idleThinK

Historian and postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. Tumblr includes but is not limited to: Asian history, old photographs, books and manuscripts, quotable quotes, and other aesthetically pleasing things. No promises of consistency, only interestingness. You can also find me at http://www.idlethink.com/

[idlethink]

:'( 

[idlethink]

飲食養生鑑 Inshoku yōjō kagami / Mirror of Dietary Regimen (19th c.)

[natgeofound]

Reading the news in France. Photograph by Maynard Owen Williams, National Geographic

[natgeofound]

Club members on the ocean front are shaded by decorative parasols, 1930. Photograph by Clifton R. Adams, National Geographic

[idlethink]

Charles August Albert Dellschau (1830-1923)

"Dellschau was a butcher for most of his life and only after his retirement in 1899 did he begin his incredible career as a self-taught artist. He began with three books entitled Recollections which purported to describe a secret organization called the Sonora Aero Club. Dellschau described his duties in the club as that of the draftsman. Within his collaged watercolors were newspaper clippings (he called them “press blooms”) of early attempts at flight overlapped with his own fantastic drawings of airships of all kind. Powered by a secret formula he cryptically referred to as “NB Gas” or “Suppa” — the “aeros” (as Dellscahu called them) were steampunk like contraptions with multiple propellers, wheels, viewing decks and secret compartments. Though highly personal, autobiographical (perhaps!), and idiosyncratic, these artworks could cross-pollinate with the fiction of Jules Verne, Willy Wonka and the Wizard of Oz. The works were completed in a furiously creative period from 1899 to 1923, when air travel was still looked at by most people as almost magical... 

Researchers have found no account of a Sonora Aero Club, not in Texas or California. So was this simply a fantasy-fueled creative exercise by a retired man smitten with the wonders of flight?"

more here.

[natgeofound]

Alexander Graham Bell and Mabel kissing within a tetrahedral kite, October 1903. Photograph courtesy Library of Congress

[idlethink]

from a fantastic recent collection of photographs from Iran, taken by a Lonely Planet photographer. they're all spectacular. but this one in particular -- the remains of a statue of the deposed Shah, sawn in half by Islamic revolutionaries -- put me in a Shelley-esque state of mind--

I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear -- "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias 

[idlethink]

surely the best book cover redesign ever! Ray Bradbury's book about book-burning can now, you know, be burned. the spine of the book is screen-printed with matchbook striking paper. match is included. design by Elizabeth Perez.

[demonagerie]

British Library, Add MS 11695, detail of f. 147v. Beatus of Liébana, Commentary on the Apocalypse. 1091-1109

[idlethink]

'Les troubles de Corée: La garde japonaise aux prises avec les émeutiers à Séoul' (Troubles in Korea: The Japanese Guard deals with Rioters in Seoul) from Le Petit Journal illustré, 1907. Also on the cover of this month's excellent issue of the American Historical Review. 

[idlethink]

sound writerly advice. makes more sense the more writing my life demands -- especially the pleading, commanding tone. self-discipline is hard to come by, and these writer dudes know it all too well (as I, alas, do). via.

[microscopicexpressionism]

You Wish Your Neurons Were This Pretty

When Greg Dunn finished his Ph.D. in neuroscience at Penn in 2011, he bought himself a sensory deprivation tank as a graduation present. The gift marked a major life transition, from the world of science to a life of meditation and art.

Now a full-time artist living in Philadelphia, Dunn says he was inspired in his grad-student days by the spare beauty of neurons treated with certain stains. The Golgi stain, for example, will turn one or two neurons black against a golden background. ”It has this Zen quality to it that really appealed to me,” Dunn said.

[idlethink]

We die to each other daily. What we know of other people Is only our memory of the moments During which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same Is a useful and convenient social convention Which must sometimes broken. We must also remember That at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.

T. S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party (1949) 

[idlethink]

'The American Wall Goes Up as the Chinese Wall Comes Down', Puck Magazine (1882). China opens up to US trade, while the US closes its borders to Chinese immigration. Love the 'non-reciprocity' and 'jealousy' bricks. Via. 

[idlethink]

Japan blows away the flimsy Chinese war fortifications in the Sino-Japanese war. Kiyochika Kobayashi, 1895. 

[idlethink]

'Easter in the Old-World Barnyard: A New Chicken Hatched', Puck Magazine (1895)

in which the Japanese chicken is born out of the Sino-Japanese War of 1895, taking its place among the flock of old Great Power chickens (much to their surprise). Via. 

[mpdrolet]

Echo, Burma, 2006

Monica Denevan