06.30.07
Centennial Lake Park in Edina.
Another old shot to draw your attention to the DailyDickinson.com project.
06.29.07
Centennial Lake Park in Edina.
This is actually rather an old picture–summer of 2004–and I’m including it not because I’m short on pictures, but because I’ve decided that (a) it fits with a certain project that I’ve had going for a few weeks now, and (b) I might as well announce that project here.
I recently became interested in “Google gadgets”–it’s partly a professional interest, since gadgets are a little like portlets, which I work with for my pay; and partly just geekiness. I wanted an excuse to write a gadget, and the excuse I came up with was . . . DailyDickinson.com!
Every day, DailyDickinson.com posts an Emily Dickinson poem, accompanied by a picture by yours truly. That poem can be accessed by going to DailyDickinson.com, or subscribing to the RSS feed, or . . . adding the gadget below to your iGoogle page! (You can actually add it to pretty much any web page; go to the gadget page to see the little snippet of HTML that enables the gadget).
Geeky? You bet. Kinda fun? To a geek, maybe.
06.28.07
That’s the Golden Gate Bridge off in the distance, as seen over Fort Mason (I think; it was early, I had jet lag…). The Yashica doesn’t have a long lens, so there was no way to get a “postcard view” of the bridge from this hill, but I think this picture captures the stillness of an early morning along the shore.
06.27.07
We crept
through fog all night but it closed behind us:
around and very close above:
only below in the black the self-lit fishes
passed ignorantly among the wrack of wrecks
and all the water held its tongue and gave
no password. And so sealed in our silent passage
we slept.
The Sea Fog, Josephine Jacobsen
06.26.07
And look for the fishing fleet at morning,
Shadows like lost souls,
Slide through the fog where the seal’s warning
Betrays the shoals
The Sailor’s Grave at Clo-oose, V.I., Marjorie Pickthall
06.25.07
Washburn Water Tower, Minneapolis.
06.24.07
. . . and we shall light upon some lonely shore,
Some lodge within the waste sea-dunes, and hear the waters roar,
And see the ships from out the West go dipping thro’ the foam . . .
The Flight, Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Washburn Water Tower, Minneapolis.
06.23.07
Echo Lake at Moose Lake State Park.
06.22.07
Echo Lake at Moose Lake State Park.
06.21.07
Echo Lake at Moose Lake State Park.
Now see these:
06.20.07
Echo Lake at Moose Lake State Park.
06.19.07
Echo Lake at Moose Lake State Park.
06.18.07
Echo Lake at Moose Lake State Park.
06.17.07
Echo Lake at Moose Lake State Park.
06.16.07
I was afraid that this summer’s first camping trip a couple weeks ago, to Moose Lake, would be rained out; Saturday morning was drizzly and windy and cold, with fog lying (if picturesquely) on Echo Lake. But we toughed it out, and the weather cleared up–not enough to swim, maybe, but certainly enough to enjoy the outdoors.
Now see these:
06.15.07
Dowling Community Garden.
Some other pictures from around the Internet:
06.14.07
Something I’ll miss about the end of school is the excuse to wander through Dowling Community Garden in the morning. Of course, I’ll probably wander through anyway just to see the change of seasons in this little parcel of urban nature.
Some pictures to consider today:
06.13.07
For the last week, the boys have been singing Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out”; I’m assuming they learned it from some of the older kids at Minneapolis Kids. They’re not quite clear on the words, but insert “stinky” whenever they’re stumped.
They like school, though, so they make a lot of exceptions when pushed on the song–the song is about the OTHER teachers, not Mrs. Kujat, or Mrs. Marshall, or Ann at Minneapolis Kids, or …
Pictured are the boys with their grandmother at the “Goodies with Grandparents” morning at school this spring.
06.12.07
Bay Bridge, San Francisco
With their dream hearts they summoned his song
and sent it out again to search the red dawn
for those not strong enough to stand,
for those overcome by fear,
for those thrown down by those who can’t see
that they fling themselves down,
for those whose names are hidden,
for those whose poverty costs them a fortune,
for those who can’t see that truth always contradicts itself,
for the earth whose arms of abundance are about to close,
for those who can’t see that they
are the strands that weave the world together.
Duane BigEagle, Burdens of the Day, Nov. 12, 1936 (the day the Bay Bridge opened), published in Zyzzyva, a venerable (22 years is venerable in the lit journal world, right?) journal out of San Francisco
06.11.07
A couple years ago, I followed with some interest the story of the ivory-billed woodpecker, long thought extinct but now thought to be alive and well and living in Arkansas. At about the same time, I heard a story on MPR about an oologist’s collection that turned up in Iowa. These two bird stories, along with an old wardrobe in my house and an interminably dull meeting at work, led to this story about eggs and furniture.
This is sort of a companion piece to Ichthyology, my fish story. They were written about the same time, and both involve creatures that live in the interstices of phyla. I think there may be a few more of these taxonomical misfits roaming about in my addled brain…
This story can be found in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #20, a fabulous (and fabulist?) ‘zine from Small Beer Press. Order your copy today, or track one down on the shelves of one of the enlightened purveyors of books listed below:
- Atomic Books, Baltimore, MD
- The Book Cellar, Chicago, IL
- Borderlands Bookshop, San Francisco, CA
- Broadside Books, Northampton, MA
- Downtown News & Books, Asheville, NC
- Elliott Bay, Seattle, WA
- Dreamhaven, Minneapolis, MN
- Pandemonium, Cambridge, MA
- Powell’s, Portland, OR
- Prairie Lights, Iowa City, IA
- Quimby’s, Chicago, IL
- A Room of One’s Own, Madison, WI
- Sqecial Media, Lexington, KY
- St. Mark’s Bookshop, NY, NY
- Mark V. Ziesing, Bookseller, CA
06.11.07
Bay Bridge, San Francisco
06.10.07
Bay Bridge, San Francisco
06.9.07
I’ve got a series of the Bay Bridge queued up, and then we’ll have a break from my tourist shots for a little while (or at least my out-of-state tourist shots; I’m hopeful for some Moose Lake slides that I’ll be collectng on Wednesday…).
06.8.07
06.7.07
This poor picture tried to be too much; that’s Alcatraz in the background, and the v-shaped thing in front of the boat is the swimmer from a couple days back. The Yashica, wonderful though it is, is a rangefinder best for close-in portraits and hip shots of street action, not so much a camera for many layers of detail.
Still, I like the blue tones all the same.
06.6.07
I suppose it’s a terribly touristy thing to be fascinated by the antique streetcars still in service on San Francisco’s F line. But there’s an undeniable magic about them, especially the Peter Witt trams that originally ran on the streets of Milan (and which still have Italian signage in them).
St. Paul and Minneapolis were great streetcar towns in their time, their time being from 1875, when the first horse-drawn line was established on Washington Avenue downtown, to 1954, when Fred Ossanna and associates finished the pillage of the system begun by Charles Green and the last line was paved over for buses. Indeed, the rush to replace the streetcars was so hasty that the streetcar tracks are often just inches below the surface: Lake Street is in a state of excavation these days, and the old metal tracks are in plain site for the first time in 50 years.
The Minnesota Streetcar Museum operates several cars on the Como-Harriet and Excelsior lines, and we’ve ridden them all. On Father’s Day, I’m planning to have the boys take me on the streetcar ferry on Lake Minnetonka (they’re young enough to take suggestions for this outing, and I have no problem taking advantage of their train obsessions to cover for my own…).
But wouldn’t it be lovely to ride a working streetcar line to work? There’s occasional noise about returning the streetcars to service; like Stanley Gordon West, I’m waiting patiently until they bring the streetcars back.
06.5.07
Early in the morning, the blues and purples blur into each other.
06.4.07
An intrepid swimmer prepares to crawl the bay in the early hours of the day.
06.3.07
And here’s the fabled City Lights bookstore, one of the most famous (and rightly so) purveyors of reading materials in the world. I made my pilgrimage there after a day of hearing jargon-filled discussions of SOA and open source and frameworks and the like, and breathing in that musty bookshop air was a good way to clear my head. Though City Lights certainly represents well its history as the publisher of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and “Kaddish” and other key Beat works, it’s no museum piece; its shelves are packed with new and exciting things. I didn’t have much room in my suitcase, so I left just with Kelly Link’s Trampoline anothology; if my luggage and wallet could have stood the stress, I’d have left with much more.
I’m on autopilot this weekend, as we head up north for our first camping trip of the year.
06.2.07
Some more early-morning Chinatown roaming.
“The back of the City Lights building faces Chinatown, while the Columbus Avenue side faces east and looks out on the far end of Western civilization–a fitting location for this crossroads of culture.” So notes the City Lights website. And here we see Jack Kerouac Alley, at the Chinatown entrance.
I’m on autopilot this weekend, as we head up north for our first camping trip of the year.
06.1.07
Some more early-morning Chinatown roaming.
I’m on autopilot this weekend, as we head up north for our first camping trip of the year. The weather forecast for Moose Lake has had a lot of rain and lightning symbols on it, so I’m a little worried that it will be a damp outing, at least on Saturday; so long as it’s not a buggy one like one of last year’s trips, I’m fine with a little bit of rain.
