Farewell to Coliseum Books

Another long-established New York City bookstore bites the dust. When I lived in Manhattan it was still at 57th Street -- not a location I passed by all that frequently, but when I did, it was virtually certain I'd pop in.

Final clearance today and tomorrow.

Stonehenge news

Stonehenge has been in the news twice recently. Both a new view and a new interpretation of the monument have been announced.

The new view is a tiny medieval drawing, only a couple of inches across, noticed in a scala mundi or “world ladder”, a chart of universal chronology from the Creation onwards. The document was in the municipal library of Douai, in northern France, probably taken there from England by Catholic refugees in the 16th century; Professor Christian Heck catalogued it there six years ago without at that stage thinking more about its importance.

The document dates from the 1440s, not the oldest depiction of the monument — which dates from around 1342 and is on a similar scala mundi at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge — but one of very few known. “Medieval representations of Stonehenge are extremely rare,” Professor Heck says, and this one is “the first known design to represent Stonehenge not just as a symbolic image, but with precise observations on its form and construction techniques. It bridges perfectly the worlds of medieval myth and Renaissance observation.”

Los Angeles: it isn't just the smog, Jake

Quick, what is "the largest single source of particulate pollution in the country"?

Yes, it's LA's fault -- but not its vehicles':

. . . in one of the largest river restoration efforts in the West, water is again flowing along a 62-mile stretch of the Owens River after a dry spell of nearly a century. . .

The restored flow is among several long-awaited steps the city is taking to help make amends for the environmental consequences of its water maneuvering, most notably the drying up of Owens Lake, an area more than three times the size of Manhattan, here in the Owens Valley.

Los Angeles agreed in December to expand efforts to control toxic dust storms that erupt from what is left of the lake, a 110-square-mile body that emptied when the river was diverted to Los Angeles through an aqueduct opened in 1913.

The lake’s salty, mineral-laced basin has been the largest single source of particulate pollution in the country. It looks so otherworldly that it doubled as a desolate planet in the movie “Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.”

Craig Hugh Smyth obit

In today's NY Times; rather disappointingly brief, so I will await something better to excerpt.

Keros: reevaluating Cycladic sculpture

Unlike its larger, postcard-perfect neighbors in the Aegean Sea, Keros is a tiny rocky dump inhabited by a single goatherd.

But the barren islet was of major importance to the mysterious Cycladic people, a sophisticated pre-Greek civilization with no written language that flourished 4,500 years ago and produced strikingly modern-looking artwork. . .

Indeed, more than half of all documented Cycladic figurines in museums and collections worldwide were found on Keros. Now, excavations by a Greek-British archaeology team have unearthed a cache of prehistoric statues - all deliberately broken - that they hope will help solve the Keros riddle. . .

British excavation leader Colin Renfrew now believes Keros was a hugely important religious site where the smashed artwork was ceremoniously deposited.

"What we do have clearly is what must be recognized as the earliest regional ritual center in the Aegean," he said.