικής Γλώσσας της Εθνικής Ακαδημίας Επιστημών της Ουκρανίας και την Ελληνική Πρεσβεία στην Ουκρανία διοργανώνει Διεθνές Επιστημονικό Συνέδριο με θέμα «Η πνευματική κληρονομιά του καθηγητή Α. Ο. Μπιλέτσκυ στο φως των νεώτερων εξελίξεων της επιστημονικής γνώσεως» με αφορμή τη συμπλήρωση εκατό χρόνων από τη γέννησή του. Το Συνέδριο θα πραγματοποιηθεί στις 21 Οκτωβρίου 2011.

Στις 20 Μαΐου 1999 στο πλαίσιο του Ινστιτούτου Φιλολογίας του Εθνικού Πανεπιστημίου «Ταράς Σεβτσένκο» του Κιέβου ιδρύθηκε η Έδρα Ελληνικών Σπουδών για την κατάρτιση φιλόλογων-ελληνιστών και διερμηνέων.

Είναι γεγονός ότι στο Πανεπιστήμιο αυτό η εκμάθηση της νέας ελληνικής ως δεύτερης ξένης γλώσσας ξεκίνησε το 1958 από τους επιφανείς ελληνιστές – καθηγητή Ανδρέα Μπιλέτσκυ και υφηγήτρια Τετιάνα Τσερνισόβα στο πλαίσιο της Έδρας Κλασικών Σπουδών. Με την πρωτοβουλία των σπουδαίων αυτών φιλολόγων ξεκίνησε και η μετάφραση έργων των Ελλήνων συγγραφέων στα ουκρανικά και των έργων του Ταράς Σεβτσένκο, της Λέσια Ουκραΐνκα και του Ιβάν Φρανκό στα νέα ελληνικά.

Τώρα οι φοιτητές του Τμήματος Δυτικής Φιλολογίας μαθαίνουν τα νέα ελληνικά ως πρώτη ή δεύτερη ξένη γλώσσα. Η Διευθύντρια της Έδρας είναι καθηγήτρια Νίνα Κλιμένκο, η γλωσσολόγος και ουκρανολόγος που επί πολλά χρόνια μελετά τις ελληνο-ουκρανικές γλωσσικές επαφές, μεταφράζει από τα νέα ελληνικά. Την ελληνική διδάσκουν επίσης ο γλωσσολόγος, συγγραφέας και μεταφραστής καθηγητής Αλέξανδρος Πονομαρίβ, ο υφηγητής Ευγένιος Τσερνούχιν, οι λέκτορες Ιρήνα Τιταρένκο, Ταράς Μπόΐκο, Ανδρέας Σαβένκο και Σβετλάνα Περεπλιότσικοβα.

Οι καθηγητές της Έδρας παραδίδουν τα κάτωθι μαθήματα: πρακτική εξάσκηση, θεωρητική γραμματική, θεωρητική φωνητική, λεξικολογία, υφολογία, συγκριτική γραμματική της νέας ελληνικής και της ουκρανικής γλώσσας, οι αρχές της ειδικότητας, χωρογραφία, επιχειρηματική ορολογία, γνωστικές επιστήμες, συγκριτική λεξικολογία της ουκρανικής και της νέας ελληνικής γλώσσας κ.α.

Οι καθηγητές της Έδρας μελετούν τα εξής θέματα: ελληνο-ουκρανικές γλωσσικές επαφές (καθηγητής Πονομαρίβ Α.Δ.), συγκριτικές έρευνες της ελληνικής και της ουκρανικής γλώσσας, λειτουργική και δομική γραμματική (καθηγήτρια Κλιμένκο Ν.Θ.), θεωρία και πρακτική μετάφρασης (διδάσκοντες Περεπλιότσικοβα Σ.Ε., Σαβένκο Α.Α., Τιταρένκο Ι.Β., Μπόΐκο Τ.Α.). Ο υφηγητής Ευγένιος Τσερνούχιν μελετά τα ελληνικά χειρόγραφα που διατηρούνται στην Εθνική Βιβλιοθήκη «Βλαδίμηρος Βερνάτσκυ» της Εθνικής Ακαδημίας Επιστημών της Ουκρανίας.

greece.kiev.ua

Museum of Nature in Canada

The Canadian Museum of Nature (French: Musée Canadien de la nature) is a natural history museum in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Its collections, which were started by the Geological Survey of Canada in 1856, include all aspects of the intersection of human society and nature, from gardening to gene-splicing.The Museum is affiliated with the Canadian Museums Association, the Canadian Heritage Information Network, and the Virtual Museum of Canada.

The building, known as the Victoria Memorial Museum Building, was built in former farm fields known as Appin Place, the estate of the Scottish-born merchant, William Stewart. The neighbourhood became known as Stewarton and residential development started in the area during the 1870s. The government purchased the land in 1905 hoping to develop the site as a sort of 'end piece' to complement the stone structure of the Canadian Parliament Buildings at the opposite end of Metcalfe Street, on Parliament Hill.

Nighttime view of new Queen's Lantern, built where old tower stood. This massive stone structure is an excellent example of early 20th-century architecture in Ottawa, and was built for $1,250,000 by architect David Ewart who is responsible for many similar structures around the city.The construction of the building involved the importing of 300 skilled stone masons from Scotland. The architectural style is sometimes described as Scottish baronial. Ewart was sent to Britain to study the architecture of Hampton Court and Windsor Castle, which greatly influenced his design of this building.

Unfortunately, because of the presence of unstable Leda clay in the geology of the site, a tall tower that was situated at the front of the building had to be taken down in 1915 due to settling and the concern that the foundation could not support the weight. The unstable site forced some workers to stop working, as shifting foundations in the basement shot bricks and stones out from the walls, hitting some construction workers.

A major renovation of all parts of the building began in 2004 and was completed in 2010, including a lighter-weight glass "lantern" taking the place of the tower removed in 1915. For most of the duration of the renovation, parts of the building were still open to the public, but the entire building was closed temporarily on 26 April 2010 for final changes. The newly renovated museum re-opened again on 22 May 2010, and the lantern structure was christened the "Queens' Lantern" in honour of both Elizabeth II, who visited the building on her 2010 royal tour, and Queen Victoria.