Since history is on my mind anyway…
From Jeff VanderMeer’s Ecstatic Days blog recently, by guest blogger Tero Ykspetäjä: the top five reasons “Why Finnish Is Cooler Than English.” Reason #5 (with slightly tongue-in-cheek coda):
There’s no future tense in the Finnish language. The present tense is used instead. “No future,” as the Tähtivaeltaja slogan says. This [...]

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[In the wake of yesterday's post (which began as a study of someone else's neurosis but ended as a study of my own), I'm really feeling the need today to just write about something completely free (for me) of any, y'know, import. Here's what floated to the surface, as it were.]
A while back, I participated [...]

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There’s a particular category of human experience unlike any other. It’s got nothing to do with personality or intelligence; it crosses geographic and linguistic borders as if they didn’t exist (because they don’t, except in our minds and on the paper where we record the products of those faulty machines). Such an experience comes and [...]

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I’m working on a two-part series of posts at the moment, with Part 1 due up tomorrow. In the meantime, I thought you’d appreciate this. It’s a promotional video for the New York Public Library Photography Collection:

Among the photographers discussed, you can find more information at these Web sites (besides Wikipedia, of course):

Dorothea Lange: her [...]

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I’ve always liked black-and-white photographs — especially family snapshots (even of other people’s families) taken in the 1950s and earlier.
It’s not that they satisfy some inner longing for quaintness (I’m not a fan of quaintness in general, and the adjective “whimsical” often makes me want to reach for the X-Acto knife (especially, ha ha, when [...]

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Continuing last Friday’s meditation on the topic of sight, and the things which we might see differently “if only”…
First, from whiskey river’s commonplace book*:
Picasso is riding on a train and someone sits down next to him.
Recognizing who he is, the person asks, “Why don’t you paint people the way they really are?”
Picasso asks, “What do [...]

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Okay, look — so I don’t have kids of my own, and my niece and nephews and stepkids are all grown and the next generation is still somewhere out on the misty horizon.
But I keep coming across these nominally “children’s” books which I then wish I had a non-adult excuse to read. Much of the [...]

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There’s so much news every day. Who can keep up with it all…?
For example, I’m a couple-three months behind the curve on this:
One of the central works in the exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (until 12 May), Victimless Leather, a small jacket made up of [...]

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For reasons which I’m not sure I could articulate, I love this drawing without reservation. (Click the image for a larger version.) It’s from a page in 2007’s Edward Gorey “Page-a-Day” calendar and I’ve kept it around on various computers, trying without success to make it work as a desktop wallpaper. (Icons are inconsistently legible [...]

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Last weekend, The Missus and I visited the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. By the time you’ve seen (say) your 500th painting in one day, it’s tempting to claim they all look pretty much alike. Tempting, and wrong. Many of them sort of blend together, true. (In the Renaissance galleries, I lost count [...]

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