Pisa

Pisa

It is impossible for me
to see the leaning tower
without imagining it
as a pile of pizzas
about to topple
onto the greensward.
The photos never show
the huge cathedral beside it,
majestic and serious,
or its ornate baptistery.
Instead we see only
the tower and its funny tilt,
as though it stands alone
on the Field of Miracles,
a prop for photos showing
tourists pretending to hold it up
or trying to match its angle.
Walking back to the train
through congested streets,
I buy a triangle of pizza
with round mushrooms,
oblong anchovies,
and squares of mozzarella.
As the slice leans toward
my mouth, the waitress
smiles like Mona Lisa.

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Terry Eagleton on a new book about Bakhtin

"Language for Bakhtin is a cockpit of warring forces, as each utterance finds itself occupied from within by alien significations. Every sign glances sideways at other signs, bears the traces of them within its body, and faces simultaneously towards speaker, object, context and addressee."

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Visual Journal Sites

1000 Journals

Dan Eldon

Zettiology (Tracy V. Moore)

Sabrina Harrison

Lawrence Halprin

Lawrence Halprin, born in 1916 and presumably now 90, made his mark as a landscape and urbanscape architect, designing for such spaces as Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco. He is a traveler who records his observations visually and verbally in a pleasing combination. I first learned about him through his Notebooks: 1959-1971. Like many innovators, he is hard to categorize neatly. Best know for his urban designs, his notebooks demonstrate his interest in a variety of natural and manmade phenomena. His wife Anna is a dancer/choreographer, and he apparently has spent a lot of time exploring connections between his architectural perspectives and her craft. In my travels, I'd like to learn to slow down and take the time that it must require to do observational sketches and notations like this one from a town in Norway (click on it for a closeup):