Tag: animals
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In Richmond Park
Here is the cusp of November colour: deer in a nicotine prairie. Trunks snaked by squirrels, clouds and crows over yellow and russet leaf-rag. On thin legs, bulbous-jointed like twiglets, picking their way through the tussocks, three females pause, wary of me inching toward their group. Of the two stags, one chooses now to move…
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Multiverses 263-396: Another Worlds iz Possible
After John Bell, Momus, Heisenberg, Jonathan Swift, I Ching, Calvino, and Shrodinger Multiverse 263 The Multiverse in which multiplication is always exponential across galaxies. For every status update posted on Facebook, another two are posted in alternative Multiverses. Multiverse 264 The Multiverse in which falsifiability has been banished. All knowledge in Multiverse 264…
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Open Call: Clean Unclean
Cleanliness, they say, is close to godliness. And the pig has long resided in the realm of the unclean. Even today: “It’s like a pigsty in here!” – as if the pig has much choice in how he lives… More than ever do we feel the urgency of cleanliness: clean hands, clean homes, clean minds….
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(Re)Imagining the Insect
54 million years before humans appeared on earth, there was once upon a time an insect that died, its cadaver is still visible and intact, the cadaver of someone who was surprised by death at the instant it was sucking the blood of another! Jacques Derrida, Typewriter Ribbon, 1998 It is all very…
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A Field Guide to East London Wildlife
Humans are not the only species undergoing a process of urbanisation. It is well documented that we have made a mess of this planet, and – depending on who you speak to – it may be too late to do anything about it. But as the world gradually turns to concrete, and species extinction continues…
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Oikeusjuttu (The Trial)
In Finland, the wolf is both more and less than an animal; it is a symbol. And this November sees a court case in which the very nature of that symbolism will be on trial. Fifteen men have been accused of the 2013 killing of three wolves (three of a population of around 150) in…
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Rye’s Valhalla
Influx Press’s editor-at-large, Gary Budden, and author of Marshland, Gareth E. Rees, venture into Rye Harbour with inadequate footwear and a 1904 guide to Sussex. They discover more than they’d bargained for… BUDDEN: I switch at Ashford International. I hate Ashford. The train rumbles off. I rub my eyes, wishing I’d slept more….
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Modern Naturalism
In 1958, the great Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser published the Mould Manifesto against Rationalism in Architecture. In it he declared, with characteristic chutzpah, that: “Only the engineers and scientists who are capable of living in mould and producing mould creatively will be the masters of tomorrow.” As far as we’re aware, few have taken up…
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Walking in the Sky
A small brown kestrel rises over the crest of a hill and pauses, hanging in the wind, scanning the fields below. With a tilt of its wings, it shifts vantage point twice, three times, hangs for a moment, then suddenly slides downwards, a gleam of silver under the high sun. Six foot from the ground,…
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![Animals are good to think [with]](https://thelearnedpig.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/garden-of-eden.jpg)
Animals are good to think [with]
Animals are good to think [with] – Claude Lévi-Strauss To be in two minds, think amoeba. To sell tea, think chimp. To build your own beak, think owl. To lick jowls and vomit logic, think wolf. To be insulted, think cow. To turn your voice inside- out, think crow. To balance the earth…
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The Beast is not only the Tiger
The top floor of a modernist apartment block seems an unlikely location for the studio of an artist best-known for his engagement with botany. Nonetheless this is where we find Alberto Baraya, one of Colombia’s most prominent contemporary artists: his working environment not the cavernous white-walled spaces favoured by Bogotá’s other leading practitioners, but a…