Wednesday, October 31, 2012


i put on a blonde wig and a red mask and went strolling down the street in the warm night. Little kids with flimsy swords and fairy wings and tilted headgear were running up to houses in search of candy, their parents at their backs. Medium kids were walking down the street in small cliques, talk talk talk, and some were kicking field goals down the block. The oldest kids were hanging out by a car, sneaking a smoke. Grownups in funny hats were pouring into a house for a party. It's Halloween in the hood.

Monday, October 29, 2012



All Saints Day, a Roman Catholic Holy Day, will soon arrive on November first, the day after Halloween. In parts of Louisiana, people celebrated this day by visiting the graves and tombs of departed family members and dear friends. Stones were cleaned and white-washed, flowers and mementos were brought along to decorate the graves, and visitors picnicked at the site. In New Orleans, street vendors sold tiny carved skeletons and sugar skulls. Besides providing enthusiastic community care for the graves and cemeteries, the Holy Day (and city holiday) gave death a nod, and a day to remember those buried there.










Austin State Hospital Cemetery, Austin, Texas, 3-29-12




Sunday, October 28, 2012

Sometimes promises didn't come through, and they operated on the fly. Appliances, printers, phones, cameras, internet, hoses and recipes, news and weather reports, books and movies, dryers and underwear went awry. People didn't show up. Jobs fell through.




The focus function on my camera didn't respond to these lizards, but affably left a bit of abstract art instead.

Saturday, October 27, 2012


I came upon this delightful ball of little mushrooms on October 19, 2012, here in Lafayette, Louisiana:




Here is a photo of the mushrooms five days later, on October 24:



Monday, October 22, 2012







A light bulb in the kitchen fixture exploded. My father handed me the needle-nosed pliers and I got the ladder and worked the remains of the bulb out of the socket.

This morning, I was charmed to discover that the retired bulb could be so bright and personable.





Sunday, October 21, 2012





Lafayette, Louisiana 10-12
there was more reality
than met the eye -
why not take a glimpse?
and he scaled the high walls
of his labyrinth


Lafayette, LA
Oct 2012




Saturday, October 20, 2012







A flock of cormorants at the airport was shot rather than delay a flight. Great pines and ancient oaks were destroyed in the night with gasoline-powered chainsaws and bulldozers. Rivers were rerouted to more convenient locations.

Flowers, and wild berries, neighborhood play lots and cemeteries, and the old or unfashionable folks had to go. Sentiment and Nature were for the weak. Progress - gargantuan highways and tall climate controlled buildings and sculpted landscaping, nuclear power and monitoring of resident activity - was for those with big financial vision and bottomless pockets. The gifts we'd been blessed with were met with disdain and wasted on a whim.



Thursday, October 18, 2012


Walking was not exercise. Walking was breathing. Walking was what swimming is to fishes, flight to butterflies. What is a parrot alone in a cage with a little mirror? A whale living in a concrete pool? What is a human confined to a room with a television? What is a mustang in a stall?

Wednesday, October 17, 2012




I'd like to watch the Luthier at work.
I'd like to see the Maker's hands, with tools, vises, sandpaper, shaping wood.
I'd like to see the relationship between wood and sound develop, how wood comes to refine sound, how human desire for harmonic sound refines wood.

Sunday, October 14, 2012




It was their first apocalypse; they were winging it.

They quickly saw that somebody needed to save the world. With perhaps as yet unmerited bravado, they said, 'sure! we can do that -' and they were on their way, cheerful to have a chance to contribute as a team.

The first time they all were held flat, facedown to the floor, they did entertain some doubts. Perhaps they had bit off more than they could chew.




Saturday, October 13, 2012



what's been lost
what might be gained
whose at fault
what remains
(the bugs and willows
camellias and brim
are
breathing
weaving
what's to come)



Friday, October 12, 2012



I'm looking at photos in The Illustrated Longitude (Dava Sobel and William J. H. Andrewes) of beautiful chronometers designed and assembled in the 1700s and 1800s. A number of people were competing for some very large prize money offered by the British Parliament to the person who could come up with a way to figure out longitude precisely when at sea. There were two main schools of thought. One was that the best readings would be generated through astronomical data and observations. The other school of thought was that using an accurate timepiece to coordinate time with star positions would be the best way to figure precise location.

This competition was fascinating on many levels - the efforts and consuming passion of the scientists and engineers, the politics behind the preferences shown by the Parliament committee known as the Board of Longitude, the reasons achieving this goal was considered so important, and what happened to the various shining timepieces, each of which took years to complete.

A number of questions have been percolating. The book makes me want to understand better how the timepieces worked, and, since the new timepieces were being compared with official time generated by a clock in Greenwich as a measure of accuracy, how did the Greenwich timepiece work?

How important is timekeeping to us humans, and shared agreement about labeling what time it is?

Finally, having written about the Antikythera mechanism earlier in the week, and having finished reading the book Longitude, the question comes to mind whether the Antikythera Mechanism was not so much a calendrical gadget but more of a grand-scale clock?

(Below are images of a greeting card I bought a couple years ago -)






so many tucks and seams appeared in their clothes that pretty soon, they didn't have a thing to wear....

Thursday, October 11, 2012


This image was taken on Burnet Road in Austin, Texas, 13 June 2012.

Wednesday, October 10, 2012


The Zilker Park Christmas tree. Austin, Texas, January 22, 2012.

Monday, October 08, 2012


there was an episode of Rifleman in the 1960s where the main character spends the night alone, camping out in an arid-looking area - dust and cacti. He opens his eyes the next morning and sees there's a rattlesnake coiled on his chest for warmth. The whole episode is spent with him holding very very still and sweating a lot. I don't remember the ending, but the actor does survive to make another show for the next week....

Sunday, October 07, 2012




Once more, a video replication of the workings of the Antikythera Mechanism has me mesmerized. The original two thousand year old system of gears was a complex model of celestial mechanics. Descriptions I've read in the past suggest that its design from an earth-centric perspective rather than a solar perspective is its main flaw. This evening, I found a perceptive comment on the criticism:

'Perhaps the ancient Greeks did conceive of a heliocentric model of the solar system, however they may have realized that it is neither more nor less true than a geocentric system. In this case I think it seems natural that the sun and moon appear to be going around the earth, because this is the point of view of the user. I doubt the device was designed to be used by someone standing on the sun, therefore a heliocentric representation would seem very odd and rather meaningless.'

StimuLAZ
comment on video graphics of Antikythera mechanism




Saturday, October 06, 2012





Grace Presbyterian, 10-6-12, Lafayette, Louisiana

Friday, October 05, 2012

Since I've returned to Louisiana this year, haven't seen any black widow spiders, or daddy-long-legs, or the big long spiders with the sturdy webs that would span our driveway. But in our back yard, I have seen three of these below, in time for Halloween. A week ago, I had trouble getting a sharp image, but today, one of the spiders was very gracious about letting me take a portrait. These critters are new to me.










Taken Friday, October 5, 2012, in Lafayette, LA.




Thursday, October 04, 2012



I've been thinking about whales lately. (I've had an image in my mind of a big whale floating in a little boat, as though to a different time, different waters.)

My dad at lunch today said he's been thinking about buffalo.

He wasn't sure that tremendous herds of buffalo could have really existed because, how could we have killed that many?

In Wiki under American Bison, there are graphic maps that indicate the range of the bison dropped from the length and breadth of central north America to just a few islands of territory in a span of 20 years - between 1870 and 1889. I remember reading about people riding cross-country on the new railways, shooting herds of bison for sport.

There was an expansive article in National Geographic some years back that explored the hunting of whales. The maps showed where different countries had 'whaling stations' in the oceans around the world, and how many hundreds of thousands of whales were hunted and processed each year.

It seems to me, at some point in each case, we humans switched from hunting to slaughter, to an almost coordinated, soulless effort to eradicate these animals who had phenomenal presence and power.

In Wiki under Whale, there are references to some of the many ancient myths regarding whales. It states (with limited references) that the Inuits told a story about 'Big Raven' finding a beached whale. The Great Spirit guides Raven to a place in the forest where the moonlight reveals mushrooms. Raven eats the mushrooms, and becomes very strong, strong enough to return Whale to the sea. This restores balance to the world.

I followed a link to creation myths, and found an image of a painting.

Here is a link to 'The Creation' by James Tissot: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tissot_The_Creation.jpg





Wednesday, October 03, 2012

Galls on oak leaves: I've been told over the years that these particular galls are caused by certain species of wasp. The gall tissue is created by a mature insect laying eggs in the budding leaves. A biochemical reaction causes the swelling to occur, and the larva develops in the hardening chamber within. In a way, the oaks foster parent the wasps. These images were taken September 30, 2012 in Lafayette, LA. You can tell by the pinholes in the galls that the young wasps have exited their cozy compartments, and entered the larger world without.







Tuesday, October 02, 2012


It was a crummy day today in many ways; however even crummy days have their bizarre points of light and today was that way. As I was walking along Brentwood, Stevie Ray Vaughan started singing 'Taxman' in my head and, exactly at the moment a young man scratched his ear while doing yard work, as though he were directing, the theme song from the 1960s tv show 'Batman' started playing in my head. This head-tunes combo was quite a piece of work. "Let me tell you how it will be -" "Batman!" "There's one for you, nineteen for me -" "Batman!"

(Actually, I don't know all the lyrics, and I was kinda making it up as I go, more like "Here's some for you, a lot for me -" "Batman!")

Anyway. It sounded pretty good and it added a touch of grace to a way-under-the-weather hounded-by-traffic kind of day. The Taxman-Batman song and fixing my dad a sixties-style dinner (mashed potatoes and peas - how comforting retro-American can you get?) were the highlights of the day.

Monday, October 01, 2012

There were tales of the magic key. They found no magic key but that a key was coded within everything around them. Whether their passion was for poems, or intricacies of car engines,




there were moments where awareness settled lightly upon them.


(art detail from a print in a doctor's office by an artist whose first name is Dan and last name begins with M)