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Saturday, February 5th, 2011
Here are three pictures I took while Sylvia and I were looking at the Egyptian exhibit at the Met this afternoon.
This is from the beginning of a long scroll, it stretched across a full wall. I am in general not careful about reading labels in museums, so cannot tell you much about the scroll.*
Ibis-headed Thoth, facing himself in the center column, is the god credited with the invention of language and writing -- an appropriate frontspiece for the document.Three small Thoths** are grouped together here:
In addition to an ibis' head the god may be depicted with a baboon's head. The ibis in the middle, watching over his likeness, must be related. I felt lucky to spot this relief on the way out of the museum: 
Just breathtaking. I had not been to see this exhibit in quite a while; indeed this may be the first time I ever really gave it any of the attention it deserves. Very happy about Sylvia's newly blossoming interest in mythology and ancient cultures.
 *(added) Aha! But they have much of the metadata online. I think it was likely a papyrus belonging to the Priest of Horus, Imhotep. **These are: Striding Thoth, Thoth as Ibis, and Figure of a Cynocæphalus Ape.
posted evening of February 5th, 2011: Respond
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Wednesday, January 26th, 2011
(It probably helps not to adopt too rigorous an understanding of the term "nothing" in this game.)
posted evening of January 26th, 2011: 1 response
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Another animal that migrated across the Bering land bridge and east and south throughout the Americas and eventually down as far as Chile: the polyommatus butterfly. Dr. Naomi Pierce of Harvard et al. have vindicated Nabokov's hypothesis regarding the introduction of this genus of butterfly to the Americas, as Carl Zimmer reports today for the NY Times. The slideshow attached to the article has to be seen to be believed. Below the fold, a piece from The Art of Resurrection that came to mind as I was reading this article. (I have that book on my brain now...)
 At the opening of Chapter 4, the Christ of Elqui is walking along the rail line through the pampa, from Sierra Gorda to Providencia (or as the two he met in Sierra Gorda told him it is known locally, La Piojo -- they also warned him to stick to the tracks so as not to get lost in the desert) --
Across the pampa's wide expanse, the dry four o'clock wind was beginning to blow. The Christ of Elqui, he had been hiking for a long hawl with no rest, his long hair blowing into his eyes, when he stopped; he lifted up his gaze, making a visor of his hands. All of a sudden it seemed as if he could make out the gravel lot of the plant over there where the hills began to rise -- in the pampa, such a sight gives one the illusion of seeing "a ship foundering on the desert plain," as some northern poet's verses call it. But the railroad line just followed its interminable southerly right-of-way.
Surely a little ways further, and it would turn off to that side. Just at that moment, miraculous in the open pampa, under the brutally incandescent midday sun, a butterfly crossed over the iron rails. "An ephemeral butterflyâ€, he said in wonder, the Christ of Elqui; he could not imagine from how far off it had flown. It was an orange butterfly with black markings.* As he watched it disappear, fluttering off to the east, that was when it occurred to him. Why not take the short cut, save some hiking, save some time? Clearly, more powerful than all the desert’s misdirections and illusions would be the Eternal Father, guiding his steps.
So he thought; and that is what he did.
(Is it clumsy, this having the two warn him to stay on the tracks, then having him take the short-cut and get lost? Possibly. But, very beautiful. Some of the subsequent portion of the chapter is quoted in this post from a few months back.) I wonder who the northern poet being quoted in the second paragraph is. The closest thing to the quoted phrase I have been able to find with Google is from Elisabeth Nox' recently published first novel La ciudad de los hombres perdidos, "Pero en ningún momento llegó a preguntarse cómo habÃa llegado el barco a encallar en mitad del desierto." Interesting but probably not what I'm looking for... * One of the butterflies that Nabokov named, the Pseudolucia aureliana, is native to the Atacama; however it is blue with yellow markings, oh well.
↻...done
posted afternoon of January 26th, 2011: Respond
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Tuesday, January 25th, 2011
I found this lovely anagram at neatorama -- it's the work of Torontonians Micah Lexier and Christian Bök. Among other things, Bök has written Eunoia (2001), consisting of five univocalic chapters and some poetry.
posted evening of January 25th, 2011: Respond
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Sunday, January 23rd, 2011
(found in Dorfman's Desert Memories)
Up ahead, to one side of the route, is a gigantic granite hand thrusting up from a slight mound in the desert. Yes, I did say a granite hand and I did say gigantic -- towering twenty or thirty meters high -- a smoth rock statue, this Mano, erected here in 1992 by the Chilean sculptor Mario Irrarrázaval as a way of commemorating the presence of humans on this land, both the Europeans who had arrived in 1492 and those who had made the journey so many millenia before Columbus.Our answer to the desert, that hand.
For more, see Karl Fabricius' writeup of the Hand of the Desert at Environmental Graffiti, with photography from Wikimedia Commons and Flickr.
posted afternoon of January 23rd, 2011: Respond
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Saturday, January 15th, 2011
So far this winter, we've had a big snow-storm at the end of December and a much smaller snow-storm this week. The snow is icy on the ground now, a cold white blanket for the yards and parks of South Orange. cleek links to the Guramdolart gallery in Russia, with some lovely pencil drawings of Imereti, Georgia, under the fallen snow.
posted evening of January 15th, 2011: Respond
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Wednesday, January 12th, 2011
Thanks to Jen Mandel at The Great Whatsit for linking to this marvelous video of Morgan and Destiny's Eleventeenth Date:
And there, costumated as a monochromatic rarebear,
Stood the food-penguin, lemon-faced as ever.
The duo partook in a pair of pink fluff-puffs;
Destiny masticated her sugar-stick saxifragously,
Leaving Morgan haberdashed.
Sort of like "Happy the Golden Prince" maybe? Dramatically different from the every-day at any rate.
posted evening of January 12th, 2011: Respond
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Tuesday, November 23rd, 2010
Today, boston.com's Big Picture runs a gallery of photos of political demonstrations around the world in 2010; by turns inspiring, depressing, confusing, amusing... Thanks for the link, CK!
posted afternoon of November 23rd, 2010: Respond
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Wednesday, November 17th, 2010
Mindy Fisher's ornaglyphic logograms resonate between violence and innocence:
(Found thanks to The New Postliterate)
posted evening of November 17th, 2010: Respond
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Thursday, November 11th, 2010
Lead ions collide in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN,
generating temperatures a million times hotter than the heart of the sun
and producing a quark-gluon plasma.
posted morning of November 11th, 2010: Respond
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