September

These photographs were taken from one of my favorite spots on earth, a dam that holds back a local reservoir. A couple of days before, the tiny rock shown in the second photo, the surviving remnant of what was once a hill before the area was inundated, was crowded with scores of resting cormorants. Following signals known only to them, as the sun began to fall they rose in clusters of five or ten and passed close above my head, their wings beating audibly as they headed towards the setting sun. By nightfall the rock was bare.

Tourist advisory

This is why you should always keep a decent set of maps in your glove compartment: you're driving along, just hoping to get home by dark, but the road is looking more and more unfamiliar, was that a rice paddy you just passed?, and all of a sudden you're hurtling down the long hallway of an apartment building, there's laundry waving on lines above your head, you hit the brakes too late to stop the car from plummeting into the coal cellar. So you climb out your car door and look up at the woman who's leaning over the railing looking down at you, hands on hips and shouting "hey, here's another one," and soon you're running, running, but it does no good, they'll catch up with you sooner or later, and what's worse, your supper is cold.

Other Nations

Henry Beston:

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

The Outermost House

Susan Goodnight

It might be your light, it might be your front door
It might be the last time, I don't know
Something's on your mind
Something's on your mind

I stayed away 'til I knew you'd already phoned
You're not out walking, nobody's home
Something's on your mind
Something's on your mind

Come by my house, stand by the backyard gate
Somebody's early, somebody's late
Something's on your mind
Something's on your mind

Susan, goodnight
Susan, goodnight
Goodnight
Susan, goodnight

Is there any vocalist more improbable, and more underappreciated, than Robert Ray, professor at the University of Florida and the author of titles like A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980 and How a Film Theory Got Lost and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies? Here he sings the last cut from (to date) the last Vulgar Boatmen album, Opposite Sex. At a minute and forty-one seconds the song is easy enough to overlook, leaving aside the fact that since Opposite Sex was torpedoed by its own label shortly after its release in 1995 few people are likely to have heard it all. It doesn't assert much of anything, it doesn't manipulate the listener, and in a world that does far too much of both maybe the best reaction to the song is just to listen to it and leave it at that.

Hills, evening

These pictures were taken on an overcast day from a secret (but not at all remote) location during an hour's hike after work. The world still has its little surprises.

María

This postcard portrait of a woman who signed only her first name was addressed to one Señora Doña Leonora de Esteban in Castro Urdiales in northern Spain. There's no date or trace of a stamp or postmark; the elegantly-penned inscription reads "To demonstrate once again the love that your friend professes for you, she dedicates to you this little memento." María was clearly not only well educated but possibly (if the desk is any indication) an educator. She wears heavy, dark clothing with an elaborate embroidered motif. I imagine her as unmarried, part of a nascent class of independent female professionals, writing to a former colleague who had married and moved away, but that's basically nothing but speculation. I'm not sure if this portrait was taken in a studio or (more likely) on location, but the use of the window to open up the background is an effective touch.

Rafael A. Idelmón, a native of Madrid, opened a photographic studio in Valladolid in January 1860 and another in Palencia four years later; his descendants were reportedly still in business at least until 1927, and a living descendant named Enrique del Rivero Cuesta is active as a professional photographer, continuing a family association with the camera lasting more than a century and a half. The portrait of María is presumably from the first decades of the twentieth century, and may be the work of one of Rafael's sons or an employee of the firm. I'm not sure what the initials G.I.F.A.G. stand for, though I'm guessing that they indicate membership in a gremio or trade association.

A Quincunx for Sir Thomas Browne

Kenneth Jackson has directed a brief documentary about Sir Thomas Browne, in conjunction with an upcoming exhibition at the Royal College of Physicians. (The poster of the video has disabled embedding, so you'll have to click through the above screenshot to watch.) The exhibition, which opens in January 2017, is also intended to coincide with a project to issue a scholarly edition of Browne's complete works.

For me, the highlights of the film are the surprising number of words Browne added to the English language (they include "ambidextrous," "electricity," "hallucination," and "coma," among many others), and, of course, his firm debunking of the once widely-held notion that badgers had shorter legs on one side of the body in order to facilitate walking across slopes. Science moves slowly, perhaps, but it marches on all the same — though its legs may be a bit wobbly and uneven.

Maxims (July 2016)

If you're not part of the problem, you're not part of the solution.

Preening one's moral feathers at the expense of others is not a morally defensible position.

There's no net.

Few things are more evident than someone else's illusions.

Those who have the least have the most to lose.

Nothing is more perishable than meaning.

Everything is a prism.

The unavoidable and the unacceptable are like a snake swallowing its own tail.

See it for what it is.

The world's indifference is the precondition of our responsibility.

Beware of neat rhetorical tropes. Beware of maxims.

Stonebirths

This is not their time, our present world, but who is to say if that time is ages behind them or merely still to come? What may awaken when we, in turn, have had our day?

Swallows (Color Chips)

Rot

Scenes from the woods, spring and summer 2016.

Many of these specimens seemed to appear overnight (or maybe I just didn't notice them), and many were gone or wasted away to nothing in a day or two. All are fungi except the second, which is Indian Pipe (Monotropa uniflora), and the last, which seems to be a slime mold. The brightly-colored insect in the third-to-last shot is one of the aptly-named Pleasing Fungus Beetles.

Update: Further rot below:

Above: Probably Climacodon septentrionalis.

The Door

He climbs the wooden stairway, his advancing shadow traced by sparse incandescent bulbs that emit, out of their little prisons of wire mesh, a faint whiff of singed insects. The banister is damp to his touch and he lets go. At each landing a hallway branches off; he pauses for breath but barely raises his eyes. He reaches the top storey. At the end of a long corridor there is a single door with a panel of unlettered frosted glass, diffidently backlit from within. He walks along the worn floorboards until he is within reach of the knob. As he lifts his hand to turn it he feels fingers grasp his shoulder from behind.

The Clearing

One of the paths I often walk is bordered on one side by inpenetrable swamp, but today I spotted a place where I could cross easily onto an island of slightly higher ground. No one goes there. For whatever combination of reasons — light, water, chance — the understory that covers much of the edge of the swamp is absent here, nor is the spot as barren and brown as the deepest and oldest woods just a few yards away. Instead, there are nearly pure stands of ferns, a few patches of wispy grass, and here and there a fallen trunk.

At the base of a tree I found the sole remnant of some creature's successful hunt.