un regard oblique: 05/04/2003

10.5.03

Elsa Lanchester (not 'caster') at Turnabout Theater
remembered at LA Public Library
also this image
and this

also:
Odetta was 'discovered' at Turnabout Theater

Palestinian embroidered dress
image in the Photo archives of LA Public Library

An A-bomb blast set off in Nevada at 4:36 a.m., on April 18, 1953, was judged by early risers to have been the most sensational of any seen so far. The blast made the eastern horizon as “bright as day.”

Los Angeles Herald Express Tabloid Photos exhibit at LA Public Library,
original exhibit curated by Diane Keaton
link path from No Sense of Place
also this image of LA policewomen
and this Manzanar Farewell

JG Ballard: Author

Finnegans Wake by James Joyce

Joyce's incomprehensible novel, which has provided a living for generations of English Literature professors, represents a lamentable tendency in 20th-century fiction: the quest for total obscurity. Finnegans Wake is the best example of modernism disappearing up its own fundament.

Brits wits dis lit
Independent UK 08 May 2003

...Orlando used to be called Mellonville, used to be infested
with pests. Shuffleboard, croquet, lawn bowling. Plumosa,
cabbage palms, banana and bamboo. Hibiscus here
is a spicy weed, not a pricey exotic, we rip the stuff
out of the back yard and burn it.

My hair is wet underneath
from March through November. I save a
drowning boy, being from Orlando. My
brother swims in the Junior Olympics. My mother
swims across a lake when she is angry
at my father. She wears her clothes.
She swims for three hours.

Year after year we ski around
Orlando, in between Orlando, all the lakes,
blue pads of cool, some bottomless, some so
brown from pine needles unfolding, they stain
the whites of your eyes til Christmas. We thread
our way through the wet blue heart. We think surely...

Heather Sellers
Being from Orlando
Poetry Daily May 10, 2003

9.5.03

Eric Meola

he's the Afghan greeneyed girl guy Saris

at Tamarin/Photo
Meola's mentor Pete Turner
link path from plep

I was a girl, and these celibate Sisters had spent their young and middle lives caring for girls like me. Brought to communal Shaker villages themselves when their own families had fallen asunder, the Shakers I knew had chosen to spend their lives in the faith when they grew up in spite of the cost—no marriage, no sexual expression, no children of their own. As they grew to womanhood, their motherly hearts found reward in the care of girls.

So when I came and showed enthusiasm for Shaker history and affection for the Sisters, I entered a place in the heart already prepared, although I didn't realize it at the time. I was just glad that they liked me.

I Was A Teenage Shaker
Jane Sprigg
excerpted in Smithsonian Journeys April 2001

8.5.03

sow bugs, roly-polies
wood lice?

Bird spirits
Jessie Oonark
at Core Inuit
at The Inuit Gallery of Vancouver
link path from the majestically thorough plep

7.5.03

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

6.5.03

...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

5.5.03

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."