Perspective, Proportion, Sweet Spot

[Image: “Perspective,” a portion of Engineered Biotopes; this was an entry in a 2010 Greek architectural competition called “Piraeus Tower 2010 — Changing the Face/Façades Reformation.” For more on the competition, and this entry in particular, see this page at the Bustler architecture/design site.]

From whiskey river:

To My Doppelganger

You were always the careful one,
who’d tiptoe into passion
and cut it in half with your mind.
I allowed you that, and went
happier, wilder ways. Now
every thought I’ve ever had
seems a rope knotted
to another rope, going back
in time. We’re intertwined.
I’ve learned to hesitate
before even the most open door.
I don’t know what you’ve learned.
But to go forward, I feel,
is to go together now. There’s a place
I’d like to arrive by nightfall.

(Stephen Dunn [source])

…and:

It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of the intoxicating existence we’ve been endowed with. But what’s life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours — arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on. Lichens don’t. Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment’s additional existence. Life, in short just wants to be.

(Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything [source])

Not from whiskey river:

For a few precarious seconds, the chaplain tingled with a weird, occult sensation of having experienced the identical situation before in some prior time or existence… Déjà vu. The subtle, recurring confusion between illusion and reality that was characteristic of paramnesia fascinated the chaplain, and he knew a number of things about it. He knew, for example, that it was called paramnesia, and he was interested as well in such corollary optical phenomena as jamais vu, never seen, and presque vu, almost seen. There were terrifying, sudden moments when objects, concepts and even people that the chaplain had lived with almost all his life inexplicably took on a familiar and irregular aspect that he had never seen before and which made them seem totally strange: jamais vu. And there were other moments when he almost saw absolute truth in brilliant flashes of clarity that almost came to him: presque vu. The episode of the naked man in the tree at Snowden’s funeral mystified him thoroughly. It was not déjà vu, for at the time he had experienced no sensation of ever having seen a naked man in a tree at Snowden’s funeral before. It was not jamais vu, since the apparition was not of someone, or something, familiar appearing to him in an unfamiliar guise. And it was certainly not presque vu, for the chaplain did see him.

(Joseph Heller, Catch-22 [source])

…and:

A Cuclshoc

Not the new racquets themselves, strung
To the pitch of drums in that wiry meshed black
Of loudspeakers. Not the crammed tube of feathers.

They are a daughterly indulgence, gear
To stir the sluggish pumps and muscles of our fifties,
Mythical as the breath they need, and tan knees.

Not these, which seem a flattering novelty,
But a letter found later in a dusty trunk
Brings to mind all that I know of this game.

Brings it back across a half century
In a cautious upper case and licked pencil
That once imagined Blackpool for Nairobi.

The signifiers are elementary. I HAVE
GOT A CUCLSHOC. I CAN HIT IT
5 TIMS. What else do I remember?

The cistern drip and chill of an attic Christmas.
The layered curves of the frames, strained maroon
Like spills, and trussed with yellow woven gut.

And the rattling thwung of the wobbly cork tub
Bound with its brittle stumps of varnished feathers
That however hard you hit it, slowed, and turned.

It made me think of the parson’s nose, all quills:
When it wavered towards me over the washing-line
It was like getting ready to biff a chicken’s bum.

And if I missed, although it had stopped dead
Mysteriously in mid-air, it dropped just too quickly
Out of my reach, like a newsreel commando.

Whatever I might have known about adult love,
About the sacred triviality of letters
Or their conspiracy at a distance about presents,

Whatever I suspected might be uncertain in the future,
In the size of oceans, the licensed irregularity
Of wars and the accuracy of torpedoes,

Cries out from these laborious sentences
With all their childish feeling and now with all
My later tears. I HOPE YOU WILL COM BACK SOON

SO WE CAN HAVE SOM FUN. That winged basket,
That little lofted button, forever hovering,
Still hangs in the back yard, beyond my racquet.

The feathers are splayed in the sun, like the fragile words
We sometimes write and mean, which therefore always
Mean and always will be there to do so.

SEND A FOTORGAF OF YOR SELF. It glints
With the stitching of angels, buoyant in the light,
Never falling. WELL WELL GOOD BY DADDY DEAR.

(John Fuller, from Collected Poems [source])

Singer-songwriter Sam Phillips just wrapped up a wonderful, year-long experiment in releasing new music exclusively on the Internet — without a recording company. “The Long Play,” as it was called, offered subscribers (for $52) access to five EPs, a complete album, and a whole bunch of miscellany — album art, photographs,  videos, complete lyrics, bonus songs, “exclusive audio and visual oddities”…

It was a bet, true: a bet that people she didn’t know wouldn’t abuse her generosity, in exchange for exclusive access to her work for that year. I’m very happy that it seems to have worked out as she wanted.

Here’s “So Glad You’re Here,” the last song on the just-released album Cameras in the Sky.

[Below, click Play button to begin So Glad You’re Here. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:28 long.]

In deference to the spirit of the whole thing, instead of (per usual) transcribing the lyrics, I’ve just included a screen shot from the PDF which accompanied it: