Ramage

Irregular Mansions

Liked this quote from one Gilbert Meason, the first writer to use the term ‘landscape architecture’, in the title of his book The Landscape Architecture of the Great Painters of Italy(1828).

‘In selecting specimens out of many in our possession to illustrate this work, we have in view such as may be useful to architects in the composition of irregular mansions. These may be arranged under single towers, buildings of small size but simple in their form, and large edifices, picturesque in the disposition of their parts, and those parts of such breadth as to impress, in general, grandeur on the whole composition… Such edifices spread over the country would contribute most essentially to the beauty of British landscape.’

via Some Landscapes

Sadly, what you see these days are rather too many depressingly regular mansions spread over the country...

Taking care of business

If there were a head-hunter in your neighbourhood, you would, I'm sure, feel somewhat reassured to learn that he bore a stout, manly, pipe-smoking sort of name like Dick Heatherton, now, wouldn't you?

Ephemerally Yours has a tremendous collection of stuff up at Flickr, incidentally. Go see.

On the -nth day of Christmas

...my true love - well, that is, um, aw shucks, del.icio.us/leahb gave to me...:

Seven (plus or minus a few half dozen) lemurs leaping...

Ramage RIP?

No, not dead, just sleeping...

"I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow..."

[Theodore Roethke: The Waking]

Widget sees everything

I love the new UPS "Widget sees everything" ads. Might be because I associate UPS with interesting new deliveries of American books to the store I work in. Might also be because I like the little guy's head poking up above the billboard I saw on Chester Road today.

[http://www.widget.ups.com/]

Conversation

"So ...been doing anything?"

"Oh, just, y'know, brain scanning the fruit fly..."

According to Dr Mary O’Connell of the MRC Human Genetics Unit, who led the research, the brain cell loss that affects humans in conditions like Alzheimer's, also affects insects.

"In the autumn, bees and wasps often develop erratic behaviour before they die"

via Conscientious

The hills are alive...

A somewhat hallucinatory image:

Haselberg, Tyrol, photochrom print c. 1905, from the Library of Congress

Small...

...but perfectly-formed - the lumen art pool on Flickr:

image by SEngstrom

Photograms

Curtis Moffat (1887 - 1949). 'Dragonfly'. Solarised gelatin silver print photogram. About 1930. Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

I was going to do a post about photograms, and other forms of cameraless photography, but Katie Cooke at slowlight has done it for me. Look at all this wonderful work: 1, 2, 3, 4. And more to come, too.

Hands off

The orator, like the hysteric, is the anxious object of an abstracting gaze, made to perform his every natural affect and impulse according to a predetermined plot. At times, you can almost imagine that he revolts against this inhuman regimen, that he is madly signaling for assistance, or raises his arm at a random and rebellious angle, letting it drift along a dotted line of his own choosing, through the air's uncharted ways.

From A. M. Bacon, Manual of Gesture (1875).

The vexed history of gesture, from Cabinet magazine.