Michael Flynn's Blog, page 32

A Misspent Youth

The Tears of OctoberTOF is pleased to announced that his archeological trollings in kept treasures have revealed that he too once committed poetry in his storied youth.  Is there no crime of which the college student is innocent? 

Yes.  For as feckless as he once was the TOF-that-was never inflicted these hapless poems on a wider audience.  TOF will drop them on the unsuspecting public one at a time, much like the Chinese water torture, until the victims cry out NO MORE!!!

TOF have not laid eyes on these gems for many decades.  Let's see how they run.  There are, apparently, two 'collections'.  The Tears of October and Mythologies.  Join us now as TOF returns to the errors of his youth. 
Read with caution »

Quotes of the Day

A Potpourri of QuotesWhile clearing out a storage locker, TOF found a box full of (wait for it) overhead transparencies.  Whoa.  These were various quotes used for humorous effect during training classes, in the days before PowerPoint forced us all into the predetermined sequentialism of the e-equivalent of the 35 mm slide show.

TOF will share this accumulated wisdom and then discard the acetates.
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The Wonderful World of Statistics
"If I had only one day left to live, I would live it in my statistics class.  It would seem so much longer."  -- Anonymous.

More Quotes

The Passing of the Modern Ages

Art and ArtistryA correspondent with the insufficiently envoweled name of roystgnr has commented on TOF's post "Observation on the State of Modern Art"

I vaguely recall modern art enthusiasts once *bragging* about a double-blind study in which art students preferred modern artists' work over children's and chimps' a whopping *two thirds* of the time. Pathetic.

Or was that sympathetic? You do have to feel for visual artists in the post-photography age. Now that the mere real is more easily captured by kids with camera phones than by professional painters, apparently the only contributions remaining for the artist to make lie in the surreal... so isn't it tempting to give up on enhancing realistic images entirely and just focus on abstract composition?

This prompts TOF into an unaccustomed (cough cough) philosophical mood. 

The intellect is perfected in two ways, scientia and ars, or "science" and "art" in modern parlance.  Science was in the original sense of knowledge; and art was the application of that knowledge to something practical.  In brief: "know" and "know how."  Physicians and engineers, indeed any menial who worked with his hands, were therefore counted as artists. 

The original term was "artisan." 

"Artists in the sense that we understand and use the word, meaning practitioner of fine art, didn't exist in Leonardo's time it would be more appropriate to use the word artisan in its meaning of craftsman or skilled hand worker."

Irrational musings continue here »

Notes from the Untergang

An observation on the state of modern art

I Dare Not Contradict Them

Reviews of "The Journeyman" and Captive Dreams. 

Movies You Would Pay to See

or not

Now available

BooksWhile cleaning out the storage locker, TOF located and retrieved several boxes of books and shlepped them home, where they now occupy the best part of two racks of shelving.  The thought occurred that these could be made available to Faithful Reader for a modest donation.  Therefore, TOF proposes the Great Housecleaning Challenge!

Send me a check made out to Our Lady of Mercy Church in Easton PA plus postage and address for shipping your selected book, and TOF promises in return at least some small pittance of reading pleasure in return.

All copies will be autographed unless you prefer otherwise.  
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Con Report

TOF at Chicon 7TOF attended Chicon 7, the World Science Fiction Convention and both he and the convention escaped unharmed.

TOF has always liked Chicago as a city.  It is the one major city that most resembles New York, that has that old 1930s/40s feel to it.  He also likes the three-layer streets, which have a SF feel to them.  Why not have all the trucks move on the lower level streets and the passenger cars on the higher level?  Indeed, why not indeed rent the same square footage three times?  The city scape is also more interesting.  In the New Cities, the skyscrapers are all glass boxes with not much of interest to them; but Chicago has skyscrapers from the first time skyscrapers were bespoken, and they have architectural interest in their facades and roofs.  They were built in a day when craftsmen included details that the street level could not see.
 
Con report below the cut »

Notes from the Untergang

The Lost Tools of Learning from "The Lost Tools of Learning," by Dorothy Sayers:

"Before you dismiss me with the appropriate phrase--reactionary, romantic, mediaevalist, laudator temporis acti, or whatever tag comes first to hand--I will ask you to consider one or two miscellaneous questions that hang about at the back, perhaps, of all our minds, and occasionally pop out to worry us...

"Have you ever, in listening to a debate among adult and presumably responsible people, been fretted by the extraordinary inability of the average debater to speak to the question, or to meet and refute the arguments of speakers on the other side? Or have you ever pondered upon the extremely high incidence of irrelevant matter which crops up at committee meetings, and upon the very great rarity of persons capable of acting as chairmen of committees? And when you think of this, and think that most of our public affairs are settled by debates and committees, have you ever felt a certain sinking of the heart?

Read more »

Captive Dreams

Amazon.com sez they have only 18 copies left in stock.  I assume that does not apply to the Kindle version.  But if you want one in your hot little hand, act soon.