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.