↓
 

The Icarian

The Icarian
  • Blog
  • Music
    • RDScally and The Obstweedles – Discography
    • RDScally and Weasels – Discography
  • Video
    • Ireland Inside & Out
    • Time Crime Adjudicator

The Icarian Blog Returns – Corona Virus Edition

The Icarian

The Icarian blog is back. Again.

This Icarian iteration combines video, audio, writing, photography and illustrations in a retro early 2000s-style blog website format.

The Icarian is the web home of RDScally and The Obstweedles and their musical stuff. The Icarian is also the cyber home of the short film “Time Crime Adjudicator: The Case of The Missing Infinity Cube”, which is currently in production with a projected release date in late 2021. The video series “Ireland Inside & Out” also makes its web home here. Please check out the videos on YouTube and give them each a thumbs up.

Voltaire thinking about Candide
Voltaire thinking about Candide

Stay tuned for super-interesting (if we do say so ourselves, and we do) posts about The Obsteedles’ upcoming interpretation of Voltaire’s Candide – Gardening With Candide or The Optimist Grows It Alone.

If you would like to receive email alerts of Icarian blog posts, please use the form on the upper right of the webpage to enter your email and subscribe to little message that wills camper into your inbox whenever a new post appears here. After you’ve subscribed, please click on the link in the box below the email subscription form to follow The Obstweedles on Spotify.

If you you received this message as an email and DO NOT want email alerts from The Icarian blog please unsubscribe.
Otherwise, if you are already a subscriber, do nothing. Except maybe you can tell other people who might be interested in the kinds things that may appear here.

This version of The Icarian blog is a word-of-mouth thing. The site itself will not be on Facebook or Twitter.
Email forwarding of posts is cool and encouraged. If YOU want to post a link tone of The Icarian’s posts on social media, that’s great and encouraged.
No social media links. No cookies. No ads. The Icarian does use YouTube, Spotify, Bandcamp.com and email.
Since The Icarian is self-funded and there is no free lunch when publishing on the Internet, a Patreon account may soon appear here in an attempt to help “monetize” this nonsense.

Thank you.

Gardening With Candide – The Optimist Grows It Alone

The Icarian Posted on November 6, 2020 by adminNovember 6, 2020

Out now on Bandcamp!

Voltaire, Butt-Biting Sex Apes, A Mutilated Slave and Candide

The Icarian

François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire, was born in November 1664 in Paris.

He was the youngest child of a lawyer/civil servant father and a mum who was low-ranking nobility. He had a brother and two sisters. His was a sort of an upper middle class family 350 years ago in Paris.

Voltaire was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher. Voltaire is famous for his wit, intellect and cutting criticism of Christianity, especially the Roman Catholic Church. And for writing Candide.

Voltaire was an advocate of free speech, freedom of religion and separation of church and state. Any one of of those things could get you into A LOT of trouble in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.

Voltaire thinking about Candide
“The Best Of All Posssible Worlds” Voltaire thinking about Candide

He was imprisoned twice and temporarily exiled to England once for criticizing the French government. Voltaire wound up doing hard time for a naughty rhyme. A satirical verse accusing the Régent of incest with his daughter resulted in an 11-month, from May 1717 to April 1718, in a windowless cell with 10-foot thick walls in the Bastille.

Candide meets a slave mutil
Candide meets a slave mutilated in the Caribbean sugar fields.

Following his Bastille stint, François-Marie Arouet became Voltaire. The origin of the Voltaire moniker is unclear, but apparently refers to the Arouet’s family’s home area in France. As Voltaire, he kept on writing and kept on being very naughty in various ways.

One fact about Voltaire’s life is certain. Voltaire was one mean writing mo-sheen.

Voltaire wrote in almost every literary genre. He wrote plays, poems, novels and essays. He produced respected historical and scientific works. During an 82-year lifetime, he dashed off more than 20,000 letters while churning out more than 2,000 books and pamphlets. And the guy didn’t even have a typewriter.

But with Candide Voltaire scored his greatest hit writing as a satirist criticizing intolerance, religious dogma, and French institutions of his time.

Voltaire's character Candide encounters Butt Biting Sex Apes
Voltaire’s character Candide encounters Butt Biting Sex Apes

Published under secretive circumstances in 1759, Candide, ou l’Optimisme (Candide, or The Optimist)
simultaneously became a great success and great scandal. Candide was immediately banned due to religious blasphemy, political sedition, and hostility to authority all disguised as naïveté.

This made Voltaire’s wild tale of Candide wildly popular.

Three hundred and sixty years later Candide is considered Voltaire’s magnum opus. Many scholars consider Candide a vital part of literature’s Western canon.

Leonard Bernstein,1955

With its fantastical story line, pointed humor and insightful portrayal of the human condition, Candide has inspired numerous authors and artists to adapt it to their times. Indeed, the concept of gardening with Candide has even spawned an app to sell you gardening stuff. Within this slim novella, Voltaire’s Candide travels the known world, encountering butt-biting sex apes (spoiler alert: it doesn’t end well), the Inquisition, an earthquake and tsunami. Voltaire even manages to highlight the savagery of slavery when Candide meets with a slave mutilated in the French Caribbean sugar cane fields.

And that brings us to Gardening With Candide, or The Optimist Grows It Alone and why Candide is relevant during these new times of plague and political failure. It’s RDScally and the Obstweedles turn at perverting Voltaire’s demented yet insightful adventure yarn.

Nitty gritty details about Voltaire, Candide’s adventures and The Obstweedles’ own HGTV-meets-corona-virus era interpretation is revealed in Part Deux: “The Best Of All Possible Worlds.” It’ll even explain the butt-biting sex apes. Promise.

Meanwhile, here’s a sample track from Gardening With Candide.

Read Candide & other stuff by Voltaire

Candide 1759 book cover

Link to 100% FREE Candide ebook download:

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19942

Link to 100% FREE ebooks of other works by Voltaire from Project Gutenberg:

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/913

Under emergency reconstruction

The Icarian Posted on April 4, 2020 by adminApril 5, 2020

Due to technical difficulties within our control, and which were our OWN fault the I’m busting butt to fix things.

Yeah, I know. Should’uh done a backup.

SUBSCRIBE!

Loading

Follow The Obs’ On Spotify

RDScally and The Obstweedles 

Click Here To Follow

People/Places/Things

  • Digital Shadow Management
  • James Cudziol - Artist/Painter. Buy his art.
  • Ivan Goldman - Author. Buy his books.
  • Paul Horn - Artist/Cartoonist/Author (Not The Jazz Guy). Buy his stuff.
  • Llewellyn Ludlow - Artist/Surfer. Buy his art.
  • Sharleen K. Nelson - Writer/Author/Photographer. Buy her book.
  • Laura Prebble - Author. Buy her books.
  • Superbad
  • UnitedResistance.com

Previously

  • Gardening With Candide – The Optimist Grows It Alone
  • Voltaire, Butt-Biting Sex Apes, A Mutilated Slave and Candide
  • The Icarian Blog Returns – Corona Virus Edition

Listen 2 Entropy

This site is cookie free. It's also gluetin-free.
©2023 - The Icarian
↑