Just re-read it,good...Laura Lippman,Baltimore Blues

Art: Such is but one of the implications of Macaulay’s provocative study of Mackintosh, which reminds us once more that truly universal art always begins with an intensely personal engagement with the local and the specific.

Such is but one of the implications of Macaulay’s provocative study of Mackintosh, which reminds us once more that truly universal art always begins with an intensely personal engagement with the local and the specific.

Looking foward to this,a great artist Saul Steinberg by Deirdre Bair

 Steinberg emerges as a philosopher-cartoonist-artist of prodigious talent, vision, and duality. Copyright 2012 Booklist Reviews.

Good,but depressing...Privilege by Shamus R. Khan

The Great Freeman Dyson...

The fringe of physics is not a sharp boundary with truth on one side and fantasy on the other. All of science is uncertain and subject to revision. The glory of science is to imagine more than we can prove. The fringe is the unexplored territory where truth and fantasy are not yet disentangled. Hermann Weyl, who was one of the main architects of the relativity and quantum revolutions, said to me once, “I always try to combine the true with the beautiful, but when I have to choose one or the other, I usually choose the beautiful.” Following Weyl’s good example, our string cosmologists are making the same choice.

Could use some editing,but comes to a satisfying concluence Mark Helprin In Sunlight and Shadow

BRIAN DOMITROVIC To the Randians of All Parties Why Ayn Rand’s economic arguments make sense—and why they’re ignored 19 November 2012

r goals of The authors endorse the Randian argument that remarkable people need extra space to achieve self-realization. Their capacities are larger than most people’s, their horizons broader, and their scope of impact more vital—so get out of the way, government. And when remarkable people succeed in business, the authors note, the public benefit is often immense. But such people aren’t greedy, according to the authors. Rand described the motivation of businesspeople and entrepreneurs as “rational selfishness,” and Yaron and Brook elucidate Rand’s view that purely acquisitive or “greedy” types are not rationally self-interested—that they haven’t thought fully about the propelife.

Good,but could use some editing...The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater

On the Hold Shelf Double Entry by Jane Gleeson-White and Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

PW Reviews 2012 August #1

For those who fear that the Internet/e-readers/whatever-form-of-technological-upheaval-is-coming has killed or will kill paper and ink, Sloan's debut novel will come as good news. A denizen of the tech world and self-described "media inventor" (formerly he was part of the media partnerships team at Twitter), Sloan envisions a San Francisco where piracy and paper are equally useful, and massive data-visualizationâ€"processing abilities coexist with so-called "old knowledge." Really old: as in one of the first typefaces, as in alchemy and the search for immortality. Google has replaced the Medici family as the major patron of art and knowledge, and Clay Jannon, downsized graphic designer and once-and-future nerd now working the night shift for bookstore owner Mr. Penumbra, finds that mysteries and codes are everywhere, not just in the fantasy books and games he loved as a kid. With help from his friends, Clay learns the bookstore's idiosyncrasies, earns his employer's trust, and uses media new, old, and old-old to crack a variety of codes. Like all questing heroes, Clay takes on more than he bargained for and learns more than he expected, not least about himself. His story is an old-fashioned tale likably reconceived for the digital age, with the happy message that ingenuity and friendship translate across centuries and data platforms. Agent: Sarah Burnes, the Gernert Company. (Oct.)

[Page ]. Copyright 2012 PWxyz LLC

What I want to read...Inside The Centre by Ray Monk

What I'm Reading...Treasure Island by Robert L. Stevenson

Fortune: Everyone seems hungry to make a fortune, but on nearly every occasion the word ‘fortune’ pops up, it refers not to the treasure, but to chance, to accident, to people committed to pushing their luck. In this book, a fortune isn’t always something you are pleased to take possession of Kids Gone Rotten,by Matthew Bevis,London Review of Books

 Everyone seems hungry to make a fortune, but on nearly every occasion the word ‘fortune’ pops up, it refers not to the treasure, but to chance, to accident, to people committed to pushing their luck. In this book, a fortune isn’t always something you are pleased to take possession of Kids Gone Rotten,by Matthew Bevis,London Review of Books

My first Silva,won't be my last...Fallen Angel by Daniel Silva

Other blogs I have...

http://greatpyrenesssightingsnyc.blogspot.com/about Great Pyrenees dogs http://gardendesignpsycharch.blogspot.com/my garden design http://bestofpsycharch.blogspot.com/my favorite drawings http://christainpsychedelicarchitecture.blogspot.com/my Christian art http://psychedelicarchitecture.blogspot.com/all of my art... 

Another Quote...

 The Romantics are read because schools are not very successful in linking discipline to creative thought.

A Quote from Malcolm Muggeridge.

It is only possible to succeed at second-rate pursuits - like becoming a millionaire or a prime minister, winning a war, seducing beautiful women, flying through the stratosphere or landing on the moon. First-rate pursuits - involving, as they must, trying to understand what life is about and trying to convey that understanding - inevitably result in a sense of failure. A Napoleon, a Churchill, a Roosevelt can feel themselves to be successful, but never a Socrates, a Pascal, a Blake. Understanding is for ever unattainable. Therein lies the inevitability of failure in embarking upon its quest, which is none the less the only one worthy of serious attention. “ 
Malcolm Muggeridge.

What would an American Aristocrat look like?

A Classic,from"The Third Man"

In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." 

A major stream of human accomplishment is fostered by a culture in which the most talented people believe that life has a purpose and that the function of life is to fulfill that purpose.Charles Murrary

Another quote:

This art is about a certain kind of romantic tosh, a false idea of what the world is like that gets into little girls' heads before they are mature enough to know the truth. What is original about Kilimnik is that she doesn't dismiss this stage of growing up: she treasures it.

Had there been a particle of cynicism in all this, I'd have hated every second of the Serpentine show.

But I genuinely believe that in her dotty way this strange artist responds to a beauty she sees in European culture that eludes most of us who live here. Kilimnik is one step away from being an outsider artist.

You don't judge her work by its skill or technique but by the authenticity of its vision

A Good Quote...

We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures that we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open. ~Jawaharlal Nehru ~ 

Very Powerful re-defines "tough childhood" Satan Is Real by Charlie Louvin

Good,Common Sense book on raising kids... Teach Your Children Well by Madeline Levine

A Great,Great book! Splendors Glooms by Laura A. Schlitz

Every Love Story is a Ghost Story by D.T. Max

What would an American Aristocrat look like?

What would an American Aristocrat look like?

THIS WAS AN ARTICLE WHICH CAME OUT YESTERDAY IN THE NEW YORK SUN NEWSPAPER. AMAZING

Paris Theodore, 63, Inventor of Spy Weaponry

By STEPHEN MILLER Staff Reporter of the Sun

Paris Theodore, who died November 16 at 63, was a holster-maker, gun inventor, and clandestine manufacturer of weapons meant to kill men without leaving a trace.

With a secret laboratory located behind a safe at his Seventrees, Ltd. holster shop in the garment district, Theodore evoked comparisons to a fictional master of lethal gadgetry, Q, from the James Bond books. If the stories told by associates and family contain even a few grains of truth, the comparison would have to include 007 himself, because many people think Theodore worked as an assassin for government agencies so secret they don’t even have names. He never told.

Government documents show that he was specially exempted from all provisions of the National Firearms Act, which was necessary for pursuing research into his “Uzi in a briefcase” — a gun that could fire from within a briefcase. He developed a working cigarette lighter that would spray three .22 rounds in a pinch. He called it a “Zappo.” For the FBI, he produced a clipboard to be used by a hostage negotiator that could fire a dozen rounds.

But Theodore’s most important invention may have been the ASP pistol, a sleek, lightweight, 9 mm handgun that became de rigueur for government agents needing a concealable weapon. First produced in the early 1970s, the ASP (named for a subsidiary company, Armaments Systems Procedures Corp.) became a gun world legend for innovations like its clear Lexan window in the stock, which allowed the user to determine how much ammunition was left, and the “Guttersnipe” sight, a beveled channel running down the top of the gun.

“It was the first service-caliber sidearm in pocket size,” a former Army lieutenant colonel who served in Special Operations Forces in Vietnam and later became an instructor in specialized weaponry at Fort Bragg, N.C., Rob Jones, said. “All of a sudden today the gun market is filled with subcompact weapons in service calibers.”

Mr. Jones and others also credit Theodore with challenging decades of conventional wisdom, epitomized by human-profile shooting targets with a bull’s eye on the chest, about the best place to aim to stop a foe. Theodore insisted that it was better to aim for the central nervous system — the spine, the head, and the medulla oblongata at the base of the skull.

“There is no such thing as knockdown power. It is a figment of the collective imagination of the Hollywood scriptwriters,” Theodore once wrote, addressing the common misperception that the sheer force of a .45 slug can knock a man down.In 1985,he patented parts of what became known as the Quell system, a shooting protocol that included a distinctive,two-handed shooting pose and a line of targets with vital areas outlined.

“He was essentially an artist,” said Michael Hershman,president of the Fairfax Group,an international global intelligence and investigative security company based in Virginia. “That gave him a perspective that others didn’t have. If he was working with a poison, what sort of vehicle would transport it best?”

Theodore had several answers to that question, including a bee-sting antidote kit, a tube of toothpaste, and a single strand of fiber optic cable fired into a victim’s scalp.

But then Theodore came from a creative family. His mother, Nenette Charisse, was a vaudeville dancer and ballet instructor, and his aunt, Cyd Charisse, was a dance legend. His father, John Theodore, was a sculptor and art professor, and his stepfather, after his parents divorced, was Robert Tucker, a choreographer.

Paris Theodore took up painting and also appeared on Broadway as the character Nibs in the 1954 production of “Peter Pan,” starring Mary Martin. He was paid $15,000 for four months’ work, his son Ali Theodore said. It was the last money he ever earned that the IRS was aware of, yet somehow he managed to raise a family on Park Avenue.

Shortly after graduating from the Browning School, Theodore was apparently recruited as a courier by clandestine services. Stories from ensuing years link him to violent encounters in Greece, Africa, and Vietnam, although nothing can be verified. In Czechoslovakia, a longtime friend at a large metropolitan police department, Steve Minguez, said,Theodore was wounded, captured, and then escaped.

Part of the reason he was involved in so much violence,Mr.Minguez said,was that the clandestine services leaked his name while using him as a decoy to cover for other operations.“They were surprised when he came back.”

By 1966, perhaps tiring of the danger,Theodore founded Seventrees, Ltd. Soon he was producing innovative holsters, as well as all sorts of what were called “unique defense devices.”There were binoculars that could shoot .38 rounds, gun silencers, knives that attached to the soles of shoes, and a type of explosive that acquaintances said would detonate in total silence.

Theodore did business with multiple government agencies and also sold holsters and weapons to police officers and people with jobs in private security. But the clandestine weapons work was more or less ended by the Church Committee hearings into CIA operations in 1975.Theodore testified, but in a closed session.

Mr. Hershman of the Fairfax Group escorted Theodore to the session.When they came to the metal detector outside the Senate office building, Mr. Hershman said,Theodore balked — normally he was permitted to walk around metal detectors, but not here. “I’m packing,” he told Mr. Hershman. Irritated at this breach of protocol,Mr.Hershman asked him where he had secreted the weapon. “It’s behind my tie,”Theodore said.

His weapons lab shut down,Theodore began working on gun training, and also filed lawsuits against manufacturers for infringing on his gun and holster patents. In the late 1980s, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and spent most of the past decade bedridden.

One of his sons, Paris Kain, has been putting together a documentary of what can be reconstructed about his father’s shadowy career. In it, Theodore, speaking with effort, confirms practically nothing about his covert missions. But when discussing his contributions to unique defense devices, he smiles broadly and proclaims, “I was Q!”

Paris Theodore

Born January 9, 1943, in New York; died November 16 at St. Luke’s Hospital in Manhattan of complications from multiple sclerosis; survived by his sons, Ali Theodore, Said Theodore, and Paris Kain. His wife, Lee Becker, a well-known choreographer, died in 1987

Scarve and socks in Party's Colors

What would an American Aristocrat look like?

Sara Palin

What would an American Aristocrat look like?

She's red,she rides-what else do you need to know?

What would an American Aristocrat look like?

Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor, DSO, OBE (11 February 1915 – 10 June 2011) 

My Kind of War...Double Cross by Ben Macintyre

PW Reviews 2012 May #2

"Any method of seeking the truth can also be used to plant a lie." Therein lies the root of the brilliantly dangerous Allied plan (which MI5 called Double Cross)â€"recounted by Macintyre with the same skill and suspense he displayed in Operation Mincemeat and Agent Zigzagâ€"to throw off the Germans and launch an assault at Normandy on June 6, 1944. The key to the planâ€"convincing Germany that the impending attack would come either at Pas de Calais or in Norwayâ€"was the careful manipulation of five double agents, each feeding misinformation back to their German handlers. Polish zealot Roman Czerniawski volunteered his services to his German captors, only to defect to Britain and become "Agent Brutus." Serbian playboy Dusan Popov ("Agent Tricycle") became one of MI5's most prized assets. Failed Catalan chicken farmer Juan Pujol ("Agent Garbo") badgered both German and British intelligence services into accepting him, eventually becoming the linchpin of the D-Day ploy. Lily Sergeyev ("Agent Treasure"), a high-strung Frenchwoman, had the opportunity to blow the whole operation with a single punctuation mark, while Elvira de la Fuente Chaudoir ("Agent Bronx") transformed from a gambling Peruvian society girl to solid double agent. Macintyre effortlessly weaves the agents' deliciously eccentric personalities with larger wartime events to shape a tale that reads like a top-notch spy thriller. 

Just reserved at the NYPL...The Voice Is All by Joyce Johnson

My first Rendell,reminds me of P.D.James... Tigerlily's Orchids By Ruth Rendell

Not so great,reads like a report...Born Together Reared Apart by Nancy Segal

Oh,Yumm!

But in 1834 the Quarterly Journal of Education reported that "before an Eton boy is ready for the University he may have acquired . . . a confirmed taste for gluttony and drunkenness, an aptitude for brutal sports and a passion for female society of the most degrading kind, with as great ease as if he were an uncontrolled inhabitant of the metropolis." 

The Krupps!! Krupp by Harold James

Really Great...The Innocent by David Baldacci

Just Reading...Spies of the Balkans by Alan Furst

Just finished...The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis

A Good One: Lassie Come Home by Eric Knight

A good biography for the general reader: Alaxander by Guy M. Rogers

a great book...The Last American Man by Elizabeth Gilbert

A Great Book:A Vision for Girls

Joseph Campbell

One thing that comes out in myths is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation. The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.  — Joseph Campbell

Delacroix

Without boldness, and extreme boldness, there are no beauties. One must dare to be oneself. One must be very bold. Thus one has to surpass oneself, in order to be everything one can be… There can be no rules for great souls; rules are only for those who have merely a talent that can be acquired—not for genius… The most sublime effects are often the result of pictorial license. For example, the unfinished appearance of Rembrandt’s works, and the exaggerations in Rubens. Mediocre men never have such daring, they never go beyond themselves. Method cannot supply a rule for everything, it can only lead everyone to a certain point.                                    Besides having generally conservative instincts, the painter was also a classicist, a solitary, a talented writer and an altogether engaging man. In John Russell’s words, “Delacroix in his Journal is one of the most cogent arguments for the human race. That we are in the company of a great man is never in doubt. But whereas not every great man gains from proximity, or can usefully be studied in isolation from his work, Delacroix the diarist begins with our respect and ends, just on half a million words later, with our unbounded affection. Incomplete as they are, his diaries rank among the fragmenta aurea of European civilization. They are passionate but not scabrous, worldly but not heartless, intimate but not indiscreet, animated but not rackety, profound but not ponderous, discursive but not self-indulgent. Above all, they are truthful and direct.”

Want to read this...112 Greene Street

I am looking forward to this!!! The Last Englishman by Roland Chambers

Just Finished...Orpheus by Ann Wroe

My first Furst...Mission to Paris by Alan Furst

Just Started...Prairie Fever by Peter Pagnamenta

Should be on everyone's bookshelf...State of Fear by Michael Crichton

Can't resist those eyebrows! Coco Chanel by Lisa Chaney

From the AMP bookshelf...Democracy Needs Aristocracy by Peregrine Worsthorne

Love Her! Available Dark by Elizabeth Hand

A Great Book about the war in Iraq The Snake Eaters by Owen West

I want to read this! The Age of Miracles by Karen T. Walker

Drags a bit,don't like switching between times...The School of Night By Louis Bayard

Fantastic, utterly hilarious,you have to love Simon! Simon the genius in my basement,by Alexander Masters

Couldn't say it better myself ...

Published on The Weekly Standard (http://www.weeklystandard.com)

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A Weakness for Royalty

The vindication of John Adams.

Meir Y. Soloveichik

June 18, 2012, Vol. 17, No. 38

Had our Founding Fathers been suddenly transported last week to modern America and forced to watch the morning television shows, they would have been shocked to see breathless American anchors all agog, celebrating the enduring reign of a British monarch live from London. They would have wondered why their countrymen were so enchanted by the glory of a direct descendant of George III the same week that, centuries ago, Richard Henry Lee first submitted his fateful resolution to the Continental Congress: “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.” The man who seconded Lee’s resolution, however, would not have been surprised. John Adams dedicated his life to the cause of liberty, yet continued to insist that the allure of royalty among men could never be abolished.

If the American Revolution came to embody not only a rebellion against England, but against the very institution of monarchy, a great deal of the credit goes to Thomas Paine, who devoted the central section of his Common Sense to a theological attack on kingship of any kind. “Government by kings,” he informed his many thousands of American readers, “was first introduced into the world by the Heathens, from whom the children of Israel copied the custom. It was the most prosperous invention the Devil ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry.” As Harvard’s Eric Nelson notes in his fascinating book The Hebrew Republic, Paine was drawing on an idea of recent intellectual vintage. Modernity is often seen as an embrace of secularism, Nelson remarks, but with the triumph of republicanism in modern political thought the opposite actually occurred. “Renaissance humanism, structured as it was by the pagan inheritance of Greek and Roman antiquity, generated an approach to politics that was remarkably secular in character,” Nelson writes of the previous political order. Meanwhile, in the fervor of the Reformation in the 17th century, “Christians began to regard the Hebrew Bible as a political constitution, designed by God himself for the children of Israel.”

Some of these theologians founded their arguments for republicanism on the Book of Samuel, wherein God responds with anger to the Israelites’ request for a king. Perhaps the most eloquent English version of this idea can be found in both the poetry and prose of Milton, a great opponent of the Restoration. Noting that “God in much displeasure gave a king to Israelites, and imputed it a sin to them that they sought one,” Milton further argued that all monarchy is idolatrous, as “a king must be adored like a Demigod, with a dissolute and haughtie court about him, of vast expence and luxurie.” Had Milton seen the parade of a thousand boats on the Thames last week, he might have repeated his contention that a monarch does little except “pageant himself up and down in progress among the perpetual bowings and cringings of an abject people, on either side deifying and adoring him.” Paine, while himself utterly irreligious, knew his biblically literate American audience, and argued similarly: “As exalting one man so greatly above the rest cannot be justified on the equal rights of nature, so neither can it be defended on the authority of scripture; for the will of the Almighty as declared by Gideon, and the prophet Samuel, expressly disapproves of government by kings.”

Adams, in contrast, believed that while the rise of the American republic would change the world, it could never change human nature. People, he was certain, would always be attracted to the trappings of majesty, and it was better to channel it than to ignore it. Upon meeting Paine, Adams reported in his autobiography, “I told him further, that his reasoning from the Old Testament was ridiculous, and I could hardly think him sincere. At this he laughed, and said he had taken his ideas in that part from Milton; and then expressed a contempt of the Old Testament, and indeed of the Bible at large, which surprised me.” When he became vice president, Adams argued that royal titles, such as “His Most Benign Highness,” should be given to the leaders of the new government. If the grandeur akin to royalty were not accorded public servants, Adams insisted, Americans would focus their enraptured attention on others.

His proposal failed spectacularly, and fed false charges that Adams was himself a monarchist. Mocked by his enemies as “His Rotundity, the Duke of Braintree,” Adams suffered for eight years in a position that he called “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.” For the rest of his life, Adams continued to express envy at the credit accorded to Paine for the changes wrought by the Revolution. “What a poor, ignorant, malicious, short-sighted, crapulous mass is Tom Paine’s ‘Common Sense,’ ” he wrote to Jefferson. “And yet history is to ascribe the Revolution to Thomas Paine!”

Perhaps, though, Adams spoke too soon. Vindicating his prediction, millions of Americans tuned in to the royal wedding and the Diamond Jubilee. None of the enraptured anchors saw fit to cite Paine’s contention that “when a man seriously reflects on the idolatrous homage which is paid to the persons of kings, he need not wonder that the Almighty, ever jealous of his honour, should disapprove a form of government which so impiously invades the prerogative of Heaven.” Paine himself died alone and penniless. Meanwhile, David McCullough’s bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of our second president has been made into an HBO miniseries, celebrating Adams’s contributions to the American cause. Somewhere, John Adams is—well, not smiling, certainly, but perhaps harrumphing in quiet satisfaction.

Meir Y. Soloveichik is director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University and associate rabbi at Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun in Manhattan.

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Source URL: http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/weakness-royalty_646846.html

A Good Quote...

Eccentricity is not, as some would believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd. Edith Stiwell

Good,so far...Fatal Colours by George Goodwin

What's the Difference between the Aristocratic and the merely Expensive?

"Who is this Proust? Huxley talking about him? Perhaps I ought to read him" Brian Howard,OE

From the AMP Bookshelf,a book that started me thinking about Aristocracy:Saint Genet by Jean-Paul Sartre

Just Finished:Birdseye by Mark Kurlansky