Author: Marina

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The Author of the Acacia Seeds, Ursula K. Le Guin

Link to the short story, The Author of the Acacia Seeds, Ursula K. Le Guin.

This was warmly transcribed and posted by a Matt Webb in 2008 who stated:

My favourite short story is The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics by Ursula K. Le Guin. It’s a story of language, translation, and understanding things in terms of themselves, and – like all of Le Guin’s best – progressively takes me so far outside myself that I can glimpse what it would be like to live non-sequentially, sideways to time, or without action and with only response. Le Guin helps me understand how historically contingent I am (personally and socially) , which helps me accept the points of views of others, human and non-human. Anyway, it’s a story which can be read into endlessly, and also beautiful: It helps me see meaning in broader scales and configurations than those to which I am accustomed. (Le Guin’s Always Coming Home is in my top 5 books.)

I’ve wanted to share it with friends, but short stories are inconvenient to pass round because you have to lend the whole book. So I’ve transcribed the story and put it online. I hope many more people read Le Guin because of it. Read The Author of the Acacia Seeds.

via Matt Webb

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london futures

..from the fantastic  artists / visulaizers  Robert Graves and Didier Madoc-Jones.

London Futures is a new exhibit on display at the Museum Of London featuring images depicting the possibilities that could await London in a future devastated by climate change, as imagined by artists Robert Graves and Didier Madoc-Jones.

The gallery showcases 14 digitally crafted images constructed as large back-lit transparencies, stemming from the artists’ Postcards From The Future series. The project was first started in response to the 2008 G8 summit, which focused on climate change. Graves and Madoc-Jones realized that the idea of climate change was hard for people to understand in a concrete way, so they decided to craft very real images of what iconic picturesque locations in London could look like in a future left to the whim of climate change.

(via Huffington Post)

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Texas Brainstorm

Call for information:

I am planning a residency in partnership with Diverseworks in Houston, Texas for two weeks in 2011. I’ll be gathering research and conversation on a rather open-ended inquiry into
depleted oil fields,
pump jacks,
picturesque big and small oil operations,
migratory flyways,
invasive species,
effects of climate change,
and
what might spring to mind as elements of local ecosystems, intersections of nature/culture, what makes Texas Texas.

The more these things overlap in real space, the better but right now I am keeping this open.
Visual stunners welcome :)
Non-sequitors also welcome.

*Also, any movie references that feature classic “oil” landscapes would be appreciated –

The ultimate results of this research will be an animated landscape installation as part of the Mesocosm series (here’s the first one  based on Northern England) and hopefully a participatory art project.

Please post comments here.
Thanks so much!

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Eating your Enemy in NYC

Canada goose eating wild grass, by FlashyWings
From a Oct 22 NYT Article on proper killing and cooking of Canada Geese: Don’t Landfill That Goose. Braise It.

The key to delicious Canada goose, Jackson Landers says, begins at the moment of death. “When people taste a Canada goose and say ‘this is terrible,’ ” Mr. Landers said, “usually when you track down the history of how the animal was taken and butchered, you might have an animal that’s gut shot and left to sit for a few hours in the back of a truck. If you handled a cow or a domestic chicken the way that a lot of hunters handle their meat, it would taste gamy and vile as well.” Mr. Landers, a hunting instructor and locavore activist based in Virginia, knows whereof he speaks. He has written a book on deer hunting and is working on a second book, and, he hopes, a reality television show (see trailer below), called “Eating Aliens,” about eating invasive species. …With the help of a Brooklyn chef, Leighton Edmondson, Mr. Landers will cook and serve the geese — paired with New York State wines, of course — at a two-hour workshop under the auspices of Slow Food NYC. …“If someone’s going to eat meat,” Mr. Landers said, “that’s at least better than putting an animal in a dark cage for its entire life indoors, cutting off its beak, pumping it full of steroids and then killing it.”

Jackson Landers’s workshop, “The Locavore Hunter — Geese Gone Wild!” is Saturday, Oct. 30, from noon to 2:30 p.m. at Ger-Nis Culinary and Herb Center, 540 President Street, Suite 2A, in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Tickets are $35 for nonmembers of Slow Food NYC and $25 for members, available from Brown Paper Tickets.

(video via Michael Galinsky)

(thanks to Mary Ann Newman for sending article)

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Taproot

Been thinking a bit about taproots as a good model for stubborn ideas.

A taproot is an enlarged somewhat straight to tapering plant root that grows vertically downward. It forms a center from which other roots sprout laterally.[1]

The taproot of Carrots.

Plants with taproots are difficult to transplant. The presence of a taproot is why dandelions are hard to uproot — the top is pulled, but the long taproot stays in the ground, and re-sprouts.

Most plants start with a taproot,[2] which is one main root forming from the enlarging radical of the seed. The tap root can be persistent through out the life of the plant but is most often replaced later in the plants development by a fibrous root system.[2][3]A persistent taproot system forms when the radical keeps growing and smaller lateral roots form along the taproot; often the radical dies some after seed germination causing the development of a fibrous root system which lacks one main downward growing root. Most trees begin life with a taproot,[3] but after one to a few years the main root system changes to a wide-spreading fibrous root system with mainly horizontal growing surface roots and only a few vertical, deep anchoring roots. A typical mature tree 30–50 m tall has a root system that extends horizontally in all directions as far as the tree is tall or more, but well over 95% of the roots are in the top 50 cm depth of soil.

– thanks wikipedia