September 11, 2017

At the Twilight Dreams Café...



... I hope you have some peaceful thoughts at the end of the weekend's storm, on the anniversary of the whirlwind.

(The image is by Arthur Rackham, “Twilight Dreams,” 1913.)

23 comments:

tcrosse said...

Fairies ! Not there's anything wrong with that.

peacelovewoodstock said...

I think those are technically "faeries"

buwaya said...

Casting a faerie curse on humanity in 1913, soon to manifest, next summer, as WWI.

tim in vermont said...

I just watched The Girl with the Pearl Earring. Hey, Scarlett Johansen... Anyway, I think the plot must be just about the same as 50 Shades of Gray.

Big Mike said...

Rackham surely knows how to convey a sense of foreboding, does he not?

tim in vermont said...

This book tour of Hilary's is more fun than election night.

“I’m the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country,” she said. “Because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”

She says she took herself out of context and that possibly this was a mistake.

Bix Cvvv said...

Heard at a bar - **When I was your guys's age, she was my type and you weren't (the speaker is talking to a woman who is much younger than himself, and referencing another woman who was not present) but at my age any woman your age is my type. **
Martin Buber once wrote there is something to admire in almost everybody.
Heard in an elevator - **No, I don't have kids. I wouldn't mind having a few, though, like, if they were running around some village in Africa somewhere and somebody else was taking care of them. I could afford those child support payments - don't think I could afford the payments in the States.**
Heard on an airplane, the seat behind me, guy sounded a little like Rex Harrison in that movie with Liza Hepburn: **"I'll be at this wedding with all those people who speak Swedish ....(garbled, untranscribeable) ... yeah, give me a month, I can talk in Swedish, enough to communicate, two months, I can sound like a Norwegian speaking Swedish, three months, you wouldn't know I wasn't born in Stockholm. But that ain't gonna happen." **
Speaking of twilight dreams, last night I was walking in one of those suburban semi-meadow places (bigger than a vacant lot, too small to be the sort of place they turn into a park) and I saw a few moths flying around freely, enjoying life among the plants (I look for moths all the time on summer evenings, and typically see dozens every week, on walls in the garden apartments where I live, or clustering under lights) it was so much joy to see them in their element, in the darker moments when twilight is almost over, living the life of a moth with all which that means. They were fairly bright moths (green or yellowish or or bright tan or white in daylight) and it was like ti was a second seasons of fireflies, but with beautiful humble moths, flying around in the twilight, reflecting the last remnants of daylight as they flew around the plants and the dark green evening twilight foliage.

Howard said...

Wow. Rackhams portfolio makes him king of washed line drawings. He illustrated many books. This post forced me to look at NC Wyeth, Howard Pyle, Harvey Dunn, etc. The golden age of illustration.

Bix Cvvv said...

In good news, Mr Richard Posner - who I have thought for decades to be the archetype of the self-satisfied apparatchik that we just need to live with because well, that is our legal system - impressed people of good will all across the world this week with his announced motive for retiring - apparently, as I read in his interview with a paper in NYC today, he thought that his fellow judges were giving short shrift to pro se litigants and he gave them (the judges not the poor pro se litigants) an ultimatum - let mev(Judge Posner) review Every Single petition from a pro se litigant in the Entire Area of the Seventh Circuit, to see if we can do what we can not to reject it on the sort of technical grounds that the Cravath boys never worry about, or I will quit. That was a kind offer! They said no, he quit. Good for him! I take back everything bad I have ever said about him, except of course for his bigotry against unborn children - I have no right to take that back - but rarely have I been so impressed with someone I have so little respect for.

Bix Cvvv said...

typos fixed, to make it clear that a 78 year old judge volunteered to read over Every Single pro se brief in the entire Seventh Circuit, and was rejected : "let me, Judge Posner, review every single petition from a pro se litigant in the entire area of the Seventh Circuit, to see if we can do whatever it takes not to reject it on the sort of technical grounds that the Cravath Swaine and Moore clients never worry about" . Impressive stuff, which you won't read about anywhere, probably.

tim in vermont said...

Chief Strategist Steve Bannon finally said out loud what many of us already knew: that Hillary Clinton is “not very bright.”

The worst kept secret since Groucho's secret word.

Darrell said...

Wait a second, Groucho's secret word was a secret and not obvious. The show was cheap.

Churchy LaFemme: said...

If you're interested in illustration, you should get on Bud Plant's "Bud's Art Books" catalog list. Some really good stuff. I won't link it since it can't be done through the Althouse portal. (Also be aware, some of it veers into arty porn).

Churchy LaFemme: said...

Wow Len Wein has passed. He was only 69.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/11/arts/design/len-wein-influential-comic-book-writer-dies-at-69.html?mcubz=1

Wolverine, Swamp Thing and much else..

David said...

The Golden Age, when children's illustrators were unafraid of terrorizing the children.

Mr. Majestyk said...

In his NYT "exit interview," Posner is quoted as saying that "about six months ago, I awoke from a slumber of 35 years." So after adjudicating literally thousands of pro se cases over more than three decades, he finally realizes that pro se litigants aren't getting a fair shake? And rather than stay and try to,persuade his colleagues to give these people a fair shake in individual caes, he ... quits. Uh huh.

rhhardin said...

Imus reports the NYT reviews a play whose name they won't print.

If they had, there could have been a discussion about whether fucking is a gerund or an epithet.

tim in vermont said...

Wait a second, Groucho's secret word was a secret and not obvious. The show was cheap

Yeah, but everybody knew it but the one certain person who was the center of attention. At least that's how I remember the show. Maybe I am thinking of a different show.

Darrell said...

but the one certain person who was the center of attention

Yeah. The contestant trying to win money.

Professional lady said...

A poster of Rackham's "Falling Leaves" used to hang in my living room. I wonder if I still have it somewhere?

Jael (Gone Windwalking) said...

Beautiful.

Bix Cvvv said...

Mr Majestyk - i agree, that is what is so sweet about it.

Bix Cvvv said...

"sweet" is not necessarily a good word, by the way. You don't want a sweet martini and you don't want your police force - particularly the detective, but even, most of the time, the cops on the beat - to be too sweet. It is nice, though, to see a very old person - and 78 is old, the average 10 year old chihuahua is going to outlive the average 78 year old person, and 10 years old is old for a chihuahua - it is nice to see an old person realize he has been very very wrong about something very important for a very long long time. All of us will have to, one day, realize what we were wrong about, if only because God in Heaven wants us to join him there, but not without repentance for all our wrong affections and all our selfish ideas, that we coddled for too long. God bless Mr Posner. Maybe in a few weeks he will apologize for his racist pro-abortion efforts. Probably not, but maybe: God wants us all to improve as much as we can while we are still young and healthy.