stamped

Karl Nawrot's stamp box.

His work is endlessly inspiring, but lately I have been thinking about this the most.

Seen here, here and here.

her dainty feathered hen

Beautifully Janet slept
Till it was deeply morning. She woke then
And thought about her dainty-feathered hen,
To see how it had kept.

One kiss she gave her mother,
Only a small one gave she to her daddy
Who would have kissed each curl of his shining baby;
No kiss at all for her brother.
“Old Chucky, Old Chucky!” she cried,
Running on little pink feet upon the grass
To Chucky’s house, and listening. But alas,
Her Chucky had died.

It was a transmogrifying bee
Came droning down on Chucky’s old bald head
And sat and put the poison. It scarcely bled,
But how exceedingly

And purply did the knot
Swell with the venom and communicate
Its rigour! Now the poor comb stood up straight
But Chucky did not.

So there was Janet
Kneeling on the wet grass, crying her brown hen
(Translated far beyond the daughters of men)
To rise and walk upon it.

And weeping fast as she had breath
Janet implored us, “Wake her from her sleep!”
And would not be instructed in how deep
Was the forgetful kingdom of death.

John Crowe Ransom

Kevin German: Steve the Chicken, seen long ago at Swissmiss.

As soon as I saw this photo, I thought of this poem. I love it.

off and running

Having taken this under advisement, everything today features roosters and hens. We'll see who is most popular.

Etienne-Jules Marey: Fragment of a chronometric filmstrip of running hen, 1894.

Via Wired.

signs


So it happened that I reached the point of my sign, and I found five, all there. And I wasn't able to recognize my own. It's this one, no, that; no, no, that one seems too modern, but it could also be the most ancient; I don't recognize my hand in that one, I would never have wanted to make it like that . . . And meanwhile the Galaxy ran through space and left behind those signs old and new and I still hadn't found mine.
I'm not exaggerating when I say that the galactic years that followed were the worst I had ever lived through. I went on looking, and signs kept growing thicker in space; from all the worlds anybody who had an opportunity invariably left his mark in space somehow ...
*
Every now and then I'd start: that's the one! And for a second I was sure I had rediscovered my sign, on the Earth or in space, it made no difference, because through the signs a continuity had been established with no precise boundaries any more.
In the universe now there was no longer a container and a thing contained, but only a general thickness of signs superimposed and coagulated, occupying the whole volume of space; it was constantly being dotted, minutely, a network of lines and scratches and reliefs and engravings; the universe was scrawled over on all sides, along all its dimensions. There was no longer any way to establish a point of reference: the galaxy went on turning but I could no longer count the revolutions, any point could be the point of departure, any sign heaped up with the others could be mine, but discovering it would have served no purpose, because it was clear that, independent of signs, space didn't exist and perhaps never had existed.
Italo Calvino, 'A Sign in Space', translated by William Weaver

Image: Ffffound.

bones


Justine Cooper: photo of Cretaceous dinosaur bones. They were excavated almost 100 years ago and are still sitting in storage at the American Museum of Natural History.

Full slideshow here. Via Hollister Hovey.

dinosaurs

From the New Yorker, Feb. 29, 1964.

cleveland is a warm, fuzzy place

This is my favorite book about the Cleve. It was published in 1977 by Dave Cockley, and it details the adventures of one Benjamin Bear as he searches the city for his lost owner.

Benjamin arrives in Cleveland the usual way:
In addition to hitching a ride with a mounted cop, visiting other bears at the zoo and getting medical attention at the Cleveland Clinic, he checks out one of my local favorites:
He also manages to score the game-winning kick in a Browns game (oh Benjamin, where are you now?)
In recognition of this achievement, he gets to meet the boy mayor (you may know him as the once-and-future presidential candidate):
After these triumphs, he spends some time thinking deep and strange thoughts in front of the statue of Moses Cleaveland:
One Cleveland is enough for me too, bear.

His button reads: Cleveland - The Best Things in Life Are Here.

I could never hope to match the awesomeness of this book (there's a copy for sale here), but I am guest-blogging with some of my personal picks for travelers headed to the C-town over at Truant this week.

imaginary outfit: clothes that would make me feel better about monday mornings


Right now, I have two jobs with overlapping weekend work hours. As a result, the past couple of weekends have felt like I am cramming a full workweek into two days. It's not the best arrangement, and I have six weeks to go. It leaves me dreading Monday mornings and the resumption of my normal projects. So today, as I am dragging my reluctant self up and out and staring bleakly at my closet, I am imagining something to wear that would provide enough motivation to get me out of my pajamas and out of the house - something comfortable with a little edge, a contrast of restful neutrals with mixed textures and subtly strange shapes.

On further consideration, those moccasins may be working against my up and at 'em needs a little bit - I think I hear them saying 'stay on the couch, eat cereal and watch Turner Classic Movies all day' ...

Temptation.

ardor


Then comes a longing
That I don't understand
Because it feels like it's towards you
But here you are
So I don't understand
What this longing's for
From 'Watching the Sleeping Lover' in Sam Shepard + Joseph Chaiken's 'Savage/Love'

Image of Andy Warhol's Kiss from 7 Objects in a Box. 1966.

reluctance

André Kertész: The Kiss, 1920.

the may-irwin kiss


This is the first kiss ever captured on film - it was a scene from the play The Widow Jones, and was staged for the camera. It was the most popular Edison Vitascope film in 1896.

By 1900, people had become more lascivious on film:

a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous

Kisses, as defined by Ingrid Bergman. Image from this.

gone

Teddy Roosevelt's diary entry the day his wife Alice died from Bright's Disease. She was only 22.

Seen at tatielle.

bleeding heart pie

To serve to those who break your heart.

From Coo-Koo-Ri-Koo via Craft.

loveletters

LinkRandom billet-doux generated by Christopher Strachey's 'Loveletters' computer program, originally written in 1952. A new letter appears every time you refresh the page.

Found through Rhizome.

this weekend

It's here!

Yay.

On the calendar:

And lots of work for me. Have a good weekend.

Image from Found.

this breathing plain of snow


We'd rather have the iceberg than the ship,
although it meant the end of travel.
Although it stood stock-still like cloudy rock
and all the sea were moving marble.
We'd rather have the iceberg than the ship;
we'd rather own this breathing plain of snow
though the ship's sails were laid upon the sea
as the snow lies undissolved upon the water.
O solemn, floating field,
are you aware an iceberg takes repose
with you, and when it wakes may pasture on your snows?

This is a scene a sailor'd give his eyes for.
The ship's ignored. The iceberg rises
and sinks again; its glassy pinnacles
correct elliptics in the sky.
This is a scene where he who treads the boards
is artlessly rhetorical. The curtain
is light enough to rise on finest ropes
that airy twists of snow provide.
The wits of these white peaks
spar with the sun. Its weight the iceberg dares
upon a shifting stage and stands and stares.

The iceberg cuts its facets from within.
Like jewelry from a grave
it saves itself perpetually and adorns
only itself, perhaps the snows
which so surprise us lying on the sea.
Good-bye, we say, good-bye, the ship steers off
where waves give in to one another's waves
and clouds run in a warmer sky.
Icebergs behoove the soul
(both being self-made from elements least visible)
to see them so: fleshed, fair, erected indivisible.
Elizabeth Bishop

Frederic Edwin Church: The Iceberg, 1891. Currently on view as part of the 'To the Ends of the Earth: Painting the Polar Landscape' exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum.

stock-still like cloudy rock


It is hardly possible to look at Camille Seaman’s icebergs as inert or insentient. Therein lies the gift these images bestow. Though they are made of ice, these massifs of the sea are as diverse and distinct as any terrestrial form. The tabular mesas broken off from the Weddell Ice Shelf are white glazed deserts. The crystal pinnacles cast off from Greenland seem to be mountaintops set adrift. Icebergs known as drydocks can have arches and bridges carved by rain and wind. Unstable pinnacles can invert themselves as they melt above sea line, creating localized tidal waves that can easily swamp a nearby boat.


I can't wait to get my copy of this book. The photos are currently on exhibit in D.C.

we'd rather have the iceberg than the ship

Lauren Nassef: The Belgica Deliberately Overwintering in the Antarctic.

northern lights


Beautiful. I think I've watched this ten times.

(How they come to be.)

death-white realms


I returned to my book - Bewick's History of British Birds: the letterpress thereof I cared little for, generally speaking: and yet there were certain introductory pages that, child as I was, I could not pass quite as a blank. They were those which treat of the haunts of sea-fowl; of "the solitary rocks and promontories" by them only inhabited; of the coast of Norway, studded with isles from its southern extremity, the Lindeness, or Naze, to the North Cape ... Nor could I pass unnoticed the suggestion of the bleak shores of Lapland, Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland, Greenland, with "the vast sweep of the Arctic Zone, and those forlorn regions of dreary space—that reservoir of frost and snow, where firm fields of ice, the accumulation of centuries of winters, glazed in Alpine heights above heights, surround the pole, and concentre the multiplied rigours of extreme cold." Of these death-white realms I formed an idea of my own: shadowy, like all the half-comprehended notions that float dim through children's brains, but strangely impressive.
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre.

Caspar David Friedrich: The Sea of Ice, c. 1823.

imaginary outfit: polar explorer


I couldn't resist.

goggles

Inuit snow goggles carved from a single block of red cedar wood. Size: 5" x 2".

One of Christopher Oberg's ethnographic art reproductions.

The Vancouver Maritime Musuem has a nice photo of an original pair, and this explanation of their function:

The intense sunlight of the springtime in the Arctic, when reflected from the snow-covered ground causes a temporary condition called snow blindness. To prevent this, the Inuit made snow goggles. These were fashioned to fit the contours of the face snugly to allow light to enter only through narrow viewing slits that restricted the field of vision and reduced the amount of light that reached the optic nerve. The area behind each eye slit was hollowed out to prevent eye contact and blackened to eliminate glare ... The width of the slits governs the width of lateral vision, and the narrower the slit, the more the acuity of vision. This simple but ingenious invention is superior to modern high-tech sunglasses.

snowblind

Nicolas Hughes' snowscapes (Edge Verses II, #11, 12 &13). I've been a little in love with these ever since I saw them at today and tomorrow.

before you go

I'd study up. From things magazine via Ffffound.

tents

Photos from the Febraury - March 2007 installation 'Antarctic Village' by Lucy + Jorge Orta. It was set up during the brief months of summer in Antarctica.

From the artists' statement:

Antarctic Village is a symbol of the plight of those struggling to transverse borders and to gain the freedom of movement necessary to escape political and social conflict. Dotted along the ice, the tents formed a settlement reminiscent of the images of refugee camps we see so often reported about on our television screens and newspapers. Physically the installation Antarctic Village is emblematic of Ortas’ body of work, composed of what could be termed modular architecture and reflecting qualities of nomadic shelters and campsites. The dwellings themselves are hand stitched together by a traditional tent maker with sections of flags from countries around the world, along with extensions of clothes and gloves, symbolising the multiplicity and diversity of people. Here the arm of faceless white-collar worker’s shirt hangs, there the sleeve of a children’s sweater. Together the flags and dissected clothes emblazoned with silkscreen motifs referencing the UN Declaration for Human Rights make for a physical embodiment of a 'Global Village'.

Via Share Some Candy.

penguin


They are extraordinarily like children, these little people of the Antarctic world, either like children, or like old men, full of their own importance and late for dinner, in their black tail-coats and white shirt-fronts—and rather portly withal.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard on penguins

Image: Penguin. 1992 Origami by Michael LaFosse.

polar exploration


Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised. It is the only form of adventure in which you put on your clothes at Michaelmas and keep them on until Christmas, and, save for a layer of the natural grease of the body, find them as clean as though they were new. It is more lonely than London, more secluded than any monastery, and the post comes but once a year. As men will compare the hardships of France, Palestine or Mesopotamia, so it would be interesting to contrast the rival claims of the Antarctic as a medium of discomfort. A member of Campbell's party tells me that the trenches at Ypres were a comparative picnic. But until somebody can evolve a standard of endurance I am unable to see how it can be done. Take it all in all, I do not believe anybody on earth has a worse time than an Emperor penguin.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World.

Image: 'View of ice, with the ship 'Terra Nova' in the distance, taken 7 January 1911 by Herbert George Ponting during the British Antarctic Expedition.' From here.

the silent wastes