via New Statesman by Tom Holland
PICTURE: TASCHEN
In 1830, an English geologist named Henry Thomas De la Beche painted a watercolour of Dorset. The scene it portrayed was not a conventional one. Cows and green fields were notable by their absence. Instead, palm trees sprouted from otherwise bare lumps of rock. Shark-like reptiles with bristling teeth and giant eyes swam in a sinister, monster-filled sea. Overhead there soared strange creatures, half-dragon, half-bat. Bucolic it was not.
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How Renaissance Painting Smoldered with a Little Known Hallucinogen
via Arts & Letters Daily: by Forrest Muelrath in Hyperallergic
Looking at depictions of St. Anthony in the paintings of Renaissance masters, the influence of the disease of ergotism on the history of art starts to become clear.
Follower of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, “The Temptation of Saint Anthony” (c. 1550/1575), oil on panel, Samuel H. Kress collectionContinue reading
And there is no image of the “Garden of Earthly Delights” which I sat and stared at for ages in The Prado.
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Wild African Dogs Practice This Democratic Exercise
via Big Think by Philip Perry
Flikr.
Most expert sources say that all types of dog pack behavior emanates from wolves, their common ancestor. Here, the alpha male and alpha female are thought to form an absolute monarchy to which, all other members are bound to serve and obey. A new study published in The Proceedings of the Royal Society B, found a different model, one more democratically inspired. The study surrounds African Wild Dogs, one of the most endangered species in the world. There are only 6,600 left at last count.
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Joseph Conrad and the East
an article by Douglas Kerr for Eurozine (September 2017) first published in New Eastern Europe
One of the most acute chroniclers and critics of the 19th-century European empires of the East was neither a historian nor a political scientist, but a Polish mariner.
Before he ever left home, Joseph Conrad knew what powerful nations and material interests could do to weaker peoples. Born Józef Teodor Konrad Nałęcz Korzeniowski, in Berdychiv in modern-day Ukraine in 1857, he belonged to a nation, Poland, which was no longer to be found on the map. His father Apollo, a writer and prominent Polish nationalist, was arrested and exiled with his family for anti-Russian conspiracy when his son was four years old. This was Conrad’s first lesson in the power of empires and the cost of idealism. Life was difficult and by the time he was 11, both his parents were dead. Conrad never forgave imperial Russia: ‘from the very inception of her being’, he was to write in 1905, ‘the brutal destruction of dignity, of truth, of rectitude, of all that is faithful in human nature has been made the imperative condition of her existence.’ At age 17, the young Korzeniowski went to sea, serving first as an ordinary seaman and later as a ship’s officer, mostly in vessels of the British merchant marine. He learnt English in his 20s and developed an ambition to become a writer in this, his third language.
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Victimhood
via Arts & Letter Daily: Edgar Jones in Spiked
Bridging two academic worlds, Edgar Jones is ideally placed to understand the history of psychological trauma. He trained as an economic and social historian at Nuffield College, Oxford, but, as he explains in his office at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London, ‘I always wanted to be a psychotherapist’. This led him to work unpaid as a nursing auxiliary in the department of psychiatry at Guy’s Hospital in London, before using his earnings as a self-employed historian to pay his way through medical school (culminating in a doctorate in clinical psychopathology). And it was at Guy’s that he began to draw upon his undergraduate training to research the history of psychiatry, especially the growing understanding of the psychological effects of conflict. All of which gives Jones a unique insight, as a clinician and a historian, into the development of the idea of trauma.
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Warning: this is a long read and you are likely to be caught up in it.
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10 of the Best Poems about Friendship
via Interesting Literature
The best poems for friends
Love may be a bigger topic for poets than friendship, but there are nevertheless some classic poems about friends and friendship to be found in English literature. Here are ten of the greatest poems about friendship, and poems for friends, that poets have come up with over the centuries.
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10 facts about the bassoon
via OUP blog by Vivian Yan
Ensemble Deva – Carnival of the Animals (14th Jun 2016)”. Photo by Mark Carline. via Flickr.
Rising to popularity in the 16th century, the bassoon is a large woodwind instrument that belongs to the oboe family for its use of a double reed. Historically, the bassoon enabled expansion of the range of woodwind instruments into lower registers. The modern bassoon plays an important role in the orchestra due to its versatility and wide range.
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I love that the OUP tells me what is being played whilst the photo was being taken!
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Loggerhead turtles use rocks as cleaning stations
via Boing Boing by Andrea James
In the crystal blue waters of the Greek island of Zakynthos hundreds of loggerhead turtles use isolated rocks to scrape barnacles off their shells and generally spruce up. Biologists collected video evidence of the behavior in a recently published study.
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Commuters, cranes and party crowds: the (very quiet) comeback of silent film
via The Guardian by Pamela Hutchinson
In London Symphony, Alex Barrett turned the 24-hour life of Britain’s capital into a black-and-white silent film, showing how old techniques are helping film-makers make thoroughly modern movies.
Silent city … a scene from the documentary London Symphony. Photograph: film company handout
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Return of the city-state
via 3 Quarks Daily: Jamie Bartlett in Aeon
Until the mid-19th century, most of the world was a sprawl of empires, unclaimed land, city-states and principalities, which travellers crossed without checks or passports. As industrialisation made societies more complex, large centralised bureaucracies grew up to manage them. Those governments best able to unify their regions, store records, and coordinate action (especially war) grew more powerful vis-à-vis their neighbours. Revolutions – especially in the United States (1776) and France (1789) – helped to create the idea of a commonly defined ‘national interest’, while improved communications unified language, culture and identity. Imperialistic expansion spread the nation-state model worldwide, and by the middle of the 20th century it was the only game in town. There are now 193 nation-states ruling the world.
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