belles-lettres or diplomatic provisioning

As much as penmanship is a vanishing art, so too is the is legible and literate eye for penetrating not necessarily historic documents of great importance and concern—as the discipline of diplomatics mostly concerns itself with, but also for the everyday that’s receding out of our scope of what’s readable.
Like how I’ve heard that parents can use cursive as secret hieroglyphic code (like spelling out matters that aren’t meant for sensitive ears), we can’t train our gaze to the compact and economic handwriting that fills up older postcards and other correspondence when paper was more a premium commodity, rather than just an unpolished draft and cue to toss away. A diplomatic transcription is a faithful reproduction of a manuscript with no effort to bring it in line with modern conventions of modern copybooks. I suppose such calligraphy will never be wholly unbroachable to us in the future—thanks to advanced optical recognition, but I do wonder about the fate of collected letters and other non-ephemera. What do you think?

reformer or lolled

Though perhaps less famous in the annals of religious reformation movements, the Lollards—under the leadership of theologian John Wycliffe—ought to be better remembered than the movements on the continent that are heir to them.
More succinct than the ninety-five theses of Martin Luther, which may or may not have been posted publically on the door of the Wittenberger Dom though certainly posted to the Archbishop of Mainz on All Hallows Eve in 1517 (enough to get Luther in hot water), the Lollards compiled a list of Twelve Conclusions that was definitely nailed to the doors of Westminster Abbey and Saint Paul’s in early Spring 1395, and was a similar litany of accusations before the practise of selling indulgences took off and convinced Henry VIII to stand his ground against Church authority. As a prologue to their general beliefs, the Lollards rallied against the Church’s meddling in temporal powers, conquest and crusade, celibacy in the priesthood, exorcism and veneration of relics as witchcraft and idolatry, and questioned the need for the Church to mediate between God and man—even producing an unsanctioned edition of the Bible in English for home-use. The knights of this brotherhood were called Lollards rather pejoratively (but like the Quakers or the Shakers, they were happy to run with this name) and gruesomely after the babbling imitation of the gravediggers that bore away Plague victims, who were deputised to administer last rites—to mumble, as in lullaby. Suppression, intrigue and rather disproportion responses sent the Lollards underground but ensured that this resurgence and received tenants would be retrieved by later Protestantism.

palimpsest or spine-tingling

As The Guardian reports, x-ray techniques similar to those methods that have revealed artists’ earlier versions of iconic works or teasing out the script from the scorched manuscripts of Pompeii are now as being applied to the bindings of early printed books and discovering fragments of much older texts.
Antiquarians have known that it was common practise after the introduction of the printing-press for book-binders to pulp spare handwritten manuscripts (considered obsolete) in order to strengthen the covers of new editions. Once considered lost to the ages, researchers can know explore and reconstruct what’s within with non-invasive means. Only a small sampling from the University of Leiden has been examined so far with this technology, but with millions of older volumes in libraries across the globe, who can say what might be hidden?

ginsburg precedent

A newly classified species of Praying Mantis, named in honour of the Notorious RBG, the Ilomantis ginsburgæ, represents a significant departure from the usually gender-bias of taxonomists and biologists, which had heretofore almost exclusively (for reasons) isolated unique exemplars by male representation. When told (mansplained) that looking at lady bits had no taxonomical value, one researcher became more determined and found a new specimen within the genus and designated it after the equal rights champion and US Supreme Court judge.

player-piano or à quatre mains

I did enjoy seeing this demonstration called “Andante” by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Tangible Media Group, which aims to reformat performances as interactive, collaborative and engaging for all the senses. Figures gallop and dance over the keyboard with the music and the video of the duet (piano four hands) is really amazing, and I bet such a show could be a tutor for instrument-lessons.

alhambra

Antoni Gaudí, perhaps best known for his exquisite though not slated to be finished until 2026 basilica Sagrada Família in his native Barcelona, also designed a colossal hotel to dominate the skyline of New York City.
Called Hotel Attraction, the renowned architect submitted the blueprints in 1908 but was deemed structurally unsound for construction methods of the time. Originally proposed for a location somewhere in Lower Manhattan when it was known as Little Syria but before the establishment of Radio Row and later, to reverse urban-blight, the World Trade Center, Gaudí’s sketches were among the contenders for rebuilding at Ground Zero—and arguably a far better and purer memorial and testament (since the architect’s ego was not involved in the project) than the ghostly pillars that carried the day.