It must have been a long time before men thought of giving a common name to the manifold objects of their senses, and of placing themselves in opposition to them.
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Pretty Pictures
Images I have found striking over the years.
READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
At Skytopia, Daniel White has written up a 3-dimensional extension of the Mandelbrot set, with extraordinary renderings of it at different levels of magnification, and with different parameters to the equation. I am finding it easy to imagine jumping into this, climbing around on it like a toddler on an endless jungle gym.
...And, there looks to be a whole lot of other engaging stuff on the site, I haven't really started to look it over yet. Thanks for the link, Russ!
Happy Armistice Day! (And to our Latvian readers, happy Lāčplēsis Day!) The guns of August have ceased their roar. A good time to hope that we will see an end to the wars that plague our world today.
In this week's NY Times Magazine, Negar Azimi takes a look at the Museum of Innocence Orhan Pamuk is constructing in Istanbul. Pamuk says, "My novel honors the museums that no one goes to, the ones in which you can hear your own footsteps."
Arthur Ganson specializes in kinetic sculptures. Thanks to Martha for pointing this out -- this is great, addictive stuff! I am sorry I'm not in Cambridge to see his show at M.I.T.
Besides the Magdalene to the right (who seems like a appropriate emblem for this site), I was really taken with this picture of Philippe de Croÿ, the right half of a diptych:
At A Journey Round My Skull (which looks in general to be a fantastic source for trippy imagery -- thanks for linking to it, badger!), Will posts several illustrations from Russian Fairy Tales (1945), drawn by Alexandre Alexeïeff; also, a link to the pinscreen animation work of Alexeïeff and his wife and partner Claire Parker. The Nose, adapted from Gogol:
posted evening of September 30th, 2009: Respond ➳ More posts about Animation
Christine K. passed along a link to Rachel Sussman's hunt for the Oldest Living Things in the World -- fun reading and some great photography. I was particularly taken with Sussman's photo of the llareta, an Andean plant which grows over rocks kind of like moss and forms some delightful shapes as it ages through the millenia.
Currently Sussman is on a pilgrimage to see a 9,500-year-old Spruce tree that is growing in Sweden.
posted evening of September 24th, 2009: 1 response
By way of the Wooster Collective I see that street artist Elbow-Toe has a new painting in Union Square, based on Rembrandt's drawing "Monk in a Cornfield" -- beautiful, I hope it is still there next time I am in the city! The Rembrandt drawing really captured my imagination when I saw it a few years ago at the Pierrepont-Morgan Library.
Last time I went to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, was with my friends Monique and Jeremy; and I took a couple of pictures on Monique's camera which I had since forgotten all about. But today she mailed them to me. Thanks Monique!
The pictures are of a statue whose title and author I have since forgotten, I'm hoping somebody will recognize these photos. If you do, please let me know in comments. Here is the front view of the statue: and here is the view from behind, over the statue's shoulder, which is what initially caught my eye:
And speaking of that Museum: I'm going there this Sunday afternoon to meet up with Bill of Orbis Quintus; Bill let me know about the current exhibition of James Ensor's work. (So if nobody recognizes the statue, I will check when I'm there.) I don't know much about Ensor but I'm very intrigued by the sample images I've found looking around the web.
