Maggie's Farm

A re-post for book lovers

Book lovers (and book dealers) from New England and New York travel hundreds of miles on an annual pilgrimage to the Annual Pequot Library Book Sale, in elegant Southport, CT., on the last weekend of July. It's a gold mine of used books, arranged by categories, and the serendipitous finds can be wonderful. Two years ago I found the complete Pepys diaries. 

Their 120,000 books on sale come from estates, donations, and especially from other libraries. The money raised helps support the Pequot Library.

It goes on for 5 days beginning Friday, and prices go down each day, and everything is free on the last day. However, the place gets raked over carefully, so Saturday is maybe the best day to go. In a way, I hate to let more people know about this event, but it's my duty as a blogger.

Another piece from the show at MOMA. This is by Brazilian Beatriz Milhazes, called Eggplants. I was certain that I had the camera level.

Here. h/t, Viking. A sample:

Made it to the MOMA "What is painting?" show yesterday. Their new building is excellent. As usual, the place was packed.

Do I love Modern Art? I dunno - I just like to look at stuff and to think about it.

I learned that "painting" is anything man-made (or man-altered), based on a flat surface which engages the eye when you stand and look at it. I could have thought of that, but it seems overly-broad: would not that definition apply to a Men's Room sign, when one is in need of one?

Anyway, it's a very eclectic show, with the predictable and silly all-white canvas which makes you wish you had a magic marker in your pocket. I liked this very large piece by George Baselitz, "Woodsmen."

We're in love! Let's drink!

A country song by Rodney Carrington. Not OK for work, but cute - not porn. "If you love your country, then show them to me..."  It's a guy thing - some might say a bit adolescent. (h/t, Ace)

The music video, with many bare chests, here. 

Ships can weather far worse storms than this, but it's unusual to have a helo taking film at the same time. This is the cruise ship Voyager in cyclone Valentina in the Med on Valentine's Day, 2005. Not very romantic. (h/t, And rightly So)

Asians and Westerners literally see the world differently. From a piece at Live Science:

Nisbett illustrated this with a test asking Japanese and Americans to look at pictures of underwater scenes and report what they saw.

The Americans would go straight for the brightest or most rapidly moving object, he said, such as three trout swimming. The Japanese were more likely to say they saw a stream, the water was green, there were rocks on the bottom and then mention the fish.

The Japanese gave 60 percent more information on the background and twice as much about the relationship between background and foreground objects as Americans, Nisbett said.

This 62' 1926 Elco yacht is powered by twin diesels and, to my mind, is one handsome craft. Regular readers know that I am fond of the Elco tradition, partly because my Gramps owned the Elco dealership for New England. This one is for sale.

How to hide from the wife when she wants you to do something around the place, while catching a few Zs. A good year-round use for your camo.

This bit came in over the transom:

The New York City Public Schools have officially declared "Jewish English", now dubbed "Hebronics", as a second language. Backers of the move say the city schools are the first in the nation to recognize Hebronics as a valid language and a significant attribute of American culture.

According to Howard Ashland, linguistics professor at Brooklyn College and renowned Hebronics scholar, the sentence structure of Hebronics derives from middle and eastern European language patterns as they evolved into Yiddish.

Professor Shulman explains, "In Hebronics, the response to any question is usually another question with a complaint that is either implied or stated. Thus 'How are you?' may be answered, 'How should I be, with my bad feet?'

Shulman says that Hebronics is a superb linguistic vehicle for expressing sarcasm or skepticism. An example is the repetition of a word with "sh" or "shm" at the beginning: "Mountains, shmountains. Stay away. You should want a nosebleed?"

Another Hebronics pattern is moving the subject of a sentence to the end, with its pronoun at the beginning: "It's beautiful, that dress."

Shulman says one also sees the Hebronics verb moved to the end of the sentence. Thus the response to a remark such as "He's slow as a turtle," could be: "Turtle, shmurtle! Like a fly in Vaseline he walks."

Shulman provided the following examples from his best-selling textbook, Switched-On Hebronics:
Question: "What time is it?"
English answer: "Sorry, I don't know."
Hebronic response: "What am I, a clock?"

Remark: "I hope things turn out okay."
English answer: "Thanks."
Hebronic response: "I should be so lucky!"

Remark: "Hurry up. Dinner's ready."
English answer: "Be right there."
Hebronic response: "Alright already, I'm coming. What's with the 'hurry' business? Is there a fire?"

More examples on continuation page -

You are an artist. You buy the paint, then what? A piece by Daniel Kunitz in the NY Sun about a new show at the MOMA titled "What is Painting?" - a quote:

Once upon a time, we knew what painting was. As recently as the 1960s, there was, if not a single consensus, then at least several broad and overlapping consensuses about what constituted a painting: It was two-dimensional and used pigments on some type of support, like a canvas; it was abstract, or it was representational; it was defined by its medium and sought to exclude the influence of all others, or it was defined by how prettily or truthfully it employed its medium, etc.

The delightful proposition of "What Is Painting?" — a broad survey of art from the 1960s to today, drawn from the Museum of Modern Art's contemporary collection — is that we have utterly lost our way: We no longer have any idea what painting is, and we are much better for it. Loosely chronological and with an equally relaxed thematic structure, the show makes its argument largely through the variety and quality of the work on view.

Read the whole thing. 

Image: A 1969 painting by William T. Williams in the MOMA's show, from the NY Sun article. 

Many remain blithely unaware, and many remain in denial and therefore unconcerned, despite sightings around the world. Story here. (h/t, Tim Blair). Rumors that Dick Cheney is behind all of this cannot be confirmed as yet, but Congressional hearings will surely be scheduled soon, with a flurry of subpoenas for the White House.

But I suspect that this may be the result of an experiment-gone-wild, performed by the crazed biologists at Ducks Unlimited.

Drove down to JFK on Saturday to put the youngest pup on a plane to spend a while in Barcelona to soak up some Spanish history, literature and culcha. Yes, and to perfect her Spanish too.

For me, the highest points of Spanish culture are El Greco and Cervantes - but probably not the astonishing Gaudi. Words like "ugly," "strange," and "hallucinogenic" do not do justice to how interesting his buildings are to look at, though.

Here are some Gaudi buildings.

Photo is Gaudi's Casa Batllo in Barcelona.