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Pretty Pictures
Images I have found striking over the years.
READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
Crabfu Artworks presents a walking machine powered by Princess, a pet Roborovski Dwarf Hamster -- huge fun and quite confusing for the Crabfu cat... The machine is a miniature version of Theo Jansen's Strandbeest PVC pipe creations which wander the beaches of Holland. Here is a 3sat Kulturzeit program on Jansen and his creatures:
Jansen gave a TED talk about his project in March, 2007.
...Also fun: Jansen and his pets make their appearance on Wallace & Gromit's World of Invention (a show of whose existence I am happy to learn... a few other episode clips on this playlist on Youtube).
All the adjectives that come to mind when I seek to describe the photography of Geert Goiris are gerunds of transitive verbs -- "Stunning"; "spell-binding"; "transfixing"... Make of that what you will as I am not sure what to make of it. Goiris describes her style as "traumatic realism".
Here are three pictures I took while Sylvia and I were looking at the Egyptian exhibit at the Met this afternoon.
This is from the beginning of a long scroll, it stretched across a full wall. I am in general not careful about reading labels in museums, so cannot tell you much about the scroll.*
Ibis-headed Thoth, facing himself in the center column, is the god credited with the invention of language and writing -- an appropriate frontspiece for the document.
Three small Thoths** are grouped together here: In addition to an ibis' head the god may be depicted with a baboon's head. The ibis in the middle, watching over his likeness, must be related.
I felt lucky to spot this relief on the way out of the museum:
Just breathtaking. I had not been to see this exhibit in quite a while; indeed this may be the first time I ever really gave it any of the attention it deserves. Very happy about Sylvia's newly blossoming interest in mythology and ancient cultures.
Another animal that migrated across the Bering land bridge and east and south throughout the Americas and eventually down as far as Chile: the polyommatus butterfly. Dr. Naomi Pierce of Harvard et al. have vindicated Nabokov's hypothesis regarding the introduction of this genus of butterfly to the Americas, as Carl Zimmer reports today for the NY Times. The slideshow attached to the article has to be seen to be believed.
Below the fold, a piece from The Art of Resurrection that came to mind as I was reading this article. (I have that book on my brain now...)
At the opening of Chapter 4, the Christ of Elqui is walking along the rail line through the pampa, from Sierra Gorda to Providencia (or as the two he met in Sierra Gorda told him it is known locally, La Piojo -- they also warned him to stick to the tracks so as not to get lost in the desert) --
Across the pampa's wide expanse, the dry four o'clock wind was beginning to blow.
The Christ of Elqui, he had been hiking for a long hawl with no rest, his long hair blowing into his eyes, when he stopped; he lifted up his gaze, making a visor of his hands. All of a sudden it seemed as if he could make out the gravel lot of the plant over there where the hills began to rise -- in the pampa, such a sight gives one the illusion of seeing "a ship foundering on the desert plain," as some northern poet's verses call it. But the railroad line just followed its interminable southerly right-of-way.
Surely a little ways further, and it would turn off to that side.
Just at that moment, miraculous in the open pampa, under the brutally incandescent midday sun, a butterfly crossed over the iron rails. "An ephemeral butterflyâ€, he said in wonder, the Christ of Elqui; he could not imagine from how far off it had flown. It was an orange butterfly with black markings.*
As he watched it disappear, fluttering off to the east, that was when it occurred to him. Why not take the short cut, save some hiking, save some time? Clearly, more powerful than all the desert’s misdirections and illusions would be the Eternal Father, guiding his steps.
So he thought; and that is what he did.
(Is it clumsy, this having the two warn him to stay on the tracks, then having him take the short-cut and get lost? Possibly. But, very beautiful. Some of the subsequent portion of the chapter is quoted in this post from a few months back.)
I wonder who the northern poet being quoted in the second paragraph is. The closest thing to the quoted phrase I have been able to find with Google is from Elisabeth Nox' recently published first novel La ciudad de los hombres perdidos, "Pero en ningún momento llegó a preguntarse cómo habÃa llegado el barco a encallar en mitad del desierto." Interesting but probably not what I'm looking for...
* One of the butterflies that Nabokov named, the Pseudolucia aureliana, is native to the Atacama; however it is blue with yellow markings, oh well.
I found this lovely anagram at neatorama -- it's the work of Torontonians Micah Lexier and Christian Bök. Among other things, Bök has written Eunoia (2001), consisting of five univocalic chapters and some poetry.
Up ahead, to one side of the route, is a gigantic granite hand thrusting up from a slight mound in the desert. Yes, I did say a granite hand and I did say gigantic -- towering twenty or thirty meters high -- a smoth rock statue, this Mano, erected here in 1992 by the Chilean sculptor Mario Irrarrázaval as a way of commemorating the presence of humans on this land, both the Europeans who had arrived in 1492 and those who had made the journey so many millenia before Columbus.
Our answer to the desert, that hand.
For more, see Karl Fabricius' writeup of the Hand of the Desert at Environmental Graffiti, with photography from Wikimedia Commons and Flickr.
So far this winter, we've had a big snow-storm at the end of December and a much smaller snow-storm this week. The snow is icy on the ground now, a cold white blanket for the yards and parks of South Orange.
And there, costumated as a monochromatic rarebear, Stood the food-penguin, lemon-faced as ever.
The duo partook in a pair of pink fluff-puffs;
Destiny masticated her sugar-stick saxifragously,
Leaving Morgan haberdashed.
Sort of like "Happy the Golden Prince" maybe? Dramatically different from the every-day at any rate.
posted evening of January 12th, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Music
In the Wall Street Journal, Stephen Greenblatt speculates on Shakespeare's editorial process; meanwhile the blogger at Little Bits of Ice is speculating about Shakespeare's motivations.
Sort of like "Happy the Golden Prince" maybe? Dramatically different from the every-day at any rate.
speculates