Brandymore Castle

I received Bashō, The Narrow Road to Oku , yesterday (the 19th of May), a poetic and anecdotal chronicle of the celebrated poet's journey in 1689 to the northern end of the island of Honshū. The book itself is beautifully made of high quality materials, typical of a Japanese paperback. I sent for Bashō after enjoying his poetry while studying haiku and having read the jacket cover blurb by illustrator Miyato Masayuki online before ordering. I was captivated by the description of Bashō "drifting with the clouds and streams" and "lodging under trees and on hard rocks," in his long journey to Oku. I felt a sensation of deja vu wash over me as I read the blurb. I looked up to one of my drawings on the wall behind where I sit at my computer, which depicts a poplar leaf caught up in the flow of a stream and about to run aground on a rock. I had seen many a leaf in this predicament, turning and twirling with the current until it snagged upon a rock, in my explorations ...

I dragged my parents to the film 2001: A Space Odyssey for its original theatrical release. I was five years old and in love with the Apollo program. I had seen advertisements on television for the film and insisted I go. We saw the film at the old drive at Bailey's Crossroads right across from the airport (legend has it one pilot scraped his wheels on the screen making a landing) that has been gone for many years. I fell asleep halfway through, what I have always since called the most boring film ever made. I did wake up in time to see Hal get his comeuppance. It was years later before I began to understand the film's subtleties. My parents didn't get any of it. The film represented the epitome of realistic depiction of space and space travel within the solar system. The praise it won for special effects was justified and was in strong contrast to the usual science fiction fare in the cinema. As I grew up, I began in my teenage years to read science fiction. I fell in lov...

On March 11 2007, the audience of the AFI Silver in Silver Spring Maryland was treated to live music from a group of young musicians after the screening of the documentary film on Stephen Wade, Catching the Music . I attended as a member of the Folkstreams team (we had to sprint to the local Office Depot for a ethernet cable or the Folkstreams presentation would never have made it to the silver screen) and we enjoyed the music afterward very much, as did the audience. The musicians Stephen brought with him played wonderfully, each featured on their own and along with Stephen's magical banjo playing. My favorite was Liberty Dawne who sings and plays the fiddle. She has a CD available, which I purchased from her at the show and that you should give a listen to. A favorite of mine is Pass that Burley Down, a standout song of the set and one of two songs written by Liberty from an experience stripping tobacco. It is reminiscent of work songs and field hollers from African American mus...

I've been reading Elaine Lawless's book, God's Peculiar People , which arrived here in good condition today. She explains how Pentecostals are in daily contact with the paranormal. They keep one foot in the spirit world, to place it in context with the notions of pre-literate cultures. The "willfulness principle" was observed by Lawless operating in these communities that held strong beliefs in the power of "witches" to influence events. The willfulness principle was coined by Barber and Barber to explain the notion that in pre-literate cultures, natural effects have supernatural causes, principally the actions of willful spirits. It is worth noting that in Miyazaki's films (Spirited Away and My Friend Totoro notably) there exists the same close association between the natural world and the spirit world Lawless discovered in her observations of Pentecostals. His films express this notion of a spirit world parallel to and mirroring the natural world, ...

Although I am not a folklorist, through my work on the Follkstreams website, I have come to appreciate the study of folk culture and understand how expansive a field it represents. Folk culture is the culture people make for themselves and share with others. Web 2.0 is a folk culture, it even coined a phrase "folksonomy" to denote a system of categorization that replaces a vocabulary controlled by an authority or group of authorities with a vocabulary created ad hoc by the people involved in using the system of categorization. The media sharing sites like YouTube and MySpace and "mashup" systems like Yahoo Pipes and Microsoft Popfly enable a rich shared folk media culture to arise. Increasingly, as we head into the 21st century, it is a supreme irony that folklore is taking on greater importance as nearly everything is democratized and individualized, and is poised to become perhaps the most significant field of research in this century, after having for centuries r...

Subversive content in photographs. No, I do not mean politically subversive, but details in the image that subvert or comment on the image's subject. For example, you may be attempting a very serious image of an important landmark, let's say the Iwo Jima memorial in Arlington, Virginia, but in the foreground are parked a string of dump trucks or perhaps a string of circus vans. The presence of such contradictory details undermines the meaning and mood of the image. Of course, it can also be used by the photographer in a controlled manner to create commentary. Here is an excellent example where subversive content is used to enhance the image. The graffiti in the background becomes a compositional element leading the eye to the hugging couple frame right and the joyous dancing figure of the iPod advertisement directly behind them communicates what the photographer "mind reads" or imagines is their inner feelings. Hugs (San Francisco Streets 2007, godfrey digiorgi 2007...

I somehow doubt CSPAN is running an all day celebration of televangelist Gene Scott, but for some reason all afternoon CSPAN 2 has been showing Gene Scott video on the Real Video stream. I discovered this when I switched from tv to CSPAN 2 video to see the Book-TV Marvin Olaksy interview live. The Windows media strean is showing the Olasky interview. http://www.c-span.org/watch/cs_cspan2_rm.asp?Cat=TV&Code=CS2 What do you think?

Enthusiasm I saw through enthusiasm like a child sees through the easter bunny to the man walking down the street in a bunny suit I saw through enthusiasm too easily, and dismissing in melancholy realism the love I had, I threw the rare book in the trash it had begun to mold and grandfather had cut a pattern from the cover and no one was ever going to be interested in Craftsman homes again I saw through enthusiasm like a child realizes there is no santa claus bearing gifts, but a man in santa suit I saw through enthusiasm too easily, to be swept up in discovery, as if by the tide, to fall blindly in love with an idea who would come to use it who would not ridicule its simplicity, so I never made anything of it Now, I see through ghosts the past, lackluster years the cost of never falling in love enough to stop seeing through enthusiasm to stop being a con man conned into giving the envelope back to the old fool -sek, January 01, 2006

The Strike high above the earth the stoop begins wings pulled in response to sensing movement on the ground sensors sensing more accurate than human they zero in the prey high above the earth the dive begins dead prey walking the earth now, but soon to be fodder for the superior, the mover, the diver it zeroes the target falling, turning reaching inhuman speeds, moving with inhuman accuracy, seeing with inhuman eyes the inhuman flying machine readies for the strike closer to human ground, revealed the falcon strikes and in front of God's eyes the sparrow falls -sek, May 01, 2005. I wrote this after watching a small hawk or peregrine falcon perched on a tree swoop down after a small bird, whether it caught it I could not see, for the distance was too great by the time they both disappeared across the valley.

The Urchin's Progress One day, purple urchins covered the left side of a great rock jutting into the sea and the urchins remained there until they were pushed halfway back by olive urchins coming up on the right side of the rocks washed by the sea Next day, olive urchins fell back to one side pushed back by the purple ones as if they were never masters over the other and the struggle went on until the day when a great wave washed over the lesser rock and swept away the urchins, purple and olive Years later, visitors would come to the spot and say what a nice empty rock to sit upon, to contemplate the sea and never think once of the urchins purple or olive who once held sway over their domains. -sek (Steve E. Knoblock), Original work July 12, 2005, revised May 3, 2007. This is more of a story and prose poem than a metered poem.

I use compact fluorescent lamps and have on occasion needed to swap one out for an incandescent bulb. If you are worried about the CFL breaking during storage (we did not keep the original packing...a good idea to keep it if you intend to store them) a solution is to fit a styrofoam cup over spiral bulb to protect it from blows and enclose the whole thing in a sealed plastic bag in case it should break. mercury escaping from these lamps has been in the news lately, and it is a legitimate health concern, especially if the number of CFLs in use increase dramatically. Although the amount of mercury is less than in a large fluorescent tube, I would prefer to avoid a hot spot in my home or the mercury getting into the environment, which according to the California state government's Waste Prevention Information Exchange website document on Fluorescent Lamps and Tubes in the year 2000 contributed approximately 370 pounds of mercury to the environment in California "due to the breaka...