Mandelbrot Set


Mandelbrot Set in Need of a Diet

Letters to Great Men

So that's the way you wrote to him
He kept it carefully--your letter--
But the 13 sides he wrote you first
Might they not be even better?

Everybody keeps letters
Sent to them by great men,
But great men can't be bothered
To keep letters written to them.

Imagining words, now long gone,
I posit questioning doubt:
"Which side are you on?"
              or
"What are you talking about?"


           Joshua Fry Speed

I can't find a photo of Ernst Bertram! Except it seems to have been  Weber. I'm too sleepy to look it up.


Paul Ehrenberg (making his 4th appearance in this--peculiar journal--if you count his painting:


I have never seen a letter from any of them, though Thomas Mann wrote to  Bertram and Ehrenberg, and Abraham Lincoln wrote to Speed. A lot.

My daughter and two friends in high school-they really WERE posing as Charlie's Angels, too..

Martha, my daughter, and Dawn McHarris in Hawaii--they always photograph tourists with a parrot (or is it a cocatoo?) on a shoulder. They're 18 or 19, I think.

Persistence of magic

Did I really forget to breathe
turning  pages written in the first person
I thought were written 45 years later
in the third person?

Did I liquefy and sink into the carpet
during a Conversation?

Did I stand at the window on a Swiss alp
and watch the hand-held torches
descending the opposite mountain,
joining together in twos and threes, then lines,
on their way to midnight Mass
in the valley
on Christmas Eve?

Yup.

from the Shsoin, textile fragments, 6-7th century

Jenny's--about 10 years old:



That's me peeking over the center, and Hazel around the right-hand side. (picture taken yesterday)


Beginning's of Chris's (my son's) quilt--it doesn't really look like paper!

(see poem just below this one)


This poem  was a good
idea.--Maybe next time I look
It will be a good poem.

(The first verse inspired by the ending of "Ugetsu," [1953]K.  Mizoguchi.)

 





Moon-rain

You reach to spin the turntable
Your pot is growing real,
Your hands are busy with the clay--
I love to help you turn the wheel.

                        *

We push the children's roundabout
Push with toe and heel
Laugh across  their glee and shouting--
I love to help you turn the wheel.

                         *

I tiptoe up and kiss your cheek
You feel the things I feel
You pull me round and kiss my mouth--
I love to help you turn the wheel.

My screaming shirt--now stolen. I thought I wrote "an unsatisfactory" (wrong)--but I got it right after all*


Not just with embarrassing stuff
but poems that just aren't good enough
Instead of putting them in  the trash
like anyone using his/her head--
I "friensdlock" them instead.

Thus for friends I wish I had
I save the stuff that's really bad.

* what might embarrass you doesn't necessarily embarrass me.

Concerned Friend

You used to beg me
to wear a helmet
when I rode my
bicycle.

Then you told me
you dreamed I crashed, and died
because I didn't wear one.

Next time you dream
of me riding my bike,
put a helmet on me, O.K?

Lewis Carroll and his illustrator,  John Tenniel;  Rudyard Kipling, "The Cat that Walked by Himself" from Just So Stories.

There are 92 (I think) blocks, each consisting of 8 pieces, of 3 different sizes.  The blocks are not yet sewn to each other,  nor laid out in exactly the way she wants them. The picture is a little blurry (which is why it's no small!), but you get a good idea of the variations of color--no two blocks are exactly alike!

Kvetch! Kvetch! Kvetch! You'd think
I had a prickly pear for
breakfast this morning!


Bill Mauldin, Up Front, 1942-45

The film has opened in Japan (July 4). With all (Tokyo Times) the humor being unintentional and arising from high-tech escapes and car chases, I assume all, and not just most, of the sex has been eliminated--which must make it an odd movie, made from a manga which was a funny, bitter, sad, deadly love story. Additionally, it has a happy ending ("Godzilla is dead")...which eliminates the delightfully scary thought that Yuki is still among us, and we are never told the name of the country which has SECRETLY stashed deadly gas away somewhere in Japan (instead of the truth: the U.S. put it on Okinawa, with Japanese cooperation).

I can wait almost indefinitely..,..

If you ever liked a graphic novel (including Maus), you might want to try this one, or Ode to Kirihito, better yet, or, best of all, volume 4 of Phoenix, "Karma," all by Tezuka Osamu.

 
"This is the perfect place for me to live. And I SHALL live as long as I can. I feel like helping the rest of the world live too."







"With his new eyes, the Buddha appeared to glare at the assembled masses,  like a Daruma* doll on election day" (the year 752)
*Daruma doll:  A doll, used in Japan, whose eyes are colored in to celebrate victory, especially in politics.


--from Phoenix, Volume 4, "Karma," Tezuka Osamu, 1969-70


Dr. Kirihito sees a man afflicted with the disease he will soon have. Ode to Kirihito, 1972

Unless otherwise stated, all stuff on this dumb journal is by me. Except the pictures, many of which are stolen from other places, or have been collected by me from time to time.


That sign, for instance, is from the English Garden, Munich, where I have never been in my life  (but at least I know more about it than the TUILERIES---which I woudn't know from Tiananmen Square.). It says one of two things--
either: it is forbidden to walk through here, or it is impossible to walk through here.