Beautiful Things Research Articles

Taking the David Story out of its Box

Taking the David Story out of its Box: Review Essay Jan Wojcik The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel, by Robert Alter. New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1999. 410 pp. $30.00. King David: The Real Life of the Man who Ruled Israel, by Jonathan Kirsch. New York: Ballantine Books, 2000. 368 pp. $28.00. King David: A Biography, by Steven L. McKenzie. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 232 pp. $25.00. Forty years ago, at the same 18 years of age David was when he began his story as the harried and beloved of God, I became a novice in a Jesuit seminary. Callow like the young David, I had never read the Bible. Most Jewish and Christian religious people have not either, beyond poems and stories about the length of parables and rhythmic liturgical snippets, or stories easily cartooned like David and Goliath and Noah and the Animals and Eve and the Snake. The main difference for us novices is that we were ready to dedicate our chaste, poor, obedient lives to what the Bible said without knowing what it said. We each had been issued a new Bible in a box. Inside the front cover of the box was a card listing all the passages I still was not supposed to read. The text itself came with little warnings in the margins to skip over whole books like the Song of Songs, and Susanna and the Elders, and the episode in 2 Samuel where King David spies a naked woman bathing on a roof, and sends his men to bring her to him. There was no accompanying explanation as to why we were to skip these parts of the Bible. And none was required for the perfectly obedient, so for a few weeks, the stories remained behind a wall secured by my betters. But one day I was weak and used the card to zero in on the naked Bathsheba story. I found the story enormously stimulating, sexually, because for one thing I knew it was forbidden, and for another, the rest of my imaginative landscape was bleak. The translation was an English translation of a French translation (the Douay) of Jerome’s Latin Vulgate of the Jewish Septuagint Greek translation of the original Hebrew. Yet I think my reading scored a direct hit with the original Hebrew story written thousands of years ago by someone who would find me as incomprehensible as I would have found him or her. I got the story. I had a deep response. Of course I could [End Page 96] see it was a lousy thing for David to do, but it was understandable, really, given the kind of court he was running. I read the next few chapters with the story about his son Amnon raping his sister Tamar, and another son Absalom killing the rapist, and then instigating a civil war which climaxed in David’s lament over his son’s dead body: “Absalom, O Absalom my son.” Later, David, warmed in bed by the young, beautiful and apparently continuously virginal Abishag, gets sick. Before he dies, and after apparently Abishag has been removed, he says beautiful and pious things on his death bed. He asks for everyone to forgive him. I could understand this. The sinner at rest at last in the bosom of an understanding God. And Bathsheba did well, too, since her second son with David, Solomon, succeeded him to the throne after the primary candidates had been killed off. Oddly, it all worked out for the best. I started from the beginning of 1 Samuel then, and read the entire David Story, most of which was permissible for novices, probably because the bulk of the stories are about fights and bloodshed and thus not lascivious. It begins with Eli, a priest with two bad sons who steal and eat the poor people’s sacrificial meat. One day Eli notices a woman passionately praying and accuses her of being drunk. She protests she is sober. She is really very upset about being barren. Eli blesses her. She conceives and gives birth to Samuel, whose family takes over...

Photodiode Front Ends: The Real Story

Photodiode front ends are by no means glamorous. Living between the detector and the signal processing system, they're supposed to turn a photocurrent into a buffered, filtered electronic replica while preserving the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Nobody notices them until they stop doing their jobs.Your optical system may be a thing of great beauty, but a badly designed front end can sink those precious photoelectrons deep in Johnson noise. My unscientific sampling suggests that unfortunately a great many front ends are badly designed: the usual mistake is to trade SNR for speed without a fight. This article will describe techniques for building fast front ends without sacrificing SNR.

Beauty and testimony

Kant claims that the judgement of taste, the judgement that some particular is beautiful, exhibits two ‘peculiarities’. First:[t]he judgement of taste determines its object in respect of delight (as a thing of beauty) with a claim to the agreement of every one, just as if it were objective.

Industrial Sewing Machines, Work-Disciplines and Aesthetics

People strive for ‘better lives’. Young women in Bohol temporarily out-migrate to Manila and other urban centres for economic and aesthetic reasons, which are both complementary and contradictory. Their temporary out-migration is a kind of rite of passage in which they transform themselves into beautiful and marriageable women in far-away places in the proximity of beautiful people and things in the city. The modernizing state translates the question of ‘better lives’ into a solvable problem via purification. Towards the end, I introduce Japanese gold, the metaphor and metonym for plundered wealth brought from Singapore, which is pursued by both Japanese experts and Boholanos. Japanese gold enables us to see ‘better lives’ as an unpurified hybrid equally sought after by Boholanos, Japanese experts, the dictator and his prodigal beauty queen.

Laughter and Subjectivity: The Self-Ironical Tradition in Bengali Literature

By the grace of the Almighty an extraordinary species of sentient life has been found on earth in the nineteenth century: they are known as modern Bengalis. After careful analysis zoological experts have found that this species displays the external bodily features of homo sapiens. They have five fingers on their hands and feet; they have no tails; and their bones and cranial structures are indeed similar to the human species. However as yet there is no comparable unanimity about their inner nature. Some believe that in their inner nature too they are similar to humans; others think that they are only externally human; in their inner nature they are in fact beasts.Which side do we support in this controversy? We believe in the theory which asserts the bestiality of Bengalis. We learnt this theory from English newspapers. According to some redbearded savants, just as the creator had taken atoms of beauty from all beautiful things to make Tilottama, in exactly the same way, by taking atoms of bestiality from all animals he has created the extraordinary character of the modern Bengali. Slyness from the fox, sycophancy and supplication from the dog, cowardliness from sheep, imitativeness from the ape and volubility from the ass—by a combination of these qualities He has made the modern Bengali rise in the firmament of history: a presence which illuminates the horizon, the centre of all of India's hopes and future prospects, and the great favourite of the savant Max Mueller.

Scientific Instruments 1500–1900: An Introduction

The impulse to collect is an almost universal one, satisfying the hunting and acquisitive instincts, the love of beauty, and intellectual curiosity. The wealthy have collected rare and beautiful things from the earliest days of civilization, but the collection, or 'cabinet', containing natural curiosities dates from the sixteenth century, and it was this type of collection in which scientific instruments found a home. In the twentieth century, we have come to accept a vast range of technical, often complex, equipment for everyday use. Science has become the very substance of our life style. But the appeal of historic scientific instruments remains, and from them much can be learned of the practice and development of science over four centuries. This book traces the historical origins and development of instruments as they spread across the globe, explaining their manufacture, use, and adaptations. This must-have book for the active collector gives practical advice on dealing with instruments and checking their authenticity. It features a comprehensive international list of major museums and instrument collections. Over 100 superb illustrations show the instruments to their full advantage.

Writing Literary Memoir: Are We Obliged to Tell the Real Truth?

142Fourth Genre ent. Personal essayists do not need to have enormous vocabularies or—spare us—a gift for grandiloquence, but they must constantly adjudicate the voices in their heads and choose the right language. These, then, are the essential shaping devices, the tools of the essayist's craft: beginnings and endings, proportion and pace, and language. They do not involve invention, but they are the way to art—and they are rarely easy. Recognizing that art is in the shaping oflanguage, not in inventing or being true to life, can be liberating for students. They do not need to have exciting lives in order to write about themselves, nor do they need to resort to fanciful creativity. Instead they can find that any event, when fashioned in words, can have meaning. But all of us, whether we be students, teachers , writers, or—bless their souls!—readers, reap benefits from carefully shaped compositions. "All that you love you lose," Yeats wrote. Our life slips through greedy fingers even as we live it. Works ofart may not give us our lives back, but they are money in the spiritual bank. With these hard-earned things of beauty we redeem a lifetime of losses. Writing Literary Memoir: Are We Obliged to Tell the Real Truth? Michael Steinberg The aims of the imagination are not the aims of history. Cynthia Ozick Recently at a writer's conference, I gave a public reading ofa memoir about a turbulent relationship I'd had with an old high-school coach. During the q and a, I was asked several questions: "Did it really happen the way you wrote it?" "Did your coach really do those perverse things to you?"And the one that almost always comes up: "Ifyou were only thirteen, how can you remember exactly what was said in the coach's office?" Those questions go right to the heart of some of the more provocative issues that literary memoirists are currently debating. Issues such as: Does the writer have to stick to the literal facts ofthe story?What should writers do when they can't remember the details of an important incident, situation , or conversation? Can/should they embellish? And if so, to what end? My first impulse is to advise aspiring memoirists to write the whole story first, just the way they remember it. Include all ofthe specifics and the names Roundtable: Literal versus Invented Truth in Memoir143 and the situations. I say this because ideally when we write memoir, we're hoping to create an authentic and convincing story. In other words, we want the work to ring true. But what does that phrase, "to ring true," really mean? I was thinking about these matters while I was attending an Associated Writing Programs (AWP) convention a few years back. As part of a panel discussion on truth and invention in nonfiction writing, memoirist Fern Kupfer gave a talk entitled "Everything But the Truth?" In her speech, Kupfer spoke about the differences between literal and artistic truth. At one point, she said something to the effect of the following. "The question of lying comes up all the time in the creative nonfiction classes I teach. 'But that's how it happened' my students sometimes say when I suggest changes that would shore up the narrative and pep up the prose. 'Your memoir shouldn't read as slowly as real life,' I tell them." Kupfer went on to suggest that "We need to give memoir writers permission to lie, but only when the reconstructed version of the story does not deceive the reader in its search for the aesthetic truth." By raising the issue ofaesthetic truth, Kupfer was moving into a controversial area. Some writers and editors contend that memoirists should remain faithful to the facts and events, much like good journalists are expected to do. Others like Kupfer, and Patricia Hampl, believe that imagination cannot help but transpose memory. In which case, the writer has license to invent. For myself, I believe that the type ofmemoir a writer produces is determined at least in part by that writer's sensibility, as well as by how that writer views/defines the genre. Someone who thinks...

Sacrificial Bodies and the Body of the Text in Aristophanes' Lysistrata

‘Why is inert Matter female and the animating Nous male, please?’‘Because earth is the Mother, because all beautiful things spring from her, trees and flowers and creatures.’A.S. Byatt Angels and InsectsByart's characters, the Victorian gentlewoman who asks the question and the poet who answers, articulate an enduring notion of Western popular and intellectual culture. The association of women with matter and the body, men with form and the soul, is the legacy of ancient Greek thought which gendered the physical universe according to social convention: women were considered to be passive and therefore acted upon by the formative male principle. Examples of this bilateral symmetry include preformation theories of conception which suggest that a mother only provides the fetus with its raw material, while the father's seed organises that undeveloped material into its human form. This is a value-laden distinction, as we see from ancient philosophy which privileges the masculine soul over the feminine body and aligns men with the intellect but women with the baser corporeal passions.

Three beautiful things

New BlackfriarsVolume 79, Issue 931 p. 390-390 Three beautiful things Michael Kelly, Michael KellySearch for more papers by this author Michael Kelly, Michael KellySearch for more papers by this author First published: 27 July 2007 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-2005.1998.tb01622.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume79, Issue931September 1998Pages 390-390 RelatedInformation

Transcriptional activation: is it rocket science?

One of the beautiful things about biology is that you don’t have to fully understand it to put it to good use. The engineers who design spacecraft may need a certain working familiarity with all of the parts in their systems. But biologists, and particularly biologists whose mission is to treat human disease, can make do with considerably more ignorance. One reason for this difference is that biological control usually is exerted through linear pathways of protein–protein interactions. Intervention at a single known point in the pathway often is sufficient to capture that pathway in its entirety.

Six not-so-easy pieces: Einstein's relativity, symmetry, and space-time

No twentieth-century American scientist is better known to a wider spectrum of people than Richard P. Feynman (19181988)physicist, teacher, author, and cultural icon. His autobiographies and biographies have been read and enjoyed by millions of readers around the world, while his wit and eccentricities have made him the subject of TV specials and even a theatrical film. The spectacular reception of the book and audio versions of Feynmans Six Easy Pieces (published in 1995) resulted in a worldwide clamor for More Feynman! More Feynman! The outcome is these six additional lectures, drawn from the celebrated three-volume Lectures on Physics. Though slightly more challenging than the first six, these lectures are more focused, delving into the most revolutionary discovery in twentieth-century physics: Einsteins Theory of Relativity. No single breakthrough in twentieth-century physics (with the possible exception of quantum mechanics) changed our view of the world more than that of Einsteins discovery of relativity. The notions that the flow of time is not a constant, that the mass of an object depends on its velocity, and that the speed of light is a constant no matter what the motion of the observer, at first seemed shocking to scientists and laymen alike. But, as Feynman shows so clearly and so entertainingly in the lectures chosen for this volume, these crazy notions are no mere dry principles of physics, but are things of beauty and elegance. No onenot even Einstein himselfexplained these difficult, anti-intuitive concepts more clearly, or with more verve and gusto, than Richard Feynman.

The Brier Poems by Jim Wayne Miller (review)

ness ofstereotypes undermining the truth ofthe region. And as a university professor he filled a career in higher education. Finally, in his writing he turned to the novel, looking back from his home in Kentucky to his first home in North Carolina to tell the story of Robert Lee Wells, his family and an ever widening community offriends. Folk beliefs and characters from earlier poems echoed pleasantly in these pages. Ever-old, ever-fresh, this is the coming-of-age story that has engaged great tellers and ready readers through the centuries. In Newfound, Jim Wayne explores the mystery, to their children, of parents' differences, but he never exploits the pain created by their divorce . With sentiment that never spills over into sentimentality, he evokes a boy's subtle and complex relationships with others, and his response to the seasons, the natural world. Perhaps the real pleasure of Newfound is Jim Wayne's sense of irony, his sustaining humor that invites readers to laugh with, but never at, his people, his world. Itwas appropriate that ourlast briefvisit tookplace last Julyin Hindman at the ninetieth birthday celebration ofhis friend and mentor, James Still. To say that Still's classic, River ofEarth, and Miller's Newfound have much in common is not so much to compare their achievement as to appreciate the quiet, profound sense ofsimple humanity that they shared. And that they continue to share with us. —Wilma Dykeman Miller, Jim Wayne. The BrierPoems. Frankfort, Kentucky: Gnomon Press, 1997. 159 pages. Paperback. $14.50 This compilation ofthe late JimWayne Miller's The MountainsHave Come Closer (1980) and Brier, HisBook (1988) includes also some recent work. Typically, these poems describe an Appalachian scenery, a scenery both of the eye and ofthe heart. For the most part, the sentiment springing from this landscape seems deeply felt, and poems here can turn eyesores into things ofbeauty (ifnot joys forever). Presumably, the thread that binds this collection is the persona of Brier. "Brier" is a pejorative term sometimes given to Appalachians, but Miller's Brier assumes the roles of preacher, philosopher, commentator, possibly seer. Rather, I should say, these roles are conferred upon him by a narrator who remains strangely and awkwardly more remote than Brier. It is not clear why Miller chose to present so many ofthese poems in the third person. 66 The imagery and metaphor are good; the monosyllabic rhythms, entirely appropriate. But the sentiment remains questionable, in part because the omniscient narrator seems incapable ofsuch intimacywith Brier's black thoughts. This book has other limitations, certainly. In a poem called "The Country ofConscience" (dedicated to CzeslawMilosz) Millerwrites about tyranny: "This history hires plainclothes operatives/ with two rolls offat on the backs oftheir necks." (Oh, iftyranny were only so obvious in its appearance!) Miller is not the first poet who has written not well about political and social oppression. For some reason, politics and poetry often (at least in our generation) mix badly. It seems that one or the other, the poetry or the politics, must suffer in this endeavor, and it is probably better that it is so often the poetry that does. Miller's voice is strongest and most convincing when the poet is focusing on the commonplace and the domestic, things that we share beyond boundaries ofcountries, regions, and ways oflife. He, like his Brier, is at his best when he assumes the role of observer or reporter. In "The Brier's Pictorial History ofthe Mountains," Miller demonstrates that clean reporting is more powerful than the editorializing and that metaphor is still the most subtle form ofargument known to mankind: Green trees pale before deadening axes. The woods fall back, heading for high ground. Fields follow, pushing the woods uphill, taking all the ground up to the rib rock. When Miller is using this kind ofsubtlety, he can render truthfully the abstractions oflife as well as any poet can. In "His Mother's Story," Miller manages to move us with the story ofa small truth that is literally locked in the foundation ofa house. An injustice is visited upon the Brier's mother when she is a child: she has been punished for losing one ofher father's tools...

The Politics and Poetics of Otherness: A Study of Wole Soyinka's 'The Interpreters'

Olofi created the earth and all the things in it. He created beautiful things and ugly things. He created Truth and he created Falsehood. He made Truth big and powerful, but he made Falsehood skinny and weak. And he made them enemies. He gave Falsehood a cutlass, unbeknownst to Truth. One day, the two met and started fighting. Truth, being so big and powerful, felt confident, and also very complacent since he didn't know that Falsehood had a cutlass. So Falsehood

Ideas and Objects: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain

The speaker is William Morris, the leading figure of the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain. The sentiment in this quotation is negative and perhaps even shocking; but it represents my subject. I want to suggest that the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain was inspired by the desire to produce beautiful things and by a hatred of modern civilization. The Wolfsonian's inaugural exhibition, and the book which accompanies it, convey two arguments with admirable clarity. One is the general argument that design serves to express ideas, and that it shifts our perceptions of the world. The other is that design in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was preoccupied with the experience of modernity. The Arts and Crafts movement in Britain fits well into these arguments. Not since the Gothic Revival earlier in the century, whose idealism was derived from a powerful religious movement, had the designing and making of things carried such serious meanings. Arts and Crafts people had ambitious ideas about the nature of work and the improvement of design, and they were always, if obliquely, concerned with modernity. What is more, the Arts and Crafts movement was linked with politics, for some of the most important figures in the movement were also part of the early Socialist movement in Britain. In this paper, I will concentrate on the general point that design serves to express ideas; I will take up the themes of modernity and politics at the end. My argument goes in two directions. It starts with ideas and goes towards objects, asking what effect these ideas had on design. Then it turns round, starting with objects and listing their typical qualities, in order to discover the spirit in which they were designed. Both approaches are necessary, for the relationship between ideas and objects in the Arts and Crafts movement is not always straightforward. Sometimes you cannot move directly from idea to object, as from plan to execution. Sometimes the objects contradict 1 May Morris, ed., The Collected Works of William Morris, vol. 23, (London: Longmans Green and Company, 1910-15), 279.

Hot Cows and Green Pastures in the Rio Sonora Country, Mexico

Deserts rarely get their due. During my dissertation-proposal defense a faculty member turned to me with a puzzled look and asked, But aren't cattle grazers? What are they eating if there's no grass? In Sonora, where browsers graze and grazers browse, general rules of animal diet tend to fall apart. Given a choice between eating rocks or mesquite pods, cattle favor mesquite. For the most part, cattle adapt quickly and learn to browse shrubs eight months out of the year, as they wait for the summer and mild winter rains to produce herbaceous forage. Sonora is a place of contradictions. Cattle ranching occupies more than 90 percent of the state's land base, yet this extensive form of land use depends on the irrigated districts for supplementary feed. Cattle ranchers are therefore also agriculturists. A second contradiction is in the rhetoric of buffelgrass (Cenchrus ciliaris), a species of exotic African grass planted on rangelands, which is much decried by local and international environmentalists. Methods of preparing rangeland for seeding with buffelgrass are not pretty: One of my colleagues refers to this as bulldozer ecology. Aesthetics notwithstanding, soil erosion may actually decrease once buffelgrass is in place - at least that is what my preliminary results indicate. Although cattle have been present in Sonora for more than four hundred years, ranching as a more formal industry has grown in a remarkably short time. Mexican ranchers, of course, did export to the United States before the aftosa (foot-and-mouth disease) crisis of 1946-1954. The changes wrought by U.S. policies toward diseased Mexican cattle, however, were far-reaching. A sharp decline in cattle exports and numbers led to the importation of fine breeds of European ancestry, many times at the expense of the Mexican government, though international moneys certainly contributed. Between 1960 and 1985 the World Bank invested more than U.S.$1.5 billion in Latin American cattle projects, in an effort to improve animals. The consequences of such improvement are now well known: Improved animals need improved food. In other words, croplands across Latin America have been converted to feed cattle, not people. Small communities, such as Baviacora - where I stay [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED] - have witnessed dramatic changes in land use and crop cover. Wheat crops have nearly disappeared, alfalfa and oats have surged forward, and corn is now mostly reserved for other animal industries that have appeared in the Rio Sonora region. Indeed, the pork industry of Sonora is growing at a faster rate than the cattle industry, a fact liberally evident on a drive with the windows down on any Sonoran road. In this matter, Sonora is certainly not unique: Scholars have noted this ganaderizacion (livestockization) of Mexican agriculture for decades. Studying cattle ranching, and agriculture in general, in an arid realm has its advantages. First, patterns of land use are more readily visible, for the green pastures contrast sharply with the surrounding gray and brown. Extreme temperatures call for extreme measures. When water is lacking, ranchers and smallholders burn the spines from cacti so that cattle can eat and rehydrate at the same time. A final plus for research here is the ecological sensitivity of the place: Small environmental changes can produce dramatic results on the landscape. A gentle spring rain can delay cactus blooms. A cow tumbles down a hill and causes a rockslide; the alluvial material accumulates in a canyon and produces a series of ponded reservoirs for both wildlife and cattle. Small, beautiful things can be accidents, but this makes them no less notable when they occur. Sad events may also lead to a quick environmental impact. A rancher's daughter drowned in a stockpond, and the grief-stricken rancher destroyed the earthen dam that created the reservoir. After the retaining wall was blown up, thick, coffee-colored liquid spewed down the canyon. …

The Visual in Botany

One of my favorite writers on biology is a woman who never held a professional position, but who was third woman to be elected a Fellow of Royal Society, Britain's premiere science society. Her name is Agnes Arber (1878-1960) and she was a specialist in plant morphology, particularly of monocots. But book of hers that I most enjoyed is The Mind and Eye (1954), a study on biological inquiry that ranges far from her specialty. In it, she argues for importance of observation to biologist; and like psychologist of art, Rudolph Arnheim (1966), she sees functions of perception and thought of eye and mind, so intertwined as to be impossible to separate. Arber also sees art and biology as interconnected, since in both fields thoughtful perception can be key to creativity. Though in this book Arber draws her examples from many areas of biology besides botany, I'm not sure that it could have been written by anyone but a botanist. I think it is in botany perhaps more than in any other area of biology that visual and artistic are essential to development of discipline. In a book on natural history illustrations in British Library, Ray Desmond (1986) argues that foundations of modem botany were laid by artist rather than by scientist. He quotes 17th-century botanist John Ray as observing that a history of plants without figures is like a geography book without maps. Agnes Arber was acutely aware of importance of visual to botany. Her scientific papers and her monographs are full of illustrations, most of which she created herself. Her father was an artist and began giving her drawing lessons when she was eight years old. She developed an interest in botany while in her teens. It was quite natural for her to combine her two interests, and she continued to combine them throughout her life. Early in her career, these interests led her to write a history of herbals (Arber 1912, revised in 1938), and later to write of Goethe's interest in botany (1946). It was Goethe who observed that you really do not see a plant until you draw it. Because I like Arber's clear and opinionated writing style and enjoyed The Mind and Eye so much, I recently read her book on herbals which led me to other works on plant illustration. This has been a very pleasant experience because many of these books have beautiful reproductions of work of artists and artist/botanists who have advanced science of botany while at same time creating things of beauty. This experience has also made me more convinced than ever of Bernard McTigue's (1989) observation that if C.P. Snow had known something about history of botany he might have modified his ideas on two cultures because the history of botany is also to a certain extent history of art, one in which progress in systematic exploration of natural is matched by advance in quality of means used to represent that world (p. 50).

The splendor of ethnic jewelry: from the Colette and Jean-Pierre Ghysels collection

Over the long course of human history, jewelry and other kinds of body adornment have expressed a multitude of meanings in people's lives - social position, marital status, individual wealth, self-esteem. All these things and more are revealed in the objects that men and women use and wear on and around their bodies. And those who can perceive and understand the subtle meanings of these richly elaborated, finely crafted, and beautiful things are the richer for it. Among the world's finest private collections of ethnic jewelry is that of Colette and Jean-Pierre Ghysels. Formed over the course of more than thirty years of dedicated world travel, conscientious trekking, and trading, the Ghysels' collection has, until now, not been available for viewing except to the couple's friends and selected scholars. Never exhibited extensively, never published in any comprehensive way, the collection has remained carefully protected in Brussels. Published here for the first time, the Ghysels Collection comes to light in brilliant photographs - made especially for this book - by John Bigelow Taylor and accompanied by a thoughtful and wide-ranging introductory text by a Belgian scholar, the art historian France Borel. Among the four hundred stunning color reproductions from the collection are pieces from every corner of the globe - Africa, the Middle East, the mountain kingdoms of Asia, India, the golden triangle, Indonesia and Malaysia, the Philippines, China and Japan, Oceania, and the Americas. The materials of which they are made cover an enormously wide array: gold, silver, brass, bronze, and iron; precious and semiprecious gems such as carnelian, turquoise, and amber; animal fur, bones, teeth,and feathers; shell, ivory, wood, leather, stone, glass, seeds, plant fibers, and clay. The range of sizes, forms, and craft techniques is equally amazing. In her lucid and readable overall survey of the subject and in geographical section introductions, France Borel leads the read

Holography in Japan

The discovery of beautiful and mysterious things is not the joy of artists alone; scientists, engineers and even nonprofessionals are also greatly affected. When holography was discovered, excited writers spread the word, and a spirit of great expectation prevailed. In 1968, after receiving my degree in sociology from Hosei University, I started working as a coordinator of plastic lens development at the Japan Optical Resin Company. I began studying optics with engineers from the company for my work project, which was the development of a segmented multiple prism lens for wide-angle television screen tubes. I researched the use of a laser to measure prism angles to within ?3 minutes of arc, and while reading a technical handbook on optics for this task, I happened to notice an explanation of laser holography. I was completely fascinated. I was impressed by the images in the handbook of Stephen Benton's holograms, one of dice and one of a locomotive steam engine. After that, I dreamed of someday working in holography. But it was 7 years before I saw an actual hologram at the 1975 Ikebukuro Seibu department store exhibition entitled Holographic Fantasy. There and then, seeing Benton's Engine Number Nine hologram, I realized that I could not escape the lure of holography. These holograms far exceeded my highest expectations. I would not call myself an artist, but I do appreciate art. And like an artist, I can appreciate the true beauty of holography. In 1977 I left the Japan Optical Resin Company and went to work for Holomedia, Inc., the first company in Japan to specialize in the production of holograms. My involvement with the holography community also dates from this year.

Why Did Suffragettes Attack Works of Art?

D(XIlJMENTS Why Did Suffragettes Attack Works of Art? Rowena Fowler Mary Richardson's attack on the "Rokeby" Venus on 10 March 1914 was the first and most famous in a campaign of deliberate damage to works of art during the last months of suffragette militancy before the outbreak of war. Fourteen pictures were slashed and nine women arrested between March and July. The statements made by the women in self-justification and the reactions of public and government demonstrate the poUtical and sodal importance of works of art and their powerful symboUc status. The attacks received widespread pubUdty at first and were almost universally condemned. For nonmUitant suffragists, and even for some more radical sympathizers, the destruction of art was the crudal test of the validity and expediency of the campaign of violence. Even though the discussion of the rights and wrongs of the attacks often took place at a rudimentary level reminiscent of the ethical old chestnut about babies and paintings in burning buildings, the feelings of outrage and puzzlement cannot just be reduced, as the suffragettes argued, to hypocrisy. It was not necessary to be an art lover or connoisseur to be disturbed by the threat to a valuable but vulnerable national possession; it was genuinely upsetting to see beautiful things spoüed and to find "great" and "timeless" works of art forced into proximity with the messiness of contemporary poUtical conftid. It also contributed to the impad of the attacks that they were not carried out surreptitiously or anonymously but took place in pubtic during the open hours of museums and gaUeries. All the women involved were immediately apprehended and charged; only one gave a false name. I shaU discuss the reverberations of these seemingly irrational acts of violence, deliberately and conspicuously perpetrated by respectable and sometimes timid women against something they professed to care for and appreciate. Of particular interest is the surrogate nature of the pictures which were attacked; the way in which a painting of a woman or a portrait of a man was perceived as standing for female exploitation or male authority. For this reason I have concentrated on two female nudes and four portraits of important men. A list of the attacks can be found in the Appendix. Mary Richardson claimed that her slashing of the Velasquez Venus was a reprisal for the Glasgow arrest of Emmeline Pankhurst. In a statement sent to the office of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), she wrote: "I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in © 1991 Journal of Women-s History, Vol. 2 No. 3 (Winter) 110 Journal of Women's History Winter THE GASHES MADE IN VELASQUEZ'S "VENUS WITH THE MIRROR," IN THE NATIONAL A dastardly outrage took place in the National GaUery, in Trafalgar Square, on Tuesday, March 10, when a militant Suffragette attacked the world-famous Rokeby "Venus," of Velasquez, mutilating it with a smaU chopper. The actual damage done is shown in this illustration. The marks made by the woman on the canvas are exactly as is here shown; and they are here reproduced by authority of and courtesy of the "Times." That paper describes the damage as follows: 'To judge from the damaged frame, the first blow was struck at the point marked by the star in the reproduction of the picture-----What is described by one who afterwards saw the damaged masterpiece as probably the most serious blow has caused a cruel wound in the neck. For three or four inches, he says, it runs almost 1991 DOCUMENTS: ROWENA FOWLER 111 GALLERY: THE HARM WROUGHT BY THE MILITANT TO THE £45,000 MASTERPIECE verticaUy, and spreads out an inch wide. Another severe cut has been aggravated apparently by the chopper's having been twisted a Uttle as it was withdrawn for the next blow. Further, there is a broad laceration starting near the left shoulder and roughly forming, with two other cuts, a letter 7N/ Two of the limbs of that letter are six or dght inches long, and the third is a gash extending right beyond the body and some inches through the drapery bdow it. The other cuts...

Things to see on a clear night

Many beautiful things are visible in the night sky if a good observing site is chosen and the weather is clear. No sophisticated equipment is needed, but a little preparation beforehand ensures that everyone can recognize what they see.