Leo Piron (Belgian, 1899-1962), Paysage Hivernal Avec Moulin [Winter Landscape With Windmill]. Canvas,

Ad Reinhardt, from ‘How to Look at Art, Arts & Architecture’ (1946)

Atlas Mountains by untidy souls on Flickr.

Ita Ever (1.04.1931 - 9.08.2023).

It has been announced that the legendary Estonian actress Ita Ever has passed. She was 92 years old.

Ita Ever was a staple both on screen and on the stage in Estonia until very recently. Her perhaps most memorable role for the younger generations has always been Metsamoor in Nukitsamees (1981).

The Princess and the Trolls –The Changeling, by John Bauer, 1913.

btw, the molotov cocktail got named that by Finns who used them when fighting back against the Soviet Union’s imperialist invasion of their country, as a mocking reference to Vyacheslav Molotov’s propaganda about said invasion (“we’re not bombing them, we’re just flying in food deliveries because they’re starving!”)

so i’m not gonna stop y'all from making molotov cocktail jokes, but you’d better not turn around and post soviet apologia afterwards. respect the cocktail’s history

Wooded valley, probably Bolton Woods Lovers in a woodland clearing a pair, John Atkinson Grimshaw

A fact is what won’t go away, what we cannot not know, as Henry James remarked of the real. Yet when we bring one closer, stare at it, test our loyalty to it, it begins to shimmer with complication. Without becoming less factual, it floats off into myth. Italo Calvino’s Mr Palomar looks at the sky, his lawn, the sea, starlings, tortoises, Roman rooftops, a girl, giraffes and much else. He wants only to observe, to learn a modest lesson from creatures and things. But he can’t. There is too much to see in them, for a start. … And there is too much of himself and his culture in the world he watches anyway: the universe is littered with the signs of our needs, with mythologies.

Michael Wood

It is not possible deliberately to create ideas or to control their creation. When a difficulty stimulates the mind, suggested solutions just automatically spring into the consciousness. The variety and quality of the suggestions are functions of how well prepared our mind is by past experience and education pertinent to the particular problem. What we can do deliberately is to prepare our minds in this way, voluntarily direct our thoughts to a certain problem, hold attention on that problem and appraise the various suggestions thrown up by the subconscious mind. The intellectual element in thinking is, Dewey says, what we do with the suggestions after they arise. Other things being equal, the greater our store of knowledge, the more likely it is that significant combinations will be thrown up. Furthermore, original combinations are more likely to come into being if there is available a breadth of knowledge extending into related or even distant branches of knowledge.

- W.I.B. Beveridge