Creative writing

Just thought you might like to see this

Wow....

Horn-shaped cup with dragon handle, carved from a piece of white jade. China, Han Dynasty, 200 BC - 200 AD

Henryck Górecki’s Symphony No. 3.

Górecki, a Polish composer, called his 1976 third symphony “The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs.” Each movement features a solo soprano singing texts inspired by war and separation. The second movement was composed of text is taken from the scribblings on the wall of a Gestapo cell during the Second World War.

Avdotia Ilyinichna Istomina

Avdotia Ilyinichna Istomina (1799–1848) was the most celebrated Imperial Russian ballerina of the 19th century. Orphaned at a young age, she was accepted into the Imperial Theater School. She debuted in the Imperial Russian Ballet in 1815 to immediate acclaim.

 Several people were killed dueling for her heart, and her honor was defended in the fourfold duel (1817): Count Zavadovsky killed Count Sheremetev, while the Decembrist Yakubovich shot through a palm of the playwright Alexander Griboedov.

She was the first Russian dancer en pointe. She served in the Imperial Ballet for twenty years. Istomina died of cholera on June 26, 1848 in St. Petersburg.

Lee Morgan in New York, 1971 Photo Val Wilmer

Lee Morgan (July 10, 1938 – February 19, 1972) was an American jazz trumpeter and composer. One of the key hard bop musicians of the 1960s, Morgan came to prominence in his late teens, recording on John Coltrane's Blue Train (1957) and with the band of drummer Art Blakey before launching a solo career.
Morgan stayed with Blakey until 1961 and started to record as leader soon after. His song "The Sidewinder", on the album of the same name, became a surprise crossover hit on the pop and R&B charts in 1964, while Morgan's recordings found him touching on other styles of music as his artistry matured. Soon after The Sidewinder was released, Morgan rejoined Blakey for a short period. After leaving Blakey for the final time, Morgan continued to work prolifically as both a leader and a sideman with the likes of Hank Mobley and Wayne Shorter, becoming a cornerstone of the Blue Note label.

 Morgan was killed in the early hours of February 19, 1972, at Slugs' Saloon, a jazz club in New York City's East Village where his band was performing. Following an altercation between sets, Morgan's common-law wife Helen Moore (a.k.a. Helen Morgan) shot him. The injuries were not immediately fatal, but the ambulance was slow in arriving on the scene as the city had experienced heavy snowfall that resulted in extremely difficult driving conditions. They took so long to get there that Morgan bled to death. He was 33 years old.

Thomas Müller (https://artaxis.org/thomas-muller/)

Thomas Müller is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, California. He was born in Cape Town, South Africa, and spent his childhood growing up between Africa, Europe and the United States. He went on to receive his BFA from the University of Washington and did his graduate studies at the Cranbrook Academy of Art where he earned his MFA. He is currently an Associate Professor and Chair of Art, 3D at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

A sculpture titled ‘Water Water (Abstract Glass Cooper Wall Art sculpture)’ by sculptor Paul Hardcastle.

In November of 2018, this painting sold for $92 million

Chop Suey, 1929, Edward Hopper.

In a bibliography by Gail Levin, the location of Chop Suey is described, “…the setting recalled the inexpensive, second floor Chinese restaurant the Hoppers had been frequenting in Columbus Circle”. This might explain the primary focus on the woman (possibly his wife, Jo) and the dullness of the surroundings. If it was a place Edward Hopper had frequently visited then there would be no reason to concentrate on the surroundings, but rather the moment of the scene.

 According to art scholar David Anfam, one "striking detail of Chop Suey is that its female subject faces her doppelgänger."……Others have pointed out it would not be so unusual for two women to be wearing similar hats, and that it is presumptuous to claim doppelgängers when one subject's face is not visible to the viewer.

The literary set

John F. Kennedy, Gore Vidal, and Tennessee Williams shooting clays

Hemingway in Africa

Black and white film

Photo taken by Alberto Ferreira, named “Feet before feet” on April 21, 1960.

Hapless

You know where the word “hapless” comes from? Some of it is from the old Norse work   “happ” meaning good luck and the old English word Laes meaning without.

Zephyrus is the Greek god of the west wind. The Zephyrus eventually evolved into zephyr, a word for a breeze that is westerly or gentle, or both.

Four amazing astronomical discoveries from ancient Greece

Attic white-ground lekythos depicting a fallow deer.  Artist unknown; ca. 540-525 BCE.  Found at the ancient city of Ialysos, Rhodes;

The Histories by Herodotus (484BC to 425BC) offers a remarkable window into the world as it was known to the ancient Greeks in the mid fifth century BC. Almost as interesting as what they knew, however, is what they did not know. This sets the baseline for the remarkable advances in their understanding over the next few centuries – simply relying on what they could observe with their own eyes.

Herodotus claimed that Africa was surrounded almost entirely by sea. How did he know this? He recounts the story of Phoenician sailors who were dispatched by King Neco II of Egypt (about 600BC), to sail around continental Africa, in a clockwise fashion, starting in the Red Sea. This story, if true, recounts the earliest known circumnavigation of Africa, but also contains an interesting insight into the astronomical knowledge of the ancient world.

The voyage took several years. Having rounded the southern tip of Africa, and following a westerly course, the sailors observed the Sun as being on their right hand side, above the northern horizon. This observation simply did not make sense at the time because they didn’t yet know that the Earth has a spherical shape, and that there is a southern hemisphere.

1. The planets orbit the Sun

A few centuries later, there had been a lot of progress. Aristarchus of Samos (310BC to 230BC) argued that the Sun was the “central fire” of the cosmos and he placed all of the then known planets in their correct order of distance around it. This is the earliest known heliocentric theory of the solar system.

Unfortunately, the original text in which he makes this argument has been lost to history, so we cannot know for certain how he worked it out. Aristarchus knew the Sun was much bigger than the Earth or the Moon, and he may have surmised that it should therefore have the central position in the solar system.

Nevertheless it is a jawdropping finding, especially when you consider that it wasn’t rediscovered until the 16th century, by Nicolaus Copernicus, who even acknowledged Aristarchus during the development of his own work.

2. The size of the Moon

One of Aristarchus’ books that did survive is about the sizes and distances of the Sun and Moon. In this remarkable treatise, Aristarchus laid out the earliest known attempted calculations of the relative sizes and distances to the Sun and Moon.

It had long been observed that the Sun and Moon appeared to be of the same apparent size in the sky, and that the Sun was further away. They realised this from solar eclipses, caused by the Moon passing in front of the Sun at a certain distance from Earth.

Also, at the instant when the Moon is at first or third quarter, Aristarchus reasoned that the Sun, Earth, and Moon would form a right-angled triangle.

As Pythagoras had determined how the lengths of triangle’s sides were related a couple of centuries earlier, Aristarchus used the triangle to estimate that the distance to the Sun was between 18 and 20 times the distance to the Moon. He also estimated that the size of the Moon was approximately one-third that of Earth, based on careful timing of lunar eclipses.

While his estimated distance to the Sun was too low (the actual ratio is 390), on account of the lack of telescopic precision available at the time, the value for the ratio of the size of the Earth to the Moon is surprisingly accurate (the Moon has a diameter 0.27 times that of Earth).

Today, we know the size and distance to the moon accurately by a variety of means, including precise telescopes, radar observations and laser reflectors left on the surface by Apollo astronauts.

3. The Earth’s circumference

Eratosthenes (276BC to 195 BC) was chief librarian at the Great Library of Alexandria, and a keen experimentalist. Among his many achievements was the earliest known calculation of the circumference of the Earth. Pythagoras is generally regarded as the earliest proponent of a spherical Earth, although apparently not its size. Eratosthenes’ famous and yet simple method relied on measuring the different lengths of shadows cast by poles stuck vertically into the ground, at midday on the summer solstice, at different latitudes.

The Sun is sufficiently far away that, wherever its rays arrive at Earth, they are effectively parallel, as had previously been shown by Aristarchus. So the difference in the shadows demonstrated how much the Earth’s surface curved. Eratosthenes used this to estimate the Earth’s circumference as approximately 40,000km. This is within a couple of percent of the actual value, as established by modern geodesy (the science of the Earth’s shape).

Later, another scientist called Posidonius (135BC to 51BC) used a slightly different method and arrived at almost exactly the same answer. Posidonius lived on the island of Rhodes for much of his life. There he observed the bright star Canopus would lie very close to the horizon. However, when in Alexandria, in Egypt, he noted Canopus would ascend to some 7.5 degrees above the horizon.

Given that 7.5 degrees is 1/48th of a circle, he multiplied the distance from Rhodes to Alexandria by 48, and arrived at a value also of approximately 40,000km.

4. The first astronomical calculator

The world’s oldest surviving mechanical calculator is the Antikythera Mechanism. The amazing device was discovered in an ancient shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera in 1900.

The device is now fragmented by the passage of time, but when intact it would have appeared as a box housing dozens of finely machined bronze gear wheels. When manually rotated by a handle, the gears span dials on the exterior showing the phases of the Moon, the timing of lunar eclipses, and the positions of the five planets then known (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) at different times of the year. This even accounted for their retrograde motion – an illusionary change in the movement of planets through the sky.

We don’t know who built it, but it dates to some time between the 3rd and 1st centuries BC, and may even have been the work of Archimedes. Gearing technology with the sophistication of the Antikythera mechanism was not seen again for a thousand years.

Sadly, the vast majority of these works were lost to history and our scientific awakening was delayed by millennia. As a tool for introducing scientific measurement, the techniques of Eratosthenes are relatively easy to perform and require no special equipment, allowing those just beginning their interest in science to understand by doing, experimenting and, ultimately, following in the foot steps some of the first scientists.

One can but speculate where our civilization might be now if this ancient science had continued unabated.