l'astronave

You know Fresca best here as The Wordlemeister -- her name runs through those famous Wordle Challenges of Yesteryear with the erosive persistence of water.

And so you just knew she had to be a writer!

Better than that, really. An ut pictura poesis practitioner.

Anyway, I enjoy her blog a great deal, especially lately, as I'm just plain parched.

Think: artesian well.

The water may not be different, but it comes to the earth's surface a bit differently. Groundwater in aquifers between layers of poorly permeable rock, such as clay or shale, may be confined under pressure. If such a confined aquifer is tapped by a well, water will rise above the top of the aquifer and may even flow from the well onto the land surface. Water confined in this way is said to be under artesian pressure, and the aquifer is called an artesian aquifer. The word artesian comes from the town of Artois in France, the old Roman city of Artesium, where the best known flowing artesian wells were drilled in the Middle Ages. The level to which water will rise in tightly cased wells in artesian aquifers is called the potentiometric surface.

Deep wells drilled into rock to intersect the water table and reaching far below it are often called artesian wells in ordinary conversation, but this is not necessarily a correct use of the term. Such deep wells may be just like ordinary, shallower wells; great depth alone does not automatically make them artesian wells. The word artesian, properly used, refers to situations where the water is confined under pressure below layers of relatively impermeable rock.

Yes, Fresca is deep, a cool, verre d'eau.

Excuse me, this computer -- a new, or at least, different one -- is blinking and hooting at me. Sputtering, even.

Part of me keeps thinking "This isn't very wise, Retired Educator! Better you should close the plush velvet curtains of The Computer Turret, though they are impervious to not much, so as to better shield this shy, blinking, hooting instrument from the needling horizontal rain with which the Lord has blessed us, than to continue to risk disc failure by pecking away on damp keys and dipping the world's longest extension cord into the stray puddles gracing the uneven slate flagstone."

Yes, we DO have a turret!

Only the one, though.

It was a medieval design flaw, very common, but normally disguised as a soot-spewing chimney by the gaggle of ensuing sub-contractors unleashed by the inevitable Industrial Revolutions. The original Manor Residents had Castle Pretensions. Anyway, Captain Haddock's first mother-in-law, whose living conditions he seems to have delighted in complicating, was housed up here back in the 50s. After her departure, highly fêted, it kind of became a design nightmare and went through incarnations that might shock even Niecy Nash. [I confess that I sometimes wander around Marlinspike Hall with a blindfold on, stopping suddenly and yelling: "Take your blindfold off and OPEN YOUR EYES!"

Yes, I did recently break a leg. Your point?

The only way in or out, up or down, the pesky turret is via a thick rope ladder, dyed caution yellow, that extends down (but mostly sideways) out to the Manor Stables -- a remarkable outbuilding that is an alarming replica, as we pointed out in our last post, of the Knoppenburg Manor Stables. The proper term today is "agricultural building." You won't catch me calling it a barn if there are any prying ears about. Of course, the last outsider who dropped by was The Technician Overlord of Our Telecommunications Bundle, which he so wisely decided was best centered in the Hobby Room at the top of the Turret Tower. We had concocted a cover story about the rope bridge ("It's more a bridge than a ladder," Fred just said), which consists of the baldfaced lie that we are a new off season venue for those Cirque du Soleil performers who are fresh out of rehab. So the hefty diameter of that hemp monster, see, is easily explained away as necessary gear for these poor, troubled acrobats.

I'm usually not subject to such heights of embarrassment (heights, and, lately, riches) but I just don't want anyone to think that I have to zig zag my way from one Manor Wing to another, make it to the Grand Ballroom, out the entrance, patterned after Brunelleschi's bronze baptistery doors, over the drawbridge (Provided it is down! Men!), across the moat, down the lane, over the hedge, into the damned agricultural outbuilding, up the custom wheelchair ramp into the hayloft, and then, lickety-split, go hand-over-fist on the rope bridge for a good half mile... all just to get my email.

Competition for the Baptistry Doors in Florence - Brunelleschi and Ghiberti (1401) from Beth Harris on Vimeo.

My heart warms every day as I pass that portal -- the story of the baptistry door competition is such an engaging one. I wonder if I can get my Vasari volumes back from TW?

Anyway, we stashed a superlight refurbished, factory-conditioned sport wheelchair up there, so I have the capability of turning in circles really, really fast 'round the damp, crooked, crowded outer edges of the Turret Hobby Room. I don't yell out "Take your blindfold off and OPEN YOUR EYES!" up there. That would be silly.

I yell passages from Poe. Yes, often "quoth the raven, 'Nevermore.'"

A friend of Fred's, one of the Angry Lesbian Existentialist Feminists he hangs with on Wednesday evenings, told him "most of [Retired Educator's] charm is in her brilliant self-referentiality." I think she meant my succulent auto-referentialiciousness.

Fresca tends not to make a mess of things. She translates thought into appropriate and good art, and usually doesn't muck it up with words that only mean she's talking about herself.

Sigh.

Her blog (one of them) is called l'astronave. Here is a tease from a piece she posted today, Movies & Poetry: A Film from the Sixties, which I like a lot.

[Oh, if you cannot have enough William Shatner/Cap'n Kirk? L'astronave is the place for you!]

This is one of the funniest descriptions of writing I've come across.
Here's Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, on the unfilmability of poets--from her Nobel lecture, no less:

"It's not accidental that film biographies of great scientists and artists are produced in droves.
... Of course [they are] all quite naive and [don't] explain the strange mental state popularly known as inspiration, but at least there's something to look at and listen to.

But poets are the worst. Their work is hopelessly unphotogenic.

Someone sits at a table or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a while this person writes down seven lines only to cross out one of them fifteen minutes later, and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens ...

Who could stand to watch this kind of thing?"

There may be few films about writing poetry, but poets do write poems about films. Including Szymborska.

Well, my ankles are swollen and I don't relish the climb back to The Manor proper.

I can hear La Bonne et Belle Bianca -- it floats on the air... ah, je ris de me voir... -- I don't doubt the rich intertextuality of my dreams tonight.