Thursday, October 19, 2017

Urban mushroom diary - 13 - summer 2017

Urban mushroom diary - 13 - summer 2017
Particles of deep topography - 28 - mushrooms
I'm always looking for city mushrooms in nature and culture. Interesting how fungi take over the world.
I've collected many place descriptions through the years. I publish them from time to time. I add pictures when suitable.
Links to previous chapters are listed at the end of this post.

Text: A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett
Text: Gateways to Abomination (Matthew M. Bartlett)
At first I thought I had seen a young death-cap, Amanita Phalloides, but it does not fit the description so well. Maybe Amanita vaginata. It grows under beech trees but maybe it's just growing from the wood chips. I give up on this one. It's simply too difficult.

31 July 2017 - Oostvoorne - As mentioned in the previous post, it's strange, and frustrating, that a mushroom with a definite name and species, can still be so elusive. Somewhere, someone knows its name, but that's not me:
This applied to everything. If I saw an insect I hadn’t come across, I knew that someone must have seen it before and categorised it. If I saw a shiny object in the sky I knew that it was either a rare meteorological phenomenon or a plane of some kind, perhaps a weather balloon, and if it was important it would be in the newspaper the following day. If I had forgotten something that happened in my childhood it was probably due to repression; if I became really furious about something it was probably due to projection, and the fact that I always tried to please people I met had something to do with my father and my relationship with him. There is no one who does not understand their own world.
In the old park leading up to the dunes and the seaside. Most likely an Agaricus and probably edible. All these mushrooms are pleasant and friendly, totally different from the mushrooms in horror stories:
The tree trunks were sprawled, glistening, mottled with black lichen in intricate patterns, looking for all the world like malignantly eschatological graffiti. The ground around them was thick with varicose roots twining through, around, and over soft mushrooms the size of chair cushions. Some of them were partially collapsed or split with gaping fault lines, revealing their inner craggy textures. They seemed to breathe out a pulsing fog, fetid, fusty.
14 August 2017 - Rotterdam - More of the beautiful and edible Leccinum duriusculum, both young and mature. A day later someone had picked these beautiful mushrooms. It's atypical of the Dutch to pick wild mushrooms, they have a mycophobic culture.
And, in the same spot, a mushroom that does not look like a Russula. It could be Agrocybe cylindracea.
18 August 2017 - Rotterdam - At the Rotterdam train station. I give up on this one too. But I'm happy with having caught a mushroom in such a cultural, urban space.
19 August 2017 - Rotterdam - The first signs of the cultural mushroom season. Friendly plastic mushroom, made in China. I'll never put something like this in my house, but I like to see them in shopping window displays.
27 August 2017 - Rotterdam - Armillaria mellea in the city park. A ubiquitous weed of the mushroom kingdom. I should check if they give light in the dark. Note: That's no irony, they really seem to do this.
This could be some Lactarius or Panellus or Lentinus. As always, impossible to determine for sure:
In the green light, I felt my eyes sliced open and drained, and new eyes grew like mushrooms in their place.
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Sunday, October 15, 2017

Particles of deep topography - 25

Stories

Text: The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales (Mark Samuels)
Text: The White Hands and Other Weird Tales (Mark Samuels)
Text: Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality (Edward Frenkel)
Pictures: Broken glass at the metro station, January 2012
Whether we want or not we're always making stories. Being somewhere and walking around is a narrative experience. We tell this story to ourselves and we long to tell it to others.
This story is without doubt the strangest thing I’ve ever read. It is as if the text is a reflection of my own thoughts. No—that’s wrong. It is as if my thoughts are only a reflection of the story. While I read I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the page and I forgot all about the outside world. It seemed as if my mind was becoming a part of the text. It was horrible and irresistible at the same time. And the really bizarre thing is that, on the surface, it appeared only to be a confused jumble of disconnected words!’ ‘It’s an experiment,’ I told her, ‘a new technique I’m trying to perfect.’
When we succeed the sum of place and tale is more than its components:
‘You succeeded,’ she said finally. ‘The story’s like an incantation. There’s some mysterious power in it that words can’t explain.
Unfortunately, the enjoyment of topography is a very elitist pastime. Place appreciation is just as rare as enjoyment of mathematics. It needs hard work and maybe some talent and predisposition:
It has become, in the words of poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “a blind spot in our culture – alien territory, in which only the elite, the initiated few have managed to entrench themselves.”
This view of the world contains some postmodern thinking. And this can be irritating:
The merits of a writer’s work were of no interest to them and they viewed the existence of literary work as a proliferation of vermin, being only too willing to act as pest controllers in this regard. All texts were without a centre of meaning. Their interpretation rested with the reader, not the author. There could be no agreed purpose to a text. All was chaos. The text was an autonomous entity. In short, without the reader the text did not even exist save as a cipher.
We run the risk of saying things that are just meaningless words:
The Collective was putting tenets into action that few dared even to consider. Unlike the book-burning Nazis or the censorious communists, it was not selective. It did not destroy because it thought works corrupt or dangerous. It destroyed works because it believed none had meaning or significance, because words only mean other words and chase each other, in a linguistic game of tag, to a void.
About this series Over the years I've collected many place descriptions. It's a waste to keep them on my harddisk. So I'll publish them from time to time. I will add some pictures when suitable.
Enhanced and amplified topographies can be found in a broad range of literature. The best ones link to metaphysics or mysticism and (pre-) load the landscape with unexpected layers, sheets, slabs and strata of meaning. We can appropriate all this work to enrich our everyday surroundings.

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Friday, October 13, 2017

Particles of deep topography - 24

Secret urban drift

Text: Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring (Pete Earley)
Illustrations: A walk through south Rotterdam, 2011, Google maps, Bing maps
A dreary walk along through the southern shore of Rotterdam resonates with these cold walks through wintry Vienna. Next time you walk the city imagine that you're following secret instructions. That everything you do has a secret meaning. That you're being watched to see if you're not followed. Remember to act inconspicuously!
The Vienna Procedure was written on a single sheet of white typing paper, and the first time that John saw it, he thought it had been typed. But when he looked carefully at the document, he realized each letter had been printed by hand across the page in incredibly small and neat lines. A bird’s-eye view of the course would show that John had walked in a series of circles all near city parks or small plazas where a KGB agent could sit unnoticed and see both the beginning and end of his jaunts.
The Vienna procedure - At 18:15 p.m. come up to the “Komet Küchen” store (kitchen cabinets and appliances) on the corner of Schönbrunner Strasse and Rückergasse. To get there walk from Schönbrunn palace and park grounds; on Schönbrunner Schlossstrasse and its continuation Schönbrunner Strasse to Rückergasse. Turn left on the latter and stop at the window of the “Komet Küchen” store, which is looking on Rückergasse, just a couple of yards away from the corner. For easy identification please carry your camera bag on your left shoulder and hold a small paper bag in your right hand. Pause by that window for about two minutes from 18:15p.m. To 18:17 p.m., Drifting slowly along it away from Schönbrunner Strasse toward the other corner of the building ...
He walked around the corner of the store as instructed, paused, and then returned to the front of the building. As he was walking back, John noticed that there was a public park diagonally across the street from the store. A KGB agent could easily and unobtrusively watch him from the park benches there and also tell if he was being followed. Following the instructions, John crossed the street and stood in front of another display window. He was now standing parallel to the park.
He walked down the sidewalk and turned right at the next corner into a narrow side street lined with cars. The instructions called for him to walk one block and turn left, then walk another block and turn left again. This brought him back to the main thoroughfare, and he found himself once again facing the public park. Had anyone been following John, he would have been easily apparent to a watcher sitting in the park. There would be no reason for someone to take such an indirect route unless he was shadowing someone.


About this series Over the years I've collected many place descriptions. It's a waste to keep them on my harddisk. So I'll publish them from time to time. I will add some pictures when suitable.
Enhanced and amplified topographies can be found in a broad range of literature. The best ones link to metaphysics or mysticism and (pre-) load the landscape with unexpected layers, sheets, slabs and strata of meaning. We can appropriate all this work to enrich our everyday surroundings.

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Monday, October 2, 2017

Dream topography

After posting this on the Fortean Times forum I received this reply from Ermintruder:
GPS is often weird in dreams. As is 4G...you can never get a decent bloody signal, no matter how hard you try. Perhaps 5G will work better (or maybe a cup of coffee before bed-time will do the trick)
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