Archive for August 2013
“When I had journeyed half of our life’s way…”*
Surely the best-known artist to illustrate The Divine Comedy, Dante’s tour of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, was Gustave Doré, whose iconic folio was published in 1861. But countless artists– from Botticelli to Dali– have been inspired by the poet’s visionary allegory. The image above is from Jean-Édouard Dargent (also known as Yan’ Dargent), a rival of Doré’s, who also published (in 1870) a book illustrating Dante’s epic. Instead of Doré’s polished, classical nudes and precise lines, Dargent strikes a more primitive, violent tone, a little rough around the edges.
See more of his Divine work at “Amazing 19th-Century Illustrations of The Divine Comedy“; and see (even) more of the images in larger format here.
| *Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita | When I had journeyed half of our life’s way, | ||
| mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, | I found myself within a shadowed forest, | ||
| ché la diritta via era smarrita. | for I had lost the path that does not stray. | ||
| Canto 1, 1 |
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As we pack for an extended journey, we might send a witty birthday sketch to Aubrey Beardsley; he was born on this date in 1872. An artist and illustrator, Beardsley was (with James MacNeil Whistler and Oscar Wilde, whose work Beardsley illustrated) a leading figure in the Aesthetic Movement. His career was short– he died at 25 of tuberculosis– but his work was a formative influence in the development of both Art Nouveau and Poster Style.
“The Peacock Skirt”, for Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé (1892)
In praise of punctiliousness…
On August 10 the website of the Athens [Georgia] Banner-Herald ran the headline “Man asked to clean up after dog pulls gun.”
It has subsequently been changed.
Via World Wide Words, where editor Michael Quinion also quotes from an article in The Independent on 12 August about the Australian general election: “On the campaign trail and addressing a Liberal Party event in the city of Melbourne [opposition leader Tony] Abbott said: ‘No one — however smart, however well-educated, however experienced — is the suppository of all wisdom’.”
Indeed. (And lest one think there’s little at stake, this.)
[image above, via Nora Wilkinson]
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As we disagree with Vampire Weekend, we might send addled birthday greetings to an empress of ellipses and exclamation points, Jacqueline Susann; she was born on this date in 1921. Having been disappointed by her luck as an actress and a model, Ms. Susann turned to the typewriter. Her first novel, Every Night, Josephine (featuring her poodle), was a best-seller. Her second, Valley of the Dolls was the best-seller: it topped the chart for 22 weeks, and by the time of Susann’s death in 1974, had sold over 17 million copies, making it the best-selling novel of all time. Its current cumulative sales of 30 million puts it in a dead heat with Gone With the Wind, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and To Kill a Mockingbird).
Keeping up with the Smiths…
From The Charming Charlie: a Tumbler of artwork from Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic series, with words from Smiths lyrics written by Morrissey– from Lauren LoPrete, a Bay Area graphic designer and co-founder of the record label Loglady.
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As we say “oui” to ennui, we might send an amusing birthday verse to Ogden Nash; he was born on this date in 1902. A poet best known for his light verse, Nash wrote over 500 pieces published, between 1931 and 1972, in 14 volumes. At the time of his death in 1971, he was, The New York Times averred, “the country’s best-known producer of humorous poetry.” The following year, on his birthday, the U.S. Postal service celebrated him with a commemorative stamp.
- Candy
Is Dandy
But liquor
Is quicker.- “Reflections on Ice-Breaking” in Hard Lines (1931); often misattributed to Dorothy Parker
- It is common knowledge to every schoolboy and even every Bachelor of Arts,
That all sin is divided into two parts.
One kind of sin is called a sin of commission, and that is very important
And it is what you are doing when you are doing something you ortant…- “Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man” in The Family Album of Favorite Poems (1959)
Out of harm’s way?…
The online real-estate service Trulia has crunched federal-disaster data to create a series of local maps and a collection of national maps showing the worst cities to live in for weatherphobes and quake-haters – stay out of California metropolises if you fear having your home burnt down, for instance, and Oklahoma City is a terrible place to hunker if you don’t want EF-4 twisters knocking at your door. The Trulia team warns:
Most metros were high risk for at least one of the five natural disasters [hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, forest fires and earthquakes], even though no metro area is high risk for everything. Earthquakes and wildfires tend to go hand-in-hand, with California and other parts of the West at high risk for both. Hurricanes and flooding also tend to strike the same places, particularly in Florida and along the Gulf Coast. Tornadoes affect much of the south-central U.S. What parts of the country are left? Not the Northeast coastal cities, which – as we all know after Hurricane Sandy – face hurricane and flood risk. Instead, the metros at medium-to-low risk for all five disasters span Ohio (Cleveland, Akron, and Dayton), upstate New York (Syracuse and Buffalo), and other parts of the Northeast and Midwest, away from the coasts…
Where should one head to avoid the next great storm? Here are the top 10 large housing markets in America that are most removed from “nature’s wrath,” according to the company’s risk assessment (the prices refer to the average home-asking price per square foot):
- Syracuse, New York* ($89)
- Cleveland ($80)
- Akron, Ohio ($81)
- Buffalo ($93)
- Bethesda-Rockville-Frederick, Maryland ($174)
- Dayton, Ohio ($72)
- Allentown, Pennsylvania-New Jersey ($109)
- Chicago ($113)
- Denver ($129)
- Warren-Troy-Farmington Hills, Michigan ($94)
* Syracuse: Trulia says the “data on flood risk, which comes from the Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA], is incomplete for Syracuse and for several other metros not on the ten lower-risk list.”
Read the whole story at “These U.S. Cities Are the Safest Refuges From Natural Disasters“; and explore the Trulia maps here.
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As we dream of Oz, we might recall that it was on this date in 1834 that Mt. Vesuvius erupted. Again.
Vesuvius famously erupted in 79 CE, destroying Pompeii and Herculaneum; but the volcano had erupted many times before, and has again, many times since.
The last major eruption was in March 1944. It destroyed the villages of San Sebastiano al Vesuvio, Massa di Somma, Ottaviano, and part of San Giorgio a Cremano. At the time of the eruption, the United States Army Air Forces 340th Bombardment Group was based at Pompeii Airfield near Terzigno, Italy, just a few kilometers from the eastern base of the mountain. Tephra (rock fragments ejected by the eruption) and hot ash damaged the fuselages, the engines, the Plexiglas windshields, and the gun turrets of the 340th’s B-25 Mitchell bombers; estimates were that 78 to 88 aircraft were completely destroyed.
Vesuvius from Portici by Joseph Wright of Derby
There but for the grace of God…
This (thankfully unexecuted) 1948 plan for traffic flow in San Francisco is one of the many fascinating specimens on Andrew Lynch’s Tumblr Hyperreal Cartography & The Unrealized City— city planning maps collected from libraries, municipal archives, and dark corners of the internet, all memorializing metropolitan visions never actually instantiated.
[via MapLab; for a higher resolution version of the image above, which is courtesy of WalkingSF, click here]
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As we program our GPS units, we might recall that it was on this date in 1974 that Paper Lace’s “The Night Chicago Died” hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The tuneful tale of a (fictional) shoot-out between gangsters tied to Al Capone and the Chicago Police, the single was a follow-up to “Billy Don’t Be a Hero,” a #1 hit in the U.K. for Paper Lace (which wrote the song), but virtually unheard in the U.S. where Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods’ cover scooped the Paper Lace release, and reached #1.
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