NamEmanate

Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, Paracelsus

Many books mentioning Paracelsus also cite him as the origin of the word "bombastic"* to describe his often arrogant speaking style, which the following passage illustrates:

I am Theophrastus, and greater than those to whom you liken me; I am Theophrastus, and in addition I am monarcha medicorum and I can prove to you what you cannot prove...I need not don a coat of mail or a buckler against you, for you are not learned or experienced enough to refute even a word of mine...As for you, you can defend your kingdom with belly-crawling and flattery. How long do you think this will last?...Let me tell you this: every little hair on my neck knows more than you and all your scribes, and my shoe buckles are more learned than your Galen and Avicenna, and my beard has more experience than all your high colleges.

— Paracelsus, Selected Writings

*Boring accuracy:  According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the origin of the word "bombastic" is "bombast", an old term for cotton stuffing, rather than a play on Paracelsus's middle name, Bombastus.~~Wikipedia

Toyen With Idea(l)s

Marie Čermínová Toyen, Messages de la forêt, 1936

This actually happened to me once, but because I am not so wise and not so near a real forest, instead of an owl I had a pigeon dive onto my head and dig its claws into my skull, as I walked home from the Champ de Mars, still walking on the gravelly paths, but so near the pavement.

A few days before that happened, I dreamt an eagle or hawk or another menacing flying predator was about to attack my face, coming in the living room window as I slept.

So when I saw this painting for the first time in the Dark Romanticism exhibit in the Orsay (l'Ange du Bizarre), I knew the feeling it conveyed and the idea Toyen played with in it.

Quite apart from that, the painting itself is pretty exceptional, the contrast of this shade of blue, usually so soothing and here suddenly menacing, in the dark background... the disembodied head of a woman, head claimed by nature's "wisdom".

I like it loadsly.    

I looked up Toyen's paintings/drawings after I saw this one, was v impressed by some of them, and wondered why she's not mentioned in the same breath as Miro' and Dalì and Ernst, Tanguy and Picasso.  Well, she is now.

Apt

Technopark, Winterthur, Switzerland

After months away, I've no excuse other than I had nothing interesting to write about.  Rather, I did, but couldn't find a voice to give to it.  I had time, but not enough; I had ideas, but not good enough. And today, as my bathroom gets stripped bare, its walls grated, its tiles replaced, I have time, but no silence.

Some things are things unto themselves: ideas or events.

The ones which are in-between, those which are woven into the mediocrity of daily life are harder to treat by 99.999999999999% of people who make an attempt. 

Graters, hammers, sanding paper, repetitive movements, a weak cloud of thin dust.  

I have heard many people say it isn't what one writes about, but how one does it.  "Style," said Céline, "comes once or twice a century, if that.  Everyone has a story, but can everyone tell it in an interesting way?"  I wonder how many writers could write about having their bathroom redone and keep the reader turning the pages.  I wonder if this can be done at all in a way that doesn't quickly become pompous and overdescriptive, that doesn't turn into a badly written caricaturish "remake" of Proust?

Because at some point, fairly early in a text about a topic such as this, one would have to go entirely into metaphorical language, or it'd turn into a manual, or a text in some DIY remodelling publication.

If I wanted to do it, the first thing I'd have to do would be to learn the vocabulary of tools and machines, of substances that end up on walls and tiles, and the different verbs to signal this or that action.  That, alone, would require more time than it'd take me to write the text itself, most likely.