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Photography by Henri Prestes

Colin Hayes

Friends, I don’t have a newsletter for you this week because I am taking a brief head-clearing roadtrip to New Mexico and a bit of Colorado. But I do have a handful of photos and a tiny bit of commentary for you here.

Oh, especially for you William Blake fans, one more little thing.

Normal service will resume next week!

Holly Astle

The Sussex Downs in Winter by Eric Ravilious (1935)

Tirzah Garwood, “The Crocodile” (1929) – otherwise known as a “walking bus,” but I love the word “crocodile” in this context.

Eric Ravilious, “Vicarage in Winter” (1935)

Paper sculpture by Layla May Arthur

I started this newsletter on Mailchimp before moving to Buttondown – and if you ever start a newsletter of your own I would strongly discourage you from using Mailchimp and strongly encourage you to use Buttondown – and this is my 200th edition. Goodness! And thanks to you all for coming along for the ride.

Forthcoming in Comment:

Johann David Steingruber’s Architectonisches Alphabeth (1773)

I’m calling this the question for 2023.

Shakespeare’s Snow-Globe

Sorry for the second intrusion into your inbox, but: This is the post by Tish Harrison Warren in which she commends A Rocha International.

Blessings to all,

Alan

This year London’s St. Pancras Station “Christmas Tree” deserves those scare quotes, because it isn’t a tree and isn’t Christmassy. But it’s kinda cool! – a 3D vertical compilation of London’s architectural landmarks. Here is a much larger image.

Bethlehem in Germany,
Glitter on the sloping roofs,
Breadcrumbs on the windowsills,
Candles in the Christmas trees,
Hearths with pairs of empty shoes:
Panels of Nativity
Open paper scenes where doors
Open into other scenes,
Some recounted, some foretold.
Blizzard-sprinkled flakes of gold
Gleam from small interiors,
Picture-boxes in the stars
Open up like cupboard doors
In a cabinet Jesus built.

Harold Burdekin, photograph from London Night (1934)

A very different image from London: Piero della Francesca’s Nativity has been restored and is back on view at the National Gallery:

Edna Andrade

Bill Myers

John Baeder

The abandoned village of Craco.

The American Kestrel, AKA Sparrowhawk.

More here.

French signage

Odd monuments of Westminster Abbey:

The abbey held writers to a higher moral standard than the rich. Stanley cheered that Aphra Behn, writer and all-round hussy, hadn’t managed to get closer to Poets’ Corner than ‘beyond the east Cloister’. (Her stone carries one of the best inscriptions in the abbey: ‘Here lies a Proof that Wit can never be/Defence enough against Mortality.’) But he said not a word about Thomas Thynne of Longleat, who died seven years before her, in 1682. Known as Tom of Ten Thousand because he was so rich, and said to be syphilitic, he arranged a marriage to 14-year-old Elizabeth Percy, one of the richest heiresses in England, having paid his fellow MP Richard Brett, a known conman and a crook, £10,000 for helping to close the deal with Percy’s grandmother. His bride immediately fled abroad and Thynne was shot in Pall Mall on the orders of a failed suitor, the Swedish count Königsmarck. Königsmarck was acquitted (according to John Evelyn the jury was bribed) but his three hirelings were hanged. The murder, looking like a stagecoach hold-up, is shown in a relief on the base of Thynne’s monument – it’s worth a look and not just because it’s the only portrayal of a murder in the abbey.

Two weeks ago, I failed in my duty to my readers: I forgot to remind you all of the coming of an Ember Week. I am sorry. But you may remember them in the future this way:

Etching by John Sloan from a 1938 edition of Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage.

David Frum’s long report on the past, present, and future of the Benin Bronzes is fascinating, though I have some serious doubts about his arguments. All of this reminds me of a visit I made 31 years ago to the Sacred Grove of Ọṣun.

A storyboard by Wiard B. Ihnen for Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt (1941).

Our Native Birds of Song and Beauty

The headline says, “How medieval carpenters are rebuilding Notre Dame”, which is dumb, because no medieval carpenters are alive today – people don’t live 700 years, duh. The the story is fascinating, about how (let’s get this right) craftsmen trained in medieval techniques are helping to rebuild the great cathedral. The story itself continues the imprecision: “Frédéric Épaud, a medieval wood specialist, tells the Observer” … “a specialist in medieval wood”? That sounds odd. Maybe he’s a specialist in medieval woodworking techniques? Anyway, he says this:

Michael Heizer’s megasculpture, “City” – about which I am immensely skeptical … but I think I have to see it, if only because of this: “The whole gestalt thwarts a culture of Instagram selfies, something Heizer is especially proud of.” And because Heizer has been working on this for fifty years.

I’m scheduling this for the usual Monday morning time, but – and here I’m quoting from a recent blog post – I’m off for a brief writing retreat, to see if I can finish a complete draft of my “biography” of Paradise Lost … which has been fun to write but also immensely challenging. It occurred to me the other day that if I had to rewrite the book using nothing I have used so far — none of the facts about Milton’s life, none of the quotations from Paradise Lost, none of the references to later readers and writers — I could easily do it. That’s how much material there is to draw on. And I have to keep the whole thing to 50,000 words!

A lovely page describing the conservation by the Getty Museum of a Roman sarcophagus.

A 17th-century woman’s will.

An illuminated manuscript from eighteenth-century Pennsylvania – beautiful full-sized image here.

How Guernica flopped: “By nearly every measure, Picasso’s huge, dark painting stalled at the starting gate. Le Corbusier, the architect who reviewed all the murals at the World’s Fair, wrote that Guernica alone ‘saw only the backs of visitors, for they were repelled by it.’ Sert, who was by his own account at the pavilion constantly during its four-month run, was struck by the almost-universal disdain. ‘The people came there, they looked at this thing and they didn’t understand it,’ he said.”

Kazumasa Nagai

The Atlantic makes its entire 165-year archive available online – quite a big deal for those interested in American history.

Art by Kit Boyd

Decades ago, I looked in every issue of the Atlantic for the inevitable painting by Guy Billout – so it’s nice to see that he has an Instagram.

My friend and colleague Philip Jenkins on iconoclasm old and new:

It me. No, wait, it a maize god.

Via my friend David Hooker: Isn’t it time for you to outhorse your email?

Paul Klee’s puppets are delightful or creepy, and sometimes both.

I love the idea that a university would create and publish its own calendar/diary for its members, and, though I have no connection whatever to Cambridge University, I share Mary Beard’s sadness that the little book will cease publication.

Why Soviet Poland banned Anne of Green Gables.

As the maker of a website called Gospel of the Trees, I see some exciting material in this story about great British trees and forests.

Most of my photos feature trees. The pictures probably look same-ish to others but every tree is different, and interestingly different, to me.

Another of these intermittent messages....

Look: The greatest a capella group in history is The Persuasions. This is not something about which reasonable people can disagree. Take a listen. No argument will ensue.

One shortcoming of many of us who critique our social media culture: We say what we don’t like but fail to say what we like. I have tried to remedy that deficiency in this brief essay for the Hedgehog Review. What you should do instead of hanging out on Twitter is read Dickens. Social media will make your lifeworld narrower; reading Dickens will help you see more expansive possibilities.

Best Dickens novels, in order (kinda):

• Bleak House
• Little Dorrit
• David Copperfield
• Great Expectations
• Our Mutual Friend

It’s often said that Dickens’s characters are larger than life, which is true when we let our lives get small enough. Let’s not do that.

Hello again. Here’s another of my intermittent messages.

The most time-consuming part of my old newsletter was selecting, formatting, and uploading the images. That’s the kind of thing I just don’t have time for these days, but in this Easter season it’s good to look at some paintings by Arcabas.

The blog lately has been mainly devoted to quotations – I have some larger pieces in the works but they may take a while to be ready. The end of the term is at our throats and we are busy people. “We” being teachers.

I have had four fairly substantial essays come out in the past few weeks – which gives an erroneous sense of my productivity. I didn’t write them all at the same time!

Hello folks!

I am not able to resume the newsletter at this point, not in its former glory anyway, but I do want to send a brief update.

I have an essay out in Comment called “Recovering Piety” – I try to redefine and commend that dusty old virtue: “Renewal of trust in institutions will not happen unless the institutions recover their integrity, and that will not happen unless the people who work within them become pious — devoted, faithful, committed not to their own personal flourishing but to the flourishing of that which they serve. And if, as we have seen, utilitarianism banishes piety, the restoration of piety will depend on the banishing of utilitarianism.”

I also have an essay in the new issue of The New Atlantis called “Something Happened By Us: A Demonology”: “Several accounts of the spread of ideas jostle against one another in our moment: Richard Dawkins’s notion of ‘memes’ — ideas spreading by replication — competes with notions of ‘virality’ and of ‘social contagion.’ There is information theory and disease theory. I prefer demon theory.”

Hello folks, just briefly: I don’t expect to be able to resume this newsletter anytime soon, but

1. I am still writing at my main blog;
2. I post mainly photos but also the occasional link at my micro.blog, which you can subscribe to via email – see the “Subscribe” link at the top of that page. Those emails go out each Friday.

Each of those is different than this newsletter, though maybe if you’re interested in this you’ll be interested in them also. (Unfortunately, there’s not a simple way to enable email subscriptions to my main blog – one day I’ll figure something out, but not this day. Or this month.)

A blessed Feast of the Annunciation to all!