Nature Ubiquitous II: more plnats and other things that sprout ...

... as poetry and prose, video, music and photography ... concerning whatever comes to mind under the sun (and clouds), in whatever landscape and weather. Science and art welcome, mythology and food preparation, news about crawling and flying things, rivers and lakes, fish, bar mitzvahs, communions, pagan rites, books even.

Our provenance.

We come from here:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/93352

And before that here:

Nature, etc.

http://www.librarything.com/topic/90900

Here: Nature Redux

http://www.librarything.com/topic/89569

Here: Nature III

http://www.librarything.com/topic/88286

And also here:

Nature: the Sequel

http://www.librarything.com/topic/86448

Random Thoughts about Nature (Deer, etc.)

http://www.librarything.com/topic/82276

The Welcome to the New Thread Quiz

Cities in or near where we live: match the high temperatures forecast for today and tomorrow with the correct cities:

1. 95 to 100
2. 90 to 95
3. 85 to 90
4. 80 to 85
5. 75 to 80
6. 70 to 80
7. below 70

a. Denver, Detroit
b. Little Rock, Toledo
c. Atlanta, Tampa
d. Los Angeles, London, Brussels
e. New York, Dallas, Taipei
f. Sydney, Australia
g. Portland, Oregon

Answers tomorrow.

25°C here, what is that in Fahrenheit ?

...a pleasant 77F.

Ah, jeez. I forgot I had to provide the Celsius as well. The Tour de France must pass close to your house today, non, capitaine? The route is Rotterdam to Brussels.

even trough Ghent my friend !

Happy 4 th July to our American Friends !

So is Borders open today? I have an urge to be Independent there.

Robert

Thanks Mac!

Also on this day in 1845 Henry David Thoreau embarks on a two-year experiment in simple living at Walden Pond. Another form of independence. 91F outside the window as I type this.

Thanks Mac. It is a windy 90F day on the Chicago shores of Lake Michigan. Clouds starting to come in and the possibility of thunderstorms tonight. They should hold off until after the fireworks.

I'm guessing Sydney's the one below 70, not that I understand farenheit.

The frost seems to have damaged my passionfruit vine. Ironic that the avocado seedlings actually seem quite happy, I would have thought they'd be the first to go.

I hope you all had a happy 4th of July, with plenty of fireworks and fried chicken. That's what you do, right?

Maybe they do that in the South, Sheila, but I grilled hot dogs, barbecued chicken, and Munich (German) sausages for sixteen people. And skipped the fireworks.

Answers to Yesterday's Weather Quiz

Match the high temperatures forecast for Sunday and Monday with the correct cities:

1. 95 to 100 (e)
2. 90 to 95 (b)
3. 85 to 90 (c)
4. 80 to 85 (a)
5. 75 to 80 (d)
6. 70 to 80 (g)
7. below 70 (f)

Answers:

e. New York, Dallas, Taipei,
b. Little Rock, Toledo
c. Atlanta, Tampa, Chicago*
a. Denver, Detroit*
d. Los Angeles, London, Brussels
g. Portland, Oregon
f. Sydney, Australia

* I must remember to put my reading glasses on before I read. I left Chicago out altogether, where it was 88 yesterday, according to the forecast, and will be 83 today; and misread Detroit, at 91 degrees on each day, and hence should have been linked with Little Rock and Toledo in the 90 to 95 range, not with Denver.

Well, I don't know Fahrenheit either, but here it was about 37 celsius and the cicadas have gone bonkers. I can hardly hear myself purr.

Hotterthana2dollarpistolin Detroit today.

HotterenaHinduhothouse in Connecticut today, but, remarkably, it is a dry heat. Welcome weather for the Nutmeg State

Sandy-the-wonderdog and I had a Black Vulture flapping (ie, rather than a Turkey Vulture rocking/soaring) over our sleepy little town today. Ten years ago, people would have thought me nuts for reporting such a "tropical" bird. Ah, global warming...

I'm staying downstairs today. It's too hot on the second floor. (No air conditioning here, Jane.)

Speaking of the Nutmeg state, where I lived for a while: a bunch of years ago Connecticut decided to call itself the "Constitution" state instead. Why did they do that, Sandy? Was "Nutmeg" not manly enough?

I was feeling a bit left out, Peter. :-( It was 88 yesterday with bright sunshine and high humidity, just like summer in Chicago. As usual the forecast for today was incorrect since it is already 89 degrees with gusty southwest winds. Those are offshore winds, so they do nothing to cool us. I am glad not to have your eastern heat. Fortunately, we almost never get that hot.

It is a holiday, so I washed the boat this morning and now I am just sitting. If I get a little ambition, I might start working on my Herodotus project. Or not.

Infernal breezes. Do nothing to ameliorate the summer heat which has set in for a little spell. We have a heat advisory here in SE Michigan. Though not nearly so hot as NY heat. I attended a twin-bill featuring the Yankees & Tigers that lasted it seemed a month. It was the summer or 1967. It was so hot, I had never felt heat & humidity quite like that in my first 18 summers or so. One of the games went on for twenty innings or so. When we got back to Detroit it seemed that we went from 78 rpm to 33. An eye-opening experience for an 18 year old. Detroit is a 19th rate city by NY standards. A sleepy little hamlet.

>19 copyedit52: Nutmeggers are Yankee peddlers who ripped people off by carving nutmegs from wood and pawning them off as real spices. It was not considered PC.

>22 Sandydog1:. Wow. Good pluck, as we say in the editing game.

>21 Porius:. Yes indeed, a movie. Me and the missus are gonna go to one toot sweet, to enjoy the air conditioning.

>20 LisaCurcio:. Sorry for the oversight, skipper.

From a guy who still lives up the road (these many years later), in Saugerties, New York:

http://www.last.fm/music/The+Lovin%27+Spoonful/_/Summer+In+The+City

colderthanapolarbear'snose today. Well actually, not so bad as all that. No frost - I hardly needed the second doona last night.

I don't actually like this song much, or John Denver, but the first line of this is my answer to yours above, Piero. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2USZI21iPnE

Rena, too bad we could not have traded a few degrees today. It was Hot, Hot, Hot for many of your North American friends east of the Mississippi River. Don't know about Tani and Anna. The sun is almost down and I am quite glad. My dogs are glad, too. They have been laying around with their tongues hanging out most of the day.

The sun is down and it is HOT out there. The breezes have flown away. There is not a mouse stirring in the trees and shrubbery. It feels like about smackdab in the middle of Coleridges poem. Pretty awful for all but the most inveterate heat lovers. Those fanatics who run so many marathons in Death Valley every year. Three in a row, or more? Never could understand the marathon thing. All that running and walking without the chance to hit a 5 iron stiff from 198 yards, or hit a backhand top spin lob (not that I've ever done such a thing) on the run, (I'd settle for just running at this stage). Or just swilling down a cold Mexican beer with lemon and salt schmeered over the top of the can.

Hotter tomorrow, they say. People get a little crazy too, have you noticed?

What's a doona, Choco? You hardly needed the second one, so I'm guessing ... I just dunno. Blanket? Hot water bottle? And what's the apology for? The weather? I swear, you're getting as abstruse as our friend Tani.

You mean you people don't have doonas over there?? It's a thing with feathers in it. Not a quilt, because that implies fancy patterns. A plain white thing, on which you put a cover. Called a doona cover. I guess you'd call it an eiderdown, or counterpane?

Took me ages to work out what you mean by apology. I wasn't talking about the sorry part! I meant the first line: "Cold here in the city". Sorry to mess with your head, Piero (now there's your apology!). You need to drink something chilled, with condensation beading the side of the glass. I'd give you one if I could. :)

Lisa, trading a few degrees sounds great. It's 13.5 Celsius here right now. Give us, say 10 of your degrees, putting me at a nice 23. Ah, now that would be lovely.

Ah, yes, counterpanes. When I edit Victorian romances, which I do a lot of, there's always a lot of counterpanes, along with chamber pots and petticoats. But doona ... never heard of it. I'd guess that's an Aussie term. As for the apology, well, if you were apologizing for the weather, it brings to mind my old pal Patrick Malone, who once said, "Never apologize for reality," a line I stole in my book by placing it in my own narrative mouth. But then, Patrick also said, more than once, "Never apologize," period.

I've got a ceiling fan going full blast, and only two or three windows slightly open. This is the house-cooling strategy up here, where the nights are cooler than, say, down in the city: to suck in that cool air. Only there are a few nights in the summer--like tonight--when it's still 80 or so degrees outside (at 10:30), so it doesn't help much.

Slight breeze from the south rippling the leaves in back. Otherwise, nothing moves, and no clouds in the sky. They say it will hit 100 degrees today.

Sat on the deck yesterday afternoon, in a slant of shade beneath the overhand of the roof. A hummingbird visited the feeder a few feet away, stayed awhile. This year's awkward-looking deer nosed around on the lawn, ate a little bit and moved on, into the forest.

Yes, most of the US including the entire Eastern US is going to be a scorcher. We nutmeggers will be enjoying 97F (36C) today...

The Dog Days are approaching. I don't think that we'll hit the century mark today, but it doesn't matter overmuch when the thermometer climbs that high. It's not breezeless but is cloudless here in Mi. The grasses are turning brownish. I remember the heat wave in the summer of 1988 like it was yesterday. The grasses in August were approaching a light-yellow color. Everything resembled Edgar Winter with more than a slight hangover. I remember playing golf at Rachham GC, which is located right next to the Detroit Zoo. Coming down the 16th fairway you could see the lions at their afternoon 80 winks. It seemed for all the world like some blighted part of Kenya or some such sun-drenched part of what they used to call the 'Dark Continent.' The ground was so hard we were hitting little pitching wedges or 9 irons into 440 yard holes.

Well Portland is finally getting warmer with promised highs in the 80s today. Sorry it's so hot elsewhere but it has been a long cool spell for us ("Junuary" as they call it didn't improve much over the past weekend as we moved into July).

Y'know (he said, while sweat dripped down his face and soaked his clothes), I don't think I'd mind living where it's cloudy most of the time, and cooler in the summer. I have a melancholic aspect, believe it or not. Maybe its time I gave it a complementary clime.

The mocking hot breezes have all but departed the scene. Fortunate to have the low humidity (30%) and not-too-bad dew point (58). Some good news: a cold front is on it's way that will take our temps down to the low 80's.

I cannot tell you how glad I am that thunderstorms are moving through and the temperature has dropped to the 70s. Just putting the leashes on the dogs resulted in my being dripping wet. Maybe this is on its way to Michigan? Unfortunately, more heat tomorrow, but predictions are for a beautiful weekend. We are planning a trip to Racine on the boat, so will appreciate more than usual the good weather.

It's so hard to believe all that is happening right now. It feels like I'm reading it in a book. It's 11 degrees C here right now, which is 51.8 F. Sunny today though, which is a nice change from cold rain. Now it's my turn to develop a kind of hemispherical guilt, because I'm not suffering like the rest of you.

It's all very poetic though, the way you all write about it - bleached stillness, like a prairie.

>34 copyedit52: Piero, then you would develop SAD, and need sunshine. Not a good idea I reckon.

If you weren't quietly peeking in on us in February-March, Sheila, three or four threads ago, you missed the rondelet of misplaced envy when some got hit with a humongous amount of snow and others who got little or nothing felt left out. I was in the latter group, then got hammered up here, lost electricity, water, and heat for three days, ate and slept in the small back room with the woodstove, kept the fire stoked throughout. And I hardly felt privileged. Now, of course, the shoe is on the other foot. And what an odd bit of vanity, to suffer 100 degree heat and feel superior to some poor person in Michigan or Illinois who only hit 90, much less a sheila in 11 degrees C.

This morning, like yesterday and the day before, before the heat builds, is so quiet, even the birds in the forest subdued.

The wild berry bush that planted itself next to the tree in the backyard, and I thought to cut down before I realized what it was, is starting to bloom. Harvested, it supplies, maybe, five bowls of ripe berries.

We're cruising in the sunshine. Temps in the mid nineties by evening (that's the mid 30's to you in Celsiusland), but with a nice breeze. We were sitting on the gazebo on a small island in the pond yesterday evening about sundown with the breeze blowing in a circular pattern around the borders of the pond. Very nice.

Okay, now that I have the pictures up:

Before - this was taken just after we moved here. You may remember it.



After - This was taken after I had 20+ trees removed from the front and we repainted the house. It's starting to come along. My wife says she always wanted to live in a state park. We aren't a state park, but we could be.

Gene--Spectacular!

Yes, of course I remember that first photo. I went to camp there, didn't I? No more.

Well, we have nothing on the east coast in terms of heat, but it is still too hot for me. (A song?)

Apropos of nothing, it also occurred to me that Peter at one point suggested that I might discuss what it is like to live on a boat. Since my boat has all of the comforts of home--except a lot smaller--I could not think of anything to say except about the "neighborhood" that is the dock. For some reason I thought today about how people who are not boaters come aboard and comment that the boat is moving. When I look, I see that they are correct. But when you live on a boat, the constant movement is not noticeable. I only notice when it is moving a lot.

I have fotunately been in California for a week where it was in the 70s-80s in L.A. and even cooler in Santa Barbara. Nice July 4th wedding. Spent some time in Barnsdall Park in L.A. Ate lots of good Nicaraguan food and hit a couple good restaurants. Sadly I have come home to this miserable heat with a terrible cold I picked up from one of the chillies.

It's quiet around this thread. Clearly everyone's at the pool, or passed out on the floor by the fan.

Gene, that is incredible!

Much warmer today here - 15 degrees C. Haven't had time to notice though, sheesh, what a day. I can't wait to go home and snuggle up with my doona.

>46 ChocolateMuse:

Maybe it's quiet since it was spun off into another thread. Maybe not all followers are aware of this. I find this is a danger in creating a spin-off from any topic. Experienced it on other threads.

Probably just life interfering with virtual reality. Seems we all drop out of site for a little while from time to time.

Starting a new thread is necessary when one gets too big, especially with all of those photos we loaded into the last thread. It makes it really hard for those without fast connections to load the thread, and then it is not so much fun.

I woke up to fog in the harbor this morning. With all of the heat and humidity and then rain overnight, I guess it caused the fog. It is not just the fog that comes from the temperature contrast between water and air because I can see it hanging over the buildings inland, too. Our heat is supposed to moderate after today, and we have a more moderate, sunny, less humid forecast for the weekend.

Listening to the local classical music station this morning, I heard this song. Not much to do with Nature, but it is about sailing, sort of. And since we are heading out tomorrow morning for a little cruise, I thought it would be a good thing to share.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_RWtdm81WU

Uncomfortably hot today here in Mi. Muggy, as the dewpoint, the weather channel people keep yammering on about the dewpoint, is 67. Anything near 70 or thereabouts is cause for concern. Not that we must lock up all the silverware but make sure we drink lots of water. Clouds are rolling in and the blasting hot breezes do nothing to alleviate our misery. Storms are due later on in the afternoon.

Just back from an evening and half a day in the city.

The city? Are you insane?

Well, yes, and no. Yes, but I couldn't help it, because I'm still painting an apartment down there. And no, because it was an air-conditioned condo and I slept better than I had in days, and also because me and the missus visited one of my favorite places:

The Corona Ice King, in a little Italian nook not far from Shea Stadium (where the Mets were losing a night game). You buy one (or more) of thirty or so flavored ices (I bought two; cherry and lemon) and then sit on a bench in the small pocket park across the street, watching old men and a few younger ones play bocci under the lights. They argue, they gesture, they have nicknames for each other. One tall, thin, cream-colored guy looked just like Obama, and of course that's what everyone called him: "Obama, throw the ball."

If there were a heaven, that's what I'd want it to be: eating Italian ices on a summer night while watching the local characters play bocci.

Pietro,

Just like in an Italian city! I love most major cities because of scenes like those.

I'm thinking about it, Lisa; a tax deductible trip to Rome, to confer on the translation.

Closer to home (except for our Europeans and Pacific rimmers), today's winners and losers, or losers and winners, depending on how you look at it, in tomorrow's temperature derby:

Portland, Oregon: 95 degrees
Atlanta: 94
Dallas: 92
Tampa: 91
Taipei: 90 (32C)
Little Rock: 87
New York: 87
Chicago: 86
London: 85 (29C!)
Denver: 84
Detroit: 83
Toledo: 80
Los Angeles: 77
Ghent (Belgium): 76 (24C)
Sydney (Australia): 63! (17C!)

Thanks for the exclamation mark Piero, though I don't know if it's meant to indicate that you consider it warm or cold. 17's pretty good for July, and it's one of those puff-clouded days today with the sky behind like a blue lolly.

Celsius translations much appreciated also :)

Temperature has dropped to 75 but the air is thick. Not a breath of air at the moment. Maybe more storms tonight and early next morning, we'll see? The air dries out tomorrow & temperatures will be in the lower to mid-eighties for the weekend & next week.

>54 ChocolateMuse:. I read July and thought, No, that can't be. There's a part of the brain--or mine anyway--that says it shouldn't be so. July means summer.

>56 copyedit52: - tell me about it. I'm always reading American or British books where people use 'July' as a code word for summer, and I always have to blink and translate. In my head, July has always meant winter.

Though, having said that, I've had to translate so often, that now I tend to blink and translate either way, it's gradually becoming strangely ambiguous.

Two quite big tremblors last night, and one big one this morning. Not a good way to start the day.

overcast, humid, sultry and baking hot.

58: Secure the books!

Murr, sounds nightmarish. Reminds me of the year we almost got burnt out by bushfires. Same sort of weather, completely dark at mid afternoon, sky like some insane nightmare sunset, all black and orange. Bits of ash and charred leaf dropping down like rain. Hot, as if someone had opened the gate of hell and the wind was coming out.

I imagine the same feeling of uncertain danger is hanging in the air over there. Take care.

p.s. we weren't burnt out, though many others were.

Fear of the Inexplicable

But fear of the inexplicable has not alone impoverished
the existence of the individual; the relationship between
one human being and another has also been cramped by it,
as though it had been lifted out of the riverbed of
endless possibilities and set down in a fallow spot on the
bank, to which nothing happens. For it is not inertia alone
that is responsible for human relationships repeating
themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and
unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable
experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope.

But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes
nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation
to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively
from his own existence. For if we think of this existence of
the individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident
that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, a
place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and
down. Thus they have a certain security. And yet that dangerous
insecurity is so much more human which drives the prisoners in
Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons
and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their abode.

We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set about
us, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us.
We are set down in life as in the element to which we best
correspond, and over and above this we have through thousands of
years of accommodation become so like this life, that when we
hold still we are, through a happy mimicry,scarcely to be
distinguished from all that surrounds us. We have no reason to
mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors,
they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abuses belong to us;
are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if only we
arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us
that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now
still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust
and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those
ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into
princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses
who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps
everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless
that wants help from us.

Rainer Maria Rilke

That was beautiful! Thank you for posting it.

It's so gorgeous this morning. Around 70 with a brisk breeze. It will probably get pretty hot again, but I really don't mind this heat wave because there was so much lousy weather before we got to this point. I have not turned on my AC yet! So far I have been able to go with open windows at night.

Mostly cloudy. We didn't get the rain that was promised, not a sprinkle. The air has dried out somewhat, it was suffocatingly muggy last night. I use the air-conditioner only sparingly. Some breezes freshening out of the SW. The high temperature today, 82.

We didn't get the rain they mentioned last night, but around 10:am it began to pour. It's been raining off & on all day, the sky is grey & the atmosphere is humid enough to eat with a spoon. But the garden looks much better.

Yeah, humidity. Generally we don't get as much here as in places close to large bodies of water, aka great lakes. The ocean is 100 miles away, after all. And since it wasn't that hot today either--not 101, 99, or 93, like the last three days, but a mere 88 at five p.m.--I got on the bike for the first time this week and did my hilly nine-mile loop. And, having manufactured my own humidity, I am now in solidarity with the rest of you sufferers.

Shaping up to be a delightful evening. Dry air & comfortable temperatures. A brace of breezes making the after dinner hours easy to take. We need some pleasant weather so we can put up with all this lebron bullshit. Old Henry Lewis was correct when he said that stuff about nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public, or something to that effect. I watched the NBA finals without the sound. Next step is to deep-six the whole idiotic mess. And when I say I watched, it was out of the corner of my eye while doing something else.

Rain here. Seems a long time since the last. Steady but gentle. Sweet.

The Rainwalkers

An old man whose black face
shines golden-brown as wet pebbles
under the streetlamp, is walking two mongrel dogs of dis-
proportionate size, in the rain,
in the relaxed early-evening avenue.

The small sleek one wants to stop,
docile to the imploring soul of the trashbasket,
but the young tall curly one
wants to walk on; the glistening sidewalk entices him to arcane happenings.

Increasing rain. The old bareheaded man
smiles and grumbles to himself.
The lights change: the avenue's
endless nave echoes notes of
liturgical red. He drifts

between his dogs' desires.
The three of them are enveloped--
turning now to go crosstown--in their
sense of each other, of pleasure,
of weather, of corners,
of leisurely tensions between them
and private silence.

Denise Levertov

Dawg and I were up on the traprock ridges this morning. The cicadas are buzzing. The scarlet tanagers replaced their melodic songs with only occcasional, "chick-burr" calls. Wild Sasparilla, Greenbrier, Virginia Creeper, Canada Mayflower and other plnats are yellowing and turning brown. The tiny wild bluberries are ripe, wrinkled and tart.

Us humans think it's summer but nature knows, autumn's here.

More water and boats:

Traveling northbound on Lake Michigan looking toward Michigan



Looking toward Wisconsin



Looking at our wake from the starboard side



The harbor at Racine, Wisconsin, where we are now



We had a lovely ride--flat lake and sunshine. Beautiful weather today with a light breeze off the lake keeping things cool and again bright sunshine.

Pietro--lovely poems. Being a dog person, I particularly like that last.

I do try to balance things between cats and dogs.

Lisa, that looks like a calm day on the Atlantic. Or at least, a cleaner version of Long Island Sound. Beautiful.

Hello, all! Been totally in my element for the last week weather wise... And did not open the computer once! Spent days on the porch just reading. Ahhhh... Love the hot dry weather and occasional afternoon thunder-boomers.

Lovely poetry and pics, as usual! Might go and visit the besty's papa and sisters tomorrow in the valley. Not too sure about wanting to go down to the humidity, but have not seen them for years and Papa has a pool. Next weekend will be a day at Lake Simtustus with my brothers and their families. Gawd, I love summer!

Sandydog, yes, on Lake Michigan one can get that "ocean feeling". When the water is flat, all large bodies of water seem to look alike. But a rough day on Lake Michigan is worse than a comparably rough day on the Atlantic, IMHO. We get that "Lake Michigan chop" whether it is 2 footers or ten footers. The wave intervals are short and there is little riding up and down--it is a lot of pounding along. Fair weather boater that I am, yesterday's ride was perfect!

North Haven

In Memoriam: Robert Lowell

I can make out the rigging of a schooner
a mile off; I can count
the new cones on the spruce. It is so still
the pale bay wears a milky skin; the sky
no clouds except for one long, carded horse¹s tail.

The islands haven't shifted since last summer,
even if I like to pretend they have--
drifting, in a dreamy sort of way,
a little north, a little south, or sidewise--
and that they¹re free within the blue frontiers of bay.

This month our favorite one is full of flowers:
buttercups, red clover, purple vetch,
hackweed still burning, daisies pied, eyebright,
the fragrant bedstraw's incandescent stars,
and more, returned, to paint the meadows with delight.

The goldfinches are back, or others like them,
and the white-throated sparrow's five-note song,
pleading and pleading, brings tears to the eyes.
Nature repeats herself, or almost does:
repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise.

Years ago, you told me it was here
(in 1932?) you first "discovered girls"
and learned to sail, and learned to kiss.
You had "such fun," you said, that classic summer.
("Fun"--it always seemed to leave you at a loss ... )

You left North Haven, anchored in its rock,
afloat in mystic blue ... And now--you've left
for good. You can't derange, or rearrange,
your poems again. (But the sparrows can their song.)
The words won't change again. Sad friend, you cannot change.

Elizabeth Bishop

Well, a fabulous weekend. We had lovely, sunny, warm weather and flat water. Last night in beautiful Racine, Wisconsin, we had a thunderstorm pass through as we were sitting down to dinner. After the storm moved out over the lake, the westerly sun produced a double rainbow. I had no camera, but if I can get someone from our group to send me pictures I will post them.

Back home, all tied down, laundry underway and more thunderstorms surrounding us. Summer in the city!

Tomorrow’s Weather Sweepstakes

High temps, Monday, July 12

97 Little Rock (36C)
94 Dallas, Ghent, Taipei (34C)
92 Denver (33C)
91 Tampa
90 Atlanta, New York (32C)
89 Waterbury (Connecticut)
87 Detroit, Toledo (31C)
83 Chicago (28C)
82 Los Angeles
78 Bend, Oregon (26C)
72 London (England); Portland, Oregon (22C)
66 Sydney (19C)

The gap seems to be narrowing.

Piero, I love that poem in #74.

Will come a time, Sheila, if you, me, and the nature thread are still around, that you of course will be on top, tempwise. Just finished watching today's eighth stage of the Tour de France, btw, and Cadel Evans, a bloke from your humongous island, is now in the lead. Had to climb a mountain to do it, too.

Yeah, but then you'll all be competing for the impressive sub-zero temps and snowfall measurements; and my heatwaves, droughts and bushfires will seem very far away. But that's okay. I'm happy to provide a kind of context.

Haha, I only just realised on the 5th reread of your post that you probably said 'bloke' like it's a foreign word. Yay for Cadel Evans, go Ozzi! :)

I sincerely hope that you, me AND the nature thread will still be around then, Pietros.

Sailing Home from Rapallo

February 1954
Your nurse could only speak Italian,
but after twenty minutes I could imagine your final week,
and tears ran down my cheeks....

When I embarked from Italy with my Mother’s body,
the whole shoreline of the Golfo di Genova
was breaking into fiery flower.
The crazy yellow and azure sea-sleds
blasting like jack-hammers across
the spumante-bubbling wake of our liner,
recalled the clashing colors of my Ford.
Mother traveled first-class in the hold;
her Risorgimento black and gold casket
was like Napoleon’s at the Invalides....

While the passengers were tanning
on the Mediterranean in deck-chairs,
our family cemetery in Dunbarton
lay under the White Mountains
in the sub-zero weather.
The graveyard’s soil was changing to stone—
so many of its deaths had been midwinter.
Dour and dark against the blinding snowdrifts,
its black brook and fir trunks were as smooth as masts.
A fence of iron spear-hafts
black-bordered its mostly Colonial grave-slates.
The only “unhistoric” soul to come here
was Father, now buried beneath his recent
unweathered pink-veined slice of marble.
Even the Latin of his Lowell motto:
Occasionem cognosce,
seemed too businesslike and pushing here,
where the burning cold illuminated
the hewn inscriptions of Mother’s relatives:
twenty or thirty Winslows and Starks.
Frost had given their names a diamond edge....

In the grandiloquent lettering on Mother’s coffin,
Lowell had been misspelled LOVEL.
The corpse
was wrapped like panettone in Italian tinfoil.

Robert Lowell

Wilson... I think there is something wrong with the weather guys. They keep sayin' that the high today will be 76ish in Bend... however, it was 65° up here at 9am! hmmm... me thinks unless there is a massive cold front (highly unlikely) headed our way that they are WRONG! We'll see.

Have been on Pern for a week now. (I know it's kind of low brow for this erudite group, but have been enjoying it immensely)

;-)

Funny, but I was thinking the same thing. It's 90 here now, and not even 3:00 p.m. yet, which is usually the hottest time of day, this time of year.

As you know, Tani (I'm looking for a name as annoying as Wilson to call you but haven't found it yet), I've been to Pern, though not in a while. It's a watery place, as I recall.

90F here at 1pm CST in the mist of a quick summer shower. I am sure we will get close to 95 with no problem. It is usually a bit cooler here than Little Rock. Between being a city and sitting right on the Arkansas river, they have a bit of a micro-climate.

Awww, You'll find one I am positive of that. I will not, however, help.

How many of them did you edit? I want names, I tell you! I am through the first five and had to skip to the MasterHarper because I am still acquiring those that I have lost over the years. I knew I should not have started them without having all of them on hand. I hate reading out of sequence. But! There is something about that world that sucks me in.

I may have to switch to The Talents whilst I gather the rest of Pern. I cannot in good conscience raise my brow without a full brain so I will stay low for now.

;-)

It is now 11am here and 78°.

>83 hippypaul:. Seems it's hotter everywhere than they said it would be. Brings to mind the bumper sticker: QUESTION AUTHORITY.

>84 highdesertlady:. From the secret ledger of an anonymous freelance copyeditor:

McCaffrey, Red Star Rising Jun 96 Delrey 520 msp
McCaffrey, Changelings May 05 Delrey 324 msp
McCaffrey, Maestrom Apr 06 Delrey 366 msp
McCaffrey, Deluge Jul 07 Delrey 266 msp
McCaffrey, Catalyst May 09 Delrey 326 msp
McCaffrey, Catacombs Mar 10 Delrey 290 msp

Now you know everything.

#27 Hahaha! I love that, Wilson! Abstruse, indeed!

Lovely, Rena... We call doona's comforters and they are typically enveloped by a duvet. At least around here anyway.

Me and da Mama are quilters and have many quilts hanging around or in my cedar chest. The problem with quilts is they can become extremely heavy depending on what fabric you use and the size you aim for. I made a king sized, reversible, flannel one, as a wedding gift, for a friend a few years back and my gawd that thing was way too heavy for my tastes. However, they did live in a cabin near the mountain and I believe it has served them well.

Electrical storm last night to beat them all. Hot & steamy today with a 40% chance of more rain. Summer weather is with us in earnest.

#85 You, my anonymous copyeditor friend, are a rock star! hmmm... have not read Red Star Rising. Will have to remedy that. I fear I have been remiss in my dedication to the dragon lady.

I take that back! I read it as Dragonseye! Phew! That really freequed me out, I thought I was up to date except for Todd's books. Why did they change the name?

You gonna start calling me Rocky now?

Be careful... I just might! ;-)

Or maybe Rocco.

Oh, I do like Rocco! That kinda jibes with the Italiano theme, no?

Back to the dragon lady... why did they change the name of Red Star Rising to Dragonseye?

That so-called in-house stuff is out of my hands and beyond my knowledge. They make all kinds of decisions I don't have a clue about. Only once, in a very rare while, when I edit a manuscript and don't understand why they titled it a certain way will I note that on a memo. But whether that ever leads to actual changes: I don't know that either (because I never read the stuff I edit after it's published).

Silly publishers... just trying to confuse us and make us buy both, I suppose. hmmmph!

And I always QUESTION AUTHORITY! ;-p (to the publishers and weather forecasters)

Sometimes, like a short while ago, I get carried away in banter and overlook the obvious. In this case, your reversible quilt. It's lovely, Tani.

Thank you, Piero... It was a beast to finish. I put the last stitches into it the day before the wedding. Picture trying to fit both halves into an 18-24 inch space to sew the last seam. It is an interesting process called "Quilt as you go". Normally, you would piece the top and then sandwich it with the batting and backing, then quilt it. But, this one however, you have a sort of a 3D (or raised) effect with the seams being raised to the one side and flat on the reverse as in a traditional quilt. It is not a process I will repeat with flannel and/or a king sized quilt. Damn thing probably weighed 20 pounds or more. It was ridiculous.

> 86 Very beautiful work. Quilting is very big in Arkansas. It is often done in groups and is a major thing at the state fair every year. However, even having seen a great number of quilts, that is an outstanding creation.

Sentimental Moment or Why Did the Baguette Cross the Road?

Don't fill up on bread
I say absent-mindedly
The servings here are huge

My son, whose hair may be
receding a bit, says
Did you really just
say that to me?

What he doesn't know
is that when we're walking
together, when we get
to the curb
I sometimes start to reach
for his hand

Robert Hershon

Touching

Thank you, Paul... I think that one is my second favorite. My favorite is the one I made for myself.

Piero, that poem is awesome...

Finished the first draft of the first chapter of my next book today. Working title: "Middle Age."

Where the psychedelic memoir covered one year, and "Digging Deeper" covers about eight, this one will cover almost thirty years ... unless, along the way, I find a fitting ending at some other point.

Good for you, Rocco! What's the word on DD?

What? You guys haven't read "Digging Deeper" yet. Oh, my. Better hurry up. Hehehe. I can't wait.

YOU ARE A BRAT!!!! So not fair... I hate waiting. ;-p

>103 geneg:. Wiseguy. But with strains of wisdom too. I don't know about the book you just reviewed--on the hot list now--but I like the review itself. The way you use the content you're discussing to bring up your own life: I think you do that very well, Gene.

Are you saying I never talk about anything but myself?

You know better than that. But then, I too have trouble taking a compliment.

You have not answered my question, Wilson... ;-p

And, Gene... you are still a brat and I thumbed your review of The Same River Twice. ;-p

#106 is a reply in the mode of badinage (I should slip that into the favorite word thread) my wife and I often engage in with each other. But yes, being offered a compliment often makes me feel unworthy and uncomfortable.

I was totally unaware my review was on the hotlist. I must hightail it over to the pimp yard and thank everyone. I'm not really thrilled with the quality of the review. That should be apparent by the two long posts I used to supplement it. But I'll let it stand.

You can be a pest, Tani. (Watch out, I'm still in my serious writing head and feeling uninhibited, and maybe dangerous.)

The manuscript is with Epic Press in England, where they're going over my Word 2003 text to eliminate the glitches between that version of Word and Word 2007, which is what they have. Ellipses, for instance, appear as something else ... and I use a lot of them. And one-em dashes (--) appear as question marks, as in "Look out for the?" But I sent them a pdf copy, so they can see in all instances how the text should be, so I'm not concerned.

My brothers have oft said that of me... ;-)

This is not the best photo of the rainbow I was mentioning on Sunday, but it is what I have access to right now.



If I get any better ones, I will post them. One can never have too many pictures of rainbows!

(anyone have any poems about rainbows?)

Lisa, that is not a rainbow ! it looks more like a UFO hurtling back into space after abducting some poor earthlings.

My heart leaps up when I behold
A Rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the man;
And I wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

William Wordsworth

TC, that quilt is incredible. Have you got some close ups pics of it? I would love to see them.

We are getting the tail end of a typhoon here. Threatening skies, and what looks like torrential rain approaching over the mountains as night falls.

Thanks, tomcat. You got me off the hook on rainbow poems; I drew a blank. Bastille Day poems too, though while looking I did discover that Voltaire was imprisoned there; I didn't know that. However, I did come across a nature-type poem I liked:

A Song on the End of the World

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.

Czeslaw Milosz

Special Weather Alert for Chicago:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWXcjYNZais

Mac, on further reflection, you are right about that picture. I am hoping to get real rainbow pictures for you.

Silly Murr... Of course I have close ups! No quilter would ever let a quilt out of their hands without! ;-)

Note: All the quilting is done before assembling. Which can be kind of fun until you get towards the end, especially on a king sized quilt and done in flannels. I really built up the muscles trying to wrangle this 100" x 100" monster (finished dimensions).

Top (raised seam) side



Center of block top side



Bottom (flat) side



Center of block bottom side

>112 LisaCurcio:, 113. Or, something plunging into the water, Lisa, which only you noticed, and captured on film:

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

William Carlos Williams

Ooh, someone help me out, there's another poem by someone about the Icarus painting, with the horse scratching his backside or something? Anyone know it? I think it's from one of the greats.

Tani, that's AMAZING. How on earth do you have the patience? It looks beautiful.

Thank you... Actually, Rena quilting is much better than garments. I used to work in a tailoring shop and dry cleaners when I was in my 20s... Blech! Ptuey! The last dress I made was a strapless satin prom dress with boning and a lace over skirt. I will never sew clothes again! Mom got me into quilting about 7 years ago. I have not looked back. I love the satisfaction of creating a piece of quilt art or something warm and snugly for my friends and loved ones.

>120 ChocolateMuse: never mind, thanks to Google I found it myself. Of course it would be Auden. I love Auden.

Musée Des Beaux Arts
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind a tree.

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

ETA I won't embed the pic - for good detail it needs to be too big. Here's a link: http://www.milforded.org/schools/foran/rscaramella/allusions/icarus.jpg

118> yes, amazing TC. Thank you for posting those. I am truly impressed and awed by your skill.

Thank you, Murrushka... I am going to downsize them now that you have seen them... This is after all a Nature Thread. Sorry, Wilson!

;-)

Why is everyone always apologizing to me?

Neat, Sheila, that you found it. And interesting how it fits with the other poem. But then, they're both based on the picture ... which you also found. Good show! (Is that an Australian exclamation as well as an Anglic one?)

Do you not know how scary you are Piero? Don't tell Rique, but everyone here knows who the REAL diktateur is, at least in this thread.

Yep, I googled: Icarus "horse scratches", and there it was. Amazing thing, technolology.

'Good show' belongs to pre-WWII Aussie dialect, though it still crops up occasionally.

Awww, I'm not scared of Wilson. I just know that I was off topic with the quilting stuff.

Tani, just wanted to chime in about the beauty of your work!

I was checking out the weather forecast for the next few days, and we have a string of upper eighties and low nineties coming. Whenever we have weather like that I remember summer in my childhood--were all childhood summers hot? Did they just seem to be because we had no air-conditioning or only one window unit in the whole house? If we were lucky, we had a fan for the really hot nights. Everyone stayed out on the porch as late as possible because the house was too hot.

One of the things I like about the boat is that people sit outside at night, even though most of us have air conditioning on the boat. (Yep, I am a spoiled brat) So maybe it is just that we were more social when I was a child, and that is jumbled in with my memories of the heat.

Off topic, Tani? May I remind you that this thread is about "plnats and other things that sprout," including ideas, banter, rainbows that could be Icarus, recipes, typhoons, contests, guest appearances by Enrique le Freeque, art and architecture, books and bookstores, poems, birdcalls, other threads, and--yes--quilts too. Even this so-called Wilson shows himself here.

On temperature and lifestyles: been raining here on and off for two days, but still warm, and sometimes hot. The weather report for the next five days is something like 92-91-90-90-91. I don't recall a similar string of nineties around here in ... forever. Which brings up air conditioning, which I don't have. I think you're absolutely right, Lisa. I recall a time when families sat on stoops (a New Yorkism) in the evening, and on beach chairs up and down the block, catching a breeze, conversing, often into the night. Then air conditioners arrived and that way of life changed; everyone stayed inside, watching TV more often than not.

And then all the witnesses went inside. "The effect of urban air conditioners on street crime" a masters degree waiting to happen. (Grin)

What an idea! Do you think urban air conditioners caused an increase or decrease in urban crime? FWIW, in Chicago in the neighborhoods where people still sit out on the porch or stoop there seems to be more crime. But maybe it differs from block to block. There are microcosms in the neighborhoods where the folks are active in trying to prevent crime, and they sit outside. Maybe in other microcosms they don't sit outside because they are afraid of crime. Any graduate students out there?

Looks like rain.

Jane Jacobs has your answer.

I don't agree with everything on this page (particularly the definsible space bit), but when Jacobs first proposed this theory, it was revolutionary. It was a direct attack on the suburbanization of cities which had been billed as a safe, pastoral escape from the hectic urban core, but in reality was more about getting away from the scary black people who weren't kept on farms anymore. One of the important things that's been picked up from her, however, is the importance of allowing mixed use developments which creates actual neighborhoods rather than just a bunch of houses. And crime statistics in the US are extremely dodgy considering non-violent crimes (i.e. possession) get lumped in with everything else, and we incarcerate more people per capita than any other country save maybe China who doesn't accurately report.

Thank you, Lisa...

Okay, okay, Wilson... got it.

We spent our hot summer nights on the front porch and lawn when I was a kid. We had an old oil burning furnace (the scary monster kind in the basement) with a summer fan. We shut down the house in the morning; windows, curtains and doors and turned on the fan which kept the house cool 'til about dinner time when outside/inside temps aligned then opened the house and spent the evening and late into the night outside. Parents usually on the porches, neighborhood kids running around playing hide-n-seek or red rover and other such games. Older brothers sneaking out after the parentals had gone to sleep. Ah, yes... Hot summer nights.

Good memories... Thanks, Lisa!

Near 90 today then a cooling trend to the low-mid 80s over the weekend. Gawd, I love summer!

Wilson's friend from up Saugerties way singing about summer in the city.

>135 geneg:. Yeah, but you notice that John Sebastian lives here now, up the road from me--and for quite a while too; he predates me--nowhere near the city.

>134 highdesertlady:. Yeah, I do that ceiling fan too, Tani. Sometimes it works, but not when it doesn't cool off much at night; like now.

>133 janemarieprice:. The seven points she makes in "Qualities of a Safe Neighborhood Street" in your link are so sensible, and so obvious once read; extracted from Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs.

#138 Actually, Wilson, the fan was part of the furnace so air came through the vents. We did not have ceiling fans back then.

Now, I am as spoiled rotten as Lisa with A/C. Though the nights up here cool down to the 40s the house can be stifling. If I had my druthers, I would open the windows at night, but da Mama likes her hermetically sealed filtered air. The things we do for our parentals. sigh.

The local newspaper, the Kingston Freeman, had this as its front page story last Sunday, but without the gossipy details. The town of Rhinebeck is across the river, about ten miles away, and not all of it is as tony as the story claims; me and the missus regularly go to the movie there to see foreign, less commercially successful films. The coming shindig and the attendant traffic of helicopters ferrying muckety-mucks to and fro, and the entourage of tense Secret Service agents, will keep us away for a while. Good time to go to Montreal, I'm thinking:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/dailybeast/9011_chelseaclintonssecretweddingplans

My daughter, who was into sketch comedy for a while, just sent me this:

BP Spills Coffee

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AAa0gd7ClM

Looks and sounds about right, Wilson... Dumb ass suits.

Jane, of course I was being a bit tongue in cheek, but Chicago is certainly a city that tried to put all of those scary black people in confined spaces--our high rise low income housing is notorious and I think we are thought of as one of the most segregated cities in the country. Even the low rise housing was set up to completely segregate the people who lived there from the rest of the world.

The really big high rises are almost gone, but I don't know how successful we have been in moving people into mixed income housing areas. The other problem we have is that after three to four generations of living under those conditions, people need to learn to live in neighborhoods.

I love my city, but I recognize its flaws.

On a brighter note, here is a slightly better picture of that double rainbow. Emphasis on "slightly". At its finest, it was two full rainbows. I was with a bunch of pretty lousy photographers, unfortunately.

Beautiful nonetheless, Lisa.

I think rainbows are an especially difficult photo subject. 141 is a great shot in my book.

I don't exactly find this funny, but it's a You Tube hit at the moment and appropriate to the conversation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MX0D4oZwCsA

Piero, that BP video is about ten milllion times more witty. Awesome.

I had one of these big, bad-boys in my rhodadendren (sp?), at dusk, today.

http://www.naturemoncton.org/images/Cecropia%20Moth.JPG

(obviously not my photo)

Ahhhh.... 93 @ home today and our 7 day forecast on the high desert is 92-88-85-82-80-80-80. Yes!

Impressivo, Sandy. And whatta coincidence, TC: 93 here tomorrow, and the next day, the temp forecast having been revised upward. Sheila: don't be envious; your hot temp time will come.

Mr. Dog--that is some moth! I hope it did not eat too much.

It appears that it will be 90 something from west to east for the foreseeable future. We are having a "red sky" night, so should be good sailing weather tomorrow. I have to go to work, however, so will only be able to glance out at those who have the luxury of being on the water.

Rena, aren't there some other folks down there who would join you on this thread? You could commiserate with each other in the cold weather and feel superior together when the tables turn.

Thanks for thinking of me Piero. I'm not envious today, it's actually quite a lovely day. Bright and clear, and cold in the shade. I'm about to take a midday stroll in the sunshine. 15.7C at latest observation.

Lisa, there was Thrin, but he only pops up occasionally. Everyone else in here is from the Northern parts of the planet. Most of my non-LT friends wouldn't be interested in becoming LT friends as well, so I guess it's just me... *sniff*

It's okay, I'm quite reconciled to being She Who Walks Alone. Some days I rather enjoy it :)

That's 60F, for those of you who don't know.

Sheila: A puzzle for your entertainment. Two guys were in a bicycle race--call it the Tour de France--one from New Zealand and one from Australia, and they were in front of a group of 180 riders sprinting toward the finish line at 60 mph. One of them head-butted the other with his helmet and was thrown out of the race afterward. Which one was it?

Piero, you are touching on a national shame.

Here's some footage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oen6ZcoVOa4

Sorry; "entertainment" was a poor choice of words:

BOURG-LES-VALENCE, France--In the frenzied and dangerous mass sprints at the Tour de France, competitors often need to keep their heads.

Mark Renshaw decided to use his.

The Australian lead-out man for sprint specialist Mark Cavendish was kicked out of the race after head-butting a rival Thursday, which cleared a path for his British teammate to win his third stage at this year's Tour.

Something about France makes people want to head-butt each other.

Thunderstorms have pushed out. Sunny Friday.

ARRRGGGHHHH! I hate skunks! That's twice this week that I have gone out for a smoke before bed (yes, I smoke) and have been barraged by the smell of skunk. Ughh! Damn, Pepe Le Pew!

I have never smelt skunk. It's a thing outside of my imagination.

Ohhhh, it's awful, Rena... just awful. The worst I have ever experienced was at work in a rubber art stamp factory. The damn thing died in the ditch outside of our warehouse and our intake fans were sucking the smell into the office. I was so nauseated I had to leave. And you know... There was no one to call to come remove the disgusting mess. Two of the supervisors (women) finally had to go out and deal with it. (what they did I do not remember it was a decade ago) But no county or city agencies would touch it.

Skunk Hour

(for Elizabeth Bishop)

Nautilus Island's hermit
heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea.
Her son's a bishop. Her farmer is first selectman in our village;
she's in her dotage.

Thirsting for
the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victoria's century
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.

The season's ill--
we've lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L.L. Bean
catalogue. His nine-knot yawl
was auctioned off to lobstermen.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.

And now our fairy
decorator brightens his shop for fall;
his fishnet's filled with orange cork,
orange, his cobbler's bench and awl;
there is no money in his work,
he'd rather marry.

One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull;
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town....
My mind's not right.

A car radio bleats,
"Love, O careless Love...." I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat...
I myself am hell;
nobody's here--

only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their solves up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.

I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air--
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail.
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.

Robert Lowell

156 - Yuck! Interesting side note though, growing up there would be a skunky smell sometimes, and I always wondered what it was - I don't think there are any skunks in Louisiana. Later in life I found out it was foxes - they give off the same odor.

Glad you dropped by, Jane. I've been wanting to launch an Aesthetics Week, which sounds highfalutin, I know, but would include the way we shape our environment(s), or would like to, and how we depict what we see: art, architecture, Jane Jacobs on city streets and neighborhoods, etc. It occurred to me when the subject came up yesterday to take that ball and run with it, but talk was all over the place, including my own, and the moment was gone before I could seize it.

So let's say Monday: Aesthetics Week. Any- and everything that fits. Bring your libraries with you: Buckminster Fuller, Whole Earth catalogues, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mondrian and Matisse, Andre Breton on the je ne sais quoi elicited by a certain street corner; the ambient feel of living on a boat, in a high rise, on a lake or bayou or mountaintop, or while driving cross-country in a car. Rainbows are good too, medieval towers in Ghent, waterfalls in Oregon and elsewhere.

None of which, of course, precludes our usual chatter, which has its own internal, aesthetic logic. Skunks, for instance, are big at the moment.

Gene, u ok? You have this blank expression above... ;-)

There's nothing like the smell of skunks in the morning.

We've got 'em in Chino Hills, the town next door up in the hills, where I used to live, but not so much in Chino, in the floodplain flatlands.

Nothing like unavoidably having to drive over a skunk carcass smeared across the blacktop.

Ah, Henri. I've been waiting for you to show, in order to showcase a nonbookish piece you wrote on your blog, "Relative Stranger" (nice title that):

http://enriquefreequesreads.blogspot.com/2010/06/it-runs-in-family.html

You know, Piero, you wouldn't believe the AWESOME copy editor who edited the piece for me. He did an exceptional job!

Thanks for the plug!

Ah, I suppose that is appropriate, Rique... see your pm from me. ;-) I enjoyed it thoroughly.*

ETA: * Okay, I was referring to the novel excerpt... was that yours too? I am going back to read the family story now.

How sad, Rique... it reminds me of my own uncle's estrangement from our family.

86. Breezy. Sunny. The air is a little drier. Not quite freddrier but drier. Not as dry as a Baptist Sadie Hawkins Day, but drier. Not as dry as a Rodney Dangerfield joke ('my neighborhood was so tough when you threw a bone out of the window the dogs would call for a fair catch') but for all of that, drier.

Peter pointed out to me, after my announcement about the upcoming Aesthetics Week, that skunks don't quite capture the sublimity we're aiming for. He's right, and there's a brief story explaining my gaffe, whose provenance is the college class where we read Ulysses and a femme fatale distracted me no end. We also read Robert Lowell; specifically, "Skunk Hour." And being the benighted student I was, when we had to write a paper on it, I likened what I considered the metaphorical skunks (they were hardly that) to something noble. The professor gave me a D. It should've been an F, but she cut me some slack for spelling my name correctly.

A skunk song
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doqTSev-_lQ
Oscar Wilde: THE DECAY OF LYING
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/ntntn10h.htm

Perfecto, Por-Man! So very apropos. I had forgotten his song... gotta love that Louden!

Rena, I have been trying to come up with a description for you to imagine the offensive reek of a skunk. I read somewhere that it is something akin to the combination of rotten eggs, garlic and burnt rubber. How's that for imaginative purposes?

It is humid today. We could use a breeze along the ground.

Robert

There are some plants that smell a bit skunky. Don't know their names though. Here, you have to hire a guy to remove skunks from, say, under your house, by trapping them in humane traps and taking them to the woods to be released. I got chewed out by the critter getter for the inhumanity of going to the beach and letting the skunks stew in the trap with their Meow Mix (tm), a bait that is apparently irresistable to skunks! There was a base fee of $250 or so and $100 per skunk that got hauled away. I think we got hit for almost a thousand dollars : (

Slick... As though you knew when the silly skunk would climb into his trap...

91 and dry dry dry!!! So glad I am not in the valley.

Going to Lake Simtustus on the Warm Springs Res. tomorrow to spend the day with the brothers and the nieces. Might even catch me some fish.

Skunk on the runn
http://wdfw.wa.gov/wlm/living/graphics/skunk2.jpg
Skunkonaleesh
http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2007/10_04/2SkunkNNP_468x627.jpg

Hot day, 92 or so, but it darkened around five, then thunder, just before I was about to go out on the deck and water the severely wilted plants. It rained then, thunder but no lightning, and I turned on the ceiling fan to suck in the cooler air. Made a salad Nicoise for dinner, ate it with the missus as the rain abated,, cleaned up, wandered downstairs to the computer, and as I did so glanced at the sliding glass doors in back and saw an enormous black bear ambling out of the woods, across the backyard, and into the woods on the other side!

O magnificent animal! Not in a zoo or at a Dumpster outside of town, but unencumbered in the backyard. Not unlike those in one of Tani's quilt panels, but bigger, and real, of course. My heart's still beating fast. First one I've seen in the open in ten years.

One of my imaginings of heaven has passing bears in it.

Robert

Rightly so, Robert. I was as awestruck as when the bald eagle landed in front of me.

That is so cool, Wilson!!! Closest I have been was on the Rogue River 34 years ago (he was across the river). Wow, in the back yard... amazing stuff.

Limits

Of all the streets that blur in to the sunset,
There must be one (which, I am not sure)
That I by now have walked for the last time
Without guessing it, the pawn of that Someone

Who fixes in advance omnipotent laws,
Sets up a secret and unwavering scale
for all the shadows, dreams, and forms
Woven into the texture of this life.

If there is a limit to all things and a measure
And a last time and nothing more and forgetfulness,
Who will tell us to whom in this house
We without knowing it have said farewell?

Through the dawning window night withdraws
And among the stacked books which throw
Irregular shadows on the dim table,
There must be one which I will never read.

There is in the South more than one worn gate,
With its cement urns and planted cactus,
Which is already forbidden to my entry,
Inaccessible, as in a lithograph.

There is a door you have closed forever
And some mirror is expecting you in vain;
To you the crossroads seem wide open,
Yet watching you, four-faced, is a Janus.

There is among all your memories one
Which has now been lost beyond recall.
You will not be seen going down to that fountain
Neither by white sun nor by yellow moon.

You will never recapture what the Persian
Said in his language woven with birds and roses,
When, in the sunset, before the light disperses,
You wish to give words to unforgettable things.

And the steadily flowing Rhone and the lake,
All that vast yesterday over which today I bend?
They will be as lost as Carthage,
Scourged by the Romans with fire and salt.

At dawn I seem to hear the turbulent
Murmur of crowds milling and fading away;
They are all I have been loved by, forgotten by;
Space, time, and Borges now are leaving me.

Jorge Luis Borges

The line from Borges' poem that really got me:

Inaccessible, as in a lithograph.

Severe thunderstorms are in the making. We are under a warning this very minute. Stupendous electrical storms here the last few days. During one of them the ink-black sky lit up a near faultless Carolina blue. I had never seen anything like it. The electrical bolts were of the order the San Diego Chargers could only dream of. Thunderclaps the envy of Thor himself. Zeus would be smitten by the Green-Eyed monster. Infernally hot with an even hotter breeze. The heat would paralyze even old Beaufort's brain, rendering him incapable of defining the wind.

Here's an example of Francis Beaufort's Scale:

Beaufort Number 6
Strong Breeze
MPH 25-31
Description: Large branches in motion; telegraph wires whistle; umbrellas used with difficulty.

Earlier this month, near sundown, a large buck deer strolled out of the woods into the yard just beyond the window where I use the computer. He stooped down, nibbled some grass or weeds, then casually strolled back into the woods again. My son's Lab was in the house & didn't notice. Not a sound from the neighbor's dogs, either. I think they were all watching TV.

Massive lightning last night, not here but to the north, lighting up a large portion of the night sky with flashbulb brilliance every few seconds for about an hour, too far away to hear the thunder. I sat on the deck in back watching this through the trees, with the sky overhead clear and filled with stars. The Weather Channel reported high winds and broadcast an alert from the Mohawk Valley south to Schoharie and Greene Counties and east to Albany and Bennington, Vermont; told people to stay inside because of severe ground to cloud lightning. Later at night it rained buckets here, ushered in and out by waxing and waning thunder. Another stultifying ninety degree day expected today.

Nice piece of writing P, I love it when important things can be put in a small space, a paragraph for example.

The stormy weather passed us by here north of Detroit. Very good chance of severe weather today.

184, 185> it is in reading such a description that I am reminded that we have an author among us!

As I was just finishing up a post for the "Pre" Histories of Herodotus, a good storm blew in. The weather radar has bright red over Chicago. It went from almost still, very thick air to blowing quite hard. My neighbors with open aft decks had to scramble to get the canvas up. I am looking across the fairway at a fellow with what we lovingly refer to as a "go-fast" boat trying to get his boat covered. And another neighbor who is somewhat challenged when it comes to docking his boat is just coming in while it is still blowing and raining. He would have been better off to stay out in the lake away from any hard surfaces until it blows over. Which it is in the process of doing right now. I love summer storms!

#171 - Tani, that is a sufficiently ewww-provoking description for me to not be sorry that I've never had the skunk experience.

I think Piero has begun aesthetic week with his masterly description of the storm. It's Monday down here in upside-down land, and I'm looking forward to this week. I just hope that all those storms don't result in nobody but me being able to be on here...

We on the high desert will be experiencing a milder climate for the next five or so days in the low to mid 80s.

Wilson, that was an extraordinary description! Our T-storms will probably start in a couple of weeks and I am anticipating ours with relish, now. Hopefully, not until we return from the niece's wedding, in Olympia, at the end of the month.

REMINDER

Tomorrow is the first day of Aesthetics Week. Not that you need be an aesthete to contribute. If you have an opinion on the look, feel, taste, or texture of a thing; opinions (pix, recordings, links) concerning art, architecture, city streets, country lanes, shorelines and/or mountains, the American landscape or the ruins of Europe, elegiac or otherwise; book titles you want to share ...

Well, you get the idea.

Here's an appetitzer, from Vanity Fair magazine:

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/08/architecture-survey-slideshow...

This is one of the finest books that I've come across in my 61 years. Halle is one of my very favorite nature writers along with John McPhee, Loren Eiseley, Joseph Wood Krutch and Charleton Ogburn. There are too many more to name, so I will stop here.
http://www.librarything.com/work/1031081

Technically it is still Sunday here but being as I am out on the Best Coast and I get up considerably later than Wilson... Here is a photo from Our South American Correspondent:

Chilean Grocery

Oooh Tani, that's such a fabulous start!

It's been Monday here for AGES. So now I will post the pic that's already on my profile page. It relates to a book I haven't actually read, The Cellist of Sarajevo. The book was based on a real person, one Vedran Smajlović, who played his cello in honour of people who had been killed in the bombing of Sarajevo, amid the ruins. You can read more about it HERE if you like. Apparently Smajlović was not happy about the book, about which he was never consulted and knew nothing of before its publication.

Ode on a Grecian Urn

THOU still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearièd,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea-shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul, to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

O Attic shape! fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

John Keats

Poet and prophet differ greatly in our loose modern notions of them. In some old languages, again, the titles are synonymous; VATES means both prophet and poet: and indeed at all times, Prophet and Poet, well understood, have much kindred of meaning. Fundamentally indeed they are still the same; in this most important respect especially, That they jave penetrated both of them into the sacred mystery of the Universe; what Goethe calls 'the open secret,' 'Which is the great secret?' asks one. - The OPEN secret.' - open to all, seen by almost none! That divine mystery, which lies everywhere in all Beings, 'the Divine Idea of the World,' that which lies at the bottom of Appearance,' as Fichte styles it; of which all appearance, from the starry sky to the grass of the field, but especially the Appearance of Man and his work, is but the VESTURE, the embodiment that renders it visible. The divine mystery IS in all times and in all places; veritably is. In most times and places it is greatly overlooked; and the Universe, definable always in one or the other dialect, as the realized thought of God, is considered a trivial, inert, commonplace matter, - as if, says the Satirist, it were dead thing, which some upholsterer had put together! It could do no good, at present, to SPEAK much about this; but it is a pity for everyone of us if we do not know it, live ever in the knowledge of it. Really a most mournful pity; - a failure to live at all, if we live otherwise!
But now, I say, whoever may forget this divine mystery, the VATES, whether Prophet or Poet, has penetrated into it, is a man sent hither to make it more impressively known to us. That always is his message; he is to reveal that to us, - that sacred mystery which he more than others lives ever present with. While others forget it, he knows it; - I might say, he has been driven to know it; without consent asked of HIM, he finds himself living in it, bound to live in it. Once more, here is no Hearsay, but a direct Insight and Belief; this man too could not help being a sincere man! Whosoever may live in the shows of things, it is for him a necessity of nature to live in the very fact of things. A man once more, in earnest with the Universe, though all others were but toying with it. He is a VATES, first of all, in virtue of being sincere. So far Poet and Prophet, participators in the 'open secret,' are one.
With respect to their distinction again, The VATES Prophet, we might say, has seized that sacred mystery rather on the moral side, as Good and Evil, Duty and Prohibition; the VATES Poet on what the Germans call the aesthetic side, as Beautiful, and the like. The one we may call the revealer of what we are to do, the other of what we are to love. But indeed these two provinces run into one another, and cannot be disjoined. The Prophet too has his eye on what we are to love: how else should he know what we are to do? The highest Voice ever heard on this earth said withal, 'Consider the lilies of the field; they toil not, neither do they spin: yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.' A glance, that, into the deepest deep of Beauty. 'The lilies of the field,' - dressed finer than earthly princes, springing-up there in the humble furrow-field; a beautiful EYE looking-out on you, from the great inner Sea of Beauty! How could the rude Earth make these, if her Essence, rugged as she looks and is were not inwardly Beauty? In this point of view, too, a saying of Goethe's, which has staggered several, may have meaning: 'The Beautiful,' he intimates, 'is higher than the Good; the Beautiful includes the Good.' The TRUE Beautiful; which however,I have said somewhere, differs from the FALSE as Heaven does from Vauxhall!' So much for the distinction and identity of Poet and Prophet. -
In ancient and also in modern periods we find a few Poets who are accounted perfect, whom it were a kind of treason to find fault with. This is noteworthy; this is right: yet in strictness it is only an illusion. At bottom, clearly enough, there is no perfect Poet! A vein of Poetryb exists in the hearts of all men; no man is made altogether of Poetry. We are all Poets when we READ a poem well. The 'imagination that shudders at the Hell of Dante,' is not the same faculty, weaker in degree, as Dante's own? No one but Shakespeare can embody, out of SAXO GRAMMATICUS, the story of HAMLET as Shakespeare did: but everuyone models some kind of story out of it; everyone embodies it better or worse. We need not spend time in defining. Where there is no specific difference, as between round and square, all definition must be more or less arbitrary. A man that has SO much more of the poetic developed in him as to have become noticeable, will be called Poet by his neighbors. World-Poets too, those whom we are to take for perfect Poets, are settled by critics in the same way. One who rises above the general level of Poets will, to such and such critics, seem a Universal Poet; as he ought to do. And yet it is, and must be, an arbitrary distinction. All Poets, all men, have some touches of the Universal; no man is wholly made of that. Most Poets are soon forgotten: but not the noblest Shakespeare or Homer of them can be remembered for EVER; - a day comes when he too is not!

Nevertheless, you will say, there must be a difference between true Poetry and true Speech not poetical: what is the difference? On this point many things have been written, especially by the late German critics, some of which are not very intelligible at first. They say, for example, that the Poet has an INFINITUDE in him; communicates an Unendlichkeit, a certain character of 'infinitude,' to whatsoever he delineates. This, though not very precise, yet on so vague a matter is worth remembering: if well meditated, some meaning will gradually be found in it. For my own part, I find considerable meaning in the old vulgar distinction of Poetry being METRICAL, having music in it, being a Song. Truly, if pressed to give a definition, one might say this as soon as anything else: If your delineation be authentically MUSICAL, musical not in word only, but in heart and substance, in all the thoughts and utterances of it, in the whole conception of it, then it will be Poetical; if not, not. - Musical: how much lies in that! A MUSICAL thought is one spoken by a mind that has penetrated into the inmost heart of a thing; detected the inmost mystery of it, namely the MELODY that lies hidden in it; the inward harmony of coherence which is its soul, whereby it exists, and has a right to be, here in this world. All inmost things, we may say, are melodious; naturally utter themselves in Song. The meaning of Song goes deep. Who is there that, in logical words, can express the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the Infinite, and lets us for moments gaze into that!

Nay all speech, even the commonest speech, has something of song in it: not a parish in the world but has its parish-accent; - the rhythm or TUNE to which the people there SING what they have to say! Accent is a kind of chanting; all men have accent of their own, - though they only NOTICE that of others. Observe too how all passionate language does of itself become musical, - with a finer music than mere accent; the speech of a man even in zealous anger becomes a chant, a song. All deep things are Song. It seems somehow the very essence of us, Song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls! The primal element of us; of us, and of all things. The Greeks fabled of Sphere-Harmonies: it was the feeling they had of the inner structure of Nature, that the soul of all her voices and utterances was perfect music. Poetry, therefore, we will call MUSICAL Thought.
The Poet is he who THINKS in that manner. At bottom, it turns still on the power of intellect; it is a man's sincerity and depth of vision that makes him a Poet. See deep enough, and you see musically; the heart of Nature BEING everywhere music, if you can only reach it.

from ON HEROES, HERO-WORSHIP AND THE HEROIC IN HISTORY; Lecture III, The Hero as Poet: Dante; Shakespeare - Thomas Carlyle.
University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1966
ed. by Carl Niemeyer

On a training trip to Los Angeles, back in 2000, I had the weekend to myself so I spent a day at the Getty. In total awe, I spent several hours in the ancient sculpture section (pretty much with jaw to the floor) and a few hours outside taking in the architecture and gardens.

# 192 - Thank you for posting this, Rena! You know my love of the cello and I have oft wondered at the origins of the photo on your profile.

>194 Porius:. Fantastic extract, Peter. I read it while involuntarily thinking Yes! Yes! Yes! as I did.

From the founder of my sufi order, Hazrat Inayat Khan:

How the words 'love,' 'harmony,' and 'beauty' delight the heart of everyone who hears them! One may wonder what it can be in these words that is able to exert such a natural power upon the human soul.

The answer is that if there is anything in life which appeals to the human soul, it is love and beauty. If one asks, 'And what besides those?' then the answer is, 'There is nothing else.' Why is this? Because they are the very nature of life. Love is the nature of life, beauty is the outcome of life, harmony is the means by which life accomplishes its purpose, and the lack of it results in destruction.

When we reflect upon this whole creation we cannot but see that its purpose is to express an ideal of love, harmony and beauty. Love could not have manifested itself if there were nothing to love, eyes could not have seen if there were nothing to see. What could love have done if there were no beauty? Love would have been silent. Love can only be said to exist after it has passed from silence into expression.

Hazrat Inayat Khan, Volume VII - In an Eastern Rose Garden

From my Journal, Jan. 1997
What is 'Mungo' ? Something that comes to an African Magician. A piece of information that Idries Shah weaseled out of the Ju-Ju's? 'Mungo' comes into him and he is made. A sort of ectoplasm - a feeling of no more fear - a Lightness. The aspirant feels a readiness for action. Especially among the Nyam-Nyams and the Shilluks of Central Africa.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Man is destined to live a Social Life. His part is to be with other men. In serving Sufism he is serving the infinite, serving himself, and serving Society. He cannot cut himself off from any one of these obligations and become or remain a Sufi. The only discipline worthwhile is that which is achieved in the midst of temptation. A man who, like the Anchorite, abandons the world and cuts himself off from temptations and distractions cannot achieve power. For power is that which is won through being wrested from the midst of weakness and uncertainty. The ascetic living a wholly monastic life is deluding himself.

This seems the highest sort of Wisdom to me.

Somewhat cooler today. 79. Overcast. A Meredithian breeze (SSW). Not really enough to break one of the Master's wine glasses. The remainder of the week in the lower 80's with chances (what a word) of storms rising up now and then. Was in the Grand Traverse Bay over the weekend. More muckety-mucks then I care to see but very scenic indeed. I was sitting near the shore late in the evening when Venus rose over the distant rim and eventually produced a moon-like path of light over the bay that was perfectly aligned to where I was sitting. Well not exactly, but pretty damn close. The effect was heightened by the fact that the bay water was as smoothe as glass. Venus accompanied a plu-perfect Crescent Moon. Driving back to the Metropolitan Detroit area was less then enjoyable.

Nice photo, ChocoMuse. It's a good book too.

Aesthetically, I've always been taken by the look of things from afar: villages surrounded by farmland or nestled in hills or mountains in helicopter views of the Tour de France; city streets viewed from high rise apartment perches; the earth as seen from an airplane window; houses strung out along intracoastal waterways and on the Hudson; buildings seen from tour boats around Manhattan, the Chicago River and the Seine ...

From I Think, Therefore Who Am?:

Later, I wandered the streets, down Telegraph Avenue and then up into the hills, through residential areas, looking for something, though I didn’t know what. It got dark, and I found myself in a grove of trees, looking down. The streets below curved through the hills, and on the flatlands farther down, streetlights marked a vast grid of houses that abruptly ended at the shoreline. The moon glistened in the vast pool of water, the spires and spans of a bridge outlined against it, with the dark shapes of ships in the bay, and office towers lit up on the other side …

If only I could have remained there, looking down, content in generalities. But it was getting chilly, and I was hungry, and I had no place to sleep, so I reluctantly abandoned that perch and came down the mountain, traipsing through streets that up close were ordinary in their particularity, and took the bus back across the bay.

I cannot compete with your literary knowledge, dear Peters, so I can only contribute some photos of what I deem to be beautiful or not so beautiful buildings in my fair city.

This one is, in my opinion, an abomination. Mr. Lohan put a space ship on top of a classic:



In the background, however, are the Field Museum to the left and the Shedd Aquarium to the right with Monroe Harbor behind them.

Here is some very classic Chicago neighborhood housing. This block is particularly nice. Can't say that they all look like this.



Credit for this photo goes to http://www.oldhousejournal.com/magazine/bungalows/ohj-bungalow4.shtml

Some of you might have seen this view from the lake on my profile page:



I take credit for this one. I have seen a lot of skylines--this one is right at the top of the list of most beautiful.

Literary scmitterary, LC, those are some fine shots. The skyline sure puts dear dirty Detroit in a bad light. But Chicago is a first string city and Det. maybe a third stringer on a good day.

Whot literary knowledge is it to which you refer?

Ooooh, I'm loving all this glorious aestheticism.

Remember you all posting pics of your first crocuses and things not so long ago? Well, I have experienced my first daffodil sighting for 2010 - and in my very own garden at that. It's in a pot, which might be why it's all confused, poor thing. Surely it's not supposed to be out until late August...

I’m late to Aesthetics Week, but I figured I would start at the beginning.

Vitruvius – writer, engineer, and considered the first architect – outlined three qualities required for ‘architecture’: firmitas, utilitas, and venustas, variously translated, but best as stability, commodity, and delight (commodity in the sense of usefulness or serving of function).

In his work, he also has a story (or legend or myth) of the creation of architecture. Man, at the beginning, walked on four legs in the forest like an animal. Upon coming to a clearing, the early man saw the stars in the night sky for the first time and stands up. This moment is the creation of architecture.

Vitruvius’s architectural proportions were later beautifully illustrated by da Vinci:

204 - I don't really understand the new trend of the hybrid old/new style stadiums. They are becoming increasingly popular despite how ugly they are.

I would guess it's faux nostalgia intended to appeal to people who actually never went to places like Ebbets Field, which was falling apart, stank, and had rats, not to mention its odd dimensions down the left and right field lines.

That's my old corner in Brooklyn. It never was so quiet before or since.

Consecration

The man in the yellow hard hat,
the one with the mask
across his nose and mouth,

pulls the lever that turns
the great arm of the crane up
and over and sideways

toward the earth;
then the wrecking ball
dangles crazily,

so delicately, like a silver fob
loosened from a waistcoat pocket:
shocking to see

the dust fly up and the timber
sail up, then so slowly
down, how the summer air

bristles with a hundred splinters
and the smallest is a splintered flame,
for it takes so many lengthening

erratic movements to tear away
what stands between the sidewalk
and the bell tower,

where the pigeons now rise
in grand indignant waves
at such poor timing, such

a deaf ear toward the music;
in this way the silence

between hand and lever is turned
into a ragged and sorely lifted
wing: the wrecking ball lurches
in a narrowing arc until only

the dust resists—the rest
comes down, story by story,
and is hauled off in flatbed trucks.

Meanwhile the pedestrians come
and go, now and then glancing
at their accurate watches.

Gradually, the dust
becomes the rose light
of autumn.

But one evening a woman
loses her way as she’s
swept into a passing wave

of commuters and she
looks up toward the perfectly
empty rectangle

now hanging between
the rutted mud and the sky.
There along the sides

of the adjacent building,
like a set for a simple
elementary school play,

like the gestures of the dead
in her children’s faces,
she sees the flowered paper

of her parents’ bedroom,
the pink stripes leading
up the stairs to the attic,

and the outline of the claw-
footed bathtub, font
of the lost cathedral of childhood.

Susan Stewart

Aesthetics is for the elites. Leave me out. I wouldn't know an aesthetic if it walked up and hit me in the face. All I know is, I know what I like. I don't care about the aesthetics. They confuse me.

I thought the trend these days was to replace all those old multiuse ballparks with single use parks. Back to the aesthetics of the olden golden days of such fabled haunts as Shibe Park (where I saw my first big league baseball game), Crosley field, The Polo Grounds, Sportsmans Park, Tiger Stadium, and of course, the symbol of the era, Brooklyn's very own Ebbets Field.

Speaking of old ballparks and the aesthetics they engender--nostalgie de la boue, the "lost cathedral of childhood," the "old corner in Brooklyn"--I'll walk back what I wrote in #211 (I must've been in a sour mood) with a paraphrase of Orwell, who said about nostalgia: it's okay, so long as we recognize it for what it is--nostalgia.

I saw my first ball game at funky Ebbets Field as a boy, and what I'm left with now (putting aside Peewee, Duke, Jackie, and the other boys of summer) is the right field wall bordering one side, running along Bedford Avenue, with its old-fashioned flip-the-numbers scoreboard; the little niche in deepest center field (not so deep, actually; it was a small park) between the outcrop of bleachers and that humongous wall, where a well-hit ball could richochet long enough to allow for inside-the-park home runs; and of course, most of all, the vast (to young urban eyes) expanse green grass.

Again, posting for Wilson, from our South American correspondent.

Facade in Montevideo, Uruguay

From Anthony Trollope's AUTOBIOGRAPHY, the chapter entitled A FULL RECORD IS IMPOSSIBLE:
It will not, I trust, be supposed by any reader that I have intended in this so-called autobiography to give a record of my inner-life. No man ever did so truly, - and no man ever will. Rousseau probably attempted it, but who doubts but that Rousseau has confessed in much the thoughts and convictions rather than the facts of his life? If the rustle of a woman's petticoat has ever stirred my blood; if a cup of wine has been a joy to me; if I have thought tobacco at midnight in pleasant company to be one of the elements of an earthly paradise; if now and again I have somewhat recklessly fluttered a 5 pound note over a card table; - of what matter to that is any reader? I have betrayed no woman. Wine has brought me no sorrow. It has been the companionship of smoking that I have loved, rather than the habit. I have never desired to win money, and I have lost none. To enjoy the excitement of pleasure, but to be free from its vices and ill effects, - to have the sweet, and leave the bitter untasted, - that has been my study. The preachers tell us that this is impossible. It seems to me that hitherto I have succeeded fairly well. I will not say that I have never scorched a finger, - but I carry no ugly wounds.
* * *
It matters little that Trollope could not taste the sweet without a familiarity with the bitter. He was according to the most exacting standards a man of the very highest integrity and character.

Tani, I have forgotten what they call that little section of Buenos Aires. What is it?

Actually, Lisa, Tani doesn't know. Techno-incompetent that I am, and goodhearted trouper that she is, she's been posting all the pix I've sent her. In fact, I told her that one was a Chilean facade, but when the missus (aka our South American correspondent) saw what I'd sent (I nabbed it from her photo files), she told me, "No, that's Buenos Aires." As you noted. When she comes back from today's air-conditioned movie I'll find out the name of the neighborhood.

That was her first stop last winter, if you recall, on a cruise that began there, sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and up the Patagonian coast to Valparaiso and then Santiago, three weeks after the earthquake.

Now I get it! I was trying to figure out why Tani was posting pictures from the "South American correspondent" but decided she was just doing a take-off on the real South American correspondent. I look forward to you reminding me, because I am going to be up all night otherwise. Or, I could just search on the internet and find it.

I have a very cool piece of art that I bought in that neighborhood for less than ten dollars and then spent about US$60 framing. No pictures of it, though.

Somehow Lord Henry W. (George Sanders) has got the cat-bird seat of photos in my profile, must be that Egyptian feline).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugt5BoM4Yn8

Turns out, according to our S.A. correspondent, that the photo in #216 actually depicts a facade in Montevideo (Uruguay), the first stop on her cruise. She tells me that Argentines often cross the water and go to resort areas on the other side.

Not much above 80 today. A little humid but tolerable. A gorgeous evening. SE9mph. Though it seems pretty still out there right now.

Paul Signac
Le cháteau des Papes á Avignon, 1900 (The Papal Palace at Avignon)

I dig Impressionism. I'm with Geneg ("I know what I like") but if I were ever to front a metal band, they'd be called ... AESTHETICA.

>222 copyedit52: Pietro, So, I looked it up. What I was thinking it was was La Boca in Buenos Aires. I did not realize they had similar buildings in Montevideo. I never did get to Uruguay, although I have been to Buenos Aires twice. La Boca was a community of Italian immigrants who were mostly fishermen. It is on the water. I do have photos, but they are not digital and they are at the house home so I cannot scan them to get them on the computer.

Buenos Aires is an interesting city because it is so European. Many Italians and Germans emigrated to there. I actually had a great-great uncle who went there in the early 1900's--before WWI. Never knew him, of course.

>224 absurdeist:, 'Rique--was Signac a pointillist like Seurat? At the Art Institute we have the "Sunday on La Grande Jatte"



I am with you on the impressionists.

A Dream of Whitman Paraphrased, Recognized and Made More Vivid by Renoir

Twenty-eight naked young women bathed by the shore
Or near the bank of a woodland lake
Twenty-eight girls and all of them comely
Worthy of Mack Sennett's camera and Florenz Ziegfield's
Foolish Follies.

They splashed and swam with the wondrous unconsciousness
Of their youth and beauty
In the full spontaneity and summer of the fieshes of
awareness
Heightened, intensified and softened
By the soft and the silk of the waters
Blooded made ready by the energy set afire by the
nakedness of the body,

Electrified: deified: undenied.

A young man of thirty years beholds them from a distance.
He lives in the dungeon of ten million dollars.
He is rich, handsome and empty standing behind the linen curtains
Beholding them.
Which girl does he think most desirable, most beautiful?
They are all equally beautiful and desirable from the gold distance.
For if poverty darkens discrimination and makes
perception too vivid,
The gold of wealth is also a form of blindness.
For has not a Frenchman said, Although this is America...

What he has said is not entirely relevant,
That a naked woman is a proof of the existence of God.

Where is he going?
Is he going to be among them to splash and to laugh with them?
They did not see him although he saw them and was there among them.
He saw them as he would not have seen them had they been conscious
Of him or conscious of men in complete depravation:
This is his enchantment and impoverishment
As he possesses them in gaze only.

... He felt the wood secrecy, he knew the June softness
The warmth surrounding him crackled
Held in by the mansard roof mansion
He glimpsed the shadowy light on last year's brittle leaves fallen,
Looked over and overlooked, glimpsed by the fall of death,
Winter's mourning and the May's renewal.

Delmore Schwartz

I am posting these on behalf of Wilson (and I am a bit derelict due to the 4 year old twin grand-nephews):

Waves, environmental installation, Side View by Maya Lin in Storm King Sculpture Park, New York. Ms. Lin is best known for designing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.



Waves Overview

For Delmore Schwartz.

>217 Porius: Fantastic quote from Trollope, Por. I love the bit about the companionship of smoking.

Aesthetics. Mmm.

This is Bitan. 碧潭. Green Lake, with the character 'green' also meaning 'green jade'. I live in the hills on the right.

I think of this line from Auden as I walk over the footbridge every day:

The summer holds: upon its glittering lake



Cloudy day:



Neighbourhood Teahouse:



Taiwan. AKA Isla Formosa, Beautiful Island, in Portugese.

EPILOGUE
Ten Years After
But I have nothing to say, replied Simias; nor can I see any reason for doubt after what has been said. But I still feel and cannot help feeling uncertain in my own mind, when I think of the subject and the feebleness of man.
Plato, PHAEDO

TEN springs have passed as this epilogue is written. After ten springs a man should be wiser. He should be nearer to the apprehension of that final word by which the secret of the universe is revealed; the word that mankind has sought through the ages; the word that brings forth, at last, the Kingdom of God upon earth. It trembles on the tip of one's tongue - and still one cannot say it. I was as close to it ten years ago, although today I can, perhaps, tell better what I think.

All life, I suspect, is one. There is no such thing as the mockingbird, Minus polyglottos, a species apart. In S. America the traveler sees mockingbirds that are not quite mockingbirds, or not quite the same as the mockingbirds he sees in Washington. There is a spectrum of the genus Mimus. White in the wings increases imperceptibly, from none at one end of the spectrum to much at the other. Where the taxonomist wants to draw boundary lines, saying that everything between them constitutes one species, is a matter of his convenience. It has nothing to do with nature. SPECIES is a word, not a thing - and we should, as Justice Holmes admonished, think things rather than words.

GENUS, FAMILY, ORDER, CLASS, and PHYLUM are equally unknown to nature. If you had before you the skins of all the birds that ever lived, laid out in a series based on kinship, you could not find any point at which that series showed a natural division. From the hummingbird to the eagle there is no break. From man to the amoeba there is no break. Only the extinction over the ages of intervening forms - gaps made by death and disappearance - has caused those apparent breaks which we see in our world of the moment.

If all the song sparrows between Maine and Arizona were to disappear, would not the first taxonomist to come along say that the Maine and Ariz. birds represented, respectively, two separate species? Today we call them one species because the continuum remains between them, connecting them, making them visibly one inspite of their differences.

The ivory-billed woodpecker, today, is either already extinct or about to be. But he can be resurrected at any time by a finding of the scientists that a closely related Cuban woodpecker, instead of being a separate species, is merely a geographical variant of the same species. So our taxonomic world becomes another Wonderland for Alice.

This is the worst of our heritage from the Greek philosophers. The defect which accompanied the greatness of Socrates was in his assumption that life is made up of different categories. Here, he said, is the Good and there the Beautiful; here is Justice and there is Truth; here is Courage and there is Cowardice; here is the Body and there the Soul. He assumed that words like these represented actual building-blocks which God used in the Creation, and the questions he asked had to do with how these separate 'ideas' combined or bore upon one another. He started the word-game that Western philosophers have played among themselves ever since, never more passionately than did the theologians of the Middle Ages who resurrected Aristotle. Socrates and Aristotle created our mockingbird.

This specialization is what will destroy our world by destroying our ability to see things whole. Either you are an Historian, today, or a Political Scientist, or a Naturalist, or some other -ist. You must make up your mind. You have to decide. And if International Relations is a category, as some now say it is, where does it belong? (How much white does it have in its wings?) Our universities are laid waste by the battles that rage over these issues.

The Philosophers have recently announced a 'Revolution in Philosophy' that has occurred in the last 50 years. 'Philosophers have become . . . more technical in their discourse, and more self-conscious about their calling.' They have become 'conscious that philosophical problems are very different from those dealt with by their colleagues in the arts and sciences. Philosophy has been 'set free' by cutting the chains of association that had linked it to psychology.' Philosophy has also been 'set free' from metaphysics. In fact, it has been set so free from everything else that only licensed professional Philosophers, today, may read what Philosophers write. They talk to themselves in the seclusion of their own asylum.

He who writes this Epilogue is now, if you pleas, a Prof. of Foreign Affairs. Therefore he writes it uneasily, glancing over his shoulder like a schoolboy writing a letter to his girl when he should be doing his homework. (He ought to be reading this moment . . . ). Someone says he has no doctor's degree in Natural History. He is not licensed to write about Nature. But someone points out that neither has he a degree in Foreign Affairs. Does that make it all right? - or is the case now hopeless? It will not do for him to say that he knows as much about birds as the next Professor of Foreign Affairs, or that he knows as much about For. Affairs as Roger Tory Peterson.

The point is that you cannot find any place to draw the line between For. Aff. and Nature. Let me illustrate. Everyone grants that Politics and For. Aff. have to do with each other. If you want to know about Politics, however, just observe a flock of crows. One of them has acidentally broken a couple of feathers in his wing. Another sees that he has and, with a raucous cry, dives upon him. The gap in the injured bird's wing puts him at a disadvantage and he can hardly defend himself. Other crows, noting his difficulty, start up a sudden self-righteous and indignant cawing. They, too, descend upon him as if they were outraged angels and he an emanation of blackness. Even his former companions can now newly perceive the defect in him, the sable stain. It becomes clear to them, too, that he must go. They, too, begin to caw and plunge bravely. The victim, especially if he has been the nonpareil of the flock, is now lucky if he can find a place of obscurity in the lower woods for the day that remains. Is this not politics?

What we need is a unified Field Theory that will embrace Einstein's equations, natural selection, the plays of Shakespeare, the Sermon on the Mount, the death of Socrates, and the behavior of crows. What we need is the one word that reveals the Kingdom of God. It trembles on the tip of the tongue - and still after ten years, one cannot say it. But I can tell you where to look for it. Not in Scwarzenberger (the Foreign Relations readings earlier), and not in the president's message on the state of the union (unless he has broken out of his office lately). It is in the world of eternal things, the world that renews its beatitude perennially.
It occurs to me that perhaps someone has already said the word. But I did not read his book and the critic who did dismissed it as 'Eschatology.' There's glory for you! Even when the word is spoken, who knows that it will not fall on deaf ears?

This, I think, is what I really want to say after ten years. Perhaps there is no secret, but we are all hard of hearing. Perhaps truth is not invisible, but we are blind.

The web of life, though seamless, has its north and south, its east and its west. There is no Good and Evil, but there is better & worse. There is a higher life and a lower - depths beneath us from which we have risen and a rarer atmosphere above the murky sea in which we live. At times we have strained upward, glimpsing filaments or sparkles of light above. This is promising. We may be farther up a million years from now, if we will keep on straining. But there is material food in the sea too, a higher standard of living lower down, and this attracts us. Today - in Politics, in Foreign Affairs, in Philosophy, even in Natural History - we look downward for the Kingdom of God. So downward we go, perhaps to remain, perhaps to perish, perhaps to rise again. Who knows?

Ten springs is not enough time. God grant us a million!

Louis J. Halle
The Universe
Summer, 1956

226> Don't quote me, but I'm pretty sure, if memory serves, that Signac was a pointillist.

Excerpt from an Aldo Leopold essay:

Killing the Wolf
.... We were eating lunch on a high rimrock, at the foot of which a turbulent river elbowed its way. We saw what we thought was a doe fording the torrent, her breast awash in white water. When she climbed the bank toward us and shook out her tail, we realized our error: it was a wolf. A half-dozen others, evidently grown pups, sprang from the willows and all joined in a welcoming melee of wagging tails and playful maulings. What was literally a pile of wolves writhed and tumbled in the center of an open flat at the foot of our rimrock.

In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy; how to aim a steep downhill shot is always confusing. When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable side-rocks.

We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters' paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.

So, nature and art or nature as art. There is a really fascinating exhibit at the Museum of Arts and Design in NY right now. It is various sculptures and installations made entirely from organic matter.

Dead or Alive

My favorite piece was this piece made of piegon feathers. Here is a sampling of some of the artist's other work:



232 - He was indeed a pointillist and trained as an architect. In my admittedly limited experience I think most architects want to be artists and most artists want to be architects.

What I see up there, and in the link, complements this extract I came upon, from History of Art, Spirit of the Forms, Elie Faure:

Universal form is built on a single basis. It can be discovered anywhere. Poor indeed is the one who, for example, fails to see in a human or animal skull not only a well-ordered countryside with hills and valleys, rivers, internal movements, geological unity, and rhythm, but also a perfect sculpture with its asymmetrical balance, its silent planes, its fleeting lines, its expressive projections, and its sinuous and pure profiles. And when man and his devices appear on the Earth, is it by chance that his weapon is similar to an animal's horn or defensive appendage? ... Is it by chance that a submarine resembles a fish, that an airplane resembles a bird or a giant insect, that a boiler or a sewer resembles a person's entrails, that a motor resembles a beating heart? ... There is between the mind and the motives that are constantly shaping and drawing it to seek nourishment and security, a prevailing and benign view that intelligence picks up where imitation of an object leaves off, and that invention ends where the object is forgotten.

oooooooooh pigeon feathers!!!! Yum yum!

>230 QuentinTom:, Murr, what a beautiful spot!

Here is a view from the boat looking south toward downtown tonight:



A half moon in the sky and a clear night.

Yes, quite a fetching spot. Came as a surprise to me. I pictured tomcat in an urban jungle.

oh Taipei is an urban jungle, but I am lucky enough to live outside it all now.

My Brother, the Artist, at Seven

As a boy he played alone in the fields
behind our block, six frame houses
holding six immigrant families,
the parents speaking only gibberish
to their neighbors. Without the kids
they couldn't say "Good morning" and be
understood. Little wonder
he learned early to speak to himself,
to tell no one what truly mattered.
How much can matter to a kid
of seven? Everything. The whole world
can be his. Just after dawn he sneaks
out to hide in the wild, bleached grasses
of August and pretends he's grown up,
someone complete in himself without
the need for anyone, a warrior
from the ancient places our fathers
fled years before, those magic places:
Kiev, Odessa, the Crimea,
Port Said, Alexandria, Lisbon,
the Canaries, Caracas, Galveston.
In the damp grass he recites the names
over and over in a hushed voice
while the sun climbs into the locust tree
to waken the houses. The husbands leave
for work, the women return to bed, the kids
bend to porridge and milk. He advances
slowly, eyes fixed, an animal or a god,
while beneath him the earth holds its breath.

Philip Levine

Here's a very olde American poem with lots of dialect, but it's one of my favorites. You intellecshulls there may laugh it off, but, hey, some of us are just plain folks.

Our Hired Girl - J. W, Riley

Our hired girl, she's 'Lizabuth Ann;
An' she can cook best things to eat!
She ist puts dough in our pie-pan,
An' pours in somepin' 'at's good an' sweet;
An' nen she salts it all on top
With cinnamon; an' nen she'll stop
An' stoop an' slide it, ist as slow,
In th' old cook-stove, so's 'twon't slop
An' git all spilled; nen bakes it, so
It's custard-pie, first thing you know!
An' nen she'll say,
"Clear out o' my way!
They's time fer work, an' time fer play!
Take yer dough, an' run, child, run!
Er I cain't git no cookin' done!"

When our hired girl 'tends like she's mad,
An' says folks got to walk the chalk
When she's around, er wisht they had!
I play out on our porch an' talk
To Th' Raggedy Man 'at mows our lawn;
An' he says, "Whew!" an' nen leans on
His old crook-scythe, and blinks his eyes,
An' sniffs all 'round an' says, "I swawn!
Ef my old nose don't tell me lies,
It 'pears like I smell custard-pies!"
An' nen he'll say,
"Clear out o' my way!
They's time fer work, an' time fer play!
Take yer dough, an' run, child, run!
Er she cain't git no cookin' done!"

Wunst our hired girl, when she
Got the supper, an' we all et,
An' it wuz night, an' Ma an' me
An' Pa went wher' the "Social" met,--
An' nen when we come home, an' see
A light in the kitchen door, an' we
Heerd a maccordeun, Pa says, "Lan'--
O'-Gracious! who can her beau be?"
An' I marched in, an' 'Lizabuth Ann
Wuz parchin' corn fer The Raggedy Man!
Better say,
"Clear out o' the way!
They's time fer work, an' time fer play!
Take the hint, an' run, child, run!
Er we cain't git no courtin' done!"

The whole difference between an educated man and a cultured man is to be detected here. An educated man confines his mental and aesthetic life to periodic visits to galleries, theatres,museums, libraries, lectures. When he goes for a day's pleasuring into the country it is as a sportsman, a golfer, a motorist. He is then taking his holiday; taking it from education quite as much from business, but not by any means escaping from energetic action.

But in a cultured person's life holiday, like the lady's love in WILHELM MEISTER, are a case of 'never or always.' Every day is a holiday. Every day has its own particular margin of lovely relaxed sensations, upon the deep quietude of which no practical, no educational disturbances are allowed to impinge. To the cultured person, that day is utterly wasted where one has been cheated of all time to one's self.

To an educated man's mind the pictures of Constable or Corot, of hobbema or Ruysdael are all in the museum; Homer's ODYSSEY, Wordsworth's PRELUDE, T.S. Eliot's WASTELAND are all in the shelves. But the man or woman who is using literature and art as a means of enhancing certain thrilling sensations to be got out of life has (consciously or unconsciously) assimilated a feeling for that morning freshness, dewy and diaphanous as a liquid mist, through which the legended figures of Corot move with such wistful grace.

This birch-coppice by the banks of an American creek whose heavy July-greenery invades the old dark woodwork of a water-mill, finds an added response in a cultured person's imagination, not only because of something Ruysdael-like, or Hobbema-like, about the way a 1000 little objects are grouped there, but because of something in those rounded moss-grown branches, of something in that floating greenery, which suggests the kind of poetic romance that we associate with the ODYSSEY.

It is above all the sign of a cultured man to be enough of a connoisseur in the art of past generations not to be fooled into fantastic dogmatism by the art-theories of his own age. Although a violent and fantastical championship of modern art has a lively value in stirring things up and making conversation illuminating, as far as happiness is concerned, the more sceptical, easy, uncommitted enjoyment of every particular epoch we chance to encounter, for some special grace in it, seems the maturer method.

How many lovely and never-returning vignettes of Nature one might have missed altogether, if, moving through the world with a steel armour of modern-art arrogance about one, one had hardened one's heart to certain quaint old-fashioned inartistic methods, which nevertheless have, on occasions now totally forgotten, entered into the imagination and profoundly moulded it.

It is in fact a grand imaginative power, this liberation from the restraint of the right of being thrilled by endless enchanting things, in both art and Nature, that break all the aesthetic rules! And it needs a most holy ignorance or a most sophisticated wit to reach this consummation! What real culture, in fact, can do for personal happiness is to simplify existence down to bed-rock, to heighten in fact those great permanent sensations which belong, as Wordsworth puts it, to 'the pleasure which there is in life itself.'

This achievement is of course a matter of habit. But it is a habit well within the scope of every son or daughter of Adam. To attain it one must be at once stoical and epicurean; stoical in one's power of hardening one's sensibility to 'the ills that flesh is heir to.' and epicurean in one's power of lively response to the simplest recurrent sensation.

The coolness of sheets, the warmth of blankets, the look of the little blue flames dancing on the top of a fire of hard coal, the taste of bread, of milk, of honey, of wine or of oil, of well-baked potatoes, of earth-tasting turnips! - the taste of the airs, dry or moist, that blow in through our opened window, the look of the night-sky, the sounds of twilight or of dawn, the hoarse monotone of distant pinewood or of pebble-fretted waves - all these things as one feels them, in the mortal pride of being able to feel them at all, are the materials, eternal and yet fleeting, of the art of being a man alive upon earth.

Assume that one lives in a great city. Is there a particular street near us where the morning sun turns the pavements into aqueous gold? Is there a particular street near us where the sinking sun gives to every figure that moves out of that glowing furnace the opaque blackness of a goblin of the abyss?

Never, even amid the most obtrusive and tyrannous masonry, do the fluctuating lights and shadows of one day exactly produce those of another! The cultured man is the man whose interior consciousness is forever obstinately writing down, in the immaterial diary of his psyche's sense of life, every chance-aspect of every new day that he is lucky enough to live to behold!

from THE MEANING OF CULTURE by John Cowper Powys, Part II: Application of Culture, Chapter VI Culture and Happiness 103-121

W.W. Norton & Company, Inc
70 Fifth Avenue, NY
First Edition

I love baked potatoes! Custard-pie too!

It is above all the sign of a cultured man to be enough of a connoisseur in the art of past generations not to be fooled into fantastic dogmatism by the art-theories of his own age. Although a violent and fantastical championship of modern art has a lively value in stirring things up and making conversation illuminating, as far as happiness is concerned, the more sceptical, easy, uncommitted enjoyment of every particular epoch we chance to encounter, for some special grace in it, seems the maturer method.

Amen!
I also like and even aspire to the stoical/epicurean bit, but it is too often forgotten by me. Thanks for that reminder.

Tried to post this last night, but I am having a bit of computer angst... not sure if it's my computer or the damn satellite. Posting on behalf of Wilson.

Seattle Sculpture Park

Is the toddler part of the scuplture? If not, he should be! He gives a nice sense of scale to the whole picture.

More aesthetica on fiction: How should fiction be read? John Gardner v. William H. Gass

He's a real live tyke, slick. I would not have considered it an interesting picture without the little feller. You'll see more of him tomorrow, with his father, in the same setting outside the Seattle Art Museum.

The Kingbirds have lost their tyranical ways and are even starting to flock together and enjoy each others' company. Pretty soon they'll be down in South America peacefully eating fruits and berries. Knave-birds.

The Joe-pye-weed has bloomed and the Katydids have even started. In no time, that ol' bee-yatch Sandy and me will be down at the hawkwatch, hoping, hoping for a good strong, cold NW wind, 10 km visibility, clean optics, and 60% cumulus...

What My House Would Be Like if It Were a Person

This person would be an animal.
This animal would be large, at least as large
as a workhorse. It would chew cud, like cows,
having several stomachs.
No one could follow it
into the dense brush to witness
its mating habits. Hidden by fur,
its sex would be hard to determine.
Definitely it would discourage
investigation. But it would be, if not teased,
a kind, amiable animal,
confiding as a chickadee. Its intelligence
would be of a high order,
neither human nor animal, elvish.
And it would purr, though of course,
it being a house, you would sit in its lap,
not it in yours.

Denise Levertov

Woo Hoo! Computer/Satellite is done giving me angst. Again, posting on behalf of Wilson. (I don't see his dad in this one, Wilson... but he is oh so cute!)

Seattle Sculpture Park part 2

I could've sworn he was there. Maybe he's hiding behind a slab.

Now, for myself... it is going to be Hot, Hot, Hot tomorrow and Sunday (96°) and this one cools me down:

Above Reid Glacier on Mt Hood

Loved the Levertov, sculptures and glaciers!

Ditto on your snowy, tinted corner of old Brooklyn in #212, slick. Where was that anyway, if you don't mind my asking? (And why should you, if you are truly from Brooklyn?) And don't tell me Flatbush, which is like saying "the Earth," when people ask you where you live.

It was in Cobble Hill at the corner of Congress and Clinton. A few blocks south of Atlantic Avenue and west of Court Street. I'm not from Brooklyn. Just lived there for a dozen years or so; the longest I've lived anywhere.

The weird tint is from the sodium in the street lights. It changed the color of things, especially cars.

I assume it was in Brooklyn where you had to inspect the dead body in the morgue close up?

>257 absurdeist:. What? You don't have dead bodies in Chino? Or you do but you have someone else look at them for you?

>256 slickdpdx:. I know Cobble Hill, and the indistinguishable neighborhoods that run into it: Boerum Hill and Carroll Gardens. I myself lived in Park Slope, twice, and north of there, in Greenpoint, for five years, before eventually moving up here.

I assumed the tinted snow was grime.

My wife lived in the Slope on 9th Ave, about a half block from the park. What is the hardware store there - Tarzana's or something like that?

Ninth Street, you mean ... which was a bit out of my range to know the local hardware flora and fauna. I lived on President Street, near Grand Army Plaza (before the neighborhood was renovated), and years later on First Street, off Seventh Avenue, opposite the schoolyard (which, for all you kids out there, is not a good place to find an apartment, what with the werewolves who gather at night). Cobble Hill and the adjacent nabes are now quite lively with the younger set. Lotsa terrific yet relatively inexpensive restaurants: Cuban, Italian, French, Thai, Fusion (whatever the hell that is). But alas, the Middle Eastern eateries and grocery stores on Atlantic Avenue have all moved to less pricey Bay Ridge; only the Damascus Bakery and the Tripoli are left.

That is tragic! The middle east eateries were a great attraction, for me. Cheap delicious eats. I admit, I never set foot in Sahadi's. I don't know why.

Smith Street has really taken off. Did you ever go to the Brooklyn Inn? Its the bar in the Paul Auster -related films Smoke & Blue in the Face. Beautiful old place: http://nymag.com/listings/bar/brooklyn_inn00/

I most miss The Last Exit:
http://www.lastexitbar.com/lastexitbar/index.html
http://nymag.com/listings/bar/last_exit/

Here is the last post from Wilson's aesthetic collection...

Bridge Lattice

I love that patio at the Last Exit, Slick! It kind of reminds me of the patio at Viejo's in Los Barriles, BCS, Mexico. Very welcoming and comfortable.

I found myself thinking about it seriously when I read the following in Wilson Knight's book on John Cowper Powys: 'Those who have incurred his wrath have so invariably suffered misfortune that he has, as it were, been FORCED into a life of almost neurotic benevolence . . .Powy's early ambition to become a magician was no idle dream.'

Before moving to Kensington in the autumn of 1952, my wife and I had lived in Wimbledon, in the house of an old man who suffered from asthma; my wife was his nurse. During the 6 months we lived in the house, he became increasingly querulous and difficult, until there was a perpetual atmosphere of tension like an impending thunderstorm .I am not given to nursing grudges, but the feeling of being steeped in pettiness, of being prevented from concentrating on more important things, produced climaxes of loathing in which I wished him dead. In August we returned from a week's holiday to find that he had died of a heart attack.

It was when the situation repeated itself 3 months later that I found myself speculating idly whether thoughts can kill. The landlady was insanely suspicious , and violent scenes soon became a daily occurrence. 2 months later, she visited a doctor, who diagnosed a cancer of the womb. She died shortly after we left the house. I now recalled the peculiar nature of those paroxysms of loathing. On certain occasions, the anger had increased to a pitch that in a paranoid individual would lead to an explosion of violence. But the explosion would be purely mental: a burst of rage and hatred, followed by relief, as if I had thrown a brick through a plate-glass window.

These mental explosions always had a peculiar feeling of authenticity. of reality. By this I mean they seemed somehow different from paroxysms of feeling induced by imagination. I cannot be more specific than this, but I suspect that most people have experienced the sensation.

In his AUTOBIOGRAPHY, Powys writes: 'The evidence of this - of my being able, I mean, and quite unconsciously too, to exercise some kind of "evil eye" on people who have injured me - has so piled up all my life that it has become a habit with me to pray to my gods anxiously and hurriedly for each new enemy.' (p. 480)

The case of Powys is interesting because of the peculiar nature of his genius. Until he was in his mid 50's, Powys spent much of his life lecturing in America, and 3 novels written in his early 40's are interesting with out being remarkable. Then, in his 60's, there appeared a series of immense novels - in bulk and in conception - beginning with WOLF SOLENT and A GLASTONBURY ROMANCE. The most remarkable thing about these novels is their 'nature mysticism' and their incredible vitality; it is clear that he has tapped some unconscious spring, and the result is a creative outpouring that has something of the majesty of Niagara Falls. A GLASTONBURY ROMANCE (1933) is probably unique in being the only novel written from a 'God's-Eye' point of view. The simplest way of illustrating this is to quote the first paragraph:

At the striking of noon on a certain 5th of March there occurred within a causal radius of Brandon railway-station and yet beyond the deepest pools of emptiness between the uttermost stellar systems one of those infinitesimal ripples in the creative silence of the First Cause which always occur when an exceptional stir of heightened consciousness agitates any living organism in the astronomical universe. Something passed at that moment, a wave, a motion, a vibration, too tenuous to be called magnetic, too subliminal to be called spiritual, between the soul of a particular human being who was emerging from a third-class carriage of the twelve-nineteen train from London and the divine-diabolic soul of the First Cause of all life.

The abstractness of the language here gives a false impression of a book that is anything but abstract; but it also reveals Powys's desire to see his characters and events from some 'universal' point of view in which the algae in a stagnant pond and the grubs in a rotten tree are as important as the human characters.

One should note the presupposition of this first paragraph, which is present in all of Powys's work: that there is a kind of 'psychic ether' that carries mental vibrations as the 'luminiferous ether' is supposed to carry light.

This I would define as the fundamental proposition of magic or occultism, and perhaps the only essential one. It will be taken for granted throughout this book.

What is so interesting about Powys is that he deliberately set out to cultivate 'multi-mindedness,' to pass out of his own identity into that of people or even objects: 'I could feel myself in to the lonely identity of a pier-post, of a tree-stump, of a monolith in a stone circle; and when I did this , I LOOKED like this post, this stump, this stone' AUTOBIOGRAPHY (p. 528).

It was an attempt to soothe his mind into a state of quiescent identity with the 'psychic ether,' with the vast objective world that surrounds us. Everyone has had the experience of feeling sick, and then THINKING ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE and feeling the sickness vanish. 'Objectivity' causes power to flow into the soul, a surge of strength, and contact with the vast, strange forces that surround us. In a famous passage in THE PRELUDE, Wordsworth describes a midnight boating excursion when a huge peak made a deep impression on his mind, and how days afterwards:

. . . my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being; o'er my thoughts
There hung a darkness, call it solitude
Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes
Remained, no pleasant images of trees,
Of sea or sky, no colors of green fields;
But huge and mighty forms, that do not live
Like living men, moved slowly through the mind
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams. (Book One)

Wordsworth like Powys, had acquired the ability to pass beyond his own personality and achieve direct contact with the 'psychic ether.' But as he grew older, he lost this ability to transcend his personality and the poetry loses its greatness. Powys never lost his power of summoning a stange ecstasy. In the AUTOBIOGRAPHY he describes how, lecturing on Strindberg in an almost empty theatre in San Francisco, there stirred within him:

. . . that formidable daimon which, as I have hinted to you before, CAN be reached somewhere in my nature, and which when it IS reached has the Devil's own force . . . I became aware, more vividly aware than I had
ever been, that the secret of life consists in sharing the madness of God. By sharing the madness of God, I mean the power of rousing a peculiar exultation in yourself as you confront the Inanimate, an exultation which is really a cosmic eroticism . . . (p. 531)

And again, in the Roman amphitheatre in Verona:

Alone in that Roman circle, under those clouds from which no drop of rain fell, the thaumaturgic element in my nature rose to such a pitch that I felt, as I have only done once or twice since, that I really WAS endowed with some sort of supernatural power . . . I felt it again, only 5 years ago, when I visited Stonehenge . . . The feeling that comes over me at such times is one of most formidable power . . . (p. 403)

from THE OCCULT by Colin Wilson
Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, NY, 1973

>264 Porius:. Great stuff, Peter. I thought I as reading Arthur Conan Doyle there for a moment, thenH. P. Lovecraft. I've got a Colin Wilson around here someplace ... I'll have to look for it. The last paragraph jibes with my (pagan? hippie? deluded? transcendent?) belief that landscape itself has properties, waves, vibrations, ether, whatever. I obliquely rub against that in one of the chapters of "Digging Deeper," which I call "Spiritual Valley," which takes place in Ojai, California: How much of what we think a place is has to do with what we've read and heard, and/or want to believe, and how much is real (whatever that is)?

>263 highdesertlady:. Yes, a real loss. I love that kind of food: tabouli, hummus, falafel, citrus soup (I made that up). On Last Exit, no, I've never been there, but if the name derives from Last Exit to Brooklyn, I must, of course, check it out.

>262 highdesertlady:. Thank you, again, for posting my pix, Tani. Or rather, the missus's pix. (I am such a sluggard, in so many ways.) You are the best, even though you insist on calling me Wilson.

On Cowper, from Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility:

"{...}Oh mama! how spiritless, how tame was Edward's manner in reading to us last night! I felt for my sister most severely. Yet she bore it with so much composure, she seemed scarcely to notice it. I could hardly keep my seat. To hear those beautiful lines which have frequently almost driven me wild, pronounced with such impenetrable calmness, such dreadful indifference!"

"He would certainly have done more justice to simple and elegant prose. I thought so at the time; but you would give him Cowper."

"Nay, mama, if he is not to be animated by Cowper! -- but we must allow for difference of taste. Elinor has not my feelings, and therefore she may overlook it, and be happy with him. But it would have broke my heart had I loved him, to hear him read with so little sensibility. {...}

JCP is a descendant of Cowper. Powys's middle name is pronounced: Cooper, as it rimes with pooper. But enough of that. Inest sua gratia parvis. As they must.

I can not easily find it on the internet (!) but it put me in mind of Shirley Jackson's death curse on an editor. The pleasure she took in its apparent success seems really horrible, but then again, it was probably as much the result of her surprise that it might have succeeded.

I may be wrong here but it doesn't sound like Austen was particularly fond of Cowper.

I'm sure there's plenty of dead folk in Chino. And I'll bet our dead folk don't stink as bad as Brooklyn dead folk.

"Only the dead know Brooklyn."

--Thomas Wolfe

Brooklyn Tony on Math Lessons:

The teacher asks her class, "If there are 5 birds sitting on a
fence and you shoot one of them, how many will be left?" She calls on Brooklyn Tony.

He replies, "None, they will all fly away with the first gunshot."

The teacher replies, "The correct answer is 4, but I like your
thinking."

Then Brooklyn Tony says, "I have a question for YOU. There
are 3 women sitting on a bench having ice cream: One is delicately licking the sides of the triple scoop of ice cream. The second is gobbling down the top and sucking the cone. The third is biting off the top of the ice cream. Which one is married?"

The teacher, blushing a great deal, replied, "Well, I suppose the one that's gobbled down the top and sucked the cone."

To which Brooklyn Tony replied, "The correct answer is 'the one with the wedding ring on,' but I like your thinking."

Very unstable weather today. We are under a tornado warning this moment. A flash flood warning. You name it. Stiflingly hot. The nastiest of infernal breezes haunt the air. And the same things starts all over again tomorrow. It has of a sudden become as still as the confessional out there. We have only to await our penance in the form of inclement weather.

Oo, take cover, Por-Man!

Of course, as always, you are welcome, Piero... ;-)

Our T-storms on the high desert will be a week early this year. Expecting them to start on Sunday. So long as they are wet and don't start any wildfires in my back yard (The Deschutes National Forest) I CAN'T WAIT!!!!!!

Enrrrrrrique Frrrrrreeque! You funny!

I loved the Seattle sculpture park! One of my favorite parts of the city.

The Lightning Field:

To Brooklyn Bridge

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty--

Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
--Till elevators drop us from our day ...

I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;

And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced
As though the sun took step of thee, yet left
Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,--
Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!

Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
A jest falls from the speechless caravan.

Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,
A rip-tooth of the sky's acetylene;
All afternoon the cloud-flown derricks turn ...
Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.

And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,
Thy guerdon ... Accolade thou dost bestow
Of anonymity time cannot raise:
Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.

O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry,--

Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path--condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City's fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year ...

O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

Hart Crane

The Newberry Caldera - Paulina Lake and East Lake; about a half hour from my house:

Wow! Tani. What is that? An extinct volcano? The other photo is of course the Brooklyn Bridge, with the Manhattan Bridge in the distance.

Tomorrow's high temps, for selected locations:

Little Rock 104
Dallas 98
New York City, Toledo 97
Atlanta 96
Portland, Ore. 94
Detroit 93
Waterbury, Conn. 92
Tampa 92
Chicago, Taipei 91
Los Angeles 80
Denver 78 (or else this was a typo)
London, Eng. 75
Ghent, Bel. 69
Sydney 61

Yes, Piero, Newberry Caldera is a national volcanic monument. The plateau that I live on is basically about 1500' of ash and porous vocanic rock. We are, in Pringle Falls, surrounded by lava flows to the west and south and the big obsidian flow is in the Caldera. Central Oregon is full of cinder buttes and cones. Oh, and in answer to your question... I believe it's last eruption was some 2400+ 1520 years ago. (my bad!)

GEOLOGIC BACKGROUND:

Newberry Volcano is a shield shaped composite volcano, about 40 miles north-south and 25 miles east-west. During its more than half million year history of activity, including caldera collapse and subsequent caldera-filling volcanism, Newberry has erupted often, including several times in the Holocene. The volcano rises about 3,600 feet above the surrounding area but covers an area of in excess of 500 square miles and has a volume of over 110 cubic miles. The erupted volume is probably substantially greater than this, because lava flows and alluvium from Newberry extend more than 40 miles beyond the base of the volcano.

The east and west flanks of the volcano consist almost entirely of ash-flow and air-fall tuffs, alluvial deposits, and a few basaltic flows. The north and south flanks, on the other hand, cover mainly by basaltic andesite cinder cones and lava flows.

There are approximately 400 basaltic cinder cones and fissure vents on the flanks of Newberry (majority are on the north and south flanks). These vents are the source of the many flows that cover much of the surface of the volcano. Dacite, rhyodacite, and rhyolite domes and flows also occur at many localities on the middle and upper flanks of the volcano.

The summit caldera of Newberry is approximately 5 miles east-west and 4 miles north-south. The west wall of the caldera is only a few tens of feet high where Paulina Creek has cut a channel to drain Paulina Lake. In other areas of the caldera the walls are 500 to 1600 feet high. The caldera was initially deeper by at least 1600 feet but has been filled during late Pleistocene and Holocene time by pyroclastic rocks, flows, domes and sedimentary rocks.

During the late Pleistocene and Holocene there have been six eruptive episodes; four rhyolitic (east half of the caldera) and two basaltic (on the flanks).

* South Obsidian Eruptive Episode: An estimated 12,000 calendar yrs ago, an obsidian dome and related obsidian flow erupted in the southeast part of the caldera.
* East Rim Eruptive Episode: About 11,200 calendar yrs ago (10,000 C14 yrs B.P.), mafic cinders, scoria, spatter, and lava flows erupted from a fissure on the east rim of the caldera.
* Interlake Eruptive Episode: A series of rhyolitic eruptions began in the caldera approximately 7,300 calendar yrs ago (6,200 C14 yrs B.P.). They produced a widespread phreatomagmatic pumiceous tephra deposit, obsidian flows, large and small pumice cones, and a pumice ring. This eruptive episode probably lasted for about 200 years.
* Northwest Rift Eruptive Episode: About 7,000 calendar yrs ago (6,100 C14 yrs B.P.), basaltic andesite lava and cinder cones erupted from extensive fissure vents on the northwest and south flanks of Newberry. Spatter and cinders also erupted from a fissure on the north caldera wall. The lava flows range up to 9 km long and are more voluminous at lower elevations. This eruptive episode probably lasted for less than 50 years.
* East Lake Eruptive Episode: About 3,500 yrs ago, obsidian flows and associated pumice deposits in the caldera erupted from caldera ring fractures.
* Big Obsidian Eruptive Episode: About 480 A.D. (1,470 calendar years B.P.), a 3-part sequence of rhyolitic eruptions began, which included an air-fall tephra, ash-flow tephra, and an obsidian flow, from a common vent at the base of the south caldera wall. The initial Plinian eruption 480 A.D. (1,580 C14 yrs B.P.) produced the Newberry pumice fall deposit which blanketed the east flank of the volcano and areas to the east. About 210 yrs later the Paulina Lake ash flow (1,310 C14 yrs B.P.) spread from near the south caldera wall to Paulina Lake. The final phase of the eruption produced the Big Obsidian Flow which covers 2.8 sq km. US Forest Service, Deschutes National Forest

I can't wait to get out there Tani. Everyone at work is spouting, "Why would you vacation in Oregon? 50 degrees one minute, 90 degrees the next".

They just don't get it. Up to 500 tons of biomass PER ACRE. Suck it, Nutmeggers, I am so looking forward to romping in the woods.

Hey, if I bring a Spotted Owl back and hide it in the Salon, don't nobody tell.

Take the damn things, Sandy! They ruined our economy... no one will miss 'em. Well, at least not the loggers... watch out for the ELF tho! ;-p



Back in the late 80s when all that was going down, I was on my way over the top deck of the Marquam Bridge to a physical therapy appointment in my little 280zx and there were probably at least 100 Log Trucks surrounding me stopped and stuck up there. I was terrified we would collapse that damn bridge. I hate that bridge anyway... but holy crap that was scary.

Maybe everyone in the rest of the world can pitch in to preserve those "worthless" old growth forests of yours. Maybe we could get some jang from Borneo or Brazil. Now that would be ironic.

Hmm, but what could loggers be re-trained to become interior decorators? Receptionists? accountants? Mary Kay cosmetics reps? librarians? Telemarketers? Tough call.

I'm currently reading The Hidden Forest, about doctoral students, et al, spending decades putting flow meters in streams, marking rocks to see how they creep ever so slowly around, etc. Fascinating stuff. 500 tons of biomass in a single acre. That's a lot of moss and banana slugs. I can't wait to see some of it before it all gets turned into Victoria Secret catalogs and paper towels.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNSkONWeURw&feature=related

Oh, I am being facetious, Sandy... But they did put a huge dent in our livelihoods. And there was a huge amount of displaced workers that were in fact re-trained as some of those jobs you mentioned above.

Up unusually late, but tomorrow is the start of the 102nd Chicago to Mackinac Island race. I am docked at the face of the Chicago Yacht Club, and the younger sailors are still partying. The "Old Goats" know better and have gone to bed. It has been a wild weather evening with thunderstorms, lightning and heavy rain moving through. I am just hoping it will move all the way through by morning. The reason I am here with my power boat is that sailboat races need places to check in to say they are participating and other places to start the race. (Remember they don't have that line in the water thing down yet.) So the sailors deign to give us the time of day when they need us!

Rain or shine, I will be taking the boat out in the morning to a designated spot and "dropping the hook" so that every boat that has registered can ride by and let the race committee folks know that they are really there and heading out to the start. If anything interesting happens, I will give "roving reporter" reports. Otherwise, I will see what I can do to get some decent photos of cool boats and send them.

Hidden Things

Let them not seek to discover who I was
from all that I have done and said.
An obstacle was there that transformed
the deeds and the manner of my life.
An obstacle was there that stopped me
many times when I was about to speak.
Only from my most imperceptible deeds
and my most covert writings--
from these alone will they understand me.
But perhaps it isn't worth exerting
such care and such effort for them to know me.
Later, in the more perfect society,
surely some other person created like me
will appear and act freely.

Constantine Cavafy

Roving reporter here at the check-in for the start of the Chicago to Mackinac Island sailboat race. The first start will be in 40 minutes. 355 boats registered. My position, for anyone who cares, is 41 53.529N, 087 35.604W.

All sailors must pass us to check in for the start. I will get some of those photos later. This race is a big darned deal here. The Coast Guard Cutter takes local dignitaries out for the start, and then escorts the fleet as it makes its way up the 330 miles to Mac Island.

The sailors should at least have a good start. Winds are WSW which is a good thing when you want to go NE.

Here are a couple of the Coast Guard cutter and escort boats. It was docked at Navy Pier and reverses to open water where it pivots to go forward out to the lake.







On the weather front, it was a wild night in Chicago. Huge storms and rains. The Chicago River was flooding, so they opened the locks to let it flow into the lake. The area in which we are anchored was full of debris including some good sized logs and an overturned row boat. At the moment we are in the clear, but weather radar looks like more rain coming. We don't need it now!

Will check in later.

On your way to the Mighty Mac. I was in Lake Mi. last week and the waters were warmer than usual. And the magnificent Superior whose waters never warm up much.

Overcast. Storms threaten. None of the dire weather predictions came to pass yesterday for my area. A few claps of distant thunder. A 45 second intense rain shower. I was prepared for some atmospheric drama and Mother Nature mustered little but duds. Maybe today she can do a little better on that score.

I am looking forward to our weather coming up! I loves a light show! It will be interesting considering the 96° we are expecting today and tomorrow. Monday and Tuesday will also be in the 90s and expected T-storms all week.

Last year's August 2nd storm was one of the biggest in over a decade. We'll see if it measures up.

Closest I've ever been to that island is Traverse City; the Leelanau School, actually. Must at least be cooler on the great lake, Lisa, than on land. It's a steambath here; or rather, out there beyond the sliding glass door of my ground-floor room, which is twenty degrees cooler than elsewhere in the house, which in fact is hotter than outside.

But enough of the local weather report and on to my virtual point: On my slower computer it's taking forever to load the thread, what with all the pix. But keep them coming, and we'll limp through till tomorrow (those of you with slow machines), when we'll make a thread switch. I'm taking suggestions on new names, since I'm running out of variations on the Nature-plus theme.

>288 Porius: My boat will not be going. I am a volunteer power boat. I would love to make the trip in my power boat, but it would be at least 33 hours on the water, so we would break it into at least four days stopping in a port every night. The other problem is the fickle Lake Michigan weather. If it is nasty, I don't go. Bottom line: I would not make the trip unless I had at least two weeks to go there and back. Some day . . . .

The fastest boats with a good breeze can make it in 24 hours. They sail nonstop. The wind they have now might not hold up, or they could get too much wind as happened a couple of years ago when a storm came up and dismasted at least one boat. The slowest boats won't get there until late Monday even with good wind.

I love to watch it, but I have no interest in doing it. I am too spoiled.

We are seeing a bit of blue sky and temperature is rising. I would be happy if we are on the north side of the front--we won't get anymore of those storms.

Here's a photo posted on the Chicago Tribune web site from someone in one of the close in suburbs:

Whatever we do let's make a separate photo thread. Things go haywire for me when I post anything. I love the pictures but it's next to impossible manage the thing now.

Well, Pietro, as Peter pointed out, Lake Michigan is warmer than usual. Of course, that only means that it is in the low 70s, so it does still cool us off. Today, however, winds are off shore so it pushes the cool air out.

A couple more photos, and I will stop.



A tri-maran. This one will fly



This is one of my friends from law school. She is at the wheel in her pink flamingo outfit. In the past, they have all worn pink flamingo hats.

>290 copyedit52:, Wilson, whatever you call the new thread it must have plnats in it.

What about, for a change, stanlp?

Robert

Pietro, Piero, Pierre, Wilson, whatever you are calling yourself this week, I ran across this on Andrew Sullivan's blog and thought you might be interested.

Gene, thanks for the article.

Presumably the serial comma is the Oxford comma. It shouldn't be a matter for conversation because it should be settled. A comma should normally follow the penultimate item in a series.

She used 'quotes' as a noun. Long usage by illiterate writers notwithstanding, 'quotes' is a verb form. She meant 'quotation marks.' I have a problem with 'scare quotes;' I have no alternative.

Robert

*giggles* @ Gene calling you Wilson... ;-)

Probably my last contribution to aesthetics week. It was a success.

There is reason to believe that Powys did not understand the mechanisms of this power. A strange story was related of Powys and his friend Theodore Dreiser:

Dreiser said that when he was living in NY, on West 57th St., JCP came occasionally to dinner. At that time P. was living in this country, in a little town about 30 miles up the Hudson, and he usually left D's place fairly early to catch a train to take him home. One evening, after a rather long after-dinner conversation, P looked at his watch and said hurriedly that he had no idea it was so late, and he would have to go at once or he would miss his train. D. helped him on with his overcoat, and P., on his way to the door, said, 'I'll appear before you, right here, later this evening. You'll see me.'

'Are you going to turn yourself into a ghost, or have you a key to the door?' D. laughed when he asked that question, for he did not believe for an instant that Powys meant to be taken seriously.

'I don't know,' said P. 'I may return as a spirit or in some other astral form.'

Dreiser said that there had been no discussion whatever during the evening, of spirits, ghosts or visions. The talk had been about American publishers and their methods. He said that he gave no further thought to P's promise to reappear, but he sat up reading for about 2 hours, all alone. Then he looked up from his book and saw Powys standing in the doorway between the entrance hall and the living room. The apparition had Powys's features, his tall stature, loose tweed garments and general appearance, but a pale white glow shone from the figure. Dreiser rose at once, and strode towards the ghost, or whatever it was, saying, 'Well, you've kept your word, John. You're here. Come on in and tell me how you did it.' The apparition did not reply, and it vanished when Dreiser was within 3 feet of it.

As soon as he had recovered somewhat from his astonishment Dreiser picked up the telephone and called JCP's house in the country. Powys came to the phone, and Dreiser recognized his voice. After he had heard the story of the apparition, Powys said, 'I told you I'd be there, and you oughtn't to be surprised.' Dreiser told me that he was never able to get any explanation from Powys, who refused to discuss the matter from any standpoint.*

*W.E. Woodward, THE GIFT OF LIFE (NY, Dutton, 1947). Quoted by Professor Wilson Knight in THE SATURNIAN QUEST, p. 128

Why should Powys refuse to discuss it from any standpoint? BECAUSE HE HAD NO IDEA OF HOW HE HAD DONE IT and could not describe the process. It depended on the nature of the psychic link between himself and Dreiser: 'I used to be aware . . . of surging waves of magnetic attraction between Dreiser and myself . . . which seem super-chemical and due to the diffusion of some mysterious occult force . . .' The appearance was probably in Dreiser's own mind; another person in the room might not have seen it.

>297 Mr.Durick:. Robert: Someone, seeing that I was an editor, wrote me about a month ago, asking about the Oxford comma. I didn't know what that meant, having never heard the term, but then she gave me an example and I was able to respond:

Okay, I understand, Amy. The lingo in American publishing companies is "serial comma" as opposed to non-serial comma, which is your "Oxford comma." The non-serial comma is more common, if not prevalent, in books published in the UK; the serial comma always applies to books published in the U.S., or at least with the dozen publishers I've worked for over almost thirty years. Serial: Russia, Spain, and Australia. Non-serial: Russia, Spain and Australia. Oddly, the latter style is common in U.S. newspapers. In my own writing, I always use the serial comma.

>294 geneg:. Gene, it will have plnats in it. As for the names--Pietro, Piero, Pierre, Wilson--I have expressed a preference for Piero; the others were foist upon me.

>295 Mr.Durick:. No. I will not call it stanlp, Mr. Durick. Unless, maybe, you reveal your nonvirtual whereabouts.

Peter: When we do the new thread, it will be with a matching photo thread, as per your request. Henri also suggested that, two or three threads ago.

You batonists are hilarious.

My sister had a baton, but I never did.

When I was a boy, the comma after the next to last element of a series had no name; it was merely the right way to do it and did not have to be distinguished from any other way except the wrong way. Lynn Truss got it wrong. The teacher who taught me it also did not know how to apply the rule. In a list of things my sister's cat likes I wrote "..., and macaroni and cheese." The teacher x'd things out and put in an inappropriate comma. So I'm not surprised that people get it wrong, but neither they nor wrong practice should be defended. I have read that it is an Oxford comma because it comes from the Oxford University or Oxford University Press style book or somesuch.

Meanwhile I am in my chair about to edit a newsletter our property manager has written for our condominium association. I have met your condition; let's see about your 'maybe.'

Robert

I had a baton but never could get the hang of it and as I was better at the hula hoop I gave up the baton.

Piero, dear... I will cease and desist with the Wilson nomenclature if you wish. But you have to ask.

Mr. Durick, you are such a tease!

New thread:

Nature etc. etc.

http://www.librarything.com/topic/95489

And its photographic sibling:

Nature etc. etc. photography

http://www.librarything.com/topic/95490

Some loose ends, or maybe frayed threads, to tidy up before I move on to Nature etc. etc. forevermore, maybe.

Tani: When I read Wilson, it's not the half-headed character in Home Improvement who comes to mind, but Mr. Wilson from Dennis the Menace, and who wants to be him?

Robert aka Mr. Durick: I was kidding, of course. I know where you live. It's our secret.

Gene: Sorry about plants in the new thread. I meant to type plnats and actually thought I did, only to discover that I hadn't when it was too late to change it. I must've been possessed by the editor in me.

Peter: Thank you for your contributions during Aesthetics Week. They were great. And thank you too for delineating the paragraphs in #299. You were driving the editor in me crazy.

slick: I met a guy from Brooklyn yesterday, here at the art colony for the month, who told me that Sahadi's, on Atlantic Avenue, is still across the street from the Damascus Bakery, and still selling pistachio nuts, figs, baklava, olives, and so on. You shoulda checked it out when you had the chance.

Piero: If I called you Mr Wilson I could understand that. He was such a curmudgeon. But think of it this way, I see you as a mentor of sorts and that is exactly how Wilson of Home Improvement was to the Taylor family. So it totally fits in my mind and until you ask me not to, you are my Wilson. N'est ce pas? Capish?

Mentor, huh? Since you put it that way, how can I say no?

I thought you would see it my way... ;-)

You can be very persuasive, Tani. The way you turned Wilson on his head, so to speak, and then topped it off with French and then Italian. Had you finished with Yiddish, it would have been perfect. Farshtayt?

Will definitely bone up on my yiddish... ;-)