‘Seeking an explanation for his depression and other psychosomatic problems he undertook a course of Jungian psychotherapy at the Tavistock Clinic under Wilfrid Bion, and while ultimately uncertain whether this therapy had succeeded, Beckett remembered for the rest of his life a lecture of Jung’s which he attended on the subject of the “never properly born”. The lecture had direct repercussions in Beckett’s subsequent work, especially Watt, Waiting for Godot, and All that Fall which reports the end of the lecture more or less word for word.’
Paul Davies, "Samuel Beckett." The Literary Encyclopedia. Full text at The Literary Encyclopedia.
‘Recording your own voice is relatively simple, and there are a variety of programs that can do this, the most popular being Audacity, which can record, edit and process your audio files. It has several advantages: it is multi-platform (Windows 98 and later, Mac OS 9 and X, and Linux), and, more importantly, it's free. This open-source program has become the standard tool for podcasters. Everything you record with Audacity appears on screen as sound waves that you can edit very much like a word processing program: as with a page full of words, you can zoom in and out to see more or less of the audio wave on screen at once, select portions with a cursor, and delete or format those portions as you desire. You'll want to delete your "erms" and "y'knows" wherever they appear, and you can also use the cursor to snip out boring or screwed-up parts of your recording - and the swearing. After each recording, save your file in WAV (uncompressed) format - it'll take up a bit of space on your hard drive, but it's the best format to guarantee you don't compromise on sound quality.
After you've completed editing your recordings, you can export your finished podcast in MP3 format and to do that, you can either download the LAME MP3 encoder as a helper for Audacity, or use the more user-friendly iTunes. Either site will walk you through the process.’
Jimmy Leach, ‘Education Guardian’, Full text at Education Guardian website.
‘Previously unknown journals by the 17th-century explorer Thomas Bowrey, the first English man to describe the recreational use of cannabis, have turned up at an Isle of Wight auction house.
In the 1690s Captain Bowrey tried "bhang", an infusion of cannabis seed and leaf, in India. "In less than half an houre it's Operation will Shew it Selfe for the space of 4 or 5 hours," he wrote.
The journals record his travels to Bengal in 1689, an attempt to find the north-west passage in 1695, and an observation of a transit of Venus.’
Maev Kennedy, ‘The Guardian’, Saturday February 25 2006. Full text at Guardian Unlimited website.
‘We are still as much possessed by autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians. Today they are called phobias, obsessions, and so forth; in a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious speicmens for the doctor's consulting room ...’
Carl Jung, ‘Commentary on "The Secret of The Golden Flower" ’, cited in Murray Stein, ‘In Midlife’, Chapter Four, p. 64.
‘In order to affirm the transcendence of the Christian God one must affirm a radical distinction between God and the universe, a distinction which the Church Fathers were convinced was denied in the Hellenistic view that the world is eternal ... For the Church Fathers, to claim that the world is eternal is to claim that it is equal to God. Thus, one important reason for making clear that Christians believe in a God who creates the world out of nothing is to deny any kind of identification of the world with God ...
Furthermore, for the Church Fathers, the view that the world is eternal, in the specific sense of being without a finite temporal duration, seemed inevitably to require a cyclical view of history, a view that would raise fundamental problems for Christianity. Only a temporally finite world could constitute the scene for the religious drama of Fall and Redemption, with its central, unique, unrepeatable event: the coming of Christ.’
Steven E. Baldner & William E. Carroll, "Aquinas on Creation", Introduction, pp. 6 - 7
‘In De aeternitate mundi contra Proclum, written in 529, Philoponus not only restates the Christian doctrine of an absolute temporal beginning to the universe; he also argues that on philosophical (i.e., scientific in the broadest sense) grounds one must conclude that the universe is temporally finite. This treatise represents a significant shift in the history of the doctrine of creation out of nothing, for Philoponus contends that on the basis of the principles of Greek thought, especially Aristotle's arguments for the impossibility of an actual infintiy, one knows for sure that the universe cuold not be eternal. Philoponus points out that were the universe to be infinite there would have to be an actual infinity of past days. Furthermore, if past days were infinite, what sense could one make of adding today to this past series, since one cannot increase the infinite?’
Steven E. Baldner & William E. Carroll, "Aquinas on Creation", Introduction, p. 11
‘In 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council proclaimed:
We firmly believe and simply confess that there is only one true God, ... one origin [principium] of all things: Creator of all things, visible and invisible, spiritual and coporeal; who by His own omnipotent power from the beginning of time [ab initio temporis] all at once made out of nothing [de nihilo condidit] both orders of creation, spiritual and corporeal, that is, the angelic and the earthly ...
The decree of 1215 is the first formal conciliar statement by the Church that the world had a temporal beginning. The question of the world's temporal finitude occupied the attention of theologians and philosophers throughout the century. In 1277 Etienne Tempier, the Bishop of Paris, issued a list of propositions condemned as heretical, among them the claim that the world is eternal.’
Steven E. Baldner & William E. Carroll, "Aquinas on Creation", Introduction, pp. 24-25
‘Aquinas recognized the possibility of an eternally created world because he saw that there was nothing in the concept of "being created out of nothing" that indicates the necessity of a temporal beginning. Since there is nothing at all in the meaning of creatio ex nihilo to indicate a temporal beginning, because the act of creation does not take place in time (it is not like a change that takes place in matter), and since actual causes are always simultaneous with their effects, it would not be unreasonable to say that the created world had eternal duration.’
Steven E. Baldner & William E. Carroll, "Aquinas on Creation", Introduction, p. 54
‘Although Tilman Riemenschneider (c. 1460-1531) was a contemporary of Michelangelo -- albeit an elder one -- he was through and through an artist of the Late Gothic North in contrast to the Renaissance South. There's not a hint of the classical in his remarkable carvings, no more than in the work of his German contemporaries, with the arguable exception of the painter, Albrecht Durer -- no sense, that is, of the nobility of the human form that the Italian Renaissance made the lingua franca of art in Europe after about 1500. In the Rhineland, Late Gothic was a late blossom, a hold-over; it coincided with the High Renaissance in Italy and hence with Leonardo, Raphael, and the aforementioned Michelangelo.
The difference between gothic North and humanist South in this era has often been noted -- emphatically and famously by Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain, but also with penetrating insight by Wilhelm Worringer, Heinrich Wolfflin, and more recently Michael Baxandall. In Riemenschneider's own time this art was referred to as 'altfrankisch': the word, as Theodor Muller puts it, "a nicely ambiguous term, meaning... both ancient Franconian and old-fashioned." This altfrankischness is compounded by the relation of this sculpture to the emerging pictorial art of the time, especially from the Low Countries.’
Terry Fenton. Full text at Terry Fenton's website.
‘Beuys insisted on a recognition of the whole, not just those aspects of the whole which were capable of giving pleasure and instant gratification ...
...Beuys creates a new idea of beauty. One that would regard as silly the traditional conception of that being beautiful which satisfies a sentiment within us that reflects to us some scene of recreation or sereneness or leisure (I'm thinking of Impressionism); the art object existing to soothe us.
While Impressionist paintings are undeniably beautiful, it is also undeniable that they helped to create and to preserve—in their depiction of the pleasures of cafe life, the comfortable drawing room interiors, the attended ladies at bath—a class divided from the world in its comforts and signs of sophistication. Beauty is attendant as the price paid for financial superiority.
Beauty, here, is a means of escaping from the issues and obligations of the day. It is a way to avoid engagement with the mundane reality surrounding one; a way to lift oneself out of the ditch of the ordinary; to ascend to a plane where comfort is allowable to those who can afford it’
Greg Masters. Full text at Artchive.
‘There is no doubting the importance of Art Since 1900, a massive new volume. For a start, it states its own significance in block capitals on the cover: "A LANDMARK STUDY IN THE HISTORY OF MODERN ART". Not only have the authors written a landmark study - they've reviewed it too! In the roundtable discussion that concludes the book, they congratulate themselves on a history that "might have some liberatory effect". Some liberatory effect? Who speaks like that?
Art historians, that's who. The four authors - professors Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, Yves-Alain Bois and Benjamin HD Buchloh - will mean nothing to many readers, but in the world of art theory they constitute the ultimate team of academic superheroes, mighty wielders of the poststructuralist lexicon. As editors of the journal October, they have become the most influential commentators on 20th-century art that - it is no exaggeration to say - have ever lived.’
Jonathan Jones, The Guardian, March 23 2005. Full text at the Guardian website.
‘Max Ernst, Georges Bataille, Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock, and other Krauss regulars are re-enlisted in the project of discrediting — or deconstructing — modernism. As before, they are strained through the forbidding argot of the two Jacques — Lacan and Derrida — Melanie Klein, Jean-François Lyotard, Fredric Jameson, Walter Benjamin, et al. "Phallicism," the informe, "part-object," the "paranoiac-schizoid scenario of early development," "the mirror stage": all our old friends have come back for an encore.’
Roger Kimball, ‘The New Criterion’, Vol. 11, No. 9, May 1993. Full text at The New Criterion website.
‘In its modern origins, art history certainly engaged theoretical issues. The noted founders of the discipline in its German Kunstwissenschaft phase were all involved with principles of interpretation. Jacob Burckhardt, Edwin Panofsky, Alois Riegl, Aby Warburg, and Heinrich Wölfflin, to name only an illustrious few, may have been in fundamental disagreement about the central issue in art historical interpretation--why and how styles of art come into being and then pass away again--but not one avoided explanations for the process on the ground that theorizing was something extrinsic to the study of art as art. All in fact offered grand Hegelian schemes to account for the diachronous process at work, and if their focus on the objects (as well as the objects themselves) differed, their primary commitment to interpretation never faltered.
For these early analysts, "theory" would be the term assigned to the mode of explanation, and more often than not, the argument underlying the historical evidence had to do with the cause of stylistic change and whether it could be attributed to factors intrinsic to the history of images or whether the explanation for transformation should be sought in the cultural world that surrounded their production’
Michael Ann Holly, ‘Art Theory’ in The John Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Full text at online Guide
‘Technology publishing firm O'Reilly has launched Rough Cuts, a service that lets participants read online versions of books as they are written and suggest changes that can be incorporated into the final - printed - version. Is this a trend? ...
Tim O'Reilly argues that a defining characteristic of this woolly movement is the end of the software release cycle. Software becomes constantly upgraded, often on a daily or hourly basis, he says, and the users of the software become codevelopers.’
Danny Bradbury, Technology Guardian, February 2 2006. Full text at the Guardian website.
‘On the iTunes Music Store, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not goes for £7.99 and is encoded in AAC (Advanced Audio Codec) format encoded at 128kbps - that is, every second of music is represented by 128 kilobits of data. On the CD, every second takes up 175 kilobytes - 11 times more.
Buy the album from Napster, for £7.95, and you'll get WMA (Windows Media Audio) files encoded at 192kbps. Better sound quality than Apple's, for 4p less.
Meanwhile, over at Bleep.com, the download store run by Warp Records, you can download the UK's fastest selling debut album as DRM-free MP3s for £6.99, and at the noticeably higher bitrate of 320kbps - still four times less than the CD.
Why are the digital versions less sonically faithful? It's to enable files to be downloaded quickly and ensure that portable players can hold thousands of tracks. Otherwise it would take hours rather than minutes or seconds to download the files.
Like MP3, AAC (Apple's preferred encoding format) and WMA (Microsoft's proprietary format, used by virtually all the other mainstream online retailers) are known as "lossy" formats. In layman's terms, they are compressed derivatives of the original....
For the specialist end of the market, higher quality options are around the corner. Bleep is already selling FLAC files - essentially zipped-up lossless WAV files - for artists such as Autechre and Aphex Twin, which are indistinguishable from the CD originals.’
Adam Webb, Technology Guardian, February 2 2006. Full text at the Guardian website.
‘Sir Arnold Bax, one-time Master of the Queen's Musick, famously said, or rather quoted ‘a sympathetic Scot’ as saying: "You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk dancing." ’
Philip French, The Observer, 22 Jan 2006. Full text at the Observer website.