the-descending-blue
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Latest Posts by the-descending-blue
Egon Schiele
Portrait of the Artist’s Sister-in-Law (or Edith Schiele?) Covering Mouth with Hand
Private Collection
1917
I bought this book called A Short Treatise Inviting the Reader to Discover the Subtle Art of Go, which is a translation of a book that was written by three French guys in the 1960's who learned Goban (aka Weiqi aka Baduk) and then wanted to make it a huge phenomenon in France.
And it's hysterical.
Behold, section 0.6: Chess —
We will, over the course of this modest work, in order to better understand certain principles of the game, have occasion to speak of chess.
Please understand that it is just a crutch, imposed by the deplorable popularity of this pathetic game in France.
So it is important to let this idea sink in: GO is anti-chess.
The game of GO is not Japanese chess. There is in fact a Japanese chess that goes by the name of Shogi. Never has a GO player been known to play Shogi.
Let us here sum up everything we feel to be wrong about Chess:
1. It is a feudal game, founded upon the Exaltation of the Tournament and social inequality.
[next page]
2. It is a game whose rules change every three centuries.
3. It is a game whose antiquity is debatable (just about contemporary with Canasta!)
4. It is a game that (like Checkers!) has only three outcomes, all lacking in nuance: victory, defeat, or a tie. One can certainly win or lose, but it is impossible to win by one point, which is one of the great refinements of GO!
5. Even worse, it is not a game that breeds polite behavior.
6. Two players with different skill sets cannot play together and maintain the interest of the stronger player.
7. A chess match lasts thirty moves at the most.
8. It is an unclear game in which no two pieces do the same thing
9. We do not know how to play chess.
Woman on the stairs (1825) by Caspar David Friedrich
Vilhelm Hammershøi - Interior, Sunlight on the Floor 1906
Diego Velázquez, View of the Gardens of the Villa Medici, Rome, Ca. 1630, Museo Nacional del Prado
‘The river mist deepens. The fields are cold.
It is not your shadow alone that follows you
darkening the reeds at the edge of the pond …
Herons rise like ghosts
above the flooded fields.’
John Ash, ‘Bespalko’s Devotions’, The Branching Stairs (Manchester, 1984)
Fra Angelico (1395-1455)
genuinely insane how difficult it is to participate in your own life
“Critics, as ‘barking dogs,’ on this view, are of two sorts: those who merely relieve themselves against the flower of beauty, and those, less continent, who after-wards scratch it up. I myself, I must confess, aspire to the second of these classes; unexplained beauty arouses an air of irritation in me, a sense that this would be a good place to scratch; the reasons that make a line of verse likely to give pleasure, I believe, are like the reasons for everything else; one can reason about them; and while it may be true that the roots of beauty ought not to be violated, it seems to me very arrogant of the appreciative critic to think that he could do this, if he chose, by a little scratching.”
— william empson, seven types of ambiguity
Pyramid of needs of the week
“I have performed the necessary butchery. Here is the bleeding corpse.”
— Henry James, after a request by the Times Literary Supplement to cut three lines from a 5,000 word article (via annadevries)
- In your day the Circus ran itself by regions… each region was commanded by its own Juju man, Control sat in heaven and pulled the strings. Remember?
- It strikes a distant chord.
- Today, everything operational is under one hand. Called London Station.
- Who’s station commander?
- Bill Haydon. His number two is Roy Bland. Toby Esterhase runs between them like a poodle.
The Trees
by Philip Larkin
The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said; The recent buds relax and spread, Their greenness is a kind of grief. Is it that they are born again And we grow old? No, they die too, Their yearly trick of looking new Is written down in rings of grain. Yet still the unresting castles thresh In fullgrown thickness every May. Last year is dead, they seem to say, Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
Frank Auerbach — Head of E.O.W. (1959-1960)
Blueberries - Ingrid Smuling , 2023.
Dutch, b. 1944 -
Oil on canvas, 13 x 14 cm.
Cyril Power (British, 1872-1951), The Tube Staircase, 1929. Linocut printed in yellow, cobalt blue and black on thin oriental laid paper, block: 444 x 258 mm.; sheet: 532 x 320 mm. Numbered 30/50
'Tis the story of a girl who's devoured by an ambition to attend a dance in a pair of red shoes. She gets the shoes, goes to the dance - at first all goes well and she's very happy. At the end of the evening, she gets tired and wants to go home. But the red shoes are not tired. In fact, the red shoes are never tired. They dance her out into the streets, they dance her over the mountains and valleys, through fields and forests, through night and day. Time rushes by. Love rushes by. Life rushes by. But the red shoes dance on.
THE RED SHOES (1948) | dir. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
Why do you want to dance? Why do you want to live? Well, I don’t know exactly why, but uh… I must. That’s my answer too. THE RED SHOES (1948)
"how can you like this objectively bad thing!" because i have bad taste. move on.
“The Windhover” by Gerard Manley Hopkins
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king- dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
There are readings—of the same text—that are dutiful, readings that map and dissect, readings that hear a rustling of unheard sounds, that count grey little pronouns for pleasure or instruction and for a time do not hear golden or apples. There are personal readings, which snatch for personal meanings, I am full of love, or disgust, or fear, I scan for love, or disgust, or fear. There are—believe it—impersonal readings—where the mind’s eye sees the lines move onwards and the mind’s ear hears them sing and sing. Now and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark—readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. In these readings, a sense that the text has appeared to be wholly new, never before seen, is followed, almost immediately, by the sense that it was always there, that we the readers, knew it was always there, and have always known it was as it was, though we have now for the first time recognised, become fully cognisant of, our knowledge.
--A.S. Byatt, Possession
One of the best of the extensive genre of late 17th century anti-Dutch British pamphlets...
Not included are the various illustrations of many-headed cheese-worms, crocodiles and spiders
Balcombe viaduct West Sussex England
Peanuts (December 31, 1966) by Charles M. Schulz
have we tried writing letters back to Cicero and seeing if that does anything
C. P. Cavafy, "The City" from C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems