David Turri's Blog, page 3
March 13, 2015
Tabloid Herodotus 3: Persians and Magi
No race is so ready to adopt foreign ways as the Persian. Pleasures, too, of all sorts they are quick to indulge when they get to know about them – a notable instance is pederasty, which they learned from the Greeks.
The Persians are very fond of wine…If an important decision is to be made, they discuss the question when they are drunk, and the following day the master of the house in which the discussion was held submits their decision for reconsideration when they are sober. If they still approve it, it is adopted; if not, it is abandoned. Conversely, any decision they make when they are sober, is reconsidered afterwards when they are drunk.
The Magi are a peculiar caste, quite different from the Egyptian priests and indeed from any other sort of person. The Egyptian priests make it an article of religion to kill no living creature except for sacrifice, but the Magi not only kill anything, except dogs and men, with their own hands but make a special point of doing so; ants, snakes, animals, birds – no matter what, they kill them indiscriminately. Well, it is an ancient custom, so let them keep it.
February 26, 2015
Ghosts
A few months ago, my occult novel “29 Argyle Drive” http://www.amazon.com/David-Turri was published. Although the action of the novel takes place in Christchurch, New Zealand, the seeds for it were planted in my head when I heard a number of stories and first-hand anecdotes from acquaintances concerning strange, paranormal goings-on in the Kyobashi district of Osaka.
Kyobashi, the district in which Osaka castle, with its wide park lands, stands, is perhaps the most blood-stained area in the whole city.
The castle was destroyed during brutal samurai fighting in 1614 and 1615. The peasants who lived in the villages around the castle suffered the worst. Men, women and children were slaughtered until the water of the Ogawa River, which still winds pleasantly through the park lands, ran red with their blood; and the river’s flow was clogged by corpses. The male ones without their heads. (The attacking samurai had to take back proof of their kill count – the kubi of the warriors they had slain. It was easier to cut off the heads of the male villagers.)
Later, it was rebuilt, and in the Meiji era, the castle grounds became an integral part of the Osaka Army Arsenal. By the time World War 2 broke out, the arsenal covered several acres of weapon-producing Japanese Army factories that spread into the surrounding districts. Sixty thousand people worked there. The arsenal became a prime target during the air raids of 1945.
On March 13, during a low-level night-raid, 43 bombers swept over Osaka, dropping napalm bombs and killing nearly four thousand people. There were eight further raids, many of them targeting the arsenal, and a total of ten thousand people were killed.
The most devastating raid occurred on August 14 – the very day that Japan surrendered unconditionally to the Allies – when 150 B-29s swept over the district, dropping 700 one-ton bombs, and completely destroying the arsenal, killing nearly 400 of the people working there at the time. The most tragic incident happened in the early afternoon when elements of the attacking force dropped bombs directly onto Kyobashi Station. Two crowded train had just pulled into the station when the bombs started falling. More than 700 civilians died, of which 500 were never identified.
Ms. T, an acquaintance of mine, is a very down-to-earth Osakan businesswoman. She numbers among her long-standing high school friends two people who are blessed or cursed with second-sight – ESP – the sixth sense. They can see the dead.
The man, while a university student, was employed nights by a business hotel located in the Kyobashi district. Part of his duty was, periodically throughout the night, to check on each floor to make sure it was secure.
There was one particular floor in that hotel for which he had to steel himself, this young man with the ‘sixth sense’, before the elevator doors opened. For they opened onto a hallway swarming with battling samurai.
They fight one another furiously the whole length of the hallway. There is no ‘sound-track’; and the specters themselves are not of aware of the man walking through their midst. Nor are the hotel’s guests aware of the strange scene that plays itself out along the hallway of that floor.
An interesting aside. Ms T.’s friend’s extra-sensory powers remained strong until he got married. They weakened considerably thereafter and disappeared completely with the birth of his first child.
Ms. T’s other high school friend has come into contact with the latter in the vicinity of Kyobashi station. Ms. T arranged to meet her for dinner at a restaurant in the area, located in the basement of an office building. Even as they went down the stairs, Ms. T noticed that her friend appeared to be unwell.
They settled at their table and studied the menu. The restaurant was already crowded. Her friend was suddenly sweating and flushed. I feel sick, she said. I have to get out. They climbed back up the stairs into the fresh air, where she recovered.
“There are things down there. I couldn’t see them, but I could feel them. They made me sick and they scared me.”
Another acquaintance of mine, Ms. A used to work in one of the office buildings in the area. Often she noticed ghostly male figures standing in the elevator halls. They wore factory clothes, and she believes they are the specters of men who worked in the armament factories that were bombed during the B-29 raids. They cause no trouble, and nobody sees them except her. But there is a locker room on one of the floors that does make the office girls uneasy. They don’t like to be in it alone; and they get out as soon as they have changed.
On the other side of the castle parklands from that building stands another. It’s not a high-rise; less than ten floors. A small company owns it. The top floor is filled with meeting rooms. But ten years ago, that floor used to be a dormitory for new employees – until one year’s new recruits boycotted it. Refused to sleep there anymore. The reason? Their slumber was disturbed nightly by a samurai on a horse galloping wildly through the dormitory corridors. Management gave way; now the top floor is a meeting space, and the new employees sleep peacefully elsewhere.
Among the teaching staffs of schools in the area, especially those in the vicinity of the castle park lands, there seems to be a similar unspoken understanding that students are encouraged not to hang around the school grounds in the evening. The teachers themselves don’t linger too late.
February 11, 2015
Tabloid Herodotus: Marriage in Babylon
The most ingenious (of the Babylonian practices) in my opinion is a custom which, I understand, they share with the Eneri of Illyria. In every village once a year all the girls of marriageable age used to be collected together in one place, while the men stood around them in a circle; an auctioneer then called each one in turn to stand up and offered her for sale, beginning with the best-looking and going on to the second best as soon as the first had been sold for a good price.
Marriage was the object of the transaction.
The rich men who wanted wives bid against each other for the prettiest girls, while the humbler folk, who had no use of good looks in a wife, were actually paid to take the ugly ones, for when the auctioneer had got through all of the pretty girls he would call upon the plainest to stand up and then ask who was willing to take the least money to marry her – and she was knocked down to whoever accepted the smallest sum. The money came from the sales of the beauties, who in this way provided dowries for their ugly sisters.
February 1, 2015
29 Argyle Drive
[http://www.amazon.com/David-Turri
The fictional address of the title is an old house that stands in the hills above the pretty seaside suburb of Sumner in Christchurch, New Zealand. The house is bought by a retired teacher who at the time ran an English language institute, part of Christchurch's flourishing study-abroad industry. His plan is to shift the school from its cramped premises in the central city area out to Sumner. The neglect of more than a decade must first be cleared away. It is during this that the spiritual entities that infest the house first reveal themselves.
As the blurb says: “Some old houses are better left in the neglected state into which they have fallen…Some painful things should remain forgotten…”
The story contains all the usual suspects of the occult genre as the details of the house’s past are revealed – the Ouija Board; a séance; a terrifying walk-through of the house by New Zealand’s most famous medium; an exorcism; a stalking spiritual entity; spiritual possession and demonic possession.
The tale is set against the background of the once-beautiful city of Christchurch, which was destroyed by earthquake in February 2011.
While 29 Argyle Drive is an occult novel, it is also about our – and the media’s – obsession with things occult, as exemplified by the many thousands of websites devoted to the bizarre.
At the end, the focus shifts from a fictional horror story to a requiem for the real horror the people of Christchurch suffered on that February day; and which they still suffer.
booksgosocial.com/2015/01/06/29-argyl...
January 27, 2015
The Five-Hundred Club: The Riddle of the Linear B Inscription
The eccentric and visionary Professor —————-, archeologist and often-spellbinding teacher of Greek History, was a major contributor, throughout the 1950s, to the knowledge we now possess of the Greek Bronze Age [ca. 1600-1100BC]
In 1955, the Professor, on a dig in the environs of the Mycenae Palace, unearthed what he believed to be a type of tholos tomb dating from the Late Helladic period [LH 1550-1060BC]. It was in this that he discovered the inscription which caused such a stir when his translation of it appeared in an issue of The Journal of Mycenaean Studies, in June 1956. Below, we reprint part of that article.
[Note: Linear B, the early Greek writing system referred to in the article, was adapted by the Mycenaeans from the earlier Minoan Linear A and was used primarily for keeping Palace records, especially trade invoices. The work of deciphering it was done between 1951 and 1953 by Ventris and Chadwick.]
***
The writing is on the wall. It is located within the tholos itself, on the wall to the left of the entrance.
Clearly, it is written in Linear B and consists of syllabic signs of phonetic value intermingled with ideograms having only semantic/pictorial significance. I also detect elements of earlier Cretan hieroglyphs. As Linear B scholarship is still in its infancy, my interpretation perforce remains tentative; certainly, speculative. Taking each syllable and ideogram
in order, let us proceed.
First, a marking indicating – Life/determination/the (human) will?
Then, a noun phrase: the noun seems to represent a People/Race.
The attributive adjective clearly means “last”, but in what context?
The last survivors of mankind?
Next, a verb indicative of (mass) exodus? A wholesale leaving – but of what? There follows an ideogram. It is a semi-circle with marks incised within it. Could this represent the earth itself?
After that, a syllable that could be rendered in English by the adverb Please. It sounds almost like a plea. But a plea to do what? To remember. Remember what? A plea to remember something (an event?) that has already happened?
What follows is chilling.
It could be either a transitive/intransitive verb or a gerund; it could be in the active or the passive voice.
I translate it into English as: Blow up.
(A cosmic explosion?)
The verb seems to have an object – the very last marking of the message – but it is in the form of an ideogram.
The ideogram could be a direct object – blow up what? Or it could be an indirect object, rendering the verb itself possibly intransitive.
Be blown up by what?
That ideogram ends the message. What is it a picture of? To my eye, it looks like nothing less than – a rocket.
***
Later excavations concluded that the structure was not in fact a tholos tomb, but a warehouse in which had been stored the staples of Mycenaean trade – olive oil, wine, timber, copper, gold and tin. The mysterious inscription which the Professor first revealed to the world has now been deciphered with some certainty. It reads:
Will the last person
To leave the chamber
Please remember to blow out the candle
http://disqus.com/embed/comments/?base=default&version=3bb0a1cd864c9793d5c6f12bf07cee2e&f=thefivehundred&t_u=http%3A%2F%2Fthe-five-hundred.com%2Ftheriddle&t_d=The%20Five%20Hundred%20-%20The%20Riddle%20of%20the%20Linear%20B%20Inscription%20by%20David%20Turri%20%28500%20words%29&t_t=The%20Five%20Hundred%20-%20The%20Riddle%20of%20the%20Linear%20B%20Inscription%20by%20David%20Turri%20%28500%20words%29&s_o=default#2
January 14, 2015
Herodotus Tabloid: Those Naughty Babylonians
There is one custom among these people which is wholly shameful: every woman who is a native of the country must once in her life go and sit in the temple of Aphrodite and give herself to a strange man.
Many of the rich women, who are too proud to mix with the rest, drive to the temple in covered carriages with a whole host of servants following behind, and there wait; most, however, sit in the precincts of the temple with a band of plaited string around their heads – and a great crowd they are, what with some sitting there, others arriving, others going away – and through them all gangways are marked off running in every direction for the men to pass along and make their choice.
Once a woman has taken her seat she is not allowed to go home until a man has thrown a silver coin into her lap and taken her outside to lie with her…The woman has no privilege of choice – she must go with the first man who throws her the money.
When she has lain with him, her duty to the Goddess is discharged and she may go home…Tall, handsome women soon manage to go home again, but the ugly ones stay a long time before their can fulfill the condition which the law demands, some of them, indeed, as much as three or four years.
[All excerpts are taken from Penguin Classics edition of Herodotus: The Histories]
Tabloid herodotus
Fifth-century Greece produced two major historians: Thucydides, who wrote “The History of the Peloponnesian War” and Herodotus, who gave us “The Histories”, his account of the struggle between the Greek states and The Persian Empire. Thucydides is dauntingly focused on his subject, so much so that over the years, after several attempts, I have never been able to get to the end. Herodotus, on the other hand, is chatty and always wandering off into fascinating asides. It is these side-bar stories that will be the subject of my posts. I have two reasons for sharing the stories with you. First, they are interesting, funny, sometimes shocking and even scurrilous. Tabloid material. Second, I hope this task will keep me focused on The Histories until the end. As I get older, I find the more I read, the less I retain, the faster I forget. Hopefully, I will not have to read the damned thing again. I hope you enjoy these curious tales.
January 13, 2015
Tabloid Herodotus
Fifth-century Greece produced two major historians: Thucydides, who wrote “The History of the Peloponnesian War” and Herodotus, who gave us “The Histories”, his account of the struggle between the Greek states and The Persian Empire. Thucydides is dauntingly focused on his subject, so much so that over the years, after several attempts, I have never been able to get to the end. Herodotus, on the other hand, is chatty and always wandering off into fascinating asides. It is these side-bar stories that will be the subject of my posts. I have two reasons for sharing the stories with you. First, they are interesting, funny, sometimes shocking and even scurrilous. Tabloid material. Second, I hope this task will keep me focused on The Histories until the end. As I get older, I find the more I read, the less I retain, the faster I forget. Hopefully, I will not have to read the damned thing again. I hope you enjoy these curious tales.
December 30, 2014
29 Argyle Drive
29 Argyle Drive
Some old houses are better left in the neglected state into which they have fallen, left until the rusted For Sale signs are choked beneath the weeds that rule their properties. Some painful things should remain forgotten.
This is the story of an old house in the picture-postcard city of Christchurch, New Zealand. It chronicles events that happened at the house in the spring and again in the summer of 2010, events which drew the world’s media like flies to honey.
That media circus christened 29 Argyle Drive “The Hell House” and the place where evidence of horror was discovered “The Hell Hole.” Better it had been left alone and the unseen things within its walls undiscovered.
It is a tale of strange things, but it is also the story of Christchurch itself and its people and the terror and tragedy that befell them in February 2011.
http://www.amazon.com/David-Turri/
December 28, 2014
Kristy
“Kristy” is a flash-fiction story of mine that was recently published on The Five Hundred. Below is the link
http://the-five-hundred.com/kristy
