Friday, June 15, 2007

Salmagundi #4

My fourth collection of odds and ends ...

Steampunk bugs (stag beetle shown here) at Insect Lab.

Need a steampunk raygun? Or a riveted leather mask with ruby-lensed brass goggles? (I do not recommend leaving the house wearing the mask and carrying the raygun.)

This week blogger Vanessa Bertozzi (ArtsJournal) discusses the steampunk subculture: "On the surface, steampunk seems anachronistic, oddball, 'totally random' ... But when you talk to people who consider themselves steampunk and observe them, they don't just 'like steampunk.' ... They value intellectual curiosity, an engineer's hands-on capability, a quirky difference from the mainstream -- born of a realization that their way of life is teetering on the edge of complete technological obsolescence."

Coming to a movie theater near you in December: the vaguely Victorian-y, vaguely steampunk-y world of Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass (shown here).

The Little Professor provides a handy list o' links relating to Victorian stained glass.

The BBC Radio 4 "In Our Time" series has an excellent archive of programming on Victorian subjects, including the Opium Wars, the Great Exhibition, Victorian realism, Victorian pessimism, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, archaeology and imperialism, John Ruskin, sensation novels, Bohemianism, John Stuart Mill, the Oxford Movement, and many more.

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts with Thumbnails