Saturday, September 30, 2023

Wednesday, September 27, 2023

Hot air balloon journey to the Moon, late-18th century


 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 

Photographs from recent expeditions suggest the Moon's surface has eroded considerably over the course of the past three-hundred years.

Monday, September 25, 2023

#230921-01 by Nobxhiro Santana








Title: #230921-01
Experimental digital work using generative AI
Resolution: 8278 x 4656 px 12.5MB
Application used: Photoshop
Not for sale

タイトル: #230921-01
生成AIによる試験的なデジタル作品
解像度: 8278 x 4656 px 12.5MB
使用アプリケーション:Photoshop

Nobxhiro Santana

Saturday, September 23, 2023

Friday, September 22, 2023

A Page of Madness (1926)


Entire film, with music by Cantos Y Cuentos:

 

 A shorter clip, with music by L.D.Q. Ysmiro:

Thursday, September 21, 2023

"Genetics" - Remarks on a satirical painting

"Genetics", 1983 Soviet painting by Aleksandr Kosolapov

From around the web, a collection of remarks on this curious painting:

“The presented painting of Kosolapov 'Genetics', 1983 refers to saying 'Genetics is imperialistic whore', that was really popular among Soviet intellectuals. There was a legend that impudent phrase belongs to academic Trofim Lysenko while contribution he denounce categorically and proclaimed 'reactionary-idealistic Morganism-Mendelism' as antiscience—in favour of Michurin agrobiology. But, in fact, this phrase belongs to satiric writer Alexander Khazin and first time appeared in his play 'Magicials live next to us' (1964). In his painting Alexander Kosolapov literally visualize devaluate phrase by depicting naked acrobat 'girl' looking in microscope and governmental department at the background. Making a parody of aesthetic of order propaganda painting Kosolapov decorates the painting with life affirming symbols: bird on the green branch, piles of books, pioneers who are visible between the legs and red flags of course with the clear blue sky as a background."

 

The painter was an emigrant. The picture is a reference to the popular expression of the Stalinist biologists: The genetical science is a slut of imperialism! In the times of Stalin, genetics was considered a false science and was dismissed by the official biology, which preferred to believe in the inheritable changes.’”

 

“Only ten years after Lysenko, the powerful Soviet pseudo-scientist who rejected Mendelian genetics and set biology in the USSR back a hundred years, died. Maybe his spirit lived on.”
 

“Socialist Surrealism.”

 

“1983?  In fact, in the Brezhnevian Era such representation would have been censored and considered ‘degenerate art.’”

 

“In 1983, Kosolapov lived in the US, presumably stripped of Soviet citizenship. It’s a satirical sots-art movement painting.”

Monday, September 18, 2023

Simultaneous Times Volume 3

Just across my desk is the latest volume of Simultaneous Times, an anthology of fiction edited by Jean-Paul L. Garnier, and published by Space Cowboy Books. So far, I've read the Introduction and the Michael Butterworth story that closes the collection.

I hadn't realized Michael Butterworth’s story was originally published in the early-1970s, in New Worlds, until after I had read it.  The story, and learning this fact, were delightful discoveries.  Probing the nature of relationships and the nature of talking about relationships, the story is rich in psychological insight. Descending through the various layers of allegorical suggestion was stimulating and rewarding.

I should remark that these stories were selected for the anthology because they have appeared as contemporary “radio dramas” in the Simultaneous Times Podcast.

I have also spent some time reading the contributors' biographies, which has been entertaining and instructive.  It is terrific seeing who writers are and what they are up to.  The section provides a good feel for the writers’ personalities and their work, and it also features large and reveling portraits of each writer.  Maybe we need to expand the Contributors section along these lines in Emanations? Meanwhile (as I wait for the Emanations 10 proof copy to arrive this Wednesday) I will read more in this neatly-produced book.


Sunday, September 17, 2023

Tracking...















Pioneer monitoring imperialist reactionary spies sending coded messages revealing details of 5-year language modification quotas.

Want to get involved?  Click HERE.

Wednesday, September 13, 2023

コドモノクニ ... Children's Country




 













International Authors colleague, Japanese artist Nobxhiro Santana, provides the following:

The title is written from the right side and is written in katakana as "
コドモノクニ". Meaning: Children's Country.

The bottom left of the title is "September," and the bottom right is Volume 10, No. 10.

At the bottom left, it says "three-page large appendix included".

 From Wikipedia:

『コドモノクニ』は、192211日から194431日にかけて東京社(現ハースト婦人画報社)から出版されていた児童雑誌[1]。子供のために描かれる童画という絵画ジャンルの確立に寄与した、大正時代を代表する絵雑誌である[2]

Translation:

"Kodomonokuni" was a children's magazine published by Tokyosha (currently Hearst Fujingahosha) from January 1, 1922 to March 1, 1944. It is a representative pictorial magazine of the Taisho era that contributed to the establishment of the genre of children's pictures drawn for children."     Source                                           



Tuesday, September 12, 2023

Echolocation in Action



Want to go deeper?  Click HERE.  

Monday, September 11, 2023

What happens next?














 

Batman meets Captain Kirk, while Milton and Nabokov exchange clever remarks. Are you ready for that?  Click HERE.

Sunday, September 10, 2023

The Germanification of American culture, institutions, and politics... where to begin?

(Click the cover images for descriptions)

Overture


The Man in the High Castle TV series. Click here and view the first episode free.

Historical and Sociological Studies


 
 

Google Search

Click here

Deeper Theory

Here is a wilderness... Leo StraussHerbert Marcuse? Maybe begin with the Wikipedia article on Carl Schmitt. Click the photo: 



Saturday, September 9, 2023

Philosophical pith or Wagnerian dreck? You decide! (Wittgenstein, Satire and Parody, continued...)

Here I shall make some "English" remarks (and the distinctions some make between the "English" and the "British" notwithstanding).

We all know Wittgenstein wrote in German. Could his roots in the German language be his motivation for making such statements? In English,
these are--culturally, linguistically, from a literary perspective--SILLY remarks. And "silly" is a kind way to put it. Nor do I mean this in an anti-intellectual sense. The fact of the matter is, in English, there is a well-established intellectual position that says... Erm... Well, it suggests, "something is not quite right here. Yes?"

Or put it this way... Is the German language--as a medium of philosophical disposition and activity... a "loci" of obtuse self-importance, stiff-necked acerbity, obnoxious intrusiveness, and awkward seriousness--a source of conceptual confusion"?

I recall Peter Hacker once telling me, "The problem with American English is that it has been corrupted with abstract nouns, because of German immigration." And I suppose he has a point, as a matter of linguistic and historical fact. I recall taking an English friend though a train station in the metro NYC area, in New Jersey. She laughed: "'The Journal Square Transportation Center!' Pfft! Do they mean rail and bus station! Ha! Ha! Ha!"

In a recent discussion of such matters, Luigi la Via remarks, “I've read in a Kundera novel that each common noun when said in German acquires a terrific metaphysical strength.” In English, we call this reification, treating an abstract noun or an abstract concept as if it was a real thing...  Or, as Kundera suggests (I have not read this passage, nor do I know how it comes across in the original language), in German there is something monumental, or "mythological" about philosophical nouns, as if they've been valorized in some terrific national epic fraught with sturm und drang, rock and roll heroes playing guitars with violin bows, fist-raising mobs, goose-stepping hosts, slave labor camps, and thunder-belching gods.

Along these lines, recall the frequent use of the definite article in the Greek language, and reflect the linguistic imprecision that causes philosophers to reify abstract nouns into concrete, as it were, metaphysical conceptions.  The field of Ontology, for example, was in its genesis enhanced by the use of the, as in the being.  The definite article--the--enhances the illusion, for Parmenides that being is a thing.  A property (or a part, an abstraction) becomes a thing. Example, the coldness, the damp, the colorness (and whatever that is, ahem); if we call it the colorness, then it must be something. And so on.

To put it in a more forceful--but I think English--way: "Now here is an insight into why in the 1940s we found it necessary to build Lancaster bombers and take the business to the skies over Germany." And, yes, I wish this was simply a joke, but it is not.

But let's end this on a lighter note.

As to the question heading the post on September 7: is Wittgenstein writing satire? Is Wittgenstein engaged, like Nabokov, in using parody to convey amusing philosophical insights?

I think so.  For an example, see the quote from his On Certainty that serves as an epigraph in Emanations: I am Not a Number (click the title, then click the "Look Inside" feature and scroll to the epigraph at the beginning of the book).  Also, see my post from August 27, "If White was a sound... If White was a color..." in which I set out to make some philosophical points but was somewhat surprised--and amused--to perceive myself writing a kind of parody.

Want to go deeper? Click here.

Philosophical pith or Wagnerian dreck? You decide!

Thursday, September 7, 2023

Is Wittgenstein a satirist? Is this parody?

The question is: is constructing a 'transparent white body' like constructing a 'regular biangle'?

I can look at a body and perhaps see a matt white surface, i.e. get the impression of such a surface, or the impression of transparency (whether it actually exists or not). This impression may be produced by the distribution of the colours, and white and the other colours are not involved in it in the same way.

(I took a green painted lead cupola to be translucent greenish glass without knowing at the time about the special distribution of colours that produced this appearance.)

And white may indeed occur in the visual impression of a transparent body, for example as a reflection, as a high-light. I.e. if the impression is perceived as transparent, the white which we see will simply not be interpreted as the body's being white.

Nor can we say that white is essentially the property of a--visual--surface. For it is conceivable that white should occur as a high-light or as the colour of a flame.

A body that is actually transparent can, of course, seem white to us; but it cannot seem white and transparent.

But we should not express this by saying: white is not a transparent colour.

'Transparent' could be compared with 'reflecting'.

An element of visual space may be white or red, but can't be either transparent or opaque.

Transparency and reflection only exist in the dimension of depth of a visual image.

   - Remarks on Colour, III, 138-140, 145-150



Wednesday, September 6, 2023

Tuesday, September 5, 2023

Monday, September 4, 2023

Emotional Self-Portraits?

Pablo Picasso Picasso - Figure Noire, 1948















Pablo Picasso -  Femme dans un fauteuil, 1946

















Saturday, September 2, 2023

Friday, September 1, 2023

All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO)

Curious about UFO's? A new US website dedicated to studying such phenomena is under development.  Click the following image to visit the site:










As for the Latin on the seal...
  
Universum mutao est
 
In English:

"The Universe is Changing."

Vita nostra est quod cogitations nostra facere est
 
In English:
 
"Our life is what we make of it." 

Rather than the study of evidence for extra-terrestrial life, does the language on the seal announce the advent of an era of transhumanism?