Emocionada.

ChasingMoksha over at Hah! tagged me with the picture meme. Thank you! I intend to repeat this exercise a few more times, because coming up with ONLY 8 images that amaze me, eight amazing images is like trying to answer the question "what's your favorite book?" No way to choose. But here are eight to start.


The girl is going to be twelve in one week. I'm purely amazed.



This is a picture from the summer of her grandparents in Portalrubio in Spain. The fact that we are in each other's lives at all is something for which I give thanks.



The Golden Gate Bridge was a fact of my childhood landscape. I miss seeing the Bay, the bridge, the fog. I miss walking on the beachers, over the hills, through Golden Gate Park. I need to go back soon.


I saw this enormous stone carving in Mexico City before I ever saw a picture of it. It made my hair stand on end. It still does.




This is an image I've had on a postcard since I was a child. I never paid attention to who the artist was or what the image was about. I just liked how the woman was so absorbed in her reading that she didn't seem to care that she was riding on the back of a giant carp. That was me, and it still is. To be able to share another person's world through words continues to amaze me.

Now I know that it is called Mitate no kinko and was painted in 1765 by Suzuki Haronobu, the artist who revolutionized printing techniques during the Ukiyo-e (Floating World) period in Japan.



This painting by Frida Kahlo is the first painted image I know of in which the viewer is positioned to see a woman's own body from that woman's point of view, without the use of a mirror.


In my dreams, I can dance like Judith Jamison. I saw her in "Cry" with the Alvin Ailey company before she stopped performing.

Isn't this amazing? I have seen an eclipse. I love being able to see these pictures of the universeCrown of the Sun.

I guess I'm supposed to tag someone, but I don't really know that many bloggers and i feel shy about tagging someone out of the blue. So I'll invite anyone who reads to think about doing their own image gathering, and if you do it, let me know, OK?

Writing and images

Today in class we talked about corn, history, writing, and work. I used a new tool in class for the first time: the Offline Image Viewer of the electronic database ArtSTOR. I'll write more about that tool another time, but what it allows me to do is have access to a fabulous database of images and use them for class without violating copyright laws. I used it to search for images tagged with corn or maiz, and turned up one famous image of a Maya scribe writing, who is depicted with an ear of corn in his headdress, probably associated with the Young Corn God.
The photo here in this post was taken by Ana and Jose on their travels in South America (gracias) and they lent it to me to use in class because we had been talking about the challenges we teachers will face as we try to take advantage of the latest groovy technologies for multimedia in the classroom, while trying to respect the rights of authors and artists to their work. It is a challenge for the blog as well. I am trying to only post images I shot myself, or links to images, but it's so easy to copy and image and post it--when do we cross the line?

The subject of writing in the Americas--writing systems that pre-date European arrival and the introduction of alphabetic literacy--is one that fascinates me, and on which I've done a lot of research, although I am not a specialist in that area. This explanation of how Maya heiroglyphic writing works, and how that compares to the alphabet we use, is a good explanation to start with. The links on the page are excellent. It is part of the very cool FAMSI site (Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc).

There has been much written on the Popol Vuh. I recommend this post on the blog Posthegemony, not as a "starter" post, but as an excellent sythesis of the scholarship and thinking on the topic.

luna lunera, cascabelera

The Moon passed in front of the sun today. This partial solar eclipse was photographed from South America. It wasn't a total eclipse; because the moon was far enough away from the earth that it could not completely block the sun, it looks as if the sun makes a ring around the moon, so it's called an annular eclipse. NASA's "Astronomy Picture of the Day" site has a wonderful photo of a similar event from last year. It's easy to search their archive.

Looking for images of moon goddesses, I came across this post on Moleskinerie with an image of Ixchel, Maya goddess of the moon. The post was actually about a fun site called the Godchecker! ("your guide to the gods"). You can search for gods or goddesses by topic or by pantheon.
Moleskinerie is a treasure trove; it also had a post that led me to the The New York Public Library's Digital Gallery . What a gorgeous collection of hundreds of thousands of images from their holdings, Here are some from a Japanese book called "100 Aspects of the Moon", woodblock prints by the artist Yoshitoshi. .