1883 Travels in Palestine

TEMPLE, SIR RICHARD Palestine Illustrated
London, W.H. Allen & Co, 1888,
A description of the author's 1883 travels in Palestine with reproductions of his thirty-two oil studies of the Holy Land

The Artist who Slept with His Sister in Ein Hod???!!!

Two years ago I was invited to view a collection of contemporary art in the home of a prominent Belgian collector. Knowing of my interest in the work of Marcel Duchamp, he showed me one or two items by the artist in his collection. We then went off to dinner, where we were joined by his son, a young man who had just begun his own collection of contemporary art. When I was introduced as an expert on Marcel Duchamp, the son thought for a moment and then asked: "Isn't he the artist who slept with his sister?"

Art in America, Jan, 1998 by Francis M. Naumann

Arturo Schwarz is a Egyptian-born poet, anarchist and former Trotskyist who has resided in Milan since the 1940's. In addition to numerous works on alchemy and cabala, he is also the author of The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp , a two-volume catalogue raisonée that was originally published in 1967 and reissued in an 18-pound third edition at the end of 1997. Unlike most of the Duchamp scholars working today, Mr. Schwarz actually knew the artist, who died in 1968, and claims to have gotten the artist to approve the final text of the book and correct the proofs. What's more, he maintains that Duchamp and André Breton, the father of surrealism, were aware of his central thesis about the artist's main work, The Large Glass -that it was the result of Duchamp's unconscious incestuous desire for his sister, Suzanne.
Whether Duchamp harbored any such desire will probably never be known, since the artist did not write about it and spoke about it to no one except Mr. Schwarz, according to the author. What is clear from the letters column of the January issue of Art in America is that Mr. Schwarz will probably go to his grave defending his theory. In a heated, lengthy response to a review of The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp that appeared in the January 1998 issue of the magazine, Mr. Schwarz takes apart reviewer Francis Naumann, a New York-based critic and expert on Dada who was a protégé of Mr. Schwarz until they had a falling out in 1991, a fact that was never mentioned in Mr. Naumann's review.
Mr. Naumann's review disputes Mr. Schwarz's unconscious incest theory. Mr. Naumann cites sources who maintain that Duchamp was not aware of Mr. Schwarz's theory and never approved of the text of The Complete Works . He says that Duchamp slept through the lecture in London at which Mr. Schwarz introduced his theory.(read more...)

Hebrew Alphabet for Deaf - Mutes

Allison Coudert points out in her book The Impact of the Kabbalah in the Seventeenth Century: The Life and Thought of Francis Mercury van Helmont that van Helmont believed that the mystical powers of Hebrew letters could ultimately:
...reveal answers to every single question exercising the human mind about God and the universe.
The full title of van Helmont's book translated into English reads as follows, 'A Most Compendious and truly Natural Draught of the Hebrew Alphabet, which at the same time furnishes a method whereby those who are born deaf may be so informed that they may not only understand others speaking but also may themselves arrive at the use of speech'.
It was not, as the title might suggest, a clinical treatise but a philosophical work arguing that Hebrew was the divine language of creation in which words exactly expressed the essential natures of things. Van Helmont contended that while time and ignorance had led to the corruption of Hebrew he had rediscovered its original form. He expected great things from this, believing it would bring an end to the religious controversies which had precipitated the Reformation and embittered its aftermath. He envisioned a natural Hebrew alphabet by which men would live in religious peace and social harmony.By showing that deaf mutes could easily learn to speak Hebrew, van Helmont thought that he could demonstrate the two premises on which his theory of the natural alphabet was based: first, that there were such things as innate ideas; they had only to be activated to come into conciousness. And second, that Hebrew language perfectly represented these innate ideas.
'Kurtzer Entwurff des Eigentlichen Natur-Alphabets' [at HAB], by Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont (Hellmont).
(Via http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/)

Stop Complaining!

The oldest shaped bricks found date back to 7,500 B.C. They have been found in Çayönü, a place located in the upper Tigris area, and in south east Anatolia close to Diyarbakir. Other more recent findings, dated between 7,000 and 6,395 B.C., come from Jericho and Catal Hüyük. From archaeological evidence, the inven­tion of the fired brick (as opposed to the consid­erably earlier sun-dried mud brick) is believed to have arisen in about the third millennium BC in the Middle East. Being much more resistant to cold and moist weather conditions, brick enabled the construction of permanent buildings in regions where the harsher climate precluded the use of mud bricks. Bricks have the added warmth benefit of slowly storing heat energy from the sun during the day and continuing to release heat for several hours after sunset.
(via The J-Walk Blog)

Oy! I almost plotzed

Bagels are clearly no longer specifically a Jewish food. At some point in the middle of the 20th century, their position from the Jewish bun to the American breakfast bread shifted. The exact moment is unclear, but one moment stands out in my mind. In 1998, when I was first filming my PBS television series, Jewish Cooking in America, Lender's, which by then had been bought and sold numerous times, was one of our sponsors. For this cooking show featuring kosher food, they sent us an underwriting spot depicting a perfectly toasted bagel with Swiss cheese and ham! Oy! I almost plotzed. To me, that moment was the ultimate assimilation of the bagel into American life.
(read more...)

Ways Too Horrible to Tell

"We know who you are, we know where you live and we could come after you in ways too horrible to tell," they wrote in a light-hearted message introducing the channel.
The five surviving Pythons – Michael Palin, Eric Idle, John Cleese, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam – decided to release their content for free in the hope of driving sales of DVDs and box sets. In return they have asked viewers not to post "driveling, mindless comments", in a dig at the quality of discussions beneath YouTube videos.
The site, which went live last week, features celebrated Python clips including Ministry of Silly Walks, Every Sperm is Sacred and the Lumberjack Song, as well as famous scenes from their film Life Of Brian. The videos have already been viewed around 500,000 times, and the channel has attracted 13,840 subscribers(for more...)

Forever is a Funny Word

There is a sign on the door of Acres of Books that says all that needs to be said: "Closed forever. Thanks for everything."
And yet on a recent afternoon when owner Jackie Smith was inside her shop at 240 Long Beach Blvd. watching a local bookseller and hired laborers packing up the last of the store's inventory, a man stood outside pounding on the door that held the sign. Jackie finally came over to see what he wanted. "Are you going to be open on Monday?" was his question. "Forever" is a hard concept to get one's mind around sometimes. "It's been sad," says Jackie, who once oversaw the kingdom of tomes that numbered in excess of a million volumes in the best of times. "Every day when I close up and go out to my car, someone from the neighborhood will see me and give me a hug and say how sorry they are to see us go," she says. "But now, at the end, I'm resigned to it and I'm thinking let's get it over with. It's time to retire."
The decision was rushed along by the city, which paid her and her husband Phil (who inherited the store from his grandfather, Bertrand Smith, who started the business in 1934) almost $3 million for the building so that redevelopment plans could proceed apace.(read more..)

Renowned sci-fi author Ray Bradbury - who penned classics such as The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheint 451 - appeared at Long Beach's most famous bookstore, Acres of Books to talk about what makes the store so great and why it should be spared. Acres of Books was sold to the city of Long Beach so that the land can be redeveloped, but Ray is having none of that. He explains his love of the store and promises to call the Mayor, also dropping words of writing wisdom along the way.

Narco Nympho in Dope Menace

While we now enjoy this exploitative genre for its campy kitsch, gloriously bad writing, and outlandish misinformation, drug paperback books were once a transgressive medium with a perversely seductive quality. Dope Menace collects together hundreds of fabulously lurid and collectible covers in color, from xenophobic turn-of-the century tomes about the opium trade to the beatnik glories of reefer smoking and William S. Burroughs’ Junkie to the spaced-out psychedelic ’60s. We mustn’t forget the gonzo paranoia brought on by Hunter S. Thompson in the ’70s, when anything was everything.
Author Stephen J. Gertz is a well-regarded authority on antiquarian books and contributor to Feral House’s Sin-A-Rama, an award-winning visual history of sleaze paperbacks from the sixties. (from Atomic Books)