This delightful little image recently landed in my e-mail inbox, attached to a call for submissions to a collaborative Visual Studies Reader initiated by James Elkins and run by postgrad students. I clicked on the attachment, expecting a pdf of the outline or some document explaining the project; instead I found this – a small moment of pleasure and inspiration in the colon- and jargon-dominated world of academia.

Photograph by Jennifer Zwick.

Johnny Trunk at Trunk Records just released the soundtrack to the 1979 BBC series Life on Earth, composed by Edward Williams. To obtain a copy of the vinyl at Ye New Old Trunk Shoppe, buyers had to send in their own interpretation of Sir David Attenborough’s iconic photograph of a Panama tree frog. Here are my favourites:

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Please do check out the other frogs here – it was really tough to choose…

David Attenborough filming Life on Earth on Galapagos.

Here’s an afterthought to the whole anteater business posted about here, here and here.

Franklin Rosemont (1943-2009), co-founder of the Chicago Surrealist Group with his wife Penelope, wrote about their meetings with André Breton and the other remaining members of the Surrealist movement in Paris in 1965:

Penelope and I were asked at one of the meetings to suggest a title for the new journal. Spontaneously we both proposed Grand Tamanoir (‘Giant Anteater’). We had been to the old Jardin des Plantes zoo earlier in the day, and had mused together over the mythological implications of this wonderful beast that could figure as Breton’s totemic sign. The first issue of the new journal did not appear till April 1967, and it was titled L’Archibras (a term of Fourier’s). But it contained a photograph, selected by Breton for inclusion in that issue, of an object he had made by putting together two pieces of rustic wood that Elisa had found at Saint-Cirq La Popie and which he entitled Grand Tamanoir.

Within a few hours of his dying, moreover – as I learned only long afterwards – the newspapers announced that an anteater had to be chased from a Paris airfield.

In André Breton, What is Surrealism? Selected Writings, edited and introduced by Franklin Rosemont, 1978.

The world’s oldest known spider web.

Timely news in Halloween and cobweb season: the spider’s web encased in a piece of amber found by two brothers on an East Sussex beach in 2006 has proved to be about 140 million years old. The earliest bits of web that have ever been incorporated in the fossil record, they date from a time when dinosaurs walked the Earth.

Alongside threads of the spider’s web, the amber also includes sticky droplets she secreted; plant matter; insect droppings; and ancient microbes.

What I find endlessly fascinating: as the spider was defeated with her own weapons (while she caught her prey with glue, her web got trapped in sticky resin), suddenly and against all odds, something as delicate and ephemeral as a spider’s web was preserved for eternity.

Read the full story about discovery, research and results here.

Salvador Dalí emerging from a Paris Métro station,
walking a giant anteater on a leash in 1969.

Title line from André Breton’s poem After the Giant Anteater (1931).

Joseph Gandy, Sir John Soane’s Study, 1822.

The City

by Constantine P. Cavafy

You said: “I’ll go to another country, to another shore,
Find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
And my heart lies buried like something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
Where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”

You won’t find a new country; another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You’ll walk the same streets, grow old
In the same neighborhoods, turn grey in these same houses.
You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
There’s no ship for you, there’s no road.
Now that you’ve waisted your life here, in this small corner,
You’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.

Quoted in Donald Preziosi, Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art, Museums, and the Phantasms of Modernity, 2003, pp 1-2.

Cavafy’s 1910 poem is from C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems, ed. George Savidis and trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, 1992.

Can you spot the owl(s)?

From The Guardian Weekend Magazine, 24 October 2009.

The exhibition Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism continues at Manchester Art Gallery until 10 January 2010.

Eileen Agar dancing on a roof outside Mougins in 1937.
(photograph not in the exhibition)

My favourite section is a small fetish room, where several objects are displayed against a backdrop mimicking black fur and velvet.

Mimi Parent, Maîtresse, 1996.

Curator Patricia Allmer in conversation with writer Jeanette Winterson, at creativetourist.com:

Juan Sánchez Cotán, Still Life with Quince, 1602.

Writing about French socialist and philosopher Charles Fourier’s (1772-1837) utopia of the Four Movements and the General Destinies, Roland Barthes points out that in any of Fourier’s classifications, there is always a portion that doesn’t add up. There are various names for it: passage; composite; transition; neuter; triviality; ambiguity; supplement; the 1/8 of any collection; the legal margin of error. It is, in short, the class in which everything that attempts to escape classification is swallowed up. Examples of such composite, transitional objects include

the nectarine, which damps the opposition of prune and peach, and
the quince, which forms a passage between pear and apple.

Barthes gives us the following list of transitory phenomena:

There are ambiguities in every series: the sensitive, the bat, the flying fish, the amphibians, the zoophytes, sapphism, pederasty, incest, Chinese society (half-barbaric, half-civilized, with harems and courts of law and etiquette), lime (fire and water), the nervous system (body and soul), twilights, coffee (ignominiously ignored for Mocha for 4,000 years, then suddenly the subject of a mercantile craze, passing from abjection to the highest rank), children (the third passionate sex, neither men nor women); the albino; the taste for feathered fowl; Death.

See Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola (1971)

A cockroach will live nine days without its head before it starves to death
A crocodile cannot stick its tongue out
A snail can sleep for three years
All polar bears are left-handed
An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain
Butterflies taste with their feet
Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds, dogs have only about ten
Cat urine glows under a black light
Donald Duck comics were banned in Finland because he doesn’t wear pants
Elephants are the only animals that can’t jump
If you keep a goldfish in a dark room it will eventually turn white
Humans and dolphins are the only species that have sex for pleasure
A pig’s orgasm lasts for thirty minutes
In the last 4000 years no new animals have been domesticated
More people are killed by donkeys annually than are killed by plane crashes
Some lions mate over fifty times a day
Starfish have no brains
Ants always fall over on their right side when intoxicated
The average human eats eight spiders in their lifetime at night
The catfish has over 27,000 taste buds
You are more likely to be killed by a champagne cork than by a poisonous spider

From Val Williams and Greg Hobson, New Natural History, exh. cat., Bradford: National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, 1999, p. 7.