She looked more like a school teacher— or maybe it would be more accurate to say that she looked like what a school teacher looks like before the time comes that she absolutely looks like a school teacher and nothing else.
— Rex Stout, in Black Orchids
The question lurking behind these attractions and choices is not one of enchantment but: how does one overcome the wall? But perhaps this question is misleading. When discussing his early frustrations with writing, the author who described Saul Bellow's tone of voice talks about what he learned from certain authors:
Proust had given me the confidence to fail, had driven home to me the lesson that if you come up against a brick wall perhaps the way forward is to incorporate the wall and your effort to scale it into the work. I had read Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras, and been excited by the way they reinvented the form of the novel to suit their purposes – everything is possible, they seemed to say. But when you start to write all that falls away. You are alone with the page and your violent urges, urges, which no amount of reading will teach you how to channel. ‘Zey srew me in ze vater and I had to svim,’ as Schoenberg is reported to have said. That is why I so hate creative writing courses – they teach you how to avoid brick walls, but I think hitting them allows you to discover what you and only you want to/can/must say.
I didn’t need to do any more than let my eyes skim over them before I was moved to tears. So great was the impression some of the pictures made on me. Others left me cold. That was my only parameter with art, the feelings it aroused. The feeling of inexhaustibility. The feeling of beauty. The feeling of presence. All compressed into such acute moments that sometimes they could be difficult to endure. And quite inexplicable. For if I studied the picture that made the greatest impression, an oil sketch of a cloud formation from September 6, 1822, there was nothing there that could explain the strength of my feelings.
~From Boy's pool to Boy's Art Gallery of Life
The winning images in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2019 contest have been announced by the Natural History Museum in London. Here are a few of my favorites (by Audun Rikardsen, Max Waugh, and Shangzhen Fan)
Forgive me for returning to some Orwellian themes and characters like a dog to somebody else's vomit. Some work related poems can be "lofty, clear and pure light" and in Dostoevsky's novels a light that is wretched, dirty, sick like konorable karma ...
I BALANCE IT OUT WITH RED MEAT, RED WINE, AND COFFEE: Overthinking can shorten your life, according to a new study.
STEPHEN GREEN COULD NOT BE REACHED FOR COMMENT: One glass of wine a day is worse for the heart than binge drinking, study finds.
UM…. NO. Horror movies make people horny
J.S. Bach, bad boy. We remember him as a saint, but he downed beer by the gallon, got mixed up in knife fights, and consorted with women in the organ loft... Bach
100 most used words by Yammerings:
Amount, Argument, Art, Be, Beautiful, Belief, Cause, Certain, Chance, Change, Clear, Common, Comparison, Condition, Connection, Copy, Decision, Degree, Desire, Development, Different, Do, Education, End, Event, Example, Existence, Experience, Fact, Fear, Feeling, Fiction, Force, Form, Free, General, Get, Give, Good, Government, Happy, Have, History, Idea, Important, Interest, Knowledge, Law, Let, Level, Living, Love, Make, Material, Measure, Mind, Motion, Name, Nation, Natural, Necessary, Normal, Number, Observation, Opposite, Order, Organization, Part, Place, Pleasure, Possible, Power, Probable, Property, Purpose, Quality, Question, Reason, Relation, Representative, Respect, Responsible, Right, Same, Say, Science, See, Seem, Sense, Sign, Simple, Society, Sort, Special, Substance, Thing, Thought, True, Use, Way, Wise, Word, Work.
The Best Cities in the World: 2019 (not 2014) Readers’ Choice Awards - Conde Nast Traveler – “There’s a striking amount of diversity among the global superpower cities, which are filled with everything from centuries-old palaces to neon-lit skylines and staggering skyscrapers. For our 32nd annual Readers’ Choice Awards survey—yes, readers have been voting for more than three decades—a record 600,000 registered voters weighed in. The impressive number of 2019 results were especially exciting for us: We’re always curious about where in the world you go, what you loved, and who you went with. As you continue to travel, we continue to listen: Here are the international cities you loved most this year…” [Note – disregard the error in the URL which is directly from the publisher – oops – this is 2019 not 2014!]
The winning images in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2019 contest have been announced by the Natural History Museum in London. Here are a few of my favorites (by Audun Rikardsen, Max Waugh, and Shangzhen Fan)
Forgive me for returning to some Orwellian themes and characters like a dog to somebody else's vomit. Some work related poems can be "lofty, clear and pure light" and in Dostoevsky's novels a light that is wretched, dirty, sick like konorable karma ...
I BALANCE IT OUT WITH RED MEAT, RED WINE, AND COFFEE: Overthinking can shorten your life, according to a new study.
STEPHEN GREEN COULD NOT BE REACHED FOR COMMENT: One glass of wine a day is worse for the heart than binge drinking, study finds.
UM…. NO. Horror movies make people horny
J.S. Bach, bad boy. We remember him as a saint, but he downed beer by the gallon, got mixed up in knife fights, and consorted with women in the organ loft... Bach
100 most used words by Yammerings:
Amount, Argument, Art, Be, Beautiful, Belief, Cause, Certain, Chance, Change, Clear, Common, Comparison, Condition, Connection, Copy, Decision, Degree, Desire, Development, Different, Do, Education, End, Event, Example, Existence, Experience, Fact, Fear, Feeling, Fiction, Force, Form, Free, General, Get, Give, Good, Government, Happy, Have, History, Idea, Important, Interest, Knowledge, Law, Let, Level, Living, Love, Make, Material, Measure, Mind, Motion, Name, Nation, Natural, Necessary, Normal, Number, Observation, Opposite, Order, Organization, Part, Place, Pleasure, Possible, Power, Probable, Property, Purpose, Quality, Question, Reason, Relation, Representative, Respect, Responsible, Right, Same, Say, Science, See, Seem, Sense, Sign, Simple, Society, Sort, Special, Substance, Thing, Thought, True, Use, Way, Wise, Word, Work.
The Best Cities in the World: 2019 (not 2014) Readers’ Choice Awards - Conde Nast Traveler – “There’s a striking amount of diversity among the global superpower cities, which are filled with everything from centuries-old palaces to neon-lit skylines and staggering skyscrapers. For our 32nd annual Readers’ Choice Awards survey—yes, readers have been voting for more than three decades—a record 600,000 registered voters weighed in. The impressive number of 2019 results were especially exciting for us: We’re always curious about where in the world you go, what you loved, and who you went with. As you continue to travel, we continue to listen: Here are the international cities you loved most this year…” [Note – disregard the error in the URL which is directly from the publisher – oops – this is 2019 not 2014!]
Amount, Argument, Art, Be, Beautiful, Belief, Cause, Certain, Chance, Change, Clear, Common, Comparison, Condition, Connection, Copy, Decision, Degree, Desire, Development, Different, Do, Education, End, Event, Example, Existence, Experience, Fact, Fear, Feeling, Fiction, Force, Form, Free, General, Get, Give, Good, Government, Happy, Have, History, Idea, Important, Interest, Knowledge, Law, Let, Level, Living, Love, Make, Material, Measure, Mind, Motion, Name, Nation, Natural, Necessary, Normal, Number, Observation, Opposite, Order, Organization, Part, Place, Pleasure, Possible, Power, Probable, Property, Purpose, Quality, Question, Reason, Relation, Representative, Respect, Responsible, Right, Same, Say, Science, See, Seem, Sense, Sign, Simple, Society, Sort, Special, Substance, Thing, Thought, True, Use, Way, Wise, Word, Work.
The Best Cities in the World: 2019 (not 2014) Readers’ Choice Awards - Conde Nast Traveler – “There’s a striking amount of diversity among the global superpower cities, which are filled with everything from centuries-old palaces to neon-lit skylines and staggering skyscrapers. For our 32nd annual Readers’ Choice Awards survey—yes, readers have been voting for more than three decades—a record 600,000 registered voters weighed in. The impressive number of 2019 results were especially exciting for us: We’re always curious about where in the world you go, what you loved, and who you went with. As you continue to travel, we continue to listen: Here are the international cities you loved most this year…” [Note – disregard the error in the URL which is directly from the publisher – oops – this is 2019 not 2014!]
John James Audubon’s Birds of America
One of the (several dozen) posts I started writing ages ago but never finished was a collection of the hundreds of bird illustrations pictured in John James Audubon’s seminal Birds of America. The images have been floating around on the web forever, in various sizes and collections, and I wanted to group (or at least link to) all of them in one place. But now I don’t have to because the Audubon Society has put them up on their website.
John James Audubon’s Birds of America is a portal into the natural world. Printed between 1827 and 1838, it contains 435 life-size watercolors of North American birds (Havell edition), all reproduced from hand-engraved plates, and is considered to be the archetype of wildlife illustration.
Thumbnails of all 435 illustrations are presented on a single page(sortable alphabetically or chronologically by their creation date) and then each illustration is given its own page with Audubon’s notes on the bird pictured, a link to the bird in Audubon’s Bird Guide (where you can see photos and hear bird calls, etc.), and a link to download a high resolution image (if you sign up for their mailing list). The barred owl image is 111-megapixels. What a resource!
You can also see online copies of Birds of America at the University of Pittsburgh and Meisei University.
And if you’ve never had a chance to see some of these illustrations in real life, you should keep your eyes peeled for the opportunity. They really are something. (via open culture, which has been particularly great lately)
Women At Ernst & Young Instructed On How To Dress, Act Nicely Around Men HuffPo. “Women’s brains absorb information like pancakes soak up syrup so it’s hard for them to focus, the attendees were told. Men’s brains are more like waffles. They’re better able to focus because the information collects in each little waffle square.”
The University of Chicago | D’Angelo Law Library – “In honor of International Open Access Week, our library created an “Open Access Resources for Legal Research” LibGuide. These are some representative free law sources. The focus is on U.S. law, but there’s a foreign and international law section.”
Women At Ernst & Young Instructed On How To Dress, Act Nicely Around Men HuffPo. “Women’s brains absorb information like pancakes soak up syrup so it’s hard for them to focus, the attendees were told. Men’s brains are more like waffles. They’re better able to focus because the information collects in each little waffle square.”
The University of Chicago | D’Angelo Law Library – “In honor of International Open Access Week, our library created an “Open Access Resources for Legal Research” LibGuide. These are some representative free law sources. The focus is on U.S. law, but there’s a foreign and international law section.”
