Hieronymus Bosch

A reminder that Bosch is a genius, from Eduardo Galleano's "Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone"

“A condemned man shits gold coins.
Another hangs from an immense key.
The knife has ears.
The harp plays the musician.
Fire freezes.
The pig wears a nun’s habit.
Inside the egg lives death.
Machines run people.
Each nut dwells in his own world.
No one meets up with anyone.
All are running nowhere.
They have nothing in common, save fear of each other.
“Five centuries ago, Hieronymus Bosch painted globalization,” to quote John Berger.”
(Eduardo Galleano, 108)

Coffee and Croissants

Delightful quotes to enjoy in a cafe, from Eduardo Galleano's "Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone"

A Cuppa Joe:
“The British Crown decreed that its colonies had to pay an unpayable tax. In 1773, furious colonists in North America sent forty tons of London tea to the bottom of the harbor. The operation was dubbed the Boston Tea Party. And the American Revolution began.
Coffee became a symbol of patriotism, though there was nothing patriotic about it. It had been discovered who knows when in the hinterland of Ethiopia, when goats ate the red fruit of a bush and danced all night, and after a voyage of centuries it reached the Caribbean.
In 1776, Boston’s cafes were dens of conspiracy against the British Crown. And years later, President George Washington held court in a café that sold slaves and coffee cultivated by slaves in the Caribbean.”
(Eduardo Galleano, 177)

The First Cafe:
“The croissant, another symbol of France, was born in Vienna. Not for nothing does it bear the name and form of a crescent moon, which was and remains the symbol of Turkey. Turkish troops had laid siege to Vienna. One day in 1683, the city broke the siege and that same night, in a pastry shop, Peter Wender invented the croissant. And Vienna ate the vanquished.
Then Georg Franz Kolschitzky, a Cossack who had fought for Vienna, asked to be paid in coffee beans, which the Turks had left behind in their retreat, and he opened the city’s first café. And Vienna drank the vanquished.”
(Eduardo Galleano, 194)

Santa Claus

A seasonal fragment from "Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone" by Eduardo Galeano:

"The first rendering of Santa Claus, published in 1863 in Harpers of New York, showed a heft little gnome entering a chimney. He issued from the hand of the artist Thomas Nast, vaguely inspired by the legend of Saint Nicholas.

Christmas of 1930 saw Santa Claus working for Coca-Cola. Before then he did not wear a suit and generally preferred to wear blue or green. The artist Haddon Sundblom dressed him in the company colors, bright red with white piping, and gave him the features familiar to us all. Every child's friend has a white beard, laughs all the time, travels by sleigh, and is so plump that no one can figure out how he gets down the world's chimneys loaded with presents and carrying a Coke in each hand.

Neither can anyone figure out what he has to do with Christ."

In lieu of Personal Introductions

The German literary movement of Sturm und Drang was relatively short-lived, lasting just around twenty years, and it was ultimately undermined by its own proponents (e.g. Goethe), who dismissed it as youthful folly and turned to other styles. But for that brevity of its movement-form, Sturm und Drang as a concept is omnipresent. We love storms! Rage! Fire! Exclamation points! It was a dark and stormy night...

And so, to christen this blog, and to explain the title image, I quote two authors who have nothing to do with the German movement of Sturm und Drang but everything to do with the concepts of Storm und Drunk.

Midway in the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood,
for the strait way was lost.

-Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, trans. by Robert and Jean Hollander

Receive thy new possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.

John Milton, Paradise Lost, available online via Dartmouth's Milton Reading Room.

<3
-Drunk