Robert Louis Stevenson’s university notebook, 1869
National Library of ScotlandStevenson’s vivid imagination impinged on everything he did. This page is from a notebook from his civil engineering lectures at Edinburgh University in 1869. It is covered with doodles which reveal an active mind and an acute visual sense.
Marie Curie’s letter to Dr. Abbe describing the piezo-electric apparatus (Source: The College of Physicians of Philadelphia)
![mondonoir:
The Artists, Death in Reverse
Some index for clerical men and clerical women. Some shadows. Some thin green. Some index for men and women of the clergy. A patient throbbing meant for them. Pain: found. Loneliness: to a wound and an ear. Starlight odd, much else. Death in reverse, minimized, backwards.
Notes and fragments by Michael Burkard
[via This Long Century]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3q1vcfTOf1rr10yho1_1280.jpg)
The Artists, Death in Reverse
Some index for clerical men and clerical women.
Some shadows. Some thin green.
Some index for men and women of the clergy.
A patient throbbing meant for them.
Pain: found. Loneliness: to a wound and an ear.
Starlight odd, much else. Death
in reverse, minimized, backwards.Notes and fragments by Michael Burkard
[via This Long Century]
Bartók explains the form of his Fifth String Quartet, Sz. 102, and of the first movement in particular. The tonal centers of the first movement move upwards from one B-flat to the next via a whole-tone scale; it is organized in an arch-like sonata-allegro form, mirroring the large scale arch structure of the work as a whole.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: ‘Lakes’ Notebook
A map from one of Coleridge’s notebooks kept between July and September 1802, recording his solitary exploration of the mountainous landscape of the Lake District.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Lakes’ Notebook, 1802
© The British Library Board— at The British Library.Coleridge’s Moleskine.
(via an-itinerant-poet)
Emily Dickinson wrote on small pieces of paper, whatever was on hand.
[See also: The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope-Poems
by Jen Bervin & Marta Werner]
(via an-itinerant-poet)
“Travelling in a Landscape” by Johann Goethe
And now, for something completely different: Famous writers try their hand at painting, and some of them are very good.
![thepenguinpress:
Over at The Millions, A-J Aronstein recaps his trip to Austin for the recent David Foster Wallace symposium:
To his fans, Wallace struggles more mightily in his work with these kinds of questions than any author of his generation, though they’re certainly at the heart of a lot of fiction that Wallace didn’t write. He was, as [editor Michael] Pietsch puts it, “an extraordinary mind struggling with the challenge of ordinariness.” But what we seem to be searching for in an author’s archive (or even in a biography, a memoir, or whatever) is precisely an indication of the ordinariness of their struggle. So although we say we go to fiction for what we think is a unique set of experiences, we still crave the tangible evidence that an author was a person: that Wallace made sometimes-unreasonable demands of his editors, that he hid in hotel rooms while on assignment, that it was harder for him than the effortlessness of his prose would suggest.
When I asked Pietsch about the challenges of working with Wallace in everyday life, he responded with a tennis anecdote, telling me about a time when David had ask him to play a few sets.
“I demurred,” he said, “but David said ‘trust me, it’s great. What I’m really good at is putting the ball just outside your range.’”
Read the rest
(Bound copy of “Corrections of Typos/Errors for Paperback Printing of Infinite Jest“ from David Foster Wallace to Nona Krug and Michael Pietsch. Image courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center.)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3pgddhPM71r5l2jyo1_500.jpg)
Over at The Millions, A-J Aronstein recaps his trip to Austin for the recent David Foster Wallace symposium:
To his fans, Wallace struggles more mightily in his work with these kinds of questions than any author of his generation, though they’re certainly at the heart of a lot of fiction that Wallace didn’t write. He was, as [editor Michael] Pietsch puts it, “an extraordinary mind struggling with the challenge of ordinariness.” But what we seem to be searching for in an author’s archive (or even in a biography, a memoir, or whatever) is precisely an indication of the ordinariness of their struggle. So although we say we go to fiction for what we think is a unique set of experiences, we still crave the tangible evidence that an author was a person: that Wallace made sometimes-unreasonable demands of his editors, that he hid in hotel rooms while on assignment, that it was harder for him than the effortlessness of his prose would suggest.
When I asked Pietsch about the challenges of working with Wallace in everyday life, he responded with a tennis anecdote, telling me about a time when David had ask him to play a few sets.
“I demurred,” he said, “but David said ‘trust me, it’s great. What I’m really good at is putting the ball just outside your range.’”
(Bound copy of “Corrections of Typos/Errors for Paperback Printing of Infinite Jest“ from David Foster Wallace to Nona Krug and Michael Pietsch. Image courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center.)
tucci718 asked: Does your site have an FB page/feed?
Unfortunately not, though I could look into it if that’s something people really want.
Niccolò Machiavelli, Il Principe, original manuscript (1513)
