Dr. Stonebreaker

https://thecoastnews.com/2012/01/investigation-into-veterinarians-death-continues/

I used to volunteer at this veterinary clinic when I was 11 or 12 or so and still wanted to be a veterinarian.
Dr. Stonebreaker was a cool guy.  What a crazy story way to go.

Joan of Arc

Is my favorite film (1928).  I just wanted to record quickly some thoughts.

Libretto made for the silent film in the 1980s: http://www.richardeinhorn.com/vol/vol.libretto.pdf

Why did Joan of Arc suddenly become sainted in the early 20th century?  Surely this was a political move by the Catholic church.

The Arcade Fire just released a song about her on their most recent album, Reflektor.

How do you tune a bowl? (MC Richards - Centering)

Oftentimes I put quotes up here from my reading that I'd like to keep around for later.  M.C. Richards book, Centering, would require me to transcribe every page.  So instead, I'll put up this brief thought on ceramics.

I realized watching this that combining sound and ceramics is a genius idea.  Resonance provides a completely different and legitimate way of understanding a given piece's integrity, wholeness, composition, structure, tone.  What a brilliant way of expressing the invisible.

The Star-Splitter

"hugger-mugger"

"Don't call it blamed; there isn't anything
More blameless in the sense of being less
A weapon in our human fight," he said.


Robert Frost - The Star-Splitter

"That telescope was christened the Star-Splitter,
Because it didn't do a thing but split
A star in two or three the way you split
A globule of quicksilver in your hand
With one stroke of your finger in the middle.
It's a star-splitter if there ever was one,
And ought to do some good if splitting stars
'Sa thing to be compared with splitting wood."

Piet Hein's Squircle

Piet Hein is a fantastic poet-mathematician of little aphorisms he calls "Grooks."  He got me thinking about how mind boggling it is that poetry and mathematics are not taught hand in hand.  What could be more poetic than defining an equation which aptly combines the best qualities of a square and a circle ("squircle")?






Our choicest plans
have fallen through,
our airiest castles
tumbled over,
because of lines
we neatly drew
and later neatly
stumbled over.



Regarding the Squircle, Piet Hein had this to say:

Man is the animal that draws lines which he himself then stumbles over. In the whole pattern of civilization there have been two tendencies, one toward straight lines and rectangular patterns and one toward circular lines. There are reasons, mechanical and psychological, for both tendencies. Things made with straight lines fit well together and save space. And we can move easily — physically or mentally — around things made with round lines. But we are in a straitjacket, having to accept one or the other, when often some intermediate form would be better. To draw something freehand — such as the patchwork traffic circle they tried in Stockholm — will not do. It isn't fixed, isn't definite like a circle or square. You don't know what it is. It isn't esthetically satisfying. The super-ellipse solved the problem. It is neither round nor rectangular, but in between. Yet it is fixed, it is definite — it has a unity.

I'll post some more Grooks at a later moment.

Methinks we are too much like oysters..

Yes, there is death in the business of whaling—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. IN fact, take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.
—Moby-Dick, "The Chapel"

Verbal and Visual

“It is in the remarkably fluid and complex interaction of [the verbal and the visual] that one of the great motors of human culture can be discerned.  Humbling the image is no antidote to humiliating the word.  It is far healthier to nurture in both what is best called a mutual regard.” —Martin Jay, Force FIelds: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique, 1993.

"The relation between text and illustration is clearly reciprocal.  Each refers to the other.  Each illustrates the other, in a continual back and forth movement [recursive] movement which is incarnated in the experience of the reader as his eyes move from words to picture and pack again, juxtaposing the two in a mutual establishment of meaning...Such an intrinsic relation between text and picture sets up an oscillation or shimmering of meaning in which neither element can be said to be prior.  The pictures are about the text; the text is about the pictures."  —George Cruikshank


"I hold to a theory re book illustration, to wit: Book illustration is dull, inept, stupid, stifling, and gratuitous when ti seeks to provide a kind of visual nomenclature for the text, when it strives to make palpably visible the images trapped in the text; it is doubly useless when it snares and limits the range of words in terrible cages mechanically contrived.  A writer could have no worse fate.  Book illustration is meaningful, splendid, useful, apt, and bright when it performs as a partner, paralleling the text; the illustration should extend implications, deepen tragedy, heighten insights.  The illustrations should stand as works, without the text; they should comment on the text, argue with it, elevate it, and ultimately be an extension of it...Ultimately, it is the illustrator's task to extend the context of meaning, to overlay the text with a structure of the artist's devising." —Leonard Baskin Sculpture, Drawings, Prints, 1970.