False Prospect

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mountain_Landscape_with_Bridge_A30099.jpg

Because he had to earn a living painting portraits, Thomas Gainsborough could not spend as much time sketching outdoors as he would have liked. So he arranged pieces of moss, rock, vegetables, and mirror into tabletop “landscapes” that he could paint at night by candlelight.

Joshua Reynolds recalled him collecting “broken stones, dried herbs, and pieces of looking glass, which he magnified and improved into rocks, trees, and water.” Another visitor wrote, “I … have more than once sat by him of an evening and seen him make models … for landscape scenery on a little old-fashioned folding oak table. … He would place cork or coal for his foregrounds; make middle grounds of sand and clay, bushes of moss and lichens, and set up distant woods of broccoli.”

| Art

A Late Addition

Holst’s The Planets premiered in 1918, 12 years before Pluto was discovered.

So in 2000 Colin Matthews wrote an eighth movement, “Pluto, the Renewer,” to complete the cycle.

(I’m not sure of its status since 2006, when the International Astronomical Union reclassified Pluto a dwarf planet.)

| Art · Science & Math

Criticism

The library of St John’s College, Oxford, used to hold a copy of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene that bore a student’s penciled comment on the last page:

“First I thought Troilus And Criseyde was the most boring poem in English. Then I thought Beowulf was. Then I thought Paradise Lost was. Now I know that The Faerie Queen is the dullest thing out. Blast it.”

It had been written by Philip Larkin, who had studied English there in the 1940s.

| Literature

Relativity

Fixed to the front of the clock case in the north transept of Chester Cathedral is a poem by Henry Twells (1823–1900):

When as a child I laughed and wept,
Time crept.
When as a youth I waxed more bold,
Time strolled.
When I became a full grown man,
Time RAN.
When older still I daily grew,
Time FLEW.
Soon I shall find, in passing on,
Time gone.
O Christ! wilt Thou have saved me then?
Amen.

He called it “Time’s Paces.”

| Poems

Two for One

The plot of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the meter of Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha, by Martin Woodhead:

You shall hear how Lady Constance,
Tiring of her wounded husband
(Poor Sir Clifford, high war-hero,
Inconvenienced by shrapnel),
Found a gamekeeper called Mellors
Who would teach her in his lunch-hour
(And in language frank and fearless
Such as wives and servants blush at)
To admire the lower orders
While that blighted Bart, Sir Clifford
(Let us waste no pity on him,
For the man was paraplegic),
In his new electric wheelchair
Tried to drive it up a tunock —
Tried and tried, and couldn’t make it.

From a Spectator competition. Chatterley in Field & Stream. Hiawatha in condensed matter physics.

| Literature

Strike Up the Bland

In 1986, Michael Kinsley, editor of The New Republic, spotted the headline “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative” in the New York Times and challenged his readers to come up with a more boring one. This was a tall order: The Times head, someone said, manages to be “not only boring as a whole, but boring word by word.” Submissions included:

  • “U.S. Leadership Needed” (New York Times)
  • “Trade, A Two-Way Street” (New York Times)
  • “Beyond the News, Larger Issues” (New York Times)
  • “Thoughts at Graduation Time” (New York Times)
  • “Continue Manned Flight in Space” (New York Times)
  • “Chill Falls on Warming Relations Between Australia and Indonesia” (New York Times)
  • “University of Rochester Decides to Keep Name” (New York Times)
  • “Dramatic Changes Fail to Materialize on Hill” (Washington Post)
  • “Surprises Unlikely in Indiana” (Chicago Tribune)
  • “CIA Analysis Sees Soviet Economy in Need of Changes” (San Diego Union)
  • “Prevent Burglary by Locking House, Detectives Urge” (Boston Globe)
  • “Methodists Oppose Use of Nuclear Arms” (New York Times)
  • “Economist Dies” (Wisconsin State Journal)
  • “Turbulent Days for Donald D. Engen” (New York Times)

The winner was found in the New York Times science section: “Debate Goes on Over the Nature of Reality.”

| Language · Literature · Society

Alphabetical Disorder

In the 19th century, the index to the London Times was compiled by Samuel Palmer. Palmer had an unusual way of working, which apparently wasn’t noticed until 1890, when a mystified reader, Corrie Thompson, wrote to Notes and Queries with some examples:

  • An article about a boy sentenced for stealing a twopenny pie was indexed under “Atrocious Criminal.”
  • An article about a floating chapel loosed from its moorings was indexed under “Disgraceful Act.”
  • An article about a storm at Saône-et-Loire was indexed under “Fatal Storm.”
  • An article about a spell of dry weather was indexed under “Present Dry Season.”
  • An article about two women imprisoned for stealing a mare and for shooting at a man were indexed under “Rather uncommon for Females.”

Apparently Palmer had simply been compiling headlines without reading the articles. This accounts for entries such as “Extraordinary Escape of Boy at Erith Station, From a Bull Being on the Line” and “Extraordinary Marriage Adventure.” Thompson wrote, “One would expect to find this system adopted in a ‘table of contents,’ but surely it is out of place in an ‘index.'”

One wonderful exception, which Palmer apparently wrote himself:

“Death of Jane Thomas in her Mother’s Arms in Holborn at Joy in Seeing her parent at the Stage Door to Receive her.”

| Literature

Throughput

https://books.google.com/books?id=px5dAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA23#v=onepage&q&f=false

Take a piece of string about six feet in length, and tie the ends together. Pass it through a button-hole of your coat; hitch one thumb at each end, hook the little fingers into the upper strings of the opposite hand. Then draw the hands well outward, and the string will look very complicated, as in the engraving.

To get out the string, loose the hold of the right thumb and left finger, and separate the hands smartly, when the string will appear to have been pulled out through the substance of your coat.

— The Boy’s Own Conjuring Book, 1860

| Entertainment

Lineage

If the last 50,000 years of man’s existence were divided into lifetimes of approximately sixty-two years each, there have been about 800 such lifetimes. Of these 800, at least 650 were spent in caves. Only during the last seventy lifetimes has it been possible to communicate effectively from one lifetime to another — as writing made it possible to do. Only during the last six lifetimes did masses of men ever see a printed word. Only during the last four has it been possible to measure time with any precision. Only in the last two has anyone anywhere used an electric motor. And the overwhelming majority of all the material goods we use in daily life today have been developed within the present, the 800th, lifetime.

— Alvin Toffler, Future Shock, 1970

| History