Art and Artifice

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Suppose … that a finely wrought object, one whose texture and proportions are highly pleasing in perception, has been believed to be the product of some primitive people. Then there is discovered evidence that proves it to be an accidental natural product. As an external thing, it is now precisely what it was before. Yet at once it ceases to be a work of art and becomes a natural ‘curiosity.’ It now belongs in a museum of natural history, not in a museum of art. And the extraordinary thing is that the difference that is thus made is not one of just intellectual classification. A difference is made in appreciative perception and in a direct way. The esthetic experience — in its limited sense — is thus seen to be inherently connected with the experience of making.

— John Dewey, Art as Experience, 1934

| Art

Lear in Limericks

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GONERIL/REGAN: Pop’s tops!
LEAR: True Cordelia?
CORDELIA: Oh, Dad!
LEAR: I banish you!
KENT: Gad!
LEAR: Vanish!
FOOL: Mad!
Believe me, these sisters
Deceive you.
LEAR: The twisters!
GLOUCESTER: And my boy’s a bastard.
EDMUND: Too bad.
EDGAR: I’m disguised. Tom’s a fruitcake.
LEAR: Me too!
GONERIL/REGAN: Prise those eyes out.
GLOUCESTER: I’m blinded! Boo-hoo!
EDMUND: I fix my own odds.
GLOUCESTER: The gods are such sods.
EDGAR: No they’re not. Jump! All right!
GLOUCESTER: And that’s true.
REGAN: My hubby’s just snuffed it. To bed!
EDMUND: My lady?
GONERIL: He’s mine!
ALBANY: You’re still wed.
LEAR: The law is an ass;
Forgive me, my lass.
CORDELIA: Of course!
REGAN: Ugh!
GONERIL: Agh!
EDMUND: Oogh!
ALBANY: They’re all dead!
Good old gods! Three cheers!
KENT: I feel queer!
LEAR: She’s dead. Howl. Fool. Gurgle.
ALBANY: Oh dear!
KENT: He’s dead and I’m dying.
EDGAR: It’s time to start crying;
I’m king. That’s your lot. Shed a tear.

— Bill Greenwell

See GRKTRGDY.

| Literature · Poems

Fair Enough

The grave of Arthur Haine in the City Cemetery [of Portland, Oregon], between 10th and 13th Streets, is marked by a stone of his own design and the epitaph, ‘Haine Haint.’ Haine, who died in 1907, left a will saying, ‘Having lived as an atheist I want to be buried like one — without any monkey business.’

— Federal Writers’ Project, Oregon Trail: The Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean, 1939

| Death · Religion

Camera Ready

le serrec sea serpent

In December 1964, French photographer Robert Le Serrec, his wife, and his Australian friend Henk de Jong were crossing Stonehaven Bay, Hook Island, Queensland, when a gigantic tadpole-like creature appeared beneath them. Le Serrec and de Jong approached it underwater and had just begun filming when it opened its mouth and they retreated to the boat. The creature was 75 to 80 feet long.

That’s the story that Le Serrec published in Everyone magazine in March 1965; unfortunately, it quickly came to light that he was fleeing creditors in France and had boasted of money-making plans involving a sea serpent. Striking photo, though.

| Hoaxes

Dueling Ambushes

What’s unusual about this position, by Adamson?

adamson discovered checks 1

Ten discovered checks in a row:

1. Rb2+ Nd3+ 2. Nc4+ N7e5+ 3. Kg3+ gxh5+ 4. Bg5+ Nxb2+ 5. Ne3+ Ned3+

adamson discovered checks 2

Marcel Duchamp described chess as “the movement of pieces eating one another.”

| Entertainment

Clerihews

The Art of Biography
Is different from Geography.
Geography is about Maps,
But Biography is about Chaps.

John Stuart Mill
By a mighty effort of will,
Overcame his natural bonhomie
And wrote Principles of Political Economy.

The people of Spain think Cervantes
Equal to half-a-dozen Dantes:
An opinion resented most bitterly
By the people of Italy.

When Alexander Pope
Accidentally trod on the soap
And came down on the back of his head —
Never mind what he said.

The younger Van Eyck
Was christened Jan, not Mike.
The thought of this curious mistake
Often kept him awake.

“I quite realized,” said Columbus,
“That the Earth was not a rhombus,
But I am a little annoyed
To find it an oblate spheroid.”

— Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956) (More.)

| Poems

A Feathered Maître d’

The greater honeyguide of Africa eats beeswax but isn’t always able to invade a hive on its own. So it has forged a unique partnership with human beings: The bird attracts the attention of local honey hunters with a chattering call, flies toward a hive, then stops and calls again. When they arrive at the hive, the humans open it, subdue the bees with smoke, take the honey, and leave the wax for the bird.

This arrangement saves the humans an average of 5.7 hours in searching for hives, but it’s not foolproof. “We have been ‘guided’ to an abrupt precipice and to a bull elephant by greater honeyguides,” report biologists Lester Short and Jennifer Horne. “In these cases there were bee-hives below the cliff (in a valley) and beyond the elephant. Concern for the welfare of the guided person is beyond any reasonable expectation of a honeyguide.”

(Thanks, Tom.)

| Science & Math

Reality Unperceived

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But, say you, surely there is nothing easier than for me to imagine trees, for instance, in a park, or books existing in a closet, and nobody by to perceive them. I answer, you may so, there is no difficulty in it; but what is all this, I beseech you, more than framing in your mind certain ideas which you call books and trees, and the same time omitting to frame the idea of any one that may perceive them? But do not you yourself perceive or think of them all the while? This therefore is nothing to the purpose; it only shews you have the power of imagining or forming ideas in your mind: but it does not shew that you can conceive it possible the objects of your thought may exist without the mind.

— George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, 1710

| Science & Math

The Blank Column

A printer prints a sentence in a monospaced font. It inserts a space after the concluding period and then prints the same sentence again. It continues in this way until it has filled the page, running the sentences together into one long paragraph. The sentence is shorter than a full line, and no words are hyphenated. Prove that the finished page will always include a full column of blank spaces.

Click for Answer
| Puzzles