museumsmith

Thirtysomething heritage-working ex-classicist theatrophile Anglican

[museumsmith]

[Regarding Catholicity, the Anglican Church] seems to me to be a respectable suburb in the City of God, but all the same part of Greater London.

Evelyn Underhill to Dom John Chapman

[museumsmith]

then mentioning his having heard that the Doctor had been lately at Oxford, [the king] asked him if he was not fond of going thither. To which Johnson answered, that he was indeed fond of going to Oxford sometimes, but was likewise glad to come back again.

Boswell, Life of Johnson

[museumsmith]

In book-buying you not infrequently condone an extravagance by the reflection that this particular purchase will be a good investment, sordidly considered: that you are not squandering income but sinking capital. But you know all the time that you are lying. Once possessed, books develop a personality: they take on a touch of warm human life that links them in a manner with our kith and kin. Non angli sed Angeli [not Angles but Angels] was the comment of a missionary (old style) on the small human duodecimos exposed for sale in the Roman market-place; and many a buyer, when some fair-haired little chattel passed into his possession, must have felt that here was something vendible no more. So of these you may well affirm Non libri sed liberi [not books but children]; children now, adopted into the circle, they shall be trafficked in never again.

Kenneth Grahame, “Non Libri Sed Liberi”

[orthodoxwayoflife]

The darker the night, the brighter the stars, The deeper the grief, the closer is God!

- Fyodor Dostoevsky

[thegetty]

#ThyCaptionBe: Don’t Be So Crabby

You captioned this detail. And we’re revealing the full story now.

Jaws reference or some rather nasty surf and turf? It’s actually a depiction of the astrological symbol for Cancer.

Here’s the full story:

This peasant might be tired from working in the hot sun, but this is no time to go for a swim to cool off! 

We all know there’s a risk of encountering creepy crawlers when out gardening, but that giant sinister lobster lurking in the water is actually a crab – the astrological symbol for Cancer. 

Medieval prayer books often include a yearly calendar at the beginning of the text listing important feast days. Each month is usually accompanied by illuminations of seasonal activities and zodiacal signs, such as this one for the month of June.

#ThyCaptionBe is a celebration of modern interpretations of medieval aesthetics. You guess what the heck is going on, then we myth-bust.

[letsolgasidorova-deactivated201]

Larisa Kirillova. Selfportreat

[vatnik-ivan]

Лариса Николаевна Кириллова (b.1943, Novosibirsk)

[considermycat]

Well, that’s rather lovely. 

[todaysdocument]

Puget Sound Navy Yard Dry Dock Number 5, 10/7/1940

Series: Wartime Unit Histories, ca. 1941 - ca. 1945 Record Group 181: Records of Naval Districts and Shore Establishments, 1784 - 2000

[pugetsoundarchives]

Chrononhotonthologos: The Most Tragical Tragedy That ever was Tragedized by any Company of Tragedians, 1787. From the University of Puget Sound’s London Theatre collection, Mss. 024.

If you’re interested in reading the most tragical tragedy ever, you can reserve it from Collins here!

[lagoonist]

Psyche revived by Cupid’s kiss

[museumsmith]

It would not be exact to say I prayed; What for? The one I wanted there was dead. All I could do was kneel and so I did. At once I entered dark so vast and warm I wondered it could fit inside the room. When I looked round, the road I had to walk down Was still there. From that moment it was mean Beyond my strength to doubt what I had seen: A heat at the heart of dark, so plainly shown, A bowl, of two cupped hands, in which a pain That filled a room could be engulfed and drown And yet, for truth is in the bowl, remain…

PJ Kavanagh, Beyond Decoration - http://www.poetryarchive.org/poem/beyond-decoration

[museumsmith]

Most of us have, at times of weakness or self-pity, set off in pursuit of what we think of as “home”. The idea that a place, a person or an event from the past can be reanimated by association is a mawkish con that no serious person should entertain. And yet when, as sometimes happens, the zeitgeist is with you, the temptation to press on can be irresistible. You dive joyfully into a warren of self-absorption from which it takes weeks to emerge.

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/sep/04/blur-vision-of-london-parklife

[fantasticallyweirdshit]

[mostlycatsmostly]

Abort

[turntoturnover-deactivated20250]

HOW DID IT LAND

[sleepy-blossom-deactivated20160]

mononoke-maidenn

[museumsmith]

I longed to wrap up every good and bad thing that had ever happened between us and lay it on her lap.

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/sep/05/dementia-alzheimers-mum-changed-relationship

[museumsmith]

...and then I had the privilege of being asked to translate him [Herodotus]. It’s an amazing intimacy with a writer – it’s like a marriage. You will never be closer to a writer than when you are translating him.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/28/tom-holland-interview-caligula-vampires-coping-with-death-threats

[museumsmith]

I feel you have be 100 per cent faithful not to the letter of the original but to the impulse that motors the whole thing forward.... I think of adaptation as like using a foreign plug. You are in a country where your hairdryer won’t work when you plug it straight in. You have to find the adaptor which will let the electricity of now flow into the old thing and make it function. That’s the long job.

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/aug/23/robert-icke-director-oresteia-1984-interview

[museumsmith]

On our way north, we stayed the night at a B&B near Lanercost Priory, most of which has been a beautiful ruin since the Reformation. It lies in the wooded valley of the Irthing close to Hadrian’s Wall, which is why many people come – in fact, why I first came as a boy in 1956 on the back of a tandem with my dad. He was a terrific Roman wall enthusiast – this may have been his fourth trip – and I think he hoped to share his sense of wonder with his son: to introduce me to the world of hypocausts and centurions there on the northern fells. Unfortunately, I remember little of this beyond the names of forts. (Birdoswald was a strange one.) My clearest memory is of sheltering from the rain below an ancient bridge in Lanercost, while Dad fiddled with the Primus and a tin opener and eventually served me the warm contents of a small tin. Heinz baked beans with infant sausages! It was my first taste of this novel concoction, of which so many forkfuls were to follow. // On my return this week I identified the bridge, which is now closed to traffic, and tried to imagine Dad and I sheltering beneath it and about to taste ambrosia. Impossible – it was easier to imagine Romans roasting larks and pouring wine from clay jugs, or whatever they got up to in their Northumbrian villas. The past may well be a foreign country, but the recent past is a different continent. From the priory tearoom’s extensive menu, we chose flat whites and fruit scones. Sausages and beans would have been … an enormity.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/08/laid-stones-on-border-to-signify-scotlands-union-with-uk

[theparisreview]

Oh, for Christ’s sake, one doesn’t study poets! You read them, and think, That’s marvelous, how is it done, could I do it? and that’s how you learn.

Philip Larkin (via theparisreview)