I was cleaning out my Evernote inbox and saw two topics side by side: "The Lost Art of Memorizing Poetry" and the "The Lost Art of Illustrating Your Favorite Books." How many Lost Arts could there be? Are they really lost, were they superseded, or are they underground? Have the practitioners and teachers died out? Did that many people really practice it? And when we say "art" we really mean "skill," right? Or do we mean a craft that elevated both the user and the practice? There's a rather weary head-shake and heavy sigh of regret that seems to go with the phrase "lost art."

As always, when faced with an odd little eyeworm like that, I feed it into Google to see what other pages out there are using, re-using, and wearing out those specific words in that specific order. I tweaked this search a bit and decided dropping the quotation marks netted a few good articles I missed otherwise; I also removed lyrics from the search. Try it yourself.

What do we learn from this? I have no idea. I just find it interesting to see what others consider a necessary skill or behavior that no one in their self-identified peer group seems to find relevant anymore.

From a AAA.com GO magazine article on what to expect at this year's state fairs in the Carolinas:

North Carolina's lineup never fails with offerings like Fry Me to the Moon -- a deep-fried chocolate Moon Pie stuffed with Ho Hos, peanut butter cups, and Oreos, topped with cream cheese, chocolate syrup, and powdered sugar. Need more energy? Try the Bacon S'more -- a quarter-pound of maple-syrup grilled bacon on a stick dipped in chocolate, marshmallow fluff, and graham cracker crumbles...

The mind, the mouth, the gut flora tremble, as if on a knife's edge...

Another death. Another killing.

Another explosion.

Another shooting.

Another outrage perpetrated by those in power on those with none.

Another set of babble and bile from the privileged talking heads.

Another day of confused thoughts and feelings no one knows what to do with.

I dread hearing the word "another."

In Portland OR, I saw the following chalked on sidewalks in different parts of the city:

In one or two cases, there was more of a message but we were typically walking too fast (even on vacation, we hurry hurry hurry) for me to read it or take a picture.

So, two questions leapt to mind.

What the hell is the Priory of Sion?

The Priory of Sion is a well-known secret-society hoax, according to Wikipedia, itself a secret society in some ways, but never mind that now. The world has Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code to thank for promoting the Priory of Sion to a higher profile. Google will lead you to many other sites.

Why is Priory of Sion appearing all over the streets of Portland?

That other conspiratorial place, Reddit, had a few threads, like this one, on the phenomenon. One of the posters sees this as the work of one person who has a history of posting messages all over town, and others responded saying they’d seen different guys chalking the sign on the sidewalk.

What does a society have to do to stay secret??

Penny dreadfuls: the Victorian equivalent of video games

The feuding duo behind one of America’s greatest (fictional) detectives

Source: The Case of the Two-Headed Author | The Smart Set

When I was in -- 9th grade? -- I loved watching Levinson & Link's TV series Ellery Queen, which starred Jim Hutton as the detective author and David Wayne as his police inspector father. I think what most captured me was Queen's direct address to the camera just before he revealed the murderer's identity: "If you've been watching -- closely -- you have all the information you need." I never guessed correctly, of course, but I enjoyed the period detail and that was a golden age for spotting character actors.

I moved on to actually reading the damn books through junior high and high school. I have no idea why, as they don't have a lot of charm, the writing is workmanlike, and there are no thrills or action to speak of. (I was probably also reading Doc Savage reissues at that time, so, you know, forgive.) They didn't have the sort of antique charm of the TV series or even of an Agatha Christie cozy. I do remember one of the "twist" endings: "He wasn't John's twin -- he was John's triplet."

The most memorable thing about the Ellery Queen novel reissues in the '70s were their covers -- a series of absolutely lurid and ghastly "shadowbox" photos of semi-nude women. In my local DJ's Books and News stores, the Queens were competing against Matt Helm, Shell Scott, Mickey Spillane, and others of that ilk, so maybe that drove the decision. The distasteful, sexist, and just plain ugly covers did not hint at the musty, tame, and unsexy murder mysteries hiding inside. Ellery Queen was part of that necessary landscape against which real genius or originality is compared.

The Smart Set article is a delightful little delve into the Ellery Queen brand, with its own share of colorful and eye-grabbing pulp covers.

The Metropolitan Museum Breuer on 75th Street and Madison Avenue (the former site of the Whitney Museum now relocated to hip new quarters downtown) currently features an exhibition that seems perfect

Source: Non Finito | The Smart Set

Paula Marantz Cohen:

I found I often liked the unfinished works on display better than the finished ones that I knew by these artists. Finish has obvious value from the point of view of resale and comprehensibility, but is it as esthetically pleasing or evocative? One could argue that a finished work is often over-finished, and that knowing when to stop is rarer than generally thought.

I also like the invitation of the unfinished work for me to fill it in myself. I also, truth be told, love seeing the scaffolding and architecture, seeing how the rabbit is loaded into the hat.

This may be why I love artist's sketchbooks so much, more so sometimes. I own sketchbooks by Chris Ware, Art Spiegelman, Bill Griffith, Gary Panter, and others; their sketches have an energy, looseness, and immediacy that keeps me turning those pages long after their finished stories remain on my shelf. Also, they don't worry about making them pretty, which makes me feel OK about my own slapdash sketching (though Ware's dashed-off sketches look better and more like finished art than anything I could create in a million billion years).

I remember the comics artist Neal Adams reproducing from his sketchbook examples of his original pencil roughs and then the final product. He remarked in at least two cases that he preferred the roughs to the finished art. I could see his point. Inking the pencils somehow pinned those drawings to the page so heavily that movement and life had been drained. In the roughs, he was working out the problem and the scene looked alive. That mental and physical activity was almost absent in the published panel.

This may be why I adore reading journals, diaries, and letters more than any other genre; verbal sketches, perhaps, quickly done (most of them) and capturing life as it's happening on-the-fly. I feel as if I'm living the life with the person who's writing it down, fast as they can.

I spent the last week doing some intensive research on two potential tech purchases: an iPhone for me and Liz, and replacing this WordPress site with Squarespace. I decided to stay with WordPress and we both decided to keep our current "dumb phones."

The major lesson from this exercise was one I've seen pop up in various coaching and self-help articles: if it's not a hell-yes, it's a no.

Details follow, if'n you want to read them.