Chernobyl's Exclusion Zone

Source.

The Secret Science Behind Miracles by Max Freedom Long (1948)

Source.

Shipping Container Dorm, Johannesburg

Source.

Proposed Makeovers for Abandoned Metro Stations of Paris

Proposal.
Source.

Miracle Mongers and Their Methods by Houdini

Source.

A COMPLETE EXPOSE' OF THE MODUS
OPERANDI OF FIRE EATERS, HEAT
RESISTERS, POISON EATERS, VENOMOUS
REPTILE DEFIERS, SWORD SWALLOWERS,
HUMAN OSTRICHES, STRONG MEN, ETC.

BY

HOUDINI

AUTHOR OF "THE UNMASKING OF ROBERT HOUDIN," ETC.

AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED
TO MY LIFE'S HELPMATE,
WHO STARVED AND STARRED WITH ME
DURING THE YEARS WE SPENT
AMONG "MIRACLE MONGERS"
My Wife

c/f - The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin

A Ballad of the Werewolf (Sacramento Daily Union, Volume 80, Number 62, 1 November 1890)

Source.

Europe’s Wild Men

Source.

via National Geographic

A User’s Guide to Détournement - Guy Debord, Gil J Wolman (1956)

Source.

P. Ovidius Naso, Metamorphoses Arthur Golding, Ed.

Source.

Illustrations to Dante's "Divine Comedy" by William Blake

Source.

"The Wood of the Self-Murderers: The Harpies and the Suicides"

object 1 (Butlin 812.1)-- "Dante Running from the Three Beasts" object 2 (Butlin 812.3)-- "The Mission of Virgil" object 3 (Butlin 812.2)-- "Dante and Virgil Penetrating the Forest" object 4 (Butlin 812.4)-- "The Inscription over Hell-Gate" object 5 (Butlin 812.5)-- "The Vestibule of Hell and the Souls Mustering to Cross the Acheron" object 6 (Butlin 812.6)-- "Charon and the Condemned Souls" object 7 (Butlin 812.7)-- "Homer Bearing the Sword and His Companions" object 8 (Butlin 812.8)-- "Homer and the Ancient Poets" object 9 (Butlin 812.9)-- "Minos" object 10 (Butlin 812.10)-- "The Circle of the Lustful: Francesca Da Rimini" object 11 (Butlin 812.11 recto)-- "The Circle of the Gluttons with Cerberus" object 12 (Butlin 812.12)-- "First Version of Cerberus" object 13 (Butlin 812.13)-- "Second Version of Cerberus" object 14 (Butlin 812.14)-- "Plutus" object 15 (Butlin 812.16)-- "The Goddess of Fortune" object 16 (Butlin 812.15)-- "The Stygian Lake with the Ireful Sinners Fighting" object 17 (Butlin 812.17)-- "Dante and Virgil about to Pass the Stygian Lake" object 18 (Butlin 812.18 recto)-- "Virgil Repelling Filippo Argenti from the Boat of Phlegyas" object 19 (Butlin 812.19 recto)-- "The Angel Crossing the Styx" object 20 (Butlin 812.20 recto)-- "The Angel at the Gate of Dis" object 21 (Butlin 812.21)-- "Dante Conversing with Farinata Degli Uberti" object 22 (Butlin 812.101 recto)-- "The Circles of Hell" object 23 (Butlin 812.22 recto)-- "The Minotaur" object 24 (Butlin 812.23)-- "The Centaurs and the River of Blood" object 25 (Butlin 812.24)-- "The Wood of the Self-Murderers: The Harpies and the Suicides" object 26 (Butlin 812.25)-- "The Hell-Hounds Hunting the Destroyers of Their Own Goods" object 27 (Butlin 812.100)-- "Unidentified Scene in Hell" object 28 (Butlin 812.26)-- "The Blasphemers with the Usurers and the Sodomites" object 29 (Butlin 812.27)-- "Capaneus the Blasphemer" object 30 (Butlin 812.28 recto)-- "The Symbolic Figure of the Course of Human History Described by Virgil" object 31 (Butlin 812.29)-- "The Punishment of Jacopo Rusticucci and His Companions" object 32 (Butlin 812.30)-- "The Usurers" object 33 (Butlin 812.31 recto)-- "Geryon Conveying Dante and Virgil Down Towards Malebolge" object 34 (Butlin 812.32)-- "Demons Tormenting the Panders and Seducers in Malebolge" object 35 (Butlin 812.33)-- "Dante and Virgil Gazing into the Ditch of the Flatterers" object 36 (Butlin 812.35)-- "The Simoniac Pope" object 37 (Butlin 812.36)-- "The Necromancers and Augers" object 38 (Butlin 812.37)-- "The Devil Carrying the Lucchese Magistrate to the Boiling Pitch Pool of Corrupt Officials" object 39 (Butlin 812.34)-- "The Devils Under the Bridge" object 40 (Butlin 812.38)-- "Virgil Abashing the Devils" object 41 (Butlin 812.39 recto)-- "The Devils Setting Out with Dante and Virgil" object 42 (Butlin 812.40)-- "The Devils with Dante and Virgil by the Side of the Pool" object 43 (Butlin 812.41)-- "Ciampolo the Barrator Tormented by the Devils" object 44 (Butlin 812.42)-- "The Baffled Devils Fighting" object 45 (Butlin 812.43 recto)-- "Dante and Virgil Escaping from the Devils" object 46 (Butlin 812.44 recto)-- "The Hypocrites with Caiaphas" object 47 (Butlin 812.45 recto)-- "The Laborious Passage Along the Rocks" object 48 (Butlin 812.46)-- "The Laborious Passage Along the Rocks" object 49 (Butlin 812.47 recto)-- "The Thieves and the Serpents" object 50 (Butlin 812.102)-- "The Punishment of the Thieves" object 51 (Butlin 812.48)-- "The Serpent Attacking Vanni Fucci"

object 52 (Butlin 812.49 recto)-- "Vanni Fucci Making Figs Against God" object 53 (Butlin 812.50)-- "The Centaur Cacus" object 54 (Butlin 812.51 recto)-- "The Six-Footed Serpent Attacking Agnolo Brunelleschi" object 55 (Butlin 812.52)-- "Agnolo Brunelleschi Half Transformed by the Serpent" object 56 (Butlin 812.53 recto)-- "The Serpent Attacking Buoso Donati" object 57 (Butlin 812.54)-- "Buoso Donati Transformed into a Serpent; Francesco De' Cavalcanti Retransformed from a Serpent into a Man" object 58 (Butlin 812.55)-- "Ulysses and Diomed Swathed in the Same Flame" object 59 (Butlin 812.56 recto)-- "The Schismatics and Sowers of Discord: Mohammed" object 60 (Butlin 812.57)-- "The Schismatics and Sowers of Discord: Mosca De' Lamberti and Bertrand De Born" object 61 (Butlin 812.58)-- "The Pit of Disease: The Falsifiers" object 62 (Butlin 812.59 recto)-- "The Pit of Disease: Gianni Schicchi and Myrrha" object 63 (Butlin 812.60)-- "The Primaeval Giants Sunk in the Soil" object 64 (Butlin 812.61 recto)-- "The Complaint of the Giant Nimrod" object 65 (Butlin 812.62 recto)-- "Ephialtes and Two Other Titans" object 66 (Butlin 812.63)-- "Antaeus Setting Down Dante and Virgil in the Last Circle of Hell" object 67 (Butlin 812.64)-- "The Circle of Traitors: The Alberti Brothers" object 68 (Butlin 812.65)-- "Dante Striking Against Bocca Degli Abati" object 69 (Butlin 812.66 recto)-- "Dante Tugging at Bocca's Hair" object 70 (Butlin 812.67)-- "Ugolino Relating His Death" object 71 (Butlin 812.68)-- "Ugolino and His Sons in Prison" object 72 (Butlin 812.69 recto)-- "Lucifer" object 73 (Butlin 812.71)-- "Dante with Virgil and Cato" object 74 (Butlin 812.70)-- "Virgil Girding Dante's Brow with a Rush" object 75 (Butlin 812.72)-- "The Angel in the Boat Departing after Wafting Over the Souls for Purgatory" object 76 (Butlin 812.74)-- "The Ascent of the Mountain of Purgatory" object 77 (Butlin 812.73 recto)-- "The Rest on the Mountain Leading to Purgatory" object 78 (Butlin 812.75 recto)-- "The Souls of Those Who Only Repented at the Point of Death" object 79 (Butlin 812.76)-- "The Lawn with the Kings and Angels" object 80 (Butlin 812.77)-- "Lucia Carrying Dante in His Sleep" object 81 (Butlin 812.78)-- "Dante and Virgil Approaching the Angel Who Guards the Entrance of Purgatory" object 82 (Butlin 812.79)-- "The Angel Marking Dante with the Sevenfold P" object 83 (Butlin 812.80)-- "The Rock Sculptured with the Recovery of the Ark and the Annunciation" object 84 (Butlin 812.81)-- "The Proud Under Their Enormous Loads" object 85 (Butlin 812.82)-- "The Angel Descending at the Close of the Circle of the Proud" object 86 (Butlin 812.83)-- "The Terrace of Envious Souls" object 87 (Butlin 812.84)-- "The Angel Inviting Dante to Enter the Fire" object 88 (Butlin 812.85)-- "Dante at the Moment of Entering the Fire" object 89 (Butlin 812.86)-- "Dante and Statius Sleeping with Virgil Watching" object 90 (Butlin 812.87)-- "Beatrice on the Car with Matilda and Dante" object 91 (Butlin 812.88)-- "Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car" object 92 (Butlin 812.89)-- "The Harlot and the Giant" object 93 (Butlin 812.91)-- "The Spiral Stairway" object 94 (Butlin 812.90 recto)-- "Dante Adoring Christ" object 95 (Butlin 812.92)-- "The Recording Angel" object 96 (Butlin 812.93)-- "Dante and Beatrice in the Constellation of Gemini and the Sphere of Flame" object 97 (Butlin 812.94)-- "Saint Peter Appears to Beatrice and Dante" object 98 (Butlin 812.95)-- "Saint Peter and Saint James with Dante and Beatrice" object 99 (Butlin 812.96)-- "Saint Peter and Saint James with Dante and Beatrice and with Saint John Also" object 100 (Butlin 812.97)-- "The Vision of the Deity from Whom Proceed the Nine Spheres" object 101 (Butlin 812.98)-- "Dante in the Empyrean Drinking at the River of Light" object 102 (Butlin 812.99)-- "The Queen of Heaven in Glory"

Stories of the Baal Shem Tov

Source.

Also: Chassid Stories Archive.

The Baal Shem Tov and the Doctor
The Baal Shem Tov and the Werewolf
The Baal Shem Tov Reveals Himself
The Blood Brothers
The Forgotten Story
How Do We Know?
The Last Temptation of a Kabbalist
Prayers That Were Sung in the Fields
Rabbi Gershon's Dream
A Small Miracle
The Son of Rabbi Adam: A Tale of the Baal Shem Tov
The Three Laughs
The Trials of Eliezer
Winedrops on the Eyelashes
A Matter of Mesirus Nefesh
All Yisroel Together
The Faith of the Ba'al Shem Tov
The Soul of the Ba'al Shem Tov
The Service of the Ba'al Shem Tov
To Pray or Not to Pray

The Little Flowers of St. Francis in English Translation

Source.

Kafka Short Stories Online

A Hunger Artist
A Report to an Academy
The Neighbour (transl. Annika Eder)
The Neighbour (transl. Tanya Ellerbrock)
The Metamorphosis
Selected shorter writings, transl. by Ian Johnston (Before the Law, The Hunter Gracchus, Up in the Gallery, An Imperial Message, Jackals and Arabs)
A Hunger Artist (transl. by Ian Johnston)
In the Penal Colony (transl. by Ian Johnston)
A Country Doctor (transl. Ian Johnston)
A Report for an Academy (transl. Ian Johnston)
The Metamorphosis (transl. Ian Johnston)
The Great Wall of China (transl. Ian Johnston)
My Destination (transl. Alex Flores)
On the Gallery (transl. Maja Sinn)
Unhappiness (transl. Claudia Furrer)
Five short texts from Kafka's youth

Sources for Shakespeare

Source.

Below is an incomplete library of literary borrowings available online which informed the dramatist-poet's plays.

Adding more clutter to the commentaries on Shakespeare is much like writing an ode to the Gideon Bible then placing it in a motel drawer. I`ll avoid it.

Medieval Morality Plays
Everyman

Plutrach
Plutarch, Plutarch’s Lives, Englished by Sir Thomas North in Ten Volumes (1579) - The edition actually used by Shakespeare.
Plutrach's Lives as translated by John Dryden. Slightly more readable and modern edition.


Saxo Grammaticus
The Danish History, Books I-IX by Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned").

Hector Boethius
Hector Boethius, Scotorum Historia (1575 version).

Reginald Scot
Reginald Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft


King James I
Daemonologie 1599 by King James I

Seneca
Seneca's Tragedies in English
Original texts of Seneca's works at 'The Latin Library'
Works by Seneca the Younger at Project Gutenberg
Essays by Seneca at Quotidiana.org
Seneca's essays in English (at Stoics.com)
Many quotes by Lucius Annaeus Seneca via brainyquote.com.
List of commentaries of Seneca's Letters
Incunabula (1478) of Seneca's works in the McCune Collection
Seneca on Anger: written and presented by Alain de Botton
SORGLL: Seneca, Thyestes 766-804, read by Katharina Volk, Columbia University. Society for the Oral reading of Greek and Latin Literature (SORGLL)

Leo Africanus
Leo Africanus' A Geograczphical History of Africa

Ovid
The Fifteen Books of Ovid's Metamorphoses, 1567- Arthur Golding

Tacitus
The Annals by Tacitus

c/f Take a Virtual Tour of the Dictionary Shakespeare May Have Owned and Annotated

Nō Plays (Japanese Texts and English Translations)

An Introductory History of Noh and Kyogen.

Aoi no Uye
Aya no Tsuzumi
Hagoromo
Izutsu
Kagekiyo
Kumasaka
Matsukaze
Nonomiya
Sekidera Komachi
Semimaru
Sotoba Komachi
Takasago
Tsunemasa

Just stories, with stage directions, in English.
The Nō Plays of Japan by Arthur Waley (1921)

Shary Boyle: If I Had One Wish

Some Context:

Website

Why Feminist Art Still Matters | Hazlitt | Random House of Canada (Discussion with Shary Boyle, Vanessa Dunn, Aminah Sheikh)

Shary Boyle Represents Canada at 55th Venice Biennale

Everything under the Moon (with Christine Fellows) - A heartbreaking shadow play that achingly equates the show's illusory projections with vanishing peoples and species, the transitory symbols of art becoming the ghostly psychic debris of our terribly, evermore plausible extinction. And yet a children's story as well, a quest, a buddy movie, the story of friends around a campfire.

Canadian Artist Project (including commentary by Sholem Krishtalka).

New and Upcoming work.

Facebook (with art posts!).

One wishes, within the seemingly infinite crawl spaces and hobby-holes of the inter-web, that the site of a *lovvved* artist would represent all of their collected and studio work. The representative sample of Shary's work so inspires and gives voice to awkward, shapeless dodos of thought.

Below are a few of my own dodos.

- Sensitivity, skill in craft and imagination are pursued as peregrine themes in Shary Boyle's work. These three motivations are rarely pursued as separate from one another. Imagination is allowed a mischievous tentacle, transforming reality, not retreating from it.

- Sensitivity is sometimes a shying quality in the purveyor of commodities, as making commodities is a repetitive activity. In an artist, this often seems to lead to a heightened valuation of craft. The other route (not always exclusive, sometimes complimentary) is to become more machine-like. One could (arbitrarily) set up two default positions to illustrate the range of attitudes towards the art object and the commodity: the 19th Century Arts and Craft movement, at one pole, and Warhol, at the other.

- Shary's production schedule is regularly machine-like (Warhol). Each individual piece of work, however, has a great deal of particular patience and care put into it (Arts and Crafts).

- Art objects, knickknacks that demonstrate sensitivity in craft, now a rarer sight for a modern, resist the habitual quick scan of the senses. Such work is to involve one, imaginatively, sinuously, in the presented vignette. 

- Shary spends much effort digging up techniques of undervalued, outmoded (by the ever-efficient machines), excluded or forgotten artisanal practices. Among practices, thoughtfulness, sensibilities renewed in the twining, fluffy, shying-then-emboldening, leaky, leafy-lined aesthetic of Boyle's work is a generous array of stylistic preciousness.

- Here is a scrapbook note of what I imagine to be preciousness in her work: fairy tale or folklore sources; imaginative landscapes; animals and animal-people; fantastical flights of fancy; elfin and prepubescent bodies; daffy costumes; detailed depictions of cloth, material; gilt, decorative, flowery, ornate flourishes; a respect for field observation as in naturalism; brittle, dainty, breakable materials for the sculpture; delicate, complimentary colour palette for the paintings; drawer-ly pencil strokes and pencil textures for the drawings; arcane technologies (minded mostly in the service of creating wonder) for the projections (slide projectors, magic lanterns, manipulated, theatrically and moodily, in real time).

- The porcelain figurines also point to a further back historical source, in European rococo (I imagine the first originators of stylistic preciousness also sensed this continuity between the two practices, the delicate, aristocratically-refined rococo collectible on the one hand and the imaginative, industrial-democratic object of preciousness, on the other).

- No doubt the general dis-inclusion of preciousness from canonical museum art has--at least--socially patriarchal roots. Noting its remarkable influence on every nick and cranny of twentieth century creative output, glaring is the lopsided gender participation in either milieu's practitioners/members (museum=boys, preciousness=girls). Common from the Victorian era on, transmitted broadly via the pulp children's industries through the 20th then into our century, under Boyle's deft touch, preciousness has almost the appearance of a polemic; it also tests the redemptive quality of historically excluded material.

- I say "almost polemic" because so often the polemical tone in art leads to a certain brashness in presentation, broad strokes, blunted figurations, rhetorical outwardness. Again, sensitivity, the value which Boyle seems to place in preciousness, remains ice-cream-serene, supreme.

- However, Boyle's adoption of preciousness, is not in itself precious (if one is to mean by precious to be cloyingly taken with the sentimental, obsessively self-protected by the pretty and the quaint). Darkness, unsentimental frankness appears in this mythic retelling of the modern situation often, with a certain grounded literalness. And with humour.

- Darkness often comes in the form of a stylistic intrusion: the gothic, the grotesque, the violently flattened.

- Relatedly, despite the luster of pretty inherent in the materials and certain of the techniques (porcelain, ornament, floral patterning etc.), forms are often knotty, gnarled, organic in the way of old dead trees or mud.

- A lot of her illustrative qualities so reminiscent of children's picture story books, it is hard not to feel one is in the midst of a story. So, one makes up a story. Her figurines, also calling up qualities of toys (especially the off-limits-to-children toys of impeccable enchantment collected by grandparents) put one solidly over to a place of meaningful, fantastical, sentimental play.

- The stage is mythic, her girl children the heroes. Her girl children or also highly androgynous or effeminate boys; also near-hermaphrodites.

- Proportions or features of profiles, torsos, limbs, erogenous chassis, blemishes, blotches that lack ideal ratio or poise by corroboration of the beauty industries are studiously, lovingly attended to.

 - Departing from a gloomy Dickinsian suburbs of dingy interiors, looming, impersonal adults, coercive bullies, her heroes flee to take up residence in a savage and wonderful Never-Never Land. This land is frequently a woods or savanna-like. All of these locales possess an Edenic, private quality.

- Modern heroes, their adventures are complicated by embarrassment, awkwardness, genital compulsion, clumsiness.

- Heroes nonetheless, they are embarked upon a journey where they encounter as trials the strangeness of their bodies; evolving amorousness and/or self-pleasure; the compulsion of rituals; a battle with shyness and boldness before an implicit, all-present gaze (the gaze, in my mind, is a camera lens, the pose perhaps the remembered gesture of confinement during a vacation snapshot); a fight for equilibrium and fair footing within the catastrophes, excesses, self-sacrifice of desire; and the ever-present, lurking monsters of past trauma.

- Violence to the psyche is portrayed bodily (a severed head, a discombobulated anatomy).

- One suspects that the kaleidoscopes of fantasy start as nascent buds within the skin. Like leaves growing then falling from branches, these buds elaborate then self-shatter before the force and processes of the world. Responsible for these strange flowers and twirling vines, the literal crisis--its hard contours kept slightly off-frame-- is pictured in a transformed manner. The vignette is more bodily and remembered than based in the hard light of present perception.

 - Fate, the trans-formative point in stories, intervenes at moments of charged physicality, when a body seems in revolt against both environment and itself. The resulting, intimate metamorphoses convolute the flesh into endless, strange contusions and conjurations, often involving the return of spring-time or the appearance of animals. In these instances, the body can be like a disguise, an erratic shrub or sometimes a fountain.

- Otherworld Uprising (the title of Boyle's *really* good art book) is a designation which seems to refer to the condition of a literal spirit world. In the revolt, spirits, nature, body overlap one anothers' conventionally separate outlines.

- The just-below-the-surface, (half) presence of this Otherworld, its portals and rabbitholes located in bodily orifices, throws subjective turmoil and psychical discomfort in ribbons of stress against a semi-solid yet also fugitive, fleeing screen. This screen, made up of dreams and of shadows, often stands as a protective shield between two figures encountering one another, forestalling or warning off their first meeting. This outcome of these meetings is often either reconciliation/camaraderie or assault-dismemberment.

- I suspect the ectoplasm of this spirit world is made up of bodily juices.

- Poised together on a small pedestal of turf, possible murderers, potential companions, yet many times the figures stay half disinterested in one another, with the retiring tendency of shy but busily assessing, curious children.

- The contrast or collusion of gender roles (the same, different) is helpful in drawing out possible secretive meanings lodged in these frozen confrontations. Meaning plays out many ways: as fantasy fulfillment; as revenge; as appreciation and gauge of difference; as fetishistic worship; as friendship, fulfilling, joyful and intimate, but also brutal or conspiratorial; as wistful compensation; as jokey-making-fun; as critique; as ceremonial renewal; as violence. But, also, sometimes, inscrutably.

In the prolific stories of her art, Boyle seems attracted to rituals of visionary questing more usual to those swept aside, the misfits, the crackpots, the obsessive hobbyists, the shut ins (i.e. Blake, Darger). The import managed within each strange vacation slide or cameo often gives the sense of secrets within secrets, fleshed out in private and in locations of quiet, a remembrance of a remembrance (possibly dangerous), gaining not just velocity over time but also structure and a skeleton.

- Ever so often, with the kind of concentrated, slow pacing capable of affecting a shift in scene without hemorrhaging continuity or narrative sweep, Boyle's turbulent frame switches to almost-fulfillment and near-certitude in the sublime. The characters are alone, holding hands, with a planet to themselves, a planet worthy of the naturalistic raptures on the pages of a speculative edition of National Geographic. Within the context of Boyle's art, this is sublime in a heroic, personal sense, haunting one with the juxtaposition of the human with inhuman, and, in a sense, the unrepresentable landscape: Nature. It is not the sublime of the modern architect for whom the sublime is the habitat-equivalent of military shock and awe (Derived from Fredrick Jameson, the more habitual invocation of the word).

Alchemical texts from 16th, 17th and 18th Century

A very large list of links to online, firsthand texts about the subject.

Rube Goldberg's Artwork

A site dedicated to Rube Goldberg, the unlikely prophet of systems complexity.

Dodging Bill Collectors  

Rube Goldberg mistakes a lot of broken glass for bath salts and when they pull him out of the tub he mumbles an idea for dodging bill collectors As Tailor (A) fits customer (B) and calls out measurements, college boy (C) mistakes them for football signals and makes a flying tackle at clothing dummy (D). Dummy bumps head against paddle (E) causing it to pull hook (F) and throw bottle (G) on end of folding hat rack (H) which spreads and pushes head of cabbage (I) into net (J). Weight of cabbage pulls cord (K) causing shears (L) to cut string (M). Bag of sand (N) drops on scale (O) and pushes broom (P) against pail of whitewash (Q) which upsets all over you causing you to look like a marble statue and making it impossible for you to be recognized by bill collectors. Don't worry about posing as any particular historical statue because bill collectors don't know much about art.