jelly
- The King Penguin can dive to 1,100 ft (340m) and stay underwater for almost 15 minutes.
- The Emperor Penguin can survive temperatures down to -75°F (-60°C).
Penguin Distribution
32 extinct penguin have been identified and documented with the help of fossil finds. Their identification was possible because penguins have a redundant leg joint, and the breastbone to which their powerful wing muscle are attached is uniquely shaped. 17 (arguably 18) species are currently found, and they all live in the southern hemisphere.
Penguins have been around for millions of years, but the Adélie Penguin did not arrive in the Antarctic until approximatively 6,000 years ago. Because these birds need firm, ice-free ground for their nests, they were unable to settle there while the continent was still covered in ice.
The smallest penguin species live near the equator - on the Galápagos Islands for example - while larger species such as the Emperor Penguin are found in the Antarctic. This is known as the The Bergmann's Rule. In 1847, the zoologist Carl Bergmann established that individuals of a species are smaller the closer they are to the equator and that they increase in size nearer the poles. This is because warm-blooded animals with a large body volume in relation to to surface area are better adapted to storing heat and conserving energy in cold climates than smaller individuals.
Like all other penguins, King Penguins live near a food supply. They spend the breeding and molting seasons on islands, but, because they are well adapted to long-distance swimming and deep diving, the rest of the time they remain in the sea. Where cold water from the bottom of the ocean reaches the surface along the rim of the Antarctic ice shelves, it carries nutrients to the surface, and so there is a rich food supply here. In one year, a million pairs of King Penguins eat approximately 750,000 tons of lanternfish and 65,000 tons of squid. This is about 1% of the total stock of lanternfish of the entire Southern Ocean. Together with other marine birds and mammals, they have a major impact on the local food chains.
It's easy to recognize an active penguin colony. It is just as easy to spot an abandoned colony by the dark green carpet of lush vegetation that covers the previously exposed ground. The soil often remains high in nutrients for hundreds, even thousands, of years after the colony has been abandoned. While it is populated, however, not many plants are able to stand the high levels of nitrates and phosphates combined with the constant wear from penguins feet. Lichen and grass can form on the outskirts or on protruding rocks within the colony.
When it is time to breed, King Penguins start to look for a place where they can incubate their eggs and raise their young together with other penguins - this ensures that there are always other birds around to feed the young. It takes more than a year to raise a chick, molt, and eat in preparation for the next season, which is why King Penguins are able to breed only in only two years out of three.
All penguins species, including the Gentoo, are believed to have emerged somewhere near the center of the Gondwanaland continent at the point where South America, Africa, and Antarctica started to drift apart.
The largest penguin species are able to incubate only a single egg, which they keep warm under a fold of skin on top of their feet. Magellanic Penguins, on the other hand, nest in burrows and normally incubate two eggs at a time by lying on them.
I'm reading a poetry book and it feels like a horror depressing novel.
Every single page is about the death of infants, animals and humans, or pure violence:
“I have stood here before.
Just this morning
I reached into the dark if the dishwasher
and stabbed my hand with a kitchen knife.”
- extract from “View from the glass”
“Look! I bear into this room a platter piled high with the rage my mother felt toward my father! Yes, it's diamonds now.
- extract from “Look”
“Riddle” is the only poem that I enjoyed.
An art history book that reads like a novel, thanks to the captivating analysis by Xavier Bray. His writing is simple but very lively, his analysis straight to the point and wrapped up with unique details, and every single mentioned œuvre is immediately reproduced on the next page. What a wonderful reading experience.
I was still in the middle of something and always will be.
A very moving letter to his soon-to-be-born daughter, then a few short essays about daily scenes and objets. I found some sentences very poetic and well written, but was soon brought back to what this book really is: stories of driving through dozens of frogs, killing a colony of wasps, peeing in his pants when he was a teen, or how many times he peed since he was born. I stopped reading after 27% of the book, especially knowing that he will soon move on to the art of vomiting or how to hide your chewing gum in your hand in public places...
This is exactly what I am looking for in a art history book. Full-page uncut reproductions, extended pages for large pieces, drafts and drawing to reveal his process, original extracts of his journal/letters/analysis on each page instead of a someone's irrelevant essay, clear legends, high quality print, great format. A wonderful found!
The writing is very dark and enigmatic, filled with images of the color red, animated by her desire for relief and for death. It is hard to read, hard to understand, but one can only see the high quality of her writing. I need to mention that she used racial slurs several times and loose comparisons to the Holocaust.
This collection of poems was published posthumously.
Oh my that was wordy. Visiting Auschwitz and comparing the “many silent space” to “school in summer” ; commenting on a blue-haired woman who farted on him at the doctor's waiting room, and imagining gases becoming colorfully visible ; being jealous of a couple who is dancing in front of him ; complaining of a person talking on the phone while the train is stopped, and contemplating the beauty of an hare ; a description of life under an igloo as to enter this collection of poems... A feeling of pathos and bitterness to the world in general. I wish more diverse and talented poets would get the Pulitzer instead.
4.5 stars. I read it in one sitting. She writes about growing up as the only Japanese-American in Pasadena, the clash between East side and Westside LA, her grandmother deported to Manzanar in 1942, the plant nursery of her father, her son and today's racism, family celebration at a J-town restaurant, being bullied, rice recipes, and her love for stones.
I want to check more of her books. Highly recommend.
A very impressive selection of photographs from 1839 to 1939. I would have given it 5 stars, if not for the choice of putting a naked woman next to a phallic object or a glazing man as a mirror photograph twice in the book. Very useful biographical section for each photographer at the end of the book.
Probably James Forten, Unknown, Daguerreotype, ca. 1840
Black and White Hands on a Prayer Book, attrib. to Albert Sands Soutworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes, Daguerreotype button, ca. 1847
Cape Horn, Near Celilo by Carleton Watkins, Albumen print, 1867
Black Canyon, Arizona, Wheeler Survey by Timothy O'Sullivan, Albumen print, 1871
First Aerial Photo of New York, from Balloon, by James H. (Jimmy) Hare, Silver print, 1906
Society Ladies at Annual Horse Show, Newport, R. I. by Underwood and Underwood, Silver print, 1913
Pigeons in Flight by Francis Blake, Platinium print, ca. 1888
Man on Bicycle by Francis Blake, Platinium print, ca. 1888
The Wedding by Gertrude Kasebier, Platinum print, 1899
The Red Man by Gertrude Kasebier, Gum over platinum, 1901-1902
Summertime by Gertrude Kasebier, Platinum on tissue, sepia toned, ca. 1910
Pen Station, New York, by Dr. Drahomir Joseph Ruzicka, Silver print, 1919
Roebling Steel by Maurice Bratter, Palladium print, ca. 1930
Glass Abstraction by Grancel Fitz, Silver print, 1929
The Ice Box by Grancel Fitz, Silver print, ca. 1928
Dust Storm, Cimarron County by Arthur Rothstein, Silver print, 1936
The moving and horrifying memories of a man who survived 3 detention camps, as he drew them during and after his detention at the model-ghetto Terezin (1941-1943), the death-camp Auschwitz-Burkenau (1943-1944), and the labor camp Swcharzheide (1944-1945).
After his liberation, Alfred Kantor creates a book with 127 watercolor and pencil drawings. By the summer of 1945, he had finished his book. He then begins to resume his life: he comes to America, returns to art school, and enrolls at the US Army as a glockenspiel musician. After his discharge, he returns to art school and begins to work at an advertising agency. He marries a woman who had also been in Terezin and together they raise two kids. His spare-time passion is the piano, and his home remains his joy.
One can only wonder why this book is not more well-known and more studied at school.
“What I am concerned with is no longer metaphor, but metamorphosis” - Braque
This monograph contains 174 reproductions, but unfortunately only 9 in colors. The 12-page analysis compares Kafka to Braque, their visions and their use of the line, but it felt too constructed and not that relevant. I enjoyed Braque's work a lot.
Resurrection of a bird, 1959:
L'oiseau et son ombre II, 1961
L'oiseau traversant le nuage, 1957
Si je mourais là-bas, 1962 (non included in this edition)
Somniloquy
In the end, everything matters,
even rain on the hills, though it won't
save a splintered boat from sundering
or release the shark in the net.
Bathing my sick child in milk couldn't
calm her fever. Nailing myself to a tree
didn't bring God any closer,
but when I looked a serpent in the eyes
I felt a common salvation.
The day after I buried my daughterI heard a knocking and opened a drawerto find a dozen eggs, one of them rocking.I held it in my mouth. Two snakes brokefrom the shell and licked my neck. The godhanging on the wall commanded, Watch me suffer.
I dreamt my daughter dove
for whale bones on the abyssal plains,
surfaced from the seafloor bearing
spines, ribs, colossal skulls.
They grinned at me from the waves,
gods of a different history.
Two days after I buried my daughterI began to understand I was promiseda second life but not a better one. I hired mourners who wept and rent their clothesby the river, but visions still pursued me.I paid a woman to baptize herself in my name, to tell me when she changed. She disappearedbut left behind a white dress and three teeth. A woman's body is a memory with no language.
I dreamt my daughter by the side of the road
circled by thirteen dead owls. I knew it
would end here in the cat's cradle of my heart,
in my witch's little finger, but my daughter said,
Be still. It has not been decided whether you will dieon this dark continent or the next.
*
Three days after I buried my daughter,
I found a man in a field holding the soft, gray
loops of his intestines in his hands like evidence
of life, but not proof. I killed the bull
that gored him, stitched its head
onto the dead man's body. When I saw
what I had made, I kissed its nipples,
drank there until I was strong enough
to brush the flies from my breasts.
This book felt like a collage of ideas, and not a complete story. I didn't like Olivia's behavior, and I didn't like that she doesn't seem to have learned from it. I was chocked that the illustrator decided to go with the stereotypical image of the mom feeding the baby while the dad is completely absorbed in his newspaper. As Olivia asks him a question, he decides to go with the easy and fast solution, instead of building a great educational moment with his daughter.
A disappointment. It was my first book from the Olivia series.
read and reviewed: 2018-08-21
Superfund
If this was all the access you had
to sky, looking down through
boardwalk boards into a tributary
glinting, if this was all the time
your calling or had been all
this time, and you found it, found
yourself arrested above an opening,
if purgatory were as real as bridges,
where would your religion build,
in the soft parabola of carriage
and suds, or in the hip points
your heaviness keeps in counsel
with the planks. The mill of
spiderlight and curtainwork in one
run over the impress of
cofferdam in the other. This river
in the days left to live, in
the leftover days reclamation
balances, trains its instrument
on a prospect romantic, pushy and
plainly. The joinery of the boards
is thoughtful, or the prison wish is
a watchwork through and through:
to guess at the rare punt
of a single stick's odyssey, or
to separate from the rummage
each drifted glyph or superscript
and gloss the passages. Drawn through
the bothway of the ribs:
a breath, and then another.
No prior experience knowk wood.
Not purgatory, but overage.
Smalltown Lift
One last stop, he says. And they drive to Westside Lanes.
I grew up bowling. I don't want to bowl. It was raining.
We're not going to bowl, the circus carpet dark with gum
beneath them, and he parts the curtains on the best
photo booth in town. He feeds it the three dollars, Get
in. They somehow share the short ridged stool. In here
we have to tell one another one true thing. You first. Click.
This is the best way I could think to have my arm around you.
Click. Click. Click.
“No place on earth can compete with Sinai.”
A very pleasant book consecrated to Neil Folberg's photographs from the 70's and 80's in Israel, Egypt and Jordan. Very extensive description of his travels, in the form of a journal, accompanies 110 colored photographs. Many are printed on a double panel. The photographs are not equal in terms of quality, but the collection is still worth exploring.
“The challenge of landscape photography is to reduce a limitless expanse to the confines of a two-dimensional rectangle without creating a feeling of confinement within borders. It is necessary to give enough information about the environment so that the imagination can extrapole beyond the edges of the photograph, to envision what might be beyond the next ridge, to create a mood evocative enough to make the viewer want to wander in their mind through that image.”
“The beauty of the desert lies less in its small delights - a wildflower, a pool of water - than in the delight of finding these things in the midst of dryness.”
My favorites:
Egypt
Felucca, Nile at Luxor:
Pyramids, Giza:
Mawhub, Western Desert:
Street scene, village of Qurna:
Village of Qurna:
Farafra, Western Desert:
Crocodile charm, Island of Sehel, near Aswan:
Feluccas, first cataract of the Nile:
Western Desert and Elephantine Island:
Sinai
Canyon of Colors, Sinai:
Olive tree in Wadi Talab:
Pool and rock, Wadi Talah:
Sandstone, Wadi Arada HaKatan:
Hamadat El-Loz:
Great Dune and Clouds, Bikat Baraka:
Sandstorm, Bikat Baraka:
Red Sea coast at Ras Abu-Galum:
Acacia and black dike, Wadi Ara'im:
Jordan
View to the north from Wadi Burdah, in the area of Wadi Rum:
Jebel Ed-Deir and Wadi Musa:
Shobak Castle:
Israel
Poppies and almond blossoms, Judean hills:
Train, Nahal Refaim:
Monastery of St. George, Wadi Kelt:
Ain Kelt:
Village of Carmel:
Road below Har Sodom:
Salt flats, Dead Sea:
Western Wall and Temple Mount:
Mamilla Street: