Happy Sunday, everyone! Since my birthday is this week, I was treated to a brunch yesterday by my aunt in a nearby town. They have a little restaurant/shopping area located right next to the old Erie Canal. I purchased a mouse pad that is also a real, hand-woven miniature rug with a classical Persian design.
Today I attended a lecture at the local art gallery on architect-theorist Claude Bragdon that focused on his ideas regarding non-Euclidean geometry and the fourth dimension. There was a lot of crazy math stuff that went over my head, but the gist of it was that there were two Modernist movements: one that saw the fourth dimension as a higher level of space, and a second one, arising in the 1920s under Einstein's influence, that saw it as time, which is I think how most people today still envision the fourth dimension. Bragdon belonged to the former school, and shifted towards a less scientific and more mystic cosmology beginning in the twenties. As an architect, illustrator, and designer (of sets, logos, book bindings, and so forth), he was very interested in tesseracts, or "hypercubes," and their aesthetic applications. Deeply influenced by theosophy, Transcendentalism, physics, and mathematics, Bragdon saw the universe as geometric harmony. Here is one of his paintings.
He was also good friends with an artist named Fritz Trautman, whose 1942 work the Galaxy (below) was "made as a sort of chart to aid in the teaching of color dynamics, [and] symbolizes the great truth that every phenomenon in life involves all of life that nothing in this world can exist or act by itself alone."
But really, all I could think was - Lovecraft! Lovecraft! LOVECRAFT!
So that was me this weekend. Not much happened this week other than This Book and I Could Be Friend's very first guest post, brought to us by Joseph Gustav of My Dog Ate My Blog. Check it out!
And now for your weekly link round-up:
Dan Savage's "It Gets Better" project: a counter-response (via Womanist Musings)
Lost Ancestry: I am a descendant of slaves
Mainstreaming Hate
Letting the Representation of Gender Violence In: A Review of Let Me In *
No Fat Chicks: Navigating the Dating World as a Fat Girl (via Womanist Musings)
What marriage counseling can teach liberals and conservatives.
Woman Stops Railway Hooligans By Standing On Train Tracks
* See also: my review of the book Let the Right One In, on which this film (a remake of the Swedish original) is also based.
Posts
2 comments:
Happy birthday week, lady!
Aw, it makes me sad that there's a backlash against the It Gets Better project. I was totally miserable in high school & a similar project would have been so helpful to me - not so much the celebrities but the average people posting about their experiences. I get why people are being rubbed the wrong way, but strongly agree with the author of the post you linked to. The fact that something is not the ideal, fix-it-completely solution doesn't mean it's without value. :-P
What I liked about that article was how it acknowledges the bias urban progressives often have against rural and/or religious people, and how that bias can be counterproductive.
And it's not just in relation to homophobia - Renee of Womanist Musings did a post awhile back on the negative reaction towards Christianity in liberal spaces and how, while a lot of that anger is certainly justified, people still need to remember that Christians are individuals. Her point was that we need to distinguish between harmful institutions and individuals who simply receive unearned privilege from them through no fault of their own, and who acknowledge the disadvantages encountered by those who lack that privilege. (An example would be a white person who actively combats racism.)
Post a Comment