Béla Viktor János Bartók was a Hungarian composer and ethnomusicologist. He is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century. Through his collection and analytical study of folk music, he was one of the founders of comparative musicology, which became ethnomusicology. Bartók was born in the Banatian town of Nagyszentmiklós in the Kingdom of Hungary on 25 March 1881. Bartók had a diverse ancestry. On his father's side, the Bartók family was a Hungarian lower noble family, originating from Borsodszirák, Borsod, his paternal grandmother was a Catholic of Bunjevci origin, but considered herself Hungarian. Bartók's father was named Béla, she was a native of Turócszentmárton. Paula had Hungarian and Slavic ancestors. Béla displayed notable musical talent early in life: according to his mother, he could distinguish between different dance rhythms that she played on the piano before he learned to speak in complete sentences. By the age of four he was able to play 40 pieces on the piano and his mother began formally teaching him the next year.

Béla was a sickly child and suffered from severe eczema until the age of five, as a result of an inoculation with a faulty smallpox vaccine, with his facial disfigurement causing him to avoid people. In 1888, when he was seven, his father died suddenly, his mother took him and his sister, Erzsébet, to live in Nagyszőlős and to Pozsony. He gave his first public recital aged 11 to a warm critical reception. Among the pieces he played was his own first composition, written two years previously: a short piece called "The Course of the Danube". Shortly thereafter László Erkel accepted him as a pupil. From 1899 to 1903, Bartók studied piano under István Thomán, a former student of Franz Liszt, composition under János Koessler at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest. There he met Zoltán Kodály, who made a strong impression on him and became a lifelong friend and colleague. In 1903, Bartók wrote his first major orchestral work, Kossuth, a symphonic poem which honored Lajos Kossuth, hero of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848.

The music of Richard Strauss, whom he met in 1902 at the Budapest premiere of Also sprach Zarathustra influenced his early work. When visiting a holiday resort in the summer of 1904, Bartók overheard a young nanny, Lidi Dósa from Kibéd in Transylvania, sing folk songs to the children in her care; this sparked his lifelong dedication to folk music. From 1907, he began to be influenced by the French composer Claude Debussy, whose compositions Kodály had brought back from Paris. Bartók's large-scale orchestral works were still in the style of Johannes Brahms and Richard Strauss, but he wrote a number of small piano pieces which showed his growing interest in folk music; the first piece to show clear signs of this new interest is the String Quartet No. 1 in A minor, which contains folk-like elements. In 1907, Bartók began teaching as a piano professor at the Royal Academy; this position enabled him to work in Hungary. Among his notable students were Fritz Reiner, Sir Georg Solti, György Sándor, Ernő Balogh, Lili Kraus.

After Bartók moved to the United States, he taught Violet Archer. In 1908, he and Kodály traveled into the countryside to collect and research old Magyar folk melodies, their growing interest in folk music coincided with a contemporary social interest in traditional national culture. They made some surprising discoveries. Magyar folk music had been categorised as Gypsy music; the classic example is Franz Liszt's famous Hungarian Rhapsodies for piano, which he based on popular art songs performed by Romani bands of the time. In contrast, Bartók and Kodály discovered that the old Magyar folk melodies were based on pentatonic scales, similar to those in Asian folk traditions, such as those of Central Asia and Siberia. Bartók and Kodály set about incorporating elements of such Magyar peasant music into their compositions, they both quoted folk song melodies verbatim and wrote pieces derived from authentic songs. An example is his two volumes entitled For Children for solo piano, containing 80 folk tunes to which he wrote accompaniment.

Bartók's style in his art music compositions was a synthesis of folk music and modernism. His melodic and harmonic sense was profoundly influenced by the folk music of Hungary and other nations, he was fond of the asymmetrical dance rhythms and pungent harmonies found in Bulgarian music. Most of his early compositions offer a blend of late Romanticism elements. In 1909, at the age of 28, Bartók married Márta Ziegler, aged 16, their son, Béla Bartók III, was born the next year. After nearly 15 years together, Bartók divorced Márta in June 1923. Two months after his divorce, he married Ditta Pásztory, a piano student, ten days after proposing to her, she was aged 19, he 42. Their son, Péter, was born in 1924. In 1911, Bartók wrote what wa

The Ogre's Wife: Fairy Tales for Grownups is a collection of fantasy short stories by American writer Richard Parks. It was first published in trade paperback by Obscura Press in August 2002. A Kindle edition was issued in 2011; the collection was nominated for the 2003 World Fantasy Award for Best Collection. An "absolute treasure of a collection," the book collects fifteen novelettes and short stories by the author, one original to the collection, together with an introduction by Parke Godwin, it includes three of his "Eli Mothersbaugh" stories, "Wrecks," "The God of Children," and "A Respectful Silence." The Kindle edition includes the author's notes on the stories in an appendix. "Ghosts, Gods, a Dragon, Assorted Legends and Things That Go Bump in the Heart: An Introduction" "The Ogre's Wife" - Marybeth of Tumby, given as bride to an ogre in return for him sparing her village, must find some accommodation with her monstrous husband. "How Konti Scrounged the World" - Konti is the least of the gods.

When the other deities take to making worlds, he wants one too, unable to create, has to beg bits of his compatriots' works to form his own. The result is unexpected. "The Beauty of Things Unseen" - A fairy funeral is put off due to a disruption of the glamour that keeps the fairies' haven safe. The pooka Mordhu, whose funeral it was, is charged with finding and quelling the disruption before the ceremony can go forward. "Doing Time in the Wild Hunt" - Ray Wolver sees a white doe on his way to work, sees it again. He dreams of hunting it as one of a pack of dogs; the dream becomes reality, intertwined somehow with his distant relationship with his wife Mary Beth. "My Lord Teaser" - John of Devonleigh—"Running Jack"—is indeed on the run. With his doom upon him, he is given a way out, passage to the land of the Sidhe to become the queen's lover—and the king's quarry. Only if he plays his role well, might there be hope for him. "Doppels" - Doppels are the coming thing in acting. All acting contracts now include a provision to get doppeled, as aging actor Kent Doolan has just discovered the hard way.

So what's left for an obsolescent actor contractually bound to train his replacement? "Wrecks" - High-tech ghost hunter Eli Mothersbaugh tries to bring peace to a ghost haunting a train station—and the ghost's living daughter. "The God of Children" - Eli Mothersbaugh is called in by his old friend Hiro Yamada, whose mother is haunted by an unusual spirit. "A Respectful Silence" - At an abandoned airfield, Eli assists a pilot's ghost in making her final report. "The Trickster's Wife" - Sigyn, engaged in her interminable task of catching the serpent's venom dripping on her bound husband Loki, is visited in turn by Hel and the Norns, each of whom seems to want something from her. "A Place to Begin" - Umi, a child with limitless potential, is bought by the sorceress White Willow, set to simple tasks with simple prohibitions. She disobeys and understanding things she never did before. "Take a Long Step" - The lost shoe is a symptom. Can it be stopped, or delayed? "Judgment Day" - God ruminates on his failures as Judgment Day approaches, arrives—but it's not quite what he, or anyone, expects.

"Borrowed Lives" - Joshua Cullen buys a photograph of an unknown woman at a flea market, and, on a whim, uses it to replace that of his former wife. At once he finds himself with a different past, a different wife, a different fate. "Golden Bell and the Marquis of Zeng" - Seven, a young man of Zeng, falls in love from afar with Jia Jin, a concubine intended for sacrifice when the ruling Marquis dies. Desperate to save her, he seeks out a lady of the Heavenly Court, for aid. All it will cost him is his heart and soul... "Appendix: Story Notes" Parke Godwin called the book "one of the best SF/fantasy collections I've read in years" and wrote of Parks that "ike any fine writer doesn't label which makes him hell for lazy-minded pigeonholers, but his themes are consistent and clear. He uses fantasy to underscore reality: the nature of our humanity and the inescapability of what we are, the choices we make and the price we pay for each, right or wrong.... E can step imperceptibly from deadpan funny to affecting truth with an utterly transparent style that has the reader racing down the page has the rare ability to say profound things simply."Charles de Lint in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction wrote "Like the best storytellers, goes where the tale takes him, proceeds to write that story as truthfully as possible."Terry McGarry in the webzine Strange Horizons noted that "iscovering Richard Parks's fiction is like discovering a wise Zen master pumping gas at a service station or a weathered swami slinging burgers at your favorite corner diner: transcendence in the midst of the ordinary, right wher

Cortinarius argyrionus is a species of sequestrate fungus in the family Cortinariaceae. Described as a new species in 2010, it is known only from New South Wales; the species was first described scientifically by Australian mycologists Melissa Danks, Teresa Lebel, Karl Verns in a 2010 issue of the journal Persoonia. The type collection was made in Armidale, New South Wales in July 2008. Molecular analysis shows that the species groups in a clade with species in the section Purpurascentes of the genus Cortinarius, along with the sequestrate C. caesibulga and C. cinereoroseolus, the agarics C. porphyropus and C. purpurascens. The specific epithet argyrionus is derived from the Ancient Greek word meaning "silvery violet", refers to the sheen and colour of the fruit bodies; the fruit body of Cortinarius argyrionus is sequestrate, meaning that its spores are not forcibly discharged from the basidia, it remains enclosed during all stages of development, including at maturity. The caps range in shape from spherical to pear-shaped or like an inverted cone, have dimensions of 0.7–3.8 cm by 0.6–2 cm.

Caps are attached to the stipe by a cottony partial veil, violet before becoming paler in maturity. The outer skin is wrinkled, coloured pale violet to silvery-grey, with a metallic sheen; the white to cream-coloured flesh has a diameter of 0.5–1.5 mm, is thickest at the top of the fruit body. The internal hymenium-bearing structure is brown. A white to silvery violet stipe extends into the fruit body through its entire length. Fruit bodies have no distinctive taste, but possess an odour the authors describe as "strong earthy fungoid". Spores are egg-shaped, measure 7.7–9 by 5–6.5 μm. They are densely covered with nodules; the basidia are club-shaped to cylindrical, four-spored, measure 20–40 by 5–7 μm. The fruit bodies of Cortinarius argyrionus are found in the ground under leaf litter in low-lying hills and plains near Mount Duval, they occur in June and July and grow in large clusters, sometimes with the fruit bodies clumped together. Nearby vegetation associated with the fungus includes Acacia filicifolia, Eucalyptus nova-anglica, E. stellulata, E. viminalis, Hakea microcarpa, H. salicifolia and Leptospermum flavescens.

List of Cortinarius species Cortinarius argyrionus in Index Fungorum