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Hey kids! Who wants to see the Cyclorama?
Jan. 10th, 2006 11:51 pm
High temp today, here: 1. Dewpoint then: -6. High dewpoint: -4.
High temp today in TO: 3. Dewpoint then: -5. High dewpoint: -5.
Low temp today on the balcony: -1.4. High: 0.8. Current: 0.
And the rain is back. Some very light freezing rain heading back from WLU tonight. It occurred to me, last night, when Susan Hay said that there would be showers changing to freezing drizzle tonight, that nobody ever says "freezing showers".
Today's library tour: in NYRB, a review by Frank Kermode of Harold Bloom's new book on Yahweh, Yeshua, and Jesus Christ, and somebody's new book about David. (The link: Bloom proclaims that the Yahwist author of the OT is Bathsheba.) Bloom cares not for J.C. or, much, the NT (especially John, as opposed to Thomas--that again, and speaking of that again, hello again Elaine Pagels), but likes Mark's Yeshua best of the poor canonical bunch because he's nuts like Yahweh. (L. says she's heard of a Christian coming out of the Gospel of John movie and saying, disturbed, to her viewing companion, "Did Jesus seem a little ... crazy to you?" Wait'll you see the Mark movie....)
Somewhere, probably NYRB, a review of a couple of books about religion in Australia--one on the wacky Sydney diocese of the Anglican church (whose wackiness, by odd coincidence, I'd just learned of earlier today through a Wikipedia chain beginnig with "Anglo-Catholic"), the other on the Australian religious right.
In TLS, a review of some books on Sartre, in honour of his 100th birthday. Nothing memorable there, except that apparently there's some minor controversy, from the producers of The Heidegger Affair, about Sartre having accepted a university post in 1941 that a Jew had earlier been forced to vacate.
In University of Toronto Quarterly, an article about--what was it called?--I believe it was called the Cyclorama, a short-lived 19th-century attraction in Toronto. It was a sixteen-sided building lined on the inside with a massive mural of a historical scene (beginning, oddly, with one of the Franco-Prussian War, followed a couple of years later by one of the Battle of Gettysburg, and finally one of the crucifixion); viewers looked out from the middle, and the effect--an astoundingly striking effect, they say--was supposed to be such that You Felt You Were Actually There. The article quotes a newspaper report quoting an old woman saying to her son that she had to leave one of the war shows because she couldn't stand the smell of the dead horses.
And, it turns out, a cyclorama of the crucifixion (not the same one, apparently) still exists in Ste. Anne de Beaupre, Quebec, which is, oddly, a place I've been, on a school trip, though I don't think they took us to the cyclorama, which is the kind of thing you'd think you might be taken to on a school trip. (I'm not sure whether the fact it's of the crucifixion would've nixed the idea in those days; that was within a few years after the last time we said the Lord's Prayer in school.) All I remember doing in Ste. Anne de Beaupre is eating tortiere. I think, on my hypothetical cross-Canada graduation present train trip, I will have to see the cyclorama.
High temp today in TO: 3. Dewpoint then: -5. High dewpoint: -5.
Low temp today on the balcony: -1.4. High: 0.8. Current: 0.
And the rain is back. Some very light freezing rain heading back from WLU tonight. It occurred to me, last night, when Susan Hay said that there would be showers changing to freezing drizzle tonight, that nobody ever says "freezing showers".
Today's library tour: in NYRB, a review by Frank Kermode of Harold Bloom's new book on Yahweh, Yeshua, and Jesus Christ, and somebody's new book about David. (The link: Bloom proclaims that the Yahwist author of the OT is Bathsheba.) Bloom cares not for J.C. or, much, the NT (especially John, as opposed to Thomas--that again, and speaking of that again, hello again Elaine Pagels), but likes Mark's Yeshua best of the poor canonical bunch because he's nuts like Yahweh. (L. says she's heard of a Christian coming out of the Gospel of John movie and saying, disturbed, to her viewing companion, "Did Jesus seem a little ... crazy to you?" Wait'll you see the Mark movie....)
Somewhere, probably NYRB, a review of a couple of books about religion in Australia--one on the wacky Sydney diocese of the Anglican church (whose wackiness, by odd coincidence, I'd just learned of earlier today through a Wikipedia chain beginnig with "Anglo-Catholic"), the other on the Australian religious right.
In TLS, a review of some books on Sartre, in honour of his 100th birthday. Nothing memorable there, except that apparently there's some minor controversy, from the producers of The Heidegger Affair, about Sartre having accepted a university post in 1941 that a Jew had earlier been forced to vacate.
In University of Toronto Quarterly, an article about--what was it called?--I believe it was called the Cyclorama, a short-lived 19th-century attraction in Toronto. It was a sixteen-sided building lined on the inside with a massive mural of a historical scene (beginning, oddly, with one of the Franco-Prussian War, followed a couple of years later by one of the Battle of Gettysburg, and finally one of the crucifixion); viewers looked out from the middle, and the effect--an astoundingly striking effect, they say--was supposed to be such that You Felt You Were Actually There. The article quotes a newspaper report quoting an old woman saying to her son that she had to leave one of the war shows because she couldn't stand the smell of the dead horses.
And, it turns out, a cyclorama of the crucifixion (not the same one, apparently) still exists in Ste. Anne de Beaupre, Quebec, which is, oddly, a place I've been, on a school trip, though I don't think they took us to the cyclorama, which is the kind of thing you'd think you might be taken to on a school trip. (I'm not sure whether the fact it's of the crucifixion would've nixed the idea in those days; that was within a few years after the last time we said the Lord's Prayer in school.) All I remember doing in Ste. Anne de Beaupre is eating tortiere. I think, on my hypothetical cross-Canada graduation present train trip, I will have to see the cyclorama.
