Hearts, Lungs and Minds: experimental radio documentary
In the category of groovy ideas that have nothing to do with the weather ..came across this interesting piece…hurry though you’ve only 7 days to hear it.
An experimental documentary by sound artist John Wynne, who spent a year as artist-in-residence with photographer Tim Wainwright at Harefield Hospital, one of the world’s leading centres for heart and lung transplants.
Using recordings of patients, the devices some of them were attached to, and the hospital itself, the piece weaves together intensely personal narratives with the sounds of the hospital environment, exploring the experiences of transplant patients and the important issues raised by this invasive, last-option medical procedure.
Flourish
Prepare for flurry of weather centric posts …
In a round up of weather related worrying and reading I came across this article headlined Expert: Scientific reasons behind year’s weather. The second paragraph read
At least one Iowa City resident said she thinks the weather in Iowa this year, along with the seemingly apocalyptic flurry of earthquakes, deadly tornados and other natural disasters around the globe might be a sign from above.
“I think the end is near,” Linda Lewis said Friday.
I should point out the Mrs Lewis is not the expert in the article, but I was comforted to see another weather wonderer who relies on absolutely no science for her wondering. I’ve questioned whether it’s resolvable being entirely illiterate in science and concurrently obsessed with the weather.
I’ve muttered my way through some hardware shop discussions with perplexed employees as I complain about the selection of barometers they stock, whilst not being entirely clear what barometers actually do. I’ll ask do they measure air pressure without really having a clue what the purpose of measuring air pressure is, but since it matters to weather people, so it too matters abstractly to me.
Bangladesh is set to disappear under the waves by the end of the century
From Johann Hari’s piece in The Independent:
Ten years ago, the village began to die. First, many of the trees turned a strange brownish-yellow colour and rotted. Then the rice paddies stopped growing and festered in the water. Then the fish floated to the surface of the rivers, gasping. Then many of the animals began to die. Then many of the children began to die.
The waters flowing through Munshigonj – which had once been sweet and clear and teeming with life – had turned salty and dead.
Read the rest here.
Meanwhile on this side of the water they’re decking it out over whether or not to implement a carbon tax federally and some are hiccuping over the already introduced Provincial tax on petrol. Now lads, a bit closer to home, this might help you make up your minds…
The researchers say sea levels could be expected to rise by four to six meters by 2100 as part of a long-term trend towards five to ten meters. A six meter rise in sea level would put 91 per cent of Richmond, and 76 per cent of Delta underwater; the entire airport and ferry terminal at Tsawwassen would be lost to the sea; and the current erosion counter-measures around Point Grey and North Vancouver would be overwhelmed, threatening to plunge much of UBC into the ocean.
Read more here
Curiously there’s been recent, slightly rabid muttery protests about the introduction of a new bus route in our area! A bus, God help us.
Round Table discussions
I first came across these round-table discussions because one of them concerned the weather. I became distracted en route to clicking on that one and listened to the one about Susan Sontag, which is compelling listening, but rather a public dissection on her personality that, at times, seemed to these neophyte ears, a bit unforgiving. Given that this discussion took place after extracts from her journal had been published which surely gave some context on the complexities of her personality…
Perhaps I am too squeamish, but I kept thinking yes, she was a public intellectual, perhaps she could be vicious and critical, but she was also someone’s mother and it cannot be easy to have your mother turned over and pulled apart like a piece of toast. You can see why it was so necessary for her son to write his recent book, which though remarkably restrained, created a profound portrait of grief and its inherent complexities. It’s effect for the reader was what John McGahern would have described as the particular being the way to the general, which is perhaps when and how the particular can serve a purpose.
This roundtable discussion relied too much on the particular only as a means to the particular and sometimes felt like crows pecking the same patch of land to turn up the same version of the repeatedly pecked and bloodied worm.
Why are these dichotomies in her personality so surprising? Why the gasp and gush over her insecurity? I’m confused as to why this is so foreign. Are not most humans similarly flawed?
Nabakov’s position of “I pride myself on being a person with no public appeal.” made certain sense as an aspiration in the aftermath of listening to it.
The roundtable discussions are here: http://philoctetes.org/past_programs/ They are varied and some are about the brain, and the weather, areas of particular interest to me. I also like that these discussions are hours long. We live in times of conversational brevity.
Middling
“He was greatly distressed in his head. All night the parrot had swung roosting from his palate…”
From Dream of Fair to Middling Women. A Novel. Samuel Beckett. (Arcade Publishing, New York, first Arcade paperback edition 2006)