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Guercino, Resurrected Christ, 1629 (source)
Goethe, a letter:

Cento, 17 October 1786. Evening

I am writing from Guercino’s home town and in a better mood than I was in yesterday. Cento is a small, clean, friendly town of about five thousand inhabitants. As usual, the first thing I did was to climb the tower. I saw a sea of populars among which were small farms, each surrounded by its own field. It was an autumn evening such as our summer rarely grants us. The sky, which had been overcast all day, was clearing as the cloud masses moved northward and southward in the direction of the mountains. I expect a fine day tomorrow.

I also got my first glimpse of the Apennines, which I am approaching. Here the winter is confined to December and January; April is the rainy month, and for the rest of the year they have fair, seasonable weather. It never rains for long. This year September was better and warmer than August. I welcomed the sight of the Apennines in the south, for I have had quite enough of flat country. Tomorrow I shall write from their feet.

Guercino loved his native town as most Italians do, for they make a cult of local patriotism. This admirable sentiment has been responsible for many excellent institutions and, incidentally, for teh large number of local saints. Under the master’s direction, an academy of painting was founded here, and he left the town several pictures which are appreciated by the citizens to this day, and rightly so.

I liked very much one painting of his which represents the risen Christ appearing to His mother. She is kneeling at His feet, looking up at Him with indescribable tenderness. Her left hand is touching His side just below the wound, which is horrible and spoils the whole picture. He had His arm around her neck and is bending backward slightly so as to see her better. The picture is, I will not say unnatural, but a little strange. He looks at her with a quiet, sad expression as if the memory of His suffering and hers had not yet been healed by His resurrection, but was still present in His noble soul. Strange has made an engraving of this picture and I should be happy if my friends could at least see that. [...]

As a painter, Guercino is healthy and masculine without being crude. His work has great moral beauty and charm, and a personal manner which makes it immediately recognizable, once one’s eye has been trained to look for it. His brush work is amazing. For the garments of his figures he employs particularly beautiful shades of reddish-brown which harmonize very well with the blue e is so found of using. The subjects of his other paintings are not so happy. This fine artist tortured himself to paint what was a waste of his imagination and skill. I am very glad to have seen the work of this important school of painting, though such a hasty look is insufficient for proper enjoyment.

Today of course, people are like ‘Hey, check out my Flickr account!’

It’s not so simple as saying we have something called computers which are connected to a network of wires. They’d be like, what? Our intuitive understanding of the Internet comes from our understanding of things like photographs, phones, and television.

So, Galileo walks into a bar…

First, we learned of a way to preserve the image projected by a lens.

Then we discovered that many such images, seen quickly in succession, would appear to move.

Then we harnessed the power of lightning. We learned it was a type of liquid which we could transmit things through, like the way sound can travel great distances in bodies of water. Just as water can become a part of the air through boiling, so too could the liquid of lightning become part of the air, and we found a way to take our images, which when strung together and looked at quickly would appear to move, and we turned them into air, so that people with boxes all over the world could see these moving images. These boxes were really just fat framed piece of glass, all the parts making it work residing inside. It would just run through the images we had beamed through the air using electricity. We also found a way to document sound, and so when we synced up the sounds to the moving images, it looked like the people were as alive as they appear to us now.

This was about seventy years after we learned of a way to transmit voices using the power of lightning through wires which we strung between cities and homes in a vast fisherman’s web of connections.
(// Q: But why explain TV?
A: Because you need to get them to imagine things moving on glass screens.)

So, we’d found a way to make things move on pieces of glass, using the power of lightning. And we had this network of lines through which we could talk to one another. It took some work but we found a way to hook up the two, and so in the eventually we had these pieces of framed super-glass hooked up to this network, and the glass displays whatever we want on it - printing type, paintings, our mechanic images so described above (which we call ‘photographs’ which is just a pretentious was of saying ‘light drawing’). They are like windows only we can chose what to see through them.

From Goodreads 07w45:3:

November in Canada is a season of two contradictory impulses. The first is the Massey Lectures, a series of five one hour lectures delivered on CBC Ideas for a work-week sometime during this month. The Massey Lectures to me represent some of the better characteristics of our species: the desire to not only grow in knowledge, but to communicate it as well. This lecture series invites the so called expert to break down the professional linguistic barriers that too often separates them from a broad audience.

The Massey Lectures used to invite scholars and writers of international habitation, but since the mid-nineties have focused on Canadian speakers, highlighting how much excellent thinking is being done by Canadians. My own excessive fondness for the work of John Ralston Saul stems from his delivery of the 1995 Massey Lectures, and my support of Michael Ignatieff’s quest for the Liberal leadership (and the subsequent eventual likelihood of Prime Ministership) comes from his 2000 Lectures (and in that case, it wasn’t so much the content of his talks, which was on human rights, but the fact that Canada deserves to have a Prime Minster who’s intelligent enough to have delivered the talks in the first place). Other past notables of the Massey Lectures include Charles Taylor (who delivered the 1991 Lectures) and Northrop Frye (in 1962; the series The Educated Imagination I consider to be essential reading).

Prior to the can-con, Noam Chomsky taught us about the media-as-propaganda model in 1988, and Dorris Lessing taught us about ‘the prisons we live inside’ in 1985. Lessing’s lectures were re-published by the House of Anansi Press last year, just in time for this year’s Nobel win to spike sales, and I picked up my copy the other day.

This brings me to the other side of Canadian November, and that’s the poppy. This is the impulse which contradicts our desire for knowledge (that desire to grow as individuals and as a species) and that is the desire for barbaric violence. The poppy sentimentalizes what should be considered simply shameful. How can its motto of ‘lest we forget’ still be said after 90 years of more war after that ‘war to end all wars’? It’s shame should be apparent in this embarrassment.

This year I’ve decided to boycott this emblem of remembrance, because I’m tired of war, I’ve had an ear and eyeful from the news all year and I want nothing to do with it. I don’t support the troops, I think Western governance has gone on a patriarchal war-is-glory bender and whatever threats exist are only exaggerated to promote the real agenda, which is an ancient Roman ideal of glory in death, destruction, and the vanquishing of enemies. Fuck all of that.

In her first lecture twenty-two years ago, Lessing brought up the unspoken facet of violence and war which she had witnessed in her lifetime, and that was that war was for many people fun. She opens her talks with a tale of a farmer who’s expensively imported bull had killed the boy who took care of it, and that this farmer decided to kill the bull because in his mind it had done wrong. She also tells of the post-WW II symbolic trial and ‘execution’ of a tree that had been associated with General Petain. Lessing points out that the farmer’s actions, and the villagers who destroyed a tree, were irrational, acting out of symbolism but not sense. As she says, ‘I often think about these incidents: they represent those happenings that seem to give up more meaning as time goes on. Whenever things seem to be going along quite smoothly - and I am talking about human affairs in general - then it is as if suddenly some awful primitivism surges up and people revert to barbaric behavior.’ Later, she writes:

To return to the farmer and his bull. It may be argued that the farmer’s sudden regression to primitivism affected no one but himself and his family, and was a very small incident on the stage of human affairs. But exactly the same can be seen in large events, affecting hundreds or even millions of people. For instance, when British and Italian soccer fans recently rioted in Brussels, they became, as onlookers and commentators continually reiterated, nothing but animals. The British louts, it seems, were urinating on the corpses of people they had killed. To use the word ‘animal’ here seems to me unhelpful. This may be animal behavior, I don’t know, but it is certainly human behavior, when humans allow themselves to revert to barbarism. […] In times of war, as everyone knows who has lived through one, or talked to soldiers when they are allowing themselves to remember the truth, and not the sentimentalities with which we all shield ourselves from the horrors of which we are capable … in times of war we revert, as a species, to the past, and are permitted to be brutal and cruel. It is for this reason, and of course there are others, that a great many people enjoy war. But this is one of the facts about war that I think is not often talked about. (p.15-16)

It is my sense, as noted above, that the Western world has not grown out of the immaturity of its violent, Imperial and Roman past. It used to be the comparison between the United States and Rome was a metaphor, and it has now become an analogy. It can be argued that since the Renaissance the Western project has been the resurrection of the Roman political state.

There is a reason why Roman dramas are part of our televisiual schedules, and that the actors speak with English accents, and that reason is simply that to a contemporary audience at mid-20th Century, when these dramas began to be made, the English accent was associated with Empire, but we still have not shifted to Roman dramas of American accents. Perhaps that wouldn’t be ‘exotic’ enough. Perhaps because American Empire is Robert Duval saying he loves the smell of napalm in the morning, or a cowboy falling on a nuclear weapon, or Nicholson telling us we can’t handle the truth. A Roman drama with American accents wouldn’t work because we associate American Empire with a vulgar New World technological advantage and Ancient Rome still sounds better in an Old World voice.

Cue Dante. This is written as an introduction to the link below, a discussion on Dante’s Paradiso, a recent translation of which has just been published. I’ve tried to read the Paradiso more than once over the past few years and always find it extremely boring, and that’s part of my point. There is a reason why the dark, violent, Hell-Vision of Dante is more often translated, more often talked about, more often borrowed for a cinematic vision. Because we are still barbarians. Resurrecting Rome while still caught in a Dark Ages mind-set that likes all this violent shit. (Beowulf anyone?).

And yet, seven hundred years ago, in the midst of that Middle Age between the light of Empires, a man imagined Heaven. It has been said that this alone should be heralded, as a supreme accomplishment of the human imagination. And that is why I’ve tried to read and appreciate it. Because it represents something other than violence and darkness, and if we find it boring, it’s because we still allow ourselves to be thrilled by cruelty and brutality. We still pay money to see digital humans ripped apart by monsters, fake blood flying everywhere. The Romans had least had the balls to do it for real, they didn’t try to hide behind our ’special effects’ which somehow is supposed to do two things: maintain a moral vision of human worth (which is continually contradicted by the cruelties in the news) and prevent us from seeing the dubious morality of being entertained by violence.

And so, a conversation on Dante during the season of Ideas and poppies. - Timothy

I upgraded Wordpress yesterday and ran into some problems today with the .htaccess rewrite rules, which I’ve just fixed. I’m sharing these rules below. This is for people who are looking to write .htaccess rules for their Wordpress setup and need some idea of how to go about doing that.

Note: this is for a custom-structure setting of /%post_id%/. Modify your’s accordingly.

For Months:

RewriteRule ^blog/date/199([0-9]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)$ /blog/?m=199$1$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^blog/date/199([0-9]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/$ /blog/?m=199$1$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^blog/date/200([0-9]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)$ /blog/?m=200$1$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^blog/date/200([0-9]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/$ /blog/?m=200$1$2 [L]

These are doubled to account for an absent trailing slash.

For Months that are broken into pages (again doubled for a missing slash, and here I’m not taking into account any postings from the 1990s):

RewriteRule ^blog/date/200([0-9]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/page/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/$ /blog/?m=200$1$2&paged=$3 [L]
RewriteRule ^blog/date/200([0-9]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/page/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)$ /blog/?m=200$1$2&paged=$3 [L]

For basic entries:

RewriteRule ^/blog/?p=([a-zA-Z0-9]+)$ /blog/$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^blog/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/$ /blog/?p=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^blog/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)$ /blog/?p=$1 [L]

The first rule above takes into account anyone’s old links to your pages using the default format. The second rule assumes a trailing slash, and the third rule assumes a forgotten slash.

For pages:

This example uses my About page, which under the default url-setting has an id of 2. Again doubled for slashes:

RewriteRule ^blog/about/$ /blog/?page_id=2 [L]
RewriteRule ^blog/about$ /blog/?page_id=2 [L]

Categories are similar:

RewriteRule ^blog/category/uncategorized/$ /blog/?cat=1 [L]
RewriteRule ^blog/category/zeitgeist/$ /blog/?cat=9 [L]

With Categories you need to set up the rules to match the category name with its id number. Although as of the latest iterations of Wordpress, categories have been replaced with tags, and I haven’t fully crossed-over to that yet, so I’m not sure what’s involved there.

Andrew Sullivan writes about Barack Obama (via Richard Florida’s blog):

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

THEN

A slight young man who was considered a god king 3329 years ago when he died. With a long narrow skull which some people make out to be part of an ancient alien-worship cult, but that’s another story. He lies in his box for those thirty centuries while the world slowly turns into airplanes, nuclear weapons and the idiocies of television. Three thousand two hundred and forty-four years after his death, English colonials raid the tomb and use hot knives to remove the famous golden mask, glued to his face. Media frenzy ensues. A boy-king legend in born. King Tut enters the vernacular.

NOW

A shriveled leather prop for Egyptian tourist revenue.

The USA is collapsing. Is this like the USSR circa 1988?

  Drudgereport Headlines, 1 November 2007 

Chomsky at the Ryerson Q&A (1988) shown in Manufacturing Consent

Noam Chomsky participated in a Q&A at Ryerson University in 1988, related to his delivery of the 1988 CBC Massey Lectures. He was interviewed by a panel made up of David Frum (of the ‘axis of evil’ speech-writing fame), Stuart McLean (of the Vinyl Cafe), Peter Worthington (then editor of the Ottawa Sun), Kevin McMann and Margaret Daley.

Take the emphasis on professional sports. It sounds harmless but it really isn’t. Professional sports are a way of building up jingoist fanaticism. You’re supposed to cheer for your home team. Just to mention something from personal experience - I remember, very well, when I was I guess, a high school student - a sudden revelation when I asked myself why am I cheering for my high school football team. I don’t know anybody on it, if I met anybody on it we’d probably hate each other. You know, why do I care if they win or if some guy a couple blocks away wins? And then you can say the same thing about the baseball team or whatever else it is. This idea of cheering for your home team -which you mentioned before - that’s a way of building into people irrational submissiveness to power. And it’s a very dangerous thing. And I think it’s one of the reasons it gets such a huge play. Or . . . let’s move to something else. The indoctrination that’s done by T.V. and so on is not trying to pile up evidence and give arguments and so on. It’s trying to inculcate attitudes. I mentioned a couple of cases but there are a lot more. Let’s take, say, the bombing of Libya. Why did the American public support the bombing of Libya? Well, the reason is that there had been a very effective, and careful, and intense inculcation of racist attitudes about Arabs. Anti-Arab racism is the one form of racism in the United States that’s considered legitimate. I mean, plenty of people are racist, but you don’t like to admit it. On the other hand, with regard to anti-Arab racism you admit it openly. You read a journal like, say, The New Republic, and the kinds of things that they say about Arabs . . . if anyone said them about Jews you’d think you were reading (Der Stern). I’m not joking. And nobody notices it because anti-Arab racism is so profound. There are novels that have a form of anti-Arab racism that’s hair-raising. The same is true of television shows and so on and so forth. An image has been created - the media are part of this, not all - of the Arab terrorist lurking out there ready to kill us. And against that background you could bomb Libya and people would cheer. Recall how effective that was, remember what was happening in 1986, there are a lot of measures of how effective this is. Remember that in 1986 when this happened the tourism industry in Europe was virtually wiped out because Americans were afraid to go to Europe, where incidentally, objectively, they would be about a hundred times as safe as in any American city. That’s no joke. But they were afraid to go to Europe because they got these Arab terrorists out there trying to kill us. Now, that was not from New York Times editorials, that was from a whole array of television and novels and soap operas and a mass of symbolism and so on and so forth and that’s effective. The anticommunist hysteria is developed that way too. The communists are out there ready to kill us - who are the communists? - I don’t know, they’re out there ready to kill us. This is introduced by the kinds of symbolism that T.V. is good at, and cheap novels are good at and so on and that’s important. These are critical means of indoctrination it’s just that I wasn’t talking about them. I was talking about the more intellectual side.

(source)

From The End of Virtuous Albion, (on the British National Character), by Theodore Dalrymple (originally published in the New Criterion, 1 September 2005):

On walking through the hospital in which I formerly practiced, I came across the husband of a patient of mine who had always accompanied her to her appointments. He was sitting down and waiting to be called for an examination. He was much thinner than I had seen him before, and he was so jaundiced that he was almost orange in color. At his age, this could mean only one thing: hepatic secondaries in the liver, and fast-approaching death.

I passed the time of day with him, and wished him and his wife well, though I knew that he was dying, he knew that he was dying, and he knew that I knew that he was dying.

“We’ll just have to do the best we can” he said.

Indeed, he died two weeks later. There had been no protest, no self-pity, no demand for special attention. He understood that I commiserated with him, though I said nothing except that I was sorry to see that he was unwell, but he understood also that my commiseration was of a degree commensurate with the degree of our acquaintance, and that demanded no extravagant and therefore dishonest expression. By controlling his emotion, and his grief at his own imminent death, so that he should not embarrass me, he maintained his dignity, and self-respect. He retained a sense of social obligation, a vital component of what used to be called character, until the very end of his life.

I mention these people not because they were in any way extraordinary–a claim they would never have made for themselves–but because they were so ordinary. They were living up to a cultural ideal that, if not universal, was certainly very widespread (as my wife would confirm). It is an ideal that I find admirable, because it entails a quasi-religious awareness of the metaphysical equality of mankind: that I am no more important than you. This was no mere intellectual or theoretical construct; it was an ideal that was lived. Unlike the claim to rights, which is often shrill and is almost so self-regarding that it makes the claimant the center of his own moral universe, the old cultural ideal was other-regarding and social in nature. It imposed demands upon the self, not upon others; it was a discipline rather than a benefit. Oddly enough, it led to a greater and deeper contentment, capacity for genuine personal achievement, and tolerance of eccentricity and nonconformity than our present, more egotistical ideals.

While Kate Blanchette in armour and on horseback, with long red hair flowing from her wigged scalp, looking a good twenty years younger than her supposed age of 55 (which in 16th Century terms is a miracle) is visually resplendent, it captures nothing of the woman who wrote Monsieur’s Departure.

Queen Elizabeth on horseback at the 1588 Battle of the English Chanel (2007)
——————————————————– 
Queen Elizabeth Playing the Lute, (1576) by Nicholas Hilliard On Monsieur’s Departure

I grieve and dare not show my discontent,
I love and yet am forced to seem to hate,
I do, yet dare not say I ever meant,
I seem stark mute but inwardly to prate.
I am and not, I freeze and yet am burned.
Since from myself another self I turned.

My care is like my shadow in the sun,
Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it,
Stands and lies by me, doth what I have done.
His too familiar care doth make me rue it.
No means I find to rid him from my breast,
Till by the end of things it be supprest.

Some gentler passion slide into my mind,
For I am soft and made of melting snow;
Or be more cruel, love, and so be kind.
Let me or float or sink, be high or low.
Or let me live with some more sweet content,
Or die and so forget what love ere meant.

- Queen Elizabeth I

_____________
“Monsieur” is identified in two MSS as the duke of Anjou, who withdrew from marriage negotiations in 1582, and in one MS as Robert Devereaux, earl of Essex, whose long-lived affection for Elizabeth ended in a rebellion that resulted in his execution on a warrant signed by Elizabeth. (source)