snub nose golden monkey

Europeans first saw this far-fetched monkey in paintings and porcelains. But he looked so fanciful with his red hair-do and blueish stage make-up face, and no one had ever seen a real live actual one, so everyone assumed he was just a figment of Chineses imagination. 

Until, that is, he was "discovered" (well, he knew he was there all along, of course, but anyway) by 19th century French missionary and naturalist in China, Pere Armand David. He's also interesting. He went about in disguise. (See before and after pictures, below.) 

I'm not being rude but is it just me--or can you still tell it's him?

via interesting article 

(on what it means to discover a species--some say it's imperialist but couldn't it also be heroic...)

via NYT

 

 

Wither into the truth: creating in old age

photo of an old writer: Leo Tolstoy
via NYT

Some artists keep on working late in life--and get better with age.

Others peak early and then fizzle out. 

Brooke Allen in the NYT writes, "Creative artists who continue to work late in life so often seem to undergo a sea change: a distillation, a new intensity, a sloughing off of excess and ornament in favor of deep essentials."

Who wouldn't want to be like fine wine and cheese and age well? Plus I'm very keen on this "sloughing off."

"Though leaves are many, the root is one;

Through all the lying days of my youth

I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;

Now I may wither into the truth."

W B Yeats

grateful for the moon

Scale from Brad Goodspeed on Vimeo.

brilliant super bowl "The Force" commercial

Igloo library

via PW
via Barbara O'Connor

lost in snow and books

snow plea

Spencer Ainsley/The Journal

via NYT

(I love the snow but I don't say it too much out loud as I get stern lectures on the cost of clearing it and how we can't afford it)

let it dough...

via

Abstract City Blog

Niemann's clever baking blog

LOVE baking

LOVE Niemann's stuff

very clever (check out the entire thing: Abstract City Blog )

diaries and journals and notebooks...

There's this cool exhibition on: The Diary: Three Centuries of Private Lives. (At the Morgan Library til May 22). The journals and notebooks and diaries of famous and not so famous people.

Diaries and Journals. Do you keep them? I used to when I was writing frightful moaning poems in my teens and twenties but no more. (Thank Heaven.)

Some write to escape their lives (Charlotte Bronte in her tiny writing), some to record their lives, some to hide their lives and keep secrets (Sophia Peabody Hawthorne blacked bits out), some to jot down equations and calculations in theirs (I know I do... no no I don't... that would be Einstein's 1922 travel diary) and there are some like Steinbeck who say:

"I have tried to keep diaries before, but they didn't work out because of the necessity to be honest."

That's the paradox. It's like twittering and blogs. Is it all too self-conscious to be honest? too edited? not nearly as spontaneous as they pretend?

But it's the physical book people write in as much as what's inside that I find fascinating. Must tap into the writer's (or at least this writer's and several of the writer friends I know) search for the perfect notebook. Like take a look at Queen Victoria's fancy gold embossed Journal of her Highland expeditions. Or Thoreau's journals along with his special family pencils.

I definitely want to go to the exhibition. Apparently there's even an Renaissance iPad (a diary with secret ink technique for an erasable function!).

via NYT