Märthe Louise, elder daughter of the king of Norway, can apparently talk to angels. She is starting a school to help others talk to angels.
These angels, it must be said, are the New-Age variety, and since the media’s exposé last week, Norwegian churchmen have been busy condemning the princess. Their imaginary friends don’t like her imaginary friends, I suppose.
Now that school has ended for the summer, and marking exams has all-but ended, I have some seven weeks to fill with interesting activity. It looks as if I will have to become interested in painting because that is what is thrust upon me, along with all the other handy-man activities that need doing.
In preparation for decorating the living-room, I have begun bagging and moving my books to the basement. They have been sitting on the floor along a wall since we moved in, awaiting the bookshelf of our dreams. I have a lot of books, and have been able to find barely enough plastic carrier bags in which to transport them. It’s a serious problem.
In the process of moving my books, I have, however, discovered several books I had forgotten about. The most interesting to me at the moment is the old library copy of Norsk Litteraturhistorisk Bibliografi which contains six pages of Jonas-Lie-related bibliographical information. Six pages of newspaper reviews and articles from the last eight years of his life, and beyond!
So, when I am not painting, renovating, or carpentering, I will spend my time transcribing this new information, and adding it to the bibliography I maintain online.
My personal jury is out on the most important image ever taken. It could be this one (embedded video), but I am more inclined to think that Earth Rising more deserving of the title.
My reasoning is that Earth Rising formed the foundation of the Hubble image: it gave us the insight into the possibility of perspectives other than our own. The Hubble image shows how many of these other perspectives there probably are.
Once in a while some journalist really shoots himself in the foot:
Let me put this bluntly, in language even a busy blogger can understand: Criticism — and its humble cousin, reviewing — is not a democratic activity. It is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a book (or any other cultural object). It is work that requires disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sense of the author’s (or filmmaker’s or painter’s) entire body of work, among other qualities.
the old
codgers
this tripe
usually comes from
sincerely believe
their own illogical rantsI read the article from top to bottom (as a good critic should), and could I find the criteria used to distinguish “disciplined taste” from everyday, run-of-the-mill taste? No, I could not. Nor could I discern what exactly constitutes “a fairly deep sense of the author’s […] entire body of work”.
What I found instead is the tired old circular reasoning that those insecure souls who find themselves (accidentally or no) in positions of power use to hedge their positions: “You can’t do what I do as well as I do because I can do it better. Nah nah nah!”
It’s a comical yet sad spectacle. Comical because the old codgers this tripe usually comes from sincerely believe their own illogical rants, and even consider themselves quite clever for putting it to the rest of us; sad for the very same reason.
Away, away in the Northland,
Where the hours of the day are few,
And the nights are so long in winter
That they cannot sleep them through;
Where they harness the swift reindeer
To the sledges, when it snows;
And the children look like bear’s cubs
In their funny, furry clothes:
They tell them a curious story—
I don’t believe ’tis true;
And yet you may learn a lesson
If I tell the tale to you.
Although I haven’t yet been able to find similar tales, the framed tale is of familiar European thematic, style and structure. And there appears to be only one red-capped black woodpecker that lives in the arctic: the European black woodpecker, also supporting the authenticity of the tale. I would be interested to discover how the American poet discovered it — where it comes from, and who originally collected it.
This lovely little thing came in the post today. It’s a pen made entirely of metal. Actually, it’s not a pen - there is no ink, and no lead - it’s a stylus; the metal is deposited on the paper, like in the antique silverpoint technique. 
I showed my son my new curiosity. The stylus wouldn’t draw on his hand or clothes, but it draws well on paper. Wanting to describe silverpoint to him, I asked: “Do you think this is new technology?”
“It’s just bad metal”, he answered.
Ten myths the Mythbusters will never attempt to bust:
Even if they did try to bust these myths, they’d never air the results.
Their technique involves interpreting the carvings as representative of the patterns produced on Chladni plates. The music sounds fine (.mp3) - contemporary with the period of the carvings, even. But I have my doubts that the music is in fact encoded in the masonry.
Cymatics, the study of waves, didn’t exist before the end of the eighteenth century, when Ernst Chladni published his groundbreaking work with sound tables. Could the masons who carved the chapel have had knowledge of something Chladni is now considered to have pioneered? The crux of the matter is whether or not Chladni plates existed in the late mediæval period, when the chapel was built. If they did, why was knowledge of them lost for a couple of hundred years? If not, however, then why should the carvings signify what we recognise as Chladni patterns? In such a case, the Mitchells’ work would resemble the work of protagonist Oedipa Maas in Pynchon’s novel.
Apparently, some researcher-type people have found that giving girls feminine-sounding names will prevent them from studying boys’ subjects like maths and physics. The researchers have fallen into the pseudo-science of Sapir and Whorf, claiming that the perceived femininity of a name creates identity, which in turn determines life choices. Who is to say that Anna is more feminine a name than Abigail? And what evidence do the researchers have that indicates that people with similar names make similar choices in life?
I have just watched the above-mentioned film on DVD, and rate it alongside Conan the Barbarian and Red Sonja.
Mobile Blogging
The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor
The Coffee-house: A Cultural History by Markman Ellis
The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld
