imaginary lands
-BROOKLAND: Not to be confused with Brookland, Washington, D.C., U.S.A. ´Brookland´ is the name by which Helmut Grokenberger refers to New York City district, Brooklyn, in Jim Jarmusch´s film ´A Night on Earth´. Helmut Grokenberg, an East Germany immigrant who has just arrived in New York City in the early nineties, works as a taxi driver while still managing to polish his English. His first costumer´s destination is Brooklyn, location to which Helmut keeps referring as Brookland throughout the taxi round. A specific location which the German man will end up calling ´New York, New York´ at the end of the taxi ride.
imaginary lands
-NORWEGION: Hybrid word resulting from a spelling mistake from the automatic response software of a norwegian airline, whose ultimate´s fault is the programmers. A northern region. A region on the wedge. .nor .wedg .on = palindrome of the domain .no === From: Norwegian Customer Care [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: ana buigues [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Account receipt Date: 22/04/2007 19:49:41 Dear ana buigues, A new account has been registered at Norwegion.no Your user name is: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Best regards from Norwegian Customer Care.
Re: imaginary lands
On Mon, 23 Apr 2007, Ana Buigues wrote: -NORWEGION: Hybrid word resulting from a spelling mistake from the automatic response software of a norwegian airline, whose ultimate´s fault is the programmers. A northern region. A region on the wedge. .nor .wedg .on = palindrome of the domain .no I think 'weg' means a way or road in Dutch, in Norwegian it's spelled bit differently MENU BANAL http://jlehmus.sdf-eu.org MENU BANAL
Re: II from Espoo
This is wonderful - john At 03:04 AM 4/23/2007, you wrote: re-send --- II A miserable path runs along the south side of the railway. Even in the wintertime, someone has passed here. The snow isn't very deep. It barely covers the soil. On the railway embankment, willow bushes and dry stalks of some last summer's plants are seen. There has been an attempt to cut down some of the willow bushes quite recently. It is difficult to walk on the embankment except along the path. By the side of the path stands a metal cabinet, of the type that is commonly encountered near railways. There has been some spray painting on the surface of the cabinet, but most of the paint has been cleaned away. The lower part of the cabinet is covered by aluminum plate. A few sprayed letters can still be found on the aluminum. Beneath the plate some black electric cables appear in confused wreaths and continue to hidden destinations under the ground. Shortly behind the cabinet, the name of the halt can be seen on a modest signpost. The name is beautiful. Once a helicopter had landed near this place. It was landing. He looked as the helicopter descended lower and lower. It had been summer, June or beginning of July. Dry. The sound of the helicopter landing. The sound enters even inside the apartments. It is almost similar sound to a spinning washing machine. Somebody has engineered the washing machine to spin-dry the laundry just like that. The beginning of the spinning phase of the wash programme is a signal that differentiates from the background noise of the other domestic sounds. We become conscious of the existence of the washing machine. Maybe it is night. Somewehre a washing machine is spinning and you hear the sound in your sleep. The water is flowing out. This is an everyday sound we have been subjected to already in prenatal age. Looking at a watch I can tell that the duration of the spin-dry phase is four or five minutes. After those minutes the wash programme will continue more quietly. For some reason I connected the piano teacher to this place, the empty field and the railway halt beside the field, the halt actually being just a name on a blue sign beside the tracks. The news item in the paper told about some other trackside elsewhere, a location that I had never even seen. It had been cold when I met the piano teacher. Spring, maybe just before the First of May. The man was shabby. He was carrying a doll inside a transparent plastic box. The landing helicopter is not connected with this. It happened later, on a sunny afternoon. MENU BANAL http://jlehmus.sdf-eu.org MENU BANAL -- BEGIN-ANTISPAM-VOTING-LINKS -- Teach CanIt if this mail (ID 284344002) is spam: Spam:https://antispam.osu.edu/b.php?c=si=284344002m=d5bc261169ec Not spam:https://antispam.osu.edu/b.php?c=ni=284344002m=d5bc261169ec Forget vote: https://antispam.osu.edu/b.php?c=fi=284344002m=d5bc261169ec -- END-ANTISPAM-VOTING-LINKS __ Dr. John M. Bennett Curator, Avant Writing Collection Rare Books Manuscripts Library The Ohio State University Libraries 1858 Neil Av Mall Columbus, OH 43210 USA (614) 292-3029 [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.johnmbennett.net http://www.library.osu.edu/sites/rarebooks/avantwriting/ ___
untitled
I don't want to open my eyes. There's a soft cinema playing on the screen of my own darkness. Tall men, short women. I can smell them as they dance past, just enough movement and motion to ruffle hair and let skin taste presence. Always just enough, an adequacy of absence. “I'm full.” “You mean you've had an elegant sufficiency.” “No. I'm full.” Can't remember the last time I felt full, burgeoning with pregnant desire, distended by gluttony, rammed, shafted, stuffed. Ridges of fingers corrugate my eyelids. Pressing, pressing. A slight sickness. The pulpy interior. Skull fucking. A third eye somewhere. The one-eyed torpedo. One-eyed Enos. Eros. “With a pistol crossbow. Jamie Tucker was the hardest boy in school. Under eighteens South-West boxing champion.” “What weight?” “I dunno.” “Did they catch the lads who did it?” “No. Straight between the eyes. He got up and walked a mile and a half to the hospital with the bolt sticking out of his forehead like a fucking lollipop stick.” Thanateros, “Shhh.” And when you lose everything, EVERTHING, that's when you've got the most to gain. I once said to you that “A man with nothing to lose is a dangerous man,” and you said, you said something else that I can't remember, but it was the reverse of what my father had told me to think. There is no path from mercy to understanding, not directly, not across the abyss. Oh yes, you can travel the well worn routes to wisdom, severity, beauty and victory, those satellite states, but understanding, that most fragile of conditions, for that ... ... An endless drop. “Everything has been created.” “What about a vacuum?” “I beg your pardon?” stupid little girl. “How did God create a nothing?” Falling, until I pass out, until my ribs are nearly crushed, until I'm too exhausted to scream. And then, when I think I've landed, I realise it's just another dream. Intention, inattention, invention is everything. “Everything?” “Everything.” “How can you be so sure?” “Because I didn't shut my eyes.”
ars poetica update
The ars poetica project continues to walk the walk and talk the talk at: http://www.logolalia.com/arspoetica/ Poems appeared last week by: Richard Owens, Gale Swiontkowski, Audacia Dangereyes, Martin Stannard, John Byrum, and Richard Denner. Poems will appear this week by: Richard Denner and Ed Coletti. A new poem about poetry every day. Enjoy, Dan
And Why
And long dunk loop and pie sank soup and try flank hymn and meant tomb float and peel crank sort and dry hemp foot and bore tend moot and gore send wrist and play melt group and bend moan shoot and bray fen hoot and Why runner node why slammer will why canning drill why after tease why shaming dunk why clamber hole why changer moon why gassy neck why fouler dung why John M. Bennett __ Dr. John M. Bennett Curator, Avant Writing Collection Rare Books Manuscripts Library The Ohio State University Libraries 1858 Neil Av Mall Columbus, OH 43210 USA (614) 292-3029 [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.johnmbennett.net http://www.library.osu.edu/sites/rarebooks/avantwriting/ ___
l d
l og he el evation __ d ung erwear lost shoulder __ Dr. John M. Bennett Curator, Avant Writing Collection Rare Books Manuscripts Library The Ohio State University Libraries 1858 Neil Av Mall Columbus, OH 43210 USA (614) 292-3029 [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.johnmbennett.net http://www.library.osu.edu/sites/rarebooks/avantwriting/ ___
Prehistoric Mystery Organism Verified as Giant Fungus
Prehistoric Mystery Organism Verified as Giant Fungus By: University of Chicago Published: Apr 23, 2007 at 06:46 Scientists at the University of Chicago and the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., have produced new evidence to finally resolve the mysterious identity of what they regard as one of the weirdest organisms that ever lived. Their chemical analysis indicates that the organism was a fungus, the scientists report in the May issue of the journal of Geology, published by the Geological Society of America. Called Prototaxites (pronounced pro-toe-tax-eye-tees), the organism went extinct approximately 350 million years ago. Prototaxites has generated controversy for more than a century. Originally classified as a conifer, scientists later argued that it was instead a lichen, various types of algae or a fungus. Whatever it was, it stood in tree-like trunks more than 20 feet tall, making it the largest-known organism on land in its day. No matter what argument you put forth, people say, well, that's crazy. That doesn't make any sense, said C. Kevin Boyce, an Assistant Professor in Geophysical Sciences at Chicago. A 20-foot- tall fungus doesn't make any sense. Neither does a 20-foot-tall algae make any sense, but here's the fossil. The Geology paper adds a new line of evidence indicating that the organism is a fungus. The fungus classification first emerged in 1919, with Francis Hueber of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., reviving the idea in 2001. His detailed studies of internal structure have provided the strongest anatomical evidence that Prototaxites is not a plant, but a fungus. Fran Hueber has contributed more to our understanding of Prototaxites than anyone else, living or dead, said Carol Hotton, also of the National Museum of Natural History. He built up a convincing case based on the internal structure of the beast that it was a giant fungus, but agonized over the fact that he was never able to find a smoking gun in the form of reproductive structures that would convince the world that it was indeed a fungus, Hotton said. Co-authoring the Geology paper with Boyce, Hotton and Hueber himself were Marilyn Fogel, George Cody and Robert Hazen of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and Andrew Knoll of Harvard University. Their work was funded by NASA's Astrobiology Institute and by the American Chemical Society Petroleum Fund. Prototaxites lived worldwide from approximately 420 million to 350 million years ago. During this period, which spans part of the Silurian and Devonian periods of geologic time, terrestrial Earth looked quite alien in comparison to the modern world. Simple vascular plants, the ancestors of the familiar conifers, ferns and flowering plants of today, began to diversify on land during the Devonian Period. Initially, they're just stems. They don't have roots. They don't have leaves. They don't have anything like that, Boyce said. Millipedes, wingless insects and worms were among the other organisms making a living on land by then, but no backboned animals had yet evolved out of the oceans. That world was a very strange place, Boyce said. Although vascular plants had established themselves on land 40 million years before the appearance of Prototaxites, the tallest among them stood no more than a couple feet high. By the end of the Devonian, approximately 345 million years ago, large trees, ferns, seeds, leaves and roots had all evolved. They're all there. They just exploded over this one time period, Boyce said. Canadian paleontologist Charles Dawson published the first research on Prototaxites in 1859, based on specimens found along the shores of Gaspé Bay in Quebec, Canada. Hueber pored through Dawson's field notebooks, written in a completely illegible scrawl, Hotton said. Fran spent months deciphering them for clues about the localities where specimens had been collected, how Dawson interpreted them and other information that helped understand this humongous fungus, she said. Hueber also traveled to Canada, Australia and Saudi Arabia to collect specimens. He tediously sliced them into hundreds of thin sections and made thousands of images taken through microscopes to determine the organism's identity. Now Boyce, Hotton and their colleagues have produced independent evidence that supports Hueber's case. The team did so by analyzing two varieties-isotopes-of carbon contained in Prototaxites and the plants that lived in the same environment approximately 400 million years ago. The metabolism of plants is limited by photosynthesis. Deriving their energy from the sun and their carbon from carbon dioxide in the air, any given type of plant will typically contain a similar ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-13 as another plant of the same type. But if you're an animal, you will look like
[ vestment assist eyeglass jocular ]
[ vestment assist eyeglass jocular ] violence carrion coronet blew useless lengthen jocular violence religion coronet engross flamingo tried clarinet laze harmless journey jounce mono clarinet harmless scowl barley jocular journey bilious deepness gee whiz nuance perish soda pop good-by barley flashy cake citadel baroque roar nestle realist break-in passing velours blew sand warranty lengthen geneses celibacy baroque parasol realist stead laze venerate violence mafioso tube tube outran glassful classy aim screwy crunchy sand glassful flagrant deepness meek realist readjust coronet visor passing erase blew bile jug estuary barley sand celibacy terminal medalist tried fan glassful harmless starlet gee whiz seeing seaplane dearth require equality temple clement sand loon jug journey toucan clarinet lanolin lobby cob scowl outran jut gee whiz speed eyeglass passing car wash guilt equip coronet seaport laze lengthen tried baroque flare harmless harmless mono violence assist medalist deed perish journey require cheque journey courage jug require blew realist dear laze violence ambition sand woodland sand varmint seaplane sand brunch passing baroque mono talent lengthen sternum harmless
Physics News Update 821 (fwd)
-- Forwarded message -- Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 14:10:17 -0400 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Physics News Update 821 PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News Number 821 April 23, 2007 by Phillip F. Schewe, Ben Stein www.aip.org/pnu TEVATRON*S HIGGS QUEST QUICKENS. Physicists from Fermilab*s Tevatron collider have just reported their most comprehensive summary yet of physics at the highest laboratory energies. At last week*s American Physical Society (APS) meeting in Jacksonville, Florida they delivered dozens of papers on a spectrum of topics, many of which are related in some way to the Higgs boson. The Higgs is the cornerstone ingredient in the standard model of high energy physics. It is the particle manifestation of the curious mechanism that kicked in at an early moment in the life of the universe: the W and Z bosons (the carriers of the weak force) became endowed with mass while the photon (the carrier of the electromagnetic force) did not. This asymmetry makes the two forces very different in the way they operate in the universe. Validating this grand hypothesis by actually making Higgs particles in the lab has always been a supreme reason for banging protons and antiprotons together with a combined energy of 2 TeV. Nature is prodigal in its creativity, however, and the search for Higgs is expected to be shadowed by the production of other rare scattering scenarios, some of them nearly as interesting as the Higgs itself. The Tevatron labors can be compared to work at the Burgess Shale, the fossilbed in the Canadian Rockies where archeologists uncovered impressions of organisms that hadn*t been seen in 600 million years, including some new phyla. No new phyla (no new particles) were reported at the Florida meeting, but much preparatory work-the necessary chipping away of outer layers at the physicists* equivalent of a high-energy *rockface*-was accomplished. According to Jacobo Konigsberg (Univ Florida), co-spokesperson for the CDF collaboration (one of the two big detector groups operating at the Tevatron, the search for the Higgs is speeding up owing to a number of factors, including the achievement of more intense beams and increasingly sophisticated algorithms for discriminating between meaningful and mundane events, a bread-and-butter issue when sifting through billions of events. Here is a catalog of some of the freshest results from the Tevatron. Kevin Lannon (Ohio State) reported a new best figure (170.9 GeV, with at uncertainty of 1%) for the mass of the top quark. Lannon also described the class of event in which a proton-antiproton smashup resulted in the production of a single top quark via a weak-force interaction, a much rarer event topology than the one in which a top-antitop pair is made via the strong force. Moreover, observing these single-top events allows a first rudimentary measurement of Vtb, a parameter (one in a spreadsheet of numbers, called the CKM matrix, that characterize the weak force) proportional to the likelihood of a top quark decaying into a bottom quark. Gerald Blazey (Northern Illinois Univ), former co-spokesperson of the D0 collaboration, reported on the first observations of equally exotic collision scenarios, those that feature the simultaneous production of an observed W and Z boson, and those in which two Z bosons are observed. Furthermore, he said that when the new top mass is combined with the new mass for the W boson, 80.4 GeV, one calculates a new likely upper limit on the mass of the Higgs. This value, 144 GeV, is a bit lower than before, making it just that much easier to create energetically. Ulrich Heintz (Boston Univ) reported on the search for exotic particles not prescribed by the standard model. Ag ain, no major new particles were found, but further experience in handling myriad background phenomena will help prepare the way for what Tevatron scientists hope will be their main accomplishment: digging evidence for the Higgs out from a rich seam of other particles. To start with, Heintz broached but then dismissed rumors of pseudo-Higgs *bumps* in the data. The artefacts in question-the presumed exotic particle decaying into a pair of tau leptons-were of too low a statistical stature to take seriously, he said, at least for now. Other exotic particles not found, but for which there are now new lower mass limits, include such things as excited (extra heavy) electrons or Z and W bosons, extra dimensions, so-called leptoquarks (which turn bosons into leptons and vice-versa), and supersymmetric particles, a whole hypothetical family of particles for which all known bosons would have fermion counterparts and vice versa. Besides the consideration of having enough energy in the collision to create the Higgs and other interesting particles, a vital requirement in producing rare eventualities is possessing a large statistical sample. All the results above are
Re: Prehistoric Mystery Organism Verified as Giant Fungus
Interesting, reminds of the giant mushrooms bit from Mason Dixon by Thomas Pynchon. Having never seen a true lifesize cactus plant, outdoors, ever before in my lifetime, we visited the Botanical Gardens in Funchal, Madeira this last winter. There, apart from their attractive collection of albino peacocks and talking birds, the succulent garden really put me on a spin. Not for the variety of species, really, but but for the abominable, towering mass of water-filled cacti trunks rising to the sky all around in one big hell of thorny green, it was just plain amazing... On Mon, 23 Apr 2007, mIEKAL aND wrote: Prehistoric Mystery Organism Verified as Giant Fungus
III from Espoo
there is some problem with the translation, the sentences are growing much longer and more ornate than the original -- Thought that I found the right way to kick it for a clear bell sound, after reading so much Duras, but now it seems that the environs is the cut-up fodder park again (must be the language) --- III 'I Will Survive.' One frequently hears this song on the buses, many stations do play it. Very often it is in the morning. The time of the year doesn't count that much. The light inside the bus is almost invariably similar, from low, bright white, filtered through the dirty windows. The sweat absorbed into the cushions of the seats mixes with the dull smell emanating from the radiators. The buses will turn to left around here. But that place can not be seen clearly from here, it lies a little further away in the direction that you came from. On this side of the street, a man dressed in dark clothes is waiting for the traffic light of the pedestrian crossing to change. Cars are moving in and out at the entrance to the parking hall of the shopping mall. The building is so tall that its uniformly grey wall could be mistaked for the sky itself. Before the entrance to the parking hall, there is a vacant lot on each side of the access road, each one bordered by coloured fences made of plywood. The original plan was to construct some kind of an office complex, after that a number of cinema theaters. Possibly those buildings do exist already, simultaneously and silently, in some other dimension. This probably is how people usually do think about it. For a long time, a tall advertisement was standing on the site, informing about the construction project, but now it has been removed. The headlights and the general design of the fore portion of a car give a personal character to the vehicle. We can observe a silver-sided shark slowly passing us, with it's elaborately worked slanted eyes and gaping mouth. Of course the driver of this car experiences the environment from within the car, from this interior. His location is inside the car and his experience is felt in a sitting position. The car surrounds him on all sides. It is pleasant to be inside the car, comparably quiet. It is possible to select the desired station on the radio, whenever one wishes to receive entertainment or information. It is mandatory to stop before a pedestrian crossing, the light is now red. The sign informs to turn left in order to enter the parking hall of the mall. After the crossing, one must descend downhill just slightly. Under the ground. Now, over the gateway, a luminous numerical display indicates the number of currently available parking places. There is no snow on the driveway. On the sidewalks, some snow is encountered, but fine gritting has been sprinkled on the snow. The gritting darkens the sideways so that they look dirty when compared to the white areas near the edges of the sideways. Close to the pedestrian crossing, there is a little larger heap of snow. MENU BANAL http://jlehmus.sdf-eu.org MENU BANAL
AB (up for a couple of days only)
AB (up for a couple of days only) Azure adopting Anita Berber poses in a crowded loftspace; stripped of all theatricality, the effect is mannequin-like; where is the charge of the audience? Azure adapting herself to Anita Berber poses; her eyes half- shut, thinking perhaps not of Weimar, but the heady congestion of the Brooklyn streets below her. Azure adept at Anita Berber, inhaling the life and times of the doomed mercurial dancer. Azure an adept, believing herself Anita Berber, walking the heady Brooklyn streets, looking for performance-fix, cure and cognac, despair. Azure, apt at Anita Berber, wearing AB-patent-skin, fixated on Anita Berber nightrance nakedance in dawndusk morning, mourning. Azure, addaft Anita Berber, highspeed shuddertremble, rayongown, scattered library, ashes, it happened, Weimar, sex. fury. train. http://www.asondheim.org/berberrr.mov short.
