The Newspaper Lady

Last week I went to a craft fair at Gladstone's Library and came across The Newspaper Lady. Her real name is Sarah Wilson and she takes old paper - books, sheet music etc. - and recycles it into something aesthetically pleasing. Her passion for paper recycling immediately appealed to me but so too did her use of straight lines and right angles, as can be seen below. Judging from her Diary and Events page, she is very busy and a pleasing amount of paper recycling is being done.

Why Write?

I found this unattributed quote which offers some raison d'être for the enterprise of writing - even when nobody other than oneself will ever get to read one's words:

'Writing is a means of clarifying to oneself one's own ideas.'

To this one can add something from another note that I found stashed away, that the point or use of poetry is to explore ideas that cannot be expressed in any other way. Different forms of language not only allow different forms of expression, they delimit and confine as well. Different types of ideas need these different forms of expression in order to be fully realised.

The two separate ideas above combine in the writing of poetry. Poetry is popular but perhaps not popular enough. There is perhaps not enough poetry in daily life; one does not encounter it by accident often enough. If one did, perhaps we might be a more thoughtful and richer society.

300

This is merely to note that this is my 300th blog on Marginalia55.

Fez

I haven't played it (I'm not really a computer games playing person these days) but I was intrigued by it - given my love of right-angles, rectangles etc - when I saw something about it on television some months ago. The game Fez presents a three dimensional world built-up primarily from cubes - as the image below shows. One can then move through this world panning and rotating as one goes.

For a review of Fez that explains more than I can, watch:

To watch actual Fez gameplay, see:

The Price of Education

In the 1950s linking money and education was the basis for humour - as can be heard here on Hancock's Half Hour. Now the primary focus of some newer UK universities is on their finances rather than enhancing and maintaining their academic standards.