#The Lagoon: Images from Oxbow

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

The Colorado River Cuts a Canyon An astronaut onboard the International Space Station (ISS) took this photograph of the Colorado River in southeastern Utah. The river drains a sizable portion of the Rocky Mountain Range and provides water resources to more than 40 million people across seven U.S. states and northern Mexico. The Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in both Utah and Arizona is characterized by high desert with white to reddish-brown sandstone cliffs of interbedded limestone, which is common in the southwestern United States. About five million years ago, the river began carving into these sedimentary rocks, exposing bedrock that dates back approximately 300 million years. This carving, or fluvial erosion, occurred simultaneously with tectonic uplift (the rising of the landmass). The Colorado River now lies in its meandering canyon, which includes a dry, relict oxbow. Uplift has raised parts of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area as high as 10,000 feet (3,000 meters) above sea level. The interbedded limestone includes marine fossils from a variety of shallow aquatic environments of the past, such as lagoons and deltas. Astronaut photograph ISS067-E-175591 was acquired on July 4, 2022, with a Nikon D5 digital camera using a focal length of 400 millimeters. It is provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Johnson Space Center. The image was taken by a member of the Expedition 67 crew. The image has been cropped and enhanced to improve contrast, and lens artifacts have been removed. The International Space Station Program supports the laboratory as part of the ISS National Lab to help astronauts take pictures of Earth that will be of the greatest value to scientists and the public, and to make those images freely available on the Internet. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Caption by Amber Turner, Jacobs, JETS Contract at NASA-JSC.

#space #science #earth observatory #nasa #news #Utah

[uwmspeccoll]

It’s Fine Press Friday!

This week we present The Lagoon: Images from Oxbow, a collaborative book printed by the MellanBerry Press in the fall of 1989 in an edition of 55. It features poems by Conrad Hilberry, engravings by Takeshi Takahara, calligraphy by Janet Lorence, paper by Timothy Barrett, and design by Bonnie Stahlecker. The wood engravings, calligraphic plates, and Centaur types were all printed dry on paper made of raw flax.

The colophon reads:

This collaborative project grew spontaneously out of our affection for one another and for Oxbow, the artists’ retreat located adjacent to Saugatuck, Michigan since 1910. For three weeks during the summer of 1983, we joined fifty-five others who care very much about Oxbow, papermaking, calligraphy, books, poetry, and art. This work is offered in the hope that it may give the reader some sense of the privilege it is to live and work with other creative fellows at Oxbow.

Our copy is signed by all five participants, and is yet another generous donation from our friend, Jerry Buff.

View more Fine Press Friday posts.

–Sarah, Special Collections Graduate Intern

#The Lagoon: Images from Oxbow #MellanBerry Press #Conrad Hilberry #Takeshi Takahara #Janet Lorence #Timothy Barrett #Bonnie Stahlecker #Fine Press Friday #Fine Press Fridays #letterpress #engraving #oxbow #insect illustration #insects #Sarah Finn #sarah #Jerry Buff #wood engravings

[stevepotterwrites]

A GLORIOUS THOUGHT EXCURSION: On John Olson’s Novel In Advance of the Broken Justy

https://bookshop.org/a/8227/9781935835172

John Olson's thoughtful and often humorous new novel, In Advance of the Broken Justy, opens with a somewhat Kafkaesque quest to find medical attention for the narrator's wife's infected eye late at night in Paris during a doctor's strike and ends on January 8th, 2015 with news of the previous day's terrorist attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices playing on the television in their hotel room as they prepare to leave for home.

In the pages between the personal crisis and the international one, we are introduced to the oddball mix of neighbors in the narrator's thin-walled building who are driving him and his wife, Ronnie, crazy with noise from construction projects, stomping feet, and rather explicitly audible sounds of digestive functions from a neighboring bathroom. Noisy neighbors are enough to drive any introverted, bookish homebody nuts, but our unnamed protagonist tells us, during a seemingly obsessive and often hilariously aggrieved section of narration reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard, that he additionally suffers from hyperacusia — a heightened sensitivity to noise, and tinnitus — ringing in the ears, as well as Generalized Anxiety Disorder for which he has been prescribed a variety of antidepressants through the years.

It's not only their immediate living situation that is cause for aggravation, the couple are also dealing more generally with a growing dissatisfaction with life in rapidly-changing Seattle. Olson writes that his dislike of Seattle, “evolved over a period of time, like an allergy that starts out with a minor rash and then grows into strange secretions and the constant application of topical ointments.” As their disaffection with Seattle grows, so does their love of Paris. “...we each felt an attachment that had become deeply emotional, like a drug. We had become addicted to this city. It inhabited us, as Ronnie put it.”

The love of Paris among certain artistically-inclined Americans has a longstanding literary and cinematic history, of course. Mr. Olson's novel continues a lineage tracing back at least as far as Ernest Hemingway's A Movable Feast and F. Scott Fitzgerald's “Babylon Revisited” through Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road to Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris. Unlike Gil Pender, the protagonist of Mr. Allen's film, who is mostly enthralled with fantasies of Cole Porter, Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, Gertrude Stein and other American ex-pats in Paris during the Jazz Age, Olson's two protagonists are most interested in actual French poets, writers and artists such as; Rimbaud, Georges Perec, Michel Tournier, Gaston Bachelard, Raymond Queneau and Pierre Michon. And while their yearning for Paris is similar to that of the couple at the center of Revolutionary Road, it is a rather more grown-up and grounded love of the City of Lights. Olson's protagonists are a pair of older, working-class poets not young, upper-middle-class, suburban dilettantes like Yates's Frank and April Wheeler.

In addition to their dissatisfaction with home and city, the couple are also dealing with the loss of their beloved car, the broken Subaru Justy of the novel's title. After attempting to adapt to a car-less life, including several comic misadventures with public transit and Car2Go, the narrator takes some money out of savings to buy another used Subaru but somewhat spontaneously decides he'd rather take a trip to Paris than own a car again. Ronnie agrees. Plans are made, tickets are purchased, and their ongoing study of French is kicked into a higher gear. Away they go.

The narrator alludes to dark and outrageous moments in his past, back when he was still drinking and taking drugs. “At the age of eighteen, I left my father's house and struck out for California, following the scent of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. I was into Dylan and the Rolling Stones. I liked the Beatles, but they remained a bit too wholesome for my rebel-without-a-cause setup. And after reading Aldous Huxley's seminal essay, The Doors of Perception, I had a raging desire to experiment with psychedelic drugs.”

He tells briefly of getting beaten up at a New Years Eve party in Burien, attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and three failed marriages. One suspects Olson could write some fine fiction of wild times, drunkenness, heartache and despair in a Kerouacian or Carveresque vein if he felt the urge to mine his past, but part of what I love about this novel is that it doesn't do that. The image of the artist as a young wild man is a popular one and there have certainly been more than enough misbehaving poets, musicians, painters, novelists and so forth to give that cliché some weight, but what makes an artist an artist is serious, longstanding dedication to one's art. It's refreshing to read a novel that dispenses with the youthful misbehavior in a few short sentences and instead depicts the couple at its center as actual grown-up artists.

In Advance of the Broken Justy is not a novel which glorifies the wild kicks of youth or wallows in the despair of drunkenness and divorce, but rather one which celebrates more mature, quiet kicks like the contemplation of works of art in the Musée d'Orsay, the Louvre, and the Georges Pompidou Centre. It is a celebration of bookstores not barrooms. The narrator and Ronnie go on a sort of literary safari, with guidance provided by a list of the best bookstores in Paris received via email from the French poet Claude Royet-Journoud, and enjoy a cafe visit with the poet and translator Michel Deguy.

“One of the main reasons I wanted to go to Paris was so I could stand in a real bookstore once again before I die,” Olson writes. “The bookstores in the United States have deteriorated into something little better than a gift shop, or those book and magazine shops you sometimes see at the airport. Trashy titles. Nothing of any real interest.” He's not grown so jaded that he's lost all perspective, however, and can still see quality on those rare occasions it may be found. He goes on later in that passage to praise Elliott Bay Books and Open Books and elsewhere declares Magus Books in the University District to be one of the best, if not the best, used bookstores he's ever been to.

While at certain points it's clear that the author's imagination is at play, much of In Advance of the Broken Justy reads close to straight autobiography. That, of course, does not necessarily mean that it is, but the pleasures of reading the novel, for me, were often more akin to those of nonfiction. David Shields, among others, would argue that the distinction between fiction and nonfiction is meaningless. Whiile there is some validity to that stance in that in either case the author is working with a blend of memory and imagination, I think it is a bit of an overstatement. Phillip Lopate writes in a section of To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction in which he compares and contrasts the tendencies of nonfiction versus those of fiction that, “What makes me want to keep reading a nonfiction text is the encounter with a surprising, well-stocked mind as it takes on the challenge of the next sentence, paragraph, and thematic problem it has set for itself.... None of these examples read like short stories or screenplays; they read like what they are: glorious thought excursions.”

It is Olson's surprising, well-stocked mind which is of the greatest interest here, the consciousness which regards what happens more so than the particulars of what happens, that takes interesting digressions into considerations of the work of Bob Dylan, Marcel Duchamp, Georges Braque, and organic chemist August Kekulé among others. Of the other books I've read recently, it is Patti Smith's second memoir, M Train, I find it most similar to in both tone and content. Smith, the poet-rocker legend, and Olson, the poet's poet who can count luminaries such as Michael McClure, Clayton Eshleman and the late, great Philip Lamantia among his fans, are exact contemporaries, Ms. Smith being the elder by only a matter of months. Their influences overlap to a considerable degree. Both books weave together narratives of domesticity and travel. Both books present the day-to-day lives of practicing artists and consider the lives of their artistic influences. Both books recount journeys to literary sacred ground in search of a sort of spiritual contact high with forebears and idols.

Mr. Lopate's phrase, “glorious thought excursions,” seems like the perfect description of much of Olson's output. Fans of his prose poetry will find moments replete with the reeling riffs of surrealistic, hallucinatory lyricism familiar from his books such as Oxbow Kazoo, Echo Regime, Logo Lagoon and Eggs & Mirrors in the pages of In Advance of the Broken Justy. Preparations for the sale of their 500 square foot condo and a move away from their infuriatingly noisy building (preparations for naught, as it turns out, for neither sale nor move ever transpire within the pages of the novel) instigates a stream of thoughts on the nature of reality leading eventually to the following passage:  

“When consciousness meets reality the result is milk. Traffic lights blossom into prayer wheels. Laundry folds itself into armies of tide pool angst and marches around like generalities of floral chambray. Rain falls up instead of down. The acceptance of frogs liberates bubbles of pulp. Time sags with basement ping pong tournaments. Garrets ovulate glass bagatelles. Realism percolates prizefight sweat. Details sparkle like crawling kingsnakes in the mouth of a Mississippi attorney.”

In Advance of the Broken Justy is a thoughtful, grown-up novel for the sort of thoughtful, grown-up readers who seek out real bookstores and is not likely to have much appeal to fans of those trashy, escapist titles found in the sad, little book and magazine shops in airports Olson derides.  

Review by Steve Potter. Previously appeared in A Screw in the Shoe from Golden Handcuffs Review Publications. 

#book review #john olson #in advance of the broken justy #contemporary fiction #paris #seattle

[tagamark]

Linyanti’s Legendary King’s Pool Camp Reopens

New Post has been published on https://tagasafarisafrica.com/africa-travel-news/extraordinary-places/linyantis-legendary-kings-pool-camp-reopens/

Linyanti’s Legendary King’s Pool Camp Reopens

Closed for renovations earlier this year, our much-loved King’s Pool has undergone a beautiful transformation. The highlight of the camp’s position is without a doubt its proximity to the handsome oxbow lagoon where any number of wildlife, from aquatic birds to hippo, elephant and basking crocodiles, can be seen.

The nine luxurious tents celebrate the romance of the camp’s history, with a renewed authentic, yet classic, Botswana flair. In keeping with our commitment to operating with a light eco-footprint, King’s Pool is 100% solar powered.

“Luxury, in Wilderness Safaris terms, is defined as being immersed in the natural environment of the camp. Our new King’s Pool will be just that and more, celebrating the Linyanti’s incredible wilderness setting”. – Kim Nixon, Wilderness Safaris Botswana MD

The main area, deck and bar offer uninterrupted views, with closer proximity to the water, while parts of the roof extend down to ensure privacy.

As part of the camp rebuild, existing materials from walkways and flooring from the previous structure were reused to create screens and decorative wall detail for the new camp.

Special care has been taken to balance privacy, safety and comfort whilst still “inviting the outside in”, to create a signature immersive Wilderness Safaris experience.

At King’s Pool, biodiversity conservation has remained the core of our purpose since we opened in 1995. With the Linyanti situated at the fulcrum of the KAZA TFCA, we have always understood the part that we play in the preservation of this pristine wilderness area. Having the world’s largest elephant meta-herd and many other species passing through seasonally requires sensitive conservation initiatives that will contribute to the sustainability of wildlife as well as the area itself.

Activities include day and night game drives, walks and barging, all ideal for photographing birds and wildlife. In the dry season, guests can spend their siesta watching game come down to drink at the unique underground hide, where the view is at eye level. Seeing elephant feet and trunks almost within touching distance while safely inside is an experience that transcends an ordinary safari.

Coinciding with the opening of King’s Pool, Wilderness Safaris, in partnership with Helicopter Horizons, has introduced scenic helicopter flights from all of its camps in the Linyanti.

A fine dining experience overlooking the oxbow lagoon.

Staff at camp show off their basket weaving skills.

Warming up by the morning campfire before game drive commences.

The Linyanti plays a pivotal role in the conservation of the KAZA wildlife corridors.

Images by Crookes and Jackson

Post courtesy of Wilderness Safaris

[tagamark]

Kings Pool – A Linyanti Odyssey

New Post has been published on https://tagasafarisafrica.com/africa-travel-news/lodge-updates/kings-pool-a-linyanti-odyssey/

Kings Pool – A Linyanti Odyssey

“Luxury, in Wilderness Safaris terms, is defined as being immersed in the natural environment of the camp. Our new King’s Pool will be just that and more, celebrating the Linyanti’s incredible wilderness setting”.

– Kim Nixon, Wilderness Safaris Botswana MD

The rebuild of Wilderness Safaris’ King’s Pool Camp is well underway, with its nine luxurious tented suites set to open in the heart of the Linyanti Wildlife Concession in mid-June 2019. Overlooking and named for the oxbow-shaped King’s Pool Lagoon, the camp’s refreshed look and feel will ensure that guests are able to experience a life-changing journey whilst contributing to the biodiversity conservation of the Linyanti at the same time.

“By rebuilding King’s Pool, we are showcasing our commitment to driving sustainable ecotourism in the Linyanti – a truly remarkable wildlife destination”, commented Kim Nixon, Wilderness Safaris Botswana MD.

“And to celebrate the romance of the camp’s history, we will ensure that the new look retains the traits of a traditional safari camp, but with a renewed authentic, yet classic, Botswana flair”, added Lead Designer, Caline Williams-Wynn from Artichoke.

A thatch roof structure is therefore consistent throughout the camp to blend in with the surrounds, and the ancient Batswana craft of weaving is expressed in a number of architectural details – the imprint design applied to the camp’s screen walls, woven rope detail on vertical supports, as well as on the balustrades. “We’ve also carried the basket theme throughout the interiors, and will be embroidering abstract images of baskets on the scatter cushions, hand-painting basket murals on the walls, and using various design elements on the curtains, as well as installing impressive woven chandeliers in the dining room”, Caline noted.

Special care has also been taken to balance privacy, safety and comfort whilst still “inviting the outside in”, to create a signature immersive Wilderness Safaris experience. Thus, the main area, deck and bar offer uninterrupted views, with closer proximity to the water, while parts of the roof extend down to ensure privacy.

In keeping with Wilderness Safaris’ commitment to operating with a light eco-footprint, the new camp will be 100% solar powered. As much existing material from walkways and flooring from the previous camp will also be reused to create screens and decorative wall detail, such as the substructure, thatch roof, carved front doors and salvaged timber doors. These earthy, rough textures are punctuated by warm copper – in handles and other details – adding richness and depth to the architectural mood. Accents of teal will also be used throughout to enhance the neutral bronze and copper colour palette.

Activities at King’s Pool include day and night game drives, walks and barging, all ideal for photographing birds and wildlife. In the dry season, guests can spend their siesta watching game come down to drink at the unique underground hide, where the view is at eye level. Seeing elephant feet and trunks almost within touching distance while safely inside is an experience that transcends an ordinary safari.

“Luxury, in Wilderness Safaris terms, is defined as being immersed in the natural environment of the camp. Our new King’s Pool will be just that and more, celebrating the Linyanti’s incredible wilderness setting. We are looking forward to welcoming our guests to King’s Pool to not only experience a life-changing journey, but one that gives back to the conservation of Linyanti’s rich and diverse wildlife at the same time”, Kim concluded.

Post courtesy of Wilderness Safaris

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