Little girl and a fish

Have a look at this picture taken 3 years ago. At the time I felt it came straight out of a storybook and felt lucky to have captured it.

I've received a mail requesting permission to use it, and agreed to it.

Now it's going to illustrate the programme for a (poor) Theatre Production in Tennessee (!) of the play "Kingfisher Days" by Canadian writer Susan Coyne. I'm trying to get my hands on the play itself. But they'll send us a copy of the programme once it's printed, and I'll be credited, so I'm quite pleased to be able to participate across the world to it :)

"How can he remember well his ignorance--which his growth requires--who has so often to use his knowledge?"
-Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, 1854-

"Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive. (...)

The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking. If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.
"Is Google Making Us Stupid?"
-Nicholas Carr, Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2008-

Women and their self-defeating ways

"When women make their image about youth and sexuality, and not about intellect, that's kind of a dead-end road. So I think it's a combination of self-entrapment and entrapment by society."

-k.d.lang- Interview in The Guardian, 16 July 2008

The dangers of banality

"The danger of banality is an insidious one. Banality weakens our intellectual, spiritual and ethical muscles, rendering us flabby thinkers, unable or unwilling to chew over the difficult matter of experience and make it part of us. The connection between the banality of evil and the evil of banality is the danger of a surrender of our human powers of discrimination. We always need to be discriminating, and we always need to be working on refining our powers of discrimination, or one day we might find we can no longer distinguish between a human being and a widget."

The dangers of banality, by Harry Eyres, Financial Times, June 30 2008