Afnan and Aya

Thursday, 13 September 2007

Getting ready for university!

Hey everyone I am getting ready to go to University next week! I am soo nervous. First year Medicine! Does anyone else do Medicine and can you give me tips or guidance? Much appreciated!

Tuesday, 11 September 2007

Hi everyone, I hope you are enjoying the blog so far! Ramadan Mubarak to you all! I want to know does anyone have any special traditions for Ramadan or any dishes that they eat only in Ramadan?

It is a special time for us all.

Monday, 10 September 2007

Poem for today!

Arabian nights
What do I dream of? I dream of an oasis as silver
and bright as the reflections of a thousand and one damascenes
on a sun's burning desert ray that moves, hazes, blinds
then silently fades away. I can see sunsets that of them
one could write a thousand and one amorets.
I can see the people in their coloured cloth,
can taste their bitter tea, but t'is not unfamiliar
For the desert they dwell is the desert in me.
So their sinister music has become my voice and their silks
and threads have become my flesh. And beside their blazing
fires, resting, searching the sky for rain or stars or a sign,
has yielded in me an impure fire. For the twigs of desire
lit mine.
My pen now runs on the tears that have been drained from this body and
this life. Tears that should have extinguished that fire but in reality
whet its appetite for
Me. A fire I both hate and love at the bitter crux of this bitter
fight.
Oh! The axe and the sledgehammer! Chop down this wood! Feed this fire! Let it not be barred!
Or else, shall I water it, drown it, kill it and leave myself choked with the ashes and charred?
This paper that I write on is dry like the sand the bare souls of these feet will never touch.
This lamp, in front of me, burns with the innocent heat of fires in desert midnights these
semitic palms will never clutch.
A wild reminiscence of those im-a-ginary lights.
These are my Arabian nights.

Note:
The structure of the poem at the start is significant as it is the traditional structure of Arabian poetry.
The syllables of "imaginary" are lengthened just as the notes are lengthened in Arabic music.

Tell me what you think of my quasi-Arabian poetry!

Give me your reaction please

Weekly critique

A critical analysis of Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

In Xanadu did Kubla KhanA stately pleasure-dome decree :Where Alph, the sacred river, ranThrough caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile groundWith walls and towers were girdled round :And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ;And here were forests ancient as the hills,Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh ! that deep romantic chasm which slantedDown the green hill athwart a cedarn cover !A savage place ! as holy and enchantedAs e'er beneath a waning moon was hauntedBy woman wailing for her demon-lover !And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,A mighty fountain momently was forced :Amid whose swift half-intermitted burstHuge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail :And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and everIt flung up momently the sacred river.Five miles meandering with a mazy motionThrough wood and dale the sacred river ran,Then reached the caverns measureless to man,And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean :And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from farAncestral voices prophesying war !
The shadow of the dome of pleasureFloated midway on the waves ;Where was heard the mingled measureFrom the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice !
A damsel with a dulcimerIn a vision once I saw :It was an Abyssinian maid,And on her dulcimer she played,Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome ! those caves of ice !
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry,
Beware ! Beware !His flashing eyes, his floating hair !
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

It was long thought that this poem about the famous Mongol warlord was a vision of Coleridge’s in an opium dream. This poem certainly has the dreamy, exotic qualities as it conveys to us an epoch beyond the boundaries of our own, “Alph, the sacred river”, “Xanadu”, “Mount Abora”. In the depths of its sleepy dreaminess, in Xanadu is where this poem begins, lulling the reader with mellifluous monosyllabic and disyllabic words of eastern, rich connotations, “sacred”, “pleasure-dome”, “incense-bearing tree”, intertwined with short, sweet vowel sounds in “Alph”, “ran”, flowing through to “man” and terminating at “sea”. The vowel pattern is echoed in the second sentence of the first stanza with “ground”, “round”, “tree”, terminating at “greenery” which echoes back to “sea”. The sounds in the first stanza ricochet and reflect one another giving us the impression of a distant, dreamy echoing, so typical of Coleridge. Enfolded into this delicate structure is are resonances, almost musical in their quality, of alliterative, liquid “l”s in “stately pleasure” streaming to “measureless” and “sunless”, gushing through “hills” and “rills and “blossomed”. The abstraction and languor is short lived however as “But oh!”, a minor statement, implies a sense of urgency. The mood of the poem becomes uneasy and almost frantic as we know that this dreaminess and perfection will typically end disastrously. The lexical choice of “savage”, “haunted”, wailing”, “seething”, “lifeless” implies this mood. The pace of the poem increases rapidly as like “Alph” the sacred river, it gushes with action through ingenious, well placed verbs such as “vaulted” and expressive personification such as “seething” and “flung up”. The stanza structure also imitates the “mazy motion” of the river with lines being longer and of varying lengths, very different from the first stanza. The repetition of “tumult” also evokes a sense of the force of the river and its power. The power of nature, defeating the power of man.
Understanding Kubla Khan is like following the course of a river with many tributaries. At one tributary, it is a moral story of power and corruption, of a person who rises above his mortal position and believes himself to be above the rule of higher moral authority who has offensively fed on the “honey dew” and sinfully “drunk the milk of Paradise”. Another tributary, the poem is a fragment of a dream and the hard hitting reality and the nostalgia after it is over. These tributaries confluence, however. They are all inescapably about man seeking what is not man’s. Kubla Khan seeks godliness and immortality through his pleasure domes, his “gardens with sinuous rills” and his “fertile ground” and they are inevitably destroyed by the very nature which he has exploited. Similarly, the writer seeks immortality through his dreams and fantasies and they are inevitably excised by their very medium, his soul. It is a poem which accentuates the unified endeavour of man to rise above his caste, to be admired, worshipped, immortal, great and thus the river joins its estuary.

Did you know?

The human head contains 22 bones
The human head contains 22 bones, consisting the cranium and the facial bones. The cranium is formed by 8 bones: the frontal bone, two parietal bones, two temporal bones, the occipital bone in the back, the ethmoid bone behind the nose, and the sphenoid bone. The face consists of 14 bones including the maxilla (upper jaw) and mandible (lower jaw). (The skull has many little holes in its base which allow the cranial nerves to travel to their destinations.)
The cranium protects the brain, which, for an average adult male weighs about 1400 gram (49oz). The brain of Russian novelist Turgenev, weighed 2021g (71oz), Bismarck's brain weighed 1807g (64oz), while that of famous French statesman Gambetta was only 1294g (46oz). Female average brain mass is slightly less than that of males. The largest woman's brain recorded weighed 1742g (6oz). Einstein's brain was of average size.
An elephant's brain weighs 5000g (176oz or 11 lb), a whale's 10000g (352oz or 22lb). In proportion to the body, the whale has a much smaller brain than man. This seem to give man the edge, until it was discovered that the dwarf monkey has 1g of brain per 27g (0.95oz) of body, and the capuchin monkey has 1g of brain per 17,5g body, whereas man has 1 gram of brain to 44g of body.
Most scientists believe that "photographic memory" is a myth. Clever people train their brains to remember well. In fact, as humans we simply do not remember things well. Of the three beings known to be able to recognise themselves in the mirror, the orangutang, the dolphin and the human, only the latter turns around and instantly cannot remember what his/her own face looks like. (Try drawing a picture of yourself without looking in the mirror:)
Brain power
The human brains consists of more than 100 billion neurons (nerve cells) through which the brain's commands are sent in the form of electric pulses. These pulses travel at more than 400 km/h (250 mph), creating enough electricity to power a lightbulb. The brain consumes more energy than any other organ, burning up a whopping one-fifth of the food we take in.
It is estimated that the mental capacity of a 100-year old human with perfect memory could be represented by computer with 10 to the power of 15 bits (one petabit). At the current rate of computer chip development, that figure can be reached in about 35 years. However, that represents just memory capacity, not the extremely complex processes of thought creation and emotions.
But consider this: for all the complexity of the brain, you still have only one thought at a time. Make it a positive thought.
FactoidsOne-quarter of the brains in used to control the eye. We actually see with our brains, with the eyes basically being cameras.You're born with 300 bones, but when you get to be an adult, you only have 206.

Welcome

Assalam aleikum,

Welcome to my blog. We are two cousins who are Libyan and live in the UK. We wish, through this blogosphere, to communicate the experiences and culture of an anglo-libyan. We are fortunate to experience a melee of cultures through our own selves, famillies and the wider multicultural societies in which we live. We hope that this blog will serve to be a portal into different cultures, an enlightenment to those in darkness, we hope to educate and cultivate our minds. We wish to encourage debate and self-expression without barriers. It is only through speech and expression that we can further ourselves, it is the sine qua non of mankind. There shall be no frontiers uncrossed, no gates unopened, no curtains undrawn, no doors unopened and as the great Poet Laureate, Edwin Morgan said " Now let us begin, open the doors and begin".

Afnan and Aya

Thursday, 13 September 2007

Getting ready for university!

Tuesday, 11 September 2007

Hey again!

Monday, 10 September 2007

Poem for today!

Weekly critique

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