the new emotional blackmailer's handbook

Sunday, December 25, 2022

up early ... we drink two whole glasses of something bubbly ... and then wasted a half hour trying to make a clumsy visual joke about her sybaritic lifestyle ...

my christmas choice ... i hope to read it before easter

i heard him being interviewed for desert island discs a while back ...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b096gnqx

Thursday, December 22, 2022

two long quotes about SIGHT from the spencer alley blog .... and a poem ...

"Our sight is the most perfect and most delightful of all our senses. It fills the mind with the largest variety of ideas, converses with its objects at the greatest distance, and continues the longest in action without being tired or satiated with its proper enjoyments. The sense of feeling can indeed give us a notion of extension, shape, and all other ideas that enter at the eye, except colours; but at the same time it is very much straitened, and confined in its operations to the number, bulk, and distance of its particular objects. Our sight seems designed to supply all these defects, and may be considered as a more delicate and diffusive kind of touch, that spreads itself over an infinite multitude of bodies, comprehends the largest figures, and brings into our reach some of the most remote parts of the universe."

"There are indeed but very few who know how to be idle and innocent, or have a relish of any pleasures that are not criminal; every diversion they take is at the expense of some one virtue or another, and their very first step out of business is into vice or folly. A man should endeavour, therefore, to make the sphere of his innocent pleasures as wide as possible, that he may retire into them with safety, and find in them such a satisfaction as a wise man would not blush to take. Of this nature are those of the imagination, which do not require such a bent of thought as is necessary to our more serious employments, nor, at the same time, suffer the mind to sink into that negligence and remissness, which are apt to accompany our more sensual delights, but, like a gentle exercise to the faculties, awaken them from sloth and idleness, without putting them upon any labour or difficulty."

– Joseph Addison, The Pleasures of the Imagination (1712)

the full passage can be found here :

https://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/fowlerjh/chap22.htm

The Beginning of Color

These brown discolorations on a faded black-

and-white photograph are not at all like a defect

In anything remembered but, rather, a kind of

"Crystallization" as Stendhal described it, in

One of his more eccentric books about love.

In truth, my childhood was cast down like a twig

Into an abandoned salt mine near Salzburg

From where it emerged, of this I'm certain,

As something much richer than my own life,

A jeweled branch of living history, now

Retrieved by my mother from the well at Twig

Bog Lane. I'll never know who it was, and anyway

Why would I want to know who it was,

Who slid the black hard plastic button to On

One late summer afternoon in nineteen fifty-seven,

So that not only did some kind of shutter flick open

In my head, but the full force of color saturation

Hit my brain. The effect was high-speed Ektachrome

And life as it is now, that studio of constant poems –

It's just that as my mother hauled the metallic

Home Assistance milk gallon from the deep well

In Twig Bog Lane, the light of deprivation reflected

Back from her face and got lost in me, and I knew

How biography is the steadying of only one kind

Of lens, how memory offers different iterations;

How, somewhere, a paper was being coated with

Such chemicals that even deeper colors would form

Over time. During that summer, a world away,

The first International Color Salon was organized

In Hong Kong and, while restrictions on dollar

Imports meant that Ireland couldn't reach a speed

Of 100 ASA, faster colors kept rushing in. There

Was no holding life back once it swarmed; biography

Was ready for color, our brains were marked

That year for realities more personal, realities brighter

Than a boxed-in lens. Huge Blackwater river rats

That knawed through the doors of our dry toilets in

Twig Bog Lane were as ignorant of color as me; and

Could not have known that their multi-layered bristles

Would soon be seen in more subtle shades of brown.

– Thomas McCarthy (2017)

Sunday, November 27, 2022

a dutchman's harlequin ... by gerardus xavery

explanatory note ...

Friday, November 18, 2022

man ray's portrait of meret oppenheim in louis marcoussis' printing studio has always entertained ... but i only found out about louis YESTERDAY when i discovered this picture of him cleaning the ink off meret's paws ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Marcoussis

Sunday, November 6, 2022

TAROT

TAROT

I’ve only just learned, ‘cos it really didn’t interest me before, that there are TWO sets of tarot cards … usually called THE MAJOR ARCANA and THE MINOR ARCANA.

If I understand it roughly, the Minor arcana were a standard pack of playing cards as used by Italians in the 1400s. The Major arcana was an extra set “bolted-on” to make the game more interesting ... but the idea of using these cards for an occult purpose didn’t surface until 1781.

All humans are afflicted with uncertainty and anxiety to a greater or lesser degree, and it is only natural for us to seek clues about whatever FATE may hold “in store” for us.

It seems to me, tarot was developed by people willing to shroud themselves in a fortune-teller’s mantle of fake knowledge and fake wisdom, thus acquiring undeserved status amongst the ignorant and gullible who would have traditionally revered alchemists and necromancers and were content to acknowledge a traditional social hierarchy of dominance and subjection.

In France, Tarot was made fashionable by this interesting man … Antoine Court de Gébelin - Wikipedia

The false medievalism of the modern scheme satisfies the conservative impulses of those who feel adrift in our modern world. But, of course, the vivid imagery of the cards combined with the accumulating sophistication of their designs and their invented meanings are irresistible to artists, and to anyone with even a slightly romantic or fatalistic view of life and death.

The Met Museum wrote a coherent intro to the tarot for an exhibition in 2016 …

https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/in-season/2016/tarot

The schemes below are borrowed from Wikipedia. NB. There has been nothing like Wikipedia in the history of the World. I’m always hard up but always send them money once a year.

THE MAJOR ARCANA … just twenty-two cards.