outside the paradigm looking in

http://mindhacks.com/2011/02/08/a-liberal-dose-of-controversy/

leading to this ...

http://www.authorstream.com/Presentation/jhaidt-819710-haidt-postpartisan-social-psychology/

( artwork irrelevantly and  gratuitously reproduced here without the permission of the dazzling painter rip cronk )

window shopping

Betty Fry has passed away.

probably the last survivor from this group of ?pre-WWII? workers at Malmesbury Silk Mills

here's one i did earlier .... twenty-something years ago ... re-discovered in a friend's house this morning

harris the terrible pirate

a new variation on one of marcel duchamps little jokes in a garden between jermyn street and piccadilly

http://www.hauserwirth.com/exhibitions/893/subodh-gupta/view/

frivverless window dressing at fortnum and mason

the old town hall in swindon

i cannot properly imagine blindness

At first light when the world is still bruised by the night, I look out to see a yew tree dancing in the storm like a black flame.

A friend nearing retirement has worked as a postman for nearly fifty years.  He has cataracts and holds each letter close to his face, interposing a magnifying glass as he struggles to decipher addresses as if through a smoke screen.  He works more than twelve hours to complete his tasks on most days, even in the deepest frosts and heaviest downpours, and yet his managers seem oblivious of his plight and simply give him even more work in order to improve their own reputations for “efficiency”.

Yesterday I glimpsed a blind man using one of the modern sticks, a straight and slender white cane, five feet or more in length, tipped with a ball.  He was finding his way briskly along a busy pavement with a chaotic border of gardens and hedges, holding the cane in his left hand, and a with a young golden Labrador on his right hand straining ahead on its leash.

I mused with some anxiety on how I might survive were blindness to afflict me and thought I might need to go back to my ancient home town in the Cotswolds, where I would arrive already knowing most of its walls and footpaths from childhood.  But who would know me ?

the countless sods

I've never enjoyed digging in wet clay ... neither the gardens nor the graves.

It is written that the first British agriculturalists would have used antlers to break the ground ... and their backs, I'm sure.

Now I can only marvel at the plough that turns a whole field in a few mid-winter hours.

An aged friend, roughly built and spoken, and now long buried, told me how he was put to the plough, aged twelve, when all the men from his village had gone off to the Great War.

"I stuck to it all day", he said, and laughed mischievously, "though I only ploughed it to a finger's depth."

before supper, we cross putney heath road and enter the wood to light a fire so that i may contemplate some of whatever is elemental in humanity

damn ! why didn't i think of that ?

http://minimalexposition.blogspot.com/2011/01/hiroshi-sugimoto-lightning-fields-2009.html

bring me another bottle of that distilled joie de vivre ... edward bawden's homage to dicky doyle ... re-printed in the magnificent alexandra harris's romantic moderns

chanticleer chez micawber ce matin