Just enough light

 

It's called "Interior with a Lady." You could call it a portrait. For whatever reason the painter, John Koch, did not. Whistler called his famed painting of his mother "Arrangement in Grey and Black." You could also refer to this as an arrangement of colors, red near the top of the list. The lady takes center stage no matter how you slice it.

You can find evidence that Koch was painting in the mid twentieth century if you look closely. The compact electric lamp, for one thing. But he always has the feel of the late nineteenth, when Impressionism is just starting to have a broader influence. There's something to be said for holding onto the old ways, if in using them you're better able to create. That certainly looks to have been the case for him.

No late admission

I don't generally read books when I've already seen the movie, but there are exceptions. Recently my literary travels have brought me to Robert Bloch's Psycho.

The book is a good mixture of horror, thriller, and mystery. I don't think a scene-for-scene adaptation―the kind that Polanski would later do with Rosemary's Baby, for instance―would have been a hit. For one thing, Marian Crane (Mary in the book) meets her fate much quicker, and with less fanfare. So a lot of the familiar beats associated with her, like the frantic deal with the used car salesman and the tense traffic stop, aren't there. In fact the whole idea of starting the movie with Marian as the protagonist is the invention of Hitchcock and screenwriter Josef Stefano.

Norman is different too, of course. In the book he's older, fatter, wears cheap glasses, and his psychopathology is closer to the surface. Hitch knew that a handsome young man with a touch of shyness could get away with much more in the eyes of the audience.

✍

It does not, at this point, seem like you can really affect anything by voting, anymore than you can keep a beloved item on the market by continuing to buy it. Not that you're given much choice in voting anyway. Nations that are officially democracies are unofficially becoming "Here's what you're getting" propositions. For most of us politics is something that is done to us.

That's another reason why pursuing something creative―writing, painting, picking up a guitar and making a song―is a good thing. It's something that you actually can affect. And it might give you a chance to resist the onslaught.

To shroud my clothes, the black of night

This overview of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs* mentions one of the most memorable parts: the Queen's self-transformation into the Old Witch. It's scary and intense and even as a kid I knew it didn't actually make much sense.

The Queen, after all, is a ruler. Her word is law. Why would she turn herself into a hideous crone in order to get to Snow White, whom she could just have arrested and, if she so preferred, executed. Tudor Era queens Mary and Elizabeth both did in women and girls who got in their way. Neither one of them splashed their own faces with acid in order to do so.

I think it ultimately works because so much of the movie is based on dream logic. In a dream you can be getting chased through the woods by a bear who is also at the same time your high school algebra teacher. The character's terrifying forward impulse takes the lead, and the faces ultimately fade into the background.

For every dark hot cloud

We're diving right into summer with a heat wave. Actually I think it started the day before the Solstice. But yeah, it's been hot and humid all over the place.

On the plus side, I've made a discovery. If you're, say, at the computer and your arm is going to be resting on varnished wood for a while, you can lessen the unpleasant sweaty sensation by laying a washcloth underneath. A small but welcome comfort.

Unus non scit

Recently borrowed The Romans: From Village to Empire (Mary T. Boatwright, Daniel J. Gargola & Richard A. Talbert: Oxford Press). There is, of course, a pretty full plate of stuff to talk about where the Romans are concerned, especially if you start at a point before it was a real city, as is the case here.

One interesting topic involves the Romans themselves writing history:

Roman historians only rarely undertook what a modern historian might recognize as research. Undoubtedly, Romans of a later age had access to information regarding earlier centuries that was, in modern terms, reliable. Some documents did survive, although later Romans found them difficult to decipher and interpret...

However, few Roman historians seem to have consulted the old texts directly. Instead, they relied on interpretations of them (not always accurate) encountered in the work of earlier writers.

The history of Rome by the time it had reached its imperial phase was already quite long. Long enough for the Latin language to mutate and evolve. We understand Shakespeare because actors have worked to keep him contemporary and he's been quoted by thousands of other authors, but dropped in a sixteenth century English village we'd scarcely understand a word. anyone was speaking. Later Roman historians had a similar problem, running into a Latin that was already archaic. Not too surprising that they chose to copy what had already been written. Especially since originality wasn't really what was selling. (Is it ever?)

Crucial, verbal

I did a crossword today compiled by a guy from Brazil. Yes, it was an English-language puzzle. But that leads into an interesting point. I read him saying somewhere else that he creates puzzles in Portuguese and Spanish as well as English.

Writing a crossword in Spanish would be a special challenge, If you have "banana" crossing "El Niño" at the second "n" in English no one will really call you on it. The situation is different in Spanish, where they're considered to separate letters.

Call it a draw

One of my readymade Old Man complaints is the unwelcome standardization of the animated film. It's with some alarm that I realize that a generation or two has grown up with computer animation and virtually nothing else. And with a few exceptions the animation on offer has been ugly and unimaginative. Nonetheless, for kids now that's your first taste of cinema.

It's not necessarily like that everywhere, though. Disney helped destroy the artform in this country when Michael Eisner sold off all it's drawing equipment. Studio Ghibli has continued to champion hand-drawn animation, and has had great success with it, including in the US. Japan has no shortage of people expert in what we've come to call STEM, but they haven't tried to banish all their traditions.

In actuality

When the COVID thing first started I gradually started following some different publications. More right-aligned than I had read much of before, often labeled as "heterodox." The thing was, I sensed my previous sources were leaving out inconvenient bits of the story and perhaps couldn't be trusted, so I had to look outside of them.

What has become apparent since then is that a lot of the "heterodox" media aren't, really. They're not really independent, and their editorial stance is oriented to currying favor with power just as their rivals do. 

Generally I still do at least look at Spiked, Tablet and Quillette, but don't expect to find much of interest most days. UnHerd has a higher success rate, and Compact is interesting because it was founded by Trump fans who actually do favor a non-interventionist foreign policy (which for the most part The Donald himself doesn't.) But the ultimate lesson is that you need to continue taking things with a big grain of salt.

Family circle

The Ring of Brodgar. The name sounds operatic. It's a henge, like Stonehenge, and if it isn't as well-known, it's still something to make you sit up and take notice when you do find out about it. 

The Ring of Brodgar stands in Orkney. Orkney is a chain of islands that sort of bridge the British Isles and Scandinavia. They were administered by Norway for a time and are now considered part of Scotland. But the Ring dates far earlier than that, during the time of the Picts. The time it dates from was about the boundary of the Neolithic Era and the Bronze Age. Not, of course, that there was a single instant where one became the other.

Construction must have taken years of effort. So why did they do it? Likely it had something to do with their conception of the heavens. The ancients were more complex than we generally assume.

What the future may hold

For the record my dreams are just weird, as far as I can tell. And I haven't tried geomancy. Not sure if I will. Do I want/need that kind of definitive answer, even if it's available?

But I'd say I'm okay with the idea of progress being finite. The great futurist ideas of conquering the stars and other such grandiose plans never seemed like mature predictions so much as the manic phase of a bipolar episode.

There may be bleak centuries ahead, but we don't live in centuries. We live in days. And we can still use those days in the way that we see fit.

The décor

I have new neighbors one floor below. When they moved in they hung a piece of wall art next to the mailboxes. It's sort of a metal grid with an arrangement of discs laid on top of it. The discs are wooden, I think, but some of them are painted metallic colors. 

Don't want to go too much in describing it. Mainly I just think it's cool that they decided to add something to the foyer. Pretty sure none of the rest of us have done that.

A calm grazer

 

This fella looks unflappable, and likely is, out of necessity. As indicated by the name, the Himalayan goral lives in the Himalayas. There is, in fact, a population on Everest. They're adapted to rough terrain and incredible heights. Gorals have to be able to plow through.

Sprung

I know I've blogged before about Gerard Manley Hopkins, but he's always worth remembering. He'd already become an interest of mine before I had ever studied him in school. A lot of his poems were basically sonnets, but they had a different kind of rhythm, one suited to expressing his feelings on God and the world of nature.

Hopkins didn't want to be famous as a poet. He didn't want to be famous as anything, and for a long time actually stopped writing verse. This is justifiable given his calling as a priest, an ideally humble and self-effacing profession. Of course the world would be a poorer place without his poetry. Posthumous publication was perhaps the best compromise. 

His friend Robert Bridges was the primary mover of that publication, at a time when Bridges himself had attained the position of Britain's Poet Laureate. But his younger sisters Kate and Grace had something to do with his revival as well. This is nice to know, and they seem to have been quite the creative family.

Kangaroo

It's hard to imagine the verdict standing as is. Trump's appealing it was a foregone conclusion. And he has considerable grounds for appeal. In this venue, with this DA and this judge, a fair trial might have been impossible.

For 8-9 years now, the time when it started to seem likely that he would be a nominee for President, liberal politics has been all about being against one guy. For a number of people, the law is now just a pretext for going after that same guy, and in at least some cases they can make it stick. That reduces the law to an extension of politics, in a way it's not meant to be. Both sides might wind up embracing that vision of the law, though. A dangerous situation for people who get caught in the middle.