đ đ đ It’s Canada Day, 7/1, and this year’s appointments to the Order of Canada, announced yesterday, include philosopher, poet, musician, and political essayist Jan Zwicky.
The densest truths are home.
Liszt, Paganini, all the brilliant unreal
postures of intensityânothing like
the dishes in the rack, heads raised
for the clear hot rinse, children
having their hair washed in the bath.
— from âPractising Bachâ in Zwicky’s Forge, 2011
… and the ferocity of gatherers. In the heat of the moment, it all came down to:
IT WAS IN THE WAY
The Sunday (and so landscape rather than portrait, also Piraro-only) Bizarro from 2/26, posted here for International Women’s Day, 3/8:
(#1) Mammoths, hunter-gatherers, and the power of women (If youâre puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon â Dan Piraro says there are, omigod, 13 in this strip â see this Page.)
Apparently, she took the mammoth down with a sharp stick, something she was perhaps gathering as firewood. Wow. Â Don’t mess with Bess.
(Obviously, some sexual vocabulary is coming, with discussion of the acts referred to in plain language, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
Arrived at my house a little while back: the excellent collection The Essential Charles Barsotti (compiled and edited by Lee Lorenz: Workman, 1998), a review of the life and work of cartoonist Charles Branum Barsotti (1933-2014) up to that point, with an appreciation and (affectionate) interview by New Yorker cartoonist and art editor Lee Lorenz. Out of all that, my attention was caught (on p. 58) by a Barsotti cartoon about the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes, who was perhaps most notorious in the lore of the ancients for his stunt of carrying a lamp during the day, claiming to be looking for an honest man:
(#1) How do you solve a problem like Diogenes? / How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?
This cartoon was drawn for Playboy magazine, and it shows.
(Folded into this posting there will be some discussion of male-male sexual acts, and paintings of these, so the posting isn’t suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
đđđ To greet the new month — Pride Month, though that’s no doubt an accident — my Facebook ads on 6/1, yesterday, included one new to me, for art.com, offering giclee or canvas prints of Evelyn De Morgan’s 1882 painting Phosphorus and Hesperus:
(#1)
An embodiment of complementarity: two half-brothers (sharing their mother, Eos), one (Phosphorus) lighter haired, eyes open, facing up, bearing a flaming torch aloft; one (Hesperus) darker haired, eyes closed, facing down, holding a cold torch pointing down; with their arms intertwined and their bodies aligned complementarily, in a 69, or sideways astrological Cancer, or yin-yang pattern (with Hesperus as yin, Phosphorus as yang).
On Reddit on 2/22, posted by u/Tom7454:
“On the anniversary of Arthur Schopenhauer’s birth, David Bather Woods, a Schopenhauer expert at the University of Warwick, recommends five books on Schopenhauser.”
The typo was quoted on Facebook on 2/22  by Wendy Thrash, who explained the intervention of Schopenhauser:
“Because nobody wants to read about Schopenhauer.”
The pointer is to Five Books, a site with book recommendations from authorities; each recommendation is for five books on a specific subject, in this case David Bather Woods on Arthur Schopenhauer:
(#1)
Which inspired me to light verse:
Schopenhauser
Was a schnauzer
A bristly brute that
Played the flute
An antic cartoon by Tom Gauld in the latest New Scientist magazine. combining surrealist images with a famous ethical dilemma from the philosophical literature:
(#1)
Margalit Fox on Facebook on the 29th:
Time to get my hearing checked. This evening’s dialogue:
Husband: “Jacques Lacan is the thinker who merged post-Freudian psychoanalytic thought with Structuralism.”
Me: “Chaka Khan merged post-Freudian psychoanalytic thought with Structuralism?? …”
Jacques Lacan / Chaka Khan — some phonological similarity (same accentual pattern, shared medial /k/ and final /n/, initial /Ç°/ vs. /Ä/, differing only in voicing, vowels similar but not calculable here because of dialect differences in their quality), but then there’s /l/ vs. /k/), but largely the connection is through their being two relatively exotic proper names of cultural significance.
Yesterday’s Zippy has Our Pinhead imagining empathetically identifying with Grover Cleveland, Gwyneth Paltrow, Frank Zappa, Martin Van Buren, … and a (particular) squirrel:
(#1) The title of the set piece in Zippy’s dream — “Martin Van Buren, Feeding Nachos to a Hyperactive Squirrel” — uses a familiar syntactic template for describing scenes
This is the world of “Washington Crossing the Delaware” and “Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer”.
Meanwhile, Zippy engages in a mental exercise that has absorbed philosophers of consciousness for about 50 years, as distilled in the title of an influential paper by Thomas Nagel: “What Is It Like To Be a Bat?”
A Dale Coverly Speed Bump cartoon (from 10/17/17) that appeared in a Facebook posting in this form:
(#1) The philosopher’s eternal question, en français
I wasn’t aware that the strip came in a French version, but evidently it does; I still don’t know where and how it’s distributed (and I now wonder if there’s a Spanish version too, though I haven’t found one).
