STEALING AND GIVING ODOR.

“In these pictures, Edward Burtynsky shows the man-made world—the human ecosystem—that has risen up around the production, use, and dwindling availability of our paramount energy source. The mechanics and industry of extraction and refinement; the development, products, and activities associated with transportation and motor culture; and the wreckage, obsolescence, and human cost that lies at the End of Oil. These photographs are about man, and what he has made of the earth.“

“Filip Dujardin creates imaginary buildings by resampling pictures of real buildings; that is, he digitally pieces together elements of existing architecture to create fictional structures” is the Chazen Museum’s description of their recent exhibit of the Belgian photographer. I wanted to revisit Dujardin’s Imaginary Architecture at the Chazen before the exhibit closed, but of course I had to miss it. (J and I briefly walked, more like ran, through the photographic exhibit a month ago, when the weather was heating up in Madison. This last week has been an early summer scorcher and I thought it’d be nice just to stroll through the cool museum air looking at art.) I really liked some of the pieces, though I thought the exhibit was rather small, with only sixteen photographs, and the photographs themselves could have been more out-sized so as to give the viewer the impression of actually standing in or before a landscape. Instead, I was happy to stumble across BLDGBLOG, which has an excellent post on Dujardin’s resampled space, with a nice gallery and discussion. Dujardin’s impossible structures assert (or insert?) an alternative reality, closely aligned with this one, but all aslant and askew, as if obeying an-other gravity. Walking through them this time online, what struck me about the imaginary architecture of Dujardin was the total absence of inhabitants. It’s as if I were glimpsing into a future where built space no longer corresponds with the lives of real people. And in a way, because you can see it in today’s real architecture, I felt like I was looking at the imposing and bloodless facades of the present.

On a related note, the cover art for a number of recent literary journals features some striking images of imaginary architecture by various artists. I’m thinking of Canarium One, Pleiades 28.2, and perhaps my favorite cover for a literary journal this year, Ben Edward’s “Tower” (2009) for the bigger, badder Baffler.

Last weekend, J and I drove to Mt. Horub, where we walked around the sad and sleepy town, greeted by CLOSED and FOR RENT signs, poking our heads into the remaining thrift and antique shops still open. In one of the antique malls, I stumbled upon this striking picture of Mockingbirds (Mimus polygottos) defending their nest from an intruding rattlesnake (Crotalus horridus) and immediately snatched it up with my claws. For only $1.80, it was a steal.

When I went up to the shop owner to pay for it, we both marveled at the print for a moment. Drawn to the Mockingbirds, he didn’t see the concealed rattlesnake at first, as I hadn’t either upon my first glance, but was startled too when I pointed him to the center and the snake jumped out at him.

Returning home, I discovered that the picture was a reproduction of a print by John James Audubon originally painted around 1825, eventually included in his famous Birds of America as No. 6, Plate XXI (21), Mocking Bird. According to this website, from which these images have been taken, the painting excited much criticism and controversy because of Audubon’s inaccurate depiction of a rattlesnake in a tree. Still, whatever its scientific shortcomings, the image is one of Audubon’s most dramatic depictions.

Those yellow flowers on the twining vine are Florida Jessamine Gelsemium Nitidum. Poor man’s rope, or yellow jasmin. High climbing vines; leaves simple, opposite, and lanceolate, with lustrous, dark green surface; flower clusters bright yellow, fragrant, tubular blossoms, with flared petals. In winter blooming send a sweet fragrant scent. Sometimes mistaken for honeysuckle, all the parts of this plant are extremely poisonous.

Growing up, my sister and I used to take piano lessons from this sweet old lady named Hazel Chapman. She was born in 1903 and, as she claimed, a distant relative of Johny Appleseed. I have forgotten how to play piano altogether, except for a few of the most simple tunes like Yankee Doodle Dandy, but what I remember most of those piano lessons, apart from Hazel’s wondrous stories of traveling across America in an R.V. with her late husband or the day she first saw an automobile drive down the dirt road by her country house and with her siblings each bent down on their knees to smell the traces of the car, what I remember most was sitting in the armchair by the window while my sister received her lesson and quietly flipping through page after bright page of Hazel’s Birds of America. Did I see the Mockingbird? Did I catch the rattlesnake?

The only time I’ve seen a Mockingbird in real life was in Australia. They seemed a nuisance to everybody else, probably akin to the feeling people here have towards crows, starlings, and blue jays, but I was enamored by them. They had attitude, and I enjoyed greeting them wherever they alighted.

Then yesterday, J and I went to Goodwill and found a cheap, but nice frame for my Mockingbird print. The Mockingbird is the state bird of Florida, which made me extremely happy when I found that out. I’ll make sure to hang this picture somewhere in my new apartment down in Gainesville when I get there this fall.

A bright beautiful morning w/sun shining thru the blinds. E-mail, coffee, and talking with Hans Magnus Enzensberger, a profile in the Guardian. One of “the holy trinity of postwar German literature (alongside Grass and Walser) whose voice has been most audible in public,” Enzensberger is a literary beast if ever there was one; poet, polemicist, essayist, travel writer, contrarian, and omnivore. Enzenberger’s got two new books out, an experimental history of the Weimar Republic, The Silences of Hammerstein (read an excerpt here), and a collection of poems, A History of Clouds: 99 Meditations–both published by the smartly edited and lovingly designed Seagull Books. An excerpt from the article I like, Enzensberger on Enzensberger and poetry:

One of the advantages of poetry is that it is an omnivore. It can absorb anything within the human experience. Sometimes I am confused by why fellow poets limit themselves to one subject: they are astonished when you talk, say, about mathematics within a poem.

On the soundtrack to My Life. Track 29. Maybe 30.

I picked up A Single Man today in the “Gays” section of Browzers Bookshop in Madison. For realz. Between “Gender and Women’s Studies” and “African-American Studies,” and opposite of “Poetry” and “Essays,” that’s where you’ll find books apparently on or by “Gays.” I’ll have to take a picture of the little green tag next time I stop by this unfortunately named bookstore–the “z” makes me wince every time I see it–with the off-putting book categorization.

Anyways, this rather appropriately inappropriate event took place after my first day of teaching. Walking home after class, I was thinking about “A Single Man,” which I saw the night before. I liked the cool languid way the film’s stylized scenes and images washed and dissolved over the camera eye and how much of the dramatic action happened on Colin Firth’s expressive face, or what his grief-stricken character, George Falconer, refers to in the opening scene as not “so much a face as the expression of a predicament.” I decided to stop by the bookstore in the off chance I might find a used copy of Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel of the same name, which I was curious to read and compare with the new film by Tom Ford. Checked Literary Fiction. Nope. Then remembered the bookstore’s absurd categorization. And there he was, part of the feared minority, A Single Man!

Speaking of hearing and singing, James Schuyler’s poetic description of listening to the song of a cardinal perfectly captures my experience of listening to jazz, which I neither “know” as a musician nor a music critic–I’m the least musically inclined person I know. I started listening to jazz more frequently in the past couple of years as an aide to writing. I have a hard time writing in silence, but can’t write with vocal music either. “Simple and right from the heart to the heart…from the throat to the ear” is how I listen to Ornette Coleman, for instance, freely espousing through fog and mist, a song at the edge of sound’s grammar.