Start the week #9
Art, car issues, a review, a typical week, links
Our car’s less than useful feature
Here in London it’s been sub-zero temperatures, so the car windscreen gets iced up. I discovered that the windscreen heater only works when it’s warm enough. What idiot designed that? I’ve had to resort to using a deicer spray and a hot water bottle. First world problem, eh?
My art project
Some people have indicated that they like my artwork. I failed art at school, so stick that in your pipe and smoke it, art examiners! I’ve created three pictures based on existing ones, but mine have the advantages of (a) being simpler and (b) more up-to-date, and (c ) just getting to the essence of the artist’s message without all the persiflage. I mean, why do we have to try and work out what a painting means? Why should, for example, an open birdcage denote a woman of loose virtue? Why should a picture of a bloke with a globe on his desk indicate that he’s a man of the world?
Here are my first three efforts in my art project. I hope you like them.
The scream
The Mona Lisa
Ophelia, by Millais
I’ve taken a bit of a liberty with this one. Millais portrayed Ophelia loafing about in a boat. My version encapsulates the spirit and the text of Hamlet much better in my humble opinion. What do you think
?
My week
My week has settled into a nice, predictable pattern:
Monday: Designated for tech problems and annoying interruptions, guaranteed to minimise the amount of work I get done.
Tuesday: shopping, followed by work, followed by a science fiction course.
Wednesday: Work, more or less
Thursday: My day for being patronised, like being told I need to educate myself about climate change because I didn’t like a diatribe. If the person concerned had asked me, I’d have told her I was teaching my students about it in 1975, and that Elaine and I live the best way we can to minimise our impact on the environment. I was also advised that everyone can always find time to write. I must remember that next time I’m sitting with a relative in A & E till 5am, or trying to meet an almost-impossible deadline (see below).
Friday: This is the day I like to reserve for panicking about the almost-impossible deadline that didn’t seem quite so impossible when I was given it three weeks ago.
Saturday: Community stuff, bike ride or walk, or loaf about reading and writing or, sometimes, rotting.
Sunday: Start drafting Start the Week, commenting on Substack, reading, rotting, seeing friends.
Some links
I reviewed a science fiction exhibition at the Science Museum in London. Check it out:
I also asked ChatGPT to generate course outlines, which I evaluated. Check that out as well:
A great article about the Oulipo, from The Bus:
Matthew Murray gets trapped. I shouldn’t laugh, but…
Plus, a kick ass and long ass1 post about note-taking from
Further reading
Here are a couple of referral links to newsletter directories. If you click through and sign up to these services, you’ll be sent links to other newsletters you might be interested in. And the people who run these services will promote this one too. So it’s a potential win-win-win situation.
I find this one especially useful for discovering newsletters and articles concerning leadership matters, which I’m quite interested in.
I very much like the variety served up. I receive one suggestion a day, and have subscribed to a few of them.
Finally…
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Those sketches are laugh out loud funny! Thanks!
Great post, Terry! Your version of 'The Scream' is uncannily Munchian - a perfect ten. However, I'm more than a little concerned by the intentions of your 'Mona Lisa' - her message feels a little more 'come hither' than the original. As for Ophelia - she's an absolute winner. If that double-armed gesture of hers as she sinks beneath the water doesn't capture the notion of something being 'rotten in Denmark' in its absolute entirety, I don't know what does. You've saved readers of 'Eclecticism' around four hours of a numb bottom watching a production of Shakespeare's longest play: it's all right there in THAT picture.
And on the theme of rotten, I love that 'rotting' is part of your weekend schedule. Brilliant! 🙌