An arresting scene photographed in the late nineteenth century by Norwegian photographer Axel Theodor Lindahl (wiki).
Unlike many of his contemporary photographers who emphasized the dramatic nature of Norwegian landscapes, Lindahl sought in his composition the harmonious aesthetic of his subject matter.
I found the photo at wikipedia. It’s in the public domain.
A Floridian beach view from 1904, thanks to Shorpy. Click the image to enlarge for glorious details.
A 9th century Irish poem, The Viking Terror:
Bitter is the wind tonight,
it tosses the ocean’s white hair:
Tonight I fear not the fierce warriors of Norway,
Coursing on the Irish Sea.
Anonymous poet, translated by Kuno Meyer.
I know it’s a rather flat comparison, but I have sometimes thought similarly on nights when it’s been raining fiercely: “I bet even burglars stay at home on nights like this.”
The poem is from the collection “The School Bag”, eds. Seamus Heaney & Ted Hughes.
This interior of a public house by Flemish artist David Teniers The Younger, reminds me of an amateur photographic snapshot, so candid and honest is the scene. The expressions are perfect. I especially like how the smoking man’s eyes evoke that now-familiar, rabbit-in-the-headlights image of someone looking directly into the camera lens, caught unawares; he seems all the more real for it and the picture all the more truthful.
The painting resides at the Brukenthal palace in Romania.
Click the image to expand.
Peele Castle in a Storm, 1805. Sir George Beaumont (1753 – 1827)
This painting was the inspiration for Wordsworth’s ‘Elegiac Stanzas’, written after the death of his brother John at sea in 1805. It was Sir George’s donation of a major part of his collection to the nation that was to have a decisive effect on the creation of a National Gallery.
Wordsworth saw the natural world as a stimulus for thinking about the emotional response it generated within him. It was man’s growing awareness of an inner, religious response to nature that interested Wordsworth, (not simply the physical ‘rocks, and stones. and trees’).
Most of all, it was the ‘Mind of Man’ that Wordsworth declared was his ‘haunt, and the main region of [his] song.’ The mind, through imagination, could reach beyond sensory experience;it could experience ‘absent things as if they were present’ and perceive the infinite. For Wordsworth, the mind was ‘creator and receiver both,/Working but in alliance with the works/Which it beholds.’ His poetry was the product of a collaboration with nature within the mind, emotions and imagination. It is the landscape of Wordsworth’s mind that we find in his poetry.
And finally, the man worthy of all these words (the poem is Nature and the poet):
I was thy neighbour once, thou rugged Pile!
Four summer weeks I dwelt in sight of thee:
I saw thee every day; and all the while
Thy form was sleeping on a glassy sea.So pure the sky, so quiet was the air!
So like, so very like, was day to day!
Whene’er I look’d, thy image still was there;
It trembled, but it never pass’d away.How perfect was the calm! It seem’d no sleep,
No mood, which season takes away, or brings;
I could have fancied that the mighty Deep
Was even the gentlest of all gentle things.Ah! then, if mine had been the painter’s hand
To express what then I saw, and add the gleam,
The light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration, and the Poet’s dream,—I would have planted thee, thou hoary pile,
Amid a world how different from this!
Beside a sea that could not cease to smile;
On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss.A picture had it been of lasting ease,
Elysian quiet, without toil or strife;
No motion but the moving tide—a breeze—
Or merely silent Nature’s breathing life.Such, in the fond illusion of my heart,
Such picture would I at that time have made;
And seen the soul of truth in every part,
A steadfast peace that might not be betray’d.So once it would have been—’tis so no more;
I have submitted to a new control:
A power is gone, which nothing can restore;
A deep distress hath humanized my soul.Not for a moment could I now behold
A smiling sea, and be what I have been:
The feeling of my loss will ne’er be old;
This, which I know, I speak with mind serene.Then, Beaumont, Friend! who would have been the friend
If he had lived, of him whom I deplore,
This work of thine I blame not, but commend;
This sea in anger, and that dismal shore.Oh ’tis a passionate work!—yet wise and well,
Well chosen is the spirit that is here:
That hulk which labours in the deadly swell,
This rueful sky, this pageantry of fear;And this huge castle, standing here sublime,
I love to see the look with which it braves—
Cased in the unfeeling armour of old time—
The lightning, the fierce wind, and trampling waves.—Farewell, farewell the heart that lives alone,
Housed in a dream, at distance from the kind!
Such happiness, wherever it be known,
Is to be pitied, for ’tis surely blind.But welcome fortitude, and patient cheer,
And frequent sights of what is to be borne!
Such sights, or worse, as are before me here:—
Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.
Ten years ago, while experimenting with rats, [Joseph] Ledoux made a discovery that changed the way neuroscientists view memory [...].
In that experiment, Ledoux conditioned rats to fear a bell by ringing it in time with an electric shock until the rats froze in fear at the mere sound of the bell. Then, at the moment when the fear memory was being recalled, he injected the rats with anisomycin, a drug that stops the construction of new neural connections. Remarkably, the next time he rang the bell the rats no longer froze in fear. The memory, it seemed, had vanished. Poof!
Ledoux concluded that the neural connections in which memories are stored have to be rebuilt each time a memory is recalled. And during rebuilding—or reconsolidation, as he termed it—memories can be altered or even erased. Neuroscientists now believe that reconsolidation functions to update memories with new information—something of an unsettling idea, suggesting that our memories are only as accurate as the last time they were remembered.
!!!
I need to get a job.
Check out more images of this Father Time doll and how I made it, by viewing the full entry below. I’m particularly proud of the solution I found for his skull.
Shakespeare’s Sonnet CXXIII:
No, Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change:
Thy pyramids built up with newer might
To me are nothing novel, nothing strange;
They are but dressings of a former sight.
Our dates are brief, and therefore we admire
What thou dost foist upon us that is old,
And rather make them born to our desire
Than think that we before have heard them told.
Thy registers and thee I both defy,
Not wondering at the present nor the past,
For thy records and what we see doth lie,
Made more or less by thy continual haste.
This I do vow and this shall ever be;
I will be true, despite thy scythe and thee.
Widely regarded as the world’s most influential living psychologist, Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel in Economics for his pioneering work in behavioral economics.
Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our “experiencing selves” and our “remembering selves” perceive happiness differently. This new insight has profound implications for economics, public policy — and our own self-awareness.
From TED Talks 2010
Fun diagram from Wikipedia:
Biological clock affects the daily rhythm of many physiological processes. This diagram depicts the circadian patterns typical of someone who rises early in morning, eats lunch around noon, and sleeps at night (10 p.m.). Although circadian rhythms tend to be synchronized with cycles of light and dark, other factors – such as ambient temperature, meal times, stress and exercise – can influence the timing as well.
Just a small section of another great Shorpy image that caught my attention. See the full image.
The American Museum of Natural History has prepared a video in the vein of Charles & Ray Eames’ Powers of Ten which lets you see our planet’s size relative to the universe. The Museum’s is scientifically accurate — based on data compiled by their astrophysicists.
It’s nice to watch in full screen (at high quality, if your computer can handle it [mine can't!]).
(via kottke)
Actress Sue Lyon & actor Richard Burton floating on their backs during filming
of motion picture “The Night of the Iguana.” Photo: Gjon Mili, LIFE.
In this poem George Bilgere describes a sensation I find very comforting: the feeling of being insulated — separated — from time, which one experiences when suspended in water, or when in the fuselage of an aeroplane surrounded by miles of sky .
I am doing laps at night, alone
In the indoor pool. Outside
It is snowing, but I am warm
And weightless, suspended and out
Of time like a fly in amber.She is thousands of miles
From here, and miles above me,
Ghosting the stratosphere,
Heading from New York to London.
Though it is late, even
At that height, I know her light
Is on, her window a square
Of gold as she reads mysteries
Above the Atlantic. I watchThe line of black tile on the pool’s
Floor, leading me down the lane.
If she looks down by moonlight,
Under a clear sky, she will see
Black water. She will see me
Swimming distantly, moving far
From shore, suspended with her
In flight through the wide gulf
As we swim toward land together.
The poem is called Night Flight and I found it via American poet Ted Kooser‘s blog, American life in poetry.
Above: Giddy London. Circa 1949.
John Lunney‘s happened upon a nice collection of old Kodachrome images on wikipedia uploaded by the photographer’s son (user sba2). John says:
This Wikipedia user has scanned and uploaded some of his father’s old photographs, from America and Europe, seemingly from the 1960s. What strikes me is the difference that still existed between places, a far cry from the homogenous urban and suburban landscapes of today.
See the collection here.
As usual, the most recent postings on Shorpy represent a spate of historical images similarly fascinating. Here’s a row of tenement housing in New York from 1900:
Fantastic! Though you have to see it full-size.
And she knows that she knows better (4 billion years of experience can make one very cocksure), so you needn’t bother answering back.
Foster and Kreitzman argue that modern society “is in conflict with our basic biology”. Electric lights turn night into day and central heating transforms our homes into oases of summer warmth in bleak midwinter. When we feel sleepy we don’t listen to our bodies. Instead we drink another cup of coffee, roll down the car window and “kid ourselves that we can beat a few billion years of evolution.”
Guilty as charged, I should be asleep but technology has encouraged a rebellion against dear Mother Nature. The above is from PD Smith’s review of Rhythms of Life at the independent.
Smith’s personal blog is incidentally very attractive. Nice design by Jean-Michel Dentand.
A tribute to Carl Sagan and Steven Hawking by colorpulse:
It turns out that autotuning can make clever people tuneful as well.
Candies for cuties,… Oh, blast, I forgot my candies for cuties.
Shorpy‘s seemingly inexhaustible source of high quality, high definition, vintage photographs from all eras of American history never ceases to fascinate and impress me.
Here’s a terrific shot from 1943 of a teenage girl relaxing in her bedroom after a day of work in a war factory:
And below that is one from 1863!
July 1863. “Gettysburg, Pa. Three captured Confederate soldiers, likely from Louisiana, pose for Mathew Brady on Seminary Ridge following the Battle of Gettysburg.” Wet plate glass negative, half of stereograph pair.
Terrific.
