Why did you write Oryx and Crake now?

I was sitting on the balcony of Cassowary House in a nature reserve in northern Queensland, Australia, watching the red-necked crake, a species which is not very numerous. Australia is a place of mini systems. If you destroy that little bit of habitat then the species dies. That's when I started writing it but I had years of background information. Oryx and Crake, like The Handmaid's Tale, is based on certain axioms. One axiom is that the glaciers are indeed melting, the North is indeed getting warmer. Nobody really knows what is going on up there, but I can tell you from first-hand observation that the glaciers are receding and that people are very worried because the polar bear is threatened. I postulate global warming. I postulate that unless North America does something about its environmental laws, the aquifers will be depleted, groundwater will seep in and they'll become contaminated. And if you over-irrigate, you salinate the land - that's happening in California now. That's why everybody in this book is eating soya. We don't even know whether it's real soya.

People may think that these developments are not going to affect them but we saw the collapse of the cod fishery within the past 20 years. Bang. Gone. The model before that was the passenger pigeon. Everyone thought that they were so numerous, they would never run out. You can't think that about anything anymore, except possibly viruses. Speaking of which, people have asked me if SARS is my fictional killer disease made real. I say no, this is not it.

Margaret Atwood interview in New Scientist week of May 7 2203

Mainichi Daily News takes the low Road to Edo

Although Smith has fond memories of New York in the early to mid-Seventies, she resists nostalgia. 'The only reason I would romanticise the period is because so many of my friends are now dead. I'm not trapped in the Seventies. Movements are important and interesting, but we should remember that the idea of a movement is to keep moving.'

She is not oblivious to the fact that she has lived longer than most of her idols -- Rimbaud, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Jackson Pollock -- but believes the best is yet to come. 'I'm still clawing my way towards communicating my greatest thing or writing my greatest work,' she says. 'People always say to me that I romanticise all these people that died young, but I don't romanticise the indulgence with which they ran themselves into the ground -- I just loved the work they did.' She says she would like to live to 92. Why 92? 'I don't know, I just chose it -- I can imagine holding on to my mental faculties that long.'

Patti Smith interview Sunday Herald (Glasgow) May 4, 2003

...Slathering the
Ephemeral work.
Let's don't worry.
Let's don't ask.
Our institutions
Are standing by.
But I keep thinking
How easy it is
To get lost in the sky...

James Galvin Promises Are for Liars
Verse Daily May 6 2003

viscose at Plastiquarian.com Home of the Plastics Historical Society

Brenda Lee

Many a fisher fellow in old England took his meager catch to market. But instead of wholesaling it to an established monger, he stood nearby to sell directly, if possible, to whomever. This free-lancer was called a "bummaree." And gave us our word "bum."

LMBoyd

Harold Edgerton

at Joseph Bellows Gallery

Belzoni Mississippi 1939
Marion Post Walcott
at Fixing Shadows

and now her shapely foot so careful
and every day this
is there

Colin Upton is, at heart, a cartoonist

a good one

The Old Man of the Mountain, the natural stone profile that appears on everything in New Hampshire from the road signs to the state quarter, fell from its mountainside, leaving nothing recognizable in the cliff face Saturday.

Don Bliss, the state's director of emergency management, said there were no injuries when the stone fell sometime Friday night or Saturday.

It wasn't immediately clear what caused the fall, but Amy Bahr, president of the Franconia Heritage Museum, said she has long been aware that the natural profile could slide.

"I knew it would go sometime, I just didn't think it would happen in my lifetime," she said.

SFGate May 3, 2003

Ouroboros on the web

improper connectivity

Talan Memmott Self Portrait(s) [as Other(s)]

Cockettes movie home page

Zdzislaw Beksiñski
also especially this image
and this
and this

GRAFIKA KOMPUTEROWA
Beksinski digital

The Miracle of Dolphinsurfing

Joan Fontcuberta
at Zabriskie Gallery

the captivating Edna O'Brien delivers the Evangeline Wilbour Blashfield Foundation Address, at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, May 15th, 2002.
text at The New Yorker Online:

Down the years, the written word has incurred crucifixion, beheading, stoning, castration, burnings, outrage, vehemence, intemperance, and a bigotry that veers from the righteous to the superstitious. To take two tiny examples: Theodore Roosevelt described Tolstoy as "a sexual and moral pervert." Subsequently, the Postmaster General prevented copies of "The Kreutzer Sonata" from being distributed, lest it imperil the morals of America. Stalin, the Kremlin mountaineer, who had liquidated millions, believed, in the occasional Faustian moment, that Mandelstam possessed the magical powers of a shaman. My own mother sustained such a revulsion for the written word it was as if she had read Molly Bloom in a secret incarnation and had to do atonement for it.Her constant adage to me, which is certainly open to interpretation, was "That paper never refused ink."

Writers have been in the trenches from time beginning. Euripides, to my mind the greatest of the Greek dramatists, was driven out of Athens around 409 B.C., his crime being his unflinching depiction of the evil inherent in both God and man. Cutting across the orchestrated glorification of power and plunder, he wrote of the monumental folly of the Trojan War, supposedly fought over a bedizened, sensuous, and totally guiltless Helen of Troy. He fled to Macedonia and was devoured by the king's hunting dogs, which is how he died. Danger comes in many guises—political, religious, sexual, psychological, and linguistic. The stymieing of thought and of ideas has always had precedence in every epoch. Followers of Confucius were burnt alive, the emperor Tiberius had those who criticized him starved to death and then crucified. The English crown, with a nicety inconsistent with much else of its conquest and rapine, solved it completely by forbidding printing except by royal license, thus creating an ethos of precensorship, which continued until 1695. Sexual censorship found its flowering, its glorious patronage, in the person of Queen Victoria and her vassals, who commenced the drive for the purification of literature. They might just have foreseen the advent and birth of the Jesuitical James Joyce, born in Dublin on February 2, 1882, a city that he left forever in his early twenties, disavowing Mother Church and Mother Ireland. Joyce, smarting under early rejections, wished that his work would glean the same wrath as Flaubert's "Madame Bovary," in short, to be so scandalous as to incur a public trial. His prayer was duly answered.
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