Up, Down.
Peter F. Sale - Our Dying Planet from University of California Press; and at Amazon.ca, Amazon US, & Abe's. (But still not at the Toronto Public Library?) Watch his schedule for upcoming events. More links previously here & here.The next post will contain a (probably lame & incomprehensible) review of this important book.
Sh-boom, sh-boom, ya-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da."The Chords, one-hit wonders from the Bronx, discovered playing in a subway station; and The Crew Cuts, coming out of a more-or-less exclusive choir school in Toronto.
Sh-boom: A hit for The Chords in March 1954 - here & here; and a hit again for The Crew Cuts in July/August - here. The lyric quoted above is from The Crew Cuts' version.
Life could be a dream ...
(Keep in mind that in those days the 'sh-boom' imagery hearkened to recent events in Hiroshima & Nagasaki ... Bikini Atoll, Enewetak, and so on. Turns out 1954 was also the year in which Endosulfan/Thiodan/Thionex was registered by Farbwerke Hoechst A.G. aka IG Farben aka Sanofi-Aventis aka Bayer - and there are still enthusiasts.)
'Authentic' carries the baggage of individualism, 'genuine' doesn't; but 'genuine' has been thoroughly abused and worn out by barkers & shills, Madison Avenue; nonetheless, either of them could be redeemed in, say, a ... twinkling?
In the 40's Jorge Amado writes a story; a good one - you have no idea what is going to happen until the very last page. O Gato Malhado e a Andorinha Sinhá / 'The Swallow and the Tom Cat' - illustrated by Carybé with an anatomically-complete cat; this is also good.In the 60's Russell Hoban and his (then) wife Lillian start a series of 'Frances' stories. I have read one of them, 'Best Friends for Frances' which is mystifyingly asexual and cloyingly correct. You can't go generalizing from a single book - except that years ago I read Russell Hoban carefully - 'Mouse and His Child' is among the top-three, 'Riddley Walker' surmounts the handicap of an invented language ... and so on ... Anyway, they divorced (not that that answers my quibble).
Anne Tyng's spiral spatial development notions given to me sometime in the 70's; and, ... two girls dancing samba on the beach road in Ipanema in the early oughts with golden spirals around their breasts (Wowzers!).And somewhere in-between, under that yet-to-be-conceived-of rainbow, building the twenty-four armed star of tetrahelix spirals whose axes pass through a single tetrahedron and almost establish the vertices of a small-rhombicuboctahedron - inventing a whole graphic software with the matrices necessary to construct one tetrahedron upon the face of another and then view it any how. I always meant to go back and build it again as a tensegrity; never did, lost the software.
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[Ah! She died last year and is now beginning to have a presence on the Internet: at Wikipedia; & a portion at least of her 1969 paper Geometric Extensions of Consciousness; a video in San Francisco - with a view of Alkatraz - in April 2011, 5 Chapters (8 minutes); and another at Harvard in October (70 minutes). Possibly (only) emphasizing (too much) the trivial aspects that remain and leaving just ... modes of saying goodbye.]John Carroll knows something; and his wife Maria Carroll brings a complementary view; both divide their time between Peoria Illinois & Haiti.
When I read that some, many, are fleeing to Brasil (see Haitians Take Arduous Path to Brazil in the NYT) ... even being better received there than they would be in, say, Canada or the US; still an' all it seems to me tragic & unnecessary.
There is something about the way she has spread her fingers on the wall behind her ...
Be well.
Down.
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