dormers

A few seasonally creepy Victorian Flatbush details.

River Birch and Shadblow

Two more trees featured in last Saturday's Victorian Flatbush Tree Tour, at top the bark of a River Birch, one of the few trees whose trunk elicits the word plush, and the salmon-colored leaves of the Shadblow or Serviceberry. Xris explained the tree is named for coming back to life so early in the spring, blooming when the Shad spawn, when the newly thawed earth permits the undertaker's shovel.

rain mix

Maybe you've seen it too, dazzling yellow and gold on the wet dark ground today, under locusts, pinnates of yellow that would incinerate a Vuillard, that have a lesson even for Ofili's auras. An acquaintance passing by me in my confoundment didn't get it, I will have to choose candidates for euphoria more carefully.

On the train a friend took objection to the Horace's observation that "nothing is beautiful from every angle." She answered "Maybe a sphere." Then she taught me some new interesting words, euonym (well suited name) and caconym (badly chosen name), courtesy of her son who studies linguistics at Colorado State.

Watch out below

There's a chasm between self-defense and self-defenestration, or so I've become aware. Today I board a plane to go to Disney World for a family gathering and I fear I will die. Everyone I talk to tells me I'll love it, I'll have a great time, but I don't like flying, and I'm sanctimonious about and scared of Disney. We'll be there for Samhain (halloween) where I hear the veil that separates the world of the living and dead is at its thinnest. It will be interesting to tranvserse that periond in the land where the line between enough and too much has no existence. I'm taking Bachelard with me.

Thanks for the word sometime Brooklynometry word verification term chorus Kenmeer.

maple leaf

map and territory

Fallevator

There's a man, my occasional elevator companion, who is very hard to read, which I enjoy, and who makes outspoken accusations. On St. Patrick's day he accused me of coveting his shamrock pin pocked with green rhinestones. On another occasion as soon as he entered he blew on about math being imaginary. OK, loud and clear, MATH IS IMAGINARY! I'm glad the 9th floor, where I often work, is not imaginary, because it's a long way down.

Somewhere, maybe in Manhattan, there's an elevator that grants wishes. People deny this but the fact is they don't know how it works. You have to know what kinds of wishes to wish on which floors. That quiet hammer ping that announces each floor is very important.

On the lower levels, you make wishes that have REASONS. For instance, you wish for success, wealth and the old standards, meeting Mr. Right, a chick that likes you, getting the promotion or surviving the cut. The 5th floor is for wishing the hangover away but also wishing for protection from fools and tryants. On the 6th floor you make wardrobe wishes, on the 7th, food wishes, and on the 8th wishes having to do with animals (e.g., please let me only see black and white squirrels today.) On the uppermost floor the trick is this, when you wish, you can't know what your wish is, who it's for, who one is wishing it of or what it's effects will be.

It's a very dangerous sort of wishing, one can fall; as the doors truck open, one becomes aware that something has broken, and at first it's horrible and one feels brought low, before the exhilaration of the fall has woven itself into every little break, weaving imperceptibly intricate webs of soft-as-silk iron in the gaps where the reasons wore away.

Lavender Lake Competition Winners

The Lake's a canal, and its lavender's turned greasy green, but we can still call it by its old name thanks to the odd appeal of Gowanus effluviana. But at any rate, the winning design for this artists' enclave is enlivening, as attractive for humans as rabbits or teletubbies, maybe. Have a look.

Long Straight Road

Coney Island Avenue is alternately fascinating and depressing, and last Saturday, returning from the tree tour, I realized that it is no more depressing in gloom than in the sun. A stone's throw from the flat and vast Avenue that leads to the Atlantic is genteel Victorian Flatbush, which, for all its picturesqueness, looks much better in fair weather.

Argyle St. London Plane

On the Sustainable Flatbush tree tour led by the Flatbush Gardener Chris Kreussling and Tracey Hohman, we passed this ancient London Plane with an appetite for metal.

Naturam expellas furca tamen usque recurret: You can throw out Nature with a pitchfork, but she'll always turn up again.

Scales Fall

In an episode of a nature show I saw a segment about molting walruses. In the summer when they start to lose their outgrown skins they are itchy and irritable. They rub against each other to relieve their discomfort and thus reciprocally exfoliate each other's old hides. But every once in a while a walrus will take it too far and annoy another, and things come to tusk blows.

Humans with all our psychic scales get itchy too. We annoy ourselves with our narrow views that we can't quite shake off. I have to thank the Atheists who took me on for helping me shed some ill-fitting skin, the belief that all Atheists are dogmatic like the ones I've happened to meet in my narrow trails across the world. Not true, is it? Thanks for the widened view. Atheism may be a creed, but that doesn't mean there aren't Atheists who have no interest in proselytizing or ridiculing those they consider deluded for believing in God. There are some with no impulse to indulge in contempt for believers. Some just want the comfort of living their truth without the pressure to change their views, pressures that are ubiquitous in communities heavy in fundamentalism.

I've changed my mind, I'm glad the posters are up, whether or not Atheism is a dogma like all the other creeds. Laugh all you want, but remember, mind changing is a result of actual, real live thinking. The fact that we live in a country or city where Atheists can share their message in a public transport system partially supported by tax dollars is rather a summery thing, something to celebrate. Of course, other religious organizations run ads on the trains too. Sometimes I think it this shouldn't be allowed because of that old separation of church and state thing, but I usually end the ruminations by reembracing the freedoms of the First Amendment. What would be really interesting is to see those ads run in the so called Bible Belt somewhere. That would entail a lot of pretty profound mutual exfoliation, and more than a few raised tusks.

Thanks, Megapixie, for releasing your wonderful walrus image to the Public Domain. If there is an end to their bristley, blubbery awesomeness I can't find it. Do you know they snuff along the sea beds, slurping up clams?

16th Street Rose

Getting on the subway recently I was surprised to find seats available and sat down immediately between a young woman and a young man. The young woman had wide, innocent eyes and looked like the kind of person who sees the best in people. The man had a look of distrust and maybe contempt. I know they see me through filters of personality and history. If they see me at all. Most likely I'm just a faint shadow moving across their eyelids, immediately slipping into the ocean at the back of their minds. How strange, all the people who've crossed my field of vision, who I never saw, but who no doubt left traces that build into the sound I hear ringing in my ears when the room is quiet.

For reading I pulled out a volume of Rilke's poems I've had since college and looked at rarely. I was never ready for Rilke. Why I've picked it up now I have no idea whatsoever. It's falling apart though, the poems fall out of the book as I read them, so this looks to be the last chance.

Seated between the two riders I opened the book at random. The decaying book revealed a poem called The Song of the Waif and I soon learned that reading Rilke on the subway is not advisable. It starts "I am nobody and always will be." A good line for the subway, where riders are pretty much nobodies to each other, and I think we like it that way. We ride our silent conspiracy of anonymity in and out of the city with a sleepy comfort. This nobody was dropping her head to hide the pathos evoked by Rilke's waif, a desperate unloved child paradoxically doomed and blessed simultaneously.

When Rilke was a child his mother dressed him in girl's clothes because she had never gotten over the death of her firstborn, a daughter. How strange it must have been for the child to bear the weight of his mother's trauma and instinctively know he represented someone else, with so little hope of being valued for himself. I think I've felt that way my whole life, and I think my parents may have too.

In the poems I've been reading today children's gowns are one of the most affecting motifs, they speak of much more than Rilke's personal history, they are a deeply pronged testament to childhood's terrible vulnerability, and other important things beyond the reach of my comprehension. Perhaps the motif came to him as a gift from his desperate mother, nearly insane with her loss. What an amazing work, turning the barbs into gifts, how did he learn to do it? Perhaps by listening in on the dreams of sleeping roses.

New Aquaintance

Not Williamsburg, William Burges, an eminent Victorian architect who gave Cardiff Castle a mid-century upgrade. This morsel comes to me via 13th St., where I picked up a small book on Cardiff Castle tossed out with some pamphlets on various Pueblas.

Also among the plates, this stuffy little closet and John, 3rd Marquess of Bute, 1858. Watch out.


The art-architect died in 1881, and his epitaph bears the words of Lady Bute: "ugly Burges who designed such lovely things - what a duck."

Green Egg

Made by Ronnie who was puppeteering on the corner of 8th and 14th for the Green Party City Council District 39 candidate David Pechefsky. I hear the political machine doesn't let the Greens out to collect signatures until well after the big boys have worked the crowds over.

Imbrications and Concatenations

Words to unpack, they seem to have floated to the top of the alphabet soup lately. Imbricated objects overlap, concatenated ones form links in a chain. Concatenations drive computer content, units of which imbricate as the interests of various individuals overlap to become a digital tangle like tatting that tethers me here to this machine. Cats linked tail to head would be the hyperliteral interpretation of concatenation, or maybe it's a nation abundant in cats. As for imbrications, I think of acorn caps and acanthus columns, or this coral growing in a salt water tank at the locksmith's office down Prospect.

*tweaked this, thanks for the kind critique,KL

Baking Ofili's Virgin

Chris Ofili's work The Holy Virgin Mary is more than irony, it's a ploy of a trickster artist making the profane sacred and profoundly pressing the reset button as only aesthetics can. It's not every day that elephant dung gets shipped to Brooklyn, playing the part of one of the Holy Mother's breasts, but that's what drifted in with the tide of the 1997 Sensation exhibit hung at the Brooklyn Museum. Swathed in blue and surrounded by a richly articulated golden aura studded with lyrical pornographic butt-butterflies, she soaked my heart and stold into my pores. At that time I didn't really consider the religious iconography with any seriousness and the whole Goddess thing kind of freaked me out, but still I was smitten, and quite amused to see the hysterics she provoked in Guiliani. And I'm sure the ferrets appreciated a break.

My cake, shown below, was no parody, it was devotion. My friend recently came across this picture she took of it. She reminds me that I served it to her husband, a passionate conservative, on his birthday. I had completely forgotten. He must have borne it graciously, or else I would have remembered. Years later I was at their house and noticed a book on the Virgin Mary I wanted to borrow. Turned out it was his.

marigold going strong

Gerbera Leaf and Atheism

Seems the Atheist creed wants joiners. The Big Apple Coalition of Reason will be proselytizing on the subway via a volley of posters, as if they don't get their views are just another creed/dogma/faith/reaction. Perhaps the deification of human reason would be better served if they spent the ad dollars on relieving people's suffering in some way. Instead they are just another movement arrogantly trying to push their beliefs down people's throats, what a shame. The poster reads "A million New Yorkers are good without God. Are you?" Yes, good because of conscience and heart, organically good, without the dictates of creed breathing down their necks. But now what creed will be breathing down people's necks on the subway and from the sides of buses? As if the MTA's own condescending signs weren't enough. It's clear from the tone of those signs that the MTA assumes we're an idiot populace, and so justifies its mismanagement. And the Coaltion for Reason arrogantly assumes that anyone who practices a religion is brainwashed or suffering from the God Delusion, and on those grounds seeks to suppress what is liminal or "irrational" in themselves and others.

An atheist I know rants "Agnosticism's for pussies!" As if it doesn't take more courage to admit that you don't know ANYTHING about the ultimate nature of things. I hoped for more sophistication, but whatever, let them have their day in the sun, and I hope it's a good one, and there are a few who could stand to hear the message that just going to church doesn't make you better than anyone else.

At any rate, the morning light speaks for itself, but its language is so hard to understand.

Broth

I think we've been hit by H1N1 so I'm throwing garlic at it for now. Garlic broth, to be exact, from this recipe. On this account I blanched garlic cloves for the first time ever today, which reminded me of skinning shrimp, sans the tiresome deveining. It seems I spend my whole life in the kitchen lately.

My daughter swallowed a little, she said it burned her throat. Not from heat, from garlic power. I take that as a good sign. I hear no Tamiflu is available, its probably been stockpiled, and for that matter no flu shots have been available at the pediatrician and they told me the H1N1 vaccine shipment had been canceled. Very interesting.

A Bean Jumps in Brooklyn

I was working in the absolutely silent living room yesterday when I started to hear strange sounds. Investigation turned up a small box of jumping beans I later learned my husband had picked up at the Phoenix Airport. I know from childhood, there's little worms in them, throwing their weight around. Now what do we do with these things?

You know You're Not a Real Hobo When...

you wash your harmonica in the dishwasher.

Hamster Appreciation Society, Pasta

We were able to adopt this hamster from the Sean Casey Animal Rescue Center last spring for 2 bucks. She's too awesome for words, cute, friendly, bottomless cheeks, she even smells good. I don't mean to be forward but if you happen to know a hamster stud I think we'd be interested.

She appears on the article about homemade pasta featured in the New York Times last weekend. I should read it carefully, the batch we made recently wound up being more of an athletic experience than it probably should have been. Stiff dough makes for very tough extrusion. Next time, less flour, we used 4 cups to 4 eggs but should have used 3.5, or less. Anyway, son of mine said it was doughy, I think that was the right description.

Insweeticide

Centipede design inspired by a book called Hello Cupcake, a gift from my mother.

Unwound and Winding like a Worsted Ball

Started knitting again, every fall, the first lines I stitch are disasters. I go for ribbing, I get popcorn, I get unnameable things. I thought about unwinding but have decided to leave the mistakes as a testament to fallibility, as if I need any reminders.

The post title comes from Amy Lowell, who won a Pulitzer for her poetry posthumously, who was as enormous as a boulder and as awesome. I look forward to reading more of her work. She strikes me as someone who might have really appreciated Buddhism, from the little I've read it seems she really wanted to relieve her consciousness crowded with heaps of the same. The poem below is called The Starling.

"'I can't get out', said the starling."
Sterne's `Sentimental Journey'.

Forever the impenetrable wall
Of self confines my poor rebellious soul,
I never see the towering white clouds roll
Before a sturdy wind, save through the small
Barred window of my jail. I live a thrall
With all my outer life a clipped, square hole,
Rectangular; a fraction of a scroll
Unwound and winding like a worsted ball.
My thoughts are grown uneager and depressed
Through being always mine, my fancy's wings
Are moulted and the feathers blown away.
I weary for desires never guessed,
For alien passions, strange imaginings,
To be some other person for a day.

Friends of the Triskelion

Cartouche emblazoning the entrance of the 9th St. YMCA, just a few blocks down slope from Prospect Park. Maybe that explains the flipped P's? If you think it fulsome, you should go check out the 'stoons!

Important Information

Went in the Postmark Cafe with my 7 year-old at a time when men working on laptops sat silently at every table, as powered by the wi fi as by the caffeine. At one point my son got punchy during the dice game we played (very quiety!) and broke into a fit of laughter that landed him on the floor. To me his laughter sounded like birds chirping over a happy mountain brook. But I have a feeling the people at work at those tables might have had a different impression. We didn't stay long. Anyway, I like this bit about turning off the faucet with your elbows which appears in this poster in the cafe's bathroom. It seems that when you accomplish that maneuver, you inevitably end up waving hello to the empty room, or yourself.

poppy cockerel

Sloop Clearwater to Dock in Red Hook Saturday

So be kind, weather, if you don't mind, and give a nice welcome to this ship that's become a symbol of dedication to restoring NYC waterways to their former health. Docked here in Brooklyn, the Sloop will enable Brooklyn schoolchildren to learn lessons about the harbor's ecology and history from the incomparable perspective of the ship's deck. Here's the details I've received.

Welcoming Clearwater Back to Brooklyn, Oct. 17

Schedule of Events
3 - 6pm: Sloop Clearwater sails from Manhattan to Brooklyn (spots
on the sail are still available; see below).
5 - 6pm: Start your evening with a family-friendly rendezvous
aboard the Historic Waterfront Museum, a beautifully restored showboat barge and floating classroom. Catch great views of the historic tall ship Clearwater as she returns to the Brooklyn waterfront. Snacks, music and fun provided.

6 - 7:30pm: Welcome the sloop to the dock, then hop aboard
for a tour of the deck and meet n’ mingle with the Captain and crew!

8 - 10pm: Head around the corner with the crew to Sunny’s Bar, a Red Hook mainstay for sailors for over 100 years. A suggested donation of $5 - $10 gets you great music, refreshments, and a warm mug of mulled cider. Sunny’s weekly bluegrass jam follows close behind, so be sure and bring an instrument along!

Location
The dock is at the southern end of Van Brunt St. in Red Hook, Brooklyn (it’s just behind the Fairway).

More Information:
Contact: Jonathan at volcoord@clearwater.org
or Samantha capt@clearwater.org.
Visit our Facebook page.

Sailing on the Sloop Clearwater
Most Clearwater sails are devoted to environmental education for school classes – but this weekend, we’re offering two all-ages public sails:
Saturday 10/17, 3-6 pm: Transit sail! Sloop sails from the 79th St.
Boat Basin in Manhattan and arrives at the Red Hook dock in Brooklyn. Join us for festivities at the dock afterward.
Price: Adults: $60; Clearwater members: $40; Kids: $20
Sunday 10/18, 3-6 pm: Sloop sails from (and returns to) the Red Hook dock in Brooklyn. Price: Adults: $50; Clearwater members: $35;
Kids: $15
To reserve a slot, call 1-800-67-SLOOP, x107 or email sailcoord@clearwater.org.
Visit our website for more information.

Sea-Shell

Recently pulled this out of a pile of antique opera music I bought at the Holy Name Flea Market. The music once belonged to a woman named Sybil Colby who lived on Marine Parkway, and I've enjoyed posting images of the soprano's sheet music here before.

I've never heard the music to this song by Carl Engel, the lyrics which began as a verse for children are included in a collection of Poetry by Amy Lowell called A Dome of Many Colored Glass, a line she borrowed from Shelly. A little on her history, yes, from wikipedia, some of it not so friendly...

Lowell was a short but imposing figure who kept her hair in a bun and wore a pince-nez. She smoked cigars constantly, claiming that they lasted longer than cigarettes. A glandular problem kept her perpetually overweight, so that poet Witter Bynner once said, in a cruel comment repeated by Ezra Pound and thereafter commonly misattributed to him, that she was a "hippopoetess."

Lowell not only published her own work but also that of other writers. According to Untermyer, she "captured" the Imagist movement from Ezra Pound. Pound threatened to sue her for bringing out her three-volume series Some Imagist Poets, and thereafter called the American Imagists the "Amygist" movement. Pound criticized her as not an imagist but merely a rich woman who was able to financially assist the publication of imagist poetry. She said that Imagism was weak before she took it up, whereas others said it became weak after Pound's "exile" towards Vorticism.

I don't know much about Vorticism, but it seems like the song's lyrics might belong to the movement, if the call was based on the morphology of its subject. But perhaps it would be a tad too sweet for anything aligned with Futurism.

Sea-Shell, Sea-Shell,
Sing me a song, Oh! Please!
A song of ships, and sailormen,
And parrots, and tropical trees;
Of islands lost in the Spanish Main,
Which no man ever may find again,
Of fishes and corrals under the waves,
And seahorses stabled in great green caves,
Oh, Sea-shell, Sea-shell,
Sing of the things you know so well.

What now..."Whence proud escutcheons flung prismatic fires." (Dome, p.66) Did someone say escutcheon? Is it blotted? They do tend to accommodate a smudge nicely.

Convolvulus

Dancing Blue Sun

Today is the 92 anniverary of the Miracle of the Sun that took place in Fatima, Portugal. Accounts of the spectacle inspire whether or not the incident was truly miraculous. From Wikpedia...

According to many witness statements, after a downfall of rain, the dark clouds broke and the sun appeared as an opaque, spinning disc in the sky. It was said to be significantly less bright than normal, and cast multicolored lights across the landscape, the shadows on the landscape, the people, and the surrounding clouds. The sun was then reported to have careened towards the earth in a zigzag pattern, frightening some of those present who thought it meant the end of the world. Some witnesses reported that their previously wet clothes became "suddenly and completely dry."

Seasonal Color

Top owl, a lone decoration at the Double Windsor, where the bartenders are handsome and friendly, Sophie's cannibal pumpkin, I think it wants to eat me, too, payback for the seeds I stole, one of the nasturtiums still blooming on the corner of 11th and PPSW, crucifers don't mind a chill, and a 5 dollar pasta maker purchased at an unusually gratifying stoop sale on PPW and 12th, where I also scored a griffon brooch. A griffon!

At Owls Head, Vultures, Cirrus Clouds

And maybe a falcon, or so I'd like to think. The small raptor seemed to have the dark patches around her eyes, but she went fast, making frequent dives into the trees on the top of the hill, so it was hard for this novice to be certain. A flock of about 15 vultures coasted on the thermals that rose above the crest of the terminal moraine we now call Bay Ridge, but was once Yellow Hook, named for the yellow clay that leached into the sea water from the shore. It was renamed in 1853 by people traumatized by the Yellow Fever Epidemic.

The land that was sold to the city by press metal baron Eliphalet Bliss around the turn of the century for $835,000 opened as a park in 1928.

Daguerre's Dioramas

I would have loved to have seen these. At least I can go to see the tableaux performed in Green-Wood Cemetery today, at 12 and 3, if it doesn't rain. From Wikipedia:

Daguerre's Diorama

The Diorama was a popular entertainment that originated in Paris in 1822. An alternative to the also popular "Panorama" (panoramic painting), the Diorama was a theatrical experience viewed by an audience in a highly specialized theatre. As many as 350 patrons would file in to view a landscape painting that would change its appearance both subtly and dramatically. Most would stand, though limited seating was provided. The show lasted 10 to 15 minutes, after which time the entire audience (on a massive turntable) would rotate to view a second painting. Later models of the Diorama theater even held a third painting.

The size of the proscenium was 24 feet (7.3 m) wide by 21 feet (6.4 m) high (7.3 meters x 6.4 meters). Each scene was hand-painted on linen, which was made transparent in selected areas. A series of these multi-layered, linen panels were arranged in a deep, truncated tunnel, then illuminated by sunlight re-directed via skylights, screens, shutters, and colored blinds. Depending on the direction and intensity of the skillfully manipulated light, the scene would appear to change. The effect was so subtle and finely rendered that both critics and the public were astounded, believing they were looking at a natural scene.

The inventor and proprietor of the Diorama was Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851), formerly a decorator, manufacturer of mirrors, painter of Panoramas, and masterly designer and painter of theatrical stage illusions. Daguerre would later co-invent the daguerreotype, the first widely used method of photography.

Daguerre opened a second Diorama in Regent's Park in London in 1823, a year after the debut of his Paris original. The show was a popular sensation, and spawned immediate imitations. English artists like Clarkson Stanfield and David Roberts produced ever-more elaborate dioramas through the 1830s; sound effects and even living performers were added. Some "typical diorama effects included moonlit nights, winter snow turning into a summer meadow, rainbows after a storm, illuminated fountains," waterfalls, thunder and lightning, and ringing bells.

Cirlot's Symbols

Purchased this at Babbo's on Prospect Park West last year and have barely cracked it, although I find it an especially fun subject for bibliomancy. It has no reference for triskelion as such, but the triskele is mentioned under the heading "tripod," the most popular name for three-legged dogs. In his definition he suggests a dreamy tableaux including what he calls the three solar moments. It would have, and maybe it did, and maybe it will, make a beautiful subject for an installation of Daguerre-type dioramas.

Tripod Donteville regards this as a solar symbol, not because it has a circular top but because of the three supports which can be said to correspond to the three solar 'moments'–the rising, the zenith and the setting. The symbolic figure of the triskeles–three legs joined together to form a kind of swastika–is similar in meaning according to Contenvile, but Ortiz holds that t is expressive of 'swift movement.'

Sweet Moon Man

On the building that curves around part of Bartel Pritchard Square. I love his cornucopia forelock, his open mouth. How did I miss him for so long?

Drabsody

PPW mushroom growing off a stump in a tree pit, House Sparrows at the Harmony Playground, a 5th Avenue acorn from a Pin Oak.

I thought the silky grey-brown mushroom was a goner when some teenage boys took notice of it and went to stand over it. I watched them carefully. Two stood across from each other on opposite sides of it and made arcane hand signals to each other while they grinned. Then they left. I think I like these children.