…which seems to be an effective means to keep track of links I grabbed and imagined I’d get back to sometime.
I scanned an aerial image of Grand Pre dykelands from 1955:
and then it occurred to me to rotate the image 90 degrees:
And damme if Glooscap doesn’t put in an appearance, breathing Boot Island into being. YCMTSU, folks.
Mindful that my Word for the Year was Curate, what can I say about how that has gone as we near the cusp of November, with prospects that are at best uncertain and fraught? While I haven’t been systematic about Curating, there have been some interesting developments on the remote edges of the mountains of things-retained, and I want to put some links where I can find them more easily. Thus:
Philosophy of Teaching and Learning ca. 1995
Hollows and other toponymy bits 2000
Sabbatical Fall 2002
Walls in China ca. 2003
Doubtless other toothsome bits will surface. These (mere Ears of the Hippopotamus) remind me of how I was using html to keep track of and summarize projects during the Washington & Lee library years.
The photographic archives are vast and full of surprises. Consider these from a 2022 excavation, and Horton Landing bozos, 1973. Every photograph has a backstory, of course.
There will be more in this vein.
I just got Joe Boyd’s And the Roots of Rhythm Remain, a massive brick (900+pages) of A Journey Through Global Music (the subtitle). The first encounter with the text inspires me to look at my vinyl music holdings more analytically. A few years ago I serially numbered and photographed the covers of 2000+ ‘albums’ (as they used to be called), and began the process of making their content accessible. And a long process it would be to “complete” the project… but an overview of the Vinyl Catalog is at least a start. The subcategories I’ve broken out as separate genres [perhaps too high-flown a term…] are neither systematic nor exhaustive, and are really pretty disorderly, but gotta start somewhere.
The last few months of blog entries have mostly turned into Convivium texts and handwritten conversation on the yellow pads that follow me everywhere. I mean to be more attentive to the blog in future.
How did this happen? The blog is 20 years from first post, and lately my attentions have been aimed at texts for weekly(ish) Convivium. I vow to figure out how to get the blog back into my day-to-day operations. Real soon now.
…and Kentlee followed up with a pointer to John Gall‘s The Systems Bible, which deals with Systemantics. It first appeared in 1975, was updated in 1986, and expanded in a third edition in 2012. I grabbed it on the Kindle and started reading, flipping between parody and an exposé of some of the fallacies and limitations of “systems thinking” as practised (and buzzworded) in the early 1970s. Delightful reading, a flavor of which can be sampled via Taylor Pearson, and from Drafty Manor. Gall was an acute observer and had a sharp eye for hypocrises, things hidden in plain sight, and the Emperor’s Clothes.
I happened to look at the book’s cataloging information and found that one of its Library of Congress subject descriptors is
Facetiae, eh? Here are some of the dictionary entries for that one:
Hmmmm, I thought, how guilty am I of pretty much all of those? How many of the books on my shelves partake of the facetious and the parodic? Edward Gorey? Terry Pratchett? Archy and Mehitabel? The Good Soldier Svejk? The Big Lebowski? Sandman? uh oh…
Christopher Lydon’s Radio Open Source has brightened a lot of the last decade for me, opening doors into places and subjects I hadn’t known I wanted to learn about, and introducing me to stuff I’ve since realized I care deeply about. A case in point: an interview with Colm Tóibín, towards the end of which he reads an Elizabeth Bishop poem which is achingly reminiscent of the Nova Scotia I know. His lead-in is absolutely spot-on (“…what was it that just hit you, emotionally? where it was in the poem where that began, and was sustained?”)
Poem About the size of an old-style dollar bill, American or Canadian, mostly the same whites, gray greens, and steel grays -this little painting (a sketch for a larger one?) has never earned any money in its life. Useless and free., it has spent seventy years as a minor family relic handed along collaterally to owners who looked at it sometimes, or didn't bother to. It must be Nova Scotia; only there does one see abled wooden houses painted that awful shade of brown. The other houses, the bits that show, are white. Elm trees., low hills, a thin church steeple -that gray-blue wisp-or is it? In the foreground a water meadow with some tiny cows, two brushstrokes each, but confidently cows; two minuscule white geese in the blue water, back-to-back,, feeding, and a slanting stick. Up closer, a wild iris, white and yellow, fresh-squiggled from the tube. The air is fresh and cold; cold early spring clear as gray glass; a half inch of blue sky below the steel-gray storm clouds. (They were the artist's specialty.) A specklike bird is flying to the left. Or is it a flyspeck looking like a bird? Heavens, I recognize the place, I know it! It's behind-I can almost remember the farmer's name. His barn backed on that meadow. There it is, titanium white, one dab. The hint of steeple, filaments of brush-hairs, barely there, must be the Presbyterian church. Would that be Miss Gillespie's house? Those particular geese and cows are naturally before my time. A sketch done in an hour, "in one breath," once taken from a trunk and handed over. Would you like this? I'll Probably never have room to hang these things again. Your Uncle George, no, mine, my Uncle George, he'd be your great-uncle, left them all with Mother when he went back to England. You know, he was quite famous, an R.A.... I never knew him. We both knew this place, apparently, this literal small backwater, looked at it long enough to memorize it, our years apart. How strange. And it's still loved, or its memory is (it must have changed a lot). Our visions coincided-"visions" is too serious a word-our looks, two looks: art "copying from life" and life itself, life and the memory of it so compressed they've turned into each other. Which is which? Life and the memory of it cramped, dim, on a piece of Bristol board, dim, but how live, how touching in detail -the little that we get for free, the little of our earthly trust. Not much. About the size of our abidance along with theirs: the munching cows, the iris, crisp and shivering, the water still standing from spring freshets, the yet-to-be-dismantled elms, the geese.(source for the text: “Poem”)
Talking of Anglophilia, here’s what Netflix brought me today, with Maggie Smith as Mrs. Vicar:
One of my Guilty Pleasures is books that I classify as Anglophilia. The latest to join the heap is Regina Marler’s Bloomsbury Pie: The Making of the Bloomsbury Boom. It’s comfortable and interesting in a slightly voyeuristic way, and from time to time one encounters a passage that just needs to be passed along to others. Today’s case in point:
Perhaps because they threaten our private feelings for a cherished figure, attempts to explain the few veiled elements of Virginia Woolf’s character arouse frenzied opposition. Armed with Freud or Laing or Husserl or Lacan and the immense written record of Virginia Woolf’s life, numberless critics and biographers have tried their hand at the puzzle only to be judged, at best, plausible and sensitive or, at worst, hostile, fanciful, unreflective, biased, arrogant, self-serving, and violently appropriative. Even the official biographer was attacked for broaching the possibility of sexual molestation: those who came after were torn by jackals. Some observers, like Leon Edel, blamed Michael Holroyd for establishing a prurient interest in the Bloomsberries and setting the tone for subsequent journalism and scholarship. This overlooks not only the growing candor of the period, however, but the perennial appeal of other people’s private lives. “Let me confess,” wrote Quentin Bell, “horrible though it may be to do so, that I would rather read almost any frivolous and salacious journalism than almost any literary criticism.” (pp 167-168)
And so say we all.