“photos”
101 posts under this tag.
The others cast themselves down upon the fragrant grass, but Frodo stood awhile still lost in wonder. It seemed to him that he had stepped through a high window that looked on a vanished world. A light was upon it for which his language had no name. All that he saw was shapely, but the shapes seemed at once clear cut, as if they had been first conceived and drawn at the uncovering of his eyes, and ancient as if they had endured for ever. He saw no colour but those he knew, gold and white and blue and green, but they were fresh and poignant, as if he had at that moment first perceived them and made for them names new and wonderful.
Have I mentioned how much I love wet, crisp, brisk mornings?
Rain season again. Wet and wondrous outside.
My grandfather, Luis Cardenas Chavez, died last Saturday from lung cancer. It was a struggle, a mourning, of many months, many of them at my house, at that room up there ↑.
We buried him yesterday, Father’s day here in Mexico. Next Thursday was to be his 85th birthday.
Maybe it was good that his agony ended but, me, all I see is the many meaningful centuries he could have lived. I don’t say that lightly. He had more life and more lives with him than anyone I’ve known and there was at least that much still inside him. He died young. Never without a reason to wake up every morning, today he won’t.
And I feel like I have to say it because only pleasantries and comforting lies were spoken thick and fast at his most Catholic funeral: he’s dead, absolutely annihilated, choked, nothing left of him. We’ve been robbed, someone precious and irreplaceable has been taken from us, for no reason at all, taken and shattered, and we are never getting him back.ELZR
We never wrote down his memories as we both once planned.ELZR Always thought there would be a better time later. There wasn’t. What most disappointed me though was myself and how I reacted to his sickness. Or rather, how I not reacted, how I retracted. Oh I helped along, but I did not fight, didn’t read, didn’t research. I never understood his sickness, his ailments, his medicine. It was the scientific, idealistic, techno-utopian thing to do and I left it undone, I muddled thru.
But, to my horror, on top and despite all the sadness, all the frustration, all the personal disappointment, there’s ChristinaWP-frantic, exhilarating sensafreedom thru and thru. At last. Just the six of us.
I felt so trapped in this house for so long. So unhappily submerged in rude relatives that diluted my family in their toxic, stupid undertows. Some days ago I realized sadly it would never be my home again. It was just a place all of a sudden. It’s time to go.
But for now I’m here. And I’m happy to. And it’s rain season again. Wet and wondrous outside.
He was a good man.
A Fair Ellen (noun) could be a roundabout, inefficient, sometimes extravagant and always pathetic behavior to get around a bug in a product. Particularly when it lingers on long after said bug has been fixed. From Bruce Tognazzini’s inspired collie metaphor.
Albert Payson Terhune, the author who taught the world to love collies (Lad, A Dog , et. al.), once wrote an article for the Saturday Evening Post (March 26, 1927 issue) about his beloved collie, Fair Ellen.
Terhune explained that Fair Ellen.. had been born blind, but learned to live quite happily, except for one small quirk:
If I stand beside her kennel yard and call to her to come and be put up, she does not approach me in a straight line, but along an imaginary path which has perhaps six or seven twists and turns.
This used to puzzle me, until one day I saw her run against a wheelbarrow which one of the men had left in the open patch of fairway between the house and her kennel. That was three years ago. Never since then does she come to that spot without making a careful detour around the imaginary barrow.
Her twisting course, along all familiar bits of ground, is due to her effort to skirt some box or rake or other obstruction which at some times she has struck against. She has preternatural memory for such things and for the precise spot in which once they were.
Users do the same thing. Users’ behavior will not necessarily change..[when the bug that brought that behavior into being is fixed]. Once people have learned something no longer works, once they have formed a new habit, no matter how inefficient that habit is, they tend to perpetuate it.
Why do we call something a “number”?: Well, perhaps because it has a “direct” relationship with several things that have hitherto been called number; and this can be said to give it an indirect relationship to other things we call the same name.
And we extend our concept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fiber on fiber. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fiber runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of the fibers.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical InvestigationsEEM
Always have loved them. Always have obsessed about them. I treasure my favorites and revisit them again and again—I could barely think without them. I have a tag for them in this blog (here) and I almost started “a collection of beautiful definitions” to go with my eemadges website (“a collection of beautiful descriptions”). A good definition more than justifies a whole book. A good book always has many good definitions in it. Good people always carry several good definitions with them—you just have to know how to tease them out.
And yet I seem to get into all kinds of tiresome, silly discussions when I try to share them with friends. Besides my not to be belittled incompetence as an explainer and my fabled monomanias, I believe a basic misunderstanding regarding their nature is at the heart of the matter.
You see, most people seem to never have moved over the idea of a definition as distilled truth—the one true essence which both captures everything that should be captured and leaves nothing that shouldn’t be left out. Definitions as platonic ideals—the perfect divine forms of which we only see shadows. The one golden fiber that runs trough all the thread.
The problem with this view, of course, is that it is crippling in its obsession with perfection. It intimidates and nurtures ridiculous expectations. If we had had to delay mathematics until we had a “perfect” definition of number we would still be waiting.
In their supposed perfection, definitions only become cages. And we easily get to the point when not only it isn’t believed that things like “love”, “mind”, “conscience”, or “happiness” could ever be defined (again, as if there was one true definition to rule them all), but the very possibility is viewed with dread. Dread that what once was magic and alive is cramped and crippled into a cage.
A much more interesting view of definitions, in my opinion, is to regard them as tools for thought, and as such, to value them on their usefulness and pick the one appropriate for the task at hand—platonic truth is only one of the many, many things we can ask of them. Most importantly, we ought to recognize that we need them—a brain unaided can do only so much. Thinking without them is like hammering with your bare fists—it’s painful and ineffectual. Yes, they are only one (verbal) kind of tool and we run the risk of starting to see everything as a nail, but they are still one of the most basic and powerful tools we have and they have so far been needlessly feared and vilified.
Definitions are semantic flashlights, casting light on some meaning corners, shadow on some others. That everything be alight is only one criteria (ultimately impossible; only emptiness can be shadelessly illuminated), there are others—that it be bright, that it be dim, that it illuminate (or obscure!) a particular patch, that it be pristinely white, that it tint its subjects with its color, that it be diffuse, that it be focused, that it be favorable, that it be unfavorable… We say, teasingly, that an American is a “man with two hands and four wheels” not because we believe that it happens to be a perfect embodiment of what it means to be an American, but because we believe it casts them in an interesting light.
So the effort to define “play” or “capital” or “freedom” is not to pin the butterfly down and put it in formaldehyde, it’s to find new ways to look at it, new sources of joy and understanding. Definitions do not diminish their subjects, they reveal them.
I’m most definitely an idiot in at least Cortazar’s sense—always able to enthuse about anything and everything. Sometimes the excitement loop becomes critical and, a happygasm reached, I need simply contemplate the object of my devotions to reach instantaneous paroxysmal contentment. There are many examples of such cases in this blog (at its best moments it is merely a compilation of them) and here are the 3 most recent:
1. This glass. Seriously. It’s thick and stocky, heavy and curvy, velvety (in that strange way good glass can be) and transparent. Plus, it has an extremely low center of gravity (thanks to its glassy booty) that gives ponderous gravitas to the gassiest soda. I won’t drink in anything else. That all this heavenly goodness was less than a buck a piece (we’ve eight of’em) only adds to my marvel—a fragile monument to capitalism and division of labor. The photo makes absolutely no justice to its glistening beauty.
2. Mac OSX Tiger’s Wallpaper. The asymmetry, the restraint in means, the abstract yet natural forms—sometimes petals sometimes hyperbolas; sometimes tears in the canvas, sometimes valleys, sometimes hills—with their rolling, blue gradients, their digital, velvety textures; the tridimensional light play of twodimensional curves—a perfect background, ideally fitted to highlight whatever is atop it, to be discrete, serene and becoming, never flashy, never tiring. Because make no mistake, this is a designELZR, it has a purpose: to be a desktop wallpaper. And it easily trumps the cloy BlissWP, the over-eager photos, the dull colors, the duller patterns (ugh). As far am I concerned it is the best graphic design of the late twentieth century.
3. This quote. Such words. Some four centuries old and still as haunting.
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
John Donne WP, “Meditation XVII” of Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions
Fruits being another perennial fetish of mine this transfixed me. Of course.
I’m so set in my (fetishy) ways. Again, I feel compelled to say that I’m not on the look out for such pictures. They come my way. Though come on, maybe I should be…
The responsible for the baci saffici is the most talented Alessandro Pautasso.
A ”Jew” car plate (they’re assigned sequentially here in Guadalajara so there’ve been a lot of Jews lately):
A rather machista ad for pickups:
And, well, the bizarre machitoWP:
There’s been a recent, unnacounted-for change in me regarding architecture. Never having so much as glanced at it before, I now found it supremely soothing, liberating—it suddenly seems the most important thing in the world. This computer mockup of the Louvre Abu Dhabi with its canopy of light, for instance, has had me transfixed all day. See NYT’s feature, The Louvre’s Art: Priceless. The Louvre’s Name: Expensive.
|
RSS
email
