The Napoleonic Wars With Dragons.

I brought this up in the ‘Napoleon bad‘ thread, and thought I’d give it a bit more exposure. I haven’t read these, just an excerpt League of Dragons which was included at the end of Uprooted. The book pictured is the 10th and final novel in the series. You can see them all at Naomi Novik’s site.

Capt. Will Laurence is serving with honor in the British Navy when his ship captures a French frigate harboring most a unusual cargo–an incalculably valuable dragon egg. When the egg hatches, Laurence unexpectedly becomes the master of the young dragon Temeraire and finds himself on an extraordinary journey that will shatter his orderly, respectable life and alter the course of his nation’s history.

Thrust into England’s Aerial Corps, Laurence and Temeraire undergo rigorous training while staving off French forces intent on breaching British soil. But the pair has more than France to contend with when China learns that an imperial dragon intended for Napoleon–Temeraire himself– has fallen into British hands. The emperor summons the new pilot and his dragon to the Far East, a long voyage fraught with peril and intrigue. From England’s shores to China’s palaces, from the Silk Road’s outer limits to the embattled borders of Prussia and Poland, Laurence and Temeraire must defend their partnership and their country from powerful adversaries around the globe. But can they succeed against the massed forces of Bonaparte’s implacable army?

“Napoleon finished a little bit bad,”

The Tiny Tyrant has been talking again. It’s not good.

Donald Trump gave a long, rambling interview to the New York Times on Wednesday in which he mangled facts about French history.

Reflecting on his time in France earlier this month, the president talked about the downfall of Napoleon and showed a high level of historical illiteracy.

“Napoleon finished a little bit bad,” the president began. “His one problem is he didn’t go to Russia that night because he had extracurricular activities, and they froze to death. How many times has Russia been saved by the weather?”

Trump then reflected that Hitler made the same mistake in his decision to wage war in Russia during the winter.

“Same thing happened to Hitler,” he said. “Not for that reason, though. Hitler wanted to consolidate. He was all set to walk in. But he wanted to consolidate, and it went and dropped to 35 degrees below zero, and that was the end of that army.”

[…]

“But the Russians have great fighters in the cold,” he said. “They use the cold to their advantage. I mean, they’ve won five wars where the armies that went against them froze to death. It’s pretty amazing. So, we’re having a good time. The economy is doing great.”

Oh hey, here’s everything I know about French military history: Napoleon, well, bad. Russia, great! Hey, this is a good time. Is there chocolate cake? Oh yeah, the economy is doing great! Bottomed out, but great! Jesus Fuckin’ Christ.

Via Raw Story.

Holst’s Lost Manuscripts.

WELLINGTON (Reuters) – Two handwritten music manuscripts discovered in a library clearout at an amateur orchestra in New Zealand have been confirmed as the work of British composer Gustav Holst, untraced for more than a century.

The North Island’s Bay of Plenty Symphonia is mapping the path of the 1906 manuscripts after Britain’s Holst Archive last month said they were the authentic and original signed work of a composer best known for his orchestral suite, “The Planets”.

“The last few weeks we’ve been trying to piece together how they ended up there and why we have got them,” said violaplayer and orchestra member Bronya Dean.

There’s more at Reuters.

Romancing The Gibbet.

For those who prefer their tourism a bit on the grisly side of history, There’s Romancing The Gibbet, a new app.

Academics from Bristol in southwest England have developed a mobile phone app that alerts walkers when they pass some of the goriest sites from the region’s history.

As part of a project called “Romancing the Gibbet”, the University of the West of England has funded a series of audioguides that play excerpts of 250-year-old ballads and court proceedings as listeners pass the scenes of notorious crimes.

“The extraordinary 18th century practice of hanging and sometimes gibbeting selected felons – exhibiting their bodies to public view in iron cages – at the scene of their crime was intended to leave an indelible and exemplary impression on disorderly villages and small towns,” the university said.

There’s more at Reuters, including some of the specific murders and murderers who are part of the touring app.

Gimme That Old-Time Noonday Demon.

Acedia, engraving by Hieronymus Wierix, 16th century.

The sin of acedia, primarily a working of Evagrius of Pontus. Evagrius was an interesting character, who felt himself saved from being vainglorious and other problems by taking the advice of a woman, and becoming a monk. Naturally, that didn’t stop other christians pointing fingers and branding him a heretic later on.

The Demon of Acedia was known prior, and has been defined to mean many a mental condition, but the basic christian definition was “a state of restlessness and inability either to work or to pray”.  Evagrius’s particular concern was with monks, and he distilled the major problems down in Eight Logismoi, with this written about the Noonday Demon:

The demon of acedia, which is also called the noonday demon, is the most burdensome of all the demons. It besets the monk at about the fourth hour (10 am) of the morning, encircling his soul until about the eighth hour (2 pm). [1] First it makes the sun seem to slow down or stop moving , so that the day appears to be fifty hours long. [2] Then it makes the monk keep looking out of his window and forces him to go bounding out of his cell to examine the sun to see how much longer it is to 3 o’clock, and to look round in all directions in case any of the brethren is there. [3] Then it makes him hate the place and his way of life and his manual work. It makes him think that there is no charity left among the brethren; no one is going to come and visit him. [4] If anyone has upset the monk recently, the demon throws this in too to increase his hatred. [5] It makes him desire other places where he can easily find all that he needs and practice an easier, more convenient craft. After all, pleasing the Lord is not dependent on geography, the demon adds; God is to be worshipped everywhere. [6] It joins to this the remembrance of the monk’s family and his previous way of life, and suggests to him that he still has a long time to live, raising up before his eyes a vision of how burdensome the ascetic life is. So, it employs, as they say, every [possible] means to move the monk to abandon his cell and give up the race. No other demon follows on immediately after this one but after its struggle the soul is taken over by a peaceful condition and by unspeakable joy.

Going by that description, seems to me that the Noonday Demon is still with us. Perhaps if that was shifted to the Demon of Noonday Naps, everyone would be all kinds of happier, and less restless. I’m a firm believer in naps m’self. They are good for everyone, and since most employers are firmly in the camp of forcing workers to be up and productive at awful hours of the early morn, official Noonday Naps would be extra beneficial, allowing for many to catch up on sleep, and allowing the naturally early risers a nice refresher or rest time.

Cultures which embrace the concept of siesta have done the right thing, cooperating with the Noonday Demon. Why fight, when the reward is a lovely nap? Atlas Obscura has a nice article up about the sin of acedia.

Lincoln’s Body Double.

John C. Calhoun print, 1852 Library of Congress/LC-DIG-pga-02499.

After Lincoln’s assassination, there was a dearth of “heroic-style” pictures of the president. So one portrait painter got creative. On a print of the late president, Thomas Hicks superimposed Lincoln’s head onto the body of John C. Calhoun—the virulent racist and slavery proponent who did not exactly see eye-to-eye with the 16th president.

Engraver A.H. Ritchie created the Calhoun print in 1852. The original included the words “strict constitution,” “free trade,” and “the sovereignty of the states” on the desk papers. But when it was altered to feature Lincoln instead, the words were changed to “constitution,” “union,” and “proclamation of freedom.”

Lincoln edited print Library of Congress/LC-DIG-pga-02353.

For a century, no one noticed. The famous photo was only recently revealed to have been faked.

Photojournalist Stefan Lorant was compiling photos of Lincoln for his book Lincoln, A Picture Story of His Life (first published in 1957, then revised in 1969) when he discovered something odd: in the Hicks print, Lincoln’s mole was on the wrong side of his face. After some investigation, he realized that Lincoln’s face in the print exactly matched his face in Brady’s five-dollar bill photo—except in the print Lincoln’s face was flipped, making Lincoln’s mole show up on the opposite side.

Apparently, Hicks hadn’t noticed this discrepancy when superimposing the picture onto Calhoun’s body.

You can read more about this and the other photographic manipulations done by Brady when it came to photographing Lincoln at Atlas Obscura.

Cool Stuff Friday.

Go and watch David Firth’s Cream on Vimeo. You won’t be sorry, this is one of the coolest, most pointed, and terrifying things I’ve seen in a long time. Great.

Have a new pet and want something on the different side for a name? Check out Medieval Pet Names.

You can now have art texted to you from SFMOMA!

In a world oversaturated with information, we asked ourselves: how can we generate personal connections between a diverse cross section of people and the artworks in our collection? How can we provide a more comprehensive experience of our collection?

Enter Send Me SFMOMA. Send Me SFMOMA was conceived as a way to bring transparency to the collection while engendering further exploration and discussion among users. Send Me SFMOMA is an SMS service that provides an approachable, personal, and creative method of sharing the breadth of SFMOMA’s collection with the public.

Text 572-51 with the words “send me” followed by a keyword, a color, or even an emoji and you’ll receive a related artwork image and caption via text message. For example “send me the ocean” might get you Pirkle Jones’ Breaking Wave, Golden Gate; “send me something blue” could result in Éponge (SE180) by Yves Klein; and “send me 💐” might return Yasumasa Morimura’s An Inner Dialogue with Frida Kahlo (Collar of Thorns). Each text message triggers a query to the SFMOMA collection API, which then responds with an artwork matching your request.

You can read more about this here.

Portrait of Ruth Saint-Denis, a copy of which is in the BAM Archives (1920) (via Library of Congress/Wikimedia).

From an 1869 advertisement for a lecture by Frederick Douglass, to production photographs of the 2012 revival of Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach, the Leon Levy BAM Digital Archive contains more than 70,000 items chronicling over 150 years of theatrical history at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). The online platform for the BAM Hamm Archives was launched last month, including collections of posters, playbills, building photographs, and audio and video recordings.

Hyperallergic has the full story.

Collocation and Pejoration.

‘I am a gentil womman and no wenche’: from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale, c1386. Photograph: Alamy.

Linguists call it collocation: the likelihood of two words occurring together. If I say “pop”, your mental rolodex will begin whirring away, coming up with candidates for what might follow. “Music”, “song” or “star”, are highly likely. “Sensation” or “diva” a little less so. “Snorkel” very unlikely indeed.

What do you think of when I say the word “rabid”? One option, according to the dictionary publisher Oxford Dictionaries, is “feminist”. The publisher has been criticised for a sexist bias in its illustrations of how certain words are used. “Nagging” is followed by “wife”. “Grating” and “shrill” appear in sentences describing women’s voices, not men’s.

[…]

Perhaps “rabid” is collocated with “feminist” more often than with those other words (if the data the OUP uses includes online discussions, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the case). Sexist assumptions find their way into speech and writing for the simple reason that society is still sexist.

Language, as the medium through which we conduct almost all relationships, public and private, bears the precise imprint of our cultural attitudes. The history of language, then, is like a fossil record of how those attitudes have evolved, or how stubbornly they have stayed the same.

When it comes to women, the message is a depressing one. The denigration of half of the population has embedded itself in the language in ways you may not even be aware of. Often this takes the form of “pejoration”: when the meaning of the word “gets worse” over time. Linguists have long observed that words referring to women undergo this process more often than those referring to men. Here are eight examples:

Those examples are Mistress, Hussy, Madam, Governess, Spinster, Courtesan, Wench, and Tart. I’ll just include Hussy here:

Hussy.

This once neutral term meant the female head of a household. Hussy is a contraction of 13th-century husewif – a word cognate with modern “housewife”. From the 17th century onwards, however, it began to mean “a disreputable woman of improper behaviour”. That’s now its only meaning.

My whole lifetime, hussy has carried a negative meaning only. I had no idea it actually meant head of a household, much like my surprise over the primary definition of paraphernalia.  Click on over for the full article and to see the rest of the words, and how they have changed over the years! (I got to this article from another interesting one, on how American is taking over English all over the world. I get teased a lot for using English spelling rather than American, but that was how I was taught, and I’ll keep using it.)

Brewing Stones.

Geir Grønnesby, an archaeologist at the NTNU University Museum, has buckets full of rocks that have been used to brew beer since the Viking age. They’re found in buried rubbish heaps around many farms in Trøndelag. Photo: Nancy Bazilchuk.

When archaeologist Geir Grønnesby dug test pits at 24 different farms in central Norway, he nearly always found thick layers of fire-cracked stones dating from the Viking Age and earlier. Carbon-14 dating of this evidence tells us that long ago, Norwegians brewed beer using stones.

[…]

In other words, “most of the archaeological information we have about the Viking Age comes from graves, and most of the archaeological information about the Middle Ages comes from excavations in cities,” Grønnesby said. That’s a problem because “most people lived in the countryside.”

Essentially, he says, Norwegian farms are sitting on an enormous underground treasure trove that in places dates from the AD 600, the late Iron Age — and yet they are mostly untouched.

“So I started doing these small excavations to look for cultural layers in farmyards,” he said. “The oldest carbon-14 dates I found are from 600 AD, and all the dates are from this time or later. And when I found the stones, I had to write about them, since there were so many.”

[…]

Grønnesby is not the first to remark on fire-cracked stones on farms in central Norway. That distinction goes to a pioneering sociologist named Eilert Sundt, who recorded an encounter on a farm in 1851 in Hedmark.

As Sundt later wrote, he was walking and saw a farmer near a pile of strange-looking, smallish stones.

“What’s with these stones?” he asked the farmer, pointing to the pile. “They’re brewing stones,” the farmer told him. “Stones they used for cooking to brew beer — from the old days when they didn’t have iron pots.”

In his article, Sundt noted that most of the farms he visited had piles of burned or fire-cracked stones. Every time he asked about them, the answer was the same: they were from brewing, when the stones were heated until they were “glowing hot” and then plopped into wooden vessels to heat things up. The stones were so omnipresent, Sundt wrote, and so thick and compact in places that houses were built right on top of them.

Reports from archaeologists who examined farmsteads in more recent times also confirm this observation. When one archaeologist dug a test trench in the 1980s at a farm in Steinkjer, north of Trondheim, he found a cultural layer more than a metre thick, much of which was fire-cracked stone.

[…]

Grønnesby says the presence of great numbers of brewing stones on Norwegian farms underscores the cultural importance of beer itself.

“Beer drinking was an important part of social and religious institutions,” he said.

For example, the Gulating, a Norwegian parliamentary assembly that met from 900 to 1300 AD, regulated even the smallest details of beer brewing and drinking at that time.

The Gulating’s laws required three farmers to work together to brew beer, which then had to be blessed. An individual who failed to brew beer for three consecutive years had to give half his farm to the bishop and the other half to the King and then leave the country. Only very small farms were exempt from this strict regulation.

What’s equally interesting is when brewing stones disappear from cultural layers — at about 1500, right around the time of the Reformation.

“It could just be a strange coincidence,” Grønnesby said. “It could be religion. Or it could be that iron vessels were more widely available by then.”

Some of the best archaeological finds come from rubbish heaps. Throughout mid-Norway, these rubbish heaps often contain cracked stones that have been used to brew beer. Photo: Åge Hojem, NTNU University Museum.

…You can read about Grønnesby’s research in the recently published book, “The Agrarian Life of the North: 2000 BC to AD 1000: Studies in Rural Settlement and Farming in Norway”, edited by Frode Iversen & Håkan Petersson. Grønnesby’s chapter is entitled “Hot Rocks! Beer Brewing on Viking and Medieval Age Farms in Trøndelag.”

Fascinating reading! Medievalists Net has the full story.

The Lady of Cao.

A replica of The Lady of Cao face, a female mummy found at the archaeological site Huaca El Brujo, a grand pyramid of the ancient Moche pre-hispanic culture, is seen at the Ministry of Culture in Lima, Peru July 4, 2017. REUTERS/Guadalupe Pardo.

The discovery of the Lady of Cao’s mummified remains in 2005 shattered the belief that the ancient Moche society, which occupied the Chicama Valley from about 100 to 700 A.D., was patriarchal. Several Moche female mummies have been found since in graves with objects denoting a high political and religious standing.

Archaeologists believe the Lady of Cao died due to complications of childbirth but otherwise lived a healthy life.

Her arms and legs were covered with tattoos of snakes, spiders and other supernatural motifs. Discovered near her funerary bundle was a strangled adolescent, who might have been a sacrifice to guide her into the afterlife, according to the museum at the El Brujo archaeological site where she was found.

The Lady of Cao is a reminder of the complex societies that thrived in what is now Peru long before the Inca empire dominated the Andes or Europeans arrived in the Americas.

The Moche built irrigation canals to grow crops in the desert and were known for their ceramics and goldwork that have been looted from their gravesites.

The replica of the Lady of Cao, a collaboration that included archaeologists, the Wiese Foundation and global imaging company FARO Technologies Inc, will be displayed in Peru’s culture ministry in the capital Lima through July 16. It will later be shown at the museum at El Brujo.

There’s more to read and see at Reuters.

Cool Stuff Friday.

The Postal Museum Opening July 2017 from The Postal Museum on Vimeo.

During the First World War, in order protect art treasures from German attack, English museum administrators worked with the country’s national postal service to store precious artworks in a network of subway tunnels 70′ below street level. Now, you can take a ride through the historic Mail Rail when you buy tickets to London’s Postal Museum opening July 28th.

Roughly 100 years ago, the Post Office in London started utilizing a secret labyrinth of narrow tunnels, 6.5 miles long, to safely transport letters, parcels, and postcards through the city. At its peak, the Mail Rail system operated 22 hours a day and employed 220 staff that moved more than four million letters daily. The network of tunnels criss-crossed tube lines and linked six sorting offices with mainline stations at Liverpool Street and Paddington. The underground Mail Rail operation was so covert that museums like the Tate, British Museum and National Portrait Gallery deemed it safe enough to store their most precious artworks. According to representatives for the Postal Museum, the British Museum once even used the tunnels to store the Rosetta Stone.

There’s more at The Creators Project and The Postal Museum.

The Virgin Artiste.

At The Bushwick Collective block party early in June, Ashleigh Alexandria, who goes by The Virgin Artiste, body painted a model live against a brick wall covered with a graffiti painting of a skull, the work of eight-year-old street artist Ethan Armen. As Ashleigh was photographing her work on top of Armen’s work, a cop walked by. “I found the imagery of a nude, Black model covered in paint close to a police officer to be ironic,” Alexandria tells Creators, “due to the recent police killings of Black men and women.”

Sometimes Alexandria’s subjects are painted to blend into their backgrounds, but more often than not, her subjects stand out from their environment while still remaining a part of it. A lifelong New Yorker, Alexandria is a portrait artist and a body painter whose work plays with the practice of body paint blending made famous by artists like Liu Bolin, in which subjects are made to disappear into their surroundings. While Bolin is an important influence, Alexandria’s practice is a reinterpretation of this concept. “My use of women of color as subjects shows how these women can be blended into the background of American society,” she explains.

You can see and read much more at The Creators Project.

Ghastly, ghostly, and gory, Neill Blomkamp’s new sci-fi short Firebase is set in a Vietnam War haunted by more than just post-traumatic stress disorder and political unrest. While the latter are resolutely present, soldiers on the front lines face a supernatural force so powerful and destructive they refer to it as “The Devil.” Obviously the CIA is involved, which is why the details of this faux documentary aren’t in our modern day history books.

“Volume 1” of the District 9 and Chappy director’s latest introduces us to the second cinematic universe by Oats Studio, his new independent venture invoking the power of fandom with a “pay-if-you-can” business model. The first in the series is Rakka, an allegory for military occupation in which a human resistance led by Sigourney Weaver fights a brutal alien race equipped with powerful weapons and mind control. Firebase turns inward, examining the destructive force of trauma through the lens of American troops invading Vietnam. Warning, this film is bloody.

If you want to find out what happens next, you can support Oats Studio by purchasing the film on Steam.

You can read more about this at The Creators Project.

Is the City of Chicago trolling the 45th president of the United States? A gleaming, six-foot-tall sculpture that appeared this week near the downtown Trump International Hotel and Tower certainly suggests so, spelling out just two words in thick, golden letters: “REAL FAKE.”

The quip appeared on Monday evening, installed by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) as part of a new installation of public art along the Chicago Riverwalk. Simply titled “Real Fake,” the 350-pound fiberglass work, coated in metallic paint, appears as a direct dig at President Trump and his endless dismissal of the media’s criticisms as “fake news” while leading a life of fraudulence himself. But the piece, created by local artist Scott Reeder, was actually first installed in 2013 as part of Art Basel Miami Beach, where it loomed on the grassy knoll of Collins Park. It’s on loan to the city now by Reeder’s gallery, Kavi Gupta.

Hyperallergic has the full story on Real Fake!

John Pfahl, “Bethlehem #25) (1988), color print. (courtesy Cantor Arts Center).

A fascinating look at the landscape photographers of the 1960s and 1970s, the refusal to romanticize the landscape, and the intertwining of art and environmentalists. Full story here.

Sketch of an iris from The Florist (1760).

The Florist, printed in 1760, was a colouring book for adults, and one for serious colourists with watercolour experience.

The Florist was intended, as its title page relays, “for the use and amusement of Gentlemen and Ladies.” But, unlike most contemporary coloring books, it wasn’t meant to soothe the mind or encourage limitless creativity; rather, it served more as a manual for those seeking to sharpen their artistic skills. The Florist was for serious adult colorists only, filled with detailed instructions on how to paint each flower strictly according to its natural colors. (Yes, paint — this was the pre-crayon and -colored pencil era, so aspiring artists would have used watercolors.) See the directions, for instance, for a gladiolus:

This flower is crimson, inclining to purple; begun with a string layer of carmine, and neatly shading with a mixture of carmine and prussian blue. The bottom of the flower is white, shaded with a greenish tinge, by a mixture of Indian ink and sap-green; neatly blending the carmine by it, by fine strokes of each color. The leaves and stalk, from the beginning of the flowers of the top, are a brown, made with sap-green and carmine.

You can read all about The Florist, and see more, at Hyperallergic.