Tag Archives: Sir Francis Bacon

future: like beads on an infinite string

The modern future was born, according to one dating, in the year 1770, when a Parisian hack writer named Louis-Sebastien Mercier wrote a book called L’an 2440… …This linear conception of the time is another essential ingredient of the modern … Continue reading

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something about clowns

Why do we need clowns? Perhaps because, in Francis Bacon’s words, “There is in human nature generally more of the fool than of the wise. ” … Of  all the images that people have created for themselves, none is as … Continue reading

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when the noble run free

The Enlightenment. It has become an ordinary and familiar thing; like a Marcel Duchamp sculpture, what was once subversive and novel, the quarrel with Christianity and that people of different religious affiliations could live peacefully together, has now become an … Continue reading

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couch sweet potatoes

Two undraped ladies; each with troubles enough of their own. Not only look-alikes but contemporaries, each of them took a prominent part in a minor revolution. Adah Menken was a kind of nineteenth-century Marilyn Monroe, and like her a peripheral … Continue reading

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bacon: instauratio magna

” for we are not to imagine or suppose, but to discover, what nature does or may be able to do.”  Francis bacon’s gist for condensation is so remarkable that it is easy , almost four centuries later, in a … Continue reading

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gardens of magnificence

We have no idea what the Garden of Eden resembled. Painters have generally rendered it as a flowering green background to highlight Eve’s white nakedness. What we do know is that humanity from the start has delighted in gardens. In … Continue reading

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the unexplained: Bacon’s believe it or rot

The Shakespeare hoax. The bard’s identity game is an old one. With Freud and Mark Twain even taking a kick at the can. James Hudson had a theory, plausible, in which Shakespeare was actually a woman, Amelia Bassano, a converso … Continue reading

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the un-hero: theme & subject

It was a “monstrous plan.” The birth of the confessional form of writing.  It was to essay something quite new: It was to look into the heart and write with, as it were, his life’s blood. A shared carnival of … Continue reading

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astarte: defrost from the fridge

A powerful myth.A goddess of life giving nature, a suprahuman embodiment of the creative forces of the universe. Astarte was a lover and destroyer.Seductive and violent. She was a bestower of life and death.Health and sickness. This contradictory Near Eastern … Continue reading

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THE BEARDED LADY: Don’t Tug Too Hard On The Bard’s Beard

Ghost writing in Stratford-Upon-Avon. Why would a man whose works portray well-educated, proto-feminist women  raise his own daughter as illiterates as Shakespeare did? Amelia Bassano, on the other hand, made feminist history when she became the first English woman to … Continue reading

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