Yesterday I gave a new (for me) example of what fractals are — objects for which scale is irrelevant, because the same patterns repeat over and over again regardless of scale. Viewed from above, a photograph of a barren desert could be a mile wide or a meter, and there’s no way to tell the …
Read more “The Post in Which I Explain Once and For All What Makes American Fractal a Fractal”
Yesterday afternoon I recorded an interview for KPFK’s Poet’s Cafe with Lois P. Jones, which will air in a couple months (obviously I’ll let you know when it’s scheduled). As I was sitting in the studio, babbling into the big padded mike about fractals for what seems like the hundredth time this month, I had …
HIKING ALONE I shimmy out on sandstone and slate rock, past the soft ledges where the last shrubs grow. I’ve got my camera, unshuttered and silent, ready to take back with me whatever I’ve come here for—sore arms and a sunburn, blue sky like something new. At the floor of the canyon far below a …
THE SENSE OF BEING LOOKED AT Around the corner, footsteps. A heel clicking stone. The slosh of loose gravel and then the no-sound itself conspicuous— even the crickets hold their breath, hush their rough legs while deep inside houses women reading bedtime stories pause to change their endings, one good wish at a time. A …
THE MEMORY OF WATER It can be demonstrated with thermo- luminescence: the salt solution retains knowledge of what it once held, though nature, though logic would tell it otherwise. Dumb as a bedpan, the hydrogen bond remembers the lithium, the sodium chloride no matter …