I’m rereading the Cornish Trilogy by Robertson Davies, and in What’s Bred in the Bone (1985) I was struck by something art restorer Tancred Saraceni says to Francis Cornish in early 1939:
Of course, you may become something rather like a photographer. But remember what Matisse said: “L’exactitude, ce n’est pas la verite.”
That’s good, but did Matisse say it? I’m never satisfied with a quotation unless I have a source.
Happily, it’s easy to get started on this one. Wikiquote’s entry on Matisse has a quotation, crediting it to Jack D. Flam’s translation of “Interview with Henri Matisse” by Jacques Guenne in L’Art Vivant (15 September 1925).
Slowly I discovered the secret of my art. It consists of a meditation on nature, on the expression of a dream which is always inspired by reality. With more involvement and regularity, I learned to push each study in a certain direction. Little by little the notion that painting is a means of expression asserted itself, and that one can express the same thing in several ways. Exactitude is not truth, Delacroix liked to say.
Exactitude is not truth. And Delacroix! That’s the great French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix.
I got Flam’s excellent collection Matisse on Art (revised edition, University of California Press, 1995) from the library so I could see the whole piece. I like the quotation this way, including a little more of what comes next:
Little by little the notion that painting is a means of expression asserted itself, and that one can express the same thing in several ways. Exactitude is not truth, Delacroix liked to say. Notice that the classics went on re-doing the same painting and always differently. After a certain time, Cézanne always painted the same canvas of the Bathers. Although the master of Aix ceaselessly redid the same painting, don’t we come upon a new Cézanne with the greatest curiosity?
Cover of L'Art Vivant
Matisse is quoting Eugène Delacroix and in the same breath speaking of Cézanne. (It reminded me of something Gertrude Stein said: “I am inclined to believe there is no such thing as repetition.”)
I was curious to know how it read in the original French. L’Art Vivant hasn’t been digitized, but York University Libraries has it on microfilm, and I got it into the reader and took scans of the pages: “Entretien avec Henri Matisse” (2.3 MB PDF).
In French:
Peu à peu s’imposait cette notion que la peinture est un mode d’expression et que l’on peut exprimer la même chose de plusiers façons. « L’exactitude n’est pas la vérité », se plaisait à dire Delacroix. Remarquez que les classiques ont toujours refait le même tableau, et toujours de façon différente. A partir d’une certaine époque, Cézanne a toujours peint la même toile des Baigneuses. Bien que le maitre d’Aix eût sans cesse refait le même tableau, ne prend-on pas connaissance d’un nouveau Cézanne avec la plus grande curiosité.
L’exactitude n’est pas la vérité. To my high school French, Flam’s translation handles the original very clearly. We see that Tancred Saraceni (or Davies) slightly misquoted Matisse: there is no “ce” in this quotation. That’s assuming this is where Saraceni got the line; he was speaking in 1939 and is certainly a person likely to have read L’Art Vivant.
In 1947 Matisse wrote an essay titled “Exactitude is not Truth” (in Flam’s translation) for a a catalogue of a show of his drawings. Flam’s notes say, “The title phrase comes from a saying of Delacroix.” The title is the last sentence of the essay, but there is no mention of Delacroix.
I wondered if Matisse used the phrase frequently, so I looked at the indexes for the majestic two-volume biography by Hilary Spurling, The Unknown Matisse (1995) and Matisse the Master (2005). Most of the Delacroix mentions are just in passing; there’s no mention of either this phrase or the essay.
« Dans la peinture et surtout dans le portrait, dit Mme Cavé dans son traité, c’est l’esprit qui parle à l’esprit, et non la science qui parle à la science. » Cette observation, plus profonde qu’elle ne l’a peut-être cru elle-même, est le procès fait à la pédanterie de l’exécution. Je me suis dit cent fois que la peinture, c’est-à-dire la peinture matérielle, n’était que le prétexte, que le pont entre l’esprit du peintre et celui du spectateur. La froide exactitude n’est pas l’art; l’ingénieux artifice, quand il plaît ou qu’il exprime, est l’art tout entier. La prétendue conscience de la plupart des peintres n’est que la perfection apportée à l’art d’ennuyer. Ces gens-là, s’ils le pouvaient, travailleraient avec le même scrupule l’envers de leurs tableaux… Il serait curieux de faire un traité de toutes les faussetés qui peuvent composer le vrai.
La froide exactitude n’est pas l’art.
This is the entry from the Lucy Norton translation in The Journal of Eugene Delacroix, edited by Hubert Wellington (London: Phaidon, 1995). (See Wikipedia for more on Madame Cavé.)
“In painting, and especially portraiture,” says Mme Cavé in her treatise, “mind speaks to mind, and not knowledge to knowledge.” This observation, which may be more profound than she knows herself, is an indictment of pedantry in execution. I have said to myself over and over again that painting, i.e. the material process we call painting, is no more than the pretext, the bridge, between the mind of the artist and that of the beholder. Cold accuracy is not art. Skilful invention, when it is pleasing or expressive, is art itself. The so-called conscientiousness of the great majority of painters is nothing but perfection in the art of boring. If it were possible, these fellows would labour with equal care over the backs of their pictures. It might be interesting to write a treatise on all the falsities that can be added together to make a truth.
Norton translates it as Cold accuracy is not art. To match Flam we could say Cold exactitude is not art. This is how I’ve seen it translated in some other books.
Matisse said that Delacroix “liked to say” it, but I looked at five books about Delacroix and didn’t see any mention of it, which surprised me, sharp aphorism that it is. Searching texts of scanned books at the Internet Archive doesn’t turn up any supporting evidence either.
So Matisse misremembered, or misquoted, or reshaped, Delacroix. Saraceni misquoted Matisse in a trivial way, but Matisse broadens Delacroix’s “art” to “truth.” Both Delacroix and Matisse are, of course, correct.
La froide exactitude n’est pas l’art: Cold exactitude is not art.
L’exactitude n’est pas la vérité: Exactitude is not truth.
Recently on Mastodon I saw mention of Just the Browser, a web site that supplies tools and information to “remove AI features, telemetry data reporting, sponsored content, product integrations, and other annoyances” from web browsers, so you have just the browser. It’s a great project.
Instead of going into obscure browser settings and tweaking options this way or that, and then doing it all over again every time you start working on a new machine, you can just do something once (on each machine). This works with system-wide settings that affect all users on a machine. This is meant for organizations who want to control browser settings for all their users—a company might want to restrict its employees from changing security settings in the browser they are mandated to use—but if you’re the only person on your machine, and the only person affected, it still works.
I use Firefox, and in Firefox all this is handled with policies. They can be set up in different ways, but one way that works on all operating systems is to use a policies.json file. Just the Browser gives Firefox configuration instructions that have a sample file and good instructions on where to save it.
This was all new to me, and I was delighted to learn about it. I read the documentation and found how to permanently set many other options that I’ve always had to do by hand. At the moment, this is my /etc/firefox/policies/policies.json file:
Unfortunately I can’t control everything about Firefox this way. I still have to configure some things myself, some through Settings and some in about:config (for example, making the scrollbar bigger).
But this does a lot of the most important stuff: turn off the AI, disable tracking, start with the previous session, don’t show any junk on new tabs, don’t show ads and suggestions, use my default DNS server, use my preferred search engine and toss out the ones I never want.
One thing to watch: make sure policies.json is a valid JSON file! If you edit it and miss some punctuation so it’s invalid, Firefox will ignore it and revert to default settings. And once I got something wrong and Firefox lost my session information, but I could recover my tabs through History. Now I’m careful to edit with Emacs or run the file through JSONLint to make sure it’s okay before relaunching Firefox.
Notebooks get a lot of discussion in the stationery world: check notebook at the Well-Appointed Desk or notebook reviews at the Pen Addict, or the whole Notebook Stories site.. If you’re in Toronto you could go to Take Note, Wonder Pens, Toronto Pen Shoppe or Laywine’s and you’d see products in many different sizes, bindings, and paper. Of all of them, for note pads, I like Rhodia. The Rhodia paper is great and works really well with fountain pens.
But for note books, here is my choice for first place, way above all others.
It’s hardcover and strongly bound; you can open it up and push it flat and nothing will break.
There are 80 sheets, making 160 pages. Each is 8″ (20.3 cm) high by 5.5″ (14 cm) wide; the book is a little bigger because of the cover overhang. It’s ¾″ (1.9 cm) thick.
The paper is acid free and weighs 128 gsm (grams per square metre). The sticker on it say “perfect for dry media and light washes,” which I’ve found true. It wrinkles if it gets too wet, but I’ve never had any trouble using a reasonable amount of water to do ink and wash drawings. If you’re doing serious watercolour work you’d want 300 gsm and proper watercolour paper. This is not for that. Get out your Arches block. For lighter water use, this paper works very well.
It has a bit of tooth, more than hot press paper (too smooth for me) but not like cold press (which I prefer). For a notebook and what I use it for, this paper is great.
The paper works very well with fountain pen ink, and I’m never particularly concerned with bleed-through. If I’m putting on a lot of ink (for emphasis, or putting a thick box around something), or doing a drawing and using ink and a water brush, it can show through slightly. I tested and a black Sharpie Ultra Fine bleeds through, but I don’t use them in these notebooks.
The paper is plain: no lines or dots.
The cover is sturdy. You can put this in a bag and knock it around, and you don’t need to worry. You can paste things onto the pages and it’ll get thicker but won’t complain.
When you’re done with it, you can write on the spine or put a label on it, then line it up on a shelf with others. They look good.
It costs $6.
I started using it after reading Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (see my October 2024 review). I write in it, I tape and glue things into it, I draw in it. I put stickers on the covers. I carry it with me everywhere and use it almost every day. When I’ve filled one up, I label the spine, put it on the shelf, and start a new one. I refer back to the old ones to check something or for inspiration or out of curiosity.
I recommend The Notebook. I recommend using a notebook. And for me, this is the best notebook. If you haven’t found one that works for you, look for something like this at an art supply store and try it out.
I installed KDE Plasma as my desktop environment on an old machine that was getting refreshed, and tried Konsave to copy my KDE configuration from my main machine. I’m not a regular Python user and I usually find it difficult to make packages and versions work, so I document what I did here.
First, on my main machine (running Ubuntu and Plasma 5.27), I set up a virtual Python environment, installed Konsave into it, export my KDE profile, then wipe the environment. The last step is to copy the saved file to the other machine.
It didn’t get everything (for example it missed setting up Caps Lock as Ctrl, reversing the scroll on the touchpad, and the desktop colour), but pretty much everything looks right, including Konsole, so it saved me a lot of time. Perhaps the problems came from running different versions of Plasma on the two machines.
Python people probably have a better way of doing this, but it works for me. Many thanks to Konsave!
This year I reread, as usual, books by Georgette Heyer, Rex Stout, P.G. Wodehouse and some other eternals. Here are some of my favourites of books new to me. First, fiction:
Jonathan Coe, The Proof of My Innocence (2024): a brilliant mystery and novel.
Maurice Druon, the first four books in the Accursed Kings sequence (1955–57): I saw Druon named as the second-best French historical novelist, and after reading the first book I could see why; I will finish the series next year.
Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom (2024): one of the best novels about the internet; see my post in August about it.
John Scalzi, Starter Villain (2023): enormously enjoyable.
Ellen Raskin, The Westing Game (1978): another brilliant mystery, this is a Newbery Medal winner; I knew nothing about it and was amazed and delighted from the start.
E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web (1952) is not new but it’s been decades since I read it. Another Newbery Medal winner and an absolute beauty.
And nonfiction:
Sophie Calle, Blind (2011): I read in an obituary of Diane Keaton that she kept this book of photography at her bedside, which intrigued me; having read it, I understand.
Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power (2005): the second of the Third Reich Trilogy; this and the first are two of the best works of history I have ever read and I have no doubt the third will match them.
Daniel Handler, And Then? And Then? What Else? (2024): a surprising memoir, with some great insights.
Ian Penman, Erik Satie Three Piece Suite (2025): a delightful and idiosyncratic book about more than just Satie.
Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I (1968): I was led to this by Penman’s book; this is another of the best histories I have ever read.
Anyone can record and submit an introduction: the rules are simple and the text is short. It’d be nice not hear men doing it every two weeks.
I’ve been listening to Framework for years (I first mentioned it here in 2019) and always recommend it as a great show for anyone interested in field recordings and soundscapes. (I also support it financially.)
I’ve had eighteen happy years in my union, the York University Faculty Association … over eighteen-and-a-half years of membership.
YUFA has staff who are in a union of their own. They are now in the fifth week of a strike. This terrible situation was directly caused by the current Executive. It is hurting the staff right now, and some YUFA members, and will do permanent damage to YUFA that will affect all members. I’m strongly opposed to what my union’s Executive is doing.
What’s happening boggles my mind. I’ll document some of it here for anyone who’s interested, and to make my opinions public.
About YUFA
As a librarian at York University, I’m a member of the York University Faculty Association (YUFA). All full-time faculty, librarians, and archivists are in YUFA (plus two small groups of others), but not faculty at the law school, who for historical reasons are in a different union. Right now there are about 1500 members, down from around 1700 just a few years ago. Of course, this excludes faculty and librarians in management and administration roles: the president and provost (academic vice-president) are professors, and were YUFA members, but are not currently in the union.
I’ve been a member of YUFA since I started at York in 2007. In that time I’ve had several roles in the union: three full and two partial terms as a steward, over twelve years; I was a member of a side table bargaining team updating our tenure and promotion document; for one year I was on the union executive; and for two years I was a trustee.
The trustee role is defined in YUFA’s constitution; there are two, and they review “the Association’s activities and operations during their year in office and recommend improvements in the methods of operation.” I was a sole trustee for one year, then a colleague joined me for my second. The reports cover a lot of what members can know about YUFA operations, but nothing confidential: Trustee’s Report from 2023–24 and Trustees’ Report from 2024–25.
YUFA staff
YUFA has eight staff members. There are seven “executive associates” or “staff representatives” and one “co-ordinator of accounting and administration.” YUFA members see a lot of the staff reps and less of the admin person.
Member dealings with the union usually start with an email. The staff reps answer our questions and begin to help deal with problems. These range from minor to life-changing (such as the possibility of not earning tenure and therefore losing one’s job). If the problem needs special attention, the staff escalate it and YUFA members with special union roles (chief stewards, known elsewhere as grievance officers) get involved; this might lead into a complaints process that could result in a formal grievance, which could in turn lead to a mediation or formal arbitration between the parties. Big problems can take years to resolve. Staff are crucial to every stage. On top of this, staff advise and support the union executive in its work, and our bargaining team when we negotiate our collective agreement with York every three years.
The staff are in a union themselves: they are a sub-local of the Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 1281 (CUPE 1281), which has units representing staff at various unions. It may seem surprising: YUFA’s staff are themselves in a union, which means YUFA is an Employer. It surprised me when I first learned it. The CUPE 1281 - York University Faculty Association (YUFA) collective agreement is online.
(You may wonder, are CUPE’s office staff in a union? They are, in the Canadian Office and Professional Employees Union. As are the staff at the Canadian Association of University Teachers, the national association of academic unions and faculty associations. I don’t know what union COPE’s staff are in. That’s quite a chain of unions, but unions believe in the importance of unions and union membership, and it’s all various levels of people helping each other, making a better workplace, and, for social unions, trying to make changes in society.)
YUFA staff are on strike
The staff’s collective agreement with YUFA expired in May, and there was bargaining over the summer. The titles of this series of October posts from 1281 show things getting worse and the strike starting on 27 October. (See Ontario’s page on collective bargaining for details of the processes involved in conciliation and “no-board” reports.)
CUPE 1281 is not the only CUPE local on campus. The biggest and most well known is CUPE 3903: “proudly representing Teaching Assistants, Contract Faculty, Graduate & Research Assistants, Part-Time Librarians & Archivists, and Canadian Observatory on Homelessness workers at York University.” (The labour disruptions section of Wikipedia’s article on York describes its four strikes.)
Generally 3903 and YUFA maintain friendly relations, with mutual support at a respectful distance. But on 27 October, it posted CUPE 3903 Exec: Solidarity with CUPE 1281 YUFA Staff. It’s no surprise: they’re both CUPE locals. Good unions stand up for each other. I take this, and other events, as a marker that cross-campus solidarity is badly damaged, and YUFA won’t be able to depend on its fellow unions in our 2027 bargaining.
Inside YUFA there have been some emails from the Executive, and these posts on the web site:
There have been two poorly-attended meetings on the strike. It seems most members don’t care. That’s hard to understand, but at the fall general membership meeting last week only 5% of the members attended.
Executive director and in-house counsel
The most important issue is that the YUFA Executive wants to hire a manager to oversee the staff. This manager would have a role in hiring and firing and would not be in 1281. This has a been a red line for the staff. They said they wouldn’t accept it, and they haven’t.
YUFA has “managerial rights” and could just go ahead and hire for this role—employers have that power—but the Executive didn’t start with that. Instead, YUFA tabled changes to the collective agreement that set out how a manager would fit in, but it did this by surprise, without introducing the idea earlier in, for example, the labour-management committee. This infuriated 1281. YUFA says the idea has been discussed for years, so really it’s not a surprise.
Everyone agrees that YUFA could use another employee. There is too much work. But why a manager? YUFA offers a few reasons: institutional memory, assisting Executive members in their duties, helping better manage the organization and distribution of work … and stopping the staff from “running the union,” which a lot of people seem to think the staff does. I don’t. I do know of management-staff problems going back years and years, but the ones I know about were all caused by Executive members I wouldn’t want to have as my boss. Later Executive members need to work to fix those problems. That’s part of their roles.
Unions are increasingly gaining favour with younger workers with the result that waves of union campaigns are hitting workplaces, both blue-collar and white-collar alike. In this session, the speakers will discuss how employers might consider addressing the new union movement—whether as an already unionized employer dealing with demands that are less about economics and more about social investment, or as a non-union employer seeking to maintain a direct relationship with its employees in an environment where unions are showing an ever-improving ability to connect and engage.
“A non-union employer seeking to maintain a direct relationship with its employees.” You know what that means: stopping people from starting a union! See 1281’s Who is Ogletree Deakins, YUFA’s Union-Busting Lawyers? post from 06 July for more about the firm.
Ogletree Deakins’ clients measure results in two important ways. Most firm clients go year-after-year without experiencing a union election. That is the ultimate result of a well-executed positive employee relations program. Other clients that are targeted by unions for campaigns measure results differently. With unions winning elections at historically high rates in the 60% range, a very high percentage of Ogletree Deakins clients’ employees reject unionization. Moreover, these results are achieved lawfully and, in most cases, without further organizing attempts by the same union later.
YUFA spent around $75,000 on Ogletree, drove the staff to a strike, and then dropped the firm.
The other position YUFA wants to hire is an in-house lawyer. YUFA spends hundreds of thousands a year on lawyers (for consultations, briefs, representation at arbitrations, etc.), and the potential benefits of having counsel on staff are clear to everyone. CUPE 1281 staff have concerns about work being taken away from them—though not lawyers, they do legal work—but that could be worked out.
YUFA wants the in-house lawyer to be a management position. They want the lawyer to work on relations and bargaining with 1281. I don’t know how often before this round of bargaining YUFA hired outside lawyers to help it bargain with staff, but it wasn’t much, and it could be done again if needed. The lawyer doesn’t need to be management. CUPE 1281 is again entirely opposed to a new out-of-scope (non-union) position being introduced.
YUFA’s main argument is to says it’s impossible for a lawyer to be in a union. It points to §3 of Ontario’s Labour Relations Act (1995) and quotes from §3 (a):
No person shall be deemed to be an employee,
(a) who is a member of the architectural, dental, land surveying, legal or medical profession entitled to practise in Ontario and employed in a professional capacity; or
(b) who, in the opinion of the Board, exercises managerial functions or is employed in a confidential capacity in matters relating to labour relations.
Here’s what David Doorey, York professor, author of the excellent textbook The Law of Work, and expert on employment law, said about that: “It’s a Charter violation.”
However, some employees were excluded entirely from this legislation, including employees in five professions, law among them. By the 1970s, the federal government and most provinces had repealed the professional exclusion from the primary collective bargaining legislation. However, four jurisdictions—Ontario, Alberta, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island (Exclusionary Provinces)—have stubbornly preserved the exclusion.
Clear enough. But that’s the beginning, not the end. In the conclusion:
Several observations can be made about the situation facing lawyers interested in collective bargaining in the four Exclusionary Provinces. One is that without access to statutory collective bargaining machinery,employed lawyers in the private sector have no access to meaningful collective bargaining unless their employer agrees to an extra-statutory, voluntary recognition. In practice, this has only occurred when the employer is itself a union or what might be described as “a progressive employer” interested in workers’ rights and access to justice issues (e.g. legal clinics)….
A second observation is that unions have occasionally been successful at pressuring public sector or publicly funded organizations to voluntarily recognize bargaining agents representing lawyers by launching Charter challenges against the lawyer exemption or threatening to do so….
A third observation is that where lawyers have managed to obtain collective bargaining rights, the bargaining process has worked well. Experience has demonstrated that there is nothing special about employed lawyers that justifies treating them differently than other employees.
Doorey said there are many unionized lawyers in Ontario, and it’s just a matter of time before that clause in the Labour Relations Act is removed.
YUFA’s interpretation of the law is embarrassing. It should be hiring a lawyer to be in the union—a lawyer who’s the kind who wants to be in a union, and to stand up for that right—and if there’s trouble about it, YUFA should be ready for a Charter challenge. That’s how I want my union to behave.
Finally, about both the positions, there has never been any clear answer about how they will be paid for if no staff lose their jobs. YUFA has said they won’t, but 1281 is suspicious. These two new positions might cost, say, $350,000 total per year, with salaries and benefits and pensions and such. Can all of that be carved out from what YUFA is paying lawyers now? The numbers have never been clearly presented. There’s an idea that one person could combine both jobs in one. I doubt it.
The other big issue is the nature of the workplace, with staff wanting a better environment and protections from abusive YUFA members, and YUFA painting this as uppity staff refusing to help people they don’t like. I won’t get into it here.
The York University Faculty Association (YUFA) invites applications for the position of Executive Director / In-House Counsel.
Should a candidate that can occupy both roles not be found, YUFA is open to hiring one individual for each role. However, candidates who meet the requirements of both aspects of the position are especially invited to apply.
This is outrageous. This will make YUFA worse—not because of this person or these people personally, but because of how it was done, that it will drive away our excellent staff, that a new structure will be managerial and haunted by the union-busting tactics of YUFA as an employer, and that, inevitably, YUFA Executive will complain that the executive director and the in-house counsel “run the union.”
YUFA Executive members get annoyed when I say that they are doing to their employees exactly what York wants to do to us. But it’s true! YUFA used an anti-union law firm to help introduce non-union management while having run a deficit for years and with inadequate reserve funds … all the while complaining about how York’s administration is hiring more administration in a budget crisis. When we go into bargaining in 2027, the York bargaining team can quote YUFA’s words back at it. “You’re complaining about hiring management positions, and calling it administrative bloat? But actually, these new associate vice presidents will help York to ‘more nimbly serve our [faculty] in a climate that is increasingly hostile to the work we do as researchers and educators’! So there!”
Bargaining in 2021 was difficult. Bargaining in 2024 was worse and we were very close to walking out. I always predicted bargaining in 2027 would probably take us into a strike. With all these problems, I started to think that we’d get walked all over by the Employer and it would be a huge fight to keep what we have. Now I’m starting to think the whole situation could be so bad there is no strike but we end up making concessions. A lot will depend on the next Executive and on member organization.
The root cause of all of this is YUFA’s Employer: York University. York is winning a years-long campaign to damage every union on campus. York forces us to turn complaints into grievances and grievances into arbitrations. A staffer likes to say: “They all sing from the same songbook. Every song has one word: No.” York has essentially infinite resources, but the unions do not. Bit by bit, faculty by faculty, program by program, year by year, complaint by complaint, York made YUFA spend millions of dollars and it put incredible pressure on YUFA members. Some lost their jobs.
York has pushed things to the breaking point, and now YUFA is fracturing. To my fellow YUFA members, I say: You may be an academic with tenure, but you’re in a union. You need a strong one. What is happening to higher education in Ontario is a policy decision made by the provincial and federal governments, and it won’t suddenly improve. We need protection and we get that through YUFA. To the YUFA Executive: Once again, I ask you to back down.
(Send comments to my off-York email address for YUFA matters, yufa@williamdenton.org.)
This led me, as usual, to Wikipedia, for example to its article on tinctures, which explains the special names used in heraldry for colours: it’s not blue, it’s azure; it’s not red, it’s gules; it’s not gold, it’s or or Or (which isn’t a colour, it’s a metal). The shapes—crosses and lines and such—are ordinaries. There is an article on heraldic lozenges.
[Note: What follows may contain many mistakes. If you’re an expert, don’t flame me.]
Vincent Massey's coat of arms
This is:
Argent on a chevron between three lozenges Sable each charged with a fleur-de-lis Argent, three stags’ heads erased Or, a canton Azure charged with the Crest of the Royal Arms of Canada (on a wreath Argent and Gules a lion passant guardant Or wearing the Royal Crown proper and holding in the dexter paw a maple leaf Gules).
On first reading, indeed possibly on second or tenth, this is cryptic, but picking apart the elements shows what’s going on:
First, start with Argent (the white background) and then on a chevron between three lozenges (the chevron is inside the three rhombi, though as we’ll soon learn you can’t really see one of them) Sable (the rhombi are black) each charged with a fleur-de-lis Argent (each black rhombus has a white fleur-de-lis on it) are three stags’ heads (we’re back in the chevron now) erased (their necks have ragged ends: see Wikipedia on heads in heraldry) Or (the heads are gold in colour). (I’m not sure how the chevron gets to be black.)
Now the description comes back up from one descent into detail and starts over with a canton Azure (the blue square in the upper left) on which there is a crest (the animal at the top) of the coat of arms of Canada, which is helpfully described in parentheses. I won’t pull out the details of that but you can see the mention of a lion wearing a crown and holding a maple leaf.
Massey’s entry in the Register describes the symbolism: “The white field, black chevron and lozenges, as well as the fleurs-de-lis are common charges found in other Massey or Massy coats of arms. The stags’ heads are likely a reference to Mr. Massey’s father, Hart Almerrin Massey, as the word ‘hart’ is a synonym for stag. The blue canton charged with the crest of the Royal Arms of Canada is an Honourable Augmentation granted to Mr. Massey by Her Majesty The Queen to honour his service as Governor General of Canada.”
Also Vincent Massey's coat of arms
And it has an illustration of Massey’s crest, from which I’ve picked out the shield. Notice that all the same elements are there but it is different from the one in Wikipedia. A blazon can be drawn in different ways.
Lady Red talks about this in the PyCon talk, and it’s covered in the Wikimedia Commons page for the escutcheon: “This coat of arms was drawn based on its blazon which – being a written description – is free from copyright. Any illustration conforming with the blazon of the arms is considered to be heraldically correct. Thus several different artistic interpretations of the same coat of arms can exist.” This was unknown and unexpected to me, and strangely delightful.
Those arms were awarded in 1963, but Massey had first received heraldry in 1920, when the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto moved to 14 Elm Street. Massey was the president at the time. To celebrate, J.E.H. MacDonald made punning shields for the executive and the past presidents; they were hung in the Great Hall and have been there ever since. I see them often because I’m a member.
A third coat of arms for Massey
Here we have an azure (blue) background on which is a sheaf of wheat tied with a ribbon that says “Blest be the tie that binds.” This I take to be about both the friendly comradeship at the club and the farm equipment made by Massey-Harris, the company that made the Masseys rich. Around it are stags—also known as harts, as the Register said, a reference to Massey’s father Hart Massey and Massey’s creation of Hart House at the University of Toronto.
I bet the harts done humorously in 1920 led directly to the harts done armigerously in 1963. J.E.H. never expected that!
One last thing about blazons and how the specialized language they use is parsed, as Lady Red talked about. “Heraldry and Blazon: A Graphic-Based Information Language” by Harold E. Thiele Jr., from Library Trends (Spring 1990), is working on the very same lines. The abstract says in part:
Examination of the various descriptive conventions used by heralds over the last 700 years to blazon armorial devices reveals several patterns that can be adapted to form a generalized algorithm to describe trademarks, logos, and other types of graphic designs. The key assumption used in the algorithm is that the graphic design is to be treated as a glyph that is to be painted onto a surface with some form of opaque media. The different design elements of the glyph are described in the order in which they are applied to the surface as one works from the background to the foreground.
Thiele turns “Azure, a bell with a pull argent” into: F\\h half-round shield # \ (:\ .\ ,\h azure)PC\\ (:\p centered .\p a bell with two rope pulls ,\h argent) PO\\ (:\p centered on bell .\h cross fleuretty ,\h argent [:\p centered on cross fleuretty .\h cross fillet ,\h sable]) SC \ \ (: \ .\ ,\) SO \ (:\ ,\ ,\) E\\ (:\ .\ ,\). I don’t know how successful this approach turned out to be, but it seems to me clearly influenced by the International Standard Bibliographic Description, the rules used to describe books for old-fashioned library catalogue cards. (Rules which haunt the libraries still, decades later.) Two people, same interests, same purpose, different fields, different decades, different results.
Harriet the Spy (1964) by Louise Fitzhugh is a masterpiece I have gone back to many times, but it was only on rereading it last week that I noticed that two of the greatest characters in fiction express themselves in small caps.
Illustrated by the author
The first is Harriet M. Welsch, who does it when she writes in her notebook. This is the end of the first section of the book, after Harriet’s nanny Ole Golly has left to get married and Harriet is very alone.
i feel all the same things when i do things alone as when ole golly was here. the bath feels hot, the bed feels soft, but i feel like there’s a funny little hole in me that wasn’t there before, like a splinter in your finger, but this is somewhere above my stomach.
The other is Death in the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett. This is an exchange with Rincewind in The Last Continent (1998):
“Is it true that your life passes before your eyes before you die?”
yes.
“Ghastly thought, really.” Rincewind shuddered. “Oh, gods, I’ve just had another one. Suppose I am just about to die and this is my whole life passing in front of my eyes?”
i think perhaps you do not understand. people’s whole lives do pass in front of their eyes before they die. the process is called “living.”
Miskatonic University Press
