Yeah, I know I’m not art blogging lately. My office is undergoing some moving and revision and the files are boxed up. And so, back to blogging about wacky articles I find on the net.
And speaking of moving boxes and whatnot, the next time your doctor tells you to get some rest and recovery time?
Listen.
I didn’t, and I was gobsmacked for two days confined back to bed, aweary, aweary, oh.
“Black hair announces cowardice and great craftiness, excessively yellow and pale white hair, such as the Scythians and Celts have, reveals ignorance and clumsiness and wildness, and that which is gently yellow points towards an aptitude for learning, gentleness, and skill in art. Unmixed fiery hair like the flower of a pomegranate is not good, since for the most part their characters are beastlike and shameless and greedy. Legs which are very hairy with thick black hair indicate slowness at learning and wildness. Those whose loins and thighs have lots of hair separately from the other parts of the body are very lascivious.”
Okey dokey.
Maybe that’s the real reason why Harrison Ford was waxing off his body hair.
Did I post this one already? What the heck. Here’s Footnotes to Parmenides.
Nietzsche saw that Parmenides was the pivotal figure of the period between 600 and 400 BC, when the history of explicitly rational thought had its beginning. In his wonderful little book Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Nietzsche imagined the “moment of purest, absolutely bloodless abstraction, unclouded by any reality” at which Parmenides arrived at his vision of the world. He admired Parmenides as one of those true thinkers who were prepared, as he put it in Thus Spake Zarathustra, “to feed on the acorns and grass of knowledge and for the sake of truth suffer hunger of the soul.” He attributes a prayer to him: “Grant me, ye gods… but one certainty [even] if it be but a log’s breadth on which to lie, on which to ride upon the sea of uncertainty. Take away everything that comes-to-be, everything lush, colourful, blossoming, illusory… Take all these for yourselves and grant me but the one and only, poor empty certainty.”
Usually considered children’s literature, the fables have been loved by adults as luminous as Aristotle, Erasmus, and Leonardo. Plutarch included Aesop in his gathering of the Seven Sages of ancient Greece. As Socrates awaited execution, he versified Aesop. John Lydgate translated seven Aesop fables into Middle English, Martin Luther translated 20 into German, and Marie de France translated 103 into French. A majority of Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables are retellings of Aesop, and La Fontaine wrote a life of Aesop to accompany them. One of John Locke’s last projects was an edition of Aesop (1703; Locke died in 1704).
Luther, de France, Erasmus, and the rest remembered Aesop as a slave, and for much of European history he was thought to have been Ethiopian, that is, black. As a result, for most of literary history, his fables have been retold as slave tales, ancestors of Uncle Remus’s, carefully coded. A simple story? Few things in literature are as complex.
I knew virtually nothing of what was written in this article. Very interesting.
His reputation as a bad-tempered husband and father is held against him. But it seems to me that the man who emerges from the poems is a man possessed by natural and human beauty, by dreams, myths and legends, a man full of ideas that are sometimes in conflict with one another; who was prepared to give up his vocation as a poet for years in order to serve a political cause; and who overcame blindness to write his greatest work, full of exquisitely imagined scenes. However gnarled and crusty a man, he is a poet who commands attention.
And for something completely different, enjoy this odiferous article about the power of smell in which we learn that Napoleon wrote to Josephine telling her that he would be returning home soon, and asked her not to wash. Apparently, her natural humours were a turn on.
By God, would somebody please burn all my letters after I am dead? I would dearly love not to be humiliated like this.
Then again, I’ve never written anyone asking them not to wash for me so I could enjoy a whiff of their pits. And I wasn’t defeated at Waterloo, either, so there you go.
It follows that hygiene has always been a convenient stick with which to beat other peoples, who never seem to get it right. The outsiders usually err on the side of dirtiness. The ancient Egyptians thought that sitting a dusty body in still water, as the Greeks did, was a foul idea. Late 19th-century Americans were scandalised by the dirtiness of Europeans; the Nazis promoted the idea of Jewish uncleanliness. At least since the Middle Ages, European travellers have enjoyed nominating the continent’s grubbiest country - the laurels usually went to France or Spain. Sometimes the other is, suspiciously, too clean, which is how the Muslims, who scoured their bodies and washed their genitals, struck Europeans for centuries. The Muslims returned the compliment, regarding Europeans as downright filthy.
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And now, more garden goodness from our Little Farm on the Mountain.
Lilacs. Alas, I was too stuffed up with sick to smell them, and bedridden when they bloomed, but we have a small grove of them, and this was the last of the blossoms I got to see.
I want to get some of those new, reblooming lilacs that repeat flower over the summer. They also have yellow lilacs now. Must get one!
I’ve acquired some reblooming azaleas last year, and they are the bomb. I buy off season to get bargains, so that means waiting a year for results, but this spring they look great.
My lavender loves it here. I bought this for my mom, and it does so well here that I have now planted dozens more. It has lasted far beyond its normal life expectancy. I am growing about 100 more plants from seed and hope to have a small commercial operation going within five years.
I don’t expect to make much from it, but there are so many small craftsmen and artisans who make soaps and other goodies, that I think I can sell locally. I will start making my own soon.
We have so many good herbs here, and a mature linden tree, my next project is to make tussie mussie waters and other organic cosmetics. I may bring a few to Charlotte Heroes Con for people to try.
There are not enough peonies in the world.
There is so much work to do around here, I have completely given up jogging, boxing and other exercise plans. If you can’t stay in shape working on a farm, you are not doing enough. We still have several acres of land to clear after the tree harvest, and most is already overgrown with huckleberry plants! We also planted lots of wildflowers. I counted more than fifty young foxglove plants!
I really wish I had not gotten sick. I am a month behind on the farm work. I am thinking of giving up spring travel altogether. There’s too much to do around here, and even missing a few days means missing some fantastic blooming thing you will have to wait a year to see again!
From the article: “For Macintosh computers, iFixit and PowerbookMedic.com offer free, extensive repair guides for a host of problems, with detailed photographs showing how to perform the work.”
PowerbookMedic and iFixit both sell new and used parts. Both also offer free how-to diagrams and guides for taking apart laptops, iPhones and iPods.
MacFixIt visitors can read a daily compendium of Macintosh problems and solutions free. For $25 a year, they can search the site’s extensive archives on hardware and software repair.
Huckleberry has been very good to me, keeping me company while I was sick. There is something wonderfully comforting about having a furry buddy who curls up at your feet and purrs at the sight of you.
Here he is curled up next to the Tom Sawyer pillow. Sawyer passed away a little less than two years ago.I have my work spread out around me, and Huckleberry warming my toes.
I’m too sexy for my catbox…Classic profile!Bulletproof angles! Every shot a beauty.
I bought hundreds of inexpensive bulbs from outlets like Sam’s Club, with pretty good results, though one box had very poor quality bulbs of which only half bloomed. Still, much less expensive than professional garden tulips. Lots of people treat tulips as annuals, but if they have the right conditions, they can bloom for about 7 years.
It looks like a peony, but this is the Angelique tulip, my favorite. I planted these in boxes with wire bottoms to save them from the greedy voles.
Tulips are vermin crack.
Wisteria. One of our major vines just got killed in a major storm last week, but we have two more.
This lunar moth died from a parasite infection just after I took this photo. You can see the spot where the parasite attacked the moth on its body. We saved the moth body. It’s a beauty. I only rarely saw these in town, but we often see them out here.
A magnificent art find in the Rhone River in France! A bust of Caesar dating back to 46 BC, the earliest image known of the ruler, along with a number of other fine objects, including bronzes believing to date back to Hellenic Greece!
An article at The Chronicle Review on Virgil’s Aenid, in a new translation from Yale University Press, by Sarah Rudin.
Throughout her career, Ruden has not let gender determine which texts she works with or how she approaches them. She has published translations of Petronius’ Satyricon, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, and the Homeric Hymns. Last year she arrived at Yale to work on her current project, which she describes as “an exploration of the letters of Paul against the background of Greco-Roman literature.”
Ruden intends her translations for popular and classroom audiences rather than for fellow scholars. Like many of Virgil’s translators, she is a published poet in her own right. She holds a master’s degree from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars.
Mr. Cuno minces no words. In his view, “antiquity cannot be owned.” By setting the stringent cultural property laws of such countries as China, Italy and Turkey in historical perspective, he is able to show how contradictory, and often unjustified, such claims of ownership tend to be, driven as they are by constantly shifting political agendas.
Mr. Cuno is a passionate advocate of “the encyclopedic museum.” By this he means a “museum dedicated to ideas, not ideologies, the museum of international, indeed universal aspirations.” This ideal, inherited from the 18th- century Enlightenment, drives his argument throughout. Against this stand ranked nation-states, many recently constituted, whose policies favor museums governed narrowly by “nationalistic limitations.”
Due diligence and good faith inquiries are no longer sufficient. When weighing the risks of acquiring an antiquity for which there is no positive evidence of its legal removal from its presumed country of origin, U.S. art museums have to be much more careful. It is not simply that the antiquity might be returned. It may be that individuals within U.S. art museums will be held criminally liable. As a consequence, the acquisition of antiquities by U.S. art museums has declined dramatically over the past five years. This does not mean that illegal traffi cking in antiquities or the looting of archaeological sites has declined; in fact, archaeologists claim that both have increased. It means only that unprovenanced antiquities are not being acquired by U.S. art museums to the extent that they were in the past.
From the sublime to the ridiculous, let’s take a look at the activities of archaeologist Indiana Jones. More precisely, at the actor who plays him, Harrison Ford.
In an effort to bring attention to the horrors of deforestation, Harrison Ford staged a public event in which he had his chest hair waxed off to feel the world’s pain. Or something.
And just how did Harrison, who is the vice chair of the global environment group Conservation International, want to get his message across?
By waxing his chest, of course.
In an effort to showcase the pain involved in deforestation, Harrison willingly subject himself to the painful process of stripping his chest of all its follicles.
Christopher Panzer at Arts Editor writes of comics/graphic novels, “The Ninth Art” in this article from January I meant to post and lost in my blog box. Sorry.
Prepared by mainstream acceptance of Pop, Psychedelia, post-Situationist Punk, and Graffiti (just to name a few), thirty years of imported Japanese manga, and the recent spate of feature film adaptations of Marvel superheroes and graphic novelists, this uniquely 20th Century medium has acquired a sophistication that legitimizes its claim to fine art status. It is also a crossroads in these synthetic times, combining the language of film, literature, art, poetry, and music. And at the same time, it reprograms our neurons to accept illustration, design, and typography as “real” art as publishing gets redefined by electronic media and print media blurs our definition of multimedia.
Enjoy Jeff Smith’s big night over here at Boneville! For obvious reasons, I could not make the show, but lots of cool folks did, and the event was a huge success! Congratulations, Jeff!
This should be posted in all schools and work places…
Love him or hate him, he sure hits the nail on the head with this! Bill Gates recently gave a speech at a High School about 11 things they did not and will not learn in school. He talks about how feel-good, politically correct teachings created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them up for failure in the real world.
Rule 1: Life is not fair - get used to it!
Rule 2 : The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.
Rule 3 : You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.
Rule 4 : If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.
Rule 5 : Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.
Rule 6: If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.
Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.
Irena Sendler, awarded the title of Righteous Gentile for helping to save 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II, has died of pnuemonia at the age of 98 in a Polish hospital.
Sendler and a group of friends in the Warsaw municipality’s social welfare department started producing false documents to provide Jews in the ghetto with monetary assistance that the Germans had cut off.
After 1940 the ghetto was closed off to non-Jews, and Sendler and her friends could not get in to distribute the funds.
She soon learned that one sanitation company was still allowed into the ghetto. Sendler got the Polish director of the service to employ her and 10 friends so they could continue helping Jews.
For the next two years, dressed as nurses, Sendler and her friends carried food, money, and medicine hidden in their dresses to ghetto residents. As conditions deteriorated, and the liquidation of ghetto began, Sendler came to the realization that the only chance for the children to survive was to escape.
In 1942, she joined the Polish underground movement, “Zegota,” and, with the help of a dozen friends, initiated a large-scale clandestine campaign to save Jewish children. “You know the people, we have the money,” the president of the organization told her, she recalled.
This is what a real superheroine looks like:
This is a cartoon:
“I get mad when someone calls me a hero,” she (Sendler) said at the end of an emotional interview, her face suddenly glowing. “I did a normal thing.”
