Hanging Around The House: More Downstairs

So, last time it was the couple of things in my office. (Remember that the thumbnails in these posts are links to gigantic versions.)

Now, we’ll move out of my my office into the hall outside:

My office is off this hall on the right, the guest bedroom is off to the left. In the shot you can see my wall of academic and professional stuff, and my gigantic Bertrand Russell headshot. It’s a poster that’s been plaque-mounted.

Bertrand is one of my big personal heroes (indeed, teen Chris’ world view and moral systems were formed to a large extent from a combination of Russell and Travis McGee), and I have wanted to have this hanging in the hall outside my office ever since I found out (by watching Manufacturing Consent) that Chomsky had this same poster hanging outside his office.

Also, an added benefit of the positioning is that Russell constantly stares into the guest bedroom and keeps the guests in line; making sure they don’t get too sure.

The bookcase below the picture contains about half of my Russell books (the other half are in a box that still isn’t unpacked), and has some “oversize” books on top of it that didn’t fit into other shelves.

The closest degrees on the wall, by the way, are my BA, MA, and Phd in Medieval Metaphysics from Miskatonic. The rest of the stuff on the wall is rather mundane by comparison–although I do like the symbolic symmetry of having my Obligation framed in an iron frame with rings on the corners.

Moving into the guest bedroom–one of the few room in the house still on the “paint it” list, we find several pieces of art. A couple of them are Impressionist posters of Trish’s, but I’m not talking about her stuff.

One of the other pieces in the guest room is this framed print of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”:

(The weird stripes of shadow, and generally washed out appearance are artefacts of this being a quick digital snapshot and not of indicative of a problem with the print.)

I always want this to be a Waterhouse print in my mind, but it’s actually by the other English Pre-Raphaelite of the same time period: Sir Frank Dicksee.

I’ve always loved the stories about the heartless ladies from under the hill, and what they do to men, and I love how this picture could be seen as lacking menace if you didn’t know the title, but that knowing it changes everything.

I had this framed and matted by my Waterloo expert, who did a lovely job, as she always did.

A more recent set of additions to the guest bedrooms are the two posters of the final issue of Promethea. In essence these posters are compact lessons on the history and theory of magick as a symbolic toolkit. I had the posters plaque-mounted thinking I would have to hang them in the garage, but Trish surprised me by really liking them, so they are going in the guest bedroom:

Phone and phone book included because I was too lazy to move them. for scale.

The posters have the brightly coloured large-scale images that are apparent in the thumbnail image here–and which I think account for Trish approving of them–but they are also covered with a smaller scale series of images that actually contain all the content.

Here’s a closeup of one section of the one on the left:

You could easily spend a couple of hours with these two images… and I guess we’ll see what our guests make of them.

In the photos they aren’t yet hung, but if I don’t have them hung by Friday I will be in trouble, so I don’t expect that situation to continue.