Historia nostri temporis

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[theparisreview]

While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in a windowpane.

Billy Collins, The Art of Poetry No. 83 (via theparisreview)

[usagroningen]

Manhattan 1609-2010.

Photographer Thierry Cohen makes portraits of the night sky free from manmade light and matches them with contemporary city skylines to remind us of what we're missing.

This is what the Lenape who greeted Hudson fell asleep to.

Slideshows are available at NYT, Smithsonian Magazine, and the Danziger Gallery in Manhattan, which is showing them until May 4.

[vanityfair]

[usagroningen]

VF: What is the trait you most deplore in others?

DB: Talent.

[life]

Happy birthday, Albert Einstein.

Here, a look at a famous picture taken in Albert Einstein’s Princeton office — exactly as he left it — mere hours after the great theoretical physicist and 20th-century icon died in 1955.

(Ralph Morse—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

[usagroningen]

I must be a genius, too.

[iconoclassic]

(via La Pequeña ciudad de P.: Bologna Ragazzi Awards 2013)

[usagroningen]

Vibrant art & thoughtful design could do much to revitalize the classics.

[guardian]

A pungent aroma? This double act examine the top farmhouse cheese during the yearly test in Kamerik, The Netherlands.

Photograph:Robin Utrecht/EPA

[motherjones]

So, um, how does one go about getting this job? Asking for a friend.

[usagroningen]

Kaas is kaas is kaas, as Gertrude Stein once said.

[theparisreview]

Six degrees of Francis Bacon.

[usagroningen]

This is a joke, of course, but insightful, too.

[usagov-blog]

Image description: Clouds move in on the U.S. Capitol.

Photo from the Architect of the Capitol

[usagroningen]

God is not pleased with sequestration.

[usagroningen]

[Illustration by Doug McLean for The Atlantic]

Inspired by the runner-novelist Haruki Murakami, novelist Mohsin Hamid took up walking:

"I needed to get unstuck. And, nearing the age of 40, I'd already used up many of the usual tricks writers before me had employed to shake things up when they were in a rut: travel chemically, break your heart, change continents, get married, have a child, quit your job, etc. I was desperate. So I started to walk. Every morning. First thing, as soon as I got up, which as a dad now meant 6 or 7 a.m. I walked for half an hour. Then I walked for an hour. Then I walked for 90 minutes. My wife was amused. Goodbye Hamid, hello Hamster—that sort of thing."

[newdirectionspublishing]

[usagroningen]

Not much poetry in this script.

[usagroningen]

Appealingly strange little short story from Guernica magazine.

[usagroningen]

Visit Original Link

[usagroningen]

America, 1950-2010.

[From The Atlantic.]

[usagroningen]

America, 2012.

[House and doll, Firebaugh, California, 2009; photograph by Ken Light from Valley of Shadows and Dreams (Heyday, 2012), originally featured in the New York Review of Books. Here's the project's website.]

[usagroningen]

Dutch citizens express their right to vote by placing their ballots in giant blue recycling bins.

(Very curious to see how big election today turns out. Will the Netherlands' subjects continue to see themselves as austerity's winners or will they recognize that they aren't really so different from the inhabitants of the countries to the south where they go for a holiday?)

Results here: http://verkiezingen.volkskrant.nl/uitslag/resultaten.html

[usagroningen]

Bach's Melancholia

The first page of the score for J. S. Bach's "Chaconne," from the Partita for Violin No. 2.

There are many versions of the piece out there, but two by Nathan Milstein (1903-1992) stand out.

The first comes from a TV performance in Paris, 1968. The second was his last public performance, in Stockholm, 1986.

In the first, the audience is primarily young people -- for whom mortality is surely still an abstraction.  In the second, Milstein is 83 years old, and his vital performance belies his own obvious age.  Yet we know he would die six years later, and surely he and his audience knew, too, that he was approaching his own end.

Indeed, Bach published the piece in the year that his wife died, and it is suffused with the melancholy of memory and grief.

(For a thoughtful reading of Milstein's performances of the piece, see here.)

[nypl]

[usagroningen]

Perhaps a percentage of the royalties from the Rolling Stones catalog could help stave off the collapse of England's public libraries?

Here's what Zadie Smith has to say about public libraries in the New York Review of Books and the Guardian.