Miskatonic University Press
A quote from Michael Coveny’s Guardian obituary of Sheila Ballantine (1928–2026), who was in Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturio Ui with Leonard Rossiter and Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests , among much, much else. Ballantine was her own woman and conducted a colourful private life at her own pace, settling in a mansion flat in Belsize Park, north-west London, in the early 1960s.…
A good friend of mine reads a lot of work by British women writers from the twentieth century, especially the middle decades. I sometimes pick up books for her if I see something good in a used bookstore, and that’s how I first read D.E. Stevenson and Angela Thirkell (whom I came to detest ). Years ago I gave her a book by Phyllis Bottome, partly because it was a mid-century British woman writer…
The Sound of Thinking: A Listener’s Companion to Conceptual Music , a new book by Craig Dworkin , has a chapter “Ut Pictura Musica” about art and music that led me to some great music that is related to my Listening to Art project (now a halfway through its six-year hiatus). Links go to Bandcamp releases. Chamber Works (2020) is several works composed by Luiz Henrique Yudo and performed by…
I was interested to see Peter Rukavina note something about John Ruskin in his recent post Drawing Your Travels . He quotes in part from the book How to Travel : But, in Ruskin’s eyes, there’s one thing we should do and that is attempt to draw the interesting things we see, irrespective of whether we happen to have any talent for doing so. I think this book is the one he refers to, from the School…
Morton Feldman tells this ancedote in a conversation with John Cage titled “The Nature and Goals of Our Music,” recorded for radio in July 1966 (dated by the mention of the death of D.T. Suzuki ). It’s collected in Complete John Cage Edition 51: Radio Happenings (1966–1967) (mode289) : When I was living on 19th Street in that building with Barney Newman, who lived upstairs, I remember for about a…
A quote from Miles Davis, from a clip used in BBC Radio 4’s Great Lives episode on him . He was asked why he doesn’t revisit his old music. Those songs, to me, don’t exist. You know, we don’t have time for “Body and Soul” and “I Got Rhythm,” you know, or “So What,” or Kind of Blue . Those things are there , they were done in that era, the right hour, the right day, and it happened. It’s over, it’s…
It was a nice day in Toronto today, and I was enjoying a walk along Bloor Street West near Ossington when I saw Toronto Darts & Games . Some juggling balls in the window caught my eye and I went in. This is a fantastic store! They have juggling supplies, Rubik’s cubes, board games, card games, decks of cards, toys, puzzles (many types, including jigsaws), chess boards and clocks, backgammon sets,…
I’m reading the Accursed Kings series of historical novels ( Les Rois Maudits in your actual French) by Maurice Druon , an immensely enjoyable telling of French and English royalty (and Aquitanian, Burgundian, etc.) in the early 1300s, with adultery , murder, poisoning, revolution, blackmail, executions, forgery, Templars, witches, babies swapped at birth, an escape from the Tower of London, the…
I have a display up at the main branch of York University Libraries , where I work. It’s timed for Earth Day, and I call it Climate Crisis, Climate Action . Here’s the whole thing, which is just inside the entrance of the Scott Library in the unattractive alcove we use for displays. A view of the entire display The screen has ten slides in rotation. The PDF version of the slide deck is about 2.5…
I came across Compositor , a really wonderful site that has a huge collection of printers’ ornaments from the 1700s. Eighteenth-century books were highly decorated and decorative. Their pages were adorned with ornaments that ranged from small floral embellishments to large and intricate head- and tailpieces, depicting all manner of people, places, and things. Compositor includes ornaments cut by…
Yesterday I was at the Art Gallery of Ontario and spent a while looking at The Rose (1964) by Agnes Martin . It’s six feet a side (182.6 × 182.7 cm to be exact) and the media are listed as “oil, red and black pencil, sizing on canvas.” It’s a quiet, mysterious work, apparently very simple but full of small differences to see when looked at closely. It’s made of pencil lines, horizontal and…
This is a follow-up to Exactitude is not truth. Cold exactitude is not art. In that January post I looked at sources for a quote from Matisse that turned out to be taken from Delacroix. My excellent York University colleague Philippe Theophanidis collects quotes and those two caught his eye. (Browse around his site Aphelis and you’ll see a lot of great quotes, and much more.) He found that the…
For over two decades I hosted my web sites at Pair Networks . This site used to be static (built with Perl’s Template::Toolkit ), then it was on Drupal , then I went back to static (with Jekyll ). For a while I managed two WordPress sites. In the end I was hosting six web sites there, and managing email for a seventh. Shell access (to a FreeBSD server) gave me procmail , database access, and more.…
Cover of What's Bred in the Bone I’m rereading the Cornish Trilogy by Robertson Davies , and in What’s Bred in the Bone (1985) I was struck by something art restorer Tancred Saraceni says to Francis Cornish in early 1939: Of course, you may become something rather like a photographer. But remember what Matisse said: “L’exactitude, ce n’est pas la verite.” That’s good, but did Matisse say it? I’m…
Recently on Mastodon I saw mention of Just the Browser , a web site that supplies tools and information to “remove AI features, telemetry data reporting, sponsored content, product integrations, and other annoyances” from web browsers, so you have just the browser. It’s a great project. Instead of going into obscure browser settings and tweaking options this way or that, and then doing it all over…
Notebooks get a lot of discussion in the stationery world: check notebook at the Well-Appointed Desk or notebook reviews at the Pen Addict, or the whole Notebook Stories site.. If you’re in Toronto you could go to Take Note , Wonder Pens , Toronto Pen Shoppe or Laywine’s and you’d see products in many different sizes, bindings, and paper. Of all of them, for note pads , I like Rhodia . The Rhodia…
I installed KDE Plasma as my desktop environment on an old machine that was getting refreshed, and tried Konsave to copy my KDE configuration from my main machine. I’m not a regular Python user and I usually find it difficult to make packages and versions work, so I document what I did here. First, on my main machine (running Ubuntu and Plasma 5.27), I set up a virtual Python environment,…
This year I reread, as usual, books by Georgette Heyer, Rex Stout, P.G. Wodehouse and some other eternals. Here are some of my favourites of books new to me. First, fiction: Jonathan Coe, The Proof of My Innocence (2024): a brilliant mystery and novel. Maurice Druon, the first four books in the Accursed Kings sequence (1955–57): I saw Druon named as the second-best French historical novelist, and…
To my delight, an introduction I made for Framework Radio was used in last week’s episode: Framework #952: 2025.11.23 . Patrick McGinley, who makes the shows, did a very nice mix from this into an Aporee Maps recording by Jan Krtička . Anyone can record and submit an introduction: the rules are simple and the text is short. It’d be nice not hear men doing it every two weeks. I’ve been listening to…
I’ve had eighteen happy years in my union, the York University Faculty Association … over eighteen-and-a-half years of membership. YUFA has staff who are in a union of their own. They are now in the fifth week of a strike. This terrible situation was directly caused by the current Executive. It is hurting the staff right now, and some YUFA members, and will do permanent damage to YUFA that will…