“Language matters because whoever controls the words controls the conversation, because whoever controls the conversation controls the outcome, because whoever frames the debate has already won it; because telling the truth has become harder and harder to achieve in an America drowning in Orwellian Newspeak.” Erica Jong Seducing the Demon
Add comment January 29th, 2009
Prolific US author John Updike dead at 76
41 mins ago AFP/File – Pulitzer Prize-winning author
NEW YORK (AFP) – Prolific Pulitzer Prize-winning US novelist John Updike, whose books and short stories chronicled small-town American life, has died at age 76, his publisher Knopf said.
“It is with great sadness that I report that John Updike died this morning at the age of 76, after a battle with lung cancer,” Knopf publicity director Nicholas Latimer said in a statement.
Over a career spanning more than half a century, Updike published at least a dozen short story collections and 25 novels.
His most famous books were in the Rabbit series, including “Rabbit, Run” and “Rabbit Redux.” He also wrote hundreds of short stories, poetry, literary criticism and reviews in The New Yorker magazine.
“He was one of our greatest writers and he will be sorely missed,” Latimer said.
The Washington-based Academy of Achievement described Updike as “one of America’s premier men of letters.”
Updike recounted how a sickly childhood on a farm in Pennsylvania prepared him for a cerebral life.
“He suffered from psoriasis and a stammer, ailments that set him apart from his peers. He found solace in writing, and won a scholarship to Harvard,” the Academy of Achievement noted.
Updike went on to edit the famous Lampoon humor magazine at Harvard and then published a poem and fiction in the New Yorker soon after graduating.
“My mother had dreams of being a writer and I used to see her type in the front room. The front room is also where I would go when I was sick so I would sit there and watch her,” Updike said.
Add comment January 27th, 2009
“Hope” 1886 by George Frederic Watts (1817-1904)
Add comment January 26th, 2009
Add comment January 21st, 2009
WHERE ON EARTH AM I?The mysterious people who created this as part of a much larger ’sculpture’ must have made such desperate pleas as their ecology changed and religion grew more brutally violent; trying no doubt, to sway or otherwise coerce their star speckled dieties.
If you know the answer, leave a comment. There is no prize, although I may leave your name (but not your answer) for others to see if you are correct. Here is a hint ...
WASHINGTON – Nature turned against one of America’s early civilizations 3,600 years ago, when researchers say earthquakes and floods, followed by blowing sand, drove away residents of an area that is now in Peru. “This maritime farming community had been successful for over 2,000 years, they had no incentive to change, and then all of a sudden, boom, they just got the props knocked out from under them,” anthropologist Mike Moseley of the University of Florida said in a statement.
Moseley and colleagues were studying civilization of the Supe Valley along the Peruvian coast, which was established up to 5,800 years ago.
The people thrived on land adjacent to productive bays and estuaries, the researchers report in Tuesday’s edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The Supe fished with nets, irrigated fruit orchards and grew cotton and a variety of vegetables, according to evidence found by research co-author Ruth Shady, a Peruvian archaeologist. They also built stone pyramids thousands of years before the better known Mayans.
But the Supe disappeared about 3,600 years ago and, after studying the region, the researchers think they know what happened.
They found that a massive earthquake, or series of quakes, struck the seismically active region, collapsing walls and floors and launching landslides from barren mountain ranges surrounding the valley.
In addition, layers of silt indicate massive flooding followed.
Then came El Nino, a periodic change in the winds and currents in the Pacific Ocean, which brought heavy rains that damaged irrigation systems and washed debris into the streams and down to the ocean, where the sand and silt settled into a large ridge, sealing off the previously rich coastal bays.
In the end, land where the Supe had lived for centuries became uninhabitable and their society collapsed, the researchers concluded.
The study was funded by the University of Florida and the Heyerdahl Exploration Fund, University of Maine.
___
On the Net:
PNAS: http://www.pnas.org
2 comments January 10th, 2009
Thunder
A rare, perhaps the only extant example of a Donal Hord sketch
and the 104lb block of Wyoming nephrite jade which he and his
longtime assistant, Homer Dana, used to create Thunder.
The project began in early 1946 and was completed in late Summer, 1947.
Add comment December 30th, 2008
Sixty four years ago the battle we call “the Bulge” was reaching its climax. San Diego sculptor Donal Hord created this Angel of Peace to stand over the graves of American dead at Henri Chapelle, Belgium. It stands 12 feet tall on an 18 foot pylon.
Add comment December 28th, 2008
WIND IN THE CORN
Corn crops, thankfully, have proven to be flops as renewable energy sources. Now maybe we can get the cost of food under control again. However, according to Harper’s Index, a quarter acre of Iowa farmland can earn $300 a year for corn, but that same plot can earn $10,000 if the farmer erects a single wind generator. And, if he so desires, he can still raise most of a corn crop!
While he’s at it, he can probably plow his field with an electric tractor conversion (which he recharges at his own wind machine) using new fangled, more efficient batteries. There are an estimated 10,000 different chemicals, most safer than those we currently use, which would make a more efficient battery. So far, 1700 of these ideas have been ‘virtually tested’ with computer models.
Add comment December 13th, 2008
Anabasis
 Gustav Klimt |
 Carole Estrup |
So Gustav Klimt has become the world’s most sought after painter. Is anyone
surprised?
Consider his time, the turn of the last century. It was an era of industrial robber
barons, failing royal empires, white and black slavery and social upheaval.
Incredible wealth boiled atop grim poverty, all of it condoned and encouraged
by various religious factions. Called the Age of Decadence, the artist himself
condemned Europe as a spreading pornography of crucifixes.
The women he portrayed might have come right out of case histories compiled
by Sigmund Freud. The vast majority of his upper crust patients suffered para-
lyzing hysteria, the doctor reported, caused by incest and other brutalities. Or
maybe Klimt’s models were actual corpses, their paleness highlighted by blue
shadows and hues of oxygen starved blood and flesh.
Certainly most of them seemed arrayed in broken, perverse poses. He encased
them in gold leaf robes or gowns heavy and solid as a sarcophagus. We get a
necrophilian kiss and the promise of much more to come.
Perhaps Klimt was simply prescient. Did he visualize the coming century of world-
wide butchery? Seer or not it is possible to see all of that sorrowful history in
Klimt’s work.
So now is the time to look at another painter, one who uses gold to tell us
about the living. She is Carole Estrup and for many decades she has recorded
the vitality of cultures which are our living, but endangered heritage. From the
rain forests and ritual huts of American natives to the ancient monuments of
China and India, out of our cave homes into the enlightened imagery of the
cosmos, she weaves visual evidence of a profound, ever tantalizing future.
Her figures are often crowded, interlocked in a dance of propagation. Examples
include “The Seven Continents” and a socio-political series which includes
“Rebirth of Africa” and “Paradise Lost”. Her earlier collection, called “Evolution of
the Soul”, was widely acclaimed and set amidst the stars like deities we imagine
explain the scientific secrets of eternity. More earthly concepts like “Creation of
the Four Winds” and “Anabasis” show us the natural phenomenon of energy, of
motion and upwelling with egocentric, human eyes.
Paintings depicting the lone human figure, such as the mysterious “The Smiling
Knight” are not rare, but they are also adazzle with living and physical spiritual
symbols. “The Swan of Tuonela” takes on the mythology of death, of a living
individual’s acceptance of that process. Yet all about every such individual life
in the plant and animal world goes on, and most of us happily accept that, too.
Gold, we have believed since early-human times, is a gift of the sun, of its body
and essence. Rather, we know now, our sun’s gift is light in all of its invisible
invaluable energies. Those colors are found on itself. They are the substance and
action with which all the creatures shout life, living, being! Some find Estrup’s vision
just the right antidote for our recent steady diet of victimization, betrayal and fear.
It might be named inspiration, resolve, even passion.
Add comment December 8th, 2008
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