a couple more wonders before countdown

tsé & tsé associeés have THE most magical website. catherine lévy and sigolène prébois!! my heroines! go there and follow the fireflies.

be patient with all the secret contraptions and you'll be very rewarded. be sure to check their links page and click on all the light bulbs to hear the harry partch-esque music.


go here to read three layer cake's interview with them. here is a sample question from it:

How do you set your professional goals together?
We never have. Our goal is to be happy, have fun, and make enough money to live. When we look at where we are and think that we have managed to make a living doing what we love, we still think it’s a miracle.

don't you love them already?






when you've finished exploring there, you can go to the gallery of obscure patents at delphion. there you'll find instructions for:




the transparent color-coded intravenous tubing invention,







the self-containing enclosure for protection from killer bees,







and the highly impractical round chessboard.

i'll leave the rest for you to be surprised by.


happy 2007.

favourite

a couple of my own favorites to showcase this friday:

one of the neverendingly photogenic isabel, that muzzle and wrinkle i can never get enough of,

and of sean and the found puppy "pablo", taken on the new houseboat, where we celebrated christmas night.

















and then there's my last three flickr favs:









go here to get them full-sized.

forget me not

it's uncanny sometimes the way subjects coincide. for christmas i received a book from kay titled "forget me not: photography and remembrance," by geoffrey batchen, concerning the embellished photograph to enhance memory-- the way the photograph embedded into a treasured momento makes it more saturated for the purposes of memory.

then from chris at bright stupid confetti i was given this link to square america, a gallery full of vintage photographs. one of the most compelling sections of this website is called 'defaced,' all pictures in which faces have been somehow obliterated.







in some of them the faces have been scratched out with something sharp. they seem to belong to a different category than these, in which the faces seem to have been lifted out to put into something smaller and easy to keep with its admirer at all times. these pictures seem less ghostly if we think of the part missing as not a part discarded, but a part kept, even more important than what it was extracted from, even; worth defacing the original for.




and then, on top of this, i'm reading austerlitz, by w.b. sebald, a story about making up one's identity from scratch, from objects and photographs left behind, from scraps of others' identities.







what is it, if not loss, that makes the collector?

holly golightly is much bigger than this in real life

she's so good for my post-christmas disorientation.

isn't it strange, that compulsion to keep shopping within the parentheses between thanksgiving and christmas, even if everyone on your list has been crossed off? that feeling that you should be buying something. it's very strong, and difficult to resist, and i've interviewed several of my friends about it who are NOT compulsive shoppers and they said the same thing.
i went to the grocery store today and walked around trying to put together some meals in my head, lightheaded and absent-minded, as if i'd lost a lot of blood. or had a very high fever that had broken in the middle of the night from some godawful illness no one thought i'd pull out of. the restaurant i work at kept leaving messages on my machine to see if i'd be willing to come in, but i was not willing at all.

i just want to listen listen listen. be sung to, reminded only of simple truths i've forgotten.

i was tagged by kate...

to answer the poetry meme.

the first poem i remember reading was...

something i don't remember. but i must have had some sense of what poetry was in order to know that the thing i'd written on a piece of pink notepaper when i was about five was indeed a poem. i don't have any memory of what i wrote; the memory is of the careful way i carried myself around the house after it was written, and of the sense i had that those words laid end to end were mysteriously and infinitely valuable.

i was forced to memorize numerous poems in school and...

actually the only forced memorizing going on was over bible verses. i had an amazing memorizing ability as a child; to everyone's delight i memorized whole chunks of the bible. as a kindergardener i delivered a 20 minute long speech about the nativity without notes and with laryngitis and received my first and last standing ovation. granted it took me months under the impatient tutelage of my stepmother, who would record my voice for hours every day on a machine with two reels.

i just think it's too bad i didn't have more imaginative educators. the entire 13th chapter of first corinthians down pat and not one poem...

my first "publication" was in...

the lanakila baptist school newsletter. the poem was titled "why?".

i read poetry because...

it thrills me.

A poem I’m likely to think about when asked about a favorite poem is…

max ernst's "the great uninhabitable house". it still takes my breath away after all these years.

i find poetry in...

everywhere there's a rhythm or an interruption of that rhythm.


the last time i heard poetry was...

at line-up at work. the chef was explaining that baby fennel is more potent than adult fennel, but he didn't know why. it made me think immediately of baby rattlesnakes being more poisonous than adult rattlers, because they don't know how to regulate their venom. when the interconnection between unlike things makes itself apparent, i hear poetry. that's why it is a permanent sound.

i didn't answer all the questions and i don't know who i should tag. i was never good at tag. too slow of a runner.

a good and productive day

cleaned laundryroom
dropped off boxes at goodwill
car washed
craig's list dryer delivered

dogs fed and exercised
chickens watered and fed and let out to roam
finches fed
goldfinches, robins, quail, and chickadees fed
fed myself

off to work in the frenzy.

more boxes to open

tea cups


untitled


_away
and

hey, that's mine!!

now i am officially a friday flickr favorite participant.

the gift of lunch

i'm being seduced by bento!

here at this bento virtuosa's site, i could get lost for hours in the carrot flowers. i've always had a weakness for the compartmentalized lunch, but now i want to start making my own. sophie will be glad, because i sure have gotten lazy in the last couple of years.



here are more, a little higher on the adorable scale:










now i remember one of the reasons why i wanted to be japanese so badly when i was a girl. i was so envious of my japanese friends' bento!






















there are about 10,000 pictures of bento on flickr.

but i really liked dhania's collection of the 121 bento boxes she has made for her husband.









this is one of them:


let's all make bento, i say.

behold our little tree

every year for about six or seven years now we bring it in from outside and lavish it with festoonery. it's always been somewhat dr. seuss-ish, but it gets a little more so each year.










and now for some close-ups:

cold and frosty

some of the birds i'm in charge of feeding while my friend thaine's away







leaves three

snail mail

i love this postcard from sophie. i just received it the other day, though she's been home for three weeks. i love how she says "rather." i can't really imagine her using "rather" in regular conversation.

a common theme

i just noticed , my last four flickr favorites are all of frozen motion.

from: oh (she's-in-the-sidebar-hall-of-fame) bara
niimo
born to hula
my other car is a bus

i love mademoiselle loulou so much i put her in my sidebar

thanks to jen at simply photo, also now in the sidebar.

on the receiving end

in the spirit of gift giving, i give you this poem about anonymous and worrisome giving, written by helen cho, who i would like to send packages of apples and fragrant lemons, with petal designs cut out with linoleum block tools. and this carved ivory pipe from the paris flea market, which i stole away with on my memory card.



A box of


I have received a box of
dirt and snow, a box as wide
as my shoulders, deep as myself. It is loosely taped:
I dig out a stone,
a can of soup, a cold white handle
bereft. It is immensely heavy. A metal
plate at the bottom of it, an inch thick.
He might have eased it onto a dolly.

It is hard to tell who might have begun
to pack such things. Someone idle, proud
of the present tense, someone
who tells himself stories
of power and desire.
I could be wrong, of course.

I am no friend, but a person he has
seen once or twice.
Not one he speaks to
any day of the week.
But he's seen enough to ascertain I will be
surprised, frightened,
and, at last, alone.

I can only imagine
one who might build a box
and fill it with apples and lemons, a handful of cotton
and coffee beans. Red pears, dried fruit.
Perhaps I am sheltered. Perhaps there is a
history I have overlooked.
Perhaps everyone sends such boxes
once and I am only now caught up.

I dig out an emptied ring,
a small red wrench, a child's shoe, and,
at last, a black banana
so soft it goes liquid.
I should lock my car.

There are no apples, lemons,
no small tree with delicate roots,
asparagus, white.
Nothing one might welcome.
What does this person mourn?
I cannot sleep at night for wondering.
My hands are cold,
delving through blackness. Something to keep,
I want something
to keep.

pulsating fields

behind the acoustics







beautiful beautiful soup











rain boots

someone must plumb the depths of the moustache,

to faithfully represent the moustache in words.
pictures never do the moustache justice.
in painting a moustache over the idea of a moustache
the depths of the moustache are obscured.

few art historians would dare to substitute the mona lisa
for the notoriously unshakeable idea of the mona lisa
and with the moustache it is no different.

the once and for all essential curvature of the moustache
has very little to do with the moustache as a facial addition,
iffy at best.

only the facsimiles of moustaches can sustain us.
the moustache once removed and in its simplest form.




lovely moustache image captured from here.

the moon's inclination to remain irridescent...

no matter how many times it is made hackneyed in a poem
is its chief strength.

but if you look
its white places also gleam whiter
where the moon agents have been polishing it
for ages.

this more or less circular argument
never fails to pull me in.

is the moon a place or is it a tranquil noun.

a telescope held up to the ear of the eye
or a stethoscope held up to the eye's ear.

a private eye,

detective of multiple heartbeats and foreseeable difficulties.


quintuplets at puberty:

in ripening, what is 'not yet' is by no means
pieced together as something not yet objectively present;
the fruit ripens itself and this ripening characterizes its being
as fruit.

yawning pomegranates attract the gazer.
the females, unlike grebes, are hardly drabber.





moon phase image from here

farewell logan whitehurst

who brought so much to the world during the short time he was in it, one of the brainiest guys ever, who lost his battle with brain cancer on december 3rd, at the tender age of 29.
go here to listen to his bright sweet brilliant music, to read his "how to be cool" essay, to see what he looked like, to sigh and miss him terribly even if you didn't know him very well.

"if illusions are always illusions of a reality, reality, for its part, is never the reality of anything but an illusion."--baudrillard

in the vocabulary of wine terminology, there is something called the 'threshold of sensation: the smallest concentration of a stimulus that can produce a general but unidentifiable sensation. lower than the threshold of perception.'

from this sentence i became aware that the imperceptible quality of a thing arises from there being a scarcity of it. just enough to sense it but not enough to name it, to put it into words. the inexpressible is merely the world outside of language. you would think this world would have shrunk into nothingness by now; you'd think the sprawl of language would have spread over every square inch of perception. oddly, i think the reverse is true, as the inexpressible is infinite and the expressible is not. it seems to me at times that language is, at its root, a substitution of what we have for what we don't have.

i think i find myself so drawn to the french language because this idea is somehow innate within its structure. in english, we think 'about' something. in french, we think 'toward' it, away from ourselves as the center of thought, toward thought as a place outside of ourselves. in english we say 'i miss you,' but in french we say 'vous me manquez:,' it is you who i lack. i learned this difference earlier in my french study, but not in the same concentration as i learned it today. i got a very sudden sense of something vast that i could not hold onto. it was only a passing glimpse and then it was gone, irretreivable, like a blissful odor from childhood, or a name that was just on the tip of my tongue.

bit part

fragment sliver
cantlet flinder,

bit of shatter
come apart.









come to pieces,
split and shiver
fissure, rent










shred and part
shard and fracture

bit of shatter
come apart.

"chinese foot chart"

"every part of us
alerts another part.
press a spot in
the tender arch and
feel the scalp
twitch. we are no
match for ourselves
but our own release.
each touch
uncatches some
remote lock. look,
boats of mercy
embark from
our heart at the
oddest knock."

--kay ryan

today i want a warm aquarium

i'm out of sorts today.
today i want to call my blog 'avalanche of the daily.'

the christmas season has a way of sometimes working me up into a froth, and then spooning me out, like meringue, into a heap, sad and confused.

this is the only simile i have inside of me today.