Happy Juneteenth! 

Penkiln Burn - Job No. 41: "Take a map of your locality. Draw a circle on the map. The circle can be any size. The centre point of the circle must be your home.

Then bake a cake. Travel to a home on the circumference of the circle taking the cake with you. Knock on the door. If there is no answer knock on a neighbours door. If the door is answered say "I have baked you a cake, here it is." They may think you are mad or bad. You are neither. Give them the cake. Go back home.

Bake and deliver cakes to different homes on the circle whenever you want. It's a friendly thing to do." 

Happy Birthday Gena Rowlands
"An aura, a demeanor, a port. And a walk. 'That's true, I know how to walk,' she chuckles. " 

<$Xvarenah$> "Imagine, though, that this were a Commons--an ecosystem--in which variety itself is seen as a benefit. We might even put up with a slightly less efficient economy, just to hang on to things we care about for themselves. Yeah, think of that."

pseudopodium on Ulysses-- "We lose all sense of perspective. We might even come to believe that there was some innate possibility for beauty and joy in the mere inescapability of human limits and plasticity of human vision. Almost like we wouldn't mind being one ourselves. "

Feverfew Pyrethrum Parthenium (Sm.). Featherfew. Featherfoil. Flirtwort. Bachelor's Buttons.  

The audience is the enemy
"'One day people love you more than they've ever loved anything in the world. And the next, you're in front of a courthouse dancing on top of a car.'

In case the audience didn't get the reference to Michael Jackson, he said, 'You know why Michael Jackson's had so many surgeries? He wanted you to like him more.'

Chappelle, obviously, will not pander to his fans. 'You guys are the worst listeners in the country,' he told the Sacramento audience. 'It's like 'The Silence of the Lambs.' Without the silence.'"

the peerless Edmund Wilson reviews Ulysses: "At his worst he recalls Flaubert at his worst--in L'Education Sentimentale. But if he repeats Flaubert's vices--as not a few have done--he also repeats his triumphs--which almost nobody has done. Who else has had the supreme devotion and accomplished the definitive beauty? " 

a special treat for conossieurs of deep ick--Peggy Noonan at the Gipper obsequies.

"The cortege was coming toward the steps. We looked out the window: a perfect tableaux of ceremonial excellence from every branch of the armed forces. Mrs. Thatcher watched. She turned and said to me, 'This is the thing, you see, you must stay militarily strong, with an undeniable strength. The importance of this cannot be exaggerated.'

To my son, whose 17th birthday was the next day, she said, 'And what do you study?' He tells her he loves history and literature. 'Mathematics,' she says. He nods, wondering, I think, if she had heard him correctly. She had. She was giving him advice. 'In the world of the future it will be mathematics that we need--the hard, specific knowledge of mathematical formulae, you see.' My son nodded: 'Yes, ma'am.' Later I squeezed his arm. 'Take notes,' I said. This is history."

Edna O'Brien on Joyce--
"WB Yeats, who had met Joyce in Dublin in Joyce's scalding youth, said he resembled 'a soft tiger cat'. " 

Kitten on a Motorbike

Mount Benson Preservation Society trying to save as much as they can of our local mountain, in the process of being privatised, logged and subdvided. 

A Report on Pigeon Aerial Photography 

Happy Bloomsday!  

lovely Victorian Bookbinding 

EJ Hughes & The BC Landscape 

acronym of the month from otherwise infuriating (on both sides) "Let the Poor Smoke" article in the Guardian-- "Forest (Freedom of the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco) "

a painting by Hughes of Nanaimo's Departure Bay (not this one, of Ladysmith Harbour) recently fetched $322,000 at auction. 

short article on Malaspina: the Hotel, the Murals & the Madness of Modernity with no illustration of said murals (by EJ Hughes and others)sadly...
"Early in February 1927, the directors organized a competition, with a prize of $25, for a suitable name for their new hotel. Hundreds of contestants responded, offering names such as the Alhambra, Bayview, Gibraltar, Hub City, King George, Lucky Strike, Majestic, Pleasant, Rio Grande, and Unity. But among a long list of names, Malaspina was the clear favourite: indeed, so many contestants submitted the winning name that the directors were in a quandary as to how to divide the prize money. "

Animals Dream by Jerry Pethick: "The bee-hive like pattern (I later learned was referred to as hexagonal stacking) had always seemed to me to be a satisfying formulation of like parts, marbles on a tray, loose ball-bearings rolling together, BB pellets piling themselves in a box; the pattern, we would learn later, that made up the fly's eye, and the honey-comb. This last holds a fascination with the bees' social organisation, with its reduced individualism depending on the similar traits of component parts being of the same importance, same scale, same shape. The architecture of a society, the near order of swarming bees." 

Fruit Dots, an old poem of mine, derived from a Dover edition of "How to Know the Ferns" by Frances Theodora Parsons, borrowed from the Britannia Library in East Vancouver, late 80's. 

"Interesting contrast created by the convergence of the San Francisco Bay (top right), Cargill Salt Ponds (right) and a more natural wetlands area (left)."
(from Kite Aerial Photography) 

Martin's Strange "Dream" includes ex-NDP premier Ujal Dosanjh

"Hazen Argue was never forgiven for bolting to the Liberals after he lost the NDP leadership to Tommy Douglas. Dosanjh faces a similar shunning. Wearing the C of captaincy on a political sweater brings with it certain expectations, even if one's ardour for the party wanes: Bite your lip, step away from the fray, pay your annual membership, and await your federal sinecure. "

also: Hazen Argue is my favorite name for a politician EVER.

Campi Phegri "Eruption of Vesuvius at Night 1776" from Accent on Images: The Language of Illustrated Books (thanksPlep) 

Garfield - corporate whore?
"In the late 1980s, Garfield plush toys with suction-cup feet were so popular than criminals broke into cars to steal them and sell them on the black market. Davis, protective of his creation's unobjectionable blandness, knew he had to act fast before people began to hate Garfield. 'We accepted the royalty checks, but my biggest fear was overexposure,' he told Entertainment Weekly in 1998. 'We pulled all plush dolls off the shelves for five years.'" 

Bloomsday fry-up:
"'He left in disgust, for Christ's sake', says John Waters, author and Irish Times political columnist. ' Ulysses was about Ireland but it was not for Ireland. You could even say that it was against Ireland because Joyce was alienated from, and by, Ireland. That seems to have been conveniently overlooked in all the Bloomsday blather. It's as if we can reclaim him by cooking the mother of all fry-ups in his name.' " 

William Basinski: The Disintegration Loops: "But as the tape winds on over the capstans, fragments are lost or dulled, and the music becomes a ghost of itself, tiny gasps of full-bodied chords groaning to life amid pits of near-silence. "