On Animals

The beings known as animals hover at the corner of the separation of inside and outside generated by the idea of a world as a self-contained system. Strangely enough, thinking in terms of "world" often excludes animals -- beings who actually live there. For Edmund Husserl, animals are like deaf people, "abnormal." For Heidegger, animals lack of a sense of world (Weltarm). Or, more precisely, their sense of the world is this lack. In contrast, some ecological thinking wants to forget about the differences between humans and other animals, real or imagined, as soon as possible. This inverted speciesism celebrates "the more than human world" (Abram). For Percy Shelly, animals lose their cruelty just as humans begin to live a more pacifist existence. ... For Rilke or Levertov, post-Romantic poets keen to establish an environmental poetics, animals have an access to the "open" that is denied to humans, either entirely or as a result of bad training. It all depends how up close and personal you want to get. Levinas strove to exclude animals from his idea of contact with the "face" of the other as the basis of ethics. But he was haunted by the face of a dog who had looked at him, perhaps with kindness, in a Nazi prison camp.

Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature (2007)

Bash Bish Falls State Park

Miroslav Tichy's Camera #1

gotta go see this guy's show at the ICP .... from here he looks both creepy and fascinating

Fitzgerald Lake miniatures

Livro sobre nada -- Manoel de Barros

Sabedoria pode ser que seja estar uma árvore ...

early spring landscape with advertiser

Mankala

rules as listed at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, where they have the game in their Africa wing(let).... ero and i learned the game there, when we and the cat shared a studio on 1st Ave., a block or so away. the game we later purchased has different rules but we liked these better:

all moves clockwise

3 possible moves

1. "scooping move" -- pick up all seeds and move them one cup left
a. move cannot be used to move seeds into home cup
b. move cannot be used to move seeds into opponent's cup

2. "scattering move" -- pick up all seeds and drop them one by one into cups to the left. you can drop seeds into opponent's cups but not into either home cup

3. "the home move" -- a scattering move that ends in a home cup. this move is rewarded with an extra move. it can be repeated for continued extra move(s)

To win: move all seeds from your playing cups to your home cup before your opponent can do the same.

Fado, doce veneno ...

William Beckford, and 18th-century English traveller in Portugal, commented on modinha, but may as well have been talking about fado, which would emerge later ....

"Those who have never heard this original sort of music, must and will remain ignorant of the most bewitching melodies that ever existed since the days of the Sybarites. They consist of languid interrupted measures, as if the breath was gone with the excess of rapture, and the soul panting to meet the kindred soul of some beloved object. With a childish carelessness they steal into the heart, before it has time to arm itself against their enervating influence; you fancy you are swallowing warm milk, and are admitting the poison of voluptuousness into the closest recesses of your existence."

as quoted in Vernon, A History of Portuguese Fado

Slowly, quietly, attentively

Writing an introductory essay on the work of Adriana Lisboa, I can't help but recall this sequence from Ron Fricke's film.

Howard Zinn (1922-2010)

"If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive movements of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare."

Vira-lata astorguense