Qu'est-ce que c'est?

Au départ, je me suis dit qu’il s’agissait d’une image de la NASA. Peut-être une éruption solaire. Je me suis même demandé s’il était possible de trouver une version en haute-résolution pour en faire un poster. Puis, j’ai compris ce que c’était.

Quand j’ai compris qu’il s’agissait en fait d’une image thermique d’un humain qui dégaze, mes idées de décoration se sont envolées. Le pire, c’est que j’ai l’impression que je viens de vous faire la plus mauvaise blague du monde sur les prouts en partageant cette photo avec vous. Pardonnez-moi.'



I most appreciated the following commentary at the site of the "original" artwork posting:

-- Dites-moi, ne serait-ce point là un fessier féminin?

-- Le mythe [des] femme[s] princesses est désormais détruit.

*merci à Norédine, de Gizmodo.fr

Just for fun, or possibly as an effort at personal redemption, check out these images of volcanoes (a comparable category?) located in the gallery of the ASTER website.

"ASTER (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer) is an imaging instrument flying on Terra, a satellite launched in December 1999 as part of NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS). ASTER is a cooperative effort between NASA, Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) and Japan's Earth Remote Sensing Data Analysis Center (ERSDAC)."

Of being numerous

Photos of and by Brother-Unit Tumbleweed, from his blog American Idlyl.











POEM from Of Being Numerous
by George Oppen


6.
We are pressed, pressed on each other,
We will be told at once
Of anything that happens

And the discovery of facts bursts
In a paroxysm of emotion
Now as always. Crusoe

We say was
‘Rescued’.
So we have chosen.





7.
Obsessed, bewildered

By the shipwreck
Of the singular

We have chosen the meaning
Of Being Numerous.

9
‘Whether, as the intensity of seeing increases, one’s distance from Them, the people, does not also increase’
I know, of course I know, I can enter no other place


Yet I am one of those who from nothing but man’s way of thought and one of his dialects and what has happened to me
Have made poetry


To dream of that beach
For the sake of an instant in the eyes,


The absolute singular


The unearthly bonds
Of the singular


Which is the bright light of shipwreck



25
Strange that the youngest people I know
Live in the oldest buildings


Scattered about the city
In the dark rooms
Of the past—and the immigrants,


The black
Rectangular buildings
Of the immigrants.


They are the children of the middle class.


‘The pure products of America—’


Investing
The ancient buildings
Jostle each other


In the half-forgotten, that ponderous business.
This Chinese Wall.



26
They carry nativeness
To a conclusion
In suicide.


We want to defend
Limitation
And do not know how.


Stupid to say merely
That poets should not lead their lives
Among poets,


They have lost the metaphysical sense
Of the future, they feel themselves
The end of a chain


Of lives, single lives
And we know that lives
Are single


And cannot defend
The metaphysic
On which rest


The boundaries
Of our distances.
We want to say


‘Common sense’
And cannot. We stand on


That denial
Of death that paved the cities,
Paved the cities


Generation
For generation and the pavement


Is filthy as the corridors
Of the police.


How shall one know a generation, a new generation?
Not by the dew on them! Where the earth is most torn
And the wounds untended and the voices confused,
There is the head of the moving column


Who if they cannot find
Their generation
Wither in the infirmaries


And the supply depots, supplying
Irrelevant objects.
Street lamps shine on the parked cars
Steadily in the clear night


It is true the great mineral silence
Vibrates, hums, a process
Completing itself


In which the windshield wipers
Of the cars are visible.


The power of the mind, the
Power and weight
Of the mind which
Is not enough, it is nothing
And does nothing


Against the natural world,
Behemoth, white whale, beast
They will say and less than beast,
The fatal rock


Which is the world—


O if the streets
Seem bright enough,
Fold within fold
Of residence ...


Or see thru water
Clearly the pebbles
Of the beach
Thru the water, flowing
From the ripple, clear
As ever they have been



29
My daughter, my daughter, what can I say
Of living?


I cannot judge it.


We seem caught
In reality together my lovely
Daughter,


I have a daughter
But no child


And it was not precisely
Happiness we promised
Ourselves;


We say happiness, happiness and are not
Satisfied.


Tho the house on the low land
Of the city


Catches the dawn light


I can tell myself, and I tell myself
Only what we all believe
True


And in the sudden vacuum
Of time ...


... is it not
In fear the roots grip


Downward
And beget


The baffling hierarchies
Of father and child


As of leaves on their high
Thin twigs to shield us


From time, from open
Time

This Blog Is In Desperate Need Of Big Moose Pictures

Roxana, who also claims to go by the unlikely moniker of "Nanny," has given me permission to publish these unshopped photos of a moose. She is the photographer. I would have not been able to hold the camera steady as I would be very busy trying to adjust my location to a point much, much farther away...

In any event, I find that pneumonia and friendship drama both respond well to the distraction of big moose pictures.

This is Roxana's commentary on The Creature:


They grow them big in Manitoba ! Man! What an animal.....his hind legs are like tree trunks !!

By the length of his beard and the grey legs, I figure he must be over 10 years old. He looks to be well over 8 feet at the top of the shoulder hump,and with his head up the height to the top of his antler must be about 12 feet .This guy is king of the forest, no bear or pack of wolves would dare come after him when he has this rack.

Considering that a dirt road can fit 1 1/2 cars across ... this fellow is HUGE. THIS IS ONE BIG BOY!

THE PICTURE WAS TAKEN IN ELLIOT LAKE
Yes it is a regular size dirt road.

The Dissolution of a Friendship

Sorry, but I remain in the Netherlands of Inspiration.

I did not think it would impact me, but there has been a huge mental hit due to... how to put it? Due to the Disillusionment of Friendship.

I almost reached the point of having to put the word friend -- and all its derivatives -- forever between quotation marks.

We all know, however, that adding to the pandemic of twitching-fingers-in-air would be a bad thing. Just picture the horrendous headtilt and voice-lilt of the entre-guillemets. {InvoluntaryShiver}

Taking some time for reflection, remembering how I have considerably sullied the word in my time, I managed to at least get rid of the accretion of emotions, the feelings of betrayal, the fatigue at the drama, the disgust at the lies.

No, the friendship has not survived and will never be renewed, but at least I am not going to take myself down with it. I am much too adept at being disillusioned as it is and do not require unsolicited outside assistance!

One, Two, Three: Breathe!

Thank you to those who have written, wondering where the heck I have been hiding out! It certainly is not beyond the realm of possibility that I might have gotten lost inside The Manor itself, or that I might wander The Grounds, witless.

Fortunately, I have been safely ensconced in bed, though I suppose "witless" might apply.

I was unusually crabby (Okay... go ahead. Get it out of your system.)

Ahem. I was unusually crabby last week, and felt pretty awful in terms of bone pain and wayyyyy increased skin sensitivity. I couldn't get a handle on things, and so was in minute-by-minute mode.

What a surprise to start coughing up blood in the middle of the night!

That's one way for the body to definitely get my attention.

A nice little pneumonia developed over the next few hours. Thankfully, my doc and his nurse were on the ball, and got me quickly started on an antibiotic.

So it has taken a few days of staring blankly and eating recuperative yogurt, but I have finally emerged on the other side.

When life began to bottom out last week, I was struggling with a long blog post. I have definitely lost the threads of my thought but plan to rework it today or tomorrow. Not that I want you to think that any thought whatsoever goes into these pieces.

I'm just sayin'.

Until such time as I return to Full Babel, explore the archives!

The 11/3 Project

There's a war going on in America, and the stakes are nothing less than Glenn Beck's internal organs.

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