de imitatione christi

Theologian and best known for his devotional collection, The Imitation of Christ (see also), Thomas à Kempis (*1380) is venerated as a founder of modern spiritualism on this the anniversary of his death in 1471, beatified and contributions made church canon but not formally canonised yet. His maxims, including, “For man proposes but God disposes” and “Everywhere for peace I sought but I have found it only in books and nooks”—in angello cum libello, are considered essential study and quite lucid.

i feel the earth move

On this day in 1976 at the Avignon Festival—title taken from the post-apocalyptic novel about the aftermath of global thermonuclear war—the Philip Glass Ensemble premiered the four act opera Einstein on the Beach—see previously here and here—a trilogy of portraits of personal vision and transformational thinking that spurred revelation through ideas rather than brute force and might. This two-hour excerpt from 1979 faithful recreates the staging from the five-hour debut.

freight yard symphony

Referred to this 1963 student film project from Robert Abel (*1937 - †2001), visual effects and motion graphics pioneer, we are enjoying how his trail-brazing work and adoption, engagement for emerging technologies is prefigured in this logistics, supply-chain management as on display in his later collaborations such as Black Hole (1979) and famously TRON (1982), disqualified from awards consideration as it was animated with computer, which was considered cheating at the time.

you know it when you see it

An internet smut purveyor, we are informed by Web Curios and Hyperallergic, has gone quite highbrow to highlight the classical stashes of the world’s museums, because while not all pornography is to be considered art, some works of art can definitely be considered as porn.

the state of tennessee v. john thomas scopes

Ending on this day in 1925 with a guilty verdict for the defendant for being found in violation of state statute, the Butler Act, making it unlawful to teach or promulgate the concept of human evolution in a public school, the show trial, test case had been deliberately staged as a publicity stunt for the plaintiff town with Scopes himself unsure whether his syllabus had ever actually risen to that threshold. The media event was engineered to pit progressive Modernism against biblical literalist and Fundamentalism that held that the word of God was primary to mundane research and exegesis with celebrity lawyers and was broadcast on the radio nationwide. The ensuing manufactured crisis and attendant entrenchment on both sides of the inchoate conflict and helped codify an anti-evolution movement that had heretofore been active in only a few jurisdictions but was now regarded as a countrywide moral panic despite the initial characterisation of Inherit the Wind as a win for science and reason over fable and superstition and only serves to illustrate how one ought to adhere to the status quo and create an ostensibly fake flashpoint for a false dichotomy.

ερμαφρόδιτος

Though the term is outdated and can be confusing and offensive if applied to an intersex individual, it had never occurred to us question where the construction hermaphrodite came from. It is rooted in Greek mythology as illustrated uncharitably anachronistically in this 1460 woodblock tableau from Guillaume Vrelant of the encounter between the naiad Salmacis and the youth Hermaphroditus, the son of the Olympian gods Hermes and Aphrodite, a portmanteau of the parental names. Sexual predation and objectification of course abounds in the classical but Salmacis is uniquely the only female perpetrator—subject of course to double-standards, being roundly shamed for it, the cougar nymph encountering, a popular theme for early Renaissance paintings as well, the fifteen-year-old bathing in the pristine pond (sacred to her and where she was wont to gaze at her reflection like Narcissus) and lusting after him grabbed him tightly, praying to the heavens that they never be parted as Hermaphroditus struggled to get away. For reasons not explained—especially given the teen-ager’s high birth—Salmacis’ wish was granted and their bodies were fused into one. Further unaccounted for was Hermaphroditus’ request to his parents that anyone else bathing in the pool would also be transformed, unclear whether their son was capable of thinking just as himself any longer or whether he thought this new nature to be a curse or a blessing.

your daily demon: morax

Governing from today through 7 July, this twenty-first spirit and infernal earl presents alternately like a bull-headed Minotaur or a mighty bull-like chimera with the face of a man. Giving wise counsel in astronomy and astrology, impairing the virtues of herbs and precious stones, Morax commands thirty legions and is opposed by the guardian angel Nelakael, and according to some sources is a syncretism with the Ancient Egyptian goddess of Truth and Justice Ma’at, as well as the patroness of writing and rhetoric.

lectori benevolo

Writing for Public Domain Review, Alex Tadel imparts some insight on classical literary culture through the lens of the brilliantly illustrated rarity Vergilius Vaticanus, a fourth century anthology containing Virgil’s Georgics and The Æneid—itself one of the oldest sources of the text (see also), though we would still have that material without this deluxe, prestige bound folio crafted and bound at a time when most reading was circulated on papyrus scrolls but be denied the privilege of enjoying this one of a kind commission, acquired by the Vatican Library in 1600 and hence the latter part of the name. Much more on being well-read in Antiquity and the bookish set of the times at the link up top.

8x8

banning: a 1967 forgotten film about a sordid tryst at a country club 

remains of the day: six relics of once ubiquitous fast-food empires  

plain chachalaca: more badly named bird friends—see previously here and here, via Super Punch

awestruck: short, initial pieces optimised for joy and wonder from NPR 

gallery 88: an electronics line for kids from Sony—see also  

dhead xlvi: a David Bowie painting (see previously) saved from a landfill fetches over one hundred thousand CA$  

grand opening: a brief history of the ribbon-cutting ceremony  

britbox: an interactive fiction project for a cult 70s television programme that dabbled in paganism and the paranormal—see also—which never existed

8x8

billboards and hoardings: the evolution of outdoor advertising  

ptychography: a high resolution imaging of atoms—see previously  

the village: lovely Mid-Century Modern accommodations in Portmeirion—where The Prisoner was filmed  

vqgan+clip: Picasso’s Persistence of Memory with Lisa Frank filter applied—via Waxy  

ems: composer and sampling pioneer Peter Zinovieff has passed away, aged eight-eight—via Things Magazine  

pulp tarot: a divining deck (previously) informed by Mid-Century illustrations from Todd Alcott

siss-boom-bah: a Japanese pyrotechnics catalogue (see also) from the 1880s  

indexing: a look at how the adoption of vertical filing helped ushering the Information Age—see also here and here

parc des ateliers

Opening to the public, Frank Gehry’s twisting tower for the Luma Arles campus is informed by the city’s Roman architecture and the craggy promontory that inspired Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night—painted near there. Clad with eleven-thousand stainless steel panels, the structure houses an exhibition space as well as seminar rooms and workshops for various projects.  Much more at the link up top.

sidereus nuncius

For the heretical cosmology espoused in his March 1610 booklet, the above-titled Starry Messenger and later works, that unseated the Earth as the centre of the Universe, on this day in 1633, Galileo Galilei was found guilty by the Roman Inquisition and “vehemently suspect of heresy”—sentenced to indefinite house arrest. Forbidden from publishing any new material, the astronomer was further required to publicly recant, repudiate and denounce his opinions, though according to popular accounts whilst delivering his abjuration, Galileo rebelliously muttered Eppur si muove—and yet it moves, under his breath.

durgan script

The always engrossing Language Log of the University of Pennsylvania acquaints us with a endangered and diffuse language—spread across Kazakhstan, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Ukraine and Mongolia—in the Sinitic (Chinese) family but written with Cyrillic and uniquely not Sinographic characters (see also). The continuum of Gansu, Mandarin and Dungan (Kansu) is mutually intelligible to a large extent. Tones are marked with the glyphs front yer and back yer (Ь / Ъ) from the Old Church Slavonic (see above and here too) and the current orthography is a compromise dating back to the 1920s when the Soviet Union banned Arabic and Persian-based writing systems, looked on disfavourably from the beginning as merchants along the Silk Road could conduct trade deals in a language that was secret to their neighbours.

index librorum prohibitorum

Though with the twentieth and last printed edition published in 1948 and Pope Paul’s December 1965 Motu Proprio (see also) reorganising the curia failing to renew or reinstate it as a part of canon law, an official notitiæ from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith effectively abolished the Catholic Church’s list of prohibited books. In circulation and updated since 1571, the Church realised that their censorship and denunciations often carried the opposite effect than the one intended and chose instead to emphasise the moral and persuasive force of the banned books index rather than focus on punitive controls. Among those authors blacklisted include Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Baruch Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, Francis Bacon, Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Blaise Pascal and John Milton.

7x7

dit-dot: via Web Curios (a lot more to see at this latest instalment), we’re invited to learn the basics of Morse code (previously) with this well designed, gamifying tutorial 

passeggiando: be a virtual flâneur in these composite Italian cities 

broadcast energy transmitter: delivering renewable energy from where it is plentiful to where it’s need via submarine transnational supergrids 

flock together: a TED Ed presentation on the evolution of feathers  

pyramid power: Duns Scotus and the esoteric history of the dunce cap—via Boing Boing  

essential reading: The Atlantic’s Ed Yong won a Pulitzer Prize for his COVID reporting  

ää: a collection of essays from the Times Literary Supplement on defence of endangered, indigenous languages

sympathy for the devil

Via Boing Boing, we are treated to a delightful animated overview of Satan and his tripartite forms, counterweight of a righteous god, trickster spirit and rebel, forms in this TED-Ed short from priest and historian Brian A. Pavlac and how we limn our experience and understanding of evil and temptation in art, theology and scholarship. Shem HaMforash!

geometry of circles

In 1979 Children’s Television Workshop animator Cathryn Aison, who first studied dance and choreography with Martha Graham before switching her academic concentration to industrial design created this very memorable interstitial for Sesame Street and commissioned composer Philip Glass, who gladly took a break from his opera Satyāgraha (सत्याग्रह, insistence on truth) based on the biography of Mahatma Gandhi and part of a decades’ long work on a trilogy including chapters on Akhnaten and Einstein on the Beach to help out, to set the transformations, arcs and bisections to music. I remember singing this choral piece over and over again in my head and being both engrossed and terrified by this incantation.

6x6

lp: an over-sized mural of well-used record sleeves adorns a corner of a Reno brewery

it’s impolite to point: helpfully finding one’s cursor with an array of candid photos—via Things Magazine

kokedama: an installation of a floating forest (根洗い, root wash—no pot) by Nomad Studio 

zeckenalarm: Ze Frank (previously) delivers true facts on the dangerous little tick 

the amusement park: a long-lost 1973 public service announcement from Dawn of the Dead creator George Romero about the nightmare of ageing in America  

bierdeckel: various graphic designers create coasters capturing historic moments from the UEFA European Football Championship

mallorn

Via Dark Roasted Blend, we are directed to the extensive archives of the J.R.R. Tolkien Society and their periodic journal—the above titled in reference to the mellyrn trees of Númenor that grow to immense sizes—whose issues include peer-reviewed scholarship, editorial, art work and academic essays on the legendarium of Middle Earth and related topics. Some of the manual typesetting and formatting, illuminated scripts really, of the earlier instalments, like this coda to an argument about the physics of Gimli’s armaments and fighting style with the contributor having developed his own Fëanorian glyphs to render their by-line, are especially worth a read through.

/kənˈtrəʊlə(r)/

Often times blogging makes me a little ambivalent about reposting something lest I steal someone else’s thunder for research and study. I think I flatter myself here with that worry. I share especially with urgency and eagerness that which has particularly waylaid me recently and though I think a lot of what we post falls into that category, this latest Merriam-Webster panel discussion was recently emblematic of what we are about, not discounting pedantic hyper-correction. Of course—coming from someone who thought quinoa, spelt and spoken, were two different grains—there’s no shame in mispronunciation unless you can’t be bothered to try with someone’s name, it was really disabusing, unsettling to learn that victuals is meant to be said vittles—plus the preponderance of a “victualler license” for restaurants and inns. Listen to the whole podcast below for more surprises and gentle corrections.