Category: landscape

AG2024_1133331a or the small makes of subsistence

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It makes of “subsistence” a synonym not for scarcity but for abundance. “The residual,” after all, can, as [Raymond] Williams reminds us, retain “an alternative and even oppositional relation to the dominant culture.” Simply by clashing with the present and the concerns of the present, the outmodedness of the residual can meta-morphosize into the “emergent.” By embodying “a fissure, a rupture, a clash,” the anachronic, in Ramizi’s words, can become a “harbinger of the new.” In Ramizi’s analysis, the transformation occurs when paysans are not merely inert figures of anachronism (Marx’s “sacks of potatoes”) but when they become instead actively, even impudently anachronistic

[…]

After all, individual profit and competition are foreign to the subsistence economy and to peasant culture generally. Elements of practical communism and organic solidarity are known to persist in Indigenous agriculture and peasant practices. The small, autonomous grower maintains productivity by conforming both to tradition and to the natural conditions such as he or she found them. The principle of production in the peasant economy is that of satisfying the immediate needs of the family and thus developing and preserving the family’s autonomy. As a repository of use values, as well as of knowledge of the land and its usages, the paysan is a source of memory and history.

The commune form : the transformation of everyday life / Kristin Ross

Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, Anne Carson. A review in BookForum, 2020.

““opportunity,” which in the original Greek is used to describe the rare points that can be pierced on a body clad completely in heavy bronze armor, the “mortal spots.” If you move the accent to the first syllable, the same word was “a technical term from the art of weaving to indicate the thrums of the web or, more specifically, that critical point in space and time when the weaver must thrust her thread through a gap that momentarily opens up in the warp of the cloth.””

Julia Halperin on Cady Noland in T Magazine.

“People started putting an emotional spin or a psychological spin” on the story, the writer Greg Allen, a Noland obsessive, said. “When there became a reason, it was people calling her mental health into question. It was misguided and driven by the misogyny and ableism that were more unchecked in that era.”

[…]

“Noland visited Sotheby’s to view it [“Cowboys Milking” (1990)], along with two other works destined for the block that season, and found its corners so damaged that she considered the work totaled. Sotheby’s called off the sale. Noland allowed the other two sales to proceed: “Bloody Mess” (1988), a haphazard-looking collection of beer cans, headlight bulbs, rubber mats and other objects on the ground, sold for $422,500, while “Oozewald” (1989), a larger-than-life silk-screen-on-aluminum cutout of Lee Harvey Oswald, President John F. Kennedy’s assassin, with an American flag stuffed into one of eight oversize bullet holes scattered across its surface, sold for $6.6 million. The latter made Noland, for a time, the most expensive living female artist at auction.”

Cady Noland, Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt (Museum MMK), 27 Oktober 2018 — 26 Mai 2019.

https://www.tumblr.com/birdbird/764369328785227776/cady-noland-untitled-1987collection-bob-nickas

the horses waited for the dawn to mount to her high place

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Troy: Fall of a City is a decent series. Achilles is the most compelling character in this telling.

Which translation of Homer to read? NY Review, in 1991, recommends Richmond Lattimore (1906–1984). The Iliad of Homer, translated by Richmond Lattimore (University of Chicago Press, 1951); The Odyssey of Homer, translated and with an introduction by Richmond Lattimore (University of Chicago Press, 1965).

“He was a Greek scholar of great distinction, who could have achieved much in pure scholarship had he not felt it more important to provide modern readers with the best possible translations of Greek poetry. His decision was surely right. Lattimore was a genuine poet in his own right, and his poetic gifts combined with his excellent knowledge of Greek and his respect for the originals to produce translations of high quality.

[…]

… let us look at Lattimore’s rendering of Achilles’ words to Priam:

Ah, unlucky,
surely you have had much evil to endure in your spirit.
How could you dare to come alone to the ships of the Achaians
and before my eyes, when I am one who have killed in such numbers
such brave sons of yours? The heart in you is iron. Come, then,
and sit down upon this chair, and you and I will even let
our sorrows lie still in the heart for all our grieving. There is not
any advantage to be won from grim lamentation.
Such is the way the gods spun life for unfortunate mortals,
that we live in unhappiness, but the gods themselves have no sorrows.
There are two urns that stand on the door-sill of Zeus. They are unlike
for the gifts that they bestow: an urn of evils, an urn of blessings.
If Zeus who delights in thunder mingles these and bestows them
on man, he shifts, and moves now in evil, again in good fortune.
But when Zeus bestows from the urn of sorrows, he makes a failure
of man, and the evil hunger drives him over the shining
earth, and he wanders respected neither of gods nor mortals.

Welcome Homer!, Hugh Lloyd-Jones

Emily Wilson translated Homer. New Yorker (2023).

On the forecast track

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At 800 PM EDT (0000 UTC), the center of Hurricane Milton was located
near latitude 27.2 North, longitude 82.8 West. Milton is moving
toward the east-northeast near 15 mph (24 km/h), and this general
motion is expected to continue through Thursday, followed by a turn
toward the east on Friday. On the forecast track, the center of
Milton will make landfall just south of the Tampa Bay region
within the next hour or two, and then move across the central part
of the Florida peninsula overnight, and emerge off the east coast of
Florida on Thursday.

Maximum sustained winds are near 120 mph (195 km/h) with higher
gusts. Milton is a category 3 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson
Hurricane Wind Scale. Little change in strength is likely
until landfall, and Milton is expected to remain a hurricane
while it moves across central Florida through Thursday. The system
is forecast to weaken over the western Atlantic and become
extratropical by Thursday night.

Hurricane-force winds extend outward up to 35 miles (55 km) from
the center and tropical-storm-force winds extend outward up to 255
miles (405 km). A sustained wind of 54 mph (87 km/h) and a gust of
96 mph (154 km/h) was recently reported at the Sarasota-Bradenton
International Airport. A C-MAN Station in Venice, Florida recently
reported a sustained wind of 71 mph (115 km/h) with a gust to 90
mph (145 km/h).

The minimum central pressure estimated from Hurricane Hunter
aircraft observations is 954 mb (28.17 inches).

Hurricane Milton Intermediate Advisory Number 19A (NOAA)

Forecast Form, a calamity form(?). Just might be.

AG2024_2100526b or One shade the more, one ray the less

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I.

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

II.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling place.

III.

And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

She walks in beauty, George Gordon Byron