Azure Sky Research Articles

„Hiszpania! Jakież czarodziejskie słowo, jakże uroczo brzmi ten wyraz!" Obraz Hiszpanii na przełomie XIX i XX wieku w polskich listach z podróży

Modern Polish ideas about the Iberian Peninsula can often be summarised in slogans: azure sky, beautiful women, bullfighting, Don Quixote from La Mancha. Has this image of Spain been with us for centuries, or has it been “produced” by modern mass tourism? The aim of this article is to analyse travel texts from the 19th and 20th centuries describing journeys around the Iberian Peninsula and an attempt to answer the question of what Spain looks like in the eyes of Poles deprived of their own statehood. Is it terra incognita, an exotic country with a rich history, in which travellers find a reflection in architecture and customs, fascinated by Madrid, Barcelona, and Salamanca? Or maybe it evokes disappointment? The article compares travel letters by four Polish travellers and historians: Aleksander Hirschberg, Adolf Pawiński, Józef Wawel-Louis, and Stanisław Starża. The analysis of the letters was divided into thematic blocks: historical Polish-Spanish relations, perceptions and impressions, opinions about Spaniards and Spanish women, and cultural controversies (corrida, cockfighting).

Blue governmentality: Elemental activism with conservation technologies on plundered seas

For the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, the atmosphere and ocean are channels for movement that are to be used and overcome in direct actions to protect marine environments. To accomplish these missions, they deploy a fleet of ships, helicopters, and drones that intervene to stop violations of conservation laws. In this way, oceanic elements—waves, winds, icebergs, and storms—mediate conservation and conservation technologies. The elements and the technologies that Sea Shepherd exploit both inhibit and make conservation possible.This paper argues that the drone is an exteriorization of the human body whose liberatory potentials are mediated by the atmosphere and ocean. Through ethnographic, textual, and videographic analysis, this article explores blue governmentality—how the azure sky and cyan ocean and the technologies that flow through these elements at once afford and constrain the control of biopower. Understanding blue governmentality means appreciating how the elements mediate movement, communication, and life itself. It requires comprehending how technologies emerge from the body, extend political intentionality, work across the elements, and network with other technologies. This article challenges conservation geography to see governmentality not as a totalizing force but one that is tempered by elemental mediations, technological affordances, and human fallibility.

Louder Than Films: Memory, Affect and the ‘Sublime Image’ in the Work of Joachim Trier

“We have to believe that new images are still possible”. This remark by Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier during a recent event in Oslo entitled ‘The Sublime Image’ speaks to the centrality in his work of images, often of trauma, that aspire to the condition of photographic stills or paintings. A hand against a window, cheerleaders tumbling against an azure sky, an infant trapped under a lake’s icy surface: these can certainly be read as sublime images insofar as we might read the sublime as an affect—a sense of the ineffable or the shock of the new. However, for Trier, cinema is an art of memory and here too, this article argues, his films stage an encounter with the temporal sublime and the undecidability of memory. Offering readings of Trier’s four feature films to date which center on their refraction of memory through crystal-images, the article emphasizes the affective encounter with the films as having its own temporality.

Вірш О. Пушкіна «Я возмужал среди печальных бурь» у двох музичних прочитаннях українських композиторів – Є. Станковича та Ю. Іщенка

У статті розглянуто ІІ частину Камерної симфонії № 4 «Пам’яті Поета» Є. Станковича, а також романс для голосу з фортепіано Ю. Іщенка. Центральним для Станковича став образ «небесної лазурі», що вплинуло на загальний просвітлений та умиротворений характер музики. Іщенко акцентує внутрішню напругу, сумніви та тривогу як домінантні образи. Об’єднуючим елементом музичних прочитань виступила гармонія, якій обидва композитори відвели першочергову роль.

“Orrin de Wolf”

“Orrin de Wolf” Mary Livermore Chainless blow the singing breezes, underneath the azure sky,Fetterless the bright bird’s pinion, winging upwards far and high:Reinless are the steeds of morning, bearing light o’er earth and sea,And the silvery waves are dancing, as they joyed in being free. 5 But in yonder stifled prison, in the suffocating cell,Where a sad and solemn dimness, and a fearful silence dwell,Sitteth one with eyelids drooping, with a pale and sunken face,And a brow, where sin and sorrow have burned in the fi ery trace. 10 Walls, like adamant, enclose him, fetters hold him to the floor,And the free, God-given sunbeams may not pass the bolted door;E’en the breeze but bloweth faintly, when it entereth the cell,And escapeth through the gratings, frighted ’mid the gloom to dwell. 15 All the night, amid the darkness, droppeth down his cheeks the tears,While upon his heart are thronging memories of bye-gone years:From his lips is wrung the anguish of a spirit-bleeding sigh,As he noteth every sun-rise, how his death-day draweth nigh. 20 Brethren, are ye dealing Christ-like with this fettered darkened mind,Such a crushing weight of sorrow on its very life to bind?With your iron heel of vengeance treading out all love and youth,While the flashings of his heart’s blood, darkly spots your robes of truth? 25 Ay, I know his hands are gory, crimsoned with his fellow’s blood—But will ye, your hands empurple in your brother’s vital flood?Yes, his midnight deed of murder curdles icy-cold the veins—But will ye, the crime revenging, spot o’er your soul with stains? 30 [End Page 372] Do ye not, each virgin morning, and at every star-crowned nightBow in prayer, for mercy suing, of the Judge enthroned in light?If thy unpaid tens of thousands God forgiveth full and free,Shall thy brother’s debt of hundreds be demanded still by thee? 35 If in pure and sinless childhood, he a mother’s heart had pressed,And had drank in holy teachings, closely folded to her breast,If with right and tender guidance she had led his tiny feet,Think you not yon gloom-hung prison, would for him be now unmeet? 40 If a friendly hand had girt him with the panoply divine,If of high and holy motives, made his youthful soul the shrine,If the voice of love had spoken, exorcising wrong and sin,—Think you he’d be chained and fettered, barred those frowning walls within? 45 Then forgive! for GOD forgiveth with a free out-gushing love,Which surrounds us in its fulness, as the sky He stretched above:Draw the bolt! cast off the fetters! and forbid his blood be spilt!Hope ye by the dark ablution to wash out his deed of guilt? 50 Spare him! for we all are brethren, and the chain must not be rivenThat with golden link unites us, fastened to the throne of heaven!Spare him, as ye hope the Father will your plea for mercy hear,When beyond the stars eternal, it ariseth to his ear! [End Page 373] Mary Livermore The Hangman, 30 September 1845 Copyright © 2017 The University Of Nebraska Press

Styling My Hair, I Dream of Ben Franklin

Styling My Hair, I Dream of Ben Franklin Jimmy Long (bio) Closest part to the clouds,you suffer in tedious strandsof moments facing the mirror,meticulously shapedto craft that Lego lookof hair boasting suppression. I flatten you with pomadeand damned if you don'tspring back, as ifsome grinning gnome sitsinside and yanks at the filamentsthat tie me to weekends, to letting go,on the windy hilltop flying kitesin a dark azure sky. Imagine it: unblessedblowing free, discoveringelectricity. [End Page 89] Jimmy Long Since earning a degree in English from Marietta College in 1993, Jimmy Long has pursued a career in the financial services industry. He has recently resumed an active writing life in Charleston, West Virginia, where he works and lives with his family of five. In 2016, Long won first place in poetry for his submission to Mountain Ink Literary Journal. Copyright © 2017 Berea College

Fences, Conservation, and Tourism: a History of the Jackson Hole Wildlife Park

On a pleasant July day in 1948, a small crowd congregated in rows upon rustic logs on the edge of a broad meadow in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Beyond the meadow to the west, they spied glimpses of the Snake River through aspen, fir, and pine trees. On the horizon, Mt. Moran loomed, framed by a vast expanse of azure sky. The crowd’s eyes however were not fixed upon the distant view, but on the small makeshift podium placed at the foot of the benches, and on the seven dignitaries who were scheduled to speak that day (Figure 1). They had come to dedicate the Jackson Hole Wildlife Park (JHWP). Conceived in 1945, the Park would provide controlled habitat for a host of primarily big game animals from the region, affording tourists the opportunity for education and close-up viewing of native mammals.

Double Creek Girl

Double Creek Girl Silas House (bio) for Sylvia Woods They don't expect much out of girlsraised on Double Creek.Up where the pines hang lowover the road like a tunneland the sun doesn't riseuntil the rest of the worldhas had its coffee and forgottenthe magic of morning already, up where evening mist breathesover the clean graveyardand gardens with their straight rows.They don't think girls from a placelike Double Creek will amount to anything at all.Especially when you were littleand they had pictures of girlslike you in all the magazines.Life and Look and Time. Oncea man from National Geographic came and took pictures up there.Girls in dresses their mothers madethem and stringy hair, hollow-eyed,hungry-eyed, sad-eyed.But you defied them, Double Creek Girl.You showed them. Every timeyou opened a book and drank it uplike spring water. Each time you read [End Page 72] a poem and closed your eyes at the end,savoring it like a good hunkof cornbread, seeing itlike an azure sky, tastingthe words like the wet in a bloom of honeysuckle. You showed themwhen you listened to every wordthe teacher said and walkedthat commencement line and tookyour degree from the handof the professor who wassecretly one of them. He neverthought you could do it. But you did. See here, our Appalachia, ourbone and blood. Listen, ourDouble Creek girl: you arewhat happens when we knowthat God lives in betweenthe pages of books and at the tipsof pencils and on the sharpedges of notebook paper. That's something they'll never know. [End Page 73] Silas House Silas House is the author of four novels, two plays, and a book of nonfiction, as well as the editor of several books. House currently serves as writer-in-residence at Lincoln Memorial University and will become the NEH Chair in Appalachian Studies at Berea College in Fall 2010. Copyright © 2010 Berea College

Gerard David’s The Rest on the Flight into Egypt

Gerard David’s <i>The Rest on the Flight into Egypt</i>

The Chapel of The Magi.

A glittering cavalcade of men and animals winds through a rocky landscape under an azure sky. The men are dressed in all the luxury of Italian 15th-century fashions, in brilliant colours, damask, gold brocade. They ride horses and camels with various creatures to amuse them - dogs, cheetahs and monkeys. In the background are forests and picturesque towered towns. This is the procession of the Magi on their way to worship the newborn Christ, painted in the chapel of the Medici's palace in Florence by Benozzo Gozzoli in 1459. For their sheer beauty, their precision, and their almost fairy-tale quality, these frescoes have always been among the most popular of all western paintings. The photographs in this book were taken after the chapel's recent cleaning. Not only do the colours glow with a new brilliance, but numerous features have been revealed that could not be seen before. The book illustrates the chapel wall by wall, showing the entire surface and then a series of details reproduced in actual size. Cristina Acidini Luchinat is an art historian and conservationist who has worked on a number of major art restoration projects, including Gozzoli's frescoes. Her lucid texts, complementing the pictures, examine the chapel as a whole, its art-historical context, the individual murals, and the problems and procedures involved in the conservation of the paintings.

The language of images in geography

In the cities in which we live, all of us see hundreds of publicity images every day of our lives.... In no other form of society has there been such a concentration of images, such a density of visual messages (Berger, 1972: 129). My first image of the Canadian West was from a picture on a calendar in our farmhouse in southern Ontario. The image was of a field of golden wheat blowing in the wind under a sunny and azure sky (Francis, 1989: xv). A strong corporate image influences the predisposition to buy a company's products, speak favourably of it, believe its statements, apply for a job with it, and the like (Worcester, 1986: 604). The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image (Debord, 1977: thesis 34). With the emergence of a truly spectacular body of experiments, imagery is one of the hottest topics in cognitive science (Block, 1981: 1).

Glowing Clouds in an Azure Sky: A Newly Discovered Royal Pageant (translated by Lindy Li Mark and Samuel H. N. Cheung)

(1986). Glowing Clouds in an Azure Sky: A Newly Discovered Royal Pageant (translated by Lindy Li Mark and Samuel H. N. Cheung) CHINOPERL: Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 1-14.

A Different Kind of “Scripture”: Women’s Access to Religious Knowledge Without the Written Word

Kyrgyzstan in 2004. My hostmother Nurgul and her best friend Ainura decided to show me an important site just outside the village. Together with my two hostsisters, nine and fourteen years old, we set off and twenty minutes later we arrived at an overgrown site: a field, the size of a football pitch, surrounded by what could havebeen the overgrown remainder of ruined walls. It was an awe-inspiring sight – the snowcapped Altai-mountains in the background, lush vegetation around us, an azure sky above, and not a sound to be heard. This was, my hostmother explained, the place where Manas, the Kyrgyz national hero, had built a fortress, and it was a sacred site. We circumambulated the site while listening to more stories about Kyrgyzstan’s hero of a thousand years ago. Then, just before we turned to walk home, my hostmother suggested to her friend to “read the Qur’an”. We squatted down in that typically Central Asian way and fell silent. Then Ainura cupped her hands in her lap and began to “read the Qur’an”. Only there was no Qur’an. And her recitation was in an Arabic I could not even remotely recognise. We finished our prayer with the “omeen”3 gesture and made our way home.

Homeric Epithets in Greek Lyric Poetry

One of the ways in which a poet may show his quality is by discrimination and originality in his choice of adjectives. Poetry likes to adorn the bare noun; a noun such as ‘the sky’ calls out for an attribute. But in practice the poet has to take care to avoid the cliche. He can seldom write ‘the blue sky’; even ‘the azure sky’ has become trite. He has to search for the epithet which will be both apt and original.

A Note on Source Influences in Shelley's Cloud and Skylark

Mrs. Shelley in her preface to her husband's collected poems remarked:There are others, such as the “Ode to the Sky Lark,” and “The Cloud,” which, in the opinion of many critics, bear a purer poetical stamp than any other of his productions. They were written as his mind prompted, listening to the carolling of the bird, aloft in the azure sky of Italy; or marking the cloud as it sped across the heavens, while he floated in his boat on the Thames.