"Big Fish":

Maybe we are about to build our way into a great union of souls and minds. Maybe that will be like being a person all together. Maybe that person will need to dream to be whole.
If that's true, I can't think of anyone better to be in charge of that dreaming than Tim Burton.
Big Fish was so full of great acting if it wasn't for Jessica Lange I wouldn't know where to start.
There wasn't a false note in it, anywhere. Including the incidental music. Billy Crudup, so perfectly nuanced and believable if I hadn't seen him in anything else I would have thought he was just a one-note playing on his looks, and Marion Cotillard going from almost jarring normality to the distilled essence of beauty. Helena Bonham Carter was bewitching, lovable, and real. Steve Buscemi's frenetic slapstick turnabout outside the bank, Deep Roy's reluctant gun hand, DeVito's naked back, Matthew McGrory every time so perfect and real, and the two poles of Albert Finney and Alison Lohman holding the entire world in balance.

St. Sebastian (detail)
Pietro Vanucci
Illuminated Manuscripts
British Library
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Judas
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Tree of Life
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Tree of Vices
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Isaiah and The Tree of Jesse
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bees, the perindens tree, a serpent and a dragon
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a knight killing a griffin
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Gawain and the beheaded Green Knight at Arthur's court
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a giant knight

Philip Pullman interview at Third Way

PP: And this, incidentally, is one of my quarrels with Lewis: the children in the Narnia books who have gone through all these experiences aren't allowed to stay in the world and make it better for other people - they're whisked off to heaven. That's not a Christian attitude.
I: They spent quite a long time in Narnia, didn't they, as kings and queens, bringing peace and justice?
PP: Not in this world. They're still children. They're off on holiday with their parents and they're all killed in a train crash. That's grotesque.
I: Maybe it's an artistic flaw?
PP: It's a bloody great big one.
I: It seems to satisfy a lot of people.
PP: It disgusted me when I read it.
Lewis is a contradictory sort of character for me. I loathe the Narnia books, and I loathe the so-called space trilogy, because they contain an ugly vision. But when he was talking about writing for children, and about literature in general, Lewis was very, very acute and said some very perceptive and wise things.

Pages from the Illuminated Manuscripts collection
at the British Library
(images with magnifier/+ cursor will expand on left click)

The creation of animals, by God
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King Laomedon of Troy confonts the Argonauts
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The green lion devours the sun
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Beatus
King David harping (Beatus detail)
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St. Jerome (what's in those bottles?)
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St Mark
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David in Penitence
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Angel calling birds; beast and false prophet cast into the pit
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Blinding of Tobit, and Tobias entering the house with Raphael
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St Francis preaches to the birds
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Solomon and Rehoboam, and the Judgement of Solomon
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Dedication of Samuel
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Samson carrying away the gates of Gaza
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Sleeping couple
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January detail
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Vainglory
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Gluttony
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God creates a soul
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Antichrist
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Opening marking the beginning of the Gradual Psalms from the Book of Hours of Laudomia de' Medici
(Stunning pages)
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Virgin and Child
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Pentecost
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Execution of Amerigot Marcel
detail 1, detail 2, detail 3
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Charles VI and the Emperor Wenceslas
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Knights and Ladies riding to London tournament 1472-3
detail
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Musical grotesques
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The Fool
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Psalm 52
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yo
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The creation of the animals

Instant Time Machine!
A mess is comprised of useful things which have not found their time. They make me feel uncomfortable because they literally tie time in knots, the only time I've got, subjective time. Objectively, or so I grasp, there can be no such thing as a mess, only degrees of chaos relative to my trained or instinctive expectations of order. Trash is comprised of non-useful things which can be disposed of without regret. In ordering a messy room, it is first essential to dispose of trash. A new order will appear which is less of a mess. The nest step is to put a few items where they belong. Some, not all: that is too much to bite off and is demotivating. Enter psychology. I can at least put all my flatpicks and fingerpicks in a box. Then put more things where they belong until you reach a point where you discover the things that don't have a place they belong. Things that don't belong but are useful are called Junk. Heap them together. Put them in a box or trunk and store it in back of the closet, basement or attic. Shake out the rugs and curtains. Sweep, dust and mop. Leave one item glaringly out of place as a convenient focal point for the next mess. Messes are the leading cause of fire, other than insurance.

Robert Hunter, troubador, lyric hero, scribe, bard, ecstatic conspirator

Danny Gregory on MLK

Reliquary of Saint Martina
Stefano Fideli
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Old Man With A Beard
Leandro Bassano
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Goldsmith
Harald Busch
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La Belle Limonadiere
Busset
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Job
Wilhelm Martin Busch
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Spendenaufruf & Plakat
Busse
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Crucifixion 1586/1600
Marten de Vos
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Farmer On The Way To Town To See A Lawyer 1613
Johan Bussemacher
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Siamese Twins
Johann Bussemacher

Siamese Twins
Effigies
Cambridge Galleries
Catherine Heard


Allegories
Hamilton Artists Inc.

detail

women enjoying tea at a balcony
Ogawa, Kazuma
Photographs, Bakumatsu-Meiji Period
Nagasaki University Library

woman washing her hair
Ogawa, Kazuma
Photographs, Bakumatsu-Meiji Period
Nagasaki University Library

women washing clothes detail
A. Farsari
Photographs, Bakumatsu-Meiji Period
Nagasaki University Library

The Idea of Nothing

...this
meeting of my heart's knock

on nothing's door that
is never answered at all.
And the river of my words
flowing out to nothing's sea

and drowning there...


Sue Owen
Verse Daily Jan.18.04

Born in 1537, married in 1553, Queen of England for nine days, beheaded at 16.

Jane Grey

'As to the rest, for my part, I know not what the Council had determined to do, but I know for certain that twice during this time, poison was given to me, first in the house of the Duchess of Northumberland and afterwards here in the Tower...All these I have wished for the witness of my innocence and the disburdening of my conscience.'
Letter of Jane Grey to Mary I, Bloody Mary, Queen of England July 19, 1553 - November 17, 1558.

note the editorial addendum - "Please note: Jane's assertion that she was poisoned is nonsense..."
"nonsense" seems an odd, almost desperate, term to use under the circumstances.
This is a re-enactment enthusiast site, not the official History of England.
Brittania, op. cit. below, a more rigorous site, though originating in Delaware, has much the same though less judgmentally.
That a 16 year old girl under these circumstances might be given to unwarranted suspicions seems understandable. That she was being poisoned seems at least plausible.

It is generally believed that Mary, commonly known as Bloody Mary, would have spared Jane's life if it had not been for the intervention of the Spanish diplomats who conditioned Mary's marriage to their king on her executing Jane.

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His {Guildford's [Jane's husband's]} carcase thrown into a cart, and his head in a cloth, he was brought to the chapel within the Tower, where the Lady Jane, whose lodging was in Partidge's house, did see his dead carcase taken out of the cart, as well as she did see him before alive on going to his death - a sight to her no less than death.
from The Chronicle of Queen Jane and of Two Years of Queen Mary
by anonymous

which I have not found a readable version of entire, online, as yet.

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THE HAND OF GOD, OR MERE COINCIDENCE?
The Six Hundred and Sixteen Families upon which the Curse of the Pillaged English Monasteries Fell
Of the six hundred and thirty families that were granted or sold Church lands in the time of Henry VIII only fourteen were not extinct at the time the revised edition of Spelman's work was published in 1895.

These facts of divine vengeance extracted from The History and Fate of Sacrilege 1632/1698 and reproduced at Annals Australia "Catholic Answers to 'Bible' Christians" in which it is implied Jane Grey was beheaded because her father participated in the dissolution and dispersal of monastic lands by Henry VIII, for which he and other English royalty were cursed, thoroughly. The author of Annals Australia avoids saying exactly who it is that bestows the operative curse, but he does provide an example of Catholic spell-casting, "...May they be cursed when they go out, and cursed in all places. May the heaven above them be of bronze, and the land they till be of iron...if they be not ashamed, and repent of their evil-doing..." Repentance, and subsequent begging of forgiveness, being the only way to undo the bestowed curse.

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Jennifer Halligan has an extensive and orderly, and well-written, series of pages devoted to Lady Jane Grey, at the equally extensive and orderly Monarchs, at Brittania, the extraordinarily extensive and orderly, somewhat more official, though still unofficial, British History Club site.
Where there is also a site devoted to "Earth Mysteries", at which the following quote, by John Michell, concerning the Druid priesthood can be found:

They also taught the traditional doctrine of the soul's immortality. They must have professed detailed knowledge of the workings of reincarnation, for one writer said that they allowed debts incurred in one lifetime to be repaid in the next.

illustration from the Book of Daniel 970
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Capital, Church, St Croix
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Faust and Mephisto on the Brocken, Walpurgisnacht
Peter Cornelius
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The Bell-Ringer
Adolf Seel
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St. Jerome in his study
Joos van Cleve, Master of The Death of The Virgin
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Allan deSouza's Woman
Redenzione
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The Wonderful Night
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Silly Symphony
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Hyenas of Lust
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The Story of a Soul
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Lyon Lea
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Pogrom
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Pax Domine
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Breath of The Gods
A dramatic sensation with Mrs. Sessue Hayakawa
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Remmelin's Catoptrum Microcosmicum

The Wanderer In The Woods 1923
Carl Bantzer
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Lazarus the Beggar
Leandro Bassano
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Woman at the Sea
Edvard Munch
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Moscow
Kandinsky
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War
Bröcklin
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Tone Table
Vera Nikolskaja
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The Orange Seller
Natalia Gontscharowa
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Bacchante
Corot
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Catherine of Siena
Beccafumi
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Mobilum Oras

Planetarium circa 1000 a.d.
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Driving Locomotive
Arkady Schaichet

Uzbekenfest
Schaichet
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Orpheus
Martin Brandenburg

einer Mandragora-Wurzel

The report of the royal commission, brandished by Benjamin Franklin, confounds the mesmerists, who escape with their loot in the manner of mountebanks, leaving a wrecked "tub" behind.

en le site de Corinne Le Marle

Confession

...and undertakers, ad-men
and fallen vice-generals,
doping their stolen crusades.
But the woman has learned, as
I have learned, as all of us
must keep learning if we are
to be good subjects, how to
make of a newspaper the
mask of a locust, calmly
put it on, and begin...

Reginald Gibbons
Poetry Daily Jan.15.04

Men scythe grass
Illuminated Manuscripts
The British Library

David J. Osborn's British Panoramics