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Book Review – The Turquoise Ledge – By Leslie Marmon Silko – NYTimes.com

…in the Tucson Mountains, pack rats make a home in the copy machine, a rattlesnake hides under the chaise longue, spiders are welcome and the appearance of a grasshopper is seen as a sign from Lord Chapulin, the Grasshopper Being.

Silko’s menagerie includes mastiffs, parrots, macaws, bees, hummingbirds and various other creatures. None of them are really pets: she gives them respect, not coddling. In fact, much of the book describes how she tends to the animals that live in and around her home, as well as how she attempts to help them ward off predators. While she can’t do much to protect them from the biggest menace, man, Silko’s understanding of nature’s balance brings her comfort. When she sees evidence of fresh destruction by a neighbor, she calms herself by imagining him being smashed under a boulder.

via Book Review – The Turquoise Ledge – By Leslie Marmon Silko – NYTimes.com.

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Gideon Lincecum, 1793-1874

In 1848, after years of practicing medicine with herbal remedies learned from Indians and trading with the Indians on the Tombigbee, he moved to Texas. He purchased 1,828 acres of the fertile prairie land he had seen on his Texas visit thirteen years before. Lincecum, Sarah, and their surviving ten children, a number of grandchildren, and ten slaves arrived in Long Point on his fifty-fifth birthday.

In Texas Lincecum continued to practice medicine, made geological explorations, assembled a plant collection including 500 species with medicinal properties, kept a meteorological journal that charted drought cycles, and observed and recorded the daily activities of insect life. He became recognized as an astute naturalist, corresponded with internationally known scientists, and contributed valuable collections to the Philadelphia Academy of Science and the Smithsonian Institution. He was elected a corresponding member of the Philadelphia Academy, a rare honor for an amateur. His writings appeared in such national publications as the American Naturalist, the American Sportsman, and the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences, and his views on a variety of subjects, including politics, appeared in the Texas Almanac and in newspapers. Charles Darwin sponsored the publication of Lincecum’s controversial paper on the agricultural ant in the Journal of the Linnaean Society of London in 1862.

(via the Handbok of Texas Online)

PS: he was also into eugenics, an ardent campaigner for castration of criminals and “mental misfits.”

An excerpt from his biography:

Screen shot 2010-11-16 at 10.17.24 PM

from Gideon Lincecum, 1793-1874: a biography
By Lois Wood Burkhalter

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Canon Pixma Sound Sculptures on Vimeo

Canon Pixma Sound Sculptures from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

Canon Pixma Sound Sculptures from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

SOMEONE should have a heyday doing a cultural analysis /slash/ mega deconstruction of this incredibly seductive work. It ain’t gonna be me, because I am way too busy nostologizing (tx Ruth Ozeki for the term).
I’m only sorry to see it so so briefly, and with its disappointing sales pitch tagline.

(via Josh Kleiner)

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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!