Ha-ha
Before the advent of mechanical lawnmowers a commonly-used way to keep grass trimmed was to allow livestock, usually sheep, to graze; a ha-ha allowed them to trim the grass of large estates while keeping them out of view from the house.
The ha-ha is a feature in the landscape gardens laid out by Charles Bridgeman, the originator of the ha-ha, according to Horace Walpole (Walpole 1780), and by William Kent and was an essential component of the “swept” views of Capability Brown.
The contiguous ground of the park without the sunk fence was to be harmonized with the lawn within; and the garden in its turn was to be set free from its prim regularity, that it might assort with the wilder country without.
Walpole surmised that the name is derived from the response of ordinary folk on encountering them and that they were, “…then deemed so astonishing, that the common people called them Ha! Has! to express their surprise at finding a sudden and unperceived check to their walk.”
An unusually long example is the ha-ha separating the Royal Artillery Barrack Field from Woolwich Common in southeast London. This deep ha-ha was installed around 1774 to prevent sheep and cattle, grazing on Woolwich Common as a stopover on their journey to the London meat markets, from wandering onto the Royal Artillery gunnery range.
Ha-has were also used at Victorian-Era lunatic asylums such as Yarra Bend Asylum and Kew Lunatic Asylum in Australia. From the inside, the walls presented a tall face to patients, preventing them from escaping, while from outside the walls looked low so as not to suggest imprisonment.
“Why do they apply. This to that.” – Gertrude Stein
I think it’s fascinating that a statement followed by a question mark asks a question of itself? Don’t you? Would you rather be considered a concept or a theory? Under what circumstances would you walk the dog? Do you yo-yo much? What, in your opinion, is the essential difference between a word and its thing? Do you feel a word can be more interesting than the thing it represents? Less than? Does the term ‘paradox of the heap’ mean anything to you? What terms do you use when talking about music? About literature? Would it be fair to say these terms are borrowed from the critical discourse surrounding these respective forms of media? Would that not be a fair thing to say because this appropriation has been more or less subconscious? Is your culture popular? If not, do you believe in a ‘popular culture’? If so, who are its friends? Who benefits? What defines your culture? At what point does an onomatopoeia become the sound it signifies? When learning a new language, do new words signify new things, old things, or other words? What does that say about words? Is the term ‘figurative language’ not redundant? Just a little? Is this a book review?
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October 19th, 2010 / 6:03 pm
October 19th, 2010 / 6:03 pm
Bill Evans On Writing
“It bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It’s not. It’s feeling.”
“Intuition has to lead knowledge, but it can’t be out there alone.” READ MORE >
“But the days arched over us and kept us typical to our era.” – Gary Lutz
LIGHT IS WAITING from Michael Robinson on Vimeo.
Reynard Seifert—
Anteaus‘s Neglected Books of the 20th Century is the kind of list making me feel like a lazy reader.
I Like What The Hell Is Going On Over Here
New Hauschka album available for a stream. Preparedly playing prepared piano.
Richard Nash extravaganza at WWAATD. Was gonna do this myself, now I don’t have to.
Noah Cicero doesn’t want no one talking bout no theories. He very upset.
This lady, this movie, every time I think why not. READ MORE >
Buckets of peanut butter with a layer of whipped cream on top, or else Mothballs-vagina
from BOMB 81 / Fall 2002, LITERATURE
Jonathan Safran Foer . . . do you consider yourself a postmodern writer? In the New Republic, Dale Peck recently said you were upholding the high literary postmodern tradition, a tradition Peck claimed was bankrupt.
Jefferey Eugenides On the issue of postmodernism, Dale Peck and I would agree more than he thinks. I don’t see myself as a high postmodernist. I always say it like this: my generation of writers grew up backwards. We were weaned on modernism and only later read the great 19th-century masters of realism. When we began writing in high school and college, it was experimental fiction. I think now that a certain kind of academic experimental fiction has reached a dead end. Middlesex is a postmodern book in many ways, but it is also very old-fashioned. Reusing classical motifs is a fundamental of postmodern practice, of course, but telling a story isn’t always. I like narrative. I read for it and write for it.
Recently I was reading an old panel discussion from 1975 called “The Symposium on the Future of Contemporary Fiction.” Almost 30 years ago now, but they were basically debating the same thing. How do you make something new in literature? How do you move it forward? This discussion took place among Grace Paley, Donald Barthelme, William H. Gass and Walker Percy. Barthelme and Gass, at the apex of their careers back then, kept going on about creating new voices by means of theoretical exertion. But it was Grace Paley who turned out to be right. It didn’t appear that she was right, but now we can see she was. She said that new language rises again and again from human voices, not just new theories. If you look back now, you see that postmodernism hit a dead end, and what took over were the kinds of books—call them multicultural or whatever you want—that Paley was prophesying.
If there’s anything new in Middlesex, it’s not a matter of formal or theoretical development but closer to the new human experience Paley was talking about. The content in the book is new. The narrator, Cal Stephanides, is a real living hermaphrodite, not a mythical creature like Tiresias or a fanciful one like Orlando.
Foer As long as we’re talking about contemporary writing… Who’s your favorite contemporary writer?
Eugenides Right now my favorite writer is A. A. Milne. Let me give you a sample of why:
Rabbit leant over further than ever, looking for his [stick], and Roo wriggled up and down, calling out, “Come on, stick! Stick, stick stick!” and Piglet got very excited because his was the only one which had been seen, and that meant that he was winning.
“It’s coming!” said Pooh.
“Are you sure it’s mine?” squeaked Piglet excitedly.
“Yes, because it’s grey. A big grey one. Here it comes! A very . . . big . . . grey . . . Oh, no, it isn’t. It’s Eeyore.”
And out Eeyore floated.
“Eeyore!” cried everybody.
Looking very calm, very dignified, with his legs in the air, came Eeyore from beneath the bridge.
“It’s Eeyore!” cried Roo, terribly excited.
“Is that so?” said Eeyore, getting caught up by a little eddy, and turning slowly round three times. “I wondered.”
Greedy Words Raping Objects Objectively
This film was posted on Bright Stupid Confetti back in the day and I saw it again yesterday on the European Cinema16 Shorts, which has films by the likes(es) of Lars Von Trier, Lynne Ramsay, Ridley Scott, READ MORE >
