England Made Me

The bronze doors slid apart and Krogh was in the circular courtyard.  Krogh was surrounded by Krogh’s.  The cold clear afternoon sky roofed in the cube of glass and steel.  The whole lower floors one room deep were exposed to him;  he could see the accountants working on the ground floor, the glass flashing primrose before the electric fires.  He noticed at once that the fountain was completed; the green shape worried him as he was not often worried;  it accused him of cowardice.  He had pandered to a fashion he did not understand; he would much preferred to have set in the fountain a marble goddess, a naked child, a nymph with concealing hands.  He paused to examine the stone; no instinct told him whether it was good art or bad art;  he did not understand.  He was uneasy, but he did not show his uneasiness. His high bald face,  like a roll of newspaper, showed at a distance only bold headlines;  the smaller type, the little subtleties, obscure fears, were invisible.

  

      He grew aware of being observed;  he was watched through the glass by an accountant over his machine, by a director from his chromium balcony, by a waitress drawing the black leather blinds in the staff restaurant.  The day faded quickly above his head, the lights began to go on behind the curved glass walls while he dallied beside the green statuary.

    Krogh mounted the double doors of Krogh’s.

"REALITY IS IN YOUR MIND" -- JAPANESE DIETING INVENTIONS

 Godzilla (l) and Rodan (r)



  Dieting has been much on my mind lately and I am currently "executing against plan," as we used to say in corporate meetings.


  I won't bore you with the details, but so far, so good.  I'm making progress and am pleased with my improving appearance and the salutary effect my slimming regimen has had on my physical and mental health.


  Still, I'm no scientist, just a maladroit craftsman always on the lookout for a better mousetrap, and I'm thinking these two news reports from Japan, which caught my eye yesterday, may just offer the constructive improvements I desire.


  So, without further ado, From The Nation That Brought You Rodan and Godzilla:

1. Japan 'diet glasses' fool wearers into eating less

By Miwa Suzuki | AFP – 6/4/12


  Goggles that trick the wearer into thinking the plain snack in their hand is a chocolate cookie, or make biscuits appear larger have been unveiled in Japan, offering hope to weak-willed dieters everywhere.


  Researchers at the University of Tokyo have developed devices that use computer wizardry and augmented reality to fool the senses and make users feel more satisfied with smaller -- or less appealing -- treats.


    On one device goggle-mounted cameras send images to a computer, which magnifies the apparent size of the cookie in the image it displays to the wearer while keeping his hand the same size, making the snack appear larger than it actually is.


     In experiments, volunteers consumed nearly 10 percent less when the biscuits they were eating appeared 50 percent bigger.


    They ate 15 percent more when cookies were manipulated to look two-thirds of their real size.


     Professor Michitaka Hirose at the university's graduate school of information science and technology said he was interested in how computers can be used to trick the human mind.

 
"How to fool various senses or how to build on them using computers is very important in the study of virtual reality," he told AFP.


  Hirose said standard virtual reality equipment that attempts to cater to complex senses like touch often results in bulky equipment.


    But he said using one or more senses to fool the others was a way around this problem.


   "Reality is in your mind," he said.


   In another project, Hirose's team developed a "meta cookie", where the headgear uses scent bottles and visual trickery to fool the wearer into thinking the snack they are eating is anything but a plain biscuit.

 
  Users can set the device to their favourite taste so they think they are eating a chocolate or strawberry-flavoured cookie.


     Hirose says experiments so far have shown 80 percent of subjects are fooled.


     The team has no plans as yet to commercialise their invention, but would like to investigate whether people wanting to lose weight can use the device.

2.  Diet Sunglasses Turn Off Your Appetite

by Steve Levenstein, Inventorspot.com, 6/4/12



   You've all heard that joke about a chubby guy or gal being on a "see food" diet. Well, a Japanese company named Yumetai seems to have given some serious thought to the matter, creating dieter's sunglasses with deep blue lenses that make the food you're eating look, well, disgusting.



   There's more to it than that - according to Yumetai, there's a scientific explanation behind these sunglasses and the lenses are blue for a very good reason: the color blue acts to calm the brain's appetite center.


       At the same time, the lenses block rays of red light which tend to stimulate the appetite. Make sense? Hey, if you're a desperate dieter you'll believe just about anything but if you think about it, there aren't many obese Japanese walking around outside the sumo dojo.

  

   If you want to put the diet sunglasses to the test, you can order them online from the Yumetai website for just 1,890 yen (about $19) plus shipping. The aviator-style sunglasses weigh just 25 grams (about an ounce) and are made in Japan.



   Considering the many millions of dollars Americans lay out on diet remedies every year, it may be time for a new approach. 



       Plus, the fact that many fattening foods already look disgusting doesn't seem to stop those intent on pigging out in style. What have you got to lose? Well just maybe, your appetite! 

Are cool blue glasses the key to doll-size Mr. Depp maintaining his sylph-like figure?

The Influence Of Inference

You see here
the influence
of inference

Moon on rippled
Stream

“Except as
and unless”

 

Lorine Niedecker:  From group of eleven poems entitled “HEAR AND SEE” (October 1967).

Upper: Albert Pinkham Ryder, Marine, 1890.

Lower, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Moonlight Marine, 1908.

Yōken Setsu (On Western Dogs)

Phillip Franz von Siebold, some types of Japanese dogs (ca. 1823-30)

    Western dogs are the best of animals and often do what people cannot.  Let me explain.  Japanese dogs only help in hunting, and scare away burglars at night.  However, Western dogs save people from drowning, and rescue travelers buried under heavy snow in cold countries.  People use them to pull sleds and deliver letters.  I have not room to enumerate their virtues.  How much superior, then, are Western dogs to Japanese dogs!  The virtues of Western dogs are truly great. [1]



  [1]  This charming, enlightening  text is the earliest surviving piece of prose written by the Japanese poet, novelist, journalist and essayist, Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902).   Shiki wrote this essay, Yōken Setsu (On Western Dogs) as a thirteen-year old public school student.  We are fortunate that Shiki took his writing seriously from an early age and collected copies of his work, sometimes publishing them along with the poetry and prose of friends in small magazines they created.

 

John Emms, St. Bernards to the rescue, ca. 1913

Confessions of Felix Roberts

I hope I may be permitted a general observation:  that person is fortunate in whose cradle some good fairy has placed the gift of responding to pleasure, a perpetual responsiveness in even the most unlikely circumstances.  No doubt this gift involves a heightening of responsiveness in general, the reverse of insensitivity, and therefore brings with it much pain which others are spared.  But I cheerfully insist that the increase in joy more than compensates for that disadvantage -- if it is one -- and it is this gift of responsiveness to the smallest and even the most commonplace pleasures that has always made me consider truly appropriate my first and real Christian name, Felix, about which my godfather Schimmelpreester felt so bitter.

Excerpt:  Thomas Mann, Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, The Early Years (trans. Denver Lindley), New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1955.

CORPSE REVIVER (NO. 2)

   Watching CNBC yesterday morning --  seeing the faces and hearing the voices of the fully employed, highly compensated presenters and guests, including  always-wrong economist Mark Zandi,  when the US Bureau of Labor Statistics announced the May unemployment numbers  -- was sadly revelatory.

      When the 69,000 jobs figure (surely to be revised downward in the usual manner thirty days from now, just as the previously announced April and March 2012 figures were corrected yesterday to hell-level accuracy) and 8.2 % (measured kindly) "upticked" unemployment levels were recited, it seemed like a bomb had exploded CNBC's and the entire news reporting establishment's universe.

   Every single media outlet we surveyed during our morning and afternoon drive north – even zombie, “Yes, Master,” MSNBC – used the same description over and over:  “Disaster.”

 

     Corrupt Labor Secretary Hilda Solis and feckless Council of Economic Advisers head, Prof. Alan Krueger, alone from the administration, were made to speak about the horrible milestone to interviewers.  Rehearsing identical talking points, theirs was sad testimony and both of them looked and sounded as though they were about to cry.  Their boss, he who sits in the Big Chair and who (formerly) relentlessly promised to "pivot back to jobs" remained totally, gutlessly, absent from the scene.

    Two days ago, attending what you might call a hiring hall (the experience reminded me of an attorney version of the longshoremen line-ups in On The Waterfront), signing up for electronic document review assignments (for non-attorney readers, litigation document review is considered to be about the most déclassé  thing one might ever find oneself doing professionally, although I personally have no problem with it; a job's a job, I like to work, and the people seemed very nice), I had an acute pre-vision of yesterday’s debacle. 

    Then again, the last three-and-one-half years of executive branch misanthropy, megalomania, ineptitude, hot air and  graft had already provided sufficient evidence of the pre-crime that robbed so much from so many.

 

    I have been practically teetotal recently and happily so, but yesterday's shocking unemployment numbers made me think a cocktail would be restorative, so I turned to reference guides and researched appropriate spirit-lifting libations to celebrate June in any event.  These dreadful, unnecessary,  insult-to-us-all, circumstances will pass and we will find ourselves again on the way to the Delectable Mountains, the Land of Beulah and beyond.  Perhaps we already are. 

    Harry Craddock’s wonderful 1930 drinks bible, The Savoy Cocktail Book, suggests a Corpse Reviver 2, as the drink of the moment and so do I:

 

Corpse Reviver 2

Ingredients

1/4 cup dry gin

1/4 cup Cointreau or other orange liqueur

1/4 cup Lillet Blanc

1/4 cup fresh lemon juice

2 dashes of absinthe or pastis

Ice cubes

Preparation

Combine first 5 ingredients in cocktail shaker; fill shaker with ice and shake vigorously 30 seconds. Strain into 2 chilled cocktail glasses.  

  To be perfectly honest with you, something I always try to do, last night my beverage of choice was a Cusqueña beer from Peru, which I tried at the very good local Peruvian restaurant Taita in Suffern, New York, before seeing the terrible (except for Charlize Theron and Sam Spruell) Snow White and The Huntsman.  

  I’d never had Cusqueña before and I’m pleased to report that it was excellent.

   As much as possible, I try to avoid making political comments here.  To any reader who believes that I’ve somehow missed the point (or, possibly, merely overstated the problem), I would simply submit that I haven’t.   

  

Ornicopia 12 (Albino Birds, Étiennne-Jules Marey, Loïe Fuller and June 1st Anniversary)

355. * Are all white birds albinos?  By no means are all white birds albinos.  Proof of this may be found in the colored eyes of many white birds.  Gulls, terns, egrets, white pelicans, swans, snow geese and whooping cranes are among the white or nearly white birds of North America.  They are not albinistic though they lack pigment in some or all their feathers.

Note:  

   The top photograph showing the white pelican is an 1886 work by the pioneering French scientist, physiologist and chronophotographer Étiennne-Jules Marey, and was made using his 1882 invention, the "fusil photographique" (chronophotographic gun). 

   This device, which anticipated the modern motion-picture camera, allowed Marey to record twelve separate consecutive images per-second on a single frame of film.      

   I keep a Marey staggered-image  of a person walking on my computer desktop at all times.  His work is a continuing wonder-of-the-world.

Étiennne-Jules Marey among his inventions.    


    The photograph which appears below the pelican reminds me of Marey's bird series and  shows the pioneering American dancer and theatrical lighting designer Loïe Fuller in performance.  The image was taken by an unknown photographer and dates from the 1890s or early 1900s.  

    Born Marie Louise Fuller in Fullersburg (now Hinsdale), Illinois, this artist  achieved great success and renown in Europe after beginning her dancing career in the United States.  Fuller eventually settled in Paris (where she is buried in Père Lachaise cemetery)  and gained the attention, respect, and friendship of many leading French artists and scientists, including Jules Chéret, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, François-Raoul Larche, Henri-Pierre Roché, Auguste Rodin, Franz von Stuck, Maurice Denis, Thomas Theodor Heine, Koloman Moser, Stéphane Mallarmé and Marie Curie. 

  
Loïe Fuller in 1900.


  Fuller held many patents related to stage lighting and luminscent costuming.  These included chemical compounds for creating color gels and chemical salts.

  Loïe Fuller's original stage name was "Louie".  In modern French "L'ouïe" is the word for a sense of hearing. When Fuller reached Paris she  was given a nickname, which was a pun on "Louie"/"L'ouïe".  The French re-named her "Loïe,"  a corruption of the early or Medieval French "L'oïe" and a precursor to "L'ouïe", which means "receptiveness" or "understanding." 

  Happy June 1, 2012.   It is the thirty-eighth anniversary of the Rainbow Theater, London concert by Kevin Ayers, John Cale, Nico and Eno that I thought would change the world.  Well, it changed my world.

Loïe Fuller sketched by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in 1892.

Marey’s chronophotographic gun ("Fusil photographique").




*  Bird albinism text excerpted from:  1001 Questions Answered About Birds by Allan D. Cruickshank and Helen G. Cruickshank (Toronto, General Publishing Company, 1958).