Pursuing praxis

Jenna said it perfectly:

     I can’t wait to be a hot, leather wearing silver-haired motorcycle riding professor.

Watch out, world. Here we come.

This is why I like Metallica.

Metallica (Black Album, 1991)

Wherever I May Roam

…and the road becomes my bride
I have stripped of all but pride
So in her I do confide
And she keeps me satisfied
Gives me all I need

…and with dust in throat I crave
Only knowledge will I save
To the game you stay a slave
Rover wanderer
Nomad vagabond
Call me what you will

But I’ll take my time anywhere
Free to speak my mind anywhere
And I’ll redefine anywhere
Anywhere I may roam
Where I lay my head is home

…and the earth becomes my throne
I adapt to the unknown
Under wandering stars I’ve grown
By myself but not alone
I ask no one

…and my ties are severed clean
The less I have the more I gain
Off the beaten path I reign
Rover wanderer
Nomad vagabond
Call me what you will

But I’ll take my time anywhere
I’m free to speak my mind anywhere
And I’ll never mind anywhere
Anywhere I may roam
Where I lay my head is home

But I’ll take my time anywhere
Free to speak my mind
And I’ll take my find anywhere
Anywhere I may roam
Where I lay my head is home

Carved upon my stone
My body lie, but still I roam
Wherever I may roam

Don’t Tread on Me

Liberty or death, what we so proudly hail
Once you provoke her, rattling of her tail
Never begins it, never, but once engaged…
Never surrenders, showing the fangs of rage

Don’t tread on me

So be it
Threaten no more
To secure peace is to prepare for war
So be it
Settle the score
Touch me again for the words that you’ll hear evermore…

Don’t tread on me

Love it or live it, she with the deadly bite
Quick is the blue tongue, forked as lighting strike
Shining with brightness, always on surveillance
The eyes, they never close, emblem of vigilance

Don’t tread on me

So be it
Threaten no more
To secure peace is to prepare for war
So be it
Settle the score
Touch me again for the words that you’ll hear evermore…

Don’t tread on me

So be it
Threaten no more
To secure peace is to prepare for war

Liberty or death, what we so proudly hail
Once you provoke her, rattling on her tail

So be it
Threaten no more
To secure peace is to prepare for war
So be it
Settle the score
Touch me again for the words that you’ll hear evermore…

Don’t tread on me

Through the Never

All that is, was and will be
Universe much too big to see

Time and space never ending
Disturbing thoughts, questions pending
Limitations of human understanding
Too quick to criticize
Obligation to survive
We hunger to be alive

All that is, ever
Ever was
Will be ever
Twisting
Turning
Through the never

In the dark, see past our eyes
Pursuit of truth no matter where it lies

Gazing up to the breeze of the heavens
On a quest, meaning, reason
Came to be, how it begun
All alone in the family of the sun
Curiosity teasing everyone
On our home, third stone from the sun

All that is, ever
Ever was
Will be ever
Twisting
Turning
Through the never

On through the never
We must go
On through the never
Out of the
Edge of forever
We must go
On through the never
Then ever comes

All that is, ever
Ever was
Will be ever
Who we are
Ask forever
Twisting
Turning
Through the never

Never

Nothing Else Matters

Nothing else matters

So close no matter how far
Couldn’t be much more from the heart
Forever trusting who we are
And nothing else matters

Never opened myself this way
Life is ours, we live it our way
All these words I don’t just say
And nothing else matters

Trust I seek and I find in you
Every day for us something new
Open mind for a different view
And nothing else matters

Never cared for what they do
Never cared for what they know
But I know

So close no matter how far
Couldn’t be much more from the heart
Forever trusting who we are
And nothing else matters

Never cared for what they do
Never cared for what they know
But I know

Never opened myself this way
Life is ours, we live it our way
All these words I don’t just say
And nothing else matters

Trust I seek and I find in you
Every day for us something new
Open mind for a different view
And nothing else matters

Never cared for what they say
Never cared for games they play
Never cared for what they do
Never cared for what they know
And I know

So close no matter how far
Couldn’t be much more from the heart
Forever trusting who we are
No nothing else matters

My Friend of Misery

You just stood there screaming
Fearing no one was listening to you
They say the empty can rattles the most
The sound of your voice must soothe you
Hearing only what you want to hear
And knowing only what you’ve heard
You you’re smothered in tragedy
You’re out to save the world

Misery
You insist that the weight of the world
Should be on your shoulders
Misery
There’s much more to life than what you see
My friend of misery

You still stood there screaming
No one caring about these words you tell
My friend before your voice is gone
One man’s fun is another’s hell
These times are sent to try men’s souls
But something’s wrong with all you see
You you’ll take it on all yourself
Remember, misery loves company

Misery
You insist that the weight of the world
Should be on your shoulders
Misery
There’s much more to life than what you see
My friend of misery

You just stood there screaming
My friend of misery

This nut didn’t fall too far from the tree. In my inbox today:

Dear Family,

Reunion time is near!! It’s time to go back to your roots and visit with all the nuts in your FAMILY TREE!!

We’ll supply the meat, coffee, punch, tablesettings and tablecloths and ask that you bring a dish to pass and $4 for park admission per car.

Please let your branch representative know how many twigs are coming from your family. Don’t leaf it to the last minute.

Pack up your trunk and join us. We’re going out on a limb and saying this’ll be the best reunion ever.

We’ll seed ya there.

The Four Saps — Tracy, Marilee, Jody and Jane.

Cool. 5 is my favorite number anyway.

Tuesday, June 20, 2006
It’s Religion and Altruism, Stupid

Posted by Craig Biddle at 11:57 AM

In an article titled "It’s an Islamic jihad [posted below], stupid," Diana West wonders why the Bush administration "keep[s] things vague and indirect," pursuing a "war on terror" rather than a war on "Islamic jihadists." Ms. West notes that

"without understanding the religious nature of jihad (holy war), along with its sister institution of dhimmitude (inferior status of non-Muslims under Islam), there can be no triumph over jihad and no avoiding dhimmitude. There can also be no understanding of the religiously rooted attitudes toward jihad movements among even non-violent Muslims, generally ranging from a tacit ambivalence to wild adulation."

This is true, and it points to a deeper fact that Americans need to face. Either faithâi.e., the acceptance of ideas in support of which there is no evidenceâis a valid means of knowing the truth, or it is not. The Islamists have faith that they are right and good and that Americans are wrong and evil. If faith is a valid means of knowing the truthâas many Americans continue to believeâthen how can anyone say that the Islamists are wrong? What Americans need to face is the fact that faith is invalid. Man’s only means of knowledge is reason. The true and the good and the right can be known only by means of observation and logic and recognition of the requirements of human life on earth. If Americans want to name and defeat their actual enemy, they must lose religion; they must embrace reason.

Ms. West further wonders why "we repeatedly send our military on dangerous house-to-house missions with restrictive rules of engagement rather than using air power." The cause of this insanity is another sacred cow that Americans need to reject: altruism. Either being moral consists in being selfless, or it does not. If it does, then such policies are perfectly moral. After all, what could be more selfless than sacrificing our sons and daughters to the enemy? If sacrifice is moral, then losing loved ones is virtuous.

Being moral does not consist in being selfless; it consists in being selfishâi.e., acting in a rational, life-promoting manner as a matter of unwavering principle. Accordingly, acting morally with regard to the Islamist threat means swiftly eliminating the regimes that support the movementâespecially those in Iran and Saudi Arabiaâusing the full force of our military. It means destroying these regimes, not by sending soldiers into close-range combat, but by launching big bombs from high altitude and long distanceâas we are perfectly capable of doing. But in order for Americans to see the morality of taking such action, they would have to be willing to challenge the dogma of altruismâsomething that few Americans today have the independence or courage to do. Thus, we relentlessly engage in acts of blatant stupidity and court our own destruction. As Ms. West notes:

In a war in which an interrogation could save a city, we rewrite our interrogation rules to make sure that it won’t. "If this debate were limited to what’s best for interrogation purposes, the decision (about whether to soften interrogation techniques) would be pretty easy," a senior Defense Department official told The New York Times. "But then you have to look at what we lose diplomatically.’"

Why? What are we, Liechtenstein? We sure act like it. The Washington Times’ Tony Blankley recently noted the defeatism in America’s about-face with jihadist Iranâthe looming front in the war. By offering non-military nuclear technology or else threatening non-military sanctions, the Bush administration seems to have acquiesced to what Blankley describes as "the only ‘respectable’ position" among both European and American elites: namely, "the absolute exclusion of a military option."

If true, this would mean that the already inadequately titled "war on terror" would no longer refer to "war" at all. And that would leave onlyâ�.

Indeed, it would. So long as Americans embrace religion, faith, and altruism, we will suffer the consequences. What will it be, America?

It’s an Islamic jihad, stupid
Jun 19, 2006
by Diana West

Discussing the "war on terror" has been endlessly awkward. Terror — like a blitzkrieg, sneak-attack or disinformation — is a tactic, not an enemy. But in our politically-correct era, we dwell on the tactic, never defining the enemy. Drop 500-pound bombs on his head if we must — and we must — but don’t describe him as an Islamic jihadist in the age-old tradition of Islamic jihadis going back to Muhammad. Such historical precision might be hurtful and insensitive, and we wouldn’t want that.

Indeed, as a matter of American foreign policy, we don’t want that. Better to keep things vague and indirect, much as the Victorians are reputed to have done to avoid giving offense in the drawing room. Once upon a time, We the People were crass enough to have repelled a German blitzkrieg, defied Japanese sneak attack, and even, some of us, combated Soviet disinformation. Now, We the Peoples are "enlightened" to the point where we send armies out for years to fight generic "terror" — no matter how specifically Islamic that it is.

There are many reasons why this matters, not least of which is that, without understanding the religious nature of jihad (holy war), along with its sister institution of dhimmitude (inferior status of non-Muslims under Islam), there can be no triumph over jihad and no avoiding dhimmitude. There can also be no understanding of the religiously rooted attitudes toward jihad movements among even non-violent Muslims, generally ranging from a tacit ambivalence to wild adulation.

Even as we fight our war against "terror," we simultaneously fight against any such understanding. Maybe the reason goes beyond reflexive PC manners. Maybe the West simply doesn’t want an "enemy" at all; maybe we simply want to safeguard ourselves against "terror." Maybe our elites believe that, in targeting only terror, the enemy will learn to like us, and terror will go away.

This mindset may explain why the United States exhausts itself trying to disclaim a connection between Islam and jihad, opening Islamic centers on U.S. military bases (most recently at Quantico at the behest of a Wahhabi-educated cleric). Thus, as Paul Sperry writes at frontpagemag.com, "facilitating the study of the holy texts the enemy uses, heretically or not, as their manual of war"; treating those same holy texts reverentially by military order at Guantanamo Bay; and even sending in the Marines to donate prayer rugs to an Iraqi mosque.

Such tactics suggest we no longer seek a military triumph over Islamic jihad — if we ever did. Had we prosecuted such a war, it would be over by now. The president would have directed the military to eradicate, freeze or neutralize jihadi threats where they exist, from Iran to Syria, from Gaza to Fallujah. Concurrently, we would have closed our own borders as a post-Sept. 11 security precaution, and implemented an immigration policy designed to avoid repeating the European example of Islamization through massive Muslim immigration or, as some are calling it, "reverse colonization."

But no. Such a war on terror long ago gave way to the Struggle to Make Everyone Think We’re Swell. In this no-win fight, we must watch what we say — as when the government "distances" itself from an official’s frank characterization of three suicides at Guantanamo Bay as a jihadi "PR stunt." And we must watch what we do — as when we repeatedly send our military on dangerous house-to-house missions with restrictive rules of engagement rather than using air power. In a war in which an interrogation could save a city, we rewrite our interrogation rules to make sure that it won’t. "If this debate were limited to what’s best for interrogation purposes, the decision (about whether to soften interrogation techniques) would be pretty easy," a senior Defense Department official told The New York Times. "But then you have to look at what we lose diplomatically.’"

Why? What are we, Liechtenstein? We sure act like it. The Washington Times’ Tony Blankley recently noted the defeatism in America’s about-face with jihadist Iran — the looming front in the war. By offering non-military nuclear technology or else threatening non-military sanctions, the Bush administration seems to have acquiesced to what Blankley describes as "the only ‘respectable’ position" among both European and American elites: namely, "the absolute exclusion of a military option."

If true, this would mean that the already inadequately titled "war on terror" would no longer refer to "war" at all. And that would leave only ….

Diana West is a contributing columnist for Townhall.com.

They fit on my shelf, but not in my schedule. This is the becoming.

Politics and economics - what is the relation? The association of men. And, as Aristotle pointed out so many years ago, the first, irreducible, irreplacable and unforgettable reason that men associate is in order to trade goods - to exchange value for value, each in pursuit of his own life, his own ends, his own purposes. And the ultimate, civilize medium of human interaction is: money.

"For it is not two doctors that associate for exchange, but a doctor and a farmer, or in general people who are different and unequal; but these must be equated. This is why all things that are exhanged must be somehow comparable. it is for this end that money has been introduced, and it becomes in a sense an intermediate; for it measures all things, and therefore the excess and the defect - how many shoes are equal to a house or to a given amount of food. The number of shoes exchanged for a house [or for a given amount of food] must therefore correspond to the ratio of builder to shoemaker.

"For if this be not so, there will be no exchange and no intercourse. And this proportion will not be effected unless the goods are somehow equal. All goods must therefore be measued by some one thing, as we said before. Now this unit is in truth demand, which holds all things together (for if men did not need one another’s goods at all, or did not need them equally, there would be either no exchange or not the same exchange); but money has become by convention a sort of representative of demand …" (Nicomachean Ethics, 1133a17-b)

With this in mind (retrospectively), I visited Wall Street in NYC, and saw the New York Stock Exchange,

with some great sculptural detail of Men at work:

And of course, the greatest bovid of them all:

(Although, as a bovid afficionado, I must point out two major anatomical flaws: our dear Market Bull basically has horse hooves, and to my knowledge no bovid (or cervid - deer - which are very closely related) has upper incisors. Most certainly not Bos taurus, the standard cow, which this is presumably based on. Ah, the license of art :o). Without the horns, who knows where a cladist would classify this critter!)

In the vicinity was Federal Hall, the place where George Washington took the Oath of Office:

A follow-up to a previous post on the apparent biological basis of logicality. Specifically, I said:

> As in, whatever the contents of your mind, your feelings and actions
> flow logically and consistently from them.

Let me clarify a little:

It’s all in how you look at the word logical, and contrast it with the word rational. See, all the irrational actions of people the world over are highly logical:

1) It’s exceedingly hard to do things contrary to one’s most deeply held principles (feelings get in the way; feelings are kind of a speedy comparison of a situation to one’s principles; the rough description: good feelings = go, bad feelings = don’t go), and it’s really really easy to do things that are in alignment with one’s most deeply held principles.

2) Many people have never stopped to ask what their most deeply held principles are, although they have absorbed them (whatever mongrel principles they may be) over the course of their life, from all the ready sources: family, friends, culture, media, etc etc.

3) Becase we can, with work, identify our base principles, and because people have the power to change many aspects of themselves, it follows that with (considerable) work, people can identify and change their base principles. A change in principle thus results in a change in feelings regarding a given situation, and a change of easiest-behavior.

Now, it is true that people can do things that are hard, and exercise their "will" in apparent contrast to their apparent values, i.e. people don’t always take the easiest route. (Here I would actually argue that this is far rarer than it would seem; you’re usually swapping values, so that your new action is contrary to an old value, but consistent with a new value; I’m not even sure if complete arbitrariness is even possible, but that’s another discussion). But you’ll never convince me that the millions and billions of people doing stupid, irrational, hostile, violent things with considerable moral, emotional, and physical consequences are ALL working AGAINST deep principles that are diametrically opposed to those stupid actions. I would actually argue that most people act consistently with their values, such as they are (and the are usually not good - they are often contradictory and prevent having a healthy, active mind). In this consistency, people can be said to be behaving logically, i.e. given a set of principles, what actions flow logically from them? Answer: the muck that you typically see from people. People, by and large, behave logically.

But that doesn’t make them rational. I think rational is a broader term with higher standards. Logic is just a computer - you get out what you put into it. Many people are irrational because the starting points of their logical actions (i.e. their principles) are flawed, contradictory, and inconsistent. If you start with principles that are incompatible with happiness, you can never be fully happy, although you may achieve a modicum of happiness cobbled together from unrelated consequences. If you start with principles that are not logically compatible with each other (i.e. are contradictory with one another, partially or completely, on one or more levels) you will never be able to lead a fully rational, integrated life; some aspects of your life will always clash.

Hence the widespread compartmentalization of people’s minds. Rather than address the root issue, it’s often easier to just try to prevent communication between different parts of your life, thereby reducing the frequency of shitty conflicts, conundrums, and dilemmas you experience (religion and science as separate epistemological compartments are exceedingly common, including for many professors, like my advisor).

But it does nothing to address the root problem, and if the shit hits the fan, you have no recourse to action except to complain that life is full of shitty conflicts, that life isn’t fair, that people aren’t meant to be happy, that death and taxes are the only sure thing, that life isn’t logical, and that rationality is overrated at best, false at worst. Of course, life is logical, it’s just that what we give it is crap to start with, oftentimes.

The alternative is, of course, to explicitly identify and evaluate your most basic values and principles - the axioms of your life, the things you won’t (can’t) ever betray or refute or contradict or hide from. This is really hard, but for motivated long-term thinkers, the payoff is so obvious and so extraordinary that the initial energy expenditure is dwarfed by comparison. Hence the on-going revision of my life. The revision pays dividends en route, of course, which makes things easier, and I expect it to be, more or less, a life-long journey for me. Even if someone told me I’d never achieve complete consistency at the end of my very long life, I’d still say it was worth it. Seeing how emotionally tortured, twisted, and mangled many people are - and they only barely realize it, and yet it governs their life like the most totalitarian of dictators - makes the decision virtually automatic for me. The alternative is so awful, that NOT climbing Mt. Everest is simply not an option.

Is the logicality of the human mind more obvious, now? The mind being a suped-up computer, of sorts, I think it makes sense. GIGO - garbage in, garbage out; or, gold in, gold out. Rationality is not assured, even in logically-operating minds - it must be chosen, and it is (logically) the option with the highest rewards. And it is the best way to operate, on all levels, given a certain set of goals that I think most people would consider desireable (happiness, health, security, success, achievement, preparedness, etc.)

I’ve just started Krav Maga. Class #3, and I’m reminded that it’s good to try hard, but it’s better to try hard and try smart. My technique needs work, obviously. Yesterday in the middle of class I looked down and I couldn’t distinguish my 4th and 5th knuckles on my right hand. It only hurts a bit, and I’m happy it doesn’t keep me from typing, although piano is out of the question for a couple days.

I’m getting there.

(Pen for scale). It is kind of strange to see photos of my own disembodied body parts. They look pretty wierd, and not terribly attractive - which is strange, because I’ve always liked my hands. C’est la vie, they work for me. Krav Maga rocks. I get to get my ass kicked four or five days a week - a great way to learn, and learn fast!

I think urban areas have the potential to be very colorful without the assistance of neon lights or Photoshop. Here are some pictures of a few colorful buildings I found in New York (and I took many on a hazy, color-suckingly bright day). As always, click the thumbnails for larger images.

I used to think I was born 150 years too late. All the stuff I liked and wanted to do, appeared to be obsolete. Biology had been reduced to genes and molecules, it seemed. 

Then I discovered that people actually studied animals with their bare eyes and bare hands. Then I quit studying for the MCAT and started carving a path towards evolutionary biology.

Now that I’ve been "in" for two years - what do I do? That is, besides read, take classes, talk, read more, write, finish projects, research new ones, track down ideas, apply for stuff, and organize the time, resources, and opportunities for the next twenty steps down the road? Well, museum work is a great way to do research. Huge collections of animals (and other stuff - if you’re a geologist, perhaps) exist in institutions around the world.

The American Museum of Natural History is one of those institution. I’m here to measure bovid heads, teeth, horns and femurs. Numbers are key - large sample sizes help ensure the signal of information (if any) swamps out measurement error, ecological variation, and other variables. So, it is actually very important to have oodles of the same or similar things. For example, sample sizes of several dozen are a minimum, in my book, for each sex are desireable. Of course, not all skulls have associated femora, or other needed data. This drives the need for large sample sizes even higher.  

For the visual learners out there, I’ve got a few pics. It’s long, dirty work. With the larger specimens, it can be somewhat physical, as I have to maneuver myself around the specimen, instead of sitting in a chair and rotating it on the table. With the little guys I can hold in the palm of my head, I can easily measure 50 or more a day. Today, I squeaked out 18 elands. Argh.

Addendum:

I like the fact that my work requires exceedingly basic tools: water and music to keep me going, a metric ruler and/or measuring tape, non-stretchy string of some kind, a notebook and pen, a camera perhaps (and a tripod and level, if you’re serious about taking pictures), a blanket to protect the specimens, and that’s it.

Finally, this is one of two giant eland I came across in a drawer, "giant" being an adjective and not part of the species or common name. The length of the outermost ridge on these guys was over 20cm longer, and the circumference of the base of the horns was about 8cm greater than the next-closest specimes. Both were from the Sudan, so I wonder if it was a populational or regional variance. It would be difficult, and not an obviously wise use of money, to find out. It’s also been 70-90 years since they were collected; hunting pressure has noticably decreased the frequencies of many species, types, and variants that qualify as trophies.

In particular, I sought out the American Wing at The Met, and was blown away.

The sculpture, the landscapes, and many of the portraits and historical paintings were just fantastic. The light, the detail, often the subject matter (thankfully). Rooms 220 and 221 were my favorite, in case you go. (Yes, several of the pictures are a bit blurry; no flash allowed, etc. Click on thumbnails for larger, blurrier views.)

 Sanford Robinson Gifford. A Gorge in the Mountains - Kauterskill Clove (which is similar to October in the Catskills, but better. He was apparently influenced by Turner, whose works appeal to me in color and light, but almost never in subject matter.)

  Worthington Whittredge, The Trout Pool, 1870

 Johan Christian Clausen Dahl, Outbreak of the Vesuvius, 1826

 George Henry Durrie? (Similar to Winter Scene in New Haven, Connecticut, 1858).

 Thomas Moran, The Teton Range, 1897

 Asher Brown Durand, The Beeches, 1845

 John F. Weir, Forging the Shaft, 1874-77

Frederic Edwin Church, Heart of the Andes, 1859.

And of course, Leutze’s centerpiece and masterpiece, George Washington Crossing the Delaware:

Now for sculpture.

 William Henry Rinehart. Latonia and Her Children - Apollo and Diana, 1870.

Medea
 William Wetmore Storey, Medea, 1865

 Daniel Chester French, The Angel of Death and the Sculptor from the Milmore Memorial, 1889-93.

 Daniel Chester French, Memory, 1909

 ? In the European Sculpture Court

And finally, one of my favorites from Rodin:

 Eternal Spring, 1906-7

And this one is actually in Central Park, and comemorates the end of feudalism or somesuch in Poland in the 1400s. Why this is of concern for New Yorkers, I’m not entirely sure. But I dig the statue.

The other day I formulated an old thought in a new way: it’s funny - strange - wonderful - and natural - that the brain is biologically logical. As in, whatever the contents of your mind, your feelings and actions flow logically and consistently from them. On the surface, I see no reason why this must necessarily be the case, in terms of biology or evolution. Of course, so much as disturb the surface with a question, and a half-dozen potential answers jump readily to mind. But that’s another thought-tangent, and another blog.

Along those lines, I note with interest how my interests and preferences in art change over time. Today I went to The Met, for probably the third time in my life. In past years, I spent the most time in the European Paintings section, with Degas and Rembrandt and David and Renoir and Rodin, and wandered dutifully through the various other continental and ethnic exhibitions. I was usually most bored by the American art. It all seemed woefully familiar, trite, and dull, and felt like a visual recap of my high school history textbook. Supremely uninteresting.

Today I planned to view those same sections again, and see if and how my reactions differed. I have clearer, more purposeful preferences in art these days (among other things), and I wondered if they were established enough to elicit new emotional reactions to art, if they were strong enough to override old preferences - basically how the old and the new play out in my current life.

First I got side-tracked by a special exhibit on Girodet (1767-1824), a French painter who trained with, and eventually spurned, the neo-classicist painter Jaques-Louis David (quite famous for the Death of Marat, and Oath of the Horatii, among other things.) It was a huge collection on display. I’m always impressed by a superb command of the human form, facility with oil paint (a la Ingres), and use of line drawing. I wasn’t enamored with his attitude and motivations, as portrayed in the program and placards available, and in his choice of subject matter and rendering. But I am a sucker for technique and lighting, and in this respect I enjoyed many of his works.

In terms of light and lighting, these caught my eye:

Burial of Atala

Endymion Asleep

The Apotheosis of French Heroes

As far as oil painting and portraiture goes, these I liked:

Danae (or, Mlle Lange as Danae)

Napoleon in Coronation Attire (and detail)

As for his drawings, like nearly every other artist save daVinci, they’re really hard to find outside of museums, probably because they’re usually preparations and studies for larger works. All Google turned up was this one by Girodet:

The ability to take a pencil and piece of paper and catch some essentially human quality in two dimensions somehow rivets me. I love drawings, whether with pencil, charcoal, crayon, touched up with watercolors, etchings and engravings (since they rely solely on lines), etc. I dislike John Singer Sargeant’s paintings, for which he is famous. I could stare at just the ankle of one of his drawn figures for upwards of an hour though. Absolutely captivating and beautiful.

By Sargeant:

About two and a half years ago, I made my first trip to the American Museum of Natural History. Six months prior to that, I had discovered what to do with my life. City map in hand, I stared thunderstruck at the columns and turrets and magisterial magnificence of the AMNH. Here was a building that architecturally honored my chosen endeavor in life: the study of life, the bare-bones way. And I had interviews with the illustrious curators of vertebrate palontology. By my request. I was there to convince them to take me - an experience-less, no-name, starry-eyed, hot-to-trot aspiring grad student - as their sole doctoral program admittee for the fall of 2004.

Well, they didn’t take me. They (and Columbia) made the right choice in taking Sterling instead. And now I’m back, in the mammalogy department instead of vertebrate paleontology, doing precisely what I’d barely permitted myself to imagine two years ago. I’m living my dream, there in the castle, in some remote crevice of a room overlooking Central Park, wedged between dusty old cabinets and poring over bones like books in Alexander’s lost library.

And it’s not till after hours, like this, that I even stop to notice the fact that I’ve sailed right past a dream. It’s so natural that I forget that all this wasn’t a given, even six months ago. More to the point, it’s because my goals are already five steps ahead, and I’m impatient to get there.

And you know what? I wouldn’t change it, not one time in a hundred. I’m glad I’m not all starry eyed, and phoning friends to tell them of my conquest, because then I’d be rotting the very mind-set that got me there: forward-thinking, resolve, confidence, and the attitude of a civilized warrior. It’s a lone fight, and it always will be, at heart.

I’m glad intellectual pursuits aren’t like sports (especially marathons), where your whole life is dedicated to a single moment - crossing the finish line - where life afterwards is a comparative void. My life is a series of simultaneous finish lines and starting lines, such that I’m always running five races at once, and achievements become stepping stones, and the prize I’m after is not static, but a dynamically increasing enticement, and its identity (and limit) are set only by me. I don’t celebrate stepping stones, but I very much celebrate the fact that I’m in the particular race that I am, and the satisfaction I feel is proportional to the the prize that I’m after.