Dream Tree

kellysearsmith @ 2008-04-14T07:02:00

2008-04-14T12:11:12Z

There's something wonderfully trangressive about transforming a utilitarian object, like a pail or a mirror, through art. There's the surprise of the sequined shoe; the glory of the art car and the concept car both; and then, too, as I'll demonstrate here, the lean beauty of the custom or art knife. Even in this age of high tech mass production, or perhaps because of it, the art of the smith continues, organized by guilds and transmitted by masters. For the custom knife community, magazines and conventions, websites and organizations bind together the few who make custom knife work their hobby, their profession, and for some, their obvious obsession and passion.

There are as many styles of art knife as there are types of knives. Pure ethnic, hunter (or rustic), and military styles I don't feature here, because, for the most part, they are about authenticity to a cultural tradition (a type of utility, but more sociological and psychological) or a functional utilitarian end that evokes a masculine culture that just doesn't interest me. Despite my love of the fantastic in the arts, I also pass over pure fantasy blades -- they are too over the top to suit my aesthetic tastes.

The knife smiths and studios that I feature here work in these styles, but have also created pieces that strike a fine balance between the cutting essence of the knife and its realization as something for the gaze, much beyond any practical end. In that sense, these are truly interstitial works of art.

[Rick] Dunkerley Handmade Knifes

for more, follow the link

William Henry Studio

Warren Osborn Custom Knifemaker

John M. Cohea Knives

[Jerry] Corbitt Custom Knives

[Stephen] Olszewski Knives

Merlin's Knives [Don Hall]

Recipe for Life: Just a Few Conditions Short of Primordial Soup

2008-03-19T23:35:16Z

For years, science fiction narratives have duked it out over whether life forms elsewhere will be carbon-based, as we are, or something else -- say, silicone based. Who can forget Star Trek Next Generation Episode 17, "Home Soil," in which the intelligent sand aggregrate refers to our type of life as "ugly bags of mostly water"?

Today, we may be closer to an answer -- we have found our very first evidence of carbon on a planet outside our Solar System. Does that mean when we find alien life (at least life we recognize) it will be carbon-based? Hard to say, but the evidence of planetary carbon is tantalizing.

According to the BBC's science reporter, Helen Briggs, reporting a study published in Nature, methane (an organic--and so inherently carbon-based--compound) has been found in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting a star that is approximately 63 light years from earth. The find was made by Dr. Giovanna Tinetti and co-authors Mark Swain and Gautam Vasisht from NASA's JPL (Pasadena CA) using the Hubble Space Telescope.

Why does methane matter? Briggs writes, "Under certain circumstances, methane can play a key role in prebiotic chemistry - the chemical reactions considered necessary to form life."

To date scientists have confirmed the existence of 270 planets orbiting stars other than Sol, our own. This most recent study also found water vapor in the planet's atmosphere, but scientists say they believe it is too hot to support life. Ah, but if not there, then where? and when?

source: BBC GCSE Science page on Atomic Structure and Bonding

Working the (Graduate) Program: Shootings at NIU

2008-02-15T22:57:02Z

I am saddened today by the shootings at NIU, shootings we now know were done by a former graduate student there (27-year-old Steven Kazmierczak) who had since moved here, where I adjunct and work (at the same university, btw, from which I received my doctorate) -- to our School of Social Work. I didn't know him, and I hope I don't know anyone exactly like him, but I understand the emotional pressure of graduate school, and I've seen many gifted minds crack under the strain. So I write this post to explain to others, who puzzle over why a bright young man with a bright future, in this case a successful student, might find working the graduate program too much. Which is not to say that graduate school pressures alone turn the trick. Those commentators who have already theorized about the American post-Baby Boom generational tendency to externalize blame, refuse personal responsibility, and turn to gun violence in extremes of emotion are not off the mark as to why such pressure might lead to what was historically an unthinkable result.

"By all accounts Kazmierczak was a good student. Serving as a member of the NIU Academic Criminal Justice Association and a teaching aid as an undergraduate. In 2006 he received a Dean's Award from the sociology department." [ABC News]

Graduate school is more of an emotional than an intellectual challenge, in my experience. It's about incredibly long hours, with little direct reward and no certainty of a place in the field. Grad students are poor, live poorly, and are low on the totem pole within department life. The value judgments of professors and, later, hiring faculty can sting deeply -- they can pierce the soul. And they hit right where the graduate student is most vulnerable, at the self-esteem that is so often mainly if not entirely based on intellect and a forming identity within a professional field. There can be a terrible loneliness too, for some -- away from home, matched or mismatched with other grads, some of whom find little time to socialize or make little time for themselves. Even when resting, many graduate students feel they are wasting time -- they could always be working harder, smarter -- getting ahead, finding an edge. And now for a more personal observation: The myth in popular culture is that book-learned people are often impractical, unable to make it in the real world. Not so much in my experience. But very smart people tend to overthink things -- they're often neurotic and unhappy. Their constant worry over the judgments of others (since their work products tend to be intellectual and conceptual rather than concrete and material) doesn't help.

Students who come to graduate study with strong family support and / or a positive sense of self weather these slings and arrows better than others (Steven's mother father had moved to Florida in 2004, where she passed away). For the rest, it's a constant struggle not to feel a fraud, soon to be discovered. And for many, this feeling lasts well into junior faculty years. I think the feeling is especially hard on students in fields that society at large does not necessarily applaud, those of basic science or social sciences or literature or the arts. Not only are they suspect, but their field is suspect -- of what value is it, aside from that they like it and are good at it? This lack of value is reflected back to them by undergraduate students who carry with them a social bias against learning for learning's sake and a desire to get to the real business of life, what they and others call "the real world." Those who can do, and those who can't...teach. It's also communicated through scarcity of funding opportunities -- summers without support, and having to teach (sometimes long hours) rather than research for pay.

It's not that I blame the faculty, not at all. The critical assessment of students in professional training for the doctorate is especially important. Faculty must have rigorous standards, both of the person and their demonstrated ability in the field, and most take their role not only as judges but mentors very seriously. And yet, the competitive job market, which has led about 50% of English Ph.D.s to die on the vine and go outside the professoriate for positions, means that only the most productive and polished have a shot at a position, let alone the plum positions that precocious youth dream of. And this means a drive to earlier demonstrations of professional accomplishment, and deeper and earlier feelings of worthlessness and self-recrimination. If the competition between school girls for differentiation and outside value too often results in anorexia and bulimia these days, the same amongst graduate students can lead to equally dysfunctional behavior.

We don't speak of the nervous breakdown -- we try not to stigmatize those already on shaky ground, but we can all tell who's losing it. The brilliant poetry specialist-to-be living in a house packed with bags of garbage he won't take out -- his friends hoping he doesn't commit suicide over break and can finish out his degree when he returns with a clearer head. The sensitive but bright Americanist who disappears in the night, food on the table, the lights left on, to turn up to everyone's relief months later in another city, her degree program in shambles. The articulate "life of the department" who attends lectures and functions and classes, but can't get himself to write a word. He's drowning in incompletes -- it's only a matter of time until he sinks to the bottom. The passionate union organizer who loses himself in local social causes, because they matter more than the academic work, which he can bring himself to do but not care for.

True, not everyone needs to finish the doctorate they've begun. There's a weeding process, in which the pressure in graduate school encourages those who don't have the drive, or the strength, or the sheer endurance to go into something that comes easier, that gives them happiness. But so often students cling to the program, because they have something to prove, because they don't want to be a quitter with their own world watching, and because they can't bear to give up on a dream to which they've already given so much of themselves.

What happens to a dream deferred, Langston Hughes once asked in a very different context. He warns us it can explode. In the case of the NIU shooter, that's just what happened. And I'm sorry, so sorry for everyone, that he didn't have a moment when he realized he wasn't pursuing his happiness, but a bitter and angry ghost of the man he dreamed of becoming, and now never will be. And yet, my greatest sorrow is not reserved for him, but for those many students he has hurt (undergrads in our care, and a fellow grad student doing the teaching gig)--and those who loved and cared for them--because he would not wake up and do what was necessary for his sake and theirs. They deserved a chance at their own dreams and lives, now cut so terribly short.

Wunderkammer Object No. 28: Leaden Hearts

2008-02-13T18:47:25Z

Imagine that as a young man in eighteenth-century England (though your story would have been the same well into the nineteenth), you'd forged a note and been convicted to life on the Hulks (a fleet that served as a floating prison), followed by exile to Australia. Convicts sent into exile bore a social stigma and had no rights; they were considered government property. These poor souls, in anticipation of being separated from those they loved, many forever, took up the practice of smoothing down low denomination coins (such as the 1797 copper cartwheel penny) and engraving them as mementos. Today, historians call them "convict love tokens"; in their day, they went by "leaden hearts."

According to the Pilot Destination Guide, "the inscriptions range from just the name and date of deportation to elaborate poems and etchings of convicts in chains and boats." Some of the inscriptions make political statements, while others focus on love. Many commentators note that not all coins were etched by the convicts themselves, who were often illiterate. Pilot adds, "Professional engravers were even allowed on board the hulks, and prisoners would commission them to craft a poignant keepsake on their behalf."

Witness here one such labor of love, posted by Objects through Time, courtesy of the Powerhouse Museum (Sydney, New South Wales). The reverse of the token pictured below showed a bird with a chain around its neck, symbolic of the jail bird.

crafted: Portsmouth, England 1786-1787

The National Museum of Australia, Canberra, which owns seven tokens, has an online exhibition of showing the three below.

Today, places like the Paramatta Heritage Center sell convict love tokens as souvenirs. Here's one in replica, embedded in the lid of a trinket box.

Douglas Burburry has shared some inscriptions from convict love tokens from The (Thomas) Millett Collection:

"Dear Father Mother/A gift to you/From a friend/Whose love for you/Shall never end"

"When this you see/Think on me/When I am in a far country" [my personal favorite]

"The rose soon drapes and dies/The brier fades away/But my fond heart for you I love/Shall never go astray"

"May the rose of England never bud, the thistle of Scotland never grow, the harp of Ireland never play till I, poor convict, gain my liberty."

Thomas Millett, a dedicated collector of the tokens, has co-authored a book on the subject: _Convict Love Tokens_, edited by Michele Field & Timothy Millett, Wakefield Press, 1998.

_____________

Objects through Time is well worth a visit for other such stories, embedded in material culture. What's more, their page covering this item goes into much more detail about the history of Australia as a site for transport; it's a bit of history everyone should know.

Return to Earth: Art Tile and Ceramics

2008-02-12T19:05:55Z

Followers of Dream Tree know that I'm a lover of art tile and ceramics, especially those that evoke the natural world in unsentimental and empirical registers. Whether these turn to the scientific, the melancholy, the grotesque, or the beautiful, these are the pieces that I think reinvoke the world with a difference, the one we peopled as children and that we can walk again with greater insight as adults. Not in the Wordsworthian sense of imagining some divinity within, but in that sense of wonder for what the natural world is in itself, and we as part of it, not wholly disconnected, if displaced.

Two of my recent finds illustrate this aesthetic.

Weaver Tile, where it comes as no surprise that artist-founder Scott Weaver received his training at Pewabic Pottery (located in Michigan), which I have featured (and purchased).

and

Alan and Ruth Barrett-Danes (Alan is now deceased), and their son Jon, who carries on in the best of their tradition, adding his own dashes of humor and whimsy.

Alan and Ruth

Cabbage Villa source

Predator Pot (1979) source

Jon

New Found Respect for the Platypus

2008-02-08T15:32:08Z

Most of us learn of the platypus with delight as children. He is the comedian of the mammal world -- a true anatomical mash-up of a beaver and a duck so oddbody that, when he was first announced to the Western world in the nineteenth century, he was considered by some skeptics to be a hoax on the order of the Feejee Mermaid exhibited in The States.

source: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography, Harvard University

I would warrant that if we as adults encountered a platypus, whilst meandering in Eastern Australia, we'd smirk and hoot, approaching it without the least fear. And yet, the platypus is venomous, one of the few mammals that can make that claim.

Every now and then, as I read beginner's science books with my son, I come across a new basic fact. The poisonous nature of the platypus -- male only -- is one such. The business end of the creature is its ankle, which sports a spur that is coated with venom nasty enough to cause a human being a good deal of pain if struck. The wiki enlightens:

"Although powerful enough to kill smaller animals, the venom is not lethal to humans, but is so excruciating that the victim may be incapacitated. Oedema rapidly develops around the wound and gradually spreads throughout the affected limb. Information obtained from case histories and anecdotal evidence indicates that the pain develops into a long-lasting hyperalgesia that persists for days or even months. Venom is produced in the crural glands of the male, which are kidney-shaped alveolar glands connected by a thin-walled duct to a calcaneus spur on each hind limb. The female Platypus, in common with echidnas, has rudimentary spur buds which do not develop (dropping off before the end of their first year) and lack functional crural glands."

Not only is the (male) platypus venomous, but they are monotremes (egg laying mammals) capable of electrolocation. That is "they locate their prey in part by detecting electric fields generated by muscular contractions," the electroreceptors being "located in rostro-caudal rows in the skin of the bill." Which is to say, if these suckers ever evolve, we'd do well to run for our lives.

Here, then, is an idea for the next big monster flick. After all, these fellows can compete with Godzilla for paleontological props. They were once thought to be part reptile (those crazy Victorians), then were theorized as coming from a very early branch of mammals that eventually evolved into marsupials (their nearest living relative is the echidna). Now, new findings suggest the platypus may have been around for as long as 110 million years, and that they are more closely related to eutherian mammals (cows, men, etc.) than the marsupials (kangaroos, koalas) -- at least according to their mtDNA.

One website (simpletoremember.com) recounts a charming story of origins for the creature, told by the aboriginal people of Australia:

"According to one of their myths, the platypus resulted from a young female duck's disobedience. Duck lived with others of their kind in a sheltered river pond. All of them were in constant fear of Mulloka, the Water Devil, and never strayed far from their pond. But one day, against the advice of her elders, Duck ventured downstream and eventually found herself at a patch of grass on the riverbank. Unaware that this was the territory of the lonely Water-rat, she climbed out. Hearing duck, Water-rat emerged, threatened her with his spear and, dragging her underground, forced her to mate with him. By the time of egg-hatching, Duck was ashamed to have to lead out two extraordinary offspring. They had bills and webbed feet, but instead of two feet they had four and instead of feathers they had fur, while on each hind leg they had a sharp spike like Water-rat's spear. The first members of the platypus race were born."

Brian Andreas: Story People

2007-11-26T17:50:19Z

We discovered artist-poet Brian Andreas in a little shop in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. The location predisposes one to look for magic and believe in it: nestled in the pine-curtained beauty of the Blue Ridge, the town quaint with white clapboard, brimming with flower boxes, shelved with art both folk and fine. The streets were punctuated with bubbles and happy faces. The shop was crowded with beauty and whimsy. There, we found Andreas' prints, with their childlike drawings and short, short stories -- Swimming like koi in the mind's pool, they slip, tickle, and transform the view.

Here's one such story, taken apart from its illustration -- and more's the pity. But I share it anyway:

I spent a long time trying to find my center;
until I looked closely one night and found it had wheels
and moved easily in the slightest breeze,
so now I spend less time sitting and more time sailing.

Rendered: Sending Soldiers Home 12th Century Style

2007-09-29T19:14:50Z

The return of the dead from a battlefield far from home conjures images of sacred duty, honor guards, an air of reverence. How much more would we expect this in the medieval era and in the case of the Crusades, when Catholic doctrine required the burial of bodies intact? Yet, how oddly this jibes with one practice common enough to require ecclesiastical legislation to prevent it:

Some dead Crusaders were dismembered and boiled down for transport home.

In answer to which the Council of Tours in 1163 ruled against the dissection of human bodies, citing the Church's abhorrence of bloodshed. Oh, the irony.

This tidbit is from The People's Chronology, Rev. Ed. by James Trager (Henry Holt).

The practice is confirmed to have continued for well over a hundred years more, per the online Catholic Encyclopedia, which says on its entry on Cremation, "In all the legislation of the Church the placing of the body in the earth or tomb was a part of Christian burial...Once in the course of the Middle Ages did there seem to be on the part of some a retrogression to the pagan ideals, and as a consequence Boniface VIII, on 21 February, 1300, in the sixth year of his pontificate, promulgated a law which was in substance as follows: They were ipso facto excommunicated who disembowelled bodies of the dead or inhumanly boiled them to separate the flesh from the bones, with a view to transportation for burial in their native land. 'Detestandae feritatis abusum,' he calls it, and it was practised in case of those of noble rank who had died outside of their own territory and had expressed a wish to be buried at their place of birth. He speaks of it as an abomination in the sight of God and horrifying to the minds of the faithful, decreeing that, thereafter, such bodies are either to be conveyed whole to the spot chosen or buried at the place of death until, in the course of nature, the bones can be removed for burial elsewhere. Those who were party to these enormities either as the cause or agent of their occurrence were to incur excommunication reserved to the Holy See, while the body thus inhumanly treated could not afterward be given ecclesiastical burial ("Extrav. Comm.", Lib. III, Tit. vi, c. i.)."

Black Pearls: Medieval Japanese Dental Beauty

2007-09-29T17:00:15Z

Tooth whitening treatments have been popular in the West for decades, and recently surged as safe, effective at-home treatments were perfected and made affordable. We are so concerned with having whiter, brighter teeth that it comes as quite a shock to learn that in medieval Japan (beginning in the 1230s--when a royal family started the fashion), blackened teeth among noble women was a sign of being well groomed--a practice called ohaguro.

The tooth-staining dye was made from soaking iron in tea or rice wine, and was applied several times each week beginning when a girl was age 9 (onset of adulthood). The darker the teeth, the more beautiful the effect. The practice later was shared by men, until it passed out of fashion except for women of more limited means, and then became a sign of married status. This practice among commoners continued through the late ninteenth century.

Supposedly, the dye helped to prevent tooth decay as well (dentistry-dentist.com dental glossary).

A fascinating, short web essay on the subject--Teeth Color as a Cultural Form by Masahiko Fukagawa (well worth reading in its entirety)--explains the different cultural meanings the practice may have had historically for men and women:

Men: "The Japanese word ‘kuro’ is connected with night; ‘kuro’ expresses darkness after the sun sets. In ancient times, night was considered the time when evil spirits being rampant. Black was ill-omened and hated as a color which means to be wrong. However, in the Buddhist faith, black is the ‘unchanging’ color which cannot be dyed with another. It was believed to represent ‘robustness’ and ‘dignity’ from its visual weightiness, and thus the high ranking Samurais were fond of using it

According to Hara, black teeth were an aesthetic symbol from ancient times in Japan. (Hara, p.190) In the Heian Era (794-1192), ‘ohaguro’ became popular among males, especially court nobles and commanders. (Hara, p.131) The custom of ‘ohaguro’, among samurais, was a proof of loyalty, that a samurai does not serve two masters within a lifetime. It was believed to represent ‘robustness’ and ‘dignity’ from its visual weightiness, and thus the high ranking Samurais were fond of using it. In the case of men, the custom is said to have ended around the Muromati Era (1558-1572) [(Nagasaki, p.234)."]

Women: "In Junichiro Tanizaki’s ‘Ineiraisan’, one of whose themes is the traditional Japanese aesthetic sense, the reason why a married woman wears ‘ohaguro’ is to emphasize ‘oshiroi’ (white powder). During the Edo Era, women of the middle class lived in a dark house. Only candles lit up the rooms. The room was dark, a woman’s kimono was also dark, as well as her teeth. And women applied ‘oshiroi’ to their faces in order not to show their expression. (pp.46-48) It is thought that ‘ohaguro’ is effective in making an expressionless face. The black of ‘ohaguro’ was in sharp contrast with the face white with ‘oshiroi’ and had the effect of emphasizing it. We see from Fig.2 that the doll shows the results of a women’s face after makeup has been applied. By shaving her eyebrows and dyeing the teeth black, the changes of feeling do not appear in her expression. Thus expression is extinguished. That is, one may say that ‘ohaguro’ is the culture which hides expression[,] which was thought to be one of the elements of a beauty. ‘Ohaguro’ came to distinctly represent age, occupation, and marital status. This meant that a woman became obedient as a subordinate to her husband because black cannot be dyed with other colors. It is clear that black has a deep connection with the idea of fidelity [(Hara, pp.97-98)."]

source for last two pictures: U. Paris online exhibit on dental practices in historic Japan

Footnotes to History: Classics

2007-09-19T14:55:57Z

One of the more amusing footnotes to history that few outside of Classics may know is that emperors, kings, generals, and nobles of times past often claimed to have descended from mythic heroes as a way of bolstering their own standing. Two cases in point: Julius Caesar claimed descent from Aeneas. Alexander the Great one-upped him, even there. His forebearer? Achilles.

Now if I had to claim a god or goddess in my past, I'd have chosen Minerva, but she'd have to have lain with some clever trickster like Odysseus or dolorous prophet half mad with the sight (cum Tiresias) to beget my line, and I just don't see us selling that to the tribe.

Socrates

2007-09-04T02:31:58Z

What is Socrates but a name handed down to us through history, an icon for wisdom, a source for the practice of cross-examination, the first mind of Athens, father of philosphy, teacher to Plato and so to Aristotle without which we cannot conceive of Western science or political science or literary or theatrical arts being the same. Well, maybe that is enough.

But to read "The Apology," in which Plato claims to represent the last words of Socrates before the assembled Athenian court of his peers, if such peers existed, gives flesh to these bones. He was 70 years old, the father of three sons (two of whom were not yet fully grown) when the 500 nearly split even on condemning him, and split again on sentencing him to death. For what? The corruption of youth. The worship of false gods, or none. Charges he claimed his enemies cooked up because he had proven them fools and called them to account for their luxuriant practices.

The proof of his disinterestedness, he said, was that he had chosen to live in poverty. He had charged no students, nor required or sought any, and yet they came, the best of them, from the highest and the lowest places of his society and beyond. Why? Because they liked to see him test the wisdom of men and find it wanting. It entertained them, he said, who admitted he had never found a man wiser than himself. And he counted himself no wise man -- he knew the limits of his knowledge, the very little circle he could draw about his certainties.

Socrates believed himself to be driven by God or the Gods. He bore within him an inner ear, such as many Western mystics have claimed to have since. The voice of his Oracle, as he called it, did not tend toward telling him what he must do, but it told him incessantly what he must not, down to cutting off the very sentences he might utter. That the Oracle gave him leave to go peacefully to his death to him was a sign that death was good. For he was certain that he was a good man who had lived nothing less than a virtuous life.

He claimed but one message ran through his many exhortations to the men of Athens, and it was this: "You, my friend,--a citizen of the great and mighty and wise city of Athens,--are you not ashamed of heaping up the greatest amount of money and honor and reputation, and caring so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul, which you never regard or heed at all?...I do nothing but go about persuading you all, old and young alike, not to take thought of your persons or your properties, but first and chiefly to care about the greatest imrpovement of the soul. I tell you that virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue comes money and every other good of man, public as well as private."

How, though, to improve the soul? For Socrates, it was to seek after truth, the beautiful and the good. "And I am called wise, for my hearers always imagine that I myself possess the wisdom which I find wanting in others: but the truth is, O men of Athens, that God only is wise; and by his answer he intends to show that the wisdom of men is worth little or nothing; he is not speaking of Socrates [the oracale at Delphi had said to another that of all men, Socrates was wisest], he is only using my name by way of illustration...And so I go about the world, obedient to the god, and search and make enquiry into the wisdom of any one, whether citizen or stranger, who appears to be wise; and if he is not wise, then in vidication of the oracle I show him that he is not wise; and my occupation quite absorbs me, and I have no time to give either to any public matter of interest or to any concern of my own..."

And for this he died.

A Grammarian's Funeral

2007-08-16T10:03:07Z

Although as an English professor, I teach the philosophy of culture, especially in response to cultural and aesthetic representations in texts, I've taught and continue to teach composition often enough that a little of the grammarian has slipped into my soul. I have often referred to myself as The Bun, since I do often sport just the kind of bun the old school marm is depicted as having worn. I have left the horn-rim glasses to an earlier generation.

So I was delighted today when this not yet so old grammarian learned a new trick, or, er, word rather (from OED's word a day):

sandhi
• noun [mass noun] Grammar the process whereby the form of a word changes as a result of its position in an utterance (e.g. the change from a to an before a vowel).
— origin from Sanskrit samdhi ‘putting together’.

Who knew? In praise of which discovery, I share this portion of one of my favorite Victorian poems -- this by Robert Browning, "A Grammarian's Funeral" (it is, of course, a deadly accurate lampoon, tongue in cheek throughout):

Long he lived nameless: how should spring take note
Winter would follow?
Till lo, the little touch, and youth was gone!
Cramped and diminished,
Moaned he, " New measures, other feet anon!
My dance is finished?"
No, that's the world's way: (keep the mountain-side,
Make for the city!)
He knew the signal, and stepped on with pride
Over men's pity;
Left play for work, and grappled with the world
Bent on escaping:
"What's in the scroll," quoth he, "thou keepest furled?
Show me their shaping
Theirs who most studied man, the bard and sage,
Give!"--So, he gowned him,
Straight got by heart that book to its last page:
Learned, we found him.
Yea, but we found him bald too, eyes like lead,
Accents uncertain:
"Time to taste life," another would have said,
"Up with the curtain!"
This man said rather, "Actual life comes next?
Patience a moment!
Grant I have mastered learning's crabbed text,
Still there's the comment
Let me know all ! Prate not of most or least,
Painful or easy!
Even to the crumbs I'd fain eat up the feast,
Ay, nor feel queasy."
Oh, such a life as he resolved to live,
When he had learned it,
When he had gathered all books had to give!
Sooner, he spurned it.
Image the whole, then execute the parts--
Fancy the fabric
Quite, ere you build, ere steel strike fire from quartz,
Ere mortar dab brick!

[...]

That low man seeks a little thing to do,
Sees it and does it:
This high man, with a great thing to pursue,
Dies ere he knows it.
That low man goes on adding one to one,
His hundred's soon hit:
This high man, aiming at a million,
Misses an unit
That, has the world here-should he need the next,
Let the world mind him!
This, throws himself on God, and unperplexed
Seeking shall find him.
So, with the throttling hands of death at strife,
Ground he at grammar;
Still, thro' the rattle, parts of speech were rife:
While he could stammer
He settled Hoti's business--let it be!--
Properly based Oun--
Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De,
Dead from the waist down.
Well, here's the platform, here's the proper place:
Hail to your purlieus,
All ye highfliers of the feathered race,
Swallows and curlews!
Here's the top-peak; the multitude below
Live, for they can, there:

This man decided not to Live but Know--
Bury this man there?
Here--here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form,
Lightnings are loosened,
Stars come and go! Let joy break with the storm,
Peace let the dew send!
Lofty designs must close in like effects:
Loftily Iying,
Leave him--still loftier than the world suspects,
Living and dying.

Reminder to Readers: Dream Tree Gallery

2007-08-14T10:46:11Z

Dream Tree includes a gallery of mid 19c through early 20c decorative arts movements, including Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau, and Aestheticsm, from architecture to home furnishins to personal adornments. The gallery's offers are posted without regard to copyright, since they are provided only for educational purposes and personal study. The original source should be found and permissions sought for any other use.

Mega-Galaxies, Circadian Clocks, and Skeletal Secrets: The Frontiers of Science

2007-08-13T21:10:14Z

Public Release: 13-Aug-2007
Genome Biology
Unravelling new complexity in the genome
Researchers uncover new clues to explain genetic differences between simpler and more complex life forms.

Public Release: 12-Aug-2007
Nature Genetics
Gene regulation, not just genes, is what sets humans apart
The striking differences between humans and chimps aren't so much in the genes we have, which are 99 percent the same, but in the way those genes are used, according to new research from a Duke University team.

Public Release: 12-Aug-2007
Nature Methods
MIT creates 3-D images of living cell
A new imaging technique developed at MIT has allowed scientists to create the first 3-D images of a living cell, using a method similar to the X-ray CT scans doctors use to see inside the body.
National Institutes of Health, Hamamatsu Corp.

Public Release: 10-Aug-2007
PLoS Biology
Circadian clock controls plant growth hormone
The plant growth hormone auxin is controlled by circadian rhythms within the plant, UC-Davis researchers have found. The discovery explains how plants can time their growth to take advantage of resources such as light and water, and suggests that many other processes may be influenced by circadian rhythms.
National Science Foundation

Public Release: 10-Aug-2007
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
X-ray images help explain limits to insect body size
Researchers at the US Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory have cast new light on why the giant insects that lived millions of years ago disappeared.
National Science Foundation, US Department of Energy

Public Release: 10-Aug-2007
What makes Mars magnetic?
If you could pick up a rock from the surface of Mars, then the chances are it would be magnetic. And yet, Mars doesn't have a magnetic field coming from its core. These rocks are clinging to the signal of an ancient magnetic field, dating back billions of years, to the times when Mars had a magnetic field like Earth's.

Public Release: 9-Aug-2007
Cell
Research shows skeleton to be endocrine organ
Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center have now identified a surprising and critically important novel function of the skeleton. They've shown for the first time that the skeleton is an endocrine organ that helps control our sugar metabolism and weight and, as such, is a major determinant of the development of type 2 diabetes. The research is published in the Aug. 10 issue of Cell.
National Institutes of Health, American Diabetes Association, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Pennsylvania Department of Health

Public Release: 8-Aug-2007
Can you catch a killer before they commit a crime?
The US government is hoping to develop scanning systems that can pick out would-be terrorists that are about to enter the US. But the sensors won't be looking for hidden explosives or knives, they will be trained at recognizing human emotions, to detect if someone is hiding an intention to deceive or harm. The US Department of Homeland Security plans to test "Project Hostile Intent" at a handful of US airports, borders and ports as early as 2010.

Public Release: 7-Aug-2007
Lost forest yields several new species
An expedition led by the Wildlife Conservation Society to a remote corner of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo has uncovered unique forests which, so far, have been found to contain six animal species new to science: a bat, a rodent, two shrews and two frogs.

Public Release: 7-Aug-2007
Nature Genetics
Weed gave up sex long ago
The ability of plants to self-pollinate -- a big factor in the spread of weeds -- is much older than previously thought in one widely studied species, biologists from five leading institutions say. The findings show that at least in plant evolution, sex with others may be more trouble than it's worth.
National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Max Planck Society

Public Release: 7-Aug-2007
Nature Neuroscience
New research discovers independent brain networks control human walking
In a study published in the August issue of Nature Neuroscience, researchers at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, Md., found that there are separate adaptable networks controlling each leg and there are also separate networks controlling leg movements, e.g., forward or backward walking. These findings are contrary to the currently accepted theory that leg movements and adaptations are directed by a single control circuit in the brain.

Public Release: 6-Aug-2007
UQ Researchers discover some of the oldest forms of life
University of Queensland researchers have identified microbial remains in some of the oldest preserved organic matter on Earth, confirmed to be 3.5 billion years-old.
Australian Research Council

Public Release: 6-Aug-2007
Nature Structural & Molecular Biology
In a first, Einstein scientists discover the dynamics of transcription in living mammalian cells
Transcription -- the transfer of DNA's genetic information through the synthesis of complementary molecules of messenger RNA -- forms the basis of all cellular activities. Yet little is known about the dynamics of the process -- how efficient it is or how long it takes. Now, researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have measured the stages of transcription in real time. Their unexpected findings have fundamentally changed the way transcription is understood.
National Institutes of Health

Public Release: 6-Aug-2007
Astrophysical Journal Letters
Monster galaxy pileup sighted
Four galaxies are slamming into each other and kicking up billions of stars in one of the largest cosmic smash-ups ever observed. The clashing galaxies, spotted by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the WIYN Telescope, will eventually merge into a single, behemoth galaxy up to 10 times as massive as our own Milky Way. This rare sighting provides an unprecedented look at how the most massive galaxies in the universe form.
NASA

Public Release: 13-Aug-2007
Genome Biology
Unravelling new complexity in the genome
Researchers uncover new clues to explain genetic differences between simpler and more complex life forms.

Public Release: 12-Aug-2007
Nature Genetics
Gene regulation, not just genes, is what sets humans apart
The striking differences between humans and chimps aren't so much in the genes we have, which are 99 percent the same, but in the way those genes are used, according to new research from a Duke University team.

Public Release: 12-Aug-2007
Nature Methods
MIT creates 3-D images of living cell
A new imaging technique developed at MIT has allowed scientists to create the first 3-D images of a living cell, using a method similar to the X-ray CT scans doctors use to see inside the body.
National Institutes of Health, Hamamatsu Corp.

Public Release: 10-Aug-2007
PLoS Biology
Circadian clock controls plant growth hormone
The plant growth hormone auxin is controlled by circadian rhythms within the plant, UC-Davis researchers have found. The discovery explains how plants can time their growth to take advantage of resources such as light and water, and suggests that many other processes may be influenced by circadian rhythms.
National Science Foundation

Public Release: 10-Aug-2007
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
X-ray images help explain limits to insect body size
Researchers at the US Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory have cast new light on why the giant insects that lived millions of years ago disappeared.
National Science Foundation, US Department of Energy

Public Release: 10-Aug-2007
What makes Mars magnetic?
If you could pick up a rock from the surface of Mars, then the chances are it would be magnetic. And yet, Mars doesn't have a magnetic field coming from its core. These rocks are clinging to the signal of an ancient magnetic field, dating back billions of years, to the times when Mars had a magnetic field like Earth's.

Public Release: 9-Aug-2007
Cell
Research shows skeleton to be endocrine organ
Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center have now identified a surprising and critically important novel function of the skeleton. They've shown for the first time that the skeleton is an endocrine organ that helps control our sugar metabolism and weight and, as such, is a major determinant of the development of type 2 diabetes. The research is published in the Aug. 10 issue of Cell.
National Institutes of Health, American Diabetes Association, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Pennsylvania Department of Health

Public Release: 8-Aug-2007
Can you catch a killer before they commit a crime?
The US government is hoping to develop scanning systems that can pick out would-be terrorists that are about to enter the US. But the sensors won't be looking for hidden explosives or knives, they will be trained at recognizing human emotions, to detect if someone is hiding an intention to deceive or harm. The US Department of Homeland Security plans to test "Project Hostile Intent" at a handful of US airports, borders and ports as early as 2010.

Public Release: 7-Aug-2007
Lost forest yields several new species
An expedition led by the Wildlife Conservation Society to a remote corner of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo has uncovered unique forests which, so far, have been found to contain six animal species new to science: a bat, a rodent, two shrews and two frogs.
Contact: John Delaney
jdelaney@wcs.org
718-220-3275
Wildlife Conservation Society

Public Release: 7-Aug-2007
Nature Genetics
Weed gave up sex long ago
The ability of plants to self-pollinate -- a big factor in the spread of weeds -- is much older than previously thought in one widely studied species, biologists from five leading institutions say. The findings show that at least in plant evolution, sex with others may be more trouble than it's worth.
National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Max Planck Society

Public Release: 7-Aug-2007
Nature Neuroscience
New research discovers independent brain networks control human walking
In a study published in the August issue of Nature Neuroscience, researchers at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, Md., found that there are separate adaptable networks controlling each leg and there are also separate networks controlling leg movements, e.g., forward or backward walking. These findings are contrary to the currently accepted theory that leg movements and adaptations are directed by a single control circuit in the brain.

Public Release: 6-Aug-2007
UQ researchers discover some of the oldest forms of life
University of Queensland researchers have identified microbial remains in some of the oldest preserved organic matter on Earth, confirmed to be 3.5 billion years-old.
Australian Research Council

Public Release: 6-Aug-2007
Nature Structural & Molecular Biology
In a first, Einstein scientists discover the dynamics of transcription in living mammalian cells
Transcription -- the transfer of DNA's genetic information through the synthesis of complementary molecules of messenger RNA -- forms the basis of all cellular activities. Yet little is known about the dynamics of the process -- how efficient it is or how long it takes. Now, researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have measured the stages of transcription in real time. Their unexpected findings have fundamentally changed the way transcription is understood.
National Institutes of Health

Public Release: 6-Aug-2007
Astrophysical Journal Letters
Monster galaxy pileup sighted
Four galaxies are slamming into each other and kicking up billions of stars in one of the largest cosmic smash-ups ever observed. The clashing galaxies, spotted by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the WIYN Telescope, will eventually merge into a single, behemoth galaxy up to 10 times as massive as our own Milky Way. This rare sighting provides an unprecedented look at how the most massive galaxies in the universe form.
NASA

Excerpts here have been selectively culled for major impact from EurekAlert!'s breaking news section.

Midwestern Gothic

2007-08-11T03:18:29Z

I wish I'd come from Sublimity, Oregon. Never been there, know nothing about it that's not in the wikipedia or a map. Rural place, not much going on, white people. Not too poor and not too rich. But what a place to say you're from. Sublimity, you'd say. Look it up.

I'm originally from Painesville, Ohio, and what can you say about a place like that? We like to joke it means Pain's Ville. Not all that unlike Sublimity, Oregan, 2542.71 miles away. Or so I want to imagine.

Little Midwestern railroad town, about 45 minutes east of Cleveland, we always say. 26,000 people when I was growing up there, mostly white, but the north side of town had a mix of African Americans and Puerto Ricans, just starting in. Not that they were corralled, but racism was alive enough on both sides of the divide, even if its effects were more institutionalized and pernicious on the white side of prejudice.

train crossing the Grand River Bridge in Painesville, 1940s

People mainly weren't that well off, and a few were poor, but midling low best describes it. More suburban in sensibility than urban. Small town America, but not so small and remote as that might sound. People knew each other, and the old guard were white men and women who'd grown up right about when cars were new and town meant Painesville--looking at it from the country, which meant Perry, Chardon, Burton, Madison, and the like. They could place you by who you were related to, up to two or three generations back.

Like I said, nothing special. But here are some facts, the kinds that all American towns accumulate when you get to know them well.

Harvey High School--where just about everyone in town went including myself--was built on a graveyard that couldn't be moved, not all of the bodies at least. Far as I know, they're still there. It's in the Lake County Historical Records. You can see the documentation online. And here's what it says of the Washington Street Burying Ground, "The burying ground on Washington Street is now occupied by Harvey High School. This was one of the oldest burying grounds in the area, but fell into neglect in the mid 1800s. Stones were buried in 1874 and 1878 and the high school was later erected on the site. A complete list of burials is not available...[These] lists of names were found among the papers left by Simeon Hickok of South Street, Painesville. They were made at the time the stones were laid underground and are not complete, as some of the paper pages on which they were written, crumbled away and some of the writing was not legible." Take that, Buffy.

Harlan Ellison came from there--one of the few Jews among a trickle, some of who stayed and some of who left. He claims he ran away with the carnival at 13. He lampooned the town in much of his work. The Black Sheep of our former citizens. And I kinda always loved him for it. Harlan was of my father's generation. I grew up and moved away, but became friends with one of his lawyers. I laughed when I found out.

When a teenager, my grandmother broke her leg jumping off Cain of the Cain and Abel statues in front of the Lake County Courthouse. We always believed it was symbolic. She was a hellraiser who became bitter when life settled her down. Good looks, brains, and no prospects.

Good kids walked the railroad tracks, had sex and drank and smoked in the parks, and the consequences weren't pretty.

Paine Falls, where I was "arrested" by a park ranger, and talked my way out of it

There was an old mattress down by the river. The wine du jour was Boonesberry Farm. A guy who ran and owned a local ice cream store used to come on to the little high school girls who worked there. I never knew whether anyone reported him for it. One of our cheerleaders got raped on the tracks, and right after she came back to school, walking the halls with her head down and her books hugged to her chest, a group of jocks called her a whore and made her cry. I never liked her (her crowd was in, and mine was way out), but I hated them for it. A wild boy got decapitated after graduation. Hood pushed in through the windshield took his head clean off. A girl I'd come up with since fourth grade robbed the Wendy's where she worked with her boyfriend. He pretended to kidnap her. Pretty dumb in a small town. Not related -- at least I don't think so: Her father was a taxidermist. She showed me his workshop once. All those plastic, tiny eyes, staring. Principle of my high school wouldn't let me read my poem at graduation, where I was a speaker. Too depressing. The choir sang "Reach for a Star" instead. But I read it anway. What was he gonna do? Knock me off stage? I should have been more worried -- he was a former football coach.

One of the bad, good looking boys I went to junior high with (smokin' blue eyes), maybe the first or second one to give my then best friend her first real kiss, ended up going on a crime spree years later with his dad. In 1985, he tortured an old couple and killed them both (the Porters, the husband a well-known Cleveland name as former editor of The Plain Dealer) -- or his dad did, or they both did, or some such--Donald Soke and father Ted. Awaiting trial, Donald had his forhead tattooed with a spider web, Manson style. He married an older woman named Daisy in jail after conviction or while on trial heading toward conviction -- I can't remember which. She fell in love with him watching him on TV. There was a scandal about their supposed conjugal honeymoon in the jail cell.

When I was in school, a mental patient escaped, headed to his mom's house to ask her for money, sawed off her head with a paring knife, carved it like a punkin, and put it in the fridge. Oh, they caught him. But we had to walk by that house on the way to school. Believe me, we never took our eyes off it. Later, a boyfriend of mine -- older of course and good at heart but bad to know according to my parents -- told me he had a best friend serving time in Lima State Hospital for the Criminally Insane for stabbing his adopted parents and setting a church on fire. Somehow, these two stories got tied together in my head.

The Lima State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in its heyday,
before it became a standard medium-level security correctional facility in 1982 and eventually closed in 2004*

When I was working at Lake County Memorial East as a candy striper, I was eating mashed potatoes in the cafeteria one day, when they wheeled by a stiff under a sheet on the way to the morgue. Later, my grandmother died in that hospital. When we went to see her, she hadn't been posed. Her eyes were open, her hands were clawed, and her mouth was shaped in an agonized, unutterable moan. She'd been brain dead, but that didn't help. I still have dreams about corpse feet, since that's what I was standing closest too. Would rather it had been the door. But it's not all bad news. I was born there.

My grandmother used to run the Parmly Hotel's front desk, which was torn down years ago to make way for the New Market Mall downtown. She met the real family from The Sound of Music, the Von Trapps. We used to ride up and down in the old elevators with the wood partitions inside the doors and the big brass lever to indicate the floor. After she died, I found a love letter on hotel stationary from a man to whom she had not been married. It was the sweetest letter I'd ever read. And I was glad that even though the affair hadn't been right, it had made her happy.

Parmly Hotel, 1905

There's more, there's more. But every small town needs a few secrets left unsaid. They say there's a ghost in Riders Tavern, but he's only the best known of our haunts. The less well known haunts go something like this: A friend of mine who was in high school ran into her mother in the bar there at Riders -- that's how she found out her mom was having an affair with the country coroner. Course, she was there on a date with her high school history teacher, so they were even.

And now what's Painesville famous for? Some controversial judge (Michael Cicconetti -- didn't I know a Cicconetti growing up?) who's handing out morality sentences cut to fit the crime -- men in chicken suits picking up trash for soliciting prostitutes. He's even got his own wiki. Not so strange after all, eh? Fits right in.

_____________

*per the Wiki: "For much of its history, Lima State Hospital functioned largely as a warehouse. Patients sometimes staged dramatic protests against the conditions of their confinement, and frequently escaped (more than 300 escapes by 1978). Conditions improved significantly after 1974 as a result of a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of the patients. In a landmark ruling, U.S. District Judge Nicholas J. Walinski spelled out detailed requirements for assuring each patient’s rights to “dignity, privacy and human care.” In its last years, the state hospital was used for the filming of a made-for-television movie about the Attica Prison riots in New York." Needless to say, where I grew up, Lima was the stuff of urban legend.

Wonders Never Cease: The Double Nosed Andean Tiger Hound

2007-08-10T19:57:37Z

It's safe to say I'm a dog lover. As an adult, I've had two dogs myself, one who died of old age after a very comfortable life and another who is young and healthy and here with me now. They're both over 100 pounds. What's more, throughout my life, I've been interested in dogs, reading about them, watching them in dog shows and documentaries, all that kind of thing. So, if you'd asked me whether there was any breed of dog known to regularly produce viable two-nosed offspring, I would have said no.

Most physically anamolous creatures born live die early, like that adorable cyclopsian kitten that hit the internet not too long ago. The external defect tends to indicate internal defects as well. However, in some cases, evolution has wonked its chemistry kit double-plus good to make something...newish, like Hemingway's six-toed cats. Here, then, the Double-Nosed Andean Tiger Hound:

Some of the dogs in this breeding line do die from complications, but enough live to give the breed the double nose as a viable characteristic. The dogs have been examined for cleft palate, but have none. Here is a "two nosed" dog that does have a cleft, from a sad story out of England (The Sun) about a stray Staffordshire bull terrier who had trouble getting adopted because of it:

Apparently, the confirmation of the existence of these Andean dogs was news to the West. The BBC reports that "Colonel Blashford-Snell first encountered a Double-Nosed Andean tiger hound called Bella in 2005 when he was carrying out reconnaissance for this year's expedition in the area near Ojaki" -- the dog pictured above is her offrspring. Blashford-Snell remarked that "legendary explorer Colonel Percy Fawcett came back with in 1913 of seeing such strange dogs in the Amazon jungle, but 'Nobody believed him, they laughed him out of court.'"

Most striking to me in the article is that the Bolivian army has extracted DNA from these dogs, in order to breed them for what? Drug and bomb sniffing missions? Evidence from onsite observers suggests that, yes, the double-nosed hounds have a superior sense of smell (the claim has yet to be clinically tested).

Blashford-Snell (who BTW was in the Amazon to confirm a theory that a meteorite hit there 30,000 years ago, and did) hypothesizes that the dogs are descended from the curiously schnozled Pachon Navarro of Spain, which the Conquistadors may have brought with them for hunting in the Americas."

Too bad more of them didn't end up in the Midwestern U.S. The article keeps emphasizing how ugly these dogs are, but come on. I think not. Two noses are cuter than one.

Wunderkammer Object #26: The Karakuri Doll

2007-07-27T20:51:29Z

Kirsty Boyle has compiled a marvellous website that explains in text and pictures "the Karakuri Ningyo craft, and its influence on technology and the arts." This craft, as Boyle explains, is the artistic and technological tradition in Japan of crafting lifelike automata (dolls, puppets, and parade floats) that mimic human movement and feeling, while hiding the mechanisms that enable their mimickery.

Boyle's site moves from Karakuri Origins (in 2600 b.c.) to Robot Perspectives in modern media and society. The most fascinating moment for me was the distinction she makes between the concept of "virtual reality" in the West and that of "intimate perspective" in the East, which is based on the Eastern sense that inanimate objects are also imbued with a natural energy that manifests the underlying structures of creation (a cultural distinction she explains in the Edo Mechanisms section).

This is one site I cannot recommend too highly. I am grateful to Kirsty Boyle for sharing her learning in this area, and to the Australia Council New Media Arts, which provided her with a grant used to develop this expertise on site, in Japan.

For more on Karakuri, see Lee A. Makela's pages on festival puppets, automatons, and modern robotics. The Wiki is also enlightening, if brief. OohJapan!, a commercial site, also gives a little history. From this last site, we gain insight into the mechanism of the dolls itself: "Their movements are caused by the power of springs, mercury and sand. You can build them and take them apart easily without ever using metallic screws or nails. Karakuri doll(Karakuri dolls) are a representative of the highest technology in the Edo period" (1603-1868).

Remain in Light: The Unearthing of Da Vinci's Studio

2007-07-25T20:32:32Z

Usually, I mention here only recently discoveries. But today I stumbled upon this news story from 2005 that deserves a reprisal for those who, like me, didn't hear it.

On January 26th, Reuters reported that a "forgotten workshop of Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci, complete with 500-year-old frescos and a secret room to dissect human cadavers, has been discovered in Florence, Italy...The find was made in part of the Santissima Annunziata convent, which let out rooms to artists centuries ago and where the likely muse of the Renaissance artist's masterwork, the Mona Lisa, may have worshipped."

What proof did researchers have that might authenticate the find? "Frescos adorning part of the workshop were left undisturbed over the centuries and gradually forgotten...In a slide-show presentation to media, Manescalchi [one of the three researchers responsible for the discovery] pointed to one colourful fresco with a character conspicuously missing from the foreground. The white silhouette bore a striking resemblance to da Vinci's painting of the archangel Gabriel, who appears in his Annunciation hanging in Florence's Uffizi gallery.

Manescalchi, who refers to the silhouette as The Ghost, told reporters it was not clear to him whether the angel was removed or perhaps never completed.

The walls were also adorned with paintings of birds, one of which strongly resembled a sketch from da Vinci's Atlantic Codex, a 1,286-page collection of drawings and writings by the painter, sculptor, inventor and scientist.

Another painting was similar to a drawing in da Vinci's codex on the flight of birds.

Manescalchi speculated that da Vinci had assistants in his workshop and probably used a 'secret' corner room for his dissections of human corpses, aimed at improving his understanding of anatomy.

While some experts have cautioned it was still too early to say Manescalchi has found da Vinci's studio, the researcher, who made the discovery earlier this month, was convinced further research would back up his claims."

I do not know whether this further research has been undertaken or what the results have been, but I will comment here should I find it.

Memory Stather: Living Jewels

2007-07-24T15:31:13Z

Memory Stather is a gifted South African artist, now settled in the UK, who works in a variety of media, but shows special talent in enamels. What's more, she is a certified gemologist, and I can't help but think her jeweled visions share much in common with her study of the plays of light upon earth in all its treasured forms. Those who love art nouveau will find a modern interpretation of it here, often but not always softer than deco, with a touch of breeze and whimsy and above all light.

I split her work samples below into two moods, one found earth and the other invented life.

Found Earth

look closely for the little carved frog on the left

Invented Life

Harris Diamant: Man in the Machine

2007-06-28T22:12:04Z

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

--- T.S. Eliot "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Harris Diamant is a native New Yorker born in the late 1930s who, for years, held a reputation as a Manhattan gallery dealer in fine American antiques, especially of the odd kind: toys, steam models, scientific instruments. Beginning in 1980, Diamant's hobby in metal, wood, glass, brass, leather, and other natural materials sculpture became his full-time occupation. He taught himself the crafts necessary to render his vision. Diamant's heads give us a strangely technical, ironically humanized vision of ourselves. They push us to see ourselves represented through the media in which we construct our modern world: denaturalized animals, disembodied heads, bodiless selves, anthropomorphized objects.

Women In Art

2007-05-31T16:25:41Z

Lovely video showing 500 years of women's portraits in European art.

Deep End of the Pool: Some Dinosaurs Could Swim!

2007-05-30T16:01:55Z

Over the past year, research has yielded dinosaurs who burrowed and tended their young, young t-rexes who lived in herds and fought to the death upon sexual maturity, and the molecular tie between dinosaurs and modern birds. We now have dinosaurs who swam!

Per Reuters: "Fossilized foot marks left by a big meat-eater on a lake bed in northern Spain 125 million years ago provide strong evidence that at least some dinosaurs were good swimmers, scientists said on Thursday....There were numerous huge, fully marine reptiles living at the same time, including the plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs, but they were not dinosaurs and in fact were only very distantly related to them...

Writing in the journal Geology, researchers led by Loic Costeur of the Universite de Nantes in France described tracks fossilized in sandstone that were left as a dinosaur swam in water roughly 10.5 feet deep, scratching the lake bottom with clawed feet.

'The animal used a pelvic paddle motion, much like living aquatic birds," Costeur said by e-mail.'
Twelve "swim tracks" over a stretch of about 50 feet included long and slender sets of grooves. Fossilized ripple marks at the site suggested the dinosaur was swimming against a current whiling trying to maintain a straight path, the researchers said.

The researchers said the shape and nature of the tracks indicated they were left by a large bipedal theropod dinosaur and not a big crocodile even though these were around at the time. Theropods are the familiar big carnivores like the North American dinosaurs Tyrannosaurus and Allosaurus.

"a typical theropod design"

Scientists have been seeking evidence that dinosaurs -- like today's large mammals such as elephants and tigers -- were capable of swimming when circumstances demanded, like hunting in wet ecosystems, crossing rivers or escaping floods.

Previously discovered fossils showed swimming tracks apparently left by other dinosaurs such as sauropods -- long-necked animals like Diplodocus -- and duckbilled dinosaurs. But some of these have been disputed and were not as revealing as the new ones.

The new tracks provided the first definitive evidence of an active swimming behavior in dinosaurs and are the best record of swimming by theropods, researchers said."

For the complete story, see here.

Wunderkammer Object #27: The Nautilus Cup

2007-05-29T16:18:08Z

Cue the Renaissance and search nature's bounty for forms of neoclassical symmetry that seem to convey in their very substance the harmoniousness of a natural order inherited from but not stopped at divinity. Through artifice, raise the humble finds to the height of human creation, and claim the bounty of the sea is within human dominion, within the grasp of a drinker of ocean worlds. And so beget the nautilus cup.

In the early modern period, German goldsmiths were renowned for their cups, whether they were of silver, gilt silver, or gold, made wholly of metal in various shapes (bells, animals, goblets, pears, crowns, castles, ships) or combined with natural materials. The pearlescent chambered nautilus shell (polished to enhance the shine) was a favored natural material for inclusion, as the shell formed a near perfect equiangular spiral. So too were ostrich egg shells and coconut shells (these last cups are featured separately in Dream Tree's wunderkammer).

The Heritage Museum curator writes, "The 16th century was truly the golden age of German art of goldsmithery. One of its principal centers was Nuremberg, a free imperial city lying at the crossroads of major commercial thoroughfares. Albrecht Dürer's birthplace, it was a center of Renaissance culture. Especially remarkable in the variety of German silverware of the 16th-17th centuries are drinking vessels. The most characteristic of them were lobing cups, double or with covers. One of the favorite forms of lobing vessels were cover cups in the form of aquilegia flower, Ageleybecher. By the 1480s, lobing cups gained wide currency, and German masters were unequaled in their creation.

Dürer's first designs of silverware inaugurated in German art of goldsmithery motifs taken from nature such as frogs, snails, snakes and lizards cast with the use of live models; the rustique style thus entered the German silversmith's art. These figurines were to surprise the onlooker with their bizarre and beautiful appearance. Another aspect of the rustique style was the use of natural shells or their imitations from semiprecious stones or metals, ostrich eggs, narwhal teeth and coconut shells to fabricate cups, bowls and other vessels for purely decorative purposes. Since early Middle Ages, works from these materials had a symbolic meaning and were regarded as something mysterious. For example, ostrich egg were believed to be laid by Phoenix and narwhal teeth were taken to be horns of the mythical Unicorn as late as the 18th century."

German Renaissance masterwork of Heinrich Jonas (Nuremburg) For a 3-D view of this cup, see the Heritage Museum online exhibit.

German, gilt silver, 1620

French (carved shell), 1830

Joachim Hiller, 1600

Johann Georg Hainz, Still Life with Nautilus Cup, 1700

The ParkeHarrison's Machining Paradise

2007-05-26T21:22:54Z

Robert ParkeHarrison is among the best art photographers working in the United States. His work estranges us from the ordinary, exposing the vulnerable touch of the natural upon the human (in more recent work), and of the technological on the organic (a sort of minimalist steampunk, or posthumanist vision, as in the photos here).

In ParkeHarrison's photographs that display technological marvels, we desire to take flight into the strangeness shown. Mad scientists become secular saints and showmen, performing scientific miracles that usurp natural or divine processes.

Robert ParkeHarrison is Associate Professor of Studio Photography at Holy Cross. An online exhibit of his work is available here (these photos are drawn from it).

Another online exhibit, "The Architect's Brother," is viewable here (you'll notice some overlap). The following amazing photo (Wind Writing) is from that exhibition. Some of these photos express not merely the whistful hope or masochism of mad science, but a sense of humor at its foibles. The poem I am reminded of when I look at ParkeHarrison's work is Elizabeth Bishop's "The Man-Moth," one of my favorites.

A Smithsonian curator had this to say of ParkeHarrison's art: "Working in an artistic conceit that dates back into the early history of photography, Robert ParkeHarrison poses in his own photographs, not as a subject for self-portraiture, but as an anonymous Everyman figure struggling heroically but futilely with the forces of nature in a drear world. Incorporating aspects of theater, performance art, sculpture, and painting, ParkeHarrison's haunting, disturbing images transcend the familiar world of conventional photographic representation into surreality and resonate with the force of myth."

Many sources list Robert's work independently, but some credit Shana ParkeHarrison as his co-collaborator.

Wunderkammer Object #36: Sutra of Passing from One Existence into Another

2007-05-23T12:49:57Z

Within The Tibetan Book of the Dead, beloved of Buddhists and mystics more various, is perhaps the best known of the Sutras, that of Passing from One Existence into Another -- it describes, as we might say in our popular New Age lexicon, crossing over or the journey to the other side or the passage to the light.

A sutra (literally a rope or thread that holds things together) in the Hindu tradition is a gathering up of sayings that form a manual of spiritual instruction. In Buddhism, sutras are specifically the oral teachings of the Buddha. The Book of the Dead is chanted by monks upon the passing of a believer into the afterlife, to assist him or her with his passage through three bardo, or afterlife states, which challenge the spirit with illusions that spring from his or her own mind and prevent spiritual release.

The very writing of the words on the page (reproduced through block printing) above are considered sacred, not only because of their content, but also because "Tibetan script is considered sacred, since it was created especially for the translation of Buddhist scripture...Tibetans handle books with great reverence. Even if a text does not contain holy scripture, it is still approached as the verbal body of the Buddha, the provisional foundation of eternal truth or sung-den (gsung rten, 'support of the exalted Word'). This explains why in Tibet books are never to be placed on the floor, at the level of one's feet, or in a low-lying impure space. Tibetan books are respected as powerful protections against evil and as paths to spiritual liberation" (U VA Special Collections).

The sutra above describes the first bardo, or state of passage from life, also called the chikhai bardo or "bardo of the moment of death." At the moment of death, for Buddhists, the clear light of reality dawns (the world's illusion and the self's are manifest). Literally, the released spirit sees a "white light."

the wheel of life held by the demon of impermanence

According to the curatorial text from the marvellous online University of Virginia exhibit on the Bardo Thodol, this sutra tells of how, "during the Buddha's stay in Rajagriha, a certain king named Bimbisara questions him on the transitory nature of karma and how rebirth can be effected by thoughts and actions which are by their very nature momentary and fleeting. Characteristically, the Buddha responds with an illustration. In this context, an individual's past thoughts and actions (karma) appear before the mind at the time of death in the same way that the previous night's dreams are recalled while awake; neither the dreams nor past karma have any solid and substantial reality in themselves, but both can, and do, produce real effects. An individual's past karma appears before the mind at the final moment of death and causes the first moment of rebirth. This new life is nothing more than a new sphere of consciousness in one of the six realms of rebirth (the worlds of the gods, demi-gods, humans, hungry ghosts, animals, and hell- beings) wherein the person experiences the fruits of his or her previous actions. From a Buddhist perspective, expressed for example in the Sutra on Death and the Transmigration of Souls, it is a mistake to refer to this specific cause and effect relationship as reincarnation since the Buddha explicitly denied the existence of a transmigrating soul that passes on from life to life. In reality, an entirely new consciousness arises at rebirth in dependence on the old. Continuity between lives is merely an illusion."

The Tibetan Book of the Dead is said to be one of the teachings left by the Pakistani saint Padmasambhava (also known as Guru Rinpoche, or Precious Master), who transcribed his teachings to his wife in the 8th century a.d. These he hid, for fear they would be misunderstood or misused, prophesying that 600 years to a day, a specially blessed individual would understand the spiritual map to them. And, according to legend, this prophesy came true in the 14th century a.d. when Karma Lingpa discovered the Bardo Thandol in the Himilayan Mountains as predicted, to the day.