Spike Milligan in a September 1992 episode of BBC Radio’s In the Psychiatrist’s Chair, hosted by Anthony Clare:
Life does let you down, doesn’t it? I mean, there’s no rehearsal for it. There’s only one performance and you never have a rehearsal. So you can never give a good performance.
A screenshot of a grim set of posts in my RSS reader (Feeder, which I recommend):
Those posts are from:
Last Week in Collapse I learned about in this recent Guardian article, “On r/collapse, people are ‘kept abreast of the latest doom.’ Its moderators say it’s not for everyone.”
I came across this photo in the Wikimedia Commons: Ontario Society of Artists Hanging Committee, 1927 (I0010428).tif.
With the help of Barbara Mitchell (curator at the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto) and a reference librarian at the Art Gallery of Ontario library, the people were identified, and I updated the metadata: from left to right they are Emanuel Hahn, Fred S. Haines, J.E.H. MacDonald, Dorothy Stevens, Herbert S. Palmer, Manly MacDonald and Frederick Loveroff. All the men were members of the Arts and Letters.
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.
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.
Here is a scan of the top of page 69:
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).
Two quotes that go well together. First, from Paul Valéry (p. 144):
I fear the known more than the unknown.
Second, from John Cage (Kostelanetz, p. 211), which I often see quoted without a citation:
I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.
Kostelanetz, Richard. Conversing with John Cage. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2003. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203427033.
Valéry, Paul. Analects. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. Collected Works of Paul Valéry, vol. 14. Princeton University Press, 1970.
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 …”
I particularly recommend episode 288 with composer Max Richter (who is very thoughtful in his answers) and episode 292 on animal sentience with Jonathan Birch (whose book The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI is available open access).
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.
It’s much too easy to rebel against everybody else, and not against oneself.
Pierre Boulez quoted from an archival recording in BBC Radio 3’s Sunday Feature episode Afterwords: Pierre Boulez at 100.
Miskatonic University Press