Dali House

The moon, Venus and Jupiter gave me a collective smile on December 1, broadening my own grin, stemming from a nice plaudit received earlier.

Dali House is getting enough traffic from Google to place it among the “100 Must-see Art Blogs (of Every Form)”, a list released last month by the US-based ArtCareer.net.

Art Career bills itself as “the complete resource for careers in the visual arts”, including tools, schools, online instruction, news and reviews, galleries and tips from the pros.

There are nine categories on the must-see-blogs list, and Dali House is under “art history” at #78.

I’d only seen a couple of the other blogs on the list previously, but having a browse through had me wondering what their authors might think of my determinedly casual approach should they too decide to have a look around the neighbourhood.

A few of them are too airlessly academic for my taste, others way too serious about a beautiful subject, and still others merely parade gallery press releases but, by far, most are really good.

Joining my effort in the “art history” category are Charley Parker’s Lines and Colors, which shows what a proper web designer can do with painters’ and illustrators’ biographies, and he gets lots of ads as a result.

On the austere side is Art History Newsletter by NYU PhD candidate Jonathan Lackman and various contributors, really just a series of event synopses.

A pair of art-history majors in upstate New York put out the Art History Blog, with many thoughtful essays and reviews.

Shelley’s Art History Blog by artist and educator Shelley Esaak has been an About.com staple since 2003 and has a good sense of humour, which is always appreciated.

Beth Harris and Steven Zucker teach the subject online and at SUNY’s Fashion Institute of Technology, and their blog SmartHistory is completely geared to instructors.

The Earthly Paradise by “Margaret” can show all those people who use Blogger sites what can be done visually within the design constraints forced on them. Its content is “inspired by Romantic poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood”, it has big pictures and it’s lovely to look at.

Israeli freelance writer Elijah Shifrin’s Art and Critique is also a treat for the eyes, and the analyses of selected works are quite good.

In another category called “By the Artist” I couldn’t help noticing a blog called Chasing Vincent. Lance Woodson of Little Rock, Arkansas, works in the telecom industry but certainly has a passion for Van Gogh, whose ability to rise above life’s grimness “to create something greater than himself” he finds endlessly inspiring.

A recent New York Times article had a curious revelation about perception, citing research by Professor Marco Bertamini and colleagues at the University of Liverpool. Whereas most people assume that the reflection of their face in a mirror is the same size as their face, and will remain the same size even when they step back, that’s not the case at all.

In fact, if you circle the outline of your face on the mirror with a marker, it turns out to be exactly half the size of your actual face. Step back and the outline will remain half the size of your face. But the reflection of something else moving in the room will indeed grow or shrink in our view.

No matter how close or far you are from the mirror, it’s always halfway between you and your reflection. That’s why it’s half your size.

The Times quotes the university’s Rebecca Lawson as suggesting you imagine an identical twin — six feet tall, like you — standing in the room with you, on the other side of a movable partition.

“How tall would a window in the partition have to be to allow you to see all six feet of your twin? The window needs to allow light from the top of your twin’s head and from the bottom of your twin’s feet to reach you, Dr Lawson said.

“These two light sources start six feet apart and converge at your eye. If the partition is close to your twin, the upper and lower light points have just begun to converge, so the opening has to be nearly six feet tall to allow you a full-body view.

“If the partition is close to you, the light has nearly finished converging, so the window can be quite small. If the partition were halfway between you and your twin, the aperture would have to be — three feet tall.

“Optically, a mirror is similar,” Dr Lawson said, “except that instead of lighting coming from your twin directly through a window, you see yourself in the mirror with light from your head and your feet being reflected off the mirror into your eye.’”

A recent Monday at work got off to a terrific start when I scaled the stairs to the roof so I could have a smoke while proofreading pages and the creature above was there to say hello. He was crawling across the wooden slats of the upper deck. I used one of my pages to scoop him onto the wooden slats of a picnic table instead so I could have a better look.

It’s a good thing I used a page instead of my fingers. As I discovered later while finding out what the hell it was, this caterpillar squirts toxins when molested.

I didn’t molest him for long. In fact I placed him gently on a shrub. When I returned to the roof with another batch of pages about an hour later, of course, he was back on the slats making a wormline for … somewhere. A subsequent visit found him gone altogether, either tucked away turning into a pupa or snatched up by a bird.

This is the caterpillar of the Oleander Sphinx moth — Daphnis nerii — a hawk-moth found from southern Europe to the subtropics of Africa and Asia.

I didn’t have a camera, so I’ve purloined these photos from the ThaiPulse Blog and ThaiBugs.com. See the rest.

JUST BOOKED IN AT DALI HOUSE!

I am so very, very sorry to Matt Drudge, the blogger who somehow became a kingmaker in American presidential politics, for unabashedly stealing his webpage’s design, I truly am. The Dorse Report is just a bit of fun, really, a mock-up of the bizarrely mega-popular Drudge Report, in this case pulling together links to recent posts here and at Dorseyland.

Unlike the originator, though, I really don’t think I can update my report daily or even regularly, so for now, it’s just out there.

Snopes.com, that trusted spoiler of urban myths, once tackled the (apparently) widespread belief that the face of the ubiquitous CPR training mannequin was based on that of its grieving designer’s dead daughter. Poignant! But the fact, now widely dispersed on the Net, is that the face belongs to “the girl who drowned in the Seine”.

It’s an even more poignant story, actually, and one that’s fairly well known, but it’s worth a return visit and a modicum of meditation. It certainly was for at least two generations of writers, though not always good writers.

The spiritually sublime visage of “the Inconnue de la Seine”, as the unfortunate young women came to be known in the absence of her true identity, was reproduced countless times at the beginning of the last century. Once, her wisp of a smile held the same fascination for tens of thousands of admirers that the Mona Lisa’s evokes.

The details of the case and its literary ramifications are ably recounted by Anja Zeidler on Steven Moore’s excellent tribute site to the American writer William Gaddis (1922-98), whose first novel, “The Recognitions” left book critics gasping for air at 900-odd words and a daunting array of allusions, including to the Iconnue.

Gaddis was following a long tradition of writers composing wreaths of words to mourn the mysterious woman whose body was carried into Paris Morgue sometime around 1900, or a decade or two earlier according to one onlooker who read in her hairstyle an earlier era as well as “a peasant girl, a poor shop girl, or that of a beggar or vagrant”.

The morgue at the time was at the eastern end of the Ile de la Cité next to Notre-Dame Cathedral, a spot I once visited to watch a chained-up Harry Houdini leap from the roof of the death house into the Seine. The morgue was a bona fide tourist attraction then, the big draw being the daily panoply of a dozen unidentified and unclaimed corpses on black marble slabs displayed hopefully in the window.

Among these cadavers was placed the young woman, so the story goes, and her haunting beauty so struck one of the morgue’s upcutters that he made a death mask. Copies of it were soon on sale, not just to medical students but the general public, and these were placed on view in many fine homes across the continent. The owners and their guests would gaze into the face and wonder who she was, how she ended up in the river, whether she was really smiling and, if so, why. (See a previous Dali House post about death masks here.)

Death in the Seine’s bosom has always been commonplace. Great rivers beckon the living. In the 18th century people ritually loosed little rafts of wood into Paris’ eternally romantic waterway for its victims, each bearing sanctified bread and a candle. In 2006, the Guardian has noted, 50 corpses were pulled from the Seine, another 146 rescued alive.

In his 1988 film “Death in the Seine”, Peter Greenaway shared the stories of 23 of the hundreds of people plucked from the river in six years spanning 1800. Most were women, it was noted, and most had drowned in April. The speculation was that male suicides preferred hanging, and that April was the direst month for the French capital’s females because it came nine months after summer, when so many unwanted pregnancies took root.

Here, one of the mementoes of a loved one that were common in the United States in the 1800s, snapshots of the just-deceased, the better to remember them. Another is elsewhere in this post.

On Sedulia Scott’s remarkable website Consolatio, a balm to the grieving, I found the touching story of Victor Hugo’s 19-year-old daughter, who drowned in the Seine in a boating accident in 1844. Hugo wrote several poems about her as he struggled to come to terms with his loss, including “At Villequier”, which begins: “Now that I am coming out, pale but victorious, from the mourning that darkened my soul …”

The poem, an appeal to God written four years after the tragedy, continues:

We never see but a single side of things;
the other plunges into the night of frightening mystery.
Man bears the yoke without knowing why.
All he sees is short, useless and fleeting … See the rest.