Mostly Medieval:Images and Reflections

So more of Adam, this time one of his hands and importantly showing yet another odd part of his body - the attachment that runs between his thumb and his chest.  Of course I know why its there, technically, in order to support that bent up arm, otherwise it would most likely have broken off at the elbow.  These kinds of struts are visible on lots of stone sculptures, starting already in antiquity, and typically we just look past or through them, not allowing them to disrupt seeing the sculpted body as similar to our own.  But what strikes me about this particular one is its elegance, its graceful form, which seems to me to integrate it with the rest of his body and so ask for it to be taken seriously as part of that body.  We have already seen how weird this body really is, so why not add this in too: not only does he have two belly buttons , but also a growth of some sort that attaches his hand to chest, apparently from his fingernail and to a place near his nippl...

I was thinking about death a for while there, but didn't want to write anything about it, largely because I didn't think I had anything all that interesting to say.  I don't want to die, the end.  Or else, since we are all going to die anyway, what's the point of doing anything, and so why write at all?  Not surprisingly this post has been hard to write.  Its taken longer than most, this is my second try at it, and I'm still not sure its all that great.   I'm going to start with my image since that I know how to write about, at least most of the time. This is (part of) the transi of Jeanne de Bourbon -Vendome, which I've been visiting at the Louvre and so may explain my train of thought.  If you aren't familiar, a transi is a type of tomb sculpture that represents the dead and so decomposing body.  Look at the swirl of her entrails that have apparent burst out of her body - although the real bursting seems to happen in the draperies that frame he...

Yesterday was International Yarn Bombing Day and this was my small contribution: crocheted covers for the tops of some of the metal posts that edge the sidewalks all around Paris.  These happen to be right in front of the building where I'm staying. If you aren't familiar with yarn bombing, its a mash-up of traditional "feminine" craft techniques,  knitting and crocheting, with street art or graffiti and so installed in public spaces, most often without permission or authorization.  I've done this kind of work since I was a child -  I learned it from my mother who learned  from her mother... - putting it to more conventional applications, sweaters and scarves and the like.  I've been intrigued by yarn bombing for a while, but I've had a hard time  getting into doing it myself because I've been hanging on to some of the expectations about this type of work that bombing is meant to subvert.  I've wanted a pattern to follow.  To make measure...

I've been in Paris since early Friday morning.  And its great. To tell the truth I'd been feeling a little guilty about coming this year, since I'm not doing any work here that I couldn't do at home - no research, just writing, reading, and thinking.  And staying home I would have saved myself a lot of money. But then I got here and went for a walk in the city - from the apartment where I'm staying near the Place des Voges over to the cathedral and back - and all of that guilt just disappeared.  This is where I want to be.  The money is so worth it. Sunday I was planning on going to a group French language class, since I'm trying to do more in French when I'm here (and by the way, Blogger is in French right now and I don't know how to tell it to be in English).  But the class was cancelled at the last minute and so I went to the Cluny museum instead.  I've spent a lot of time at the Cluny in the past, when I was here looking at Virgin and Childs...