mills

Abby came to visit Louisiana and everything went wrong, which wasn’t so bad: given that our last meeting was arranged by gods in something like paradise, it was important to have a more ordinary setting. And despite massive airline problems, awful weather, a disastrous football game, and other SNAFUs, it was wonderful. We even had a mini-meetup!

Here are her photos of it; she took about five. Here are my photos, with Will, Syd (and Vera), Paul and Heather, Eric, my family, John, Rebecca, and many other fine folks; more will probably follow.

Abby immediately took to LSU tailgating, especially the practice of listening to John drunkenly yell at his family and watching Tiger fans get into fights with one another over and over.

Vera and Abby compare hands.

Scope that WWII radio telephone! Scope that Elvira model! Do the wonders of Eric’s house ever cease?

Pumpkin party! Yes, I used a template; the shame of it will outlive me.

Leonard Knight’s recliner at Salvation Mountain; see Been Thinking’s wonderful post and Flickr set for more.

I love Knight’s work, and that of his fellow amateur builders in Zack Godshall’s documentary on them. One need not resent the preening textuality of much contemporary art -which as often as not needs an essay to explain its purpose, a quality which has the admirable effect of keeping employed many thousands of otherwise useless, overeducated pedants like me- to adore folk art. But perhaps it helps.

As is the case with popular music or regularly intelligible jazz, it is a pleasure to experience visual art that requires no curatorial explanation. This is not to say, of course, that there are clear distinctions between the straightforward, the complex, and the overly-obscure (if there is such a thing); all of us have our own thresholds of comprehension, and what is difficult is often rewarding. But the immediacy and power and vitality of, say, Howard Finster, thrills me.

I bet that it’s quite nice to sit in that chair.

The wonderful Enormous Air posted Soren Kierkegaard in the Coffee-House, a sketch in oils by Christian Olavious, 1843.

Raynor wants to know why all Bakers have the same hairstyle. Raynor likes to ask questions. Raynor ought to be careful what questions he asks about the Order of Bakers unless he wants to wind up “rotto dal mento infin dove si trulla.”

But this is scarcely a secret: we’ve modeled our haircuts on the style made famous by the dashing Søren Kierkegaard, whose contemporaries were as smitten with him as ours are with us; said one Hans Brøchner:

“My only definite impression was of [Kierkegaard’s] appearance, which I found almost comical. He was then twenty-three years old; he had something quite irregular in his entire form and had a strange coiffure. His hair rose almost six inches above his forehead into a tousled crest that gave him a strange, bewildered look.”

Thus is this instantiation edition of GPOYW dedicated to Herr Ganan, who asks but never answers.

I didn’t want to be left out of Dinoflagellates Week -a vast improvement on other animal weeks popular on this vile planet- but as I dislike dinosaurs and flagellation I had to find something tangential to contribute lest I be shown up by other contributors.

Above is the title page and single illustration for the most notable poem published by Henry Baker; it was Baker who, in 1753, first “described” “modern dinoflagellates,” whatever the hell that means; I take it to indicate that he invented them using recovered alien technology, but interpretations vary.

Baker was more than a microscope-jockey, though; he also “devised a system of instructing the deaf and dumb, by the practice of which he made a considerable fortune” (I think Wikipedia needs to update their nomenclature) and he wrote delightful books with self-help titles like The Microscope Made Easy (1743).

After absurdly suggesting that he wrote a book with that title in the eighteenth century, the short Wikipedia article on which I’ve based this whole moronic post asserts that Baker -a probable relation, as we share an uncommon last name and hairstyle- “had many pastimes, including golfing, in which he competed with his partner, John Braithwaite, with whom Baker had some sort of relationship which he concealed from his wife.”

Keep on eye on me, Abs! I kid: golf is way too hard.

Besides his secret golf-love-life and his invention of this stupid nonsense, it is Baker’s poetry that is most notable: it’s really quite bad. Its introduction is promising (I’ve modernized the capitalizations, although the colons baffled me):

“It has, too long, been a general, though absurd opinion, that all the works of Providence we see around us, were created only for the use of man… I am not for displacing man from his proper degree in the eternal scale of beings… But this globe itself is so inconsiderable, so near to nothing compared with the grand universe, that to be swelled with this small pre-eminence, and fancy himself therefore the lord of the whole creation, is no less ridiculous than it would be for the puny inhabitant of an ant-hill, to strut about, and boast that all the Earth was made for him alone… In short, man has a post assign’d him in the creation, and that no ignoble one: he is of consequence, and ought to believe himself so: but to fancy the whole was design’d for him alone, is no better than downright madness.”

An impressive smackdown of anthrocentrism for the time, although I often feel as though the planet was made for ants, what with how hard it is to keep food from falling all over the place and winding up on the ground.

But the poem itself is unbearable, atrocious, didactic, unimaginative, without lyrical or metaphorical beauty, awkward, and often willing to kneecap itself for a cheap rhyme. This supports the theory that Henry is an ancestor of mine; I once tried to rhyme the word truth with the word ruth, as in ruthless, less the -less.

So: to Dinoflagellation Week and all the science-folks and bad poets of the world! In honor of Henry Baker, I am going to replace the letter ‘s’ with the letter ‘f’ in all my business correspondence today.

“Phosphenes,” from Andrew Coulter Enright.

The inimitable S. Stratodrive informed me that the phenomenon in which one one sees spiralling, luminescing mosaics and masses of ghostly color when one presses one’s hands into one’s eyes is “an entropic phenomenon called a ‘pressure phosphene’ and it’s a result of stimulating your retinal ganglion cells.” He also shared that it’s sometimes called “prisoner’s cinema” by those in the darkness of jail.

The stimulation of these cells need not be manual: phosphenes can also result from magnetic fields, radiation, drugs, standing too quickly, or other conditions. Amazingly, astronauts report seeing phosphenes, presumably due to the radiation they encounter in space.

This is evidently because the high-energy particle radiation in space, blocked for us by our atmosphere, activates the cells responsible for detecting light; while I initially assumed this meant that, in a sense, we see such radiation (in a beautiful kaleidoscopic way), another author suggests a different explanation:

These ionizing radiation-induced free radicals generate chemiluminescent photons from lipid peroxidation, which are absorbed by the photoreceptor chromophores, modify[ing] the rhodopsin molecules (bleaching) and start[ing] the photo-transduction cascade resulting in the perception of phosphene lights.

I’m sure Jack can comment further, but I would note that (1) I think phosphenes are beautiful and, in their demonstration of the lower-order processes of our perceptions, fascinating; (2) I learned the word “psychoplasticity” while reading about this; and (3) the image above is a composite of photographs of lightstick chemicals poured into a toilet; I was searching for representations of phosphenes, which I’d like to see, and it was the best I found.

Update: be sure to read the King of Joy’s excellent corrections and expansions on this subject, on his fine site or in the comment below. Thanks, Ben!

Moonrise, from the ranch and from Abby.

Today is Will’s birthday! Will is the most admirable man I’ve ever met, a friend who is quite unbelievable in his equanimity, decency, intelligence, and humor. It’s been a gift to know him.

For those interested, here are more photos of Will being awesome all over the world. If you’re trying to think of gift ideas, he likes beads, mustaches, Elton John, history, and diatoms (whatever the hell those are).