VERY SMALL OWLS

And Death Shall Have No Dominion By Dylan Thomas And death shall have no dominion. Dead men...

Fri, 24 May 2013 21:51:47 -0700

And Death Shall Have No Dominion
By Dylan Thomas

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

"…earth, waters, and climate, the mute world, the voiceless things once placed as a decor..."

Thu, 23 May 2013 20:11:26 -0700

“…earth, waters, and climate, the mute world, the voiceless things once placed as a decor surrounding the usual spectacles, all those things that never interested anyone, from now on thrust themselves brutally and without warning into our schemes and maneuvers. They burst in on our culture, which had never formed anything but a local, vague, and cosmetic idea of them: nature.”

- Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, p 3.

Table of Contents, 5-2013

Fri, 17 May 2013 10:45:11 -0700

I don’t usually post original content here, but for anyone who’s interested here is a map of my dissertation as it is today. Only one of the chapters is written in any substantive way, as well as part of the introduction. I’ve found that the biggest hangup isn’t content but structure, so it helps me to think of the dissertation as a map of a windscape, where the parts retain their full significance only in the matter of their arrangement. Arrangement, where elements have propensities that are coordinated through placement, is a central theme of some of the middle, more Foucauldian chapters, especially, so there’s that.

But, here. And check for revisions - I revamp this every two weeks or so, sometimes almost completely.

Title:
Suspensions: Wind-Sand and Political Matters

1 introduction: suspensions of the political

2 the mobile desert: environments and infrastructure on a dusty corridor

2a interlude: windbuilt: life as structure, inorganicity as proliferation. Study of dune stabilization

3 building on sand: social management as environmental intervention

3a the showcase village: experiment as existential opening

4 time, three ways: on anthropogenesis and control

4a kill the goats to protect the capital

5 particulate exposures: life and breath in urban north china

5a the friendship forest

6 windy Asia: dust and region

7 planetary motion, trajectories of fate: California air quality planning

time-for-maps: Handy Map of San Francisco Bay (1938)

Thu, 16 May 2013 22:56:32 -0700

time-for-maps:

Handy Map of San Francisco Bay (1938)

"As I recall this I realize how open we are to the persistent message that we can avoid death. And to..."

Thu, 16 May 2013 08:56:17 -0700

“As I recall this I realize how open we are to the persistent message that we can avoid death.
And to its punitive correlative, the message that if death catches us we only have ourselves to blame.”

- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking. 206.

"In 1929 and 1930, during my weeks of travel over the lifeless sand sea in North Africa, I became..."

Wed, 15 May 2013 20:43:00 -0700

“In 1929 and 1930, during my weeks of travel over the lifeless sand sea in North Africa, I became fascinated by the vast scale of organization of the dunes and how a strong wind could cause the whole dune surface to flow, scouring sand from under one’s feet. Here, where there existed no animals, vegetation or rain to interfere with sand movements, the dunes seemed to behave like living things.”

- RA Bagnold. Sand, Wind, and War: Memoirs of a Desert Explorer.

Wed, 15 May 2013 20:40:26 -0700

Photo

Wed, 15 May 2013 20:29:00 -0700

Photo

Wed, 15 May 2013 12:39:50 -0700

"Threat is as ubiquitous as the wind, and its source as imperceptible. It just shows up. It breaks..."

Wed, 15 May 2013 11:55:00 -0700

“Threat is as ubiquitous as the wind, and its source as imperceptible. It just shows up. It breaks out. It irrupts without warning, coming from any direction following any path through the increasingly complex and interconnected world. The longer it has been that a threat had not materialized, the greater the prospects must be that it will: it is difficult to overstate an indiscriminate threat. It is impossible to stop. Absence makes the threat loom larger. Its form is a priori neither human nor natural. Its form is in the looming, as-yet-undetermined potential to just suddenly show up and spread.”

- Brian Massumi 2009. National Enterprise Emergency. P 160.

"These two criticisms are ridiculously contradictory. What do foreigners mean when they say that..."

Sat, 11 May 2013 21:12:16 -0700

“These two criticisms are ridiculously contradictory. What do foreigners mean when they say that China is a sheet of loose sand? Simply that every person does as he pleases, and has let his individual liberty extend to all phases of life; hence China is but a lot of separate sand particles. Take up a handful of sand; no matter how much there is, the particles will slip about without any tendency to cohere—that is loose sand. But if we add cement to the loose sand, it will harden into a firm body like a rock, in which the sand, however, has no freedom. When we compare sand and rock, we clearly see that rock was originally composed of particles of sand; but in the firm body of the rock the sand has lost its power to move about freely. Liberty, to put it simply, means the freedom to move about as one wishes within an organized group. Because China does not have a word to convey this idea, everyone has been at a loss to appreciate it. We have a phrase that suggests liberty—”running wild without bridle,” but that is the same thing as loose sand—excessive liberty for the individual. So foreigners who criticize us, who say on the one hand that we have no power to unite, are loose sand and free particles, and say on the other hand that we do not understand the meaning of liberty—do they not realize that it is everybody’s liberty which is making us a sheet of loose sand and that if all are united in a strong body we cannot be like loose sand ? These critics are “holding their spear against their own shield.”

- Sun Yat-Sen, from “The Three People’s Principles”

Photo

Fri, 10 May 2013 23:56:34 -0700

Photo

Fri, 10 May 2013 21:38:59 -0700

from David Rumsey Map Associates

Thu, 09 May 2013 10:05:11 -0700

from David Rumsey Map Associates

Olaus Magnus (1555), Historia de Gentibus Septertrionalibus....

Thu, 09 May 2013 10:02:41 -0700

Olaus Magnus (1555), Historia de Gentibus Septertrionalibus. “On the Names of Winds and Their Effects.”

RA Bagnold, 1938, taking a field measurement

Tue, 07 May 2013 17:49:29 -0700

RA Bagnold, 1938, taking a field measurement

PLANT TREESEVERYWHERE November and December 1982 I Plant trees everywhere and make our country...

Tue, 07 May 2013 11:26:59 -0700

PLANT TREESEVERYWHERE

November and December 1982

Plant trees everywhere and make our country green in the interest of future generations.

(Message for a conference held by the People’s Liberation Army to review the experience in afforestation and to honour outstanding units and individuals for their work.)

This work should continue for 20 years and be more solid and successful every year. If it is to have substantial results, there must be a workable system of inspection, with rewards and penalties.

(Comments made on December 26, 1982, after reading a report by the Ministry of Forestry on the nationwide movement to plant trees.)

Deng Xiaoping Thought

"Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone."

Mon, 06 May 2013 13:08:00 -0700

“Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.”

- Jose Luis Borges, 1972

gay-with-a-gun:

Wed, 01 May 2013 14:07:44 -0700

gay-with-a-gun:

"But the rainforest denies individuality in its very superfluity of life. In the dense biomass, no..."

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 22:22:00 -0700

“But the rainforest denies individuality in its very superfluity of life. In the dense biomass, no single plant, animal, or human being can stand out. By contrast, in the desert, every living thing is proudly itself, separated by space from other living things. In the desert, I feel almost too conspicuous, a lone rod casting a sharply edged shadow on the floor. On those occasions when I encounter another human being, I see him, unique and precious, in beautiful clarity against a vast backdrop of sand and sky.”

- Yi-Fu Tuan, “The Desert and I: A Study in Affinity.” 2001.