As much as I don’t support big game hunting, and despite my literary-fueled desire to see this white rhino turn in to a Moby Dick-type situation, you’ve gotta admit it.
Teddy Roosevelt was a badass.
(source: The Daytona Daily News, January 8, 1910.)
Philip Bergen, Billy Park’s Restaurant, Bosworth St., Boston, Massachusetts, 1893.
The final touch before going out is to touch your ears with a bit of your favorite perfume. Rita Hayworth, Columbia contract player, uses a lighter fragrance in the summertime, leaving the heavier odors to accompany the furs and woolens of the cooler seasons (1938)
(via mariedeflor)
"Whenever there’s an awkward silence, try whispering, “Did you forget your line?"
— (via mana-junkie)
William Hazlitt (born 10 April, 1778; died 18 September, 1830), pictured above in an engraving made around 1813; in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London
From ‘On the Ignorance of the Learned’:
‘A mere scholar, who knows nothing but books, must be ignorant even of them. ‘Books do not teach the use of books.’ How should he know anything of a work who knows nothing of the subject of it? The learned pedant is conversant with books only as they are made of other books, and those again of others, without end. He parrots those who have parroted others. He can translate the same word into ten different languages, but he knows nothing of the thing which it means in any one of them. He stuffs his head with authorities built on authorities, with quotations quoted from quotations, while he locks up his senses, his understanding, and his heart. He is unacquainted with the maxims and manners of the world; he is to seek in the characters of individuals. He sees no beauty in the face of nature or of art. To him ‘the mighty world of eye and ear’ is hid; and ‘knowledge,’ except at one entrance, ‘quite shut out.’ His pride takes part with his ignorance; and his self-importance rises with the number of things of which be does not know the value, and which he therefore despises as unworthy of his notice. He knows nothing of pictures,—‘Of the colouring of Titian, the grace of Raphael, the purity of Domenichino, the corregioscity of Correggio, the learning of Poussin, the airs of Guido, the taste of the Caracci, or the grand contour of Michael Angelo,’—of all those glories of the Italian and miracles of the Flemish school, which have filled the eyes of mankind with delight, and to the study and imitation of which thousands have in vain devoted their lives. These are to him as if they had never been, a mere dead letter, a by-word; and no wonder, for he neither sees nor understands their prototypes in nature. A print of Rubens’ Watering-place or Claude’s Enchanted Castle may be hanging on the walls of his room for months without his once perceiving them; and if you point them out to him he will turn away from them. The language of nature, or of art (which is another nature), is one that he does not understand. He repeats indeed the names of Apelles and Phidias, because they are to be found in classic authors, and boasts of their works as prodigies, because they no longer exist; or when he sees the finest remains of Grecian art actually before him in the Elgin Marbles, takes no other interest in them than as they lead to a learned dispute, and (which is the same thing) a quarrel about the meaning of a Greek particle. He is equally ignorant of music; he ‘knows no touch of it,’ from the strains of the all-accomplished Mozart to the shepherd’s pipe upon the mountain. His ears are nailed to his books; and deadened with the sound of the Greek and Latin tongues, and the din and smithery of school-learning. Does he know anything more of poetry? He knows the number of feet in a verse, and of acts in a play; but of the soul or spirit he knows nothing. He can turn a Greek ode into English, or a Latin epigram into Greek verse; but whether either is worth the trouble he leaves to the critics. Does he understand ‘the act and practique part of life’ better than ‘the theorique’? No. He knows no liberal or mechanic art, no trade or occupation, no game of skill or chance. Learning ‘has no skill in surgery,’ in agriculture, in building, in working in wood or in iron; it cannot make any instrument of labour, or use it when made; it cannot handle the plough or the spade, or the chisel or the hammer; it knows nothing of hunting or hawking, fishing or shooting, of horses or dogs, of fencing or dancing, or cudgel-playing, or bowls, or cards, or tennis, or anything else. The learned professor of all arts and sciences cannot reduce any one of them to practice, though he may contribute an account of them to an Encyclopedia. He has not the use of his hands nor of his feet; he can neither run, nor walk, nor swim; and he considers all those who actually understand and can exercise any of these arts of body or mind as vulgar and mechanical men,—though to know almost any one of them in perfection requires long time and practice, with powers originally fitted, and a turn of mind particularly devoted to them. It does not require more than this to enable the learned candidate to arrive, by painful study, at a doctor’s degree and a fellowship, and to eat, drink, and sleep the rest of his life!
The thing is plain. All that men really understand is confined to a very small compass; to their daily affairs and experience; to what they have an opportunity to know, and motives to study or practise. The rest is affectation and imposture …’—from ‘On the Ignorance of the Learned,’ published in Table-talk (1821)
(via trockneblumen)
zenr:
The gentlemen of Savile Row are getting hot under their stiffly starched collars as they absorb the news that yet another vulgar imposter, this time The Kooples, a French fashion brand, is about to lower the tone of their Mayfair street. (via Not quite our class, darling! Savile Row tailors deny snobbery… - News - Fashion - The Independent)
Why should they deny their snobbery? Standards are good.
The flamboyantly natty Savile Row tailor Tommy Nutter with his dogs. ”Although tailoring was quite distinct from fashion then, Tommy Nutter changed the way men dressed,” says Dennis Nothdruft, who co-curated the 2011 retrospective (Tommy Nutter: Rebel on the Row) at the Fashion and Textile Museum in London along with tailor Timothy Everest. “And he changed the way Savile Row was seen. Before Nutters it was an exclusive, closed-off world. They didn’t even have window displays. Though, of course, the rest of the row looked upon him as an upstart whose shop was on the wrong side of the street.” (The huge purple candles in the shape of phalluses can’t exactly have endeared him to his neighbors… Another legend, Simon Doonan, was Nutter’s window dresser back in those days.)
From Admiral Cod
