Seed Bombs

Another great idea from the folks at Just Seeds.

Seed bombs are described as "basically a simple way of sowing indigenous plants by making small balls consisting of dried clay powder, compost, seeds, and water."

There are many recipes out there, and here is one of them:

• Combine 2 parts indigenous seeds with 3 parts compost.
• Stir in 5 parts powdered red or brown clay.
• Moisten with water until mixture is damp enough to mold into balls.
• Pinch off a penny-sized piece of the clay mixture and roll it between the palms of your hands until it forms a tight ball (1 inch in diameter).
• Set the balls on newspaper and allow to dry for 24 - 48 hours. Store in a cool, dry place until ready to sow.

I am reminded of a story my grandmother has told me, of a local schoolbus driver who sowed wildflowers along his route by tossing seeds from the window of his bus back in the 1960s and '70s. Many patches of those flowers survive to this day.

Having lived for a time in Florida, I feel compelled to emphasize the word indigenous in the above recipe. Non-native plants may be invasive! See kudzu for one alarming example of a non-native species introduced with disastrous environmental consequences.

Crime Scene

~ Walter Benjamin, from "A Small History of Photography" (1931):

The camera is getting smaller and smaller, ever readier to capture fleeting and secret moments whose images paralyze the associative mechanisms in the beholder. This is where the caption comes in, whereby photography turns all life's relationships into literature; and without which all constructivist photography must remain arrested in the approximate. Not for nothing have [Eugène] Atget's photographs been likened to the scene of a crime. But is not every square inch of our cities the scene of a crime? Every passerby a culprit? Is it not the task of the photographer -- descendant of the augurs and haruspices -- to reveal guilt and to point out the guilty in his pictures? "The illiteracy of the future," someone* has said, "will be ignorance not of reading or writing, but of photography." But must not a photographer who cannot read his own pictures be no less counted as illiterate?

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* László Moholy-Nagy:
"The famous phrase, 'The illiterate of the future will be ignorant of the pen and the camera alike' is Moholy's. It has gained its considerable currency mainly by way of its paraphrasing -- without attribution -- in Walter Benjamin's celebrated 'Kunswerk' essay of 1936. Moholy's observation, originally in English, was written in 1932 and first published in 'A New Instrument of Vision,' (Feb. 28, 1936)."

The layering of dates (1931, '32, '36), editions, translations, and revisions creates an almost impenetrable confusion. But if, as Benjamin writes, "someone has said," then that "someone" seems to have been Moholy-Nagy.

"All Plots Are Arbitrary"

"When I find the novel on the bookshelf, I want the sense from it that all plots are arbitrary, and what matters is to begin, to set out. To begin writing and then to follow through this beginning, being loyal to it, letting the narrative reverberate with the Origin it cannot reach. I want to know that it is no plot that matters, but another kind of intrigue, in which Writing has been caught by Writing; in which the Origin is allowed to speak in what is only the beginning of a story, an arbitrary story."
~ Spurious, "A Secret Collision"

Leaves

"Hints of red are often found in green leaves. The color of a lilac leaf, held so that the sun glances from the surface, is full of sparkles of red. The under sides of leaves, as in the case of maple and elm and poplar leaves, often show a play of colors different from those of the upper surfaces."
~ Walter Sargent (1868-1927), The Enjoyment and Use of Color, Chapter 4: "Composite Colors"

Monstrous

"But once greed has been made an honorable motive, then you have an economy without limits. It has no place for temperance or thrift or the ecological law of return. It will do anything. It is monstrous by definition."
~ Wendell Berry, "Faustian Economics," Harper's Magazine, May 2008

Post-Modern Dilemma

The issue isn't whether or not we should strive for ________, but rather what constitutes ________.

a. a work of art
b. national security
c. accuracy in journalism
d. academic excellence
e. victory in Iraq

Click on comments below for (one) correct answer.

Better and Happier

"Men, like dogs and cats, fawn upon you while you leave them on the ground: if you lift them up they bite and scratch; and if you shew them their own features in the glass, they would fly at your throat and tear your eyes out. This between ourselves: for we must not indulge in unfavorable views of mankind. By doing so, we make bad men believe that they are no worse than others, and we teach the good that they are good in vain. Philosophers have taken this side of the question to shew their ingenuity: but sound philosophers are not ingenious. If philosophy can render us no better and no happier, away with it! there are things that can; and let us take them."
~ Walter Savage Landor, Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen (1829), "Barrow and Newton"