Strange Islands.

Image from Living Architecture: India via butdoesitfloat LINK...

Fri, 11 May 2012 12:11:18 +0100

Image from Living Architecture: India via butdoesitfloat

LINK REMIX: Drowning our debts and worries in the techno bog.

The mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.

- D. H. Lawrence. via whiskey river

Alexis de Tocqueville and the Ideology Of Technology In America:

We buy our books to give shape to our thinking, but it never occurs to us that the manner in which we make our purchases may have a more lasting influence on our character than the contents of the book.

Forgive Us Our Debts:

When dollar-gold convertibility was abandoned once and for all in 1973, borrowers and lenders began to ply a more insubstantial trade. .. Paper money debts, being no more than titles to future slips of paper, multiply more easily than debts reckoned in fixed sums of specie, and, starting in the early 1970s, overall indebtedness has indeed grown faster than most national economies.

In the Arcadian Woods. On the nature of anxiety and its varied history:

The Reformation .. emphasized a Protestant’s private communion with the Lord. Thus, individuals were left to manage their own bad consciences .. Kierkegaard and then the existentialists would riff on this theme of a dread that attends individual freedom and responsibility.

The Call of the Future:

new technology typically sets in motion a now familiar script. At first, the technology is deemed to have little import or to fulfill only very specific, limited uses. Consider, for example, this casual dismissal by The New York Times in 1939: “The problem with television is that people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen; the average American family hasn’t time for it.”

Neuroskeptic dialogue about politics and the point of voting:

How dare you call me a Nazi?”

“You effectively are behaving as one. You’re not voting against them. Which has the effect of helping them.”

“That’s ridiculous. I like Schindler’s List as much as the next guy. I hate Nazis!”

“Just not enough to do the one thing they don’t want, to vote against them.”

Charles Foster on Living Prudently:

We are all living a dream that our hearts are pure tuning forks, and we simply have to tune out the noises around us and listen to the pure vibration coming from our hearts, and then – beyond all concern for evidence or the reality of the way things work – we will know what to do.

Invoking Ireland - John Moriarty and Mythology:

I was literally glutted with culture, I had to come out and put my head in a stream in a bog in Connemara and let it all wash out and start again and remake my mind.

♫ Music: Waves in Water via shellachead:

Jal tarang is an instrument that consists of ceramic bowls tuned by water .. It’s used in both Hindustani and Carnatic music.

Francis Bacon, Study for a Portrait. (1991) From the National...

Thu, 10 May 2012 16:20:00 +0100

Francis Bacon, Study for a Portrait. (1991)

From the National Galleries of Scotland.

via cavetocanvas:

This is one of the last paintings Bacon completed. It is the second in a series of three portraits of his friend, the artist Anthony Zych. Zych appears to be standing in a doorway, possibly that of the artist’s studio. The camera tripod is an element repeated from the central panel of a triptych painted in 1944. Bacon’s portraits were almost without exception of people with whom he was familiar. He preferred to paint his subjects not from life but from photographs.

Illustration from the 1926 children’s book King Ramu-ramu...

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 19:12:38 +0100

Illustration from the 1926 children’s book King Ramu-ramu (ラムラム王) by Takeo Takei.

via 50 Watts

Pollard Tree: Sketch and Letter by Vincent Van Gogh. To Theo...

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 17:32:00 +0100

Pollard Tree: Sketch and Letter by Vincent Van Gogh.

To Theo from The Hague, July 1882.

I’ve attacked that old giant of a pollard willow, and I believe it has turned out the best of the watercolours. A sombre landscape — that dead tree beside a stagnant pond covered in duckweed, in the distance a Rijnspoor depot where railway lines cross, smoke-blackened buildings — also green meadows, a cinder road and a sky in which the clouds are racing, grey with an occasional gleaming white edge, and a depth of blue where the clouds tear apart for a moment.

In short, I wanted to make it like how I imagine the signalman with his smock and red flag must see and feel it when he thinks: how gloomy it is today.

via Bibliodyssey - Handshakes in Thought: The Van Gogh Letter Sketches

A Selection of Luk Thung 78 Labels from Thailand via...

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 12:45:00 +0100

A Selection of Luk Thung 78 Labels from Thailand

via hajimaji

***

♫ Phloen Phromdaen - Ruedu Haeng Khwam Rak (Season of Love).

from the album LUK THUNG, Classic & Obscure 78s from the Thai Countryside. More info via Haji Maji here

Francisco Goya was born on 30 March 1746 (d.1828). The Third of...

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 16:59:12 +0100

Francisco Goya was born on 30 March 1746 (d.1828).

The Third of May 1808 is the picture against which all future paintings of tragic violence would have to measure themselves. It is truly modern, never surpassed in its newness, so raw that although it was a state commission it remained in storage, unseen by the public for the first 40 years of its life.

The surface is ragged: no smooth finish. The blood on the ground is a dark alizarin crimson smeared on thick and then scraped back with a palette knife, so that it looks crusty and scratchy, just like real blood smeared by the twitches of a dying body. You can’t “read” the wounds that disfigure the face of the man on the ground, but as signs of trauma in paint they are inexpressibly shocking - their imprecision conveys the thought that you can’t look at them.

The man about to be shot faces martyrdom in a clean white shirt, throwing out his arms in a gesture that recalls the Crucifixion, a gesture of indescribable power, flinging out life in defiance. The coarse, swarthy, dilated face - all vitality. The faces of the pueblo , the Spanish people, keep their individuality right up to the edge of the mass grave which is their destiny. They are the opposite of the utter anonymity of the firing squad - all identical backs, braced into the recoil of those big .70-calibre flintlocks. The men featureless, the hill featureless. This is the first truly modern image of war, the first to register the machine-like efficiency of oppression. It is as unlike all previous war paintings as Wilfred Owen’s trench poems are unlike all Victorian war poetry. No glory; only pity and loss, and the defiant humanity of the victims.

- Robert Hughes

via The Guardian: Goya’s Unflinching Eye

Akira Kurosawa was born on March 23, 1910 (d.1998). On the set...

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 19:09:36 +0000

Akira Kurosawa was born on March 23, 1910 (d.1998).

On the set of Yojimbo (1961).

The story is so ideally interesting that it’s surprising no one else ever thought of it. The idea about rivalry on both sides, and both sides are equally bad. We all know what this is like. Here we are, weakly caught in the middle, and it is impossible to choose between evils. It was truly an enormous popular hit. Everyone at the company said it was because of the sword-fighting. But that is not so – the reason was the character of the hero and what he does. He is a real hero, he has a real reason for fighting. He doesn’t just stand by and wave his sword around.

- Akira Kurosawa.

via rhea137 via strangewood

But what’s the use of talking! I suspect that all I’m saying...

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 11:24:00 +0000

But what’s the use of talking! I suspect that all I’m saying now is so like the usual commonplaces that I shall certainly be taken for a lower-form schoolboy sending in his essay on “sunrise”, or they’ll say perhaps that I had something to say, but that I did not know how to “explain” it. But I’ll add, that there is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one’s idea for thirty-five years; there’s something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps the most important of your ideas.

- from The Idiot by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky.

Image: The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb by Hans Holbein the Younger (circa. 1521). This painting is referred to by Dostoevsky in The Idiot.

Chinese bowl from the early eighteenth century showing a scholar...

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 12:28:00 +0000

Chinese bowl from the early eighteenth century showing a scholar sitting on a chair in a pavilion and reading. Probably a scene from a novel. Musée Guimet, Paris.

The chair probably arrived in China in the second or third century AD but took a very long time to become a general item of furniture. It was probably European in origin, whatever detours it may have made to arrive in China (via Persia, India or northern China). Moreover, its original Chinese name, still current today, means ‘barbarian bed’. It was probably first used as a seat of honour, either for lay or religious purposes. And even recently in China chairs were reserved for guests of honour and old people, while stools were used much more frequently, as in Europe in the middle ages.

In fact, there must have taken place in China (some time before the thirteenth century) a major expansion of life-styles, accompanied by a separation between seated life and squatting life at ground level, the latter domestic, the former official: the sovereign’s throne, the mandarin’s seat, benches and chairs in schools. .. it is worth while noting these two types of behaviour in the everyday life of the world: the seated position and the squatting position. The latter is omnipresent except in the West, and the two only came together in China.

Image and text via Fernand Braudel: Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century: The Structures of Everyday Life.

Jacob Bronowski and life as an improbable collision.

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 22:20:00 +0000

In 1973, thanks to a 13-part television series on BBC2, he had become one of the world’s most...

Blue Bubble: Abell 33. About 1500 light years from Earth, Abell...

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 20:39:00 +0000

Blue Bubble: Abell 33.

About 1500 light years from Earth, Abell 33 is a planetary nebula - the eerie and beautiful structure created when dying stars cast off their outer layers. They come in many strange shapes, and it’s rare to find one that appears perfectly circular.

This image was made by Adam Block, using the 0.8 meter (32”) Schulman Telescope at the Mount Lemmon SkyCenter.

ᔥ via Discover Magazine : An Enigmatic Blue Bubble in Space

Link Remix: Melancholic Cyborgs Singing in My Head. Despite...

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 13:59:00 +0000

Link Remix: Melancholic Cyborgs Singing in My Head.

Despite several days of overcast skies, the weather’s been pleasantly mild and dry this week in this corner of the west of Ireland. Among the stories that have most caught my eye and mind recently:

Are Smartphones Changing What It Means to be Human?

It’s gotten to the point where my phone now somehow knows more about me than anyone else in the world, including my own darling husband. My gadget has become a tiny black mirror, reflecting back how I see myself. Which means things are getting more complicated between us.ᔥ via Boston Magazine

How Memory Works and the Pill of Forgetting.

Memories are not formed and then pristinely maintained, as neuroscientists thought; they are formed and then rebuilt every time they’re accessed. “The brain isn’t interested in having a perfect set of memories about the past,” LeDoux says. “Instead, memory comes with a natural updating mechanism, which is how we make sure that the information taking up valuable space inside our head is still useful. ᔥ via Wired

The Making of W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.

Our spread over the earth was fueled by reducing the higher species of vegetation to charcoal, by incessantly burning whatever would burn. From the first smouldering taper to the elegant lanterns whose light reverberated around eighteenth-century courtyards and from the mild radiance of these lanterns to the unearthly glow of the sodium lamps that line the Belgian motorways, it has all been combustion. Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artifact we create. The making of fish-hook, manufacture of a china cup, or production of a television program, all depend on the same process of combustion. Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers. ᔥ via Quarterly Conversation

Bones of the Book: the past, present and future of ebooks.

Writing is a miraculous technology all its own—a code that, when input through the optic nerve, induces structured, coherent hallucinations. An equivalent experience does not exist. Words have shape and musicality. They almost have a flavor. But they are too easily drowned out by stronger stimuli. ᔥ via n+1

Two Minds in One Brain: In this short, humourous and enlightening clip, in a discussion moderated by Alan “Hawkeye” Alda, neuroscientist Giulio Tononi talks about the odd phenomenon of “split-brain” patients with filmmaker Charlie Kaufman. ᔥ via World Science Festival

Sticking to brains and their two hemispheres: Pirate-Eye Pigeons Reveal How The Brain Talks To Itself.

there is also a lot of evidence suggesting that even if both hemispheres contribute equally to a cognitive task such as speech or creating a visual model of the world, each half may favor particular aspects of that task. For her part, Mann hopes to untangle these issues. And she thinks there is no better model than bird brains. ᔥ via Scientific American

The Fabric of the Cosmos with Brian Greene. I’ve only watched the first two of four episodes so far and aside from the occasionally silly (though often helpful) televisual gimmicry it’s a very good lesson in contemporary physics, both thought-provoking and thought-stopping. ᔥ via Open Culture.

In the week that #STOPJOSEPHKONY hysteria gripped the interweb, some needed perspective from netizens in Uganda: Can A Viral Video really #StopKony?

We could be reading the world just as wrongly as the world is reading us. ᔥ via Global Voices

On a similar note, I watched a Ted talk recently by Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie and her message was that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

“Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person”

ᔥ via Ted.com: The Danger of a Single Story.

Finally some music, a haunting piece from Gavin Bryars, the first release on Brian Eno’s Obscure record label in 1975, deserving of renewed interest in this the 100th anniversary year of the event commemorated therein: The Sinking of The Titanic. ᔥ via youtube

This symbol ᔥ used in places above is from a new project aimed at encouraging the culture of attribution for the stuff we share on the web. You can read more about it here from Maria Popova ᔥ Brainpickings: Introducing The Curator’s Code.

Image at top of post ᔥ via Data Garden: Expanded Cinema

A Sigh For Cybernetics. via Brainpickings - Scrap Irony:...

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 10:21:48 +0000

A Sigh For Cybernetics.

via Brainpickings - Scrap Irony: Irreverent Illustrated Cultural Commentary by Edward Gorey circa 1961

"The critic Frank Kermode has argued, persuasively, I believe, that one of art’s greatest..."

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 19:00:04 +0000

“The critic Frank Kermode has argued, persuasively, I believe, that one of art’s...

Health and self-tracking devices.

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 20:50:44 +0000

When Henry Ford first created the Model T, it didn’t have a dash-board. Early drivers had no idea...

Do We Need New Traits To Live Within Limits? Walking across...

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 18:16:00 +0000

Do We Need New Traits To Live Within Limits?

Walking across the tundra, meeting the stare of a lemming, or coming on the tracks of a wolverine, it would be the frailty of our wisdom that would confound me. The pattern of our exploitation of the Arctic, our increasing utilization of its natural resources, our very desire to ‘put it to use’, is clear. What is it that is missing, or tentative, in us, I would wonder, to make me so uncomfortable walking out here in a region of chirping birds, distant caribou, and redoubtable lemmings? It is restraint.

Because mankind can circumvent evolutionary law, it is incumbent upon him, say evolutionary biologists, to develop another law if he wishes to survive, to not outstrip his food base. He must learn restraint. He must derive some other, wiser way of behaving toward the land. He must be more attentive to the biological imperatives of the system of sun-driven protoplasm upon which he, too, is still dependent. Not because he must, because he lacks inventiveness, but because herein is the accomplishment of the wisdom that for centuries he has aspired to. Having taken on his own destiny, he must now think with critical intelligence about what to defer.

- Barry Lopez: Arctic Dreams

via Wired: Do We Need New Traits To Live Within Limits? Revkin Asks. Lopez Responds, From 1986.

Image: Ice ridges in the Beaufort Sea via Wikimedia

Lewis Thomas on the etymology of "love" and "like".

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 21:59:20 +0000

Sanskrit dictionaries list several words for loving, arranged in order of both intensity and degree...

How you ought to hold your pen. from a “New booke,...

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 18:04:42 +0000

How you ought to hold your pen.

from a “New booke, containing all sortes of handes usually written at this daie. London, 1611.”

via The Collation: Spotlight on a calligrapher

Arthur Schopenhauer. Born 22 February 1788. (Died 21 September...

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 22:29:00 +0000

Arthur Schopenhauer. Born 22 February 1788.

(Died 21 September 1860).

On the Vanity of Existence.

from Studies in Pessimism.

Of every event in our life we can say only for one moment that it is; for ever after, that it was. Every evening we are poorer by a day. It might, perhaps, make us mad to see how rapidly our short span of time ebbs away; if it were not that in the furthest depths of our being we are secretly conscious of our share in the inexhaustible spring of eternity, so that we can always hope to find life in it again.

Considerations of the kind touched on above might indeed, lead us to embrace the belief that the greatest wisdom is to make the enjoyment of the present the supreme object of life; because that is the only reality, all else being merely the play of thought. On the other hand, such a course might just as well be called the greatest folly: for that which in the next moment exists no more, and vanishes utterly, like a dream, can never be worth a serious effort.

via written text here

Audio reading via Archive.org: Librivox

read aloud by D. E. Wittkower.

A Field Guide to Argument and Critical Thinking. First in a...

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 19:13:16 +0000

A Field Guide to Argument and Critical Thinking.

First in a series of lovely animated shorts.

More via Youtube: technyou

h/t @ Berto-meister