these are the timesdirty beloved
-

31.12.05

29. When faced with danger, the octopus can wrap six of its legs around its head to disguise itself as a fallen coconut shell and escape by walking backwards on the other two legs, scientists discovered.
BBC: 100 things we didn't know this time last year
-
boynton

28.12.05

Auden

...agitprop and slogans,
all the trite forms of disinformation.
Good is always like starlight and sunlight,
and poetry when it means just what it says,
and yet admits the moon's ambiguities...

Mark Jarman
Poetry Daily
28.12.05

27.12.05

Maggot, Maggoty.

Whimsical, full of whims and fancies. Fancy tunes used to be called maggots, hence we have “Barker’s maggots,” “Cary’s maggots,” “Draper’s maggots,” etc. (Dancing Master, 1721.)

When the maggot bites. When the fancy takes us. Swift tells us that it was the opinion of certain virtuosi that the brain is filled with little worms or maggots, and that thought is produced by these worms biting the nerves. “If the bite is hexagonal it produces poetry; if circular, eloquence; if conical, politics, etc. (Mechanical Operation of the Spirit.)

Instead of maggots the Scotch say, “His head is full of bees;” the French, “Il a des rats dans la tête;” and in Holland, “He has a mouse’s nest in his head.” (See BEE.)

E. Cobham Brewer, Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 1898.
Bartleby

Cut shot down and partly loaded

Coal Car in Pocahontas Mine
-
Pony Pulling Worker Into Mine
-
Coal Miners at Work
-
Teach Sloan and child
-
Deserted Houses of Coal Mining Families in Big Stick, West Virginia
-
Old Houses
-
Wall of Coal
-
Samples from the Coal Mines of America

A few people, some wires, some horses, no cars.
Street Scene, Cambria, Virginia

Being towed across Conococheague Aquaduct
-
Boat Locking Through Canal
-
Lockkeeper & Family, Lock 25

Man Exiting Cave
-
Man drinking coffee in cave

21.12.05

Harriet Tubman

Mrs. Pankhurst being arrested for demanding the right to vote
15 October 1913

Women voting in Japan for the first time
and in France

Rebecca L. Felton, first woman elected to the United States Senate
-
Maud Younger working on her Ford in Washington D.C.

Mrs. Pankhurst being arrested 02 June 1914
She's being arrested for demanding the right to vote.

Mrs. Pankhurst on Wall Street
-
Mrs. Pankhurst on Wikipedia

Scorning man's aid suffrage leader motors alone from California


Maud Younger, legislative chairman of the National Woman's Party, seated at steering wheel of her automobile, on her arrival in Washington, D.C., from California, with her dog. (detail)

19.12.05

Homemade snippets, in the spirit of things just now.

Mariza Bateau
Belgian
Willy Moran

ID: regardez (at) gmail
Password: beloved
Lower left green box Labels sound.
The vocal clip is a sample from Mariza. She's Malagasy, and very famous in the larger world.
Made with d-lusion's Rubberduck bass synth and Drumstation
Belgian is Moonfish and Audacity and some old wav samples.
Willy Moran is a contact-pickup duct-taped to the guitar and held down by the heel of my thusly immobilized right hand, run through the microphone port on a Turtle Island sound card and recorded with Audacity. Tuning is D-A-C#-F#-A-C#. Watch the volume!
These aren't works or even projects - I'm not sure what they are, besides snippets.


Crowd waiting for Salvation Army Christmas dinner baskets (detail)

18.12.05


Crowd waiting for Salvation Army Christmas dinner baskets (detail)

"The George Grantham Bain Collection represents the photographic files of one of America's earliest news picture agencies. The collection richly documents sports events, theater, celebrities, crime, strikes, disasters, political activities including the woman suffrage campaign, conventions and public celebrations. The photographs Bain produced and gathered for distribution through his news service were worldwide in their coverage, but there was a special emphasis on life in New York City. The bulk of the collection dates from the 1900s to the mid-1920s, but scattered images can be found as early as the 1860s and as late as the 1930s."
Keyword:Tree
Bain Collection at LoC:
Tree Day Barnard College class of 1911
-
[George Jay] Gould Home seen through trees Lakewood N.J.
-
Sir H.B. Tree and Elsa Mackay
-
Mischa Elman leaning against tree playing violin
-
Christmas Tree Market New York City
-
Viola Tree
-
Helen Keller standing by tree
-
Flathead Indians holding pre-Christmas family gatherings on the west side of Glacier National Park, in the dense forest of evergreen trees that skirt the Rocky Mountains
-
Child Actor's Christmas Tree N.Y.
-
German biplane anchored to tree in Poland
-
Arbor Day N.Y. Public School 1908
-
Tree Day Barnard College, Miss Plant and The Owl of 1910
-
Tree Tea Garden
-
Christmas Tree Madison Square N.Y.
-
New York City lodging house Christmas tree
-
Children leaving police Christmas tree
-
Christmas Tree Children's Temporary Home N.Y.

Big Tree, Rangoon
-
N.Y. Police Dog Treeing Tramp
-
Keyword: Christmas
Christmas shopping
-
Packing for the Christmas Ship [for sailors in the European fleet and victims of what was at the time, 1913, still a European war]
-
Raffle for [or with] a Christmas goose
-
A load of Christmas packages
-
Christmas shoppers on 6th Ave. 1910
-
Christmas street peddlers
-
Christmas toys in shop window
-
Dr. W. W. Christmas
and Dr. Christmas elsewhere:
Dr. William W. Christmas
-
Dr. William Wallace Whitney Christmas "had an exceptional career as a North Carolina aeronaut."
-
Salvation Army Christmas dinner
-
Taking home Salvation Army Christmas dinner
-
Crowd waiting for Salvation Army Christmas dinner baskets 1908

17.12.05

Suffragette night paraders

Los Angeles Airplane Hat


Beggar, with dog, Hoboken, N.J.
(detail)
News photographs of New York City, early twentieth century
George Grantham Bain Collection
LoC

15.12.05

One Boy, One Girl, One Drawing
Catherine Ryan

MINE! YOURS!
Vigna-Maru apologizes to Goddelijke Gladiolen for non-attribution, even though she was unaware that the links she ran were originating, if that's the word, there. Someone from GG wrote to her about it.
In the early days I didn't understand a lot of that, how important it was to those doing the slog, and I just threw things up with abandon.
One time I had a distinct psychic hit from Plep of irritation and whatever it is that people feel when they feel they aren't being given credit they're due. Another time it was the late lamented dublog. Doing all the work of digging out the sources and putting them up and then seeing someone else put those same links up and knowing that others may see that and think they did the work rankles. It's like the Intellectual Property disputes.
Too much like them for me. I try to avoid plagiarism, or really what it is I try to avoid is the feeling of accomplishment when it isn't earned. But what's most important is the work.
What this is becoming because of all that work. We're making something that's too big for us to understand what it is. What it isn't, what it won't ever be, is a big pile of cumulative personal attainments, even though it's made out of almost nothing but that.
Sony is disgusting because of their business practices. Atomizing those business practices, even when no money changes hands, isn't progress.
It's tingly to see your site mentioned, especially by someone popular. And it's confirming to recognize and be recognized.
But that isn't what's central and important. A lot of the best art and photography I find on the net is in the public domain now. We need to get all the way away from a system of values that makes that less important than something that has a copyright on it.
Ours.

"INVASIONS is a large body of work related to the loss of privacy in contemporary society due to technology, surveillance, and the collection of personal data for commercial purposes. The subjects of these paintings often do not know their activities are being documented, much as we are unaware that we are documented daily by hundreds of hidden and not so hidden cameras."
Debra Goertz
-
Stricoff Fine Art

Tiel li diris. Patroklo obeis la karan amikon :
Li elkondukis el tendo kaj donis knabinon rugxvangan
Al la senditoj, kaj tiuj foriris al sxipoj Ahxajaj;
Kaj ne volonte kuniris knabino. Dume Ahxilo
Iris plorante for de amikoj kaj tie sidigxis,
Sur la bordo de l' maro; rigardis li maron malluman...
Zamenhof

14.12.05

Recent spam-haiku:

Dulciana Peoples - sprang it's gainful, it's Petrina
-
Ekewaka Clendenin - Re: wallflower wellturned heavy and dirty

13.12.05

U the man
illlustrations
Colin Johnson

Facial recognition in bees
Dental perception in narwhals
Recycled-tire spanking paddles
Assortativity in rapstar networks
collision detection
-
link Boynton

An especially compelling journal entry from “I travel in your head – visual correspondent in The Netherlands” Aline Thomassen

8.12.05

Curious Frau has a well-done guide on using the search engine at bildindex for non-German-speakers. With a link to a bildindex tutorial with screenshots by saragrace.
Both of these persons seem to be costume designers.
Curious Frau's main page, while not having been updated since last August, nonetheless features a tutorial/guide to the search engine at Der Institut für mittelalterliche Realienkunde / Digitale Bildsammlun, from whence the following detail and click-through seasonal image.


Maria mit Kind (detail)
Tomaso da Modena
-

uses frames.

6.12.05

"The most important thing is that the music flow out to where it could bring enjoyment."
Jane Siberry stage dives into the arms of everyone
-
link robotwisdom

5.12.05

Wooster documents the immune system response to Sony's viral infection of street culture.

2.12.05

I travel in your head is back

The teleborg and the telerobot Ornitorrinco
ORNITORRINCO IN THE SAHARA

Artur Zmijewski's 39-minute film Repetition (2005) is a complex and riveting documentary of his reenactment of the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment. In place of college students, Zmijewski hired unemployed Polish men to enact the roles of prisoners and guards in a simulated prison environment.

Filmed with hidden cameras, their behavior quickly progresses from play acting to acts of seemingly genuine frustration and anger. Confrontations between prisoners and guards escalate ominously, but just when it seems that Zmijewski's experiment will replicate the traumatic results of the original...
link artdaily >> Wattis Institute/CCA

1.12.05

27.11.05

Diviners of the Shang dynasty (16th-10th centuries B.C.) produced oracles by reading cracks on ox bones. Such bones bear the earliest writing known in China. The pit marks were produced by a hot poker.

Grizzly-bear dancer
Edward S. Curtis
-

A Bear, Walking
Leonardo Da Vinci
-

St Colomba Saved by a Bear
unknown Italian Master
-

Coronation Scene
Sebastiano Conca
-

The Callisto Saga: Genesis of the Constellation Ursa Major
Zimmerman ? (1768)
-

Satire on the Conquest of the Pfalz 1621
-

Christian Militant
Spottblatt (Satirical Sheet) 1551
-

Duhk-gits-o-ó-see, Red Bear
George Catlin
-

Fall in the Foothills
W. Herbert Dunton
-

Ours dans l'encadrement
Guillaume de Machaut
Bestiaire BnF
-

Skins of animals killed on Snow River, Alaska 1906
Emswyler and Dupont Bill
-

Carnaval de Nice - carte postale 1910
Cauvin
-

Mrs. Herbert Hoover stops
to feed a black bear some ice cream
Seward, Alaska 1923
-


Jazz for the bears
-

visit of the Soviet Circus artists
Republic of Czechoslovakia May 1960
-

Girl with Teddy Bear, detail
Bessie Wessel
-

Bab and Teddy Bears 1907
R. Y. Barrows
-

Grizzly Madonna
James E. Allen
-

26.11.05

Bear, Upper Magdalenian ±12500 BP
la base Joconde
-
Chicago Bears' backfield, 1941 (detail)
LoC
-
Ours dans l'encadrement
Bestiaire du Moyen Âge XVe siècle
Jean Froissart, Chroniques
BnF
-

After the encore (detail)
LoC

Pot with Bear Paw

Lorraine Williams
SAAM


Têtes d'Eléphants d'Asie, d'Afrique

Illustrations de Histoire naturelle des mammifères
BnF

24.11.05

S.F. Clear Of All But 6 Sick Japs
-San Francisco Chronicle May 21, 1942
Evacuation and Internment of San Francisco Japanese
Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco

Dear Miss Evanson...
Miss Evanson's Class, George Washington Junior High School, Seattle

"...so we have to mind him."

"Dear Miss Breed..." the letters begin.

Clara Estelle Breed, also known as "Miss Breed," was the children's librarian at the San Diego Public Library from 1929 to 1945. Miss Breed was fond of all children, including the many Japanese American children and teenagers who used to frequent the East San Diego branch library where she worked. Before World War II, Miss Breed was a mentor to many Nisei children who visited the library.

As the United states entered the war, these young Nisei were removed from their homes and placed in concentration camps. Shocked and outraged, Miss Breed helped her young friends by becoming a lifeline to the outside world. She handled out stamped and addressed postcards at the railroad station on the day of their departure and encouraged them to write.
Upon receiving their letters, Miss Breed responded with books, care packages, and immeasurable emotional support. Yet, her commitment to her Japanese American friends did not end with the letters and packages she regulary sent. Recognizing the injustice that the United States had committed against the Japanese American community and seeing the need for others to speak out on their behalf, Miss Breed wrote various articles about the internment both during and after the war. Her actions, like those of the many people who reached out and helped Japanese Americans during this time, were all the more remarkable because of the widespread fear and hatred that was associated with anything Japanese.
Letters From Camp
Japanese American National Museum

22.11.05

In 1845 Hans Chr. Andersen who for many years was a frequent guest in Glorup writes about his daily life there: "Up at 8 o'clock, drink coffee, potter about and write until 10 o'clock, then a walk along the long avenue, through the gate and along the lane to Holuf Farm, look at the Belt, walk back, read, tidy, sews, and at 12 lunch with a glass of port. Rest for a while, a new walk, same route, but a little longer, write and read to around 4, dress and go to dinner between 4 and 5. Now come the most boring time until 8 o'clock. … From 8 to 10 I bear the whole conversation."
Glorup Castle
Svindinge - a village in eastern Funen, well on its way into the second millennium, but with its roots deep in the Danish history
-
searching for Countess Moltke Huitfeldt (Miss Bonaparte)

Ethel Barrymore, daughter of Maurice Barrymore and Georgiana Drew, made her Broadway debut in Captain Jinks of The Horse Marines


Elizabeth Kennedy as Mme. Trentoni

in Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines
-
Clyde Fitch
's Best Comedy, Garrick Theater, N.Y. 1902

Unemployed father with son, at a Worker's Alliance meeting in North Platte, Nebraska 1938

Salinas lettuce strike, tear gassing, 1936

The Great Hunger, Salinas Lettuce Strike, 1936

21.11.05

Soviet Circus May 1960
-
Dreamland, Coney Island, N.Y. 1904 with detail
-
images LoC unless otherwise

An elevated position at The Most Enchanting Spot in the World.
I was preparing material for what I thought were two entirely separate entries, on bears, and on a turn-of-the-19th-century amusement park at Coney Island called Dreamland - but this page links them both in a way that seems a good beginning.
So, bears, and Woodward's Gardens, a precursor of Dreamland, in San Francisco.
I don't revere bears, I actually feel afraid of them in a way that I don't experience with any other animal, including sharks and poisonous snakes - both of which scare me, but in a healthy and understandable way. Bears spook me in a way that has a supernatural dimension, the idea of bears scares me. Yet there were many photos I found that showed them caged and humiliated, photos that tap an already existing disgust toward their captors that has nothing supernatural about it - so it's a mixed response, all in all.
The Dreamland effort has a kind of polarity to the gathered images of bears, entirely human, fantastic, temporary, gone.

Bear with me, Humanity

The Missing Craters of Asteroid Itokawa

19.11.05

Atlantic and Pacific herring create high-frequency sounds by releasing air from their anuses
-
link Wealth Bondage

The Tree That Owns Itself

Barbie Cafe

18.11.05

"Gutsy Radish"
-
link exp. aard.

Skeleton

...and Truth said Death,
looking up from licking
the caviar of moments
from Death's hand.
So here are the bones...


Chase Twichell
Verse Daily
19.Nov.05

17.11.05


exp. aard.

14.11.05

"...more precious than sperm"

...mirrors, transparent wires, scaffolding and, above all, tremendous physical stamina that allow him to create his extravagant performances

"The study of their dust"
dust houses
Maria Lopez

Martian horizon at APOD

The Sleep of Wood in The Houses of Wrens

...when it looked like there wouldn't be
enough water for people to drink in town.
Even the drunks, singing harsh,
took their whiskey straight, sacrifice
an angel that grapples with us

beside many rivers, even forgotten ones
that have gone to dust. Can we
expect wrens to live in graying wood and sing,
or a woman with gray wood
budding in her heart...

George Looney
Verse Daily
14.Nov.05

R.D. Laing:"The major scale for instance, we talked before about this, the major scale, I don't believe in this absolute consistency of definite sort of intervals. The major scale was banned in churches until the late Middle Ages. It was called the modus lacivicus, it was supposed to be inciting to lasciviousness. We don't really think of that now, I mean "I'm Dreaming of White Christmas" doesn't really incite people to have orgies under the Xmas tree at all.

Van Morrison: When did they think that, the Middle Ages?

RDL: I'd have to check it ... twelfth or thirteenth century.

VM: What I find very interesting when exploring the Renaissance period, Dowland wrote primarily about grief, that was the main thing he wrote about. You know this 'down in the dumps', you know where that expression comes from? Well they actually called music pieces a dompe, they called something like, Lady Fanshawe's dompe [My Ladye Careys Dompe] there was a piece of music called that. That's where the expression 'down in the dumps' comes from. They were into moods of despair and all sorts of things. You don't find that in songs hardly at all now. You find the sentimental folk thing, but you never actually find songs about despair or death. Dowland wrote some stuff about death as well. There must have been a completely different society at that stage, if that was the popular music at that time. "
Van Morrison In Conversation With R. D. Laing

13.11.05

Other mysteries are less well-documented

Veiled Prophets Will Appear:

The first meeting of the organization was held on the 10th day of September, 1889, and it was named for the leader [Leroy Fairchild], the "Fairchild Deviltry Committee." It was decided at this first meeting that the membership of the organization should be confined to Master Masons in good standing.
The idea of the Order proved immediately attractive. Many distinguished Masons entered the Enchanted Realm and returned pleased and charmed by its brilliancy. The Order could no longer be confined to any one locality and in response to imperative requests that were not to be denied, on the 13th of June 1890, the "F.D.C." duly founded and established the Supreme Council of the Mystic Order of Veiled Prophets of the Enchanted Realm.

Metareligion

The Juggler of Worlds:

La Reunion was a communist community formed in 1855 by French, Belgian, and Swiss colonists approximately three miles west of the present Reunion Arena and Reunion Tower in downtown Dallas, and near the three forks of the Trinity River in Texas, USA.
The community was led by the French philosopher Francois Marie Charles Fourier whose followers and associates established over 40 similar colonies in various parts of the United States of America during the 1800s.
Wikipedia
-
Reunion Arena in Dallas was named for the colony, as was Reverchon Park.
Gil Glover's Dallas View
-
"If your sciences dictated by wisdom have served only to perpetuate poverty and strife, give us rather sciences dictated by folly, provided that they quiet furies and relieve the miseries of peoples."
Théorie des Quatres Mouvements et des Destinées Générales
-Charles Fourier
-
"Si donc Psyché et Narcisse se livrent à 20 personnes passionnées pour chacun d'eux, ils peuvent contribuer au progrès de la sagesse et de la vertu. Il faut que cette union soit sacrée aux yeux du corps social, qu'elle opère sous les formes les plus nobles et les plus opposées aux orgies crapuleuses des civilisés."
-Fourier
Charles Fourier links and quotes
Christian Ronse
Université Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg

Evidently someone at the LoC has rewritten the code for their page links, so that the less bandwidth-heavy links in to the thumbnails and image data are broken.
Mrs. Bishop's links below will be fixed as best I can tonight, but the rest of them will have to wait until spontaneous happenstance calls them to my attention.
It seems an odd thing to guard against, but these are odd times.

12.11.05

Isabella Lucy Bird:

Mrs. Bishop's tent on her ride amongst the Bakhtiari Lurs - 1890
[larger image]
"In the middle of the 19th century they could put 20,000 well-equipped horsemen into the field..."
-
Isabella Bird and two natives on elephant, with
other elephants, in swamp, in Perak, Malaya - 1883
[larger image]
-
My home in the Rocky Mountains
[larger image]
Collected Travel Writings of Isabella Bird

"premier cybercafé entièrement dédié à l’informatique libre. Outre la nourriture spirituelle et informatique, le café, qui ouvrira ses portes le 15 octobre, vous propose une gamme de 26 sirops artisanaux au prix d’un euro et onze jus de fruits."

OpenSource Café
126 Rue Sébastien Gryphe
69007 Lyon


fiction image
Ria Dastidar
-

Cityscape
Edwina White
-
Kate Larkworthy

10.11.05

Swadesh list: a useful list of the most common words, which are essential to most languages and may be used in learning basic communication in other languages and even multiple languages at once.
-
Rosetta Project

* To create an unprecedented platform for comparative linguistic research and education.

* To develop and widely distribute a functional linguistic tool that might help with the recovery of lost or compromised languages in unknown futures.

*To offer an aesthetic object that suggests the immense diversity of human languages as well as the very real threats to the continued survival of this diversity.

Professor Lowe discovered the jet stream, revolutionized the manufactured gas industry, invented the predecessor of the modern refrigerator, and was [possibly] the model for the Wizard of Oz.

9.11.05

At Night The Glitterng Lights of Fifty-Six Cities Far Below!

The Great Mount Lowe Trip
-

Incline
Echo
1894 - World’s largest searchlight delivered to Echo Mountain
-
3 levels Circular Bridge
Scenic Mt. Lowe Then and Now
-
Railroad Boosters last run 1937
also the last hurrah
-
The Angeles National Forest
and Mt. Lowe Committee Volunteer Group's
Annual Mt. Lowe Excursion December 03, 2005
-
LA Transit Lines cars awaiting their fate at Wilmington
California Trolleys
Harry Marnell (an abundance of California trolley links)
-
Savant Passes
Professor Thaddeus S.C. Lowe, known the world over as the discoverer of the formulae for making water gas and artificial ice, famous as an aeronaut during the Civil war, builder of the incline railroad up Mt. Lowe and a pioneer in Southern California enterprises, died at 4:45 o'clock this morning at the home of his daughter, Mrs. Edna Wright, 280 South Euclid Avenue.
-
At the time of his death Professor Lowe was working on plans for a dirigible balloon to be operated in Southern California.
-
Images of Professor Thaddeus S. C. Lowe at LoC:
Lowe observing the battle from his balloon Intrepid
Fair Oaks Va. May 31, 1861

Lowe's "Balloon Camp" Gaines Mill, Va., May 1862

Lowe replenishing balloon Intrepid from balloon Constitution

Prof. T.S.C. Lowe, Civil War balloonist

Lowe prepares to ascend


Isolina Maldonado 1921 (detail)
Robert Henri
-


Two Women 1924 (detail)
George Bellows
-


Spring in Georgia 1942 (detail)
Andrée Ruellan
-


Deirdre 1940 (detail)
Dorothea Tanning
-


Georgia Museum of Art
Univ. of Georgia, Athens
Also:
Winslow Homer Butterflies
George Bellows The Picnic
Christian Bérard Portrait of Tamara Toumanova
Eugene Berman
Perspective of Columns at Paestum

8.11.05

Mike Weiss can kiss my [Eric Doeringer's] ass
-
link bloggy

unusual showers unusual faucets and unusual sinks
cersaie fair
designboom

7.11.05

Burkburnett, Texas, January 20th, 1919 (fixed)
-
Desdemona Field
Lt. Rip Masters was from Desdemona TX
-
Annie Oakley, 1922, with gun Buffalo Bill gave her
-

11-year old farm hand.
Father
, G.G. Jones, said: "She's the only farm hand I got. She helps a lot in the field work and house work too. Is good in school--5th grade."
He owns the farm and expects to build soon.
Location: Hardin County--Sonora [vicinity], Kentucky

Lewis W. Hine
Demetra Jones, Sonora, Ky. 1916
-
Western Union Telegraph Building West Broadway, New York 1931
Irving Underhill
LoC

Shenendoah
The USS "Shenandoah" took to the sky for the first time on September 4, 1923. She was destroyed in a violent storm over Sharon, Ohio on September 3, 1925 with the loss of fourteen of her 39 sailors.
This disaster was the trigger for Army Colonel Billy Mitchell to heavily criticize the leadership of both the Army and the Navy, leading directly to his court-martial for insubordination and the end of his military career.
Copernicus

Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin and Oscar Hammerstein II, Helen Tamiris - auditions at the St. James Theatre 1948
-
Helen Tamiris at Dance Heritage
-
George Balanchine and Lorenz Hart, aboard the Grace Line's Santa Paula, 1938

(Just behind and to the side of the) Equitable Bld., Pine and Nassau Sts., New York 1927

5.11.05

NEED 1.1 PLANETS

William Soutar, the Perth poet

He was educated at Perth Academy.
“That was my eighteenth year while yet the shadow of war was unacknowledged. Then I was one of the fleetest at the Academy; one of the strongest; first in my year at most things; I was writing poetry; I was in love; I was popular both in the classroom and the playing field. I never reached this condition of living fullness again except in brief moments.”
This was written in 1937 when he was already permanently confined to bed.

He remembered local worthies too:
Kirsty Hogg of Dunkeld, “byord’nar fond of kale” ; Teenie Dot of Madderty; Meg Murtrie from Methven with nine children, “wha lauch’t at a’ mishanter” , or Jonathan Maconachie, “the beadle o’ Kinclaven” and many more.
Whan Gowdan are the Carse-lands
Braw are the Grampian Mountains
Whan simmer licht is still;
And gowdan are the Carse-lands
Ablow the Corsie Hill.
Yonder the gowdan steeple
Spires up frae the auld toun,
And the brig wides through the water
Owre far awa for soun’.
-
Scotland
Sauls that are stark and nesh:
Sauls that wud dree the day:
Sauls that are fain for flesh
But canna win the wey.

Hae ye the unco sicht
That sees atween and atween
This world that lowes in licht:
Yon world that hasna been?

It is owre late for fear,
Owre early for disclaim;
Whan ye come hameless here
And ken ye are at hame.

-
... a dowager Countess of Strathmore who entered into a second ill-fated marriage. The account of her bitter experience impelled Thackeray to write his romance of sordid life entitled Barry Lyndon.
In some editions of that romance, a note by the author explains its foundation in history. The unhappy woman wrote about her wretched experience, the letter being described as the most damning indictment of a husband ever written by a wife.
[...]
Even in the last decade of Queen Victoria’s reign many Carse folk did not care to pass the Bogle Brig at night.
Electric Scotland
-
In the 16th century, Janet Douglas married the Sixth Lord of Glamis. When he died she was left unprotected and exposed to the full wrath of James V who had a deep and vicious hatred of all the Douglas clan. Determined to get his hands on Glamis Castle and avenge himself on his hated enemy, James accused Lady Janet of witchcraft. She and her son were imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle’s dark and dank dungeons.
Nobody believed that Janet was a witch, being beautiful and kind.
...James ordered her to be punished nonetheless.
Janet was tortured, her servants were put on the rack and stretched and her young 16-year-old son, the heir to Glamis, was made to watch his mother’s agony, before experiencing it all for himself first-hand. In the end, they confessed.
Lady Janet was convicted and on 17 July, 1537, she was burned alive.
When James V died, Lady Janet’s son was released and parliament restored Glamis to him.
Glamis Castle
Diane Maclean/Scotsman 21.Jan.05
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bonus link:
The Monster of Glamis
"Wentworth-Day describes a tale whereby a workman carrying out renovation at Glamis in the early 1900s found the secret passage, and explored it, and became "alarmed" at what he found there. The Earl and his lawyer were summoned from London, and they stopped the work and interrogated the man. The result of this was that he was bribed into silence and emigration (to Australia) with several hundred thousand pounds of hush money."

4.11.05

'not titled [Man driving a car]
Mathias Kauage
Imagining Papua New Guinea

"This exhibition celebrates 30 years of independence of Australia’s nearest neighbour. Stories and images, both traditional and imaginary, are recorded in pen, pencil, woodcuts and screenprints – all new forms of expression to artists from the region."

3.11.05

The A9 map beta is astounding and a little scary in its photographical accuracy concerning the two areas I'm familiar with that I checked before writing this.

The Obligation to Endure: Art & Ecology since Silent Spring

"Despite the seminal influence of Silent Spring, the battle that Rachel Carson fought on behalf of all living things is a long way from being won," said Nick Debs, curator of the exhibit. "We are increasingly polluting our water and air and are causing irreparable harm to the biosphere."
New York Academy of Sciences
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link ArtCal

1.11.05

Ultrasonic Songs of Male Mice

"Here, we provide a quantitative description of the ultrasonic vocalizations of the adult male mouse, and show that they display unexpected richness, including several syllable types organized into phrases and motifs. Thus, these vocalizations display the characteristics of song . Different males, even though genetically identical, show small but significant differences in syllable usage and the temporal structure of their songs. These results indicate that communication among mice may be more complex than previously appreciated."
Timothy E. Holy/Zhongsheng Guo
Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology,
Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri
PLoS Biology December 2005
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Popular story in the news feeds, but the Plos link has...wav files! Of mice! Singing!
This small file gives some hint as to what's what.
This 1.6 mb file is world-changing.
The single most significant thing the Internet has shown me, right there.
There are graphs, also:
Male Mice Vocalize in the Ultrasound


The Roosevelt family (detail) no date

LoC
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The woman on the right is a ringer for my mother at that age; she also looks a great deal like Bob Dylan, which explains some of the confusion of my youth, I expect.
My mother's people were, before they came out to California, from Oklahoma by way of Kansas and Texas. Scots-Irish, Scots, Irish, French, etc.
The original linkage that started this is something like bloggy > Dumbo Arts Center (esp. Kathe Burkhart) > Virgil Marti (which eventually sort of recursively led to James Wagner) > OKGenWeb, whose url has the string "marti" included in it because the sitemaster, whose name is Marti, is ill, and the person running it in her stead did so to honor her.
We wish her well, and take this opportunity to express our deepest gratitude to all the contributors who've made the OKGen site the treasure it is.
All the images except where otherwise noted are from there.


John N Williams courting Parrilla Montgomery
on the Ferry at Webbers Falls
Muskogee county, Oklahoma
1918
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Sarah Ballard Dryden, center, probably at the wedding
of Kitty Ballard and John B. Vincent (detail)
April 8, 1901

Vincent Family page at rootsweb
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Another Vincent family photograph:

late 1890's at the Bent Creek homestead of Nicholas B. Vincent
(or, perhaps, the adjacent homestead of his son, Hiram J. Vincent)

(detail)
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Those are sod houses.
An image from the U.S. National Archives and records Administration:
Teacher and children in front of sod schoolhouse
Woods Co., Okla. Terr., ca. 1895


Something of the tenor of their daily lives shows in the posture and expression of the children, though at least part of that must come from the seriousness of being photographed, and the strangeness of having to sit still and stare at a man who's doing basically nothing but hiding behind a small box on legs.
How young the teacher is, with the bell in her hand.
Not all the sod houses were squalid and dark. I've lived in rougher rooms than this one.
These images are from the Library of Congress but they don't have pages of their own.
Sod was the turf under the prairie grasses that covered what's called the Great Plains in the US. It turns out that the grasses, and the buffalo that lived on them, and to an extent the indigenes, had an inter-relationship that worked to everyone's advantage, once they got accustomed to it. The disruption of that ecological harmony was a primary cause of the Dust Bowl, another significant part of Oklahoma history.
The country was young, and like all young things, a little naive.
And even then, there were images of mystery, if you knew where and how to look.
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There's a lot of hard work visible in this picture, and a lot more right behind it:
Jordan Log Cabin and the Charlie Jordan Family
"This was Charlie & Ellen's first home in St. Louis, Oklahoma after their marriage. The log cabin belonged to Charlie's father. It was the William Thomas Jordan old home place. Taken around late 1912 or early 1913. Vera looks to be about a year old."

These folks were no strangers to hard work, either:

The William Duckworth Family
Okmulgee County, OK 1913
(detail)
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Here's a bunch a fellas down at the axe-handle factory.
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It's easy to read into a photograph, that's one of the reasons this kind of immersion is so easy for me to get lost in, but at the same time there's an unprovable contact with what's there, at least I believe there is.
I'm thinking a lot about decency these days, how rare it's getting, how small a thing it is, but how much impact it has when it comes your way. I like to think something shows through from these families that's decent, not in the way the word's come to mean prim and puritanical, but straightforward, what it's always meant - upright and relatively virtuous.
"A Hearty Welcome To All"
Samuel Thomas "Tom" McGuire family
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There were at least as many characters per capita in Oklahoma a hundred years ago as there are today, probably a few more.

Polly Belle Barnes
with an unknown friend from her school days

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Unknown Man, Hartshorne, Indian Territory
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Babe and Earnest Sweat 1910-1920 Osage County, OK.
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Jesse Jerome Stewart and Maggie Mae Duncan,
married August 10, 1907 in Eufaula, Oklahoma, Indian Territory. They lived on High Early Mountain.They had 13 children.
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When things got a little too individual and threatened to get out of hand, or did, there were always groups like the Anti-HorseThief Association to step in and do what had to be done.
Bill Fossett was a lawman in the Territory who rode some with the AHTA. Fossett wasn't exactly a Pinkerton but he did do some security work for the railroad interests. Later on in life he was appointed U.S. Marshall by Teddy Roosevelt, which brings us almost full circle here.
Jesse James had way too much familiarity from the Pinkertons. In a botched phosphor-bombing of his family home, when they thought he was inside though he wasn't, his mother's arm was blown off. His mother was not an outlaw. His step-father, a fairly crippled man and not at all young, was hung from a tree and seriously abused in an attempt to get him to divulge Jesse's whereabouts. Jesse James was and is a folk hero for the same reasons Robin Hood was and is a folk hero, and the Pinkertons are reviled by many for the same reasons the Sheriff of Nottingham is reviled.
Susan M. Dodd wrote a fine book about Jesse James called "Mamaw". Which brings us even closer to full circle, now.
Except for some obligatory gratuitous chicken imagery, that is.

Woman feeding chickens
And this from LoC, which is what I imagine a terraformed Mars might be like.


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30.10.05

"Up close, Mr Angry is on the left and Mrs Calm is on the right -- move back six feet and they switch places!"
Aurgasm
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If you're near-sighted you can do it sitting down.

"...but this documentary --structured as a court to try evidence about the existence of this elusive animal -- keeps the woo-woo out and all the possible science in..."

28.10.05

In two weeks, Anne Rice, the chronicler of vampires, witches and—under the pseudonym A. N. Roquelaure—of soft-core S&M encounters, will publish "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt," a novel about the 7-year-old Jesus, narrated by Christ himself. "I promised," she says, "that from now on I would write only for the Lord."

27.10.05

Where babies come from in Germany
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Serious pumpkin carvings
drawn > vigna-marú

Obedience, or The Lying Tale

...a pit of foxes
drunk on rotten brambles of berries,
and the raccoons ransack
a rabbit's unmasked hole.
What do they find but a winter's heap
of droppings? A stolen nest, the cracked shell

of another creature's child.
I imagine this is the rabbit way,
and I will not stray, Mother,
into the forest's thick,
where the trees meet the dark,
though I have known misgivings
of light...

Jennifer Chang
Poetry Daily
26.10.05

26.10.05

Long image-heavy canine post here at db annex

24.10.05

Progress was great, but nature unspoiled was greater. If a race could not breed all stronger men, through its great movements, it might better not breed any, for the bad over-multiplied the good, and so their needs magnified into greed.
Zane Grey at Today in Literature

20.10.05

Wolf Greeting
Carl Cook
Black and White Magazine

Homage to the masters of Weimar by Larry Fink at Power House books

19.10.05

The Cruel Wheel Turns Twice
...A metal rod
Exiting a tunnel, dropped in a gate groove.

Disappointment. And again The End gate
Opens and it's, Please
Come back. Please Be....

Mary Jo Bang
Verse Daily
17.10.05


John Ennis The Celebrated Pedestrian


On the final day, some of the boisterous crowd broke onto the track to taunt Rowell, the Englishman who led the race. The two remaining American contestants, Ennis and Harriman, immediately informed the audience that they would quit if Rowell's pace was interrupted. They then clasped hands and ran a lap in solidarity with the Englishman, as the crowd roared its approval.
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En 1890 John Ennis invierte 80 días en caminar desde Nueva York a San Francisco
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John Ennis was presumably the first man to run across America.

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