Is This Pasted Note Jane Austen's Final Missive?

                                                               

                                                                 

From You Tube:
This is a movie that I made for my English 2 class. If you haven't already figured it out, I was supposed to basically Discuss Jane Austen's life and books. If you want a little more info check out these websites:

http://www.janeausten.org/

http://www.tvo.org/janeausten/bio.html

http://www.jasna.org/

A SCRAP of paper covered on both sides with Jane Austen's handwriting may offer clues to the author's thought process as she wrote Mansfield Park. 

One side of Austen's note is already known to scholars as her transcript of a sermon, thought to have been delivered by her brother, the Rev James Austen. There are marks that show there is also writing in the author's hand on the other side, but no one has been able to read it since it was pasted onto a letter by James Edward Austen Leigh, the author's nephew.

Conservators at West Dean College, in West Sussex, are about to begin the painstaking task of prising the note away from the letter, which is itself pasted into a book, in the hope of reading the hidden text.

David Dorning, who will remove the note, said that it was written in 1814, the same year as Mansfield Park, and so might offer some insight into Austen's thoughts.

The text that is visible relates to a theme she explores in her third novel. It reads: "Men may get into a habit of repeating the words of our Prayers by rote, perhaps without thoroughly understanding - certainly without thoroughly feeling their full force & meaning."

Mr Dorning believes that the hidden text may be more of the sermon. "When I initially read it, I thought it was the sort of thing that Jane Austen might write," he told The Daily Telegraph. "Then I realised that it was a sermon by her brother. I thought maybe all the Austens felt like that about men.

"You can see clearly that the fragment has writing on the back. But because it's been pasted down nobody knows what it says - presumably it's more of the same sermon. It is fixed into the book so we have got some unsticking to do.

"It is almost certainly stuck together with some kind of water-soluble adhesive. We need to get it damp. I will be humidifying it gently to enable the adhesive to soften so that at some point it will be possible to lift it."

It is likely that no one has read the underside of the note since 1870, when Austen Leigh sent the book and letter to a friend. The item was recently bought by Jane Austen's House Museum at Chawton, Hampshire.

Only about a dozen examples of Austen's handwriting have survived, including manuscripts of her unfinished novels The Watsons and Sanditon.

by Jack Malvern

Above: "The Rice Portrait of Jane Austen" by Ozias Humphry.

With thanks to The Australian

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Let's Dance!

                                                             

                                                                         
You don't have to be Fred or Ginger, Cyd or Gene: just do it! 
And add some of these classic movies to your 'must watch' list.

From You Tube:

A tribute to the joy of dance...it's a wonderful thing. Song is "All These Things That I've Done" by The Killers. All rights are theirs. Images gathered from pubic domain resources, I claim no rights to images.

For those who want to play this on ipads or iphones, you can access it on my website, YouTube doesn't allow playback of this video on mobile devices. Go here: http://www.barbarancollins.com/sitebu...

Because so many people have asked, here is the lineup of clips:

1) Svetlana Zakharova - Swan Lake
2) Riverdance - Reel of the Sun
3) Michael Flatley - Lord of the Dance
4) Michael Jackson - Beat It
5) Gene Kelly, Cyd Charisse - Singing in the Rain
6) Elvis - Jailhouse Rock
7) Charlie Chaplin - Modern Times
8) John Travolta/Olivia Newton John - Grease
9) Jimmy Cagney - Yankee Doodle Dandy
10) Debbie Reynolds - Singing in the Rain
11) A Chorus Line
12) Patrick Swayze - Dirty Dancing
13) Natalie Wood/Richard Beymar - West Side Story
14) Al Nims & Leon James doing the Charleston
15) Maxim & Mel B - Dancing with the Stars
16) Elvis and Ann Margret - Viva Las Vegas
17) Michael Jackson from TV Special
18) Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers - Swing Time
19) Gene Kelly - Singing in the Rain
20) All That Jazz
21) Three Stooges get a dance lesson
22) Flashdance
23) Shirley Temple & Bill "Bojangles" Robinson - Just Around the Corner
24) Anne Reinking - All That Jazz
25) Nicholas Brothers - Stormy Weather
26) Wizard of Oz

                                                          

 

Many thanks to Ray for sending me this!

Related:
Carlos Gardel And The Tango In Movies 
Baz Luhrmann's Strictly Ballroom Musical: Dance Is In The Air 
A Look at a Legend: Rita Hayworth
The 100 Most Iconic Movie Lines of All Time
The Importance of Costume in Films: Some Iconic Images of our Culture
Hollywood Costume Exhibit In Los Angeles
Orry-Kelly:The untold story Of A Hollywood legend - "Women He's Undressed" Review
A Look at a Legend: Rita Hayworth

Anne Miller – My Favourite Dancing Queen
Dance Mashup: Characters From Golden Era Of Movies Dance To ‘Uptown Funk’ 

Charles Dellschau: Secrets of An Undiscovered Visionary Artist

                                                                  

I like to think I have an open mind. Some things cannot be easily explained.
I have to say the illustrations are somewhat astonishing in their detail and artistic merit.They are certainly worth a look.
I haven't seen this story on Ancient Aliens as yet, but that is not to say I take all their shows at face value, even though I always watch and enjoy it:)
I'll leave it to you.

                                                                    

From You Tube:
Clip now deleted.

"Charles A.A. Dellschau is one of art history's most mysterious and puzzling characters. Unknown, literally hidden away in a Texas attic the last 20 years of his life, he produced a massive volume of wildly imaginative illustrations only discovered in 1923, nearly 50 years after his death. The product of a tortured mind perhaps, or a visionary, his art predates the invention of the airplane by 50 years, but depicts flying machines propelled by anti-gravity gas. Was this merely art, or true documentation? Can UFO sightings of the 19th Century be attributed to these aircraft, the ones Dellschau drew?"   

But now another You Tube clip:

                                                             
In the fall of 1899, Charles A.A. Dellschau (1830-1923), a retired butcher from Houston, embarked on a project that would occupy him for more than 20 years.

What began as an illustrated manuscript recounting his experiences in the California Gold Rush became an obsessive project resulting in 12 large, hand-bound books with more than 2,500 drawings related to airships and the development of flight.

Dellschau's designs resemble traditional hot air balloons augmented with fantastic visual details, collage and text. The hand-drawn "Aeros" were interspersed with collaged pages called "Press Blooms," featuring thousands of newspaper clippings related to the political events and technological advances of the period.

After the artist's death in 1923, the books were stored in the attic of the family home in Houston. In the aftermath of a fire in the 1960s, they were dumped on the sidewalk and salvaged by a junk dealer.

Eight made their way into the collections of the San Antonio Museum of Art, the Witte Museum and the Menil Collection; the remainder were sold to a private collector. Dellschau's works have since been collected by numerous other museums including the American Folk Art Museum, the High Museum, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. 

Like the eccentric outpourings of Adolf Wölfli, Henry Darger and Achilles Rizzoli, these private works were not created for the art world, but to satisfy a driving internal creative force. Dreamer, optimist and visionary, Charles Dellschau is one of the earliest documented outsider artists known in America. Http://www.romanoart.com

                                                                

His story is one shrouded in mystery, almost lost forever, intertwined with secret societies, hidden codes, otherworldly theories and seemingly impossible inventions before his time. Unseen for decades and salvaged by a junk dealer in the 1960s from a trash heap outside a house in Texas, his entire body of work would later go on to marvel the intellectual world. But during his lifetime, Charles Dellschau had only been known as the grouchy local butcher.

In 1969, used furniture dealer Fred Washington bought 12 large discarded notebooks  from a garbage collector, where they found a new home in his warehouse under a pile of dusty carpets. In 1969, art history student, Mary Jane Victor, was scouring through his bazaar of castaways when she came upon the mysterious works of a certain Charles Dellschau. Inside the scrapbooks she discovered a remarkable collection of strange watercolours and collage pieces. More than 2,500 intricate drawings of flying machines alongside cryptic newspaper clippings filled the pages, crudely sewn together with shoelaces and thread.

Victor immediately notified the Art Director of Rice University, Dominique de Menil, Houston’s leading fine art patron, who snapped up four of the books for $1,500 and promptly put on an exhibition at the university entitled, “Flight”. Charles Dellschau, a Prussian immigrant had finally been discovered, nearly 50 years after his death in 1923.

He had arrived in the United States at 25 years old from Hamburg in 1853 and documents show he lived in both California and Texas with his family, working as a butcher. After his retirement in 1899, he took to filling his days by filling notebooks with a visual journal of his youth. He called the first three books, Recollections and recounts a secret society of flight enthusiasts which met in California in the mid-19th century called the ‘Sonora Aero Club’.

The Wright Brothers wouldn’t even make their famous first flight until 1903, but Dellschau draws dapperly-dressed men piloting brightly-coloured airships and helicopters with revolving generators and retractable landing gear. No records have ever been found of the Sonora Aero Club but Dellschau’s artworks hide a secret coded story. Whatever it was that he had to say was apparently too private even for his own notebooks and even today, much of the mystery has yet to be revealed.

                                                                   

A Mr. Pete Navarro, graphic artist and UFO researcher, heard about the “Flight” exhibition in 1969 and became enthralled. He believed there was a connection between Dellschau’s drawings and mysterious mass of “airship” sightings at the turn of the century across 18 states from California to Indiana. In 1972, he discovered that 8 remaining books of Dellschau were still sitting at the junk shop, unwanted and unclaimed. He bought the lot for $565 and spent the next 15 years obsessively decoding Dellschau’s work.

Dellschau never draws himself aboard the fantastical aero inventions and represent himself as the club’s scribe/ record-keeper, rather than as one of its inventors or pilots. There are as many as 100 designs for airships with names like the Aero Mary, the Aero Trump and even an “Aero Jourdan”. The club’s secret mission? To design and build the first navigable aircrafts using a secret formula he coded as “NB Gas” which could negate gravity and drive the ships wheels, side panels and compressor motors … all in a day’s work during an era when air travel was still viewed as a mystical impossibility.

Some of his drawings tell of fatal crashes of the society’s airships, sabotage of other club members and the banning of members who talked about the secret organisation to outsiders. According to Dellschau, the club’s aero prototypes would travel the open roads disguised as gypsy wagons to avoid detection.

In the notebooks’ strange code of germanic lettering, Pete Navarro found a phrase that translated as “NYMZA”. Dellschau reveals this to be an even larger secret society that allegedly controlled the Sonora Aero Club branch. Based on Navarro’s findings, UFO theorists have come up with some far-fetched speculation that the NYMZA was in fact an extra terrestrial entity. (When talking about secret societies, I think it comes with the territory).

                                                                     

While Navarro rubbished those claims, he did manage to find press clippings in Texas archives linking one of the names of Dellschau’s secret society members to an article published in 1897 about a local airship sighting. The San Antonio Daily Express article identified one of the airship’s mysterious occupants as Hiram Wilson, who according to witnesses, revealed that his airship design came from his uncle named Tosh Wilson, the very name Navarro had found mentioned in Dellschau’s watercolours as a Sonora club inventor.

But even Navarro, despite his exhaustive research, had his doubts about Charles Dellschau’s story and how much of it was fiction. Were they tall tales to keep an old man entertained? Or were they true accounts of his youth, perhaps innocently exaggerated here and there?

Fiction or not, a single page from Dellschau’s notebooks could fetch as much as $15,000 in the late 1990s. Today, Navarro is no longer in possession of his books; he sold them off in need of some cash to museums, galleries and private collectors in Texas, New York and Paris.

As for how they ended up in a trash heap in the 1960s? The books had been hiding in Charles Dellschau’s attic where he worked for many years before his death. In the 1960s, the husband of Dellschau’s step-daughter, Anton Stelzig was living in the home during the 1960s with his two ageing sisters and a nurse hired to care for them, when the fire department assessed that the house was a hazard and ordered that it be cleared of debris. The nurse was given the task of “cleaning-up”. Her way of doing things resulted in many of the family’s treasures being thrown out onto the street, including Dellschau’s books.

 Anton’s grandson Leo, painfully recalls the nurse saying, “I took care of that mess and cleaned it all up.” Some of Dellschau’s work is still believed to be missing, possibly lost forever.

In 2009, Pete Navarro finally published his co-written The Secrets of Dellschau, revealing a lot of the script he had decoded from the books. Four books still remain in the Menil Collection, locked in a humidity-controlled room. Researchers continue to unearth new pieces of information through  surviving relatives.

A Dellschau enthusiast, William Steen, obtained the aviation enthusiast’s journals in the late 1990s which included details of a secret club boarding house, with a bar and dining room where the society would have meets, dream up their newest flying machines (and probably just have a bit of guy time)!

“The more details I see about Dellschau, the more convinced I am that a great deal of it is highly possible,” he told the Houston Press. “Even though it’s fantastic, it’s more than just fairy tales.”

Sources: The Houston Press, The Observatory via Kateoplis

Article and pictures thanks to Messy Nessy Chic.

More on Charles Dellschau here, posted with caution as Wiki is not definitive and relies on editable texts.

Many thanks to Tom for sending me this.

Other posts on art:
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Christopher Allen:50 Years of Australian Visual Arts

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Fore-edge Painting: Artists Hide Paintings Along The Edges Of Old Books  

Insanely Realistic Pencil Drawings

Found: A Missing Paul Gauguin Painting

Royal Academy of British Art Coming To Town

Australia and the UK Battle Over Historic Paintings Of A Kangaroo And A Dingo

Finally: A Digital Home For Lost Masterpieces

America: "Painting a Nation" Exhibition in Art Gallery of NSW

Chauvet Cave Paintings: Cave Women Left Their Artistic Mark

London exhibition of Australian art holds up a mirror to our nation: more iconic images
 
500 Years of Female Portraits in Western Art

Some Fascinating Pictures featuring Alyssa Monks

Visual Art of the Human Body by Cecelia Webber

Ronnie Wood: His Art and The Rolling Stones

The lost Van Gogh: Painting found in Norwegian attic is confirmed as priceless work by Dutch master

Market Find Turns Out To Be A Lost Faberge Egg

Charles Dellschau: Secrets of An Undiscovered Visionary Artist

Tom Pinch: Time - Lapse Portraits of Paul McCartney and John Lennon

How JMW Turner Set Painting Free 

The Curious Case Of The Renaissance Cockatoo

Images On Andy Warhol’s Old Computer Discs Excite University Students

Human Ingenuity: From the Renaissance to the Age of the Internet - The Sistine Chapel

Katsushika Hokusai: Japanese Artist

Picasso's "Women of Algiers" Breaks Auction Record

Looted Treasures Open Door To The Dark Nazi Past

Long-lost Caravaggio Masterpiece Found In French Attic

Frederic Remington: The Man Who Helped Bring The West To Life 

Loving Vincent: The World's First Fully Painted Film 

Vincenzo Peruggia: The Man Who Stole The Mona Lisa And Made Her more Famous Than Ever

The Isleworth Mona Lisa: A Second Leonardo Masterpiece? 

 Optical Illusions In Art

MC Escher: An Enigma Behind an Illusion                                
                          
Hidden Degas Portrait Revealed

First Faberge Egg Created For 99 Years Goes To Doha  

The World’s Priceless Treasures

Woman in Gold: Another Biopic For Dame Helen Mirren 

Australia and the UK Battle Over Historic Paintings Of A Kangaroo And A Dingo

Finally: A Digital Home For Lost Masterpieces

Could Anyone Paint A Vermeer? 

Artemisia Gentileschi - Her Biography And Her Art

John Constable Painting Sold By Christie's For £3,500 In June 2013 Will Now Go To Market To Sell For £2 million

The Pre-Raphaelite Legacy

Yulia Brodskaya:Paper Explodes With Life In This Artist's Hands

Images On Andy Warhol’s Old Computer Discs Excite University Students

Human Ingenuity: From the Renaissance to the Age of the Internet - The Sistine Chapel

Charles Rennie Mackintosh: Scotland’s Greatest Architect

David Bowie's Personal Art Collection Auctioned Off For $30 Million 

7 Cardinal Rules For Life

                                                              

Some very good advice!
Many thanks to Jared for sending me this.

Sergeant Stubby: World War I Hero Dog

                                                                 

Any one who has had a dog as a pet knows all about their unstinting loyalty, companionship, and unconditional love. 

That is why so many of us appreciate our pet dogs so much.

It seems to me these are qualities not all humans have.

Sergeant Stubby was a dog who served in the Great War, WW1. 

He was America’s first war dog.

What he did was quite amazing! Of course there are many wonderful dogs serving not only in the military these days, but also in police forces, in search and rescue teams,in transport in the polar regions and such, and they do a very fine job.

Any community must be proud and thankful for the service of these dogs together with their handlers.

Much more about Stubby here.

Stubby was the most decorated dog of World War I. He was adopted by Private J. Robert Conroy and became the mascot of the 102nd Infantry, Yankee Division. He learned a lot about military life including bugle calls and how to execute a salute with his paw. He was smuggled to France when his owner shipped out and allowed to stay when the commanding officer saw him salute. 

After surviving exposure to gas, Stubby became invaluable as he had learned to recognize the scent and alert the human soldiers to its presence. He also could recognize English and was able to locate wounded soldiers and alert paramedics. He also was credited with capturing a German spy, who he tripped and attacked until American soldiers took him prisoner.

Stubby was wounded by a grenade and was sent to a Red Cross hospital, where upon his recovery, he became a therapy dog, comforting other soldiers. 

He was promoted to the rank of sergeant and received many medals, and became the first dog to be received by a sitting president, Woodrow Wilson. 

He later followed his master to Georgetown and became the Hoyas mascot. 

With many thanks to Cesarsway.

More at this site. 

More information and pictures of Sergeant Stubby at BuzzFeed.

                                                                  

                                                                              

                                                     

See Also Staff Sergeant Reckless -  the real War Horse.

Wibki: Your New Way To Explore The Web

                                                           

                                                                    

by Emily Mendel
Wibki will revolutionize the way you surf the web and bookmark your favorite sites. With a visual interface and sleek layout, you’ll never go back to your old browsing habits again.

Bookmark In Style

The idea behind bookmarking webpages is smart, but the way we go about it almost as old as the Internet itself. We find a site we know will eventually be useful to us, and keep it in a “junk drawer” like tab on our browser. 

Wibki‘s goal is to make this ineffective bookmarking method obsolete, so you’ll actually go back to your saved pages and break out from your 5 favorite sites. 

You’ll be able to create customized tabs for the expert recipes you’ll eventually tackle, the countless travel blogs you’ll need for your backpacking trip, and the best humor sites to make you pee your pants on your next coffee break. 

When you find a site, article, or blog that you love, saving them to your Wibki is easy with the customized bookmarlet.
 
Instead of a typical  drop down menu, the site is saved as the site’s icon. The visual aspect is clean, organized, and makes returning to your sites tempting.

We tend to fall into the habit of visiting the same 5 or 6 websites over and over again. We know you love your tried-and-true sites, but the web has so much more to offer than Facebook, Google, and YouTube. Wibki‘s social discovery concept allows you to discover the web from friends and other Wibki users. 

When you check out their profile, you’ll be able to see what sites they saved and visit most. If your TV-obsessed friend visits Television Without Pity 15 times a month, it’s their way of recommending the site and telling you it’s great. You get to discover the web through the eyes of your friends and show them what lesser-known sites you think they should be visiting. 

But don’t worry–your more, um, personal sites can be saved in a private category. It’s time to branch out and explore what the web really has to offer. Trust us, you haven’t seen anything yet.

 More video and information here.

With many thanks to All My Favs.