At the time Dorothy Stevens couldn’t join because she was a woman, but I think she was a member of the Heliconian Club. Her entry in the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative has scans of many reviews. The Star review of that OSA show doesn’t mention her name but the list of works she helped hang gives a sense of what a great show it must have been. As for her examples of her work, there’s a 1918 drawing in War Art in Canada: A Critical History by Laura Brandon, one of the wonderful books from the Art Institute of Canada. Her work is in the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada.
Dorothy Stevens
What a face! That portrait was taken by M.O. Hammond, another member of the Arts and Letters.
Category:Ontario Society of Artists has a lot more great photos, including hanging committees from other years, but any further identifications will have to wait.
I saw artist John Constable quoted in the TLS recently, and the quote is all over the web but without a citation. It may be in a biography, but I tracked it down to “Lectures on Landscape” in John Constable’s Discourses, compiled and annotated by R.B. Beckett (Ipswich, Suffolk: Suffolk Records Society, 1970). The book is for sale from the Society; I think there are two copies in the whole province of Ontario.
This is from the finish of the fourth and final Thursday afternoon lecture, delivered at the Royal Institution on 16 June 1836:
Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not landscape be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments?
After quoting a remark from a friend that now his lecture is over he will “be instructed in his turn by other men,” Constable’s last line is:
In such an age as this, painting should be understood, not looked on with blind wonder, nor considered only as a poetic aspiration, but as a pursuit, legitimate, scientific, and mechanical.
Noting for reference: Policy of transience by Simon Tatham, who wrote PuTTY. Some points: he doesn’t keep a shell history, regularly closes his browser, often logs out and shuts down his laptop, and uses a temporary file system in memory instead of filling up ~/tmp/ with stuff.
All the habits I’ve described above can be seen through this lens:
My shell history is either temporary (vanishes when I close that shell), or deliberately permanent (saved a command in a script with a name and an explanation).
A cluster of related applications on my desktop, like a terminal and a text editor and a gitk or something, is either temporary (I close the whole lot frequently and in any case it goes away when I log out or reboot), or deliberately permanent (if I keep wanting the same cluster a lot then I make hot keys and short command aliases to restart it any time I want).
Files on my computer are either temporary (because they’re in ~/mem which will be emptied on the next reboot), or deliberately permanent (in a sensible directory so I’ll know where to find them again, and with an explanation if needed).
URLs I want to do something with are either temporary (in my browser, which I keep closing down completely) or deliberately permanent (saved somewhere else, again with an explanation).
The file system in memory is new to me and bound to be useful. I may try not keeping a bash history—I can see how maintaining that constraint could lead to good habits. I’m already a great believer in regularly closing my browser, usually after getting back to one tab (my permanent one with email).
I went up to the McMichael Collection recently. (Its history of ownership and control is unique in Canada, I think; see the Wikipedia article for more.) The sign at the entrance desk says an adult ticket is $20. I handed over a $20 bill.
“Twenty fifty,” said the attendant. I was a bit confused, but handed over a fiver and got change back.
My receipt said admission is $17.70, plus $2.30 HST (harmonized sales tax of 13%; in Ontario that is the combination of 5% federal tax and 8% provincial tax). That equals $20. A nice round number.
But then the receipt says: “Processing fee: $0.50.”
I emailed the gallery: “Why is the fee charged on cash payments?”
The response: “The Software Processing fee applies per ticket transactions including cash.”
I’m new to the Mindscape podcast by physicist Sean Carroll, but I’m very much enjoying some of the episodes. He’s a good interviewer, who gets right to the conversation and then asks good questions, lets the guest talk but prods them along or probes a point when needed, and never does what bad interviewers do: “Actually that’s really interesting, because I [insert long personal anecdote].” A few episodes that looked interesting didn’t turn out to be, because of the guest, but it’s always easy to delete a podcast episode and move on.
This line from psychologist Ellen Langer (in episode 279) made me laugh. In a section on flow she says: “It’s interesting because Csimaksihalyi—well, we called him Mickey, can’t pronounce his name …”
From chapter fifty-five (“Is She Mad?”) of The Claverings (1867) by Anthony Trollope:
Men and women say that they will read, and think so,—those, I mean, who have acquired no habit of reading,—believing the work to be, of all works, the easiest. It may be work, they think, but of all works it must be the easiest of achievement. Given the absolute faculty of reading, the task of going through the pages of a book must be, of all tasks, the most certainly within the grasp of the man or woman who attempts it! Alas, no;—if the habit be not there, of all tasks it is the most difficult. If a man have not acquired the habit of reading till he be old, he shall sooner in his old age learn to make shoes than learn the adequate use of a book. And worse again;—under such circumstances the making of shoes shall be more pleasant to him than the reading of a book. Let those who are not old,—who are still young, ponder this well.
“Song for the Luddites” by Lord Byron comes from a letter he wrote to his friend Thomas Moore from Venice on 24 December 1816:
As the Liberty lads o’er the sea
Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,
So we, boys, we
Will die fighting, or live free,
And down with all kings but King Ludd!
When the web that we weave is complete,
And the shuttle exchanged for the sword,
We will fling the winding sheet
O’er the despot at our feet,
And dye it deep in the gore he has poured.
Though black as his heart its hue,
Since his veins are corrupted to mud,
Yet this is the dew
Which the tree shall renew
Of Liberty, planted by Ludd!
I love the last line of the first stanza, so I got the Paranoid Print Company to make a vinyl sticker of it (4 in. wide).
Photo of the sticker, black text on white
I have a couple of dozen to give away, so if you’re in Canada and want one, send me an address and I’ll put one in the mail.
Byron’s maiden speech in the House of Lords had been against the anti-Luddite Frame-Breaking Act of 1812. It’s on page 600 of The Works of Lord Byron Complete in One Volume at the Internet Archive.
As a working artist in his third decade of professional life, I’ve concluded that the point of art is to take a big, numinous, irreducible feeling that fills the artist’s mind, and attempt to infuse that feeling into some artistic vessel – a book, a painting, a song, a dance, a sculpture, etc – in the hopes that this work will cause a loose facsimile of that numinous, irreducible feeling to manifest in someone else’s mind.
The first half of that is basically Moore’s definition. The second half fits with Alfred North Whitehead’s longer definition, quoted in the original post.
Miskatonic University Press
