AnOther promises: The Best Art and Photography Books to Buy This Summer
… human centric… as in all humans all the time… not that there aren’t good works in the lot… it’s just that, maybe, if humanity spent less time on its selfies and more time on appreciating anything other than self, perhaps the planet wouldn’t be the mess that it is…
The Essential Haiku, Notes
… in the very first note i read this morning, an academic article is referenced, Basho—The Man and The Plant, by Donald H. Shively… i look up the article and it is only available through JSTOR, i look for it elsewhere but can’t find it any other way… at this point i discover that i can register for JSTOR and read up to 100 articles a month for free… um, i am not an academic, so the prospect that i might exceed the limit in any given month is unlikely… what a find!…
… and, on to the article, the plant is appreciated in China and, to a lesser extent, in Japan, as a symbol of ephemerality, as the leaves of the plant are easily damaged by the wind and the plant withers and dies in the winter in these places… Basho’s students took to calling him Master Banana Plant, because of the specimen he kept in his garden… Basho like this and adopted it as his poets name… a poem by Saigyo, one of Basho’s favorite poets, talks about the banana plant in this way:
When the wind blows
at random go
the banana leaves;
Since it is thus laid waste, is this a world
on which a human being either can rely?
… ephemerality of plan and human life… very buddhist…
Many of the traditions about the banana plant in Earlier Japanese literature are brought together in a Yokyoku of the fifteenth century entitled Basho. This No play is based on a theme suggested by the Lotus sutra, that even grasses and trees can be reincarnated as Buddhas.1
… this idea immediately leads me to think about the concept of Panpsychism, which postulates consciousness as a fundamental quality of all matter…
… Basho apparently enjoyed the concept of non-functional beauty… that is, beautiful plants, things, that had no apparent use, which left them undisturbed by humans, and therefor, made them a reliable presence… one could ground themselves in and around non-functional beauty… i relate this to my reading on the Greek concept of techne yesterday…
_ Techne (Greek: τέχνη, tékhnē, ‘craft, art’; Ancient Greek: tékʰnɛː, Modern Greek: ˈtexni (About this soundlisten)) is a term in philosophy that refers to making or doing. As an activity, technē is concrete, variable, and context-dependent. The term resembles the concept of epistēmē in the implication of knowledge of principles, in that “both words are names for knowledge in the widest sense.” However, the two are distinct._2
… the importance of usefulness or functionality in Western culture which also appreciates the fruit of the banana plant rather than the ephemeral qualities of the plant itself, which has no “concrete” value other than to produce the useful fruit…
Shively, Donald H., Basho—The Man and The Plant ↩︎
The world of robotics…
The world of robotics, is the world of robotics— and yet.
… this is a play on the Robert Haas translation of a famous Issa haiku…
The world of dew, is the world of dew— and yet, and yet.
… dew is symbolic of ephemerality and in this particular Issa poem is thought to be expressing grief over the death of his daughter…
… my “homage” picks up on the idea that things are what they are, neither good or evil in and of themselves… there is nothing inherently evil about robotics… it all hinges on the uses humans find for their creations and, on that score, the historic record is not good…
First Thoughts
… the HCR meter is encouraging this morning, day off to a good start even if an extra early start… the jobs report was stellar… the Dems are making their counter argument on the economy and it is a successful and popular argument, which is important, one of the things that can stave off a return of 45 or someone like him… now, some form of voting rights legislation needs to be accomplished… if it is, we’ll have our best possibility of staving off authoritarianism…
… presented my wires, mannequins, greek myth, techne image set last night, the salon was underwhelmed, thought the connection was what?, forced i guess… i have made up my mind to keep pursuing for a while anyway… it feels right…
… some good interactions on micro.blog yesterday…
… some progress on the dining room trim yesterday… the usual two steps forward, one back, but that will change as i remember the process…
… dogs sleeping in the studio, they have the good sense to go back to bed, me, it’s hours to make good use of… i have always been a morning person… if i become much more of a morning person, i will be a night person!… interestingly, alcohol is not to blame… i slept the night through… about 5 1/2 hours…
… i am thinking i will take the Nikon with me on the morning walk…
… the weather has been humid and hot, dog days for sure… it’s also been cloudy and a bit dismal… it will be on the far side of 95 degrees F for the next several days… hunker down, hunker down…
Mark Kurlansky, The Big Oyster
… A Molluscular History of New York…
… years ago, i read Cod, another of Kurlansky’s funny but insightful books on the ecological disasters revolving around particular creatures… wonderful author, wonderful books…
… and with that, it is time to go for my photo wander…
The Essential Haiku, End Notes
… a sense of the impossibility of translating Japanese haiku is given in these two paragraphs…
Winter Sun: This is Ueda’s translation, from Basho and His Interpreters, p. 170. The alliteration and assonance in this poem are particularly admired: fuyu no hi ya bajo ni koru kageboshi.1
… and…
A Petal Shower: The phrase used to describe the falling petals is onomatopoeic: horohoro. Some connection between that sound and the sound of the river.2
… in the note to the poem How Admirable!, some sound information on enlightenment, which is…
to see nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.3
… the commentary on Hailstones…
Hard things hitting hard things in a hard place. Mountain passes were mysterious places in old Japanese culture, inhabited by boundary gods and placatory shrines, sometimes with the carved figure of a man and a woman coupling.4
First Thoughts
… a friend once said that his day got off to a good or bad start depending on what Heather Cox Richardson had to say… it is similar for me, and today it’s a bad start… she calls a spade a spade… radical conservatives are working hard to move the country in an Authoritarian direction, praising Victor Orban, president of Hungary, whipping up anti-immigrant frenzy, telling their constituents that immigrants are to blame for the current Delta variant crises and blaming it on lax immigration policies of the Biden/Harris administration… it isn’t true… all to preserve the white male patriarchy hold on power… i saw this coming years ago… it is reaching the decisive point… the next three and a third years will be the pivot point or not…
… critical to stopping the authoritarian move is to enact federal voting rights legislation of some kind…
… i am feeling anxious about the coming day… anxious that there are too many things i should do and not enough time to do them… i will have to triage…
… K comes to weed the garden today… it will be a novel concept to have a well weeded garden…
… J and i talked a bit after the family call yesterday… we agreed that with current trends, we don’t expect J to last beyond October… my mood about that is somber… we are going where we are going… the goal is to get there with as little suffering as possible… certainly for J, but also for all of us around J… of course, accepting the inevitability of J’s death is accepting the inevitability of our own deaths… this makes it hard to face…
… time to be a bit more optimistic about the day!… i will get what needs to be done, done…
Bruce Springsteen, Born in the U.S.A
… this blog is all about the attention i pay… it is rare that i read a Pitchfork review from beginning to end, but BS is sort of my era… i like, sometimes love, his music, but i have never been an avid fan… truthfully, i have never been an avid fan of practically anything or anyone… i have my flirtations, but they all stop short of avid fandom, which always struck me as giving too much power to the heroes… excused you from being your own hero… it’s also rare that Pitchfork gives a 10 rating to an album, so i read, and kept reading to the end…
… it seems that BR enjoyed the stardom and didn’t…
… Born in the U.S.A. speaks about an America that i grew up along side of, but not in… it’s full of blue collar music that appealed to me as i rejected the white collar life my parents brought me up in as being sterile and boring… i have always been more comfortable in artistic communities and neighborhoods that sit on the edge between blue and white collar, if those things mean anything anymore…
… i may have to crank the album up later on…
First Thoughts
… Heather Cox Richardson made a post today… she usually takes Saturday night off… however, Rod Rosen testimony has begun… there has been news reporting that 45 directly pressured the Justice Department to overturn the election… it was barely resisted… but, it was resisted and now it will be testified about… will be interesting to hear what the reporting is in the coming weeks… is the noose tightening around 45?… will there be justice served?… or will our system allow him the weasel away?… HCR is hopeful… stay tuned…
… E and B had a movie night last night… wasn’t totally in the mood, but went anyway… it was fun… it was outdoors… most surprising was that i wasn’t bitten by mosquitoes… fans seemed to do the trick of keeping them away…
… had to change track on construction projects… did some research on PT lumber and the consensus seems to be that it is good to let the lumber do some drying before installing it… so i set it up with air circulation and we will wait and see… in the meantime, i plan to move on to the dining room trim… i have some boards and should be able to get it started…
… i am glad to have no commitments today, other than family zoom…
… i purchased a subscription to SetApp… i think it will be less expensive in the long run, once i switch Ulysses over to being managed through it… i also really like the NotePlan app for tracking what you plan to do, what you do… there is an Instagram uploader that may be moderately helpful in posting my images…
… yesterday i didn’t turn the TV on at all… if i had been home last night, i would have watched a movies, but that is my plan, little TV for the time that H is on BI…
… also, i continue to spend very little time on FB or Instagram… not missing it that much… feeling more at peace… it helps to not engage in the desire disappointment cycle of being liked or not…
Catherine Opie
… a retrospective volume of her photographs… the review talks about her prolific production, that it is normally organized chronologically, that in this volume, it is organized thematically… i am not sure i am as interested in the photographs as i am the words, prolific, chronological and thematic, all three of which apply to my work…
The Essential Haiku, Notes
… reading the notes, i learn or confirm that…
First Thoughts
… a long post from Heather Cox Richardson, the history of voting rights, the prospects for new legislation to protect rights… some hope that legislation will be formulated and passed, some hope that the Democrats will meet the dire situation… if they fail to pass legislation, the country is heading down the road of authoritarianism…
… curious movie last night… Test Pattern… about sexual assault, a young woman with a boyfriend goes out with a friend, gets drugged and raped… the drugs made her appear to be willing… though she was not… the bulk of the movie centers on her boyfriends insistence that she go to a hospital and have a rape kit administered, and where it gets interesting, the boyfriend is borderline controlling and possessive… it’s more important to him that she do it than to her… that she is black and he white adds further complexities to the situation… the movie is inconclusive about her and her relationship at the end… it’s interesting, critics seem to have loved the movie, audiences not so much, and i get that… intellectually i appreciate the movie, emotionally, i didn’t really connect…
… i decided yesterday to lay out a plan of what i thought i wanted to accomplish for the day, and then write down what i actually did… it was a mixed bag… things got done, things i had been intending to do, or needed to do, but not everything i planned…
Women Pushing the Boundaries of Image Making
©Carey Ellen, Crush and pull
… an interesting article on an exhibition of photo process imagery by women…
About Bull Fighting
A matador taunts a bull. © Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals Media
… i almost didn’t write about this photo essay on bull fighting… it moved me practically to tears… i have no interest in bullfighting i thought to myself… i’d rather not think about what we (humans) do to animals (and to one another)… but then, i thought, i have been powerfully affected… if this is not paying attention, then what is?… so, i share it… the photographs speak for themselves…
… i participate in killing chickens… we eat… we eat animals… i thought it important that i confront an animal and take its life if i were going to eat animals… it always saddens me, but it doesn’t stop me from doing it, because i eat animals and i should know what that is in all it’s facets…
… bull fighting is torturing animals for sport… this is obscene… like dog or cock fighting… that we should be entertained by the suffering of any creature is abhorrent… but people can be, too often are, abhorrent… we progress through the grace we offer the life we share the planet with and one another… that bullfighting still exists tells us we have a long way to go… the only hope for survival in the long term is offering that grace collectively, everywhere, always…
The Essential Haiku
… i have finished all the pages that are direct translations from works of, or about, the masters… the last piece excerpts from a record of Basho working with his students… even though Basho tells us earlier that we must write down the first lines to come into our minds… it becomes clear in this final piece that poems are revisited, refined… it is as one would expect… also, that poems were sometimes communal efforts…
… i will next read through the notes of the book as the first one illuminated the general acceptance of homosexual love in Basho’s time… i wonder when, if, that changed?…
… in a few days i have a new book coming… Rise Ye Sea Slugs!… what a title… it is a compilation of translations of well known haiku… multiple translations as, generally speaking, it is impossible to give a perfect representation of a haiku in translation…
First Thoughts
… H safely delivered to M… trip home quick, easy… dogs happy to be released, Fiona refusing her food… i will make dog food today…
… Heather Cox Richardson wrote about the Civil War today, the moment when the tide of it changed… the brutality of the war… the hatred that must have existed… we are not there yet in the present day… i hope we never get there…
… robotics on my mind… evolution on my mind… we will advance our ability to make machines regardless… i have long speculated that intelligence was moving forward through the machines we make… the problem with machines is the people who make them… they can do tremendous good, or tremendous harm… at present, it all depends on the people who commission and deploy them… i wrote a micro poem about this…
The world of robotics,
is the world of robotics—
and yet…
… in the format of the famous Issa haiku, The world of dew…
… the dogs don’t seem concerned about the absence of H…
… i wonder how the chocolates we brought to M and R were?… they certainly had interesting flavors and were beautiful enough…
** Jörg Colberg, On Art and Neo Liberal Society**
From The Merge by Sara Brincher Galbiati, Peter Helles Eriksen, and Tobias Selnaes Markussen
… watch this video demonstrating the current capabilities of robots created by Boston Dynamics…
… then read this…
… and if you need more encouragement, this…
_ But when the sum of it all — the (art) community — largely fails to respond to all the various challenges to our societies, democracies, and well being, then I’m left to wonder where it all went wrong._
Maybe it’s simply the fact that the world of art has become too enmeshed with the very people who are responsible for the challenges I just mentioned. Why or how? Simply follow the money.1
… the article is significant to me less for the book it reviews, which it pans, than for the conversation it starts, which to me is, wtf are we doing?…
Jorg Colberg, Into the Technological Sublime ↩︎
Basho On Poetry
… winding down to the end of The Essential Haiku…
The basis of art is change in the universe. What’s still has changeless form. Moving things change, and because we cannot put a stop to time, it continues unarrested. To stop a thing would be to halve a sight or sound in our heart. Cherry blossoms whirl, leaves fall, and the wind flits them both along the ground. We cannot arrest with our eyes or ears what lies in such things. Were we to gain mastery over them, we would find that the life of each thing had vanished without a trace.1
Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.2
… Basho promoting Panpsychism?…
Every form of insentient existence—plants, stones, or utensils—has its individual feelings similar to those of men3
… Learn from the Pine has a lot of wisdom… it comforts me because in general, i follow its proscriptions, not perfectly, not even admirably, but i follow them as best i can…
First Thoughts
… a text from J, during the night, they spoke to C who says J is slowing down considerably, not able to make and eat breakfast… they say they are glad that R and i will visit soon…
… exploring SetApp… i try to take a look at one new app a day, i have found two that seem worth my while, NotePlan in particular seems to be the task and planning app i’ve been waiting for all my life… combining note taking, task setting and calendar all together… it, combined with Ulysses should be enough to justify its cost… if i find one or two more that are useful, icing on the cake…
… today i take H over to M and R’s house, from there, they will spring M from rehab and take them back to Block Island… H will stay with M on the island for as long as it takes to be sure they are able to function, with or without help… or the end of the month, when they will have to be back to care for the dogs while i drive to Florida and back…
… Heather Cox Richardson’s post was about how the conservative stance on COVID19 (reinforcing vaccine disinformation, banning mask wearing and downplaying the virus altogether) is boomeranging on them as the Delta variant burns through the unvaccinated who are overwhelmingly the ones catching it, being hospitalized with it and dying from it… with any luck, conservative disenchantment with their leaders and happiness with the economic help the Biden/Harris administration has organized will lead to control of House and Senate remaining in the hands of Democrats… it would likely mean the end of the threat to democracy for the time being…
Guido Guidi
… another article by Brad Feuerhelm for ASX… this one on Guido Guidi’s Cinque Viaggi 1990-1998… another photographer who photographs the evidence of people much more than people themselves… just look at this landscape…
Guido Guidi, from Cinque Viaggi 1990-1998
… mentioned also in this article is Gerry Johansson, another of my photographer heroes… another who focuses much more on the evidence of people than the people themselves… i get my courage to move forward from these photographers… i understand them and it starts to occur to me… a hypothesis if you will… is the depiction of people much more prevalent in photography by women than in photography by men?… i am thinking i need to review more carefully the photography i love, and see what binds it together…
The Evidence of People, Not the People
… all of the photography work i am viewing this morning is of people… extremely heavy emphasis on people… i don’t photograph people and don’t seem to be in the mood to look at photographs of people… i much prefer the absence of people, in life, in the photographs i make… i do photograph the evidence of people, all the time… the evidence is more interesting to me than the people themselves, or at least, the evidence does not protest when i make a picture, does not present itself as a being that will get angry with me for intruding… and then this article on the work of Mark Templeton in ASX, by Brad Feuerhelm… and this image…
Mark Templeton from Ocean Front Property
Mark Templeton has taken notice. Though the refutation of another place is not the aim of this work, what Templeton suggests, by acknowledging the infernal desire to leave as quickly as possible and as far away as possible, is that what we are seeking is not the place itself, but rather the journey away from ourselves, and he is rightly critical of that practice. He has noted that we never seem happy enough with where we are. We have been produced and educated with this in mind. We litter our surfaces with the promise of water, and, without remorse or candor, we embark recklessly towards entropy inasmuch as we refuse to stop expanding our movements. All heat cools. All light fades. And yet it would be a shame, in this broad and beautiful geography, if we could not take time to measure ourselves against what is most precious: the home, the family, and the will to accept that our lives are fleeting no matter where our feet finally place themselves.1
… the emphasis i have placed on the one sentence above is because it so aligns with my experience of those close to me… what is is never good enough, and lives slip away, beautiful present moment by beautiful present moment, unnoticed because we are continually dreaming of some better, happier life down the road…
Mark Templeton from Ocean Front Property
… i love the above photograph… and would you believe that i prefer the decrepit urban landscape to the hot tub bliss depicted on the billboard?… i know, i’m weird… H will confirm that to you… she understands my preference, but has long wanted a hot tub…
… if my funds were limitless, or even less bounded than they are, i would buy this book… it looks very good and BF’s essay about it is good too…
Who Does That?
… someone is running a loud noisy machine, leaf blower?, at 5:30 AM!… who does that… there are chain saws too… i am wondering if a tree has fallen down and needs to be removed from the road… maybe… that would be the only acceptable explanation…
The Prose of Issa
… excerpts from “A Year of My Life (1819)…
… the interesting part being prose passages after which haiku have been inserted… as if what happened in the prose lead to the poem… or course, it could also be that the poem was written at some time in the past and inserted for it’s relevance to the moment described in the prose… Issa inserted one of his most famous poems after a passage about the death of his daughter…
The world of dew,
is the world of dew,
and yet, and yet—
… the prose in general seems to be a little banal, a little removed emotionally from what it talks about… i wonder if these journal entries seem the same to anyone who reads them?…
First Thoughts
… last night, just before going to bed, i let the dogs out… big commotion, one dog comes when called, the other doesn’t… go to investigate, the other dog is rubbing his face in the dirt, the air smells of skunk… sigh… second dog had to be bathed before going to bed… dog children… love them most of the time, damn annoying on occasion…
… we visited D and J yesterday, friends of H’s from the PBGV world… they wanted to meet Fiona and see what it might be like to have a GBGV… D has prostate cancer and the sense i got was that it wasn’t going well… D seemed depressed… it made me thoughtful…
… news broke about the release of the AG’s report investigating charges of sexual harassment by Andrew Cuomo… calls for his resignation or, if he refuses to, impeachment, began immediately… it has never occurred to me to harass any woman… i don’t understand men who do…
… Heather Cox Richardson talked about the Biden/Harris administration’s efforts to help impoverished people… at the beginning of the administration i thought that they needed to do enough that positively affected ordinary people’s lives that those people could be peeled away from 45… HCR thinks that is part of the plan too…
… i have been thinking that one of my shortcomings in life has been an inability to decide on big and deep efforts, then plan and execute them… i am going to change that… part of my problem is that i get lost in the weeds of the planning, and then fail to execute…
… tomorrow i take H to her brother’s house in CT and then come back without her… she and M will pick up M from rehab and take her out to Block Island… H will stay with her to make sure she is able to care for herself or has the help she needs… we don’t know how long that will take… while she is gone, i plan to get things done… i will rebuild the rear steps, paint the bay window, progress with the installation of trim in the dining room… i will tend the garden, work on my photography, and enjoy being on my own for a bit…