PhD Dropout / Master sounds better than Doctor anyhow, right? / Comics / Illustrated Read-alongs / Currently The Anatomy of Melancholy
That is not a typo. Sottish, not Scottish, meaning like a sot – stupid, possibly intoxicated. Continuing with the uplifting topic of the world’s madness, Burton describes the various failings and hypocrisies of so-called “wise men.” He calls Pythagoras a half-wizard half-witch and that sort of thing, concluding: “If these men now, that held Zenodotus’ […]
Okay, so the world is a fool’s head, and now Robert Burton explains why: Shall I tell you the reason of it? Fortune and Virtue, Wisdom and Folly, their seconds, upon a time contended in the Olympics; every man thought that Fortune and Folly would have the worst, and pitied their cases; but it fell […]
The Anatomy of Melancholy may ameliorate your melancholy, but it may also make it worse, so watch out! The same goes for this blog, I suppose: Yet one caution let me give by the way to my present or future reader, who is actually melancholy, that he read not the symptoms or prognostics in this following […]
The news this week is very, very bad. I don’t think I need to recap it here, but I guess basically we are looking at a lot more poverty, pollution, guns, and tanks over the next four years, thanks to that skinny budget. No good, no good at all. Poetry is a balm for the soul, or […]
Wow, so once again I am finding that Burton’s tome is totally loaded with awesome metaphors that lend themselves very well to overly literal illustrations. It is hard to choose just one. But for today, a melancholic rock, or a rocky melancholy? Because I don’t know about you, but the news this week has me […]
I narrowed my picture ideas down to these two quotes from my reading today: I might indeed (had I wisely done), observed that precept of the poet, Nonumque premature in annum [keep back your work for nine years before printing], and have taken more care: or, as Alexander the physician would have done by lapis lazuli, […]
In these four pages, Burton criticizes readers and critics who evaluate books “not by the character but by the outer garb.” So I drew some books playing dress up. Also, “If you like not this, get you to another inn” is a useful insult fit for revival. “I resolve, if you like not my writing, […]
The Boltzmann brain paradox, physics: A Boltzmann brain is a hypothesized self-aware entity that arises due to random fluctuations out of a state of chaos. The idea is named for the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906), who advanced an idea that the Universe is observed to be in a highly improbable non-equilibrium state because only when […]
This is a picture of a dunghill, because Burton just won’t shut up about them. It feels like there is at least one dunghill on every page. “And for those other faults of barbarism, Doric dialect, extemporanean style, tautologies, apish imitation, a rhapsody of rags gathered together from several dung-hills, excrements of authors, toys and […]
In the spirit of pages 20-23, in which writers are described as “all thieves” who “scrape Ennius’ dung-hills,” I will write less putid bloggery from here on: more pictures and fewer words – sometimes none at all – unless I have an imposthume that I needs must drain. A really great four pages here though, […]
Representation, Cognitive Science: (Also referred to as mental representation or cognitive representation.) A representation is a formal system for making explicit certain entities or types of information, together with a specification of how the system does this. And I shall call the result of using a representation to describe a given entity […]
My drawing for pages 18-19 did not turn out well. If you try draw a spleen in sunglasses, it will generally look like one of the California Raisins. This is just a piece of advice in case you ever find yourself in a similar situation. In my defense, I was having a bad day. After dropping […]
This morning, in the voice usually reserved for telling Very Important Secrets, my daughter said to me: “Mommy, last night I dreamed I was talking to MAGIC.”
