The Boston.com Big Picture blog has a subset of the photographs by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. Remarkable.

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/08/russia_in_color_a_century_ago.html

Funny how a familiar technology in an unusual context can produce such an odd impression.

It’s a very strange and rather hard to explain feeling that comes from breaking the unconscious linking, born of experience, of “past” to “black and white”. My first unconsidered impression on seeing these photos, this color out of context, is that the photographs are … somehow staged, which is absurd, of course. Then the consideration begins….

Since I was a kid, I’ve often wondered what exactly “real life” looked like in 1942 for example when my dad came to the US for the first time (and took photos that I’ve seen), or in the 1910s (from which I’ve seen photos of my grandparents). What did people in the late 1800s experience when they walked around. Or for that matter, in the year 200?

I can tell myself that, yes, what everyone saw and experienced was just like what I see now but with the different trappings of time and location. Reality is reality, always has been, and it’s all in color. No different from now in any great way. But even after that intentional, intellectual exercise, there remains the sense that it must have been different; after all, it existed in black and white, didn’t it? People back then mush have experienced some kind of fog or fuzziness between themselves and their world, since that is what I see now of that time….

These photos here shoot those impressions all to hell and so I’m left with some sort of cognitive dissonance, a difficulty in accepting that the past I’ve always thought existed as different is actually similar to my present. I haven’t quite yet accepted that, but I’m beginning to see the people in these photographs as people I share a reality with.

My brother just sent me a link to, and I just read: “Chaos in Fourteen Lines”: Reformations and Deformations of the Sonnet by Annie Finch

For the most part I like the article. I knew about the Italian and Shakespearian sonnet forms, and about the volta and the quatrains and the couplet and so on. I didn’t know too much about sonnet forms apart from those two.

Mostly the example sonnets are enjoyable, but I do think Ms. Finch goes a bit far. I definitely believe that sonnets have a certain something and that that something is big. Just that she’s a bit overzealous in finding connections to other even bigger things….

One example: Ms. Finch is not good at arithmetic. That is to say, she starts talking about the Golden Mean (I think she means the Golden Ratio, see Wikipedia’s entry on the Golden Ratio), the ratio seen in nature, implying that there is something numerological and vast and universal and almost spiritual about the form of the sonnet with its 6 and 8 division, but wait, the last couplet is sometimes separated out so the numbers are … 6:8:12. (Okay, so the Shakespearian form of 4,4,4,2 version doesn’t fit this cosmological connection she’s discovered, but hey). But okay, we’ll overlook all that. The only real problem is that the numbers she uses 6:8:12 to show the ratio, to prove her argument don’t hold true in any way. If you use 12, the ratio is wrong and even if she had used 14, perhaps the number she should have used (6+8), it still isn’t right.

The proportion is:

(a+b)/a = a/b

(8+6)/8 does not equal 8/6

On a different note, at one point she says, “Paul Oppenheimer makes a convincing argument that because the sonnet allowed room to struggle with oneself, it marks not only the beginning of modern poetry, but the beginning of the modern idea of our ’self’ as having a complex internal life.” Whoa. I guess I should do some research and read Oppenheimer, because I gotta figure that people way before sonnets were written in English, way before there was English, there were people thinking that we had a “complex internal life.” Didn’t people like Plato and Lao Tzu imagine a “complex internal life”? They were probably too busy doing math.

So, I may be way off on that last bit, that it’s only in the modern era that we are special enough to think ourselves to be internally complex, but I’m pretty sure about the arithmetic part.

I need to first read some Paul Oppenheimer and see if he can support his view of ancient thought and fuzzy math. And then perhaps I need to write a sonnet that does some fancy math that proves an impossibility, something like the lyrics to “I’m my own grandpa”, and have it published in the Contemporary Poetry Review.

Recently while checking out at the grocery store, the cashier began a nearly sub-vocal, somehow laid-back diatribe about how one shouldn’t vote for a person simply because they’re black or a woman. Hmm. So that’s what this guy, and all the people he is representative of, think. A nice example of how folks lie to themselves to be able to vote against the thing that scares them but feel they can’t, in polite company, air. With all the important issues hitting this society over the head with a baseball bat, he chooses to explain away to himself and a stranger his multi-sided bigotry. Aside: Alluding so subtly to what I assumed were this guy’s political leanings, I replied that people shouldn’t vote for someone simply because they are complete and utter idiot either. Not sure he got the reference.

So, will Americans vote for a black man or a white woman first? Or a white religious man? No surprise if it’s the white religious man. After all they voted for the afore-mentioned idiot. Twice. And in large numbers. But if Americans, with their tradition of prejudices, surprise us by electing either of the first two and if there is any way to separate the personal from the historical and look at the winner as icon, which of those two will they let have power first?

This is my first, and though things could change, very possibly only ever, post under both categories of Beer and Belief Systems. The web page Top Ten Reasons Beer is Better than Jesus covers both areas and as you can see by visiting the page, does indeed have a few good reasons.

My favorites are numbers 3 and 2: There are laws saying Beer labels can’t lie to you and You can prove you have a Beer.

That’s pretty much it.

So, Rudy Giuliani has gotten the kiss of death, an endorsement from Pat Robertson who overlooked Rudy’s stance on abortion. Good to know that Pat is not a one-issue voter. He’s also thrown the baby Jesus out with the bathwater. Remember him agreeing with Jerry Falwell when he said that the abortionists, among others, helped bring 911 on the US? (see below) Remember who was mayor during that time?

Let me get this straight: Pat is not only saying that Giuliani, who by virtue of being pro-choice, helped bring God’s wrath down on the very city he was mayor of, but is also saying that he approves of him. Doesn’t that, in Pat’s own eyes, make him accessory after the fact to the the murder of 3000 Americans?

JERRY FALWELL: The ACLU’s got to take a lot of blame for this.

PAT ROBERTSON: Well, yes.

JERRY FALWELL: And, I know that I’ll hear from them for this. But, throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way–all of them who have tried to secularize America–I point the finger in their face and say “you helped this happen.”

PAT ROBERTSON: Well, I totally concur, and the problem is we have adopted that agenda at the highest levels of our government. And so we’re responsible as a free society for what the top people do. And, the top people, of course, is the court system.

Color me disappointed. I’ve usually liked what I’ve read of Andrew Sullivan’s blog. But I followed this link:

http://www.beliefnet.com/story/209/story_20904_1.html

a back and forth between Andrew Sullivan and Sam Harris, author of The End of Reason.

and after reading the entire exchange (I can’t believe I read the whole thing…), I will in the future have to try very hard to keep Sullivan’s words separate from his blind Catholicism and demonstrated inability or unwillingness to confront Harris’ questions and points.

Admittedly, I start in Harris’ camp when it comes to religion, and while we’re at it, I basically agree with his position on the danger of religious “moderates”. But for someone as intelligent and articulate as Sullivan to step fully, and it seems unknowingly, into every last bear-trap of irrational argument in trying to explain why reason doesn’t hold; why various positions along a spectrum of irrationality are implausible, save his; why all religions’ views, each of which denies the others, all of which are as unjustifiable as his, save his, are wrong, is unfathomable.

There are other manifestations of the unfathomable in there and it’s an interesting read if you have the time.

I know that Mr. Sullivan writes well and writes good things but, as I read them and agree with nearly all of them, I’ll be shaking my head.