QUOTH THE PYTHONESS

just some infrequent and unrelated utterings

[quoththepythoness]

Chalk it up to providence

[quoththepythoness]

the blinking servers in the Internet Archive's greatroom, a sanctuary for public knowledge (at Internet Archive)

[quoththepythoness]

score! stumbled on a book of tom killion's Mt. Tamalpais prints in UPB today~ (at University Press Books)

[houghtonlib]

This 19th century manual on color printing demonstrates how a color image is built up through a series of printing plates, each adding a different color to the final image.

Earhart, John Franklin. The color printer: a treatise on the use of colors in typographic printing, 1892.

TypTS 870.92.347 (A)

Houghton Library, Harvard University

[quoththepythoness]

If we fail to reflect on the plots and scenes and tropes that undergird our histories, we run the risk of missing the human artifice that lies at the heart of even the most “natural” of narratives.

William Cronon discussing histories of the Dust Bowl and the Plains in “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative” (1992)

[quoththepythoness]

Woman, in the picture language of mythology, represents the totality of what can be known. The hero is the one who comes to know. As he progresses in the slow initiation which is life, the form of the goddess undergoes for him a series of transfigurations; she can never be greater than himself, though she can always promise more than he is yet capable of comprehending. She lures, she guides, she bids him burst his fetters. And if he can match her import, the two, the knower and the known, will be released from eery limitation. Woman is the guide to the sublime acme of sensuous adventure. By deficient eyes she is reduced to inferior states; by the evil eye of ignorance she is spellbound to banality and ugliness. But she is redeemed by the eyes of understanding. The hero who can take her as she is, without undue commotion but with the kindness and assurance she requires, is potentially the king, the incarnate god, of her created world.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 1949.

[fyeah-history]

Sheet music for the song “We Men Must Grow A Mustache.” 1922 Inset photo of bandleader Abe Lyman. It is poking fun at the ‘masculine traits’ many women adopted during the 1920s

[quoththepythoness]

gahhh where can I find this

[quoththepythoness]

Why is it that the part of our culture that is recorded in newspapers remains perpetually accessible, while the part that is recorded on videotape is not? How is it that we've created a world where researchers trying to understand the effect of media on nineteenthcentury America will have an easier time than researchers trying to understand the effect of media on twentieth-century America?

Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture (2004) 

[quoththepythoness]

The real significance of Eastman [Kodak]'s invention, however, was not economic. It was social. Professional photography gave individuals a glimpse of places they would never otherwise see. Amateur photography gave them the ability to record their own lives in a way they had never been able to do before. As author Brian Coe notes, "For the first time the snapshot album provided the man on the street with a permanent record of his family and its activities..For the first time in history there exists an authentic visual record of the appearance and activities of the common man made with [literary] interpretation or bias.

Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture (2004).

[quoththepythoness]

"...should our freedom just be a matter of probabilities? Just some random swerving in a chaotic system?  That starts to seem like its worse!

I'd rather be a gear in a big deterministic physical machine than just some random swerving

So we can't just ignore the problem

We have to find room in our contemporary world view for persons and all that entails

and that means trying to solve the problem of freedom, finding room for choice and responsibility, and trying to understand individuality."

-Waking Life

[robertreich]

Many of you soon-to-be college graduates are determined to make the world a better place. Some of you are choosing careers in public service or joining nonprofits or volunteering in your communities.

But many of you are cynical about politics. You see the system as inherently corrupt. You doubt...

[quoththepythoness]

[quoththepythoness]

Becoming Human

"Is it enough merely to be born, to eat, breathe, excrete, enjoy sensual gratification and avoid physical pain and discomfort? Animals do this. To become civilized is to establish relationships that are not merely physical, biological, or instinctive; it is to establish human relationships, relationships of an essentially symbolic kind, defined by tradition and convention and rooted in respect and obligation."

-Herb Fingarette, Confucius—The Secular as Sacred (1972)

[quoththepythoness]

Friends and Metaphors

"I said earlier that living metaphors can be fully paraphrased, in that most cases, we're content to leave them like that and move on.  Some metaphors though, stay with us, and we stay with them.  Aware that we don't fully understand them, and that applies not just to metaphors but to any work of art that makes a difference to us, we are moved by a sense that what we have not yet seen then is, in some way or another that we can't articulate, worthwhile.  It will repay the attention we are going to give it.  Those are the metaphors that we make in different degrees, part of our life.  They are in short, some of the things in the world that we love. 

Some of the other things in the world that we love are people.  Some people matter to me because they provide me with things that I want.  To repeat myself once again, I know what I expect from them and what I'll get from our interaction.  They satisfy desires I already have and can articulate.  In my interest with them, beyond the minimum of necessary respect, is limited to the features that enable them to serve my purposes.  Although I know that there is more to them, they have their own lives, they have their loves and their dreams.  I don't, for that reason, feel the need to come to know them any better.  I am content with my partial knowledge.  These people are, more or less, means to my ends. 

"Others, I treat not only as means but as ends in themselves.  By which I mean I don't mean I approach them with a sense of myself, taking my plans and my wishes for granted, and counting on their assistance with them.  Instead, I expect my desires to change once I expose them to them or their desires.  I hope in fact, that they will make me wish for what I have never wished before and give me what I am not now able even to imagine.  These are the people that I love."

Alexander Nehamas - Because It Was He, Because It Was I: Loving our Friends 'For Themselves'

[quoththepythoness]

As with views of the Internet, in general, scholars should avoid unreflective boosterism or instinctive Luddism. New technologies could narrow access to students with the resources to purchase the latest equipment. And university administrators eager to cut costs or large corporations looking for new arenas for profitmaking could also use the new technology for their own ends. But at the same time, new technology opens up the resources of the Library of Congress to students at institutions without extensive libraries and it offers ways for scholars to create their own teaching materials without the mediation of giant publishing conglomerates. Neither the democratization or the commodification of higher education is inherent in the technology.

Roy Rosenzweig

[quoththepythoness]

Experienced researchers loop back and forth, move forward a step or two before going back in order to move ahead again, change directions, all the while anticipating stages not yet begun.

Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams. The Craft of Research. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2008.

[boldnessbemyfriend]