Monthly Archives: October 2022

Master of the Short

16 October 2022 By in Books Fiction, Short Stories Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

The Tales of Guy de Maupassant

By Guy de Maupassant

Translations by Lafcadio Hearn and others

Published by The Easton Press

Copyright: © 1977

Guy de Maupassant was a man of stories, a writer with few equals, and he shared his talent with the world: voluminously and consummately.

His passion was the short story, writing 300 beautifully succinct stories of love and hate, mirth and war, drama and satire, a fertile mind cataloguing an earthly no-frills style of life, a life of intensity and expanse with little or no satisfaction. He wrote an astounding 295 of his short stories in the last 11 years of his abbreviated life of 43 years. His pen brought him wealth and fame, but life brought him a wordless ending of pain and madness.

The female form was likely his only happiness, stating, “The essence of life is the smile of round female bottoms, under the shadow of cosmic boredom.” adding, ” Love always has its price, come whence it may.” Death haunted him, commenting, “The past attracts me, the present frightens me, because the future is death.” followed with an epitaph, which he wrote: “I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing.” A very heavy price to pay for talents that came from God.

Bourgeois Realism

11 October 2022 By in Art, Books Nonfiction, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The Impressionists: Their Lives and Work in 350 Images

By Robert Katz and Celestine Dars

Published by Lorenz Books

Copyright: © 2016

A small coterie of Parisian painters, less than a dozen, mostly French, mostly young and middle class, disillusioned with the elite’s adherence to Neoclassicalism and Romantism, began to experiment in the latter half of 19th century with bold colors and light, loose, broad brushwork and forms, simple, pleasing scenes of everyday life and contentment, landscapes painted in the open air: en plein air, painting what their eyes saw, and their hearts felt. Their style came to be known as Impressionism, a term lifted by an art critic who intended censure and derision from Monet’s painting: ‘Impression, Sunrise’ (shown above right). Impressionism, initially disregarded and rejected by the critics and the public, became the solid foundation for all painting to come; Post-Impressionism, Art Noveau, Cubism, and onto what is today casually labeled modern or contemporary art.

As Impressionism birthed the future of painting in the west, the Realists: Millet, Corot, Corbet, and others created the base for Degas, Manet, Monet to which they added something fresh and enjoyable. Realists painted the world as they perceived it: poor, laboring, dismal, dystopian. The Impressionists kept the Realists’ stage, the world as it is, but added cheerfulness and peace by experimenting with light and form.

Monet’s genre masterpiece, ‘Woman with a Parasol-Madame Monet and Her Son (shown above left), captures his wife and son in a leisurely stroll around a blustery Argenteuil, a suburb of Paris, in 1875. The woman and son are looking down on the painter with her umbrella blocking out the sun creating an impression of light dancing through the clouds and sky, imparting a stark contrast for the shadows below moving across the grass and flowers. The woman’s vail and dress ripples across her face and body in tune with the breeze. The boy is in the background giving the painting an added sense of depth. The detail of the painting (above right) shows the broad brushstrokes, bold colors and contrasts that came to characterize Impressionistic art.

‘The Impressionist’ brings form and substance to the lives of six of the greatest artists of the genre: Pissarro, Manet, Degas, Monet, Renoir, and Sisley, who gave birth to something new.

The Stoic

9 October 2022 By in Books Fiction, Novel Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Decline and Fall

By Evelyn Waugh

Published by Everyman’s Library

Copyright: © 1993

Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh was selected by Time magazine, in 2016, as 97th most read female writer on college campuses. Number 1 is a non-fiction manual on writing, well, non-fiction. So much for layers and layers of fact checkers and editors not to mention the gross ineptitude of today’s journalists. Waugh’s fifth novel ‘Scoop‘, a farcical and possibly autobiographical look at newsrooms and their paid occupants, should be required reading for our exalted modern journalists if for no other reason than to familiarize themselves with one of the 20th century’s best writers–and humor. The less than flattering reviews by journalists of the book ‘Scoop’ suggests that as a profession, journalists are incapable of recognizing or appreciating sarcasm and irony, much in a similar vein of reasoning that has reporters fact checking the Babylon Bee or the Onion.

Leaving the critique of Time magazine’s prowess to others, Evelyn Waugh authored 13 novels or 10 novels and 1 trilogy from 1928 through 1961 plus numerous short stories, letters, travel logs, essays, articles, reviews, diaries and an autobiography. By the numbers a productive life of writing, which after publication of the novel ‘Brideshead Revisited‘ also made him a wealthy man.

Waugh’s ‘Decline and Fall’ is also a partially autobiographical farce chasing early 20th century English society down the rabbit hole with relish and ridicule. For some reason Waugh had to tell his readers that the book was meant to be funny, and it is, very. Maybe journalists are not the only ones having difficulty with recognizing humor.

Paul Pennyfeather, ‘Decline and Fall’s’ luckless, not really a hero, protagonist, plays it straight for a large cast of stooges, miscreants, and demented characters bent on bringing him down to their level, whether deliberately is not necessarily pertinent to this story. Philbrick, a butler, living more biographies in his head than a school library. Mr. Grimes, a peg-legged opportunist taking the profession of teaching to lengths not attainable by those who went before him. Pendergast, synonymous with a bad toupee, finds his doubts about scripture inimical with his chosen profession as man of the cloth. Pennyfeather joins them all, without censure, in their world much below where he would rather be.

Explorations 10: The Lemon Song

5 October 2022 By in Climate, Weather Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

It’s hurricane season but fortunately it’s winding down just to give way to the equally dreadful artic blasts of winter. During the summer season of excess wind, one’s thoughts, for the curious anyway, inevitably lead to queries, theories, or low proof opinions attempting to understand the causality, if any, between the frequency and strength of hurricanes with climate change or global warming. These are perfectly sensible and logical thoughts along with the subsequent questions, such as: Are hurricanes increasing in frequency due to climate change? Are hurricanes increasing in strength due to climate change?

These are valid questions, but likely a more germane question, or three, may be: If climate change is occurring what would the expected outcome be for the frequency and strength of hurricanes? Increasing? Decreasing? Something else? Are human gas inputs into the planet’s atmosphere causally linked to its energy budget? What methods and processes would one employ to answer these questions?

If you thought, I was going to attempt to answer the questions posed above you would certainly be wrong. I do not have the training or knowledge to provide even a precursory opinion, much less a tested and critiqued theory, but I do know how to analyze data and dagnabit I’m going to do just that.

The data used in the analysis below comes from NOAA for the years 1851 through 2021. The data are for hurricane strength only storms, category 1-5, that made landfall over the Atlantic Basin lower 48 states: specifically, the coastal states from Texas to Maine. Excluded from the analysis are all the named Atlantic Basin storms that formed but did not make landfall. Satellites, beginning in the 1960s, are able to observe and track all hurricanes whether they make landfall or not. The satellites have detected considerably more hurricanes developing in the Atlantic Basin than past data, based on storm landfall, suggested. There is a strong link between the recent increase in hurricane strength and frequency due increased observational capabilities rather than anthropogenic origins contributing to climate change.

The graph above plots wind speed in mph versus year of formation for Atlantic Basin hurricanes making landfall along the lower US 48. Years with no hurricanes making landfall are excluded but they account for about 20% of the analyzed interval. The basic analysis of the data shows that for the chosen years, 1851-2021, the average hurricane at landfall is a category 2 storm with an average speed of 100 mph. The trend line shows that the strength of landfall hurricanes has not appreciable changed over the last 170 years: slope of the trend line is 0.0077 or among friends can be taken as 0.

The graph above is the same as the first one shown except, I have attempted to account for the years with no hurricanes making landfall. I accounted for the years of no landfall by setting those data points to 0 mph. I am not comfortable with this approach but ignoring 20% of the data isn’t correct either. The analysis of the data is not significantly different from the previous graph. The average hurricane speed at landfall has decreased to 91 mph from 100 before with the average category being 2. 91 mph is a category 1 hurricane so the average category should be 1 but this is just a rounding up error. Slope of the trend line is again near 0.

The frequency of landfall hurricanes also shows little variation over time. The average number of hurricanes is 1.86 per year with the maximum number of 11 hurricanes occurring in 1917. The gaps in the x-axis are the years with no hurricanes.

The NOAA hurricane data presents a picture of little to no variation in hurricane strength or frequency from 1851-2021. What this says about climate change or global warmer is indeterminant. The question asked above about what changes are expected in hurricane frequency and strength if climate change is occurring needs answering before hurricane variability can be linked to it as a known outcome or consequence.

The Other Michelangelo

4 October 2022 By in Art, Books Nonfiction, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Caravaggio: The Complete Works

By Sebastian Schutze

Published by TASCHEN

Copyright: © 2015

The other Michelangelo, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, was born almost 100 years after the Michelangelo of Florence and Sistine Chaple fame, in the northern Italian city of Milian, at the time a part of the Spanish Empire; coming of age as a painter in the dying days of the Renaissance art period and the birth of Baroque, developing and leading a style with an increased attention to detail, lighting, and volume not so much in contrast, but in addition to the scientific realism of the previous 200 years.

Caravaggio took the Baroque art beyond the biblical themes of the Renaissance while retaining the humanism, maintaining naturalism but with detail likely unavailable to painters before him, improving on perspective and volume through the use of light and dark: Chiaroscuro, and giving the subjects an emotional bearing that communicates to the viewer a deportment not obtainable to the first Michelangelo.

The book cover, Judith beheading Holofernes, detail above with full painting shown below, depicts Judith looking down and to the viewers left with a look, according to some, of revulsion and disgust, but my interpretation is one of apathy and possibly puzzlement, as noted by the slight creases between the eyebrows and the bridge of the nose and the minor squint of the eyes. Panning out may add an unquestioning repugnance to the painting but not to Judith’s countenance, it remains one of bemusement, a ‘is this all there is’ to vanquishing one’s enemy, while an old woman looks over Judith’s shoulder concurring, not seeing the gore of the moment but the moral of the act and feeling ‘Good, it is done’. The detail may be there, but the viewers interpretation is still required.

Caravaggio, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Boo in the Night

2 October 2022 By in Books Fiction, Short Stories Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Ghosts: A Treasury of Chilling Tales Old and New

Edited By Marvin Kaye

Published by Borders Classics

Copyright: © 2005

A ghostly collection of 53 short stories of the supernatural by authors known and unknown, many memorable, a few best forgotten, the frightening mingled with the ridiculous, overall, a compilation worthy of nighttime reading and bedtime frights.

This selection of stories mainly spans from the 1850s through the 1980s, with the big gun authors of Dickens, Wilde, Irving, Asimov, and Collins providing the most entertaining accounts of ghosts and their distressed victims. Dickens supplies the best punch line ending – ever in the ‘The Tale of Bagman’s Uncle”. Wilde’s ‘The Canterville Ghost” keeps it on the light side with a ghost slowly losing his mojo. Washington Irving’s contribution is from one of his lesser known, but delicious tales: ‘The Tale of the German Student’, a cautionary story for the good Samaritan. ‘Legal Rites’ is a tongue in check, but altogether a very original story by the sci-fi master Isaac Asimov featuring a ghost deciding that an imaginative lawyer trumps a milquetoast haunting.

There is more in this book of short stories, much more with plenty of authors that you have known since your younger years and a few that will turn out to be new friends in the future. The tales are all fun and short enough to read to go to sleep by. Sweet dreams.

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