Wild Unicorn Herd

The constellation Orion—or, possibly, among some Mayan peoples, a turtle—rising over the temple of Kukulkan in the Mayan city of Chichen Itza. The orange star on the left is Betelgeuse and the brightest blue one is Rigel, corrupted English versions of the original names given them by medieval Arab Muslim astronomers.

(Via Phil Plait’s 2012 astrophotography roundup.)

djturtlep:

An Aztec marketplace

Merchants sold all manner of wares in the Great Aztec Market of Tlatelolco, from common food staples—such as maize and beans—to high-quality cloth and animal pelts.

This image of different vendors in an Aztec marketplace comes from the Florentine Codex, an encyclopedia of Aztec life commissioned by the Spanish and illustrated by Aztec artists.

(The Field Museum)

The Aztecs: drawing comics before they were cool.

(“Hey, before we subjugate your people, steal your land, and convert you to Christianity, would you mind answering a few questions? For posterity.”)

jhameia:

nextian:

mintyfizz:

watched me some El Dorado this morning

Okay brace yourself I’m going to have myself a Chel moment (because every moment in my life is a Chel moment)

We can all agree that El Dorado is a colonialist shitfest in a number of ways, but man, do I love the idea of Chel, and also the actuality of Chel. The sum total of what we know about her pre-Tulio & Miguel is that she hates living in El Dorado and wants to get out of there for Reasons, and she stole an idol for cash and split. The quote is, “You’ve got your reasons and I’ve got mine,” and we never find out any of them— I mean, besides wealth and freedom and adventure, which they’re all on board with, but we never find out why ANY of the trio got started conning people—for shits? they grew up disadvantaged? (you will pry my Tulio Is A Morisco canon out of my cold dead hands.) they’re the little mermaid and they just want MORE? (this one is true.) We don’t get to know.

We do know that Chel is growing up in what looks hells of impressive to us, the average movie-goer, but which was not actually that cool a town. Chel is in the age of Tenochtitlan and Cusco and potentially Z — there were a SHIT TON of major urban centers in South and Mesoamerica which Chel would have known about due to the fact that their city is obviously too large to support itself without extensive farming and road connections and trade, despite its Secret Hidden Waterfall Secrets or whatever, so Chel’s a smart girl growing up in a somewhat-to-extremely-sexist society in a town which is basically the South American equivalent of, I don’t know, Austin? Pasadena? She’s obviously run cons before, she knows exactly what a pair of trained conmen need, and she’s also obviously exhausted the patience of the legal system in the city; there are a hell of a lot of reasons she might want and need to get the fuck out of there and they’re all the backstory to The Sting. And she’s still alive! And running and making the best of things and seducing hot Spanish dudes and then she gets to have everything she wants + Miguel. Get it, Chel. Get it.

I dig everything said in this post.

mrmontag:

Portrait of Jorge Luis Borges, Palermo, Sicily, Italy, 1984.

Photo.: Ferdinando Scianna

Magnum Photos

An almost ghostly image of Borges seen through a reflection of a balcony and a landscape of palm trees. Actually it is not quite clear which is the reflection. A sharp white line—the border between two panes of glass—cuts across the nearest palm tree, reminding the viewer that the palm tree is only a reflection and this is only an image. It draws attention to its own artificiality. It perfectly captures the idea of meta (mirrors, stories about stories, reviews of nonexistent books, books within books) that’s one of Borges’ central themes.

wildunicornherd:

fuckyeahlatinamericanhistory:

Octavio Paz & Jorge Luis Borges.

Sci Fi Recs: Contemporary science fiction comprises a plethora of subgenres, national traditions, and fan cultures—and its roots are equally diverse. As far as I’m concerned, it’s just plain wrong to talk about the origin of sf and mention Mary Shelley and Hugo Gernsback but not Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian proto-postmodernist.

Borges didn’t do robots or rocket ships or any of the other superficial trappings of sf. Those are weird subjects; Borges weirded the story itself, and the teller — metafiction, the unreliable narrator, dreams and labyrinths and libraries and memory and time. There’s echoes of his stuff in many writers who write what I think of as “honorary science fiction”, like Eco, Calvino and Saramago, but a good many honest-to-goodness genre-ghetto sf writers count Borges as an influence as well: Jeff VanderMeer, Stanislaw Lem, Lucius Shepard, and (one of my favourite authors) Gene Wolfe, who once said “magic realism is fantasy written by people who speak Spanish”. Personally, I agree that when it comes to speculative fiction we should throw the net as wide as we can—which is why I think of Borges’ stories as sci-fi, plain and simple.

Online work:

• “The Library of Babel” (1941). Hey, who turned out the lights…?
• “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940). Takes the idea of “transformative works” to its logical conclusion.
• “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941).

TL;DR: Just read Ficciones, thank me later.

Rebloggin’ myself for Borges’ birthday.

fuckyeahlatinamericanhistory:

Today’s Google Doodle celebrates Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who was born on August 24, 1899.

Oh shiiiiiit, guys, prepare for Borges spam.