Oddments of High Unimportance

Of interest to postcard fans: The mystery of the 'same sky' postcards

Notes from a lecture given by Walter Derby Bannard at UNC-CH on November 14, 1984

• There should be an attention to art for what it is, not what it means
• Art represents the best of us to us -- to get that, you have to give art every chance you can
• Critics -- a critic should have a good eye, good grammar, and nerve. (Clement Greenburg is a good critic)
• Critics are usually best when they don't like something. When they do like something, they're usually off the mark.
• Curators don't correct their mistakes, they store them in the basement. Critics operate on the assumption that the public must be educated, instead of the curator.
• Art declined when innovation became fashionable. The middle class became affluent and bought art for status, for power, rather than for its beauty and its effect on you, which is the purpose of art.
• Good art is non-verbal, internal and personal.
• Pleasure is nature's way of telling you what to like. Denying it means to gobble up obligation.
• In the 1970s, movements were crxeated instead of improved upon.
• Beware importance.
• Good art is puzzling, upsetting, doesn't pander, crticizes you but doesn't insult you or put you down or offend you, goes right to the center, hangs on.
• Pleasure and inspiration first -- analysis after.
• Never suspend your responsibility to judgement. You've got to get it yourself and learn to alter your judgements. Have the inner security in being wrong to get it right.

At a Tom Stoppard Q&A session at Duke University, a professor noted that Stoppard has said he can’t resist “fiddling” with a play when it’s being revived or restaged. The prof asked what constitutes “fiddling” and how much of it did he do?

Stoppard replied, “How much fiddling I do depends on how much of Rome is burning at the time.”

-from rescued notes made in the 1990s

Japanese Advice for the Elderly Aging Hints from Hinohara Shigeaki Born 1911 in Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan (translated and adapted from Tanoyaku, Vol 38, June, 2007)

• Emphasize love, not hate
• Recognize your imperfection but aim to improve
• Try something new
• Focus your attention; don’t waste time thoughtlessly
• Find a model person to imitate
• Seek to empathize
• Value encounters with others
• Maintain small eating habits
• But don’t be neurotic about diet; enjoy food
• Walk; use stairs as much as possible
• Participate in group sport activities
• Enjoy leisure; avoid a life with only work
• Handle stress by exercising; walk, play
• Take responsibility for your own behavior
• Change habits when necessary; don’t be obsessed with maintaining habits

Source: ADVICE FOR AGING WELL - Constructive Living 2

voluntold – Directed by others to do work that needs doing but that no one else wants to do and without compensation

I was voluntold that I would be writing the company newsletter.

sadmin_ – The overhead, administrative work (either office or household) that needs to be done but that you don’t want to do; the administrivia work that you’re sad to have to perform.

When we got back from the trip, we had to do the sadmin of unpacking, washing clothes, and going to the grocery store.

Part of my Friday afternoon sadmin is writing the weekly report to my boss.

King of Country? Queen of Soul? Empress of the Danzonete? Honorific nicknames in popular music - Wikipedia

“It’s fantastically exciting to discover something that’s been lost all this time, but I do think it is also worth simultaneously holding the thought that actually, the only reason these fragments have survived is because at some point, someone thought the manuscripts in which they appeared were not valuable as anything other than waste. There’s a sort of lovely tension in that, I think.”

Source: Fragment of lost 12th-century epic poem found in another book’s binding | Books | The Guardian

Note: One of the interesting curiosities of history is that most paper has survived by accident. And for all the benefits that digitizing old manuscripts has brought us, there’s no substitute for good old-fashioned hands-on examination of the artifact.

CJ Chilvers gently disputes the claim of text files as the best future-proof archival medium.

There’s no magic file format. Most are likely to last long enough for you to convert to something else if need be. It’s more important to find the constraint that works for you…

I wouldn’t worry too much about your archive, though. Nothing digital is of archival quality. There hasn’t been enough time to test any format or storage method.

One of the peculiarities of archival research is that most paper has survived by accident. That’s how durable paper can be. Nowadays, archivists know exactly how to store paper; they know the temperature, humidity, pressure, etc. needed to preserve books, documents, etc. so it can last for a hundred or more years.

But digital media? Forget it. That whole area of preservation is constantly in flux and few archival standards have emerged – apart from maybe PDF-A – to ensure that even this web site will last for the next 20 years. Storage media, file formats, shifting standards, popular uptake: they all play a part.

I agree with Chilvers: old email, PDFs, and Word files work just fine for me, and for most people as well. I also count Evernote, which I’ve been using for 10+ years. Using rich text format (RTF) to capture formatting, bulleted and numbered lists, and images makes note-taking and note-making a more pleasurable and useful process.

Very few things will last forever. If they can last long enough to be of use to us, then that’s long enough.

Ostentatio genitalium (the display of the genitals) refers to disparate traditions in Renaissance visual culture of attributing formal, thematic, and theological significance to the penis of Jesus. That these images seem to have been created in good faith, with pious intentions, mystifies art historians, and many refuse to recognize the category as noteworthy or distinct from the nudity of angels and putti. Yet, as examples accrue, the conspicuous attention lent to Christ’s phallus cannot escape even the most disinterested gaze.

Source: Ostentatio Genitalium in Renaissance Art – The Public Domain Review