Archeologists claim they have discovered the oldest known wall painting on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. “But the sophistication of the imagery is a matter of some dispute. Archaeologist Paul Pettitt of Durham University in England, an expert on early art who was not involved in the new study, points out that although one animal in the group is at least 43,900 years old, most of the other figures are not dated. ‘“Scenes” are very rare in Pleistocene art,’ he observes. ‘If this were in Europe, Africa or North America, it would date to no more than [10,000] years ago.’”

Superman reveals his identity, which is being read by some—and probably rightly—as “a coming out allegory.” Comics used to be anti-establishment. They haven’t been so for a long time.

How does winning the Nobel Prize in Literature affect book sales? Take the case of Naguib Mahfouz, who was an unexpected winner in 1988. “Nobody knew him, or even how to spell his name right. We had sold 300 copies in three years — and then 30,000 in three minutes.”

The artist who went north: “Peder Balke was the artist of the end of the world. In 1832 he sailed to Finnmark, Norway’s northernmost county, hundreds of miles into the Arctic Circle, bordered by Finland and Russia, and pounded by the icy Barents Sea. At the North Cape he went ashore, and was assaulted by nature. ‘I had positioned myself on a rocky plateau some 100 feet above the sea,’ he recalled, ‘and I felt I had to hold on tight to the cliff when the backwash hurled itself against the rock face and with a deafening sound like thunder rolled out again into the heaving sea.’ Other artists of the period, such as Turner and Caspar David Friedrich, painted the sublime, but Balke experienced it. It was only in 1814 that Norway separated from Denmark and discovered in the far north its own national realm of myth. Balke was one of very few Norwegians who ventured there, and the experience was to reappear in his art over and over again. Immersed in his country’s wild lands, he wrote that ‘I hardly knew whether what surrounded me was real or supernatural’. He set about painting this dream state in pictures of isolation that though tiny in scale are nevertheless epic, all churned seas, aqueous light, cliffs and peaks of unfeasible height and fatal sheerness.”

Tom Shippey on medieval bestiaries: “The most striking feature of Book of Beasts is its 270 colour plates. The front plate shows a griffin, half-lion, half-eagle, with a man dangling from its beak: presumably one of the ‘Arimaspians’ who, according to Milton (borrowing both from Herodotus and from Pliny’s Natural History), robbed the griffins’ hoards of gold. Shortly after there is a full-page plate of a mild-looking elephant, with a green and white striped trunk and a tower on its back from which soldiers with crossbows, pikes and mattocks beat off axe-wielding assailants. Further on, lions bring their dead cubs back to life by breathing on them – a gift for the allegorist – and a tiger cub is stolen from its mother, who is deceived by a mirror into guarding the cub’s reflection. Unicorns are repeatedly shown with their heads in a maiden’s lap (sometimes a naked maiden: a gift for the illustrator, or perhaps for the aristocratic patron). It’s clear from the evidence provided here that between the tenth and fifteenth centuries, hundreds, if not thousands, of European artists poured their skill and imagination into creating bestiaries, perhaps the more readily because they lacked knowledge of what a tiger, elephant, griffin, basilisk or manticore actually looked like.”

Essay of the Day:

In Harper’s, Brian Merchant writes about the “dark world of online murder markets”:

“On a sunny July day in 2018, Alexis Stern was sitting behind the wheel of the red Ford Fusion her parents had given her the previous year when she’d learned to drive. Robbie Olsen, the boy she’d recently started dating, was in the passenger seat. They were in the kind of high spirits unique to teenagers on summer vacation with nothing much to do and nowhere in particular to go. They were about to take a drive, maybe get some food, when Stern’s phone buzzed. It was the police. An officer with the local department told her to come down to the station immediately. She had no idea what the cops might want with her. ‘I was like, am I going to get arrested?’ she said.

“Stern had graduated from high school the month before, in Big Lake, Minnesota, a former resort town turned exurb, forty miles northwest of the Twin Cities. So far she had spent the summer visiting family, hanging out with her new boyfriend, and writing what she describes as ‘action-packed and brutal sci-fi fantasy fiction.’ At sixteen, she’d self-published her first novel, Inner Monster, about a secret agent named Justin Redfield whose mind has been invaded by a malevolent alter ego that puts the lives of his loved ones at risk. ‘It isn’t until his inner demon returns that he realizes how much trouble he really is in,’ the synopsis reads. ‘Facing issues with his girlfriend and attempting to gain control of his dark side, the tension intensifies. Being the best agent comes at a price, a price of kidnapping, torture and even death.’

“At the station, the police told Stern a story that could have been a plot from one of her books. They said that a credible threat had been made on her life through an assassination marketplace on the dark web, the unregulated stretch of the internet, not indexed by Google or other traditional search engines, that’s home to many forms of illicit activity. Her murder had apparently been ordered on a website called Camorra Hitmen, which advertised gun-for-hire services with the promise of keeping its clients anonymous.

“Earlier that month, a user had logged on to Camorra Hitmen with the Tor browser—the most popular way to access the dark web—and created an account with the alias Mastermind365. Five days later, Mastermind365 sent a message asking whether it was possible for a hit man to carry out a kidnapping instead of a murder. The site’s administrator replied that it was, but it would be more expensive, because such an operation was riskier.

“A week later, on July 15, Mastermind365 sent another message. ‘I have changed my mind since i previously spoke to you,’ the user wrote. ‘I would not like this person to be kidnapped. Instead, i would just like this person to be shot and killed. Where, how and what with does not bother me at all. I would just like this person dead.’

“And with that, Mastermind365 sent more than $5,000 in bitcoin to Camorra Hitmen, along with a photo of Stern—a portrait she’d posted on a website she’d built in one of her classes.”

Read the rest.

Photos: Volcanic activity in 2019

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