Ars longa, vita brevis.
Joined October 2022
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Swift Gulliver retweeted
'There is a current fashion in Anglo-American criticism of the materialist and New Historicist varieties— odd mixtures of Marx and Foucault—to condemn Wordsworth for not having remained political enough, once he had given up his early support for the French Revolution. By 1797 Wordsworth had surmounted a long political and psychic crisis, and his poems ceased to urge political solutions for social distress. “The Old Cumberland Beggar,” The Ruined Cottage, “Michael,” and Wordsworth’s other poems that depict the sufferings of the English lower classes are masterpieces of compassion and profound feeling, and only shallow ideologues could reject them on political grounds. Our new breed of academic moralists should reflect upon the reception of Wordsworth’s poems by Shelley, politically the Leon Trotsky of his day, or by radicals like Hazlitt and Keats. What Shelley, Hazlitt, and Keats marvelously realized was that Wordsworth had a miraculous genius for teaching one how to feel sympathy for those in all manner of distress. If our academic commissars knew how to read, Wordsworth might humanize them, which is the great program of his poems like The Ruined Cottage.'
Harold Bloom,
The Western Canon
Swift Gulliver retweeted
“There is not in Europe any such thing as a pure race. Russians have an admixture of Tartar blood, Germans are largely Slavonic, France is a mixture of Celts, Germans, and people of Mediterranean race, Italy the same with the addition of the descendants of slaves from every corner of the Empire imported by the Romans. The English are perhaps the most mixed of all. There is no evidence that there is any advantage in belonging to a pure race. The purest races now in existence are the Pygmies, the Hottentots, and the Australian aborigines; the Tasmanians, thanks to the British, who were probably even purer are now extinct. There is a special absurdity in applying racial theories to the various populations of Europe.”
— Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays, Ch. VII: An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish
Swift Gulliver retweeted
Around 1500, Hieronymus Bosch painted sheet music on a sinner's bare butt in hell. 500 years later, someone transcribed and performed it. Now you can hear the original butt song from hell.
Swift Gulliver retweeted
The song is considered to be one of the most difficult arias ever written for a soprano. And yet she makes it look so easy, and with such power.
And she was only 17 years old when she performed it.
Swift Gulliver retweeted
Everything is just so fake and stupid, it's hard to care anymore. I feel like I died at some point 30 years ago and woke up in a hellscape purgatory of stupidity, where most people are idiot zombies and the rest of us are just tired, trapped in our phones, an escape-turned-prison.
Swift Gulliver retweeted
A Scandinavian folk tune played on a nyckelharpa—a string instrument with origins dating back to the 15th century.
The nyckelharpa is considered a symbol of Swedish folk music.
Folk artist: Myrkur
Still life with Fruit and Murano Glasses.
Oil on canvas. c. 1700-1720.
🎨 attributed to Maximilian Pfeiler or Gabriele Salci.
Swift Gulliver retweeted
Benjamin Franklin’s glass armonica used to be banned in some German towns, amid fears that its ethereal sound could cause illness or madness.
Before those bans, its sound inspired Mozart to write Adagio in C, K. 356 (K. 617a), in 1791.
Its ethereal sound later became surrounded by strange fears and legends.
Have you ever heard it? 🎵
