SeaSaw

 

Paul Nash, Winter Sea, 1925-1937

In York, England.  Saw this one yesterday at the York City Gallery, a surprising, small-ish museum with a few extremely good pieces.  In person, the one above is so beautiful it belongs in a room by itself.  

These two others were on the lower floor, housing an even more surprising combination of early Dutch religious paintings, taxidermy, and natures mortes.  The peacock ought to come with a caption saying "don't look at my feet", and if I were the curator, I'd call this juxtaposition HourGlasSkull "Time & Wind".

But what topped it all for me was seeing a painting by Jack Butler Yeats, brother of W.B., and not only was the painting quite good (I especially loved the colours) but the title is so unusual! That We May Never Meet Again depicts two friends who for whatever reason will never meet again!  I didn't know W. had a painter brother!  I won't post it, I didn't take a photo of it; just stood there and wondered about the title, and tried to ascertain how many different shades of blue were used, and if this was optimistic or not, and good thing there is a fan in this room cause it is so hot, and why haven't I heard of Jack Butler Yeats before... and I walked away thinking that no matter what the narrative may be, the painting is pretty good.

Can I Borrow A Melody?

If

IF you can keep your head when all about you 

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,

Or being hated, don't give way to hating,

And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;

If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings 

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,

if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,

And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!


Kipling

Prosopomp & Circumvent

e.g. "The markets received encouraging news in regards to the European debt crisis, the Fed extended "operation twist" and commodity prices continued to trend ..."

RainboWarrior

Bipolar bear

Dickinson

XI

MUCH madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness.
’T is the majority
In this, as all, prevails.
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur,—you ’re straightway dangerous,
And handled with a chain.

√

 ,

 ,

 .

Line Age

Waking with the Fishes

The term "Exocoetidae" is not only the present scientific name for a genus of flying fish in this family, but also the general name in Latin for a flying fish. The suffix -idae, common for indicating a family, follows the root of the Latin word exocoetus, a transliteration of the Ancient Greek name ἐξώκοιτος. This means literally "sleeping outside", from ἔξω} "outside" and κοῖτος "bed", "resting place", so named as flying fish were believed to leave the water to sleep on the shore.

Flying fish have in turn given their name to:

• The Exocet guided missile.
• Three ships of the United States Navy named USS Flying Fish.
• The constellation Volans ("flying", originally "Piscis Volans" = "flying fish").

Strings Attached

Sui generis

It's so hard to come across something like this.  To me, it has the perfect measure of:

Serious thought

Funny Image

Cutitude

Appropriate for all ages

Appropriate in any language!

List of Unknowns

"...
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
..."

Midsummer Night's Dream

Act 5

Scene 1

PlethOratoRhetoRich

Or "A lot of rhetorical devices for enhanced oratorical skills"

Tautology and pleonasm

Tautology and pleonasm are not the same thing. Pleonasm is defined as "the use of more words than those necessary to denote mere sense."^[1] A round circle. A big giant. Tautology is a repetition of the same idea in different words: A huge great big man. Say it over again once more. (Say it over. Say it again. Say it once more.) The crucial difference is that "Repeat it again" is a pleonasm, because again is inherent to "repeat". Repeat and again do not simply mean the same thing, which means that this is not a tautological repetition of the same thing in a different word – just as tuna and fish are not the same thing.^[2]

The expressions like added bonus, first introduction, free gift, round circle etc. are pleonastic rather than tautological. Why? Because these expressions do not convey the same meaning in different language. Instead, one idea is simply contained in the other. For example- They arrived one after the other in succession is tautology because 'one after the other' and 'in succession' convey the same sense in different languages, while in 'added bonus' added and bonus do not mean the same thing, only one idea is implicit or contained in the other. Consequently, expressions like 'added bonus', 'reason why', 'repeat again' etc. should be pleonastic rather than tautological. Besides, the expressions like 'annual exams every year' should be tautological.

Repetitions of meaning in mixed-language phrases (my fav bit!)

Repetitions of meaning sometimes occur when multiple languages are used together, such as: "rice pilaf" (pilaf is Turkish for "rice"),"chai tea" (tea tea), shrimp scampi (scampi is Italian for shrimp),"the La Brea Tar Pits" (the The tar Tar Pits), "the hoi polloi" (the the many), "Sierra Nevada mountain range" (Snowy Mountain Range mountain range), "Sahara Desert" (Deserts Desert), "Gobi Desert" (Desert Desert), "Mount Fuji-yama" (Mount Fujimountain), "shiba inu dog" (little bush dog dog), "shiitake mushroom" (shii mushroom mushroom), Jirisan Mountain" (Jiri mountain mountain), "Mississippi River" (Great-river river), "Rio Grande river" (big river river), "cheese quesadilla" (cheese cheesy-thing), "Lake Tahoe" (Lake Lake), "Faroe Islands" (Sheep Island Islands), and "Angkor Wat temple" (Angkor Temple temple). A triple redundancy example is "Breedon on the Hill" in Leicestershire (Hill-hill on the hill").

Lençois Maranhenses

"O sertão vai virar mar, o mar vai virar sertão..."

"Que Deus deu, que Deo dato."

Lookalikes

James Ellroy

John Malkovich

SequesTree

Victor Brauner, The Glowworm, 1933

Bernini, Apollo and Daphne, 1622-25

Lift it.

PedestriAnnoyed

Attention porcyclists, steamrollers, and wheelchariots of fire: I made this one just for you Y

Look, I understand.  You're respectively: actively healthy, you have babies who need to see the outside world every day even when you're tired and stressed out, and you need to transport your body even though your legs don't work--- I salute you!

But you're also in charge of a vehicle that's rigid hard, and can hurt human bodies if you bump into one!

Seriously, just because there is no engine in your machine, it doesn't mean you need not be as careful as you'd be were you driving a car or motorcycle!

Yesterday, coming out of a store, about to cross the street, I saw a car coming, so naturally I stopped, since I was not at the pedestrian crossing.  It kindly stopped for me, as Death did for Emily Dickinson, at which point I waved my unemcumbered right hand to paralinguistically thank the humanist on wheels when, suddenly, as if Thor himself had come down from on high.         KAPOW!

"I'm hit, I'm hit!  Human down, human down!"  Ok. I'm being a hyperbolic fiend.  But yes I was hit. It could have been ugly.  The panhandler in front of the shop yelled out "Attention!", so I froze in place. I was almost run over by a Man on WheelSteroids in the Mecca of the Bicycle.  Not Amsterdamage.  In Amsterdam cyclists ride at a normal speed.  Oui, France! Land of the Tour de Force de France. His body hit me.  

Hand on Old & New Testament, the Qu'ran, and any sacred and propane text you want to put under my palm, this monsieur was going faster than the spawn of SpeedyGonzales and the Roadrunner.  And do you know why? Because he is Healthier, and thus Better, than thou -- and than I, ai, ai! But it hurt!  What, what, what makes him think he can go at 40Km/h on a bicycle and take the tiny wee narrow corridor between cars and, well, pedestrians like me, when, I am certain, had he been behind the wheel of a car, he'd never ever do it?

Then, the other month... okay, it was last year, but so what? Last year, I was in Monoprix, buying shampoo, (2 for price of 1, delicious scent, really -- chestnut!) and I'm standing in the kilometric queue when PHLOP!  My right ankle is viciously nicked by a wheelchariot of fire.  It was NOT, i repeat, NOT the disabled person's fault, because her vehicle was being manned by a woman, whom I can only presume to be an absolute relative of the seated lady.  She didn't think it was worth getting too worked up about the fact that now there's an unfashionable dot of blood on my ankle, making me look like I am metamorphosing into a ladybug, which suddenly, just now, makes me think would be uberly cool.  She raised her eyebrows & shoulders, like synchronized water ballerinas, into a Gallic shrug and said, in a soft, almost inaudible, irritatingly nonchalant tone, "désolée."

Yah? *I* am désolée. Me. 

And I am even more days olé when it is a StrollerSteamroller straight out of Rosemary's Baby coming my way, as if channelling a demonic supermarket trolley.  Do ppl become blind when theyre pushing a stroller?  Suddenly, all these women discover a somehow heretofore unknown right to drive a large object on wheels into total strangers in broad daylight!  No swerving, no stopping.  It is Stroller vs Bodies.  I feel like the zombies  videogame heroes must kill. We can guess who wins. This happens all the time in Paris, a city where only infants are adored more than yippie dogs in sweaters being carried around in LouisVuitton bags  the size of a large melon at €1060 a pop per poodle.  This tshirt exists:   Need I elaborate further? (Yah okay it may be cute, cute as long as it isn't steamrolling over you.)

Already these ppl get all manner of provisos for their circumstances, as they should get.  I like to see ppl porcycling instead of driving, and I want to see both wheelchariots and steamrollers get a reserved space on public transportation and other public places.  It is necessary, right, proper, civilized and good! You should get each and every single one of these rights to come and go acknowledged and respected.  

But that does not mean you get to break basic, essential, though sometimes tacit, understandings of savoir vivre and just, well, common decency.  You just don't push your stroller into ppl, ok? You don't.  You have no idea what kind of crazy bastard deranged git lowgrade forehead you may be pushing it into, and next thing you know your baby may be caught in a problematic situation with you.  Ppl with strollers, understand something: you need to think about the infants' safety, not just your own; not just your right to get onto the bus first, to be first in the queue, to be the Monarch on Coronation Day walking down filthy Parisian pavements as if they were the red carpet. A stroller is hardly the Pope-mobile; it can hurt ppl though. But the little human in the stroller can also be harmed.  Think, for chupacabra's sake.

And cyclists.  It is stupidiotic, okay? it is, to think that you can be that healthy and charming and urbane on a cycle going at 40Km/h and not pause to consider you may fall off it and break your stupid head filled with breezy Parisian fumes. Inline skaters, too.  All this applies to you as well.  I don't have eyes at the back of my head so don't creep up on me from behind because I may have to move and now you're flat on the floor like a dragonfly on the windshield of a convertible Jaguar in the Autobahn.  Imbeciles!

Okay, when it comes to wheelchairiots I won't say much. I'll say something to those who push them.  Come on, be civilized!  Your relative gets to ride the bus because people are civilized and demand wheelchairs have a special ramp put on buses, or that the bus be equipped with those up-and-downy thingies that South Central Los Angeles Latino and Black gangsters have under the cars!  We all pay for that, so please, be courteous. Don't assault me.

The person whose chair you're pushing is disabled, but you aren't, so you're game. Why look for trouble?  Why think a wheelchair is less amenable to hurt a human body than a car, a bicycle, or a stroller?  You can damage someone's tendon forever.  Then what? 

À ala, Punk?

"There's nothing new under the black hole sun," said the gentlemen on the Titanic, rearranging the furniture on deck, as well as some of the tunes.

The Theogony of Hesiod

translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White

[1914]

(ll. 1-25) From the Heliconian Muses let us begin to sing, who hold the great and holy mount of Helicon, and dance on soft feet about the deep-blue spring and the altar of the almighty son of Cronos, and, when they have washed their tender bodies in Permessus or in the Horse's Spring or Olmeius, make their fair, lovely dances upon highest Helicon and move with vigorous feet. Thence they arise and go abroad by night, veiled in thick mist, and utter their song with lovely voice, praising Zeus the aegis- holder and queenly Hera of Argos who walks on golden sandals and the daughter of Zeus the aegis-holder bright-eyed Athene, and Phoebus Apollo, and Artemis who delights in arrows, and Poseidon the earth-holder who shakes the earth, and reverend Themis and quick-glancing (1) Aphrodite, and Hebe with the crown of gold, and fair Dione, Leto, Iapetus, and Cronos the crafty counsellor, Eos and great Helius and bright Selene, Earth too, and great Oceanus, and dark Night, and the holy race of all the other deathless ones that are for ever. And one day they taught Hesiod glorious song while he was shepherding his lambs under holy Helicon, and this word first the goddesses said to me -- the Muses of Olympus, daughters of Zeus who holds the aegis:

(ll. 26-28) `Shepherds of the wilderness, wretched things of shame, mere bellies, we know how to speak many false things as though they were true; but we know, when we will, to utter true things.'