I recall from childhood a parody of Whistle While You Work.
Whistle while you work
Hitler is a jerk
Eisenhower lost his power
Deifenbaker is a faker
I know Trudeau flunked his judo
Whistle while you work
I appears that Eisenhower losing his power may be a veiled reference to castration since one encounters many reports of a version with Mussolini and weenies and all sorts of verbs to de/link the two.
And so for day 1612
13.05.2011
Perusing Perla Meyers The Peasant Kitchen I was intrigued by the category of foods called “sdnos” — a course I had never heard of before. As I oriented myself to the rest of the cookbook I realised that what I was looking at was the chapter on “soups”.
And so for day 1611
12.05.2011
From the third of Fifteen Poems of My Heart by Juan Chi [Ruan Ji] translated by Jerome Ch’ên and Michael Bullock in Poems of Solitude.
I quoted aloud the last lines to my lover who remarked the the speaker was lazy…
I prefer to fly with jays and tits,
Not with hoary herons.
For they travel high and far,
Making the return too hard.
But let us recall the cold from the opening lines
The last rays of the setting sun,
Which once shone upon me warmly, have now gone
The wind keeps returning to strike the walls
While cold birds seek warmth in one another’s breast.
and realize that to hang out with the jays and tits is still to be active in winter which is an image with moral import for the middle of the poem characterizes the cold birds as emblems of “men of influence” perhaps beyond their prime
Clinging to their feathers,
They fear hunger in silence.
O, men of influence
Remember to withdraw in time!
You look sad and frail
Is it because of power and fame?
And so I was to turn again to the poem as a whole after having read a piece aloud — having been delighted by the alliteration of “hoary herons” — and return less to laziness more to admiring orientation mechanisms in non-migratory birds … “Studies on species that cache food (such as jays and tits) have shown that these species may even use a sun compass in order to retrace hidden food (Sherry and Duff, 1996*)” Bird Migration: A General Survey by Peter Berthold.
*Sherry, D. F., and S. J. Duff. (1996). “Behavioural and neural bases of orientation in food storing birds.” The Journal of Experimental Biology.
And so we store little bits to read later and recall Chinese poetry from the Three Kingdoms.
And so for day 1610
11.05.2011
I like the resonances that are set up in endings to two lectures, the penultimate and the ultimate, given by Robert Heilbroner as part of his CBC Massey Lectures. First he rifts off Marx’s notion of alienation and then offers a scenario of participation.
Alienation thus not only blinds us to whatever losses may result from our surrender to a commodified world, but dulls any awareness that the very vocabulary in which we appraise the performance of the economy — “efficiency,” “cost,” “value” — smuggles into the evaluation process the prerogatives and requirements of the social order to which that economy caters. Smith anticipated Marx when he pointed out that “efficiency” appears to be socially useful because we are blinded to its cost in the degradation of the labourer.
Participation thus envisages a world in which widely shared decision-making by discussion and vote displaces self-interest alone, or by persons privileged by wealth or position to make unilateral determinations. It assumes that social and economic equality has replaced social and economic inequality as the widely endorsed norm of the society, because equality seems best suited to enable individuals to lead the most rewarding lives they can.
Robert Heilbroner. Twenty-First Century Capitalism. CBC Massey Lectures.
And so for day 1609
10.05.2011
Travel in both time and space through an aquatic meditation on interconnection appealing to readers of all ages.
The water that makes up more than two-thirds of your body weight, that flows in your blood, that bathes your cells, and that you cry as tears, may once have flowed in a river. It may have floated as a cloud, fallen as a snowflake, bobbed in ocean waves, or been drunk by a dinosaur from an ancient lake. All this is possible because the water that’s presently on earth has always been here — except for ice brought by comets hitting the earth’s atmosphere. And all the water on earth is connected in a global cycle. This cycle is called the water cycle, or the hydrologic cycle.
April Pulley Sayre Wetland
And so for day 1608
09.05.2011
When I came across the following description, I was reminded of the days when raster images took a while to appear on screen — line by line.
I recall the afternoon in the archive when I first unfolded one of the large format plates interleaved perpendicularly into a copy of The Natural History of Jamaica (1725) by the British physician Hans Sloane and watched a palm tree grow sideways out of the book. This fantastic remnant of the dream enterprise of colonization takes the form of a condensed surprise. To swing open this relatively gigantic plate is to be confronted by the sensation of mixed emotion, the complicity of pleasure and disgust. To unfold the palm tree plate is to be confronted by the materializing aesthetic prospect of palms forcibly proliferated to signify boundary and property in their use as “natural fences” and its enfolding with conflicting dreams for the production of a paradise in the tropics, and countercolonial knowledges and practices not entirely contained by the textual and planting apparatus of imperial landscaping.
from Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization by Jill H. Casid
And so for day 1607
08.05.2011
What I find particularly fetching in this meditation on loss is that the many paths become subsumed under one archetype: the journey.
What of the people who don’t come back? Who leave home and they die or else they don’t die but something happens and they are never seen again. What of them?
They become the journey.
Lisa Pasold
Any Bright Horse
And so for day 1606
07.05.2011
Like one strand in a braid of sweetgrass
soot in a state of continual / atonement
Like another strand in a braid of sweetgrass
day made animate the dust
From Christopher Patton Ox
And so for day 1605
06.05.2011
Reading Keith Garebian Blue: The Derek Jarman Poems is like walking the beach at Dungeness collecting interesting bits for the cottage garden and installations.
Soon you will fall into a pool of questions
You always look for an aesthetic exit
will never be caught in a hotel room
like Wilde with the wrong wallpapermadness under a varnish of history
Even the largest canvas is smaller
than the hours in a spool of film,
which reads all the values of bluethe romance of God’s angel worth violating
The ladder waits, unclimbed.
And so for day 1604
05.05.2011
Culled from Lisa Pasold A Bad Year for Journalists, a line that becomes stark in its isolation:
a genocide doesn’t suddenly stop like a football game.
And poised here beside the recollection of the ending of Derek by Isaac Julien that fade into the white-painted brick wall with the voice over of Tilda Swinton about her friend and collaborator, Derek Jarman.
That the example you set us is as simple as a logo to sell a sports shoe; less chat, more action, less fiscal reports, more films, less paralysis, more process. Less deference. More dignity. Less money. More work. Less rules. More examples. Less dependence. More love.
Which are lines taken from a keynote speech given by Tilda Swinton at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, Saturday 17th August 2002 and published in Vertigo Volume 2, Issue 4 (Spring 2003).
Suffice it to say that that genocide (not being like football) line is not the end of Pasold’s book nor the end of her books.
And so for day 1603
04.05.2011
