BERNEVAL

Di Brandt in Now You Care provides a note at the bottom of a poem filled with natural wonders and declares that humans are “mere grace notes” in the symphony of sound that surrounds us. Humbling attitude grounded in the following observation:

“On some sophisticated machine he slowed down the hummingbird songs until they were almost a set of subsonic twinklings … For days on end, pods upon pods of whales of every kind came rolling in, breaching and blowing along side the ship, diving and gathering around the underwater speakers, chattering, hooting and cooing in courteous, measured replies between the hummingbirds’ phrases. Slightly chagrined, the elated ship’s research personnel recorded the whales’ exuberant conversation and after speeding them up found themselves listening to some very ornate hummingbird songs!” Martín Prechtel, The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun: Ecstasy and Time

David Rothenberg reflects on tail sounds of hummingbirds http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/08/a-hummingbirds-musical-tail/?_r=0

Yet that rise and fall is not an unfamiliar pleasure in the animal world. It sounds almost exactly like the song of the bowhead whale, a rarely encountered denizen of arctic seas. Why such sonic parallels between species way far apart on the tree of evolution? There may be more to animal aesthetics than arbitrariness…

Would such research make us humans the Great Listeners?

And so for day 1572
03.04.2011

Ali Smith. Girl Meets Boy

She carries on for pages in a fashion that would make even Anna Livia Plurabelle blush.

Then it changed into a music I’d never heard before, so new to me that it made me airborne, I was nothing but the notes she was playing, held in air. Then I saw her smile so close to my eyes that there was nothing to see but the smile, and the thought came into my head that I’d never been inside a smile before, who’d have thought being inside a simile would be so ancient and so modern both at once? Her beautiful head was down at my breast, she caught me between her teeth just once, she put the nip into nipple like the cub of a fox would, down we went, no wonder they call it an earth, it was loamy, it was good, it was what good meant, it was earthy, it was what earth meant, it was the underground of everything, the kind of soil that clings to things. Was that her tongue? […] and then I was sinew, I was snake, I changed stone to snake in three simple moves, stoke stake snake, then I was a tree whose branches were all budded knots […]

As signifier and signified slide over each other, the bravura performance takes off again in the dream-sequence wedding — some pages later but in the same imaginative space.

But back at the wedding the band had struck up now, and what a grand noise, for the legendary red-faced fiddler who played at all the best weddings had come, and had had a drink, and had got out his fiddle, he was the man to turn curved wood and horsehair, cut-gut and resin into a single blackbird then into a flight of blackbirds singing all the evenings at once, then into a spawn of happy salmon, into the return of the longed-for boat to a port, into the longing that waits in a lucky place for two people who don’t yet know each other to meet exactly there […]

A fantasia based on the theme of Iphis and Ianthe from Ovid Book IX of the Metamorphoses.

And so for day 1571
02.04.2011

Rotten emails = French for spam.

pourriels
spam

Pourriels are destined for the poubelle whose origins date back to the 19th century and the decrees of one Eugène Poubelle.

And so for day 1570
01.04.2011

Sometimes I am not so sharp in recording the details of where and when I have come across some interesting tidbit. Take for example

Beyond the need for the City to conform to the Provincial Policy Statement, and the desire of many residents to have natural heritage within their community, an often overlooked benefit of preserving natural heritage in urban and urbanizing areas lies in the ability of these areas to provide a wide range of “ecological services” not typically quantified or valued in conventional analyses. These services include groundwater protection, water treatment, flood control, and air quality improvement, and in some forums have begun to be considered as a vital component of a municipality’s infrastructure and given the specific label of “green infrastructure” or “natural capital” (e.g., Benedict and McMahon 2002; Oleweiler 2004; Wilkie and Roach 2004; Ewing and Kostyack 2005).

Benedict M.A. and McMahon E.T. 2002. Green Infrastructure: Smart Conservation for the 21st Century. Sprawl Watch Clearinghouse Monograph Series. URL: www.sprawlwatch.org (verified June 2007).

Olewiler, N. 2004. The Value of Natural Capital in Settled Areas of Canada. Published by Ducks Unlimited Canada and the Nature Conservancy of Canada, 36 pp.

Wilkie, K. and R. Roach. 2004. The Benefits of Urban Natural Capital: A Natural Capital Project Discussion Paper – Green Among the Concrete. Published by the Canada West Foundation, Calgary AB, April 2004, 19 p.

Ewing, R. and J. Kostyack. 2005. Endangered by Sprawl: How Runaway Development Threatens America’s Wildlife. Published by National Wildlife Federation, Smart Growth America and Nature Serve, Washington D.C., January 2005, 53 p.

This appears to be about the City which given the reference to the Provincial Policy Statement is “Toronto” but it could be any large municipality in the Province of Ontario. Running the references through a search engine does not net the document in question but does bring me a document about the urban forest in Guelph.

The urban forest has been recognized as a visual amenity and for its environmental benefits for several decades, but has only recently begun to be considered as a vital component of a municipality’s infrastructure, and given the specific label of “green infrastructure” or “natural capital” (e.g., Benedict and McMahon 2002; Wilkie and Roach 2004; Ewing and Kostyack 2005).

http://guelph.ca/wp-content/uploads/Framework-for-Strategic-Urban-Forest-Mgmt-Plan.pdf

Ideas like citations travel in packs.

Interesting to note that my unidentified City grey literature records verification of the Sprawl Watch monograph as being done in June 2007. Also the case with the Guelph paper. Some people were sharing info to construct their best policy advice. Or the search engines were directing them to the same sources.

And so for day 1565
27.03.2011