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Culture

Welcome to a Golden Age

Apparently someone has declared that poetry is dead again. Or still dead.

As a critical stance this lacks originality, but never mind. I’m just surprised anyone thinks they can tell. Looking back at the canon, the total difference between a Golden Age Of Poetry and a leaden one is two or three great poets who happen to live at the same time. And if you think you can tell whether any of the dozens of good poets currently writing will be regarded as great in 50 years time, let alone 100: you’re kidding yourself. Even if none of the established names make the cut, those three poets might be starting their careers somewhere right now. Perhaps they are recent graduates of one of those MFA programs that always seem to be one of the targets of these essays.

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FSotW: Bending Light

Via 30gms: Flickr set of the week is Bending Light by Alan Jaras.

These are photograms, taken by capturing light directly on 35mm film—i.e. without any lenses or anything—and record the refraction patterns made by light passing through glass and other transparent objects.

Shrouded in Light, originally uploaded by Reciprocity.

Creation in Red, originally uploaded by Reciprocity.

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Culture Nature

Video digiscoping experiment

It just occurred to me a couple of days ago that since my digital camera has a video mode, I could try digiscoping some video. I thought it came out fairly well, considering. I just hold the camera up to the telescope, so it’s a bit wobbly, and the audio is dominated by aeroplane noise, and the YouTube conversion hasn’t improved it, but I’ll certainly consider doing it again next time I’m doing proper birding. This is a greenfinch, btw.

I wish I’d thought of it when I was in Crete, when there was a Little Crake walking backwards and forwards past the same spot over and over again but because of the difficulty of timing the shot, I mainly got lots of pictures like this:

Little Crake walking out of shot

And while I’m on garden wildlife, look what was in the basement light well. His price for being rescued was having his photograph taken with flash. There are lots of frogs and newts, but it’s a very long time since I’ve seen a toad here.

little toad

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