NOTES

“If you read, you’ll judge” – The Journals of Kurt Cobain

Image | | Paul Greer

“I like to calmly and rationally discuss my views in a conformist manor even though I consider myself to the extreme left.

I like to infiltrate the mechanics of a system by posing as one of them, then slowly start the rot from the inside of the empire.”

— Kurt Cobain

via BrainPickings & BlackSocialistsOfAmerica

 

More in #notebooks:


 

Forms – From concert programmes to chocolate wrappers – The Manuscripts of Emily Dickinson

Image | | Paul Greer

 

“The way hope builds his house”, Amherst Manuscript # 450 – Source.

 

“Although Dickinson did lead an active life outside the home in her youth, her increasing reclusiveness in her later years give the very notion of house and home a special resonance in her work. As such, the unusual piece pictured below is of particular interest, just one of Dickinson’s many “envelope poems” – the focus of a recent book, The Gorgeous Nothings by Marta Werner and Jen Bervin. In this instance, Dickinson has cut apart an envelope so all that remains are the flap and a portion of the body. She orients the paper so the point of the flap is at the top then she fills that peak with words: “The way hope builds his house…” Or, to phrase it more directly, she writes a poem about a house on a piece of paper that looks like a house.”

— Mike Kelly 

“Necessitates celerity”, Amherst Manuscript # 540 – Source.
“Alone and in a circumstance”, Amherst Manuscript # 129 – Source.

via The Public Domain Review

 

More in #codex:


 

 

 

Drawings of dodo’s (generally assumed from to be life) by Joris Joostensz Laerle (1601) & Cornelis Saftleven (1638)

| Paul Greer

“Compilation of the first depictions of dodos (Raphus cucullatus) on the island Mauritius (Indian Ocean), made during the voyage of the VOC Gelderland in 1602. The caption says “These birds are caught on the island of Mauritius in large quantities because they are unable to fly. They are good food and often have stones in their stomachs, as big as eggs, sometimes bigger or smaller, and are called ‘griffeendt’ or ‘Kermis goose’.” (Fuller, Errol: Dodo – From Extinction To Icon, 2002)”

“Dodo specialist Julian Hume argued that the nostrils of the living dodo would have been slits, as seen in the Gelderland, Cornelis Saftleven, Savery’s Crocker Art Gallery, and Ustad Mansur images. “

via Dr Nick Crumpton

 

Also in observation:

 

The Schrift-Landschaften drawings by Herbert Pföstl

| Paul Greer

“The Schrift-Landschaften drawings are composed of a single text-fragment, written in Herbert Pföstl’s distinctly small script, inscribed upon a page from a nautical traverse table. One is reminded of the particularities of calligraphic expression and the meditative processes required to create needlework samplers, chronological tables, weather diaries, or even telegraphic code. Pföstl’s landscapes of script, however, come from a deep reading of and reliance upon literature; these lines are fragments from books gathered over many years and transformed into a landscape of incantations for the artist. What at first appears a wilderness of words on paper soon resolves into a garland of vows concealed within the text. These works are a meditation on the artist’s abiding interest in the liminal space which often exists between drawing and writing.”

— Epidote Press

More in Codex:

Dostoevsky: the drawing as writing

Image | | Paul Greer


dost

 “Indeed, Dostoevsky was not content to “write” and “take notes” in the process of creative thinking, he moved in the space and time of the particular artistic universe of his notebook, where the meaning and significance of words interact reciprocally with other meanings expressed through visual images, a method of work specific to the writer.”

– from Dostoevsky: the drawing as writing by Konstantin Barsht


dost

”

represent that key moment when the accumulated proto-novel crystallized into a text. Like many of us, Dostoevsky doodled hardest when the words came slowest.” Some of Dostoevsky’s character descriptions, argues scholar Konstantin Barsht, “are actually the descriptions of doodled portraits he kept reworking until they were right.”

– Konstantin Barsht


dost

More in “manuscript“:

A Mississippi Roll: Coloney & Fairchild’s Ribbon Map of the Father of Waters (1866)

Image | | Paul Greer

found via Kottke

“Coloney and Fairchild’s patented apparatus required that the single sheet be cut into strips, attached end-to-end, mounted on linen, and then rolled inside a wooden, metal, or paper spool (fig. 4). The resulting portability of the map was crucial because, as advertisements indicated, it was intended for business travelers, steamboat navigators, and tourists. Of this form, the Newberry Library and the Minnesota Historical Society Library hold what seems to be a first edition, while nearly a dozen archives around the U.S. hold an updated second version. With the addition of hundreds of towns, mile markers, islands, landings, landowner and plantation names, and significant Civil War locations, the Lower Mississippi appears to be a settled and thriving commercial space.”

— Nenette Luarca-Shoaf

Larger versions of the image can be found here.

 

5,500-Year-Old Sumerian Star Map Of Ancient Nineveh and the Observation Of Köfels’ Impact Event

Image | | Paul Greer

 

“For over 150 years scientists have tried to solve the mystery of a controversial cuneiform clay tablet that indicates the so-called Köfel’s impact event was observed in ancient times. The circular stone-cast tablet was recovered from the 650 BC underground library of King Ashurbanipal in Nineveh, Iraq in the late 19th century. Long thought to be an Assyrian tablet, computer analysis has matched it with the sky above Mesopotamia in 3300 BC and proves it to be of much more ancient Sumerian origin. The tablet is an “Astrolabe,” the earliest known astronomical instrument. It consists of a segmented, disk-shaped star chart with marked units of angle measure inscribed upon the rim.”

UPDATE:

Upon posting this item I got some feedback from internet friend and self-proclaimed Noticer Of Things, Chris Harris. Please find his updates below:

 

“The best way to learn is drawing, even if you’re no Leonardo Da Vinci.”

Link | | Paul Greer

‘Our anxiety around drawing starts around puberty, when we begin self-critiquing our abilities to render a perfect likeness, Dowd says. “The self-consciousness associated with ‘good’ drawing, or a naive form of realism, is mostly to blame,” he explains to Quartz. ”If you take a step back, and define drawing as symbolic mark-making, it’s obvious that all human beings draw. Diagrams, maps, doodles, smiley faces: These are all drawings!”’

–– Drawing shouldn’t be about performance, but about process.

The Codex Rotundus

| Paul Greer

Great Post on the Codex Rotundus from Book Addiction UK:

Jessica's avatarBookAddiction

Codex Rotundus 3 fac

The manuscripts and codices which survive from the late 15th century are often large and lavish affairs and usually conform to certain norms in terms of shape. But this curious and unusual little gem, which takes its name ‘Codex Rotundus’ from its unique shape, measures just over 9 centimeters across and is circular.  Its 266 pages are bound along a spine just 3cm long, so small that three clasps are needed to help keep it closed.  Thought to have been rebound in the 17th century, the original clasps which help hold the tiny codex together, were reused. As so many of the manuscripts from this period, it is a devotional text -a lavishly illuminated Book of Hours in Latin and French.

Codex Rotundus 1 fac

Remnants of a coat of arms, which a subsequent owner appears seems to have tried to obliterate, in the first initial ‘D’ suggests that it was created for Adolf of Cleves…

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