Thanks mostly to a Renaissance aesthetic notion, we’ve come to imagine ancient Greece and Rome as places of stark beauty—pure white marble temples filled with pale statues. Though it’s not a surprise to archaeologists and art historians, many of us more pedestrian folk can be stunned to learn that the clean, dignified marble statues and edifices of ancient Greece were …
Running the Numbers
Wow. Photographer Chris Jordan has some sample images from his new exhibition online. He writes: This new series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My …
The Reader as Musician
I ran across the following quote from author Zadie Smith on Steven Schenkenberg’s blog this weekend, and had to post it here, so you guys could see it. Her insight about the reading process is nicely put, and proves that I’m not the only one who can’t help using musical analogies to talk about reading and writing, which certainly doesn’t hurt. …