"The National Portrait Gallery in Britain has a great digital collection of artists and photographers speaking on the process of creating specific portraits, as well as a collection of sitters speaking about their experience of being the subjects of those portraits. Visitors interested in reading about the sitter, the artist who painted them, and the actual portrait, need only choose from the list of “Contemporary Sitters”, and read the transcript of an audio recording, a video recording, or both. Then look at the list of “Artists”, and choose whichever artist painted the portrait, and read an audio or video transcript, or both. It’s interesting to compare the artist’s perspective on the sitter, and the sitter’s own perspective.

The transcript of what Germaine Greer described as a sitter contrasts greatly with what the artist Paula Rezo said about the experience of painting Greer. Visitors interested in seeing the result of what the sitter and artist were talking about, can look in the far right hand column of the homepage, entitled “Related Portraits”, to view the actual painted portrait."

The sitters’ names are not in alphabetical order, so look at the whole list. It’s here.

Here, Germaine Greer comments on her portrait. "The whole point about it is that it’s not attractive, it’s actually aggressive and it’s difficult as a woman and conscious all the time of the duty to attract on the one hand and the impossibility of attracting on the other because you can only be found attractive, you can’t actually do anything to make yourself attractive, and somehow this picture leaps all of that and gets into a different place. Gets into where my intelligence might be or my intelligence of some sort of organising principle of my life. It’s got lots of my deformities in it, none of them has been left out I don’t think. My shoe is even broken, which is pretty typical. It’s my favourite dress, my very first proper dress when I had some money, it’s an old Jean Muir and it’s very beautiful pink. The colour’s not quite the right colour because the dress is actually raspberry, a very soft raspberry colour but Paula wanted the strong colour, the blood colour which is better, and as typical of people with dark eyes she’s exaggerated the Anglo-Saxoness of my eyes so they look much brighter and bluer, greener than they are. I love it."

More here.

And on the topic of unemployment and the economy the NPG words of John Maynard Keynes, Baron Keynes in May 1939, are apposite. He reflects "on how the preparations for war will, at least, have a helpful impact on the unemployment problem that had blighted the 1930s. ‘200,000 young men are going to be called up. And the raising of the school leaving age in autumn will make a big cut in the number of lads coming forward. What a difference all this makes. It is not an exaggeration to say that the end of abnormal unemployment is in sight. And with the demand for efficient labour, outrunning the supply, how much more comfortable and secure everyone will feel in his job. I have a special extra reason for hoping that trade unionists will do what they can to make this big transition to fuller employment works easily. I began by saying that the grand experiment has begun. If it works, if expenditure on armaments really does cure unemployment, I predict that we shall never go back all the way to the old state of affairs. If we cure unemployment for the wasted purposes of armaments, we can cure it for the productive purposes of peace, good may come out of evil."

See more here.

Dame Judi Dench says "she is nobody’s national treasure" (or even girl or puppet)

In an extensive interview in The Times, "Britain’s greatest actress talks about her life, career and why politicians are failing the arts". Tim Teeman writes "you will never want to be on the receiving end of the Dench glare. The mouth tightens, the hoods on the eyes flare. I had asked what she thought of the prospect of a Conservative government and the glare was her response, followed by five seconds of silence and then the sullen pronouncement: “I’m not too hot about that.” Gordon Brown needn’t feel smug, though. She just sighed at his name and said quietly: “I’m not much a fan of any of them now.” Indeed, Dame Judi Dench, 75, dressed today in black, would like it to be known that she is nobody’s national treasure."

More here

The globalisation of religion

In a long review article, in The Times Literary Supplement, Jonathan Benthall writes, "Ever greater numbers of people throughout the world profess adherence to one religion or another. But it is unclear how much this shows a genuine resurgence of faith, the need for shelter from the "hurricane of capitalism" - or an investment in a new kind of market".

More here.

Hitler parody on peer review

There are many YouTube adaptions of the Hitler scene from the film "Downfall", not least linked to the fates of football clubs. But find out how Hitler would respond to criticism from peer review experts of his article which is, unfortunately, oh so accurate in the citation and peer review worlds of academia. Warning some language might offend.

It’s here.

(If you have a spare afternoon over the festive break, you could spend it watching the numerous parodies taken from the film, on topics as diverse as the Edinburgh tram system)

They’re here.

Best book covers of the year

“Amazon allows you to vote on the best book covers of the year. If you vote you have a chance to win some books. And this year we're also choosing the best book covers of the year. We nominated 60 especially eye-catching and evocative covers from 2009 and opened up the voting to you to choose the finalists in 10 categories. Now that you've narrowed the field, you can vote on the overall winner Voting is open through December 17. You can vote and see the covers here.

Evelyn Waugh is to have his entire oeuvre republished in 47 volumes by Oxford University Press

This will take 15 years to publish the whole collection, representing a significant cultural landmark — especially for Waugh scholars as every (expurgated) word he wrote will be restored with copious footnotes and appendices. Waugh’s back catalogue is prodigious. He wrote sixteen novels, including Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, A Handful of Dust and Black Mischief, alongside short stories, travel books and biographies. Nancy Mitford once asked him how he could behave so abominably and yet claim to be a Catholic. "You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic," Waugh replied. "Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being."

A Christmas Rewrite, as Dickens Edits Dickens, courtesy of the New York Times and the Pierpont Morgan Library

"It is an enduring mystery of English literature: What secrets lie entombed beneath the thick scribbles that Charles Dickens made as he wrote, and rewrote, the 66 pages of “A Christmas Carol” in 1843? The manuscript of this classic holiday ghost story, written in six weeks to raise much-needed cash, is housed at the Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan, where it bears all of Dickens’s additions and subtractions in his own hand.

For example, on page 12, where Scrooge takes Marley’s ghost to be evidence not of the supernatural, but of his own indigestion, (“more of gravy than of grave,”) he converts the offending bit of food from being a “spot of mustard” to a less digestible “blot of mustard.”

Viewers can examine high resolution images of Dickens’s manuscript for themselves and discover additions and deletions he made to “A Christmas Carol” before sending it to the printer. This year, however, the Morgan agreed to allow The New York Times to photograph and display the entire handwritten manuscript online.

It’s here.

Odd book title

Catching a Cannon Ball. By Walter Brown Gibson. St. Louis. 1923.

This book clearly didn't have an impact, not being found in Libraries Australia or WorldCat.