~ Bob de Graaf, “Wings”
(via)
A bear got into an empty car, honked the horn and then sent it rolling 125 feet into a thicket, with the bear still inside, a Colorado family said. Seventeen-year-old Ben Story said he and his family were asleep in their Larkspur home, 30 miles south of Denver, when the bear managed to open the unlocked door of his 2008 Toyota Corolla early Friday and climbed inside.
A peanut butter sandwich left on the back seat is probably what attracted the bear, Story said.
@ NPR
It was, of course, only a matter of time.
What is extraordinary about being on a mountain summit (at least in good weather) is that you can see different seasons, different countries, and sometimes even the curvature of the earth. You view hundreds of miles in all directions: you occupy a panoptical point, really. This is both an egotistical and a quashing experience: you see backwards in time, outwards in space, and are both uplifted and diminished by that experience. For whatever reason, that mixture of self-celebration and self-obliteration, which is a version of the pain-pleasure mixture of the sublime, is incredibly compelling.
~ Robert Macfarlane
John Ruskin, The Glacier des Bois, 1843.
No, art that is behind its time is art that expresses something that is already in the air but has not yet been creatively articulated. The phrase “behind its time” is not meant to disparage it. It can be just as difficult to capture a mood that already exists as it is to indulge in conjecture about possible futures. Take Elvis. He was certainly unique, and helped to define a new era. But he was never ahead of his time, he was behind it. The western teenager, exploding with hormones and buoyed by the new spirit of affluence, was waiting to be courted. Elvis or his equivalent might easily have happened a few years earlier, in another recording studio, perhaps not quite so handsomely, but just as influential. It was in the runes.
~ Peter Aspden
Reading this, I can’t help but think of the huge cultural upwelling of ecological consciousness recent years have seen, and that it’s an upwelling still in wait (to my mind) for its galvanizing story. Michael Pollan, Bill McKibben, Rachel Carson, and others have written non-fiction that changed how we think, but what work of imagination has captured both that mass desire and mass attention? Is there a story, yet, from the environmental movement that has changed how we dream, or revealed how our dreams have changed over time, and that so many of us are dreaming those new dreams already?* Maybe there’s some novel, or film, or poem, or — most likely, perhaps — some video game headed toward us right now like a comet, behind its time and ready to tell us what we already know and what we should do with that knowledge.
* Yes, I know James Cameron tried.
The word jargon, meaning meaningless jabber, comes from the French for twittering birds. But in truth, the twittering of birds is never meaningless. The birds twitter for a reason — and it won’t be a frivolous reason. As you become more aware, you start to get a feel for the reasons for things. All natures acquires meaning. You realize then — and it is perhaps the most important thing to realize — that simply to be alive and aware in such a world as this is a privilege. If people in high places felt this, the world would be very different. You don’t have to be a pro, or even spend a weekend in a swamp, to see the truth of it. You just have to take an interest and be alert. The point of this book is to nudge people who feel in a general way that birds in particular, and nature in general, are kind of interesting to the point where they start to feel the meaning of it all. After that — well, life can never be the same again.
~ Colin Tudge, The Bird
A Tasmanian devil (Sarcophilus harrisii) walks down a simulated country road at Taronga zoo’s new Tasmanian devil breeding centre in Sydney
@ The Week In Wildlife
For all that, there is a dark, brooding beauty in these images that is singular and affecting. In The Solitude of Ravens, Fukase found a subject that reflected his darkening vision, and he pursued it with obsessive relentlessness. It remains his most powerful work, and a kind of epitaph for a life that has been even sadder and darker than the photographs suggest.
What creatures will be left for children’s totem animals in the future? I am thinking now of that one child in each classroom whose favorite animal was a unicorn. Remember how all the rest of us — devotees of giraffes and rhinos, lovers of lions and gorillas — pitied him for not loving an animal in the here and now? What an alarming thought to consider, that we might all some day be so marginalized as to love fantastic creatures of the imagination more than any of the fantastic creatures of reality: that the elephant, beaver, hippo, and tiger might each one day become as mythical as the unicorn.
~ Rick Bass @ Tricycle