Creature of the Shade

Time 2021-08-19 20:06:51

Web Name: Creature of the Shade

WebSite: http://urbanist.typepad.com

ID:187712

Keywords:

of,Creature,Shade,

Description:

Hey. I'm Jarrett Walker and my professional blog is over at humantransit.org ... This, on the other hand, is where I record impressions of cities and landscapes from my near-constant traveling. Close Untitled, 1981 #1488, batik.My mother, the artist Mirra Meyer, earlier known as Louella Meyer, Lou Meyer Walker, or Lou Robillard, passed away on Good Friday, April 19, 2019, at her home in Portland. Raised on farms in Iowa and Missouri, she came to Portland in 1969 and led a successful career as an artist in the 1970s and 1980s, exhibiting at major galleries throughout Oregon and beyond. A leading arts advocate, she helped to found the Oregon Designer-Craftsmen s Guild and served on the board of Oregon Advocates for the Arts and Oregon Artists Equity, pivotal groups in the development of the arts as a viable profession at that time.A collection of images of her work can be found at the end of this post.For most of this period her medium was batik, a traditional Javanese form. In batik, the artist applies wax to a fabric in some design, then dyes the fabric. The dye colors the fabric only where there is no wax. This process is repeated to create multiple shades of color progressing from lighter to darker. Batik is the opposite of painting in that the artist constructs the image negatively, creating the absence of color rather than its presence. Only the brightest colors were applied directly as in most art forms.Mirra adapted this traditional medium to create dramatic landscapes and abstracts, mostly pieces framed under glass as well as soft hangings and quilts. Life, in her work, takes the form of trees whose roots and branches are identical, yielding a form that is both a living subject and a complex stitch holding the world together. Even seen under glass, the austerity of her images contrasts with the intrinsic warmth of cloth, and with the gentle crackle effect she created by folding the waxed areas so that small rivulets of dye penetrate them.In addition to her artistic career, Mirra held numerous arts management positions over the years. As Community Development Director for the Arizona Arts Commission (1985-89), she helped communities all over the state with local arts projects and arts elements of infrastructure. She later served as Executive Director of Portland s downtown arts festival Artquake (1991-92), and finally, a subject dear to her heart, as the director of the Historic Cemeteries program for the Oregon State Historic Preservation Office. In the 1990s she shifted from batik to paintings, watercolors, and prints, many inspired by her year-long sojourn in the countryside near Canberra, Australia in 1994. After that time, Australia s eucalyptus trees, whose branches are often suggestive of human limbs, became the dominant tree form in her work.Throughout her life she was devoted to gardening, often with the goal of attracting wildlife, and to the many animals who passed through her care. She was especially fond of elderly animals. Cats 0ften came to her late in life and she helped several achieve remarkable lifespans. She also owned one of the world s oldest chickens, Golda, who is around 20 years old and who survives her. Although she lived alone, she passed away in the company of one of her dearest friends, Nan Evans Miller, who happened to be visiting at the time.She was twice married, to my father Don Walker 1961-67 and to Max Robillard 1969-78. I am her only living relative.How You Might HelpYou may be able to help with one of the following:We know we do not have a complete list of everyone who would care about this news, so please forward this to others in your network who might have known her.If you would be interested in attending a simple gathering in Portland in honor of Mirra, please respond and let me know, using the email button at right. I am not sure who is out there in the network of artists and creative people who were touched by her life. If you own a piece of Mirra s work, we would be grateful for a photograph of it. I would also love to hear your own stories and remembrances. We hope to expand this post to include an online gallery featuring highlights of her work, and perhaps to construct a book of this material. Thank you for reading, and for helping me put together the full story of who she was as an artist and human being. GalleryBelow are a few works from key periods of Mirra s life that we own or have records of. We hope to build a more complete gallery over time. Most of this work is available for purchase; contact me via the email button at the bottom of the text in the bar at right.A typical early tree image, c. 1975, #896, batik. Note the two moons or suns.Please return to this post. We will add more images as we find more of her work. Blessings to you all. My late mother Mirra Meyer, who passed away in April, spent much of the 1970s and 1980s developing batik as a modern art form, while also doing important work in several other media. We re delighted to announce her first solo exhibit in decades, at the Michael Parsons Gallery in downtown Portland. We had a good opening reception so we think we ll do it again. Please also join us for a one week before closing reception at the gallery, Saturday, August 24 at 1:30 PM. The show is open now and runs through the end of August.The gallery at 716 SW Madison St, and is open 12-5 PM Tuesday through Saturday. Last week, I agreed to sell a prime piece of downtown real estate for $200.Downtown Lineville, Iowa, that is.How many urban Americans have the ruins of a small town in their lives, and how might our view of the rural change if we did? My mother’s childhood happened around a prosperous Lineville, and throughout mine it was a site of piligramage, the destination of a long summer drive every year or two. Finally, it’s where we went in 1984 to move my confused grandmother from her collapsing house and into a nursing home, a delicate deed done amid thunder and lightning that left me with the searing image of grandma in the rocking chair on the porch, tornado sirens wailing, defiantly saying that she won’t take shelter because if it’s her time it’s her time. Lineville itself could say the same thing.Lineville is on the Iowa-Missouri border, paired with the much smaller South Lineville, Missouri. It has a classic 19th century town square, the south side of which is the state line. The Civil War’s boundary was here, and if you needed to draw some line dividing the South from the Lutheran/Calvinist upper midwest, between Faulkner and Garrison Keillor, you’d probably choose this one.Many laws differ across the line. The remaining restaurant and gas station are on the Missouri side, because the sales tax is lower. One of Lineville’s claims to fame is that Iowans go there on the Fourth of July because they can buy fireworks in Missouri and then shoot them out over Iowa, where they are illegal. The businesses are still there, with big signs facing north.The verandah where my grandmother rocked in the face of disaster is now my patch of grass, inherited after my mother’s recent passing.Next to it, and also long gone, was the home of her brother Denzil, a lifelong bachelor with epilepsy who lived there most of his life, and who never showed an interest in women. I reject the briefest impulse to put a rainbow flag on his grave. I am not here for the culture war.My grandmother once taught school – including my mother as a girl -- in a one-room red schoolhouse, lovingly maintained by the Wayne County Historical Society until it was recently damaged by arson. But it’s still there, and so is the upright piano where they sang songs 70 years ago.Lineville looks dead at the center, but there’s life on the edges. Like anywhere, there are people in cars going to and from houses and jobs in the surrounding land. Churches are scattered along the highway. People probably don’t see much value in refurbishing those collapsing old buildings, so they tear them down when they’re about to fall down. The whole north side of the square vanished quite recently; in Street View as I write, it’s still there.But there is still love here, love of community and place. Commerce has fled the town square but civic life remains: the post office, the city hall and library. The park in the town square is clearly loved and cared for. Children play and couples even stroll under its fine old trees. Abandoned lots turn to grass that the city mows, so that the town is morphing, lot by lot, into a well-maintained park. The people, scattered on the land or in the houses strung out along the roads, care enough to do that. It is remarkable how much pride an apparently ruined town can have.Like big cities, small towns first evolved around people walking, which created the town squares that people love and that many more prosperous towns have restored. They also revolved around a local economy. The corn a farmer grew just outside of town went onto the train right there in Lineville, not at some big complex far away.The vacuuming of small businesses into big corporations destroyed downtown Lineville’s economic purpose, and it’s also destroying locals’ ability to enjoy their land. The elite of the same neoliberal forces that killed much of the town is lavishing its unmatchable millions in buying up the land for recreation. A popular hunting show on TV recently made a big deal of Decatur County, just to the west, so the rush is on. For some in today’s aristocracy the proper display of power requires a private hunting reserve, just as it did for kings and dukes of old. Locals can’t afford to get onto the land that defines their identity and sense of place. The small farm, like the small town, is vanishing everywhere.None of that is news, but now I have pictures, and stories.I have to love Lineville for its family memories, and for my ancestors in the windswept cemetery, and now for some of my mother’s ashes settling into the grass. I have to love the anger and persistence of some of the people living here. I have to love the mostly elderly people I see in the restaurant, and the efficient and friendly woman who appears to be the whole City staff, and the mayor and city council who decided, in a quick phone poll, that my patch of grass was worth $200. I know how they vote here, and what that does to the world, and I wish I could convey how much many of us in cities share their pain. But I do what I’m here to do, and drive back to the city, feeling as empty as this hollowed town. Brownish-grayish squirrel. (Photo: Zach Tucker-Briggs) When I was in college, I went back and forth between Oregon and Southern California a lot. In my simplified pre-scientific awareness at the time, Oregon had brown squirrels, while Southern California had gray squirrels.Much later, I settled in Oregon again, and noticed that most of the squirrels were now grayish-brown.I was getting past the middle of my life. Unconsciously, I formed a story that captured my feelings about that:Back when things were GOOD, and AMERICA WAS GREAT, brown squirrels lived in Oregon, where they BELONG, and gray squirrels lived in California, where THEY belong. This was good. But then, somehow, squirrels got PROMISCUOUS and led a PROMISCUITY ARMY to CONVERT other squirrels, causing a EPIDEMIC of MISCEGENATION, so that now, instead of brown squirrels and gray squirrels, we are OVERRUN by brownish-grayish squirrels. It s a sign of COLLAPSE, and we should demand that everything be PUT BACK EXACTLY THE WAY IT WAS.The truth is boring by comparison. An eastern species of brownish-grayish squirrel has been expanding its population in Oregon, somewhat at the expense of the two common species of brown squirrel (one of which isn t native either). Brown squirrels are still here if you look for them. But I like my story. It resonates with my fears about aging and longing for youth in way that feels like a good massage. And to my delight, I find I can treasure it, and take pleasure from it, without believing it.Do you have a story that nurtures you, and that feels right to you emotionally, even though you know it s false? Have you figured out how to make that not a contradiction? Not everyone can do it. Indigenous people who treasure their own culture s myths but also know modern science probably have this knack. People who ve been immersed in literature have a head start in developing it, but still, it s harder than just loving a fictional story. My story about squirrels is a story about my world. Its false-but-credible appearance of explaining that world is the key to its effect.So I can take solace from my story about squirrel promiscuity even as I enjoy the antics of the brownish-grayish squirrel (pictured) that the story disapproves of. They re cute. They are comfortable around us. (A baby one even climbed me once, as though I were a tree.) When they fold their arms in front of their chests, a gesture that conserves heat but looks like a longing for my approval, I can t imagine there s anything wrong with the world. That s a false story too. I don t believe it. But it s good. It keeps me warm. We have to keep warm somehow. In the wake of Ursula K. Le Guin s passing, friends have been asking what book they should read first. So I thought about this and created a flowchart. (Click to enlarge and sharpen!) Obviously, you may be interested in many things that will cause you to follow many paths.Note that:Many great Le Guin books and stories are not on this chart, although all of the books shown are great. Those listed are simply the best points of entry.The books shown include gateways to all of Le Guin s worlds: Orsinia, Earthsea, the Western Shore, and the vast array of planets that belong to an informal league called the Ekumen. Once you re into any of these, there s much more to explore. Don t be put off by the fictional frame of the Ekumen, which may seem poorly explained in whatever book you start with. The frame explains why a visitor from outside a world would come to that world to study it, but beyond that, the meta-narrative of the Ekumen plays only a small role in each novel. As you read multiple books, it becomes more interesting but never dominates the story. Ignore the confusing term Hainish Cycle, which makes it sound like these books should be read in a particular order. The novels set in the Ekumen are all independent and there is no narrative sequence linking them. The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas is online in many places, and these places sometimes appear and disappear. At the moment, it s here. Questions? Objections? Please comment. Walked out to the car at the curb today as a man was going by, pushing a shopping cart. Wool cap pulled way down, almost over his eyes. I nodded at him, the way one acknowledges the presence of a human being.At once, he explodes, yelling at me, furious. Over and over about “what you did to me” and “how could you do that?” and “arbitration.” Not quite physically coming at me, but it’s a shock. I say what you’d expect, first “What the hell?” and then “Dude, I’m not the guy you’re mad at.” (“The hell you’re not! You know exactly what you did!”)And I think: Suppose he had a gun. A man in this much rage, sure that the cause of all his suffering is right there in front of him. I’d be dead now. In Australia I wouldn t be dead, but I’d be dead here in America.After it’s over, I think: OK. This guy’s pushing a shopping cart because of some epic dispute that didn’t go his way. And in his rage he’s not distinguishing his nemesis from others who might look similar. Race, height, shaved head -- who knows what’s enough to be the trigger?Thing is: He’s not insane. He’s traumatized, but on the other side of that wall he s a fully coherent human being. I can imagine an alternate world in which we’re friendly neighbors. And in a much lesser degree, I’ve been in his place.And yet, he might have had a gun. And for that reason, I will never again nod to acknowledge the humanness of someone pushing a shopping cart down a street in America. In many other countries, though, I will. -43.532 172.636Almost five years ago, the heart of Christchurch, New Zealand was smashed to rubble. The February 2011 earthquake didn t just take lives and destroy property; it wrecked almost everything that defined the city s character and formed its face to the world. (Should I speak only of the face, then, rather than the heart? Are travelers in any position to know the hearts of cities, however often they return to them?) I look now at the photos from my joyous 2009 visit to the city, which I posted after the quake but before I returned there. Almost everything I had photographed is damaged and closed (the Art Centre) or ruined beyond repair (the Cathedral) or simply gone (the intimate mainstreets, and the historic buildings of nearby Lyttleton). Gone too are many things I wouldn t have photographed: an entire skyline of concrete modernist buildings has vanished. Just a few still stand, plywooded and tagged. This one has a new banner promising it will be a hotel next year.Here is the former visitor s centre, the clock an absent face:One concrete building, once part of a long row of brick or wood storefronts, is now the sole fossil of a vanished row of shops.And it is hard not to look at the cathedral, still easily mistaken for a ruin of war:Of course the work and talk is of recovery. What else would humans talk of? Urbanists heap praise on the downtown shopping area made of shipping containers, an early attempt to create some life in the ruins. One fine new building, a public transport interchange, is already up and running, and within a few years there will be a 5-10 story brand-new city in the blocks around it, just south of the cathedral square. A department store has reopened downtown, which is more than many cities this size can boast.But forgive me if that s not all I notice on cold overcast Sunday evening in the nearly deserted city. Like anyone who knew Christchurch as it was, I walk through a city of absences, the lost city always flickering in peripheral vision. If I turned quickly enough, and with a certain intent, I might be back in the mainstreet of local shops, ordinary or eccentric, each with an office or residence above. A shopkeeper chatting with friends might look up at me casually, willing but not desperate to sell me a thirdhand book, or a piercing, or a faded Victorian pillow. Nobody was rich or striving on that street, but visitors like me loved the dusty oddity and gentleness -- qualities that no amount of money can restore. A few of those people died in their shops, and all were scattered, lives and livelihoods smashed. So there s been loving and grieving to do, and art does most of that work. New Zealanders have long done quirky and cheerful public art. (The traffic sheep, which are both bollards and benches, are a fine example.) Kiwis are also among the world s great gardeners, especially with their brown-and-teal native flora. Here all that comes together around the Cathedral s ruins. Over and over, I saw art and plants patching things together: Here, a fine mural on a damaged building, a row of planters hanging from a fence, and, in the lower right, a shiny designer bench. Art is the key, so let me end, as I did in my last Christchurch post, at the Art Centre. A re-use of an old college, it was a huge warren of little artists studios, the sort of place that made a life in the arts possible for many talented people. Mercifully, it did not quite fall down.New Zealand rarely experiences huge floods of investment -- what Jane Jacobs called catastrophic money -- and on balance this is one of its virtues. The money hesitates and dribbles. There are plenty of questions. What is Christchurch about now? Is it just a regional service center for the South Island, a place to go for surgery or furniture? Will it find a new purpose? Or will the arts and plants be its salvation? Both remain the essence of what Christchurch will still have when all this is over. The great parks are still here, and the Botanic Gardens still have their astonishing trees -- including Californian giants that can t be 200 years old, but look much vaster and older. The Art Centre will be put back together, and manages to look like art now and then in the process:Across the street, the Art Gallery tells us, in neon, from behind its cyclone fence, that everything is going to be alright. Only the doubt-admitting voice of art can say this with any credibility.Art and plants. There is no other way, I think, to market and mourn a city, at the same time. This series begins at Part 1.The “now, I m really there” moment in Iceland happened, for me, in the highlands. You don’t have to go far. An hour out of Reykjavík you can be in Thingvellir National Park, another dramatic site in the cleft between continental plates, important to the national narrative as the site of the world’s first parliament. Then, keep going north. Ignore the gratuitous rainbows everywhere. Icelandic weather is fast-moving and fast-changing, so the sun-rain transition that generates rainbows is a pretty routine event.Signs warn little cars to turn back, the road turns to black gravel, and you enter a vast, empty landscape of rolling mountains and plains, thinly painted with life.We stopped in a small pass where these forms collide. I was drawn to a moss-covered spherical scope, rising and curving away from me.The spongy green carpet seemed to bounce back readily, forgiving my steps. As I climbed the spherical hill it seemed almost that the surface was rotating toward me, so that I stayed in place. At a certain point, though, the sides of the moss-mounds became vertical, as though cut off, creating a Hobbiton effect … Between the mounds, little sunken gardens, wind-sheltered, for a diversity of tiny plants: heathers, low huckleberries, a few fast summer herbs. There near the autumn equinox, I saw what appeared to be the last flower of the year, from the dandelion clan. This huddled life seems to be the main niche for success in Iceland, for anything more complex than moss or grass. Later at the Reykjavik Botanic Garden, we noted that the entire Icelandic natives collection is shorter than its guardian cat: Back in the highlands, the journey over the great sphere of moss seemed to take forever. When I finally crested, seeing the tundra plain beyond with glaciers in the distance – this was the moment I chose to identify as “finally, I m there” and also as “this will do, for now, for me, as the Uttermost End of the Earth.” The silence was absolute. The cars that passed – two in the hour we were there – sounded like buzzing flies only at their closest approach. Otherwise, the silence seemed active and forceful in suppressing them. I’m not sure I could have handled the silence if it had been any louder.Oh yes, and on the way back, more rainbows. This series begins with Part 1. The touch of humanity in Iceland is always modernist, boxy, out-of-context. In place so cold, flat and windy that few plants are more than a few inches tall, the humblest hut can only be a tower of arrogance. You do what you can with steep roofs to manage wind and snow, but you will stick out patriarchally just by standing up. And viewed from above (plane or distant mountaintop) your house will resemble a child’s toy blocks, carelessly discarded on a vast, smooth floor. Which may be why half of Icelanders supposedly believe in elves, or more generally in diminutive “hidden people.” Full-sized vertical humans look so wrong in this landscape that it’s easy to image there must be a more right-sized genius loci for whom all this is really intended. If a day on the tundra makes you long for a forest, one solution is to imagine that the cool people here are the very tiny ones, they who stride purposefully through the shade of towering mosses, hunt down antelope-sized beetles, chop house-sized huckleberries down from their inch-high forest canopy, and return in splendor to lichenate cities more ornate than any fantasist could illustrate. Here too is an echo of Mars. The hard-headed scientists of Robinson’s novels never quite deny the earlier stories of “little red men” -- maybe so small that those randomly tossed rocks on the Martian plains might serve them as shelter and habitat.--- Iceland is cold but motion is heat, and in Iceland everything seems to be moving under the surface. Volcanoes are everywhere – the whole island is volcanoes really, all made of massive lava eruptions interspersed with explosions of ash – all still haunting the surface in the form of geysers, steam vents, and bubbling pools. Our favorite silly tourist spot, in Reykjarnes, was a “bridge between continents,” which is to say between the North American and Eurasian plates. A little rift valley, full of black sand, with signs welcoming you at each end. It marks the main faultline where Iceland is being slowly ripped into being, created and destroyed at the same time. We made two major expeditions out of Reykjavík, apart from touring volcanic Reskjanes on our wander in from the airport. First, southeast, to the recently erupted Eyjafjallajökull volcano, then northeast, into the highlands above Thingvellir. Eyjafjallajökull: The ö and j are as in German, the “ll” is “tl” or just “t” at the end, and Icelandic stress is always hard on the first syllable, the rest of each word sliding away as though as though down a long slope of scree. It erupted in 2010, but with ash rather than lava, and ash is good for plants. So its skirts are all grassy now, treeless of course, and its most striking feature is a cliff around the base that offers a casual abundance of waterfalls. We climbed one of these, Skógarfoss ... ... and encountered, above it, endless grasslands rushing up to the glacier along the fast stream, including a boatload of birch scrub, coming around a corner, that obviously wouldn t have survived contact with the sheep.The view down the falls, to the farm below, was also intriguing.The birches were a rare thing. Heading back into the sunset, we found a row of eight more, the only ones on the entire coastal plain. Continued at Part 3. The process of making Mars habitable for humans will start with microbes, and later a world-spanning carpet of lichen and moss. First you’ll need to increase the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to warm up the planet a bit, but then plants should spread rapidly, happily gobbling all that carbon dioxide and turning into carbon, for the plant, and oxygen, for us. Redwoods and apple trees can come later; for sheer quantity and toughness on volcanic rock, mosses and lichens will do the heavy lifting.I’d been reading about this, in Kim Stanley Robinson’s scientifically careful novel Red Mars, when we landed in Iceland, and drove out onto the volcanic plains surrounding Keflavik airport. Add a red filter, and I’d have been in the landscape of the novel: rock, moss, and lichen to the horizon, plus cold, hard wind. (Was the Viking lander named for the people who first landed in Iceland, with this parallel in mind? The internets are silent on the question.)Things move faster on Earth of course. This lava field is from an eruption in the 1300s. Some of it came down very smooth, creating flat volcanic plains such as the beachside expanse at Reykjarnes where a statue of an extinct great auk contemplates its former habitat …(It s an impressively remote site for public art, at the end of this long black-gravel road.)But sometimes new forces blasted apart older layers of lava, flipping them vertical for a ruins of war effect.Eventually moss and lichen fully covers the lava, and a while after that, you can grow grass on the flat bits, even as the volcano still steams in the distance via a geothermal plant, and hillsides of moss remind you of an earlier stage of history. Finally, you get a decently terraformed look:No trees, though. At the restaurant that evening, rain on the windows turned a barren ridgeline into a mirage of conifer forest. Mirages always show you what you re most desperate for.How would one live here? How would one build anything here? Continued at Part 2. Svartur. (Icelandic: black) The color of much of Iceland.As I understand, the a and u are both long in the German manner. In English vowels: SFAAAHR-toor. And the little t is not aspirated: just a cold click on the top of the mouth, no spittle, like switching off a light.Very fun to say. I hear the word behind me, in a deep yet female voice, and imagine turning to see a black-haired, white skinned young woman in iridescent dark green standing on a black volcanic plain that rushes away toward black mountains. (No, not a goth, dudes! She was there before goths were invented, though the Goths had been ...) In the distance, a horde of men in black armor on black horses flow over the black plain, only the spears and buckles glittering silver under the moon. Racing toward us perhaps, but not closing the gap; there is time to say SVAR-tur, SVAR-tur, SVAR-tur many times before they arrive.The pleasure of starting into any new language is the discovery of sounds. And as always, you start with approximations, quick hits on how to use your mouth, however trained, to get to a sound that is fun to say. (Whether it s accurate can wait for another day.) In the case of Icelandic, what I hear is what German would sound like if Germany were bigger, emptier, less forested -- more like Iceland, in other words. Icelandic seems designed to bounce off of far, sheer walls of granite, and return sounding like the voice of a Norse god -- oceanic vowels, sibilants, and trills rolling over each other like clashing armies or lava flows, each phoneme annihilating the last as though it had never been. (Except for all the little syllables that just vanish in spoken text, but are still there, confusing me, on the page.)I ve just closed the deal for a visit to Reykjavik, Iceland, around the autumnal equinox. I will be in rooms talking with people about transit planning, while Zach combs the famously austere countryside for photos. Obviously I will never speak Icelandic better than the least educated Icelander speaks English by the age of five. The professional use of learning a bit is mainly to be able to pronounce placenames reasonably well -- an important skill in my biz, where I talk about local geography a lot. And of course I ll try to learn to say thank you (Takk fyrir!) and a few similar things correctly, the minor lubricants of otherwise English conversations that tell the locals I know where I am. The linguist John McWhorter pointed out, as I m sure many others have, that the languages of conquerors and centralized administrators tend to get stripped of complexity. This is because people having to learn the language as adults (the conquered, in one sense or another) will outnumber its native speakers, so their simplifications will gradually penetrate the language. We can all see this happening to English now, but the same thing has happened to all conquering tongues -- Latin, Spanish, Persian, Mandarin, Arabic -- at least in their standard forms. By contrast, non-conquering languages, especially those with relatively few speakers, can be infinitely complex, opaque and counterintuitive, because almost nobody learns them as adults. Practically everyone who speaks them learned them as children, and children can learn anything without needing it to make sense. I can already feel that about Icelandic as compared, say, to standard German. I ve only been studying it for two hours and the phonics are clearly far more mysterious and subtle. There s some weird thing going with double-L; in Icelandic it sounds like t. There s also a terminal nn that sounds a lot like t. There are places where r sounds like s. In fact, a lot of Icelandic consonants seem to seize up, turn into dusty clicks and gasps of Beckettian austerity, especially at the ends of words. Yet I know that each of them is subtly different to the native, and I will have to do my best to get them all straight.But I ll also say fun words for fun. And if some tall guy with a deep voice is walking around Reykjavik at night intoning SVAR-tur! SVAR-tur! (black! black!) they ll probably just identify him as another existentialist tourist in search of the true platonic form of darkness. They must get people like that all the time.

TAGS:of Creature Shade 

<<< Thank you for your visit >>>

</b>Jarrett Walker's personal notes on places, arts, plants, and the search for home.<p>

Hot Websites