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Sunday, December 31, 2000
Self-similar syncopations:
Fibonacci, L-systems, limericks and ragtime
[This is an alternative (USA) URL for the same article mentioned below: it is really very interesting!]
posted by Marco Graziosi Sunday, December 31, 2000
Self-similar syncopations:
Fibonacci, L-systems, limericks and ragtime There are interesting symmetries shared by the limerick and ragtime, which can be observed and heard in their family groups of stressed and unstressed syllables, or beats, and which lie at the heart of what gives these forms their characteristic structure or 'feel'. They possess self-similar qualities which are related to fractal models used by contemporary scientists, and can provide a keen insight into some quite profound inter-relationships between the arts and sciences.
[Does this sound abstruse? Well, read the rest!]
+Plus Magazine, issue 10
posted by Marco Graziosi Sunday, December 31, 2000
Knowsley Safari Park
[Knowsley is now a small zoo.]
posted by Marco Graziosi Sunday, December 31, 2000
Saturday, December 30, 2000
Edward Lear in Greece
Edward Lear toured Albania, Epirus, Macedonia and Thessaly in the spring-autumn of 1848. Accompanied by his Greek "Dragoman" -an interepreter who was proficient in ten languages- he explored the unknown and intriguing corners of -what was still then known as- "Turkey in Europe"...
posted by Marco Graziosi Saturday, December 30, 2000
Friday, December 29, 2000
[minstrels] There Was an Old Man with a Beard -- Edward Lear
Lear's limericks are defined, arrgh, '*boring*': an heresy in an otherwise wonderful site.
posted by Marco Graziosi Friday, December 29, 2000
[minstrels] The Akond of Swat -- Edward Lear
posted by Marco Graziosi Friday, December 29, 2000
[minstrels] The Great Panjandrum -- Samuel Foote
Another classic of Nonsense literature.
posted by Marco Graziosi Friday, December 29, 2000
[minstrels] The Owl and the Pussy-Cat -- Edward Lear
See the previous item.
posted by Marco Graziosi Friday, December 29, 2000
[minstrels] The Pobble Who Has No Toes -- Edward Lear
The Lear poem with a short, but funny, commentary.
posted by Marco Graziosi Friday, December 29, 2000
Thursday, December 28, 2000
Die Unart des Artig-Seins
Hans Magnus Enzensberger richtete für Kinder im Residenzhof einen "Kompletten Nonsens" ein und sprach selbst sogar mit der Stimme der Fische.
[In German, about a show held in Saltzburg in August 1999 which included sung translations of Lear poems.]
Salzburger Nachrichten
posted by Marco Graziosi Thursday, December 28, 2000
PUNCH'S PROGRESS: A CENTURY OF AMERICAN PUPPETRY
November 19-December 31
Special Exhibition Galleries
The Detroit Institute of Arts
The character of Punch first appeared in America prior to the Revolutionary War when his destruction by a dog at a local fair was reported in the Virginia Gazette. Since that time, the art of puppetry has become a significant part of American popular culture, repeatedly adapting to shifting audience interests as well as the introduction of motion pictures and television. Punch's Progress: A Century of American Puppetry traces the changing face of American Puppetry from 1850 to 1950, with examples from The Detroit Institute of Arts' Paul McPharlin Collection of Puppetry and Theatre Arts.
posted by Marco Graziosi Thursday, December 28, 2000
Destiny of a great decadent
Roussel’s main literary output comprised the two novels Locus Solus and Impressions d’Afrique, adaptions of his fiction for theatre, the long poem Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique, and a posthumously published work in which he set out to elucidate his abstruse compositional methods. Like Proust, Roussel paid for the publication of his books, and while his work invited either ridicule or neglect from the mainstream, it attracted serious attention from the surrealists, and in particular Breton, Dali and Duchamp.
The Times
posted by Marco Graziosi Thursday, December 28, 2000
Friday, December 22, 2000
Per chi vota il Mago di Oz
Ma ci sono altre interpretazione nella lunga storia degli studi su Oz. Una è arrivata in Italia sulle pagine di «Ideazione», il pensatoio del centro destra, che ha rievocato il centenario nel numero sulle «Virtù del populismo», dedicato a questa parola tabù che esprime abitualmente il «lato oscuro della politica» ed è sempre usata come insulto. In certe sue incarnazioni storiche, afferma Alessandro Campi, «il populismo ha anche significato affermazione di un’autentica sovranità popolare», contro le élites. E la faccenda, in questi termini, investe la politica italiana, dalle «derive populiste» imputate a Berlusconi alle interpretazioni in questo senso di personaggi come Di Pietro, Bossi, per non parlare di Haider. Certo la verde città degli Smeraldi non è la Padania leghista. E’ Washington, spiega Consuelo Angiò nel saggio sul Mago di Oz. Nel libro confluisce l’ideologia del populismo americano di fine 800, momento di dura contrapposizione economica negli Usa.
La Stampa - Libri
posted by Marco Graziosi Friday, December 22, 2000
The Annotated Alice: the definitive edition
Lewis Carroll, with an introduction by Martin Gardner Allen Lane, The Penguin Press
The problem is that Gardner's own analysis of Carroll proceeds via a false syllogism (a misapplication of logic that doubtless his subject - a pedantic and second-rate Oxford mathematics don - would have approved in his own defence, if not in his tutorials). For Gardner: a) all paedophiles manifestly wish to have sex with their objects of desire; b) there is no evidence that Carroll wished to have sex with Alice Liddell or his numerous other "child loves"; therefore, c) Carroll was not a paedophile.
New Statesman - Book Reviews
posted by Marco Graziosi Friday, December 22, 2000
Sunday, December 17, 2000
The Wizard of Oz: An American Fairytale
A Library of Congress Exhibition
posted by Marco Graziosi Sunday, December 17, 2000
Friday, December 15, 2000
Vivien Noakes, Writer and Lecturer
Welcome to the Home Page of Vivien Noakes.
posted by Marco Graziosi Friday, December 15, 2000
Thursday, December 14, 2000
Casting Herself as 'Seussical' Savior, O'Donnell to Don Cat's Hat
Throwing her considerable box-office muscle behind the critically maligned musical "Seussical," Rosie O'Donnell, Broadway's biggest booster, announced yesterday that she would take over a leading role in the show next month. Ticket sales immediately soared.
The New York Times
posted by Marco Graziosi Thursday, December 14, 2000
Wednesday, December 13, 2000
Braccelli: Bizzarie di Varie Figure
The Bizzarie (Livorno, 1624) can rightly lay claim to being a prime exemplar of the artistic enigma – a work truly without precedent or explanation beside itself. Its sensuous imagery, occupying a dreamlike space between thought and form, made it an underground sensation amongst twentieth-century artists and connoisseurs. The art historian Sir Kenneth Clark (1903–83) was instrumental in the rediscovery of Braccelli, and the poet Tristan Tzara (1896-1963) drew parallels between these etchings and the revolutionary artistic agendas of Dada and Surrealism.
[This is a very nice book of illustrations, about 50, which, while probably not quite nonsensical, have a lot in common with later nonsense illustration. While the reproduction is good, it is hard to appreciate the small pictures.]
Octavo Edition
posted by Marco Graziosi Wednesday, December 13, 2000
My soul is a strange factory
TRY this. Your first sentence is "Time is money" and your last sentence is "Thyme is funny". Write the story - long or short - that joins the two. Be imaginative, but please stick to plausible leaps and bounds. And while you're at it, make it a novel, and - why not? - a novel in verse. Use rhyming couplets. Done it? Then you've got the hang of the strange "procedure" of Raymond Roussel (1877-1933), a millionaire, an outrageous dandy, a homosexual who liked to stay tightly shut up in the closet and a sincere believer in his own genius. You should now find Mark Ford's elegant, intense and detailed guide to the many huge works that Roussel produced with his phono-syntactic machine at least meaningful, if not completely irresistible.
booksonline
posted by Marco Graziosi Wednesday, December 13, 2000
Bell: Monograph of the Testudinata
Thomas Bell’s A Monograph of the Testudinata is one of the great reptile books, containing the finest series of colored plates of turtles ever published. A dental surgeon and professor of zoology, Bell was also a leading English naturalist when he began his ambitious attempt to summarize all the world’s turtles, living and extinct. Working with Bell to produce the forty plates was natural history artist James de Carle Sowerby, to whom Bell would send live specimens. But the genius of the published plates is largely attributable to Edward Lear (known to generations for his nonsense verse), whose reputation as the finest natural history lithographer of his age had earlier been established by a monumental folio on parrots.
[I had not realised so far that the book can be read online and the illustrations are quite good: buying the CD-ROM is still better, however]
Octavo Edition
posted by Marco Graziosi Wednesday, December 13, 2000
Saturday, December 02, 2000
Gory stories for tiny tots
"Many of Edward Gorey's most fervent devotees think he must be both a) English and b) dead," reads the biographical note on one of his darkly illustrated tales of hapless babies, consumptive waifs and sexually traumatising furniture. "Actually, he has never so much as visited either place."
No longer, sadly: though Gorey never did make it across the Atlantic, he is now - owing to a heart attack in April, aged 75, in the cat-filled Cape Cod farmhouse where he lived alone - a permanent resident of the other side. It's easy to see why readers thought he moved there years ago, his more than 50 books seeming to have issued from the pen of the love child (orphaned, of course) of Ivy Compton Burnett and Edgar Allan Poe.
Books Unlimited
posted by Marco Graziosi Saturday, December 02, 2000
Friday, December 01, 2000
ALISON LURIE: The Oddness of Oz
The year 2000 is the centenary of a famous and much-loved but essentially very odd children's classic: L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz. Those who recall the story only from childhood reading, or from the MGM film, have perhaps never realized how strange the original book and its sequels are.
The New York Review of Books
posted by Marco Graziosi Friday, December 01, 2000
'Seussical: The Musical': The Cat! The Whos! The Places They Go!
Whoever the many chefs were, the finished product is a flavorless broth. The heightened brightness of all the ingredients — the eye- searing design palette, the dizzying lighting effects, the bouncy orchestrations, those mega-watt smiles — perversely meld into a general gray dimness.
The New York Times
posted by Marco Graziosi Friday, December 01, 2000
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