Wit and Sense

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Johannes_Moreelse_-_Democritus_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

There is an association in men’s minds between dullness and wisdom, amusement and folly, which has a very powerful influence in decision upon character, and is not overcome without considerable difficulty. The reason is that the outward signs of a dull man and a wise man are the same, and so are the outward signs of a frivolous man and a witty man; and we are not to expect that the majority will be disposed to look to much more than the outward sign. I believe the fact to be that wit is very seldom the only eminent quality in the mind of any man; it is commonly accompanied by many other talents of every description, and ought to be considered as a strong evidence of a fertile and superior understanding.

— Sydney Smith, quoted in The Ladies’ Repository, September 1858

A Tree to Climb

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stairs_carved_into_an_ancient_kauri_trunk_(Ancient_Kauri_Museum).jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

This enormous kauri tree towered for a thousand years over prehistoric New Zealand before it fell into a swamp, where the lack of oxygen and fungus preserved it for 45,000 years. Workers snapped two 90-ton-capacity winch cables trying to extract it in October 1994; finally they cut it into two sections of 110 and 30 tons and hauled them out separately.

Then David Stewart built a concrete pad 20 inches thick, placed a 50-ton section of log atop it, and spent 300 hours carving it with a chainsaw and 200 hours finishing it. At 12 feet in diameter and 17 feet tall, the result is the world’s largest (and certainly oldest) single-piece circular stairway … built inside the log.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/itravelnz/7458778052
Image: Flickr

(From Spike Carlsen, A Splintered History of Wood, 2008.)

Podcast Episode 167: A Manhattan Murder Mystery

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Old_New_York_yesterday_and_today_(1922)_(14594592410).jpg

In May 1920, wealthy womanizer Joseph Elwell was found shot to death alone in his locked house in upper Manhattan. The police identified hundreds of people who might have wanted Elwell dead, but they couldn’t quite pin the crime on any of them. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll review the sensational murder that the Chicago Tribune called “one of the toughest mysteries of all times.”

We’ll also learn a new use for scuba gear and puzzle over a sympathetic vandal.

See full show notes …

Words and Music

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Burgessns.jpg

Anthony Burgess based his 1974 novel Napoleon Symphony explicitly on the structure of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, the Eroica:

  • The story is told in four “movements,” whose length corresponds to the listening time of the corresponding parts of the symphony: 118 pages (14:46 minutes), 120 pages (15:34 minutes), 30 pages (5:33 minutes), and 77 pages (11:27 minutes).
  • The allegro takes Bonaparte “from his early Italian triumphs to his crowning as Emperor”; the marcia funebre moves to the retreat from Russia; in the scherzo Napoleon attends a play featuring Prometheus; and the finale depicts his life and death on St. Helena.
  • Where the symphony begins with two sharp chords, the novel starts with Napoleon giving Josephine “two excruciating love-pinches.” In the first movement Bonaparte corresponds to the “masculine thematic group,” Josephine to the “second, or feminine subject.” The sonata form requires repetition, so, for example, the opening sentence, “Germinal in the Year Four” appears in the “recapitulation” with a slight variation, as “Germinal in the Year Seven.” The contrasting themes are reflected in shifts of scene and viewpoint, and harmonic variation is suggested by the frequent repetition of certain phrases with minor changes.
  • In the second movement Napoleon dreams of his death in verses set precisely to the rhythm of Beethoven’s theme (these are printed with the score in his essay “Bonaparte in E Flat” in This Man and Music):

    There he lies,
    Ensanguinated tyrant
    O bloody, bloody tyrant
    See
    How the sin within
    Doth incarnadine
    His skin
    From the shin to the chin.

  • During the retreat from Russia, he approximates counterpoint by writing in two levels of language, which he hopes “will leave an aftertaste of polyphony.” For example: “The primary need, General Eblé said, is to obtain the requisite structural materials and this will certainly entail the demolition of civilian housing in the adjacent township. Now the first job, Sergeant Rebour said, is to get planking, and the only way to get it is to pull down all those fucking houses.”
  • In the scherzo the waltz rhythm is reflected in sentences such as “Dance dance dance! The orchestra struck up another waltz” and “They danced. United Kingdom of Benelux Benelux, Britain gets Malte and Cape of Good Hope.”
  • The finale is based on the so-called Prometheus theme (E-flat, B-flat, B-flat, E-flat), which Burgess visualizes as a cross in the score. He interprets the initials on Jesus’ cross, INRI, as Impera[torem] Nap[oleonem] Regem Interfec[it], an acrostic that recurs throughout the movement.

Overall, Burgess said, he wanted to pursue “one mad idea”: “to give / Symphonic shape to verbal narrative” and to “impose on life … the abstract patterns of the symphonist.”

He dedicated the novel to Stanley Kubrick, hoping that it might form the basis of the director’s long-planned biography of the emperor, but Kubrick decided that “the [manuscript] is not a work that can help me make a film about the life of Napoleon.” Undismayed, Burgess developed it instead into an experimental novel. The critics didn’t like it, but he said it was “elephantine fun” to write.

(From Theodore Ziolkowski, Music Into Fiction, 2017.)

A Lofty Vision

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

Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer proposed this design for a museum of modern art in Caracas in 1955. He conceived it as a pyramid standing on its apex; the roof would be one vast skylight, and daylight would penetrate the levels inside thanks to spaces at the edges of the floor slabs. There are no side windows so as not to disturb the unity of the slanted walls.

The ground floor would house an auditorium; above that, successively, were a foyer, an exhibition gallery, a mezzanine exhibition space, and the roof, with a sculpture terrace. To free the exhibition halls of load-bearing supports, the mezzanine would be suspended from the four corners of the pyramid by perpendicular tensors.

The whole thing would have perched on a cliff overlooking central Caracas. A change in regime meant that it never got beyond the planning stage.

A Second Look

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hand_with_Reflecting_Sphere.jpg

M.C. Escher’s 1935 lithograph Hand With Reflecting Sphere gave artist Kelly M. Houle an idea.

She drew this image in charcoal on a piece of illustration board:

escher anamorphosis

Now when a cylindrical mirror is placed at the center, it produces this reflection:

escher anamorphic reflection

“When the original image is bent and stretched into a circular swath, the shadows seem to fall in all directions,” she wrote. “When the curved mirror is used to reflect the anamorphic distortion, the forms take on the familiar rules of light and shading that make them seem three-dimensional.”

(Kelly M. Houle, “Portrait of Escher: Behind the Mirror,” in D. Schattschneider and M. Emmer, eds., M.C. Escher’s Legacy, 2003.)

Law and Ordure

https://www.flickr.com/photos/icyfrance/22873059/in/photolist-32en6-vZCGfG-GHJkbP-J5fSW-ejq3g-6dgVTx-J5gTA-J5fSU-dihhor-3eudq5-cRVdPd-34eHRH-q1NRH3-5QQvSi-J5fSL-J5fXk-b7YXb-6KJcVR-5HLKVT-bySMrT-5HLKAV-3EQHmi-6VMnAM-79Wcqx-4rVHs5-6MFJo3-aBr9Bt-dNqvM8-92WSw-32en7-4yRuE9-Na8LM-ibd1uG-d6W9h-c6s46-ugDw16-og5rEZ-z5hyD-9ZQVkD-9ZQVtZ-9ZQW1T-6mXmuV-8sKcZH-D1rQVt-9ybLaB-9ZQVcB-9ZQUU8-7zL2jb-6Ps8jx-daVLnA
Image: Flickr

Chicago artist Jerzy Kenar put up this bronze statue in front of his East Village home as a gentle reminder: “I hoped it would motivate dog owners to pick up after their pets.”

When the water’s running it looks even more realistic than this. But both mayor Richard M. Daley and Father Michael Pfleger, pastor of St. Sabina Church, attended the unveiling in 2005.

Kenar says that the statue, at 1003 North Wolcott Avenue, is intended to be whimsical, and that most visitors take it in that spirit, posing and even drinking from the fountain. “Only one little old lady didn’t get the joke,” he said.

He also designed the Black History Fountain near St. Sabina … so this one is sometimes called his “number two fountain.”

(From Greg Borzo, Chicago’s Fabulous Fountains, 2017.)

For the Record

Western Kentucky University geoscientist John All was traversing Nepal’s Mount Himlung in May 2014 when the ice collapsed beneath him and he fell into a crevasse, dislocating his shoulder and breaking some ribs. He landed on a ledge, but now he faced a 70-foot climb back to the surface alone without the use of his right arm or upper leg.

“That’s when I pulled my research camera out and started talking to myself about all my options,” he told National Geographic. “I take photos of everything I do because, if I’m working in Africa and I need to recall a detail, that’s going to be the best way to do it. I was also thinking about my mom and my friends and family and realized that just talking wouldn’t convey what was happening to me nearly as well. So I started recording things.”

“It probably took me four or five hours to climb out,” he said. “I kept moving sideways, slightly up, sideways, slightly up, until I found an area where there was enough hard snow that I could get an ax in and pull myself up and over. I knew that if I fell at any time in that entire four or five hours, I, of course, was going to fall all the way to the bottom of the crevasse. Any mistake, or any sort of rest or anything, I was going to die.”

After reaching the top he rolled as much as walked back to his tent, called for help, and waited 16 hours for a helicopter to arrive. He wrote later, “I had dug myself out of my own grave.”