2011-06-02
This is a consolidation of posts from an old blog listing calm, simple and esoteric topics. There are plenty of books, songs, hobbies, and curios for your delectation.
“Dad built himself a small ‘shack’ as he called it to be as far away from the family noise as possible. That way he could work to his heart’s content and not interfere with the noisy comings and goings of the likes of my brother and me and our friends. It was not wired for electricity, so when it was late or dark or stormy, he would light his kerosene lanterns and keep pounding away on his typewriter.”
Four piano songs by Gian Francesco Malipiero. Solemn chords evocative of Mompou, with plaintive notes of birdsong. Written in 1914.
From beans to cup.
Public garden on fourteen acres in Rockford, Illinois. Meticulous. Full of calming streams and a real teahouse.
Sebastian Schutyser photographed abandoned Spanish hermitages (ermita) using a pinhole camera.
Paul Fussell’s book about the way we act is acerbic, revealing, and funny.
A fine slender hand. Mott Media sells copybooks.
Monotonous but respectable.
Resists the homogenized, the rushed, and the tasteless.
Russian black bread.
Proved the Poincaré conjecture, and now keeps to himself and will not stoop to accept prizes.
“In 2007, the world’s fourth-largest metropolis and Brazil’s most important city, São Paulo, became the first city outside of the communist world to put into effect a radical, near-complete ban on outdoor advertising.”
“As Littlewood said to me once [of the ancient Greeks], they are not clever school boys or ‘scholarship candidates’, but ‘Fellows of another college.’” — Godfrey Harold Hardy
Better known as Aita Donostia, he was a priest and musicologist who studied Basque folklore. Wrote music extensively, including piano transcriptions of Basque folk songs.
Kakuzo Okakura describes the history, varieties, and ceremonies of tea.
Wilhelm Peterson-Berger wrote these warm, lyrical piano songs in the rustic house he built on the island of Frösö.
Easy to make and sturdy. A simple vehicle for plain old cash.
“Even when she had to make some one a present of the kind called ‘useful,’ when she had to give an armchair or some table-silver or a walking stick, she would choose ‘antiques,’ as though their long desuetude had effaced from them any semblance of utility and fitted them rather to instruct us in the lives of the men of other days than to serve the common requirements of our own.” — Proust
The Scully company makes a nice plain one.
Zen calligraphy.
Swedish mini-house.
Keep only one type of utensil per person.
Reassuring.
Unlike digital mass storage, microfilm doesn’t suffer file format conflicts or require software management. It is legible with just a magnifying glass and light.
Mahler wrote music in “composition huts” — single room huts with little more than a piano inside.
Federico Mompou’s friend and fellow composer. Wrote tranquil piano music like Peces de joventut. His music served as a “diary without words” for his nature walks.
Stores your winter food without electricity.
This is the first in a series: watch
Notably hand-molded tea bowls.
Read Lyn Rodley’s account of hermitages carved in the 9th and 10th centuries.
It’s not a circuit; it does its job in full view.
Rather terrifying, but probably manageable if you’ve grown up using one. Promotes an ethos of quality and maintenance over quantity and disposal. Honing and stropping must feel satisfying.
“About ten years ago I took a job as a seasonal park ranger in a place called Arches National Monument near the little town of Moab in southeast Utah. Why I went there no longer matters; what I found there is the subject of this book.”
Perhaps a few mirrored sconces would be enough to see by.
In a world of paper millionaires, true wealth is immovable property.
A worn library counter, hollowed stairs, darkened chair arms.
For those who find brand logos distasteful.
Don’t waste the chicken carcass. Make your own stock.
For instance NOAA and C-SPAN in the US.
One way to prepare tough indian corn is to turn it into hominy, then cook it in a posole.
Perhaps the perfect piano song. Written by Jehan Alain.
A gently reflective piano song by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. He wrote it in 1919.
The best are made of coticule.
Read “The Forgotten Hermitage of Skellig Michael” by Walter Horn.
Written by H. A. Overstreet. A refreshing, enthusiastic viewpoint from the 1930s.
Use hand tools and feel the quality of wood. No electric cords, no rush. Aldren Watson wrote this excellent book.
It’s a cookbook written by Victor-Antoine D’Avila-Latourrette (that itself is a mouthful). The recipes are minimalist.
Plain gray blankets are available cheap (< $20) from army surplus.
Parsnips, turnips, and rutabagas are cheap and underused.
Wall-mounted manual sharpeners are getting rarer.
Cluster’s 1976 album is music floating from far away down a dirt path through golden haze.
“Native American Agriculture and Wild Plant Conservation.” Gary Nabhan writes about seeds’ rich genetic information.
In this movie, a hut floats in the middle of a placid lake. An old monk raises a boy.
A teenager who wandered the deserts of the southwest United States and made woodblock prints of what he saw. He disappeared in 1934 at age 20. His diaries survive.
Calm, atmospheric trip-hop.
A short movie showing levers and flames and pendulums doing their things.
Those tough blue metal boxes accept simple hand-addressed letters.
1 cup cornmeal, 1 cup flour, 2 tsp baking powder, ½ tsp baking soda, 1 egg, 1 cup plain yogurt, 3 Tbsp honey, 3 Tbsp melted butter
Bake in a skillet at 350° for 20 minutes.
Boston Ivy.
A pond and a book. At least the pond is free of contradictions.
CDs are reliable and accurate, but burnables can lose data in a few years. Taiyo Yuden is known for longevity.
A delicate variety.
The sunset dapples through.
Quiet and effective.
“Milk is not produced by computers, bread doesn’t come from a good company PR. It is necessary to plow, sow and harvest before that.”
They are cheap, nutritious, and their growth improves the soil.
llinois Vipassana Meditation Center offers ten day donation-supported retreats. It’s calm, but is it useful?
An 80s zine describing how to live without a fixed home. Bert and Holly Davis wrote it on their manual typewriter.
A composer whose later works are long, sparse, and quiet. Recommended listening: For Philip Guston (it is over 4½ hours long).
They smell good and are easy to make with just a lump of wax and some wicks.
How relaxing to knead and rise and bake.
The world’s madness is fleeting; stones endure. Read Charles McRaven’s book.
For bulbs Kelvin measures color: lower redder, higher whiter/bluer. 2600-2800 is soft cozy light.
Money’s unskilled labor.
Electrical cords wrapped in cloth rather than plastic.
Wittgenstein was a brilliant uncompromising 20th century philosopher. This book by Michael Nedo provides biographical pictures, including details of W’s cabin in Skjolden, Norway.
Heats food evenly. Repays its modest upkeep.
Tough old rotary beasts with real mechanical ringers.
A board game with just one type of move.
Not a person, but a group of men who wrote a multi-volume, austere, unified exposition of math.
Wrote haiku-like music blending Eastern sensibilities with Western instruments.
Solid metal. Indestructible.
Old, with portraits and nooks.
“In order for the character of a human being to reveal truly exceptional qualities, we must have the good fortune to observe its action over a long period of years.”
He designed algorithms, and emphasized patience and exactness. See the video Discipline in Thought.
The Garden of the Master of Nets is located in Suzhou, China. Placid water, circular windows, ancient calligraphy.
Isolation and focus can improve writing. A typewriter removes distractions.
Disjointed atmospheric instrumentals provide urban calm.
Try a cast-iron manual grinder. Make cornmeal, etc.
Corn provides a stalk for beans to climb. Beans fix nitrogen. Squash smothers weeds and cools the soil.
Easy to use, quiet, durable. A piece of slate.
E.g. Mario Botta’s single-handed watch.
It is free of instruments, meter, or polyphony. One can learn Gregorian chant by the Solesmes method.
Directed by Wim Wenders. A slow, hypnotic story of two men traveling back-roads by truck.
Loved nature, and wrote sunny, picturesque piano music. Suggested listening: En Vacances.
A book by Joseph Wood Krutch about people’s relation to non-anthropomorphic nature.
Just a frame, wheels, and a chain.
Poustinia in English. A small, sparsely furnished cabin for solitary retreats.
A survivalist so skilled he creates his own tools and a snug cabin in Alaska. He filmed himself for the documentary Alone in the Wilderness.
He wrote delicate, meditative piano music. Suggested listening: Musica Callada.
The autobiography of mathematician Alexander Grothendieck. He describes the simplicity and poetry of modern abstract math. There is no complete English translation yet.
A cookbook by Beverly Mills and Alicia Ross. Its title is accurate.
A buddhist monk who left the monastery to live in a hut outside of town. He wrote poems about his daily life.
A three-hour, mostly wordless documentary by Philip Gröning about the Carthusian monks. They live closely with wood, stone, cloth, and the seasons.
A composer of understated gentle piano music. Suggested listening: Cinq Nocturnes.
Written by Joe "begriffs" Nelson