Goose barnacle

"Goose barnacles gave rise to one of the strangest of animal beliefs. The heart-shaped shell, or "capitulum", is a chalky-white in colour and has black lines, which were thought to resemble the head of the barnacle goose Branta leucopsis. Because barnacle geese rarely nest in Britain no-one had ever seen their eggs or nests. It was supposed, therefore, that the geese "grew up on the planks of ships" and the birds finally emerged clothed in feathers and flew away. This curious theory also provided a convenient way round the church's ban on eating meat or flesh on Fridays. As the barnacle goose was obviously "not born of the flesh" but from a barnacle, they could be eaten not just on Fridays but throughout Lent!"

thanks K. for the riddle of the Barnacle Goose



"I'm found under water held fast by my mouth,
Swirl of the sea-tides goes sweeping beneath me

Fathom-deep sunk under surges I grew.
Bending roof of billows above me:

My body adrift on a floating beam.
You'll find me alive if you lift me and free me.

Dull is my coat as I come from the deep,
But straight I am decked with streamers of white,

Bright when the freshening breeze brings me from underseas
Heaves me up and urges me far

O'er the sea-bath salty.
Say what I'm called."

*

"There are founde in the north parts of
Scotland, and the Ilands adjacent,

called Orchades, certain trees,
whereon doe growe certaine shell fishes,

of a white colour tending to russet;
wherein are conteined little living

creatures: which shells in time of maturitie
doe open, and out of them grow those little living things

which falling into the water
doe become foules, whom we call Barnakles . . .

but the other that do fall upon the land,
perish and come to nothing:

this much by the writings of others, and also from the mouths
of the people of those parts...."


*

"A species of wild goose
nearly allied to the Brent Goose,

found in the arctic seas
(where alone it breeds),

and visiting the British coasts in winter.
This bird, of which the breeding-place was long unknown,

was formerly believed to be produced
out of the fruit of a tree growing

by the sea-shore, or itself to grow
upon the tree attached by its bill

(whence also called Tree Goose),
or to be produced out of a shell

which grew upon this tree,
or was engendered as a kind of mushroom

or spume from the corruption
or rotting of timber in the water."



 

bookshelf from Looney Tunes Hidden Gags
 

rob mclennan's blog asks the increasingly relevant question--

"Is there anyone out there brave enough to publish a trade edition of Victor Coleman?"
 

nice piece on Harold Pinter's fine acting--not mentioned here are a couple of small bits in Losey's "Accident" and "The Servant"--

"Pinter's role in (Beckett's) Catastrophe allows him to plumb the depths of this theme further. John Gielgud plays the Protagonist--a political prisoner standing limp and pliant on the stage of a theater--while a Director (Pinter) and his Assistant prepare him for a public exhibition. Pinter orders minute changes to Gielgud's posture and clothing to make his appearance more ridiculous (and thus more humiliating). "Raise the shins," he orders. "Higher. Bare the knees." As Pinter speaks these words, he doesn't snarl, nor does he betray any anxiety. Degrading the Protagonist is all in a day's work. The power of Pinter's performance lies in how little such degradation affects the Director. "

"Don't Let Anthing Get Between Us!"--

my favorite Captain Beefheart - Clear Spot

"Big Eyed Beans From Venus. At last.

THAT slide intro. THOSE rasped blues vocals that the Captain seemingly pulls up from his feet. "Distant Cousins -- there's a limited supply!" The rhythm climbs in steadily under the riff with a stereo split of guitars and some fantastic staccato drum rolls. For the next minute or so you're just getting used to how good it sounds when the break hits you and what happens next is the highlight of not just Clear Spot, but CB & The Magic Band's entire recordings.

"Mr. Zoot Horn Rollo, hit that long leaning note and let it float". The sound of Zoot's guitar is just a mind-blowing heavenly buzz.

The Magic Band crash back with a heavy metal bragger that'll have your head banging and feet tapping.

A real power & energy gets conveyed while Beefheart delivers Freudian lyrics about wallets & purses.

I know I'm labouring a point, but even though this is heavy rock stuff, no one could compose or deliver it as uniquely. I mean, for starters there's the drum roll (ta,ta,ta,ta,ta,ta) that lifts "Big Eyed beans.." onto an even higher level. Violin style guitar is a strangely delicate but effective backing as CB's howls about being "on the right track." and "No SNAFU." Perfect. The whole section finishes with an earnest, electrifying cry of "Check these out! Don't Let Anything Get Between Us!", more fantastic drumming from Marimba and a chorus that is one of the finest recorded moments in rock.

And what d'ya know, but then we're back to the start with a slightly different rhythm. A gradual build up gets it back to fever pitch before the Captain's pay off line with a gruff cry of "Big Eyee---ed Beans From Veee-nus" and Zoots last long, floating note. Astounding!"

DANTE'S INFERNO (1935), with Spencer Tracy--

"Amazingly enough, at least one part of the movie does end up in hell; a six-minute montage more than half-way through the movie gives the viewer a vision of hell, and it makes for the highlight of the movie and gives it its most special moment. This is a good thing, since despite the fact that it's well acted all around and has high production values (particularly during the spectacular final twenty minutes of the movie), the story itself is fairly predictable. Nonetheless, horror fans may well want to tune in for the hell sequence; it really is quite amazing."

 

Philip Pullman on the upcoming "Paradise Lost" movie--

"There's also the problem of what to do with the verse. The majesty of the language is a huge part of what the poem is about -- lines like "High on a throne of royal state, which far Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind, Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand Showers on her kings barbaric pearl and gold ..." would be sadly missed by any lover of the poem, but what do you do with them in a film? They're stage directions: the next words are "Satan exalted sat," and you could just show that by -- showing it. It would be a pity to reduce that poetry to a mere brief for the designer. So I look forward to this project with great interest, and some hope, but a little scepticism too."


 

from A Sportsman's Sketches, by Ivan Turgenev trans. by Constance Garnett--

"And how fair is this same forest in late autumn, when the snipe are on the wing! They do not keep in the heart of the forest; one must look for them along the outskirts. There is no wind, and no sun; no light, no shade, no movement, no sound: the autumn perfume, like the perfume of wine, is diffused in the soft air; a delicate haze hangs over the yellow fields in the distance. The still sky is a peacefully untroubled white through the bare brown branches; in parts, on the limes, hang the last golden leaves. The damp earth is elastic under your feet; the high dry blades of grass do not stir; long threads lie shining on the blanched turf, white with dew. You breathe tranquilly; but there is a strange tremor in the soul. You walk along the forest's edge, look after your dog, and meanwhile loved forms, loved faces dead and living, come to your mind; long, long slumbering impressions unexpectedly awaken; the fancy darts off and soars like a bird; and all moves so clearly and stands out before your eyes. The heart at one time throbs and beats, plunging passionately forward; at another it is drowned beyond recall in memories. Your whole life, as it were, unrolls lightly and rapidly before you: a man at such times possesses all his past, all his feelings and his powers--all his soul; and there is nothing around to hinder him--no sun, no wind, no sound...."

 

(A Sportsman's Notebook)

Walking down Minetown
I surprised the covey of quail
you kindly braked for last spring--

grown some since! it starts
as a scare almost--boom--low low note
somewhere inside the startled flapping

a blossom in the thorax
a mirror-ball flash of upturned leaves,
no time for even a decent recount,

less than ten, more than four
but quail for sure, that short take off leap
and then low bottle neck cormorant

underwater plunge about a foot up
from the tangled thirty degree slope then gone
but however fast its the sonic boom

that arrives just after you do,
and anyone can learn to do that--
like that Aussie woman on the newschannel

you can dehumdify
the room until it matches
you preferred level of discourse--

the earnest western tweet
swept beneath laquered feedback
with a smooth adjustment of the wrist,

the windows thrown open
onto a clean clear drink of water
forever and forever and forever.
 

Schoolyard Rhymes

"Donnie Macca, Ronnie Macca, biscuit.
I shoo shiwawa, biscuit.
Ice cream soda with a cherry on top.
Ice cream soda with a cherry on top.
Mama mama, I feel sick.
Call for the doctor, quick quick quick."

Two younger girls, a little coyly, offer an alternative:

"There once was a young English girl called
I shoo shiwawa [they touch their eyes and shoes].
All the boys on the football team
Loved I shoo shiwawa.
How was your boyfriend, all right?
Down in the fish shop, last night.
What did he die of? Raw fish.
How did he die, then? Like this ..."

But where do such verses originate? "Someone just brings them in in the morning and everybody just learns them," explains one of the "I shoo shiwawa" girls. They are passed on orally, which accounts for the "Chinese whispers" nature of the local variations: 21 years ago in Hampshire, Iona Opie heard a rather different version that began, "I know a little Dutch girl called Hie Susie Anna...". Lyrics also differ according to region. The Hackney rhyme, "I went to a Chinese restaurant", is equally familiar among Ingrow's children, but with no mention of Andy Pandy."

sleeve notes from the late John Fahey's great 1983 Railroad I

"FRISCO LEAVING BIRMINGHAM


Memory of a steam train I saw one night a long time ago. I watched it firing up, picking up speed and then barreling through Bukka White territory (North- eastern Mississippi) to Memphis. Destination, Springfield, Missouri. Where it went, it was dynamite. Real name, Saint Louis-San Francisco Railway Company. But it never got anywhere near "Frisco." It had a government charter to build out that far west, but it sold the charter to the Sante Fe. Now it's part of the Burlington Northern
Empire.


ONEONTA


There's a railroad yard there. It's part of the Delaware and Hudson R.R. Corp. I saw this line in 1948 as I was leaving Secret Caverns at Howe's Cave, New Tork, I love the D &H logo, and there's something eerie about that valley it runs through along the Sesquehanna from Albany to Binghamton. Valley of Desolation. Something frightening about that road. The sunsets around there are pure pantheism. Grandma
Moses, Hudson River School and books by William Kennedy. I go through there every summer. I have to.


SUMMER CAT BY MY DOOR


The Chessie. I grew up beside it. Back then the Cat was called the Baltimore and Ohio. It went by HER house on the suburban line. I was warned about the Cat and what it could do to you on a summer afternoon. And believe me, it did it to me. It was hot and I was only 14. It got me. There was simply nothing I could do. And
nobody could help. Nobody. But, it didn't kill me. Not completely anyway. In the end, of course, the Cat or the Dog will get you. Just like the Cat got HER too. I know this line too well to let you off with a cute aphorism. I know what can happen. Watch out.


STEVE TALBOT ON THE KEDDIE WYE


First he worked on the Espee, later the Western Pacific. He used to tell me hair-raising stories about running down out of the mountains and hitting the Wye and the tunnel at Keddie, California going west. Feather River Route. Now, I hear the whole town's for sale. Nevertheless, the Union Pacific bought the W.P. Something's up.


AFTERNOON ESPEE THROUGH SALEM


I live here by the mailine. Can't get away from it. I hear it all day and all night. A great chord, but what the hell is it? Not the same as the Great Canadian (minor) Triad. One of the tunes here I learned from Bukka White who was a good friend of mine and who was also obsessed with trains. (They got him at the end.) The verse
ran:

This train I ride,
It don't burn no coal,
Oh, it don't burn no coal


I should have asked him before he died: Was he singing about a diesel - or a "spiritual" train, or what? But the question only occurred to me too late. We get a lot of U.P. engines and cabs on the S.P. mainline here because of a pooling arrangement which the two railroads have. They meet in Portland. The "Friendly" is talking merger with the Cat. If they do that, I'll be back home again. The Cat is following me. See what I mean? You can't get away from them. No way out really. It's just a matter of time.


ENIGMAS AND PERPLEXITIES OF THE NORFOLK AND WESTERN


Always on the edge of my habitat, my periphery. Where does it come from? Where does it go? I have the impression that at night it changes its road beds and changes where it comes and goes. It won't stay still. Not like the other roads at all. It's irrational. You might wake up some morning and find it going by your house - or through your backyard. And then the next day it's gone! Sometimes it's there and sometimes it's not. What more can I say?


CHARLIE BECKER'S MEDITATION


Once he stayed up very late and thought about things. Maybe more than once. I wonder if he came to any conclusions. He's a conductor on the Mount Hood Railway, a branch line of the Union Pacific. Neat guy.


MEDLEY: IMITATION TRAIN WHISTLES/PO' BOY


Bukka White and I co-authored Po' Boy. He sang this song and played it in open G (Spanish). I arranged it so I could play the tune and the accompaniment in open D major. Not the same song as "Poor Boy A Long Ways From Home" which I have recorded elsewhere. Bukka got these two songs mixed up too, occasionally.


LIFE IS LIKE A MOUNTAIN RAILROAD


I ask you, is it?


DELTA DOG THROUGH THE BOOK OF REVELATION


This song rises off the Yazoo-Delta tracks (ICG now). They're very hot in the Northwest Mississippi bottom land. When I see the sun going down on the flat orange horizon, I know it's waiting for me. If you ever see it you'll never be the same. Charley Patton knew all this, but he got caught. He saw the "Dog" in front of the evening sun once. And that's what got him. And it may get me too. "

Oceans of Kansas

"In my opinion, one of the more interesting areas in the Prehistoric Journey is what is referred to as the Kansas seashore.... the eastern edge of a vast ocean during the Permian Period.... Fossils from the Hamilton Quarry and Elmo Insect Beds of Kansas are well represented in the exhibit."
 

The Virtual Silurian Reef

"During the Silurian Period in earth history, 425 million years ago, when much of North America was covered by a shallow, tropical sea, reefs flourished in the area now occupied by Wisconsin and Illinois. This site uses these reefs as a vehicle for students to learn general principles, local details, and environmental significance of the study of the ancient past."
 

Siluriana

"Among the best known geologists of his time, Roderick Impey Murchison had no aversion to fame, wealth, priority or mixing with European nobility. He also had a well-earned reputation for browbeating his colleagues.

Murchison named the Silurian, now understood to be one of the earlier rock formations deposited in the Paleozoic Era. Once named, Murchison expected the Silurian to get its due--from everyone. In an 1839 letter to a colleague, Murchison complained that a fellow geologist failed to "do justice to my Siluriana." A few years later, he recounted giving John Phillips "MY MIND for suppressing the title of my work in his new book." People who knew Murchison well could see this coming. When he presented a paper announcing the Silurian, a fellow geologist dryly remarked, "I can foresee the fate of geology for the next eight years--half of the globe will become Silurian."

from The standard geologic column--

Roderick Impey Murchison, born 1792 (died on this day in 1871, discoverer of the Silurian & Permian layers)

"began his study of the Transition at the unconformity and worked his way down through its strata unfolding these and ordering them as he went. He paid much attention to the fossils in the strata and used them to correlate the strata between exposures. The system he described he named the Silurian (for a tribe, the Siluries, that had inhabited the area at the time of the Roman conquest). In 1839, he published in his first monumental account of the Silurian System. Murchison was knighted in 1846 for his geological contributions and was unstoppable in his adding ever older layers of the Transition rock to his Silurian System. These he announced in successive editions of his work Siluria (5th ed. 1872). His efforts came to intrude upon the work that Sedgwick had taken upon himself which was to work upward from the base of the Transition formation. Adam Sedgwick (1785-1873) began his study of the Transition in the most mountainous part of Wales, which is its north and where, from Wernerian reasoning he would surely find the oldest strata in contact with the Primitive. He would work his way up through the Transition strata. The first formation he mapped in detail he called the Bala Limestone. In the company of Murchison, he noted that the fossils in these were similar to those of the Caradoc Sandstone Formation in Murchison's field area. However, Murchison used Lyell statistical method to assign age by fossil content, and the more contorted limestone and slaty nature of the graywacke rocks in Sedgwick's area decided them (by Wernerian reasoning) that these were of different age. The rocks in Sedgwick's field area were not very fossiliferous. To order the strata he relied mostly on lithology and the "strike" (from the German Streichen and which tells of Elie de Beaumont's influence) of units to correlate between nearby exposures. Use of the principle of superposition to order strata was made difficult by their folding (he coined the word synclinorium for an area of folds in which younger strata are exposed centrally). Acrimony arose when Murchison changed his mind and made the Caradoc and Bala age correlatives and then proceeded to add layers below to his Silurian system. in the faunas. However, in 1852, Sedgwick's paleontological assistant established a clear difference between the faunas in the upper and lower beds of the Carodoc. Also, careful regional mapping found that a angular unconformity (hard to see locally as all is folded) divides the Carodoc and the Bala Limestone Formation. This break in the rock record became the recognized bottom boundary of Silurian in Wales when, in 1879, Lapworth formally proposed the name Ordovician for the time represented locally by the Lower Bala and Carodoc Formations including a few of the strata in contact below. The name Devonian derives from a Romano-British tribe that once lived in the Bala District of North Wales. Beneath the Devonian is a slaty formation called the Lingula Flags and below this graywackes that contain the distinctive trilobite Paradoxides. These were part of the sequence that Murchison had originally included in his Cambrian (derived from the Latin name for Wales). And so they are called, which posthumously settles the squabbles of the erstwhile friends."

blissblog

""Where you're at" and "where you're from" both seem to have things in their favour, though. And it's also the case that whatever "at" you're, er, at, will always carry traces of the "from" that was your departure point. C.f. Puff Diddy as sampled by Roll Deep: "sometimes I don't think you motherfuckers understand where I'm coming from, where I'm trying to GET TO." Bryan Ferry with the traces of Geordie accent lingering in his croon. David Sylvian growing up in Catford, his real name David Batt. Sun Ra's belief that he's from Saturn inseparable from the alien-ation of being in born in Birmingham, Alabama."


 

(A Letter from Hammertown to the Bottom of the East River)

Well screw you
Albert Ayler,
it is so about me--

if I could
leap the pommelhorse
of self I wouldn't

have failed gym,
let alone the real horses
I pemmicaned on field trips,

the chicken pavilions,
veal pens, the eels
I stashed without appetite, Creeley

reminds us
that all heat is derived
from some animal,

that deliberate misreading
ends in disappointment,
like Burgess Meredith

as Borges--
libraries are for losers,
no more than a bus passenger

controls the route
can we be said
to skate between the periods &

you & Shepp
& all the armies of death metaldom
could no more wake Enitharmon

than a cheap brass clock
in an aluminum pail
struck by lightning.

Death Watch at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

"He's like a zombie some days, walking around in a trance," says one aide who, for obvious reasons, asks not to be identified. "Other times he launches into angry outbursts, cussing out anybody who gets near him."

The Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club on the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn NY are having a big blues and bbq bash on the 27th. My first ever walk in NYC, ten years ago, the day I lost my heart to Brooklyn basically , took in the canal environs, now much changed...

(The Fourth War)

Oh its all great fun
in the corn maze
until someone gets lost--

earth art,
crop circles without
the laughs, digging

around in Drumheller
for Beefheart's
"dinosaur cold"--

inside the Holy Mountain
midsummer light
etches your profile

onto plywood as you sleep.
The assumption is that
the big important shapes, say

where shotgun
overlaps with two-stroke
to define rural metrosexuality--

Richard Boone in
Have Gun Will Travel
on a pimped out

Triumph on the Parkway,
raw from the abrasions
of the English Leather soap label,

an angled mustache
that still reads "ex-officer"
from Victoria north to Campbell River,

whose neoprene longjohns
enable him to tough it out
until November,

or where rising fuel costs
temporarily trump
the fear of cresote & coalsmoke

to re-enable the choking fogs
that had disappeared
with the industrial base--

that all of this is safely tracked
from space, indeed
to be lost is ultimately

economic, those people
under the rubble assumed
their cell phones

would save them, an island
held in place
with mirrors, they

can hear you, they
can see you, they
just can't help you.
 

James Wolcott

"If it looks as if Cheney has to resign and Bush himself enters the Nixon danger zone, we'll hear the same frets and cries from the pundit shows about the country being torn apart and Americans losing faith in their government. But it isn't the country that will be torn apart by Plamegate any more than the country was torn apart during Watergate (which provided daily thrilling news entertainment value that bound citizens together); it's the Washington establishment that will be torn apart. And it should be torn apart. It's failed the country, and it's played by its own rules for too long, and "criminalizing politics" is exactly what should be done when political criminals deceive a nation into a war with Judith Miller serving as the Angie Dickinson to their Rat Pack and Richard Cohen auditioning for the part of Joey Bishop. "

handy guide to Pumpkin Festivals & weigh offs: I can't believe I missed the Shady Mile one in Nanaimo... 

Rue Hazard has a lovely post today tying together Romare Bearden, Richard Hell, Samuel Johnson & Mary Magdalene.

"Betty (from Permanent Collection)" by Tim Davis

""All art ends up as photographs," Tim Davis has pointed out, "and in a strange misalignment, most of those photographs depict only the artworks' images, not the fact of their material presence." Tim Davis' new photographs of paintings are phenomenological, relishing in the materiality of the paint and the history and labor embedded in the canvas. Made in American museums, they are photographed from oblique angles so light from existing museum sources changes the often-reproduced meaning of these works, adding light to familiar narratives, and blotting out anticipated images. In a move unfamiliar to photography, the light in these pictures is often used to obscure, as well as to illumine."

hunting around--a possible visit in mind--to find the present-day location of the site of the Aaron Burr/Alexander Hamilton duel I found the fine Weehawken Time Machine site, which had plenty of information and many fine images, including this one of "The Gang at Butch Wosorki's Bar, 1920's-1930's"
 

"Amanita muscaria reposing by the river, Sapperton, B.C." from Anodyne
 

don't miss Frank Rich: It's Bush-Cheney, Not Rove-Libby

" As we learn in 'Bush's Brain,' bad things (usually character assassination) often happen to Bush foes, whether Ann Richards or John McCain. On such occasions, Mr. Bush stays compassionately above the fray while the ruthless Mr. Rove operates below the radar, always separated by 'a layer of operatives' from any ill behavior that might implicate him. 'There is no crime, just a victim,' Mr. Moore and Mr. Slater write of this repeated pattern.

This modus operandi was foolproof, shielding the president as well as Mr. Rove from culpability, as long as it was about winning an election. The attack on Mr. Wilson, by contrast, has left them and the Cheney-Libby tag team vulnerable because it's about something far bigger: protecting the lies that took the country into what the Reagan administration National Security Agency director, Lt. Gen. William Odom, recently called 'the greatest strategic disaster in United States history.'"