Horma Kanyonu

Dikkat! Daş düşebülü! Ayı çıkabülü!

Küre Dağları Tabiat Parkı içerisinde yer alan Horma Kanyonu; Kastamonu, Pınarbaşı İlçesi’nin Ilıca köyü sınırlarında. Avrupa’nın en yaşlı ormanlarının arasında ve doğa harikası bir coğrafyada yer alan kanyon, akvaryumu andıran derin göllerden ve irili ufaklı şelalelerden oluşuyor.



Sık ormanın içinde, güneş ışığının zar zor girebildiği loş ve gizemli koridorlardan geçerken patikanın kenarında yaşlı ve bilge ağaçlar bize ormanın, doğanın ve yaşamın en gizli sırlarını anlattılar...

Çıkışında Ölüdeniz’i andıran doğal havuzuyla (Anbar Gölü) Ilıca Şelalesi’nin bulunduğu kanyon geçişi oldukça keyifli ve diğerlerine göre daha kolay.

Kaya blokların izin vermediği birkaç noktada yüzerek ilerlemek gerekiyor. Metrelerce derinlikteki suyun dibini görebileceğimiz kadar temiz olan dere bazı noktalarda su kemerini andıran kaya oluşumlarının arasından geçiyor. Bu noktalarda ya tırmanmak ya da suyla birlikte dar deliklerden kendimizi bırakmamız gerekiyor. ...



Bu sene o kadar yağış olmuş ki su gölün etrafındaki kumsalı, çakıl taşlarını ve toprağı ve tamamen söküp götürmüş. Yalnızca büyük kayalar kalmış. Ağaçların kökleri tamamen çıplak, birbirlerine sarılmış olarak açıkta kalmış, bir kök ormanı oluşmuş... Bir müddet "Burası değildi!" diye şaşkınlık içinde söylendim... Kastamonu

The portrait of a realist

Philosophy and Animal Life is spearheaded by Cora Diamond's essay, "The Difficulty of Life and the Difficulty of Philosophy," in which she reads [JM Coetzee's] The Lives of Animals, not as a kind of argument in favor of animal rights, but as a study of "a woman haunted by the horror of what we do to animals. We see her as wounded by this knowledge, this horror, and by the knowledge of how unhaunted others are. The wound marks and isolates her". What kind of knowledge is this, and what can philosophy say about it? Not much, it appears. The difficulty, Diamond says, is that such knowledge "pushes us beyond what we can think. To attempt to think it is to feel one's thinking come unhinged. Our concepts, our ordinary life with our concepts, pass by this difficulty as if it were not there; the difficulty, if we try to see it, shoulders us out of life, is deadly chilling". Diamond notes that neither the philosophers inside Coetzee's story, nor those in real life who responded to the Tanner lectures, see any difficulty here. Instead they convert the difficulty of Costello's experience into a philosophical problem about the moral status of animals – a problem that arguments can allegedly resolve. Diamond, however, seems to take Costello's side against philosophy as a practice of moral evasion. At all events, for her Costello is a portrait of someone in a condition of undeflected exposure to the world and to others in it – a true realist.

From Gerald Bruns' review of Philosophy and Animal Life and Stephen Mulhall's The Wounded Animal.

Valla Kanyonu...

Kastamonu Pınarbaşı İlçesi Muratbaşı köyünün kuzeyinde bulunan Valla Kanyonu ilçeye 26 km mesafede. Muratbaşı Valla mahallesine kadar stabilize yoldan gidiliyor. Kanyona kadar olan 1.5 km'lik kısmı ise orman içi patika yol.



Valla Kanyonu, Devrekani Çayı ile Kanlıçay'ın birleştiği bölgeden başlar. Cide ilçesi istikametinde 12 km uzunluğundadır. Yan duvar kayaların yüksekliği yer yer 800-1200 metreye ulaşır. Girişi son derece zordur.



Muratbaşıköyü Valla (Varla, Varlar) mahallesinin altından orman içi 1.5 km'lik inişli çıkışlı bir yürüyüşten sonra iki çayın birleştiği yerden seyredilebilir. Kanyon girişine yakın olan Bakacak kayasının üzerine çıktığınızda bir yanda Pınarbaşı ve Azdavay'dan gelen Devrekani çayı, bir yanda da Kanlı çay akmaktadır. Kavuştukları noktadan ise sola dönüp derin kayaların arasından kıvrılarak Cide'ye doğru yol almaktadır.



Valla Kanyonu 1994 yılında İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi'nden gelen 4 öğrencinin burada kaybolup, 14 gün sonra Cide ilçesinden çıkmaları ve burasını Vahşi Cennet olarak tanımlamaları ile basında yer almış, doğa severlerin ziyaret yeri haline gelmiştir. Kanyonun teçhizatsız geçilmesi mümkün değildir.



Kanyonda bulunan sarp kayalıklar kartal, akbaba, atmaca, doğan ve diğer tüm yabani av hayvanlarını bünyesinde barındırır. ... Kastamonu

The book to come in 2666

Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 is an obsessive and world-shifting epic. When I read it, I will be completely absorbed by it. It will be all I think about. It will affect my daily life in ways I can’t fully understand, and when I finish it I will have come to profound revelations about the nature of existence.

There's a reason for Kirsty Logan's future tense: she's describing the joy of a certain kind of book, one that: 

contains all possible characters, styles, genres, turns of phrase, metaphors, speech patterns, and profound life-changing revelations. An unread book exists only in the primordial soup of your imagination, and there it can evolve into any story you like. An unread book – any unread book – could change your life.

She goes on to imagine the possibilities of a handful of other novels she hasn't read. Apart from 2666, I haven't read them either. Yet, even though I have read all 893 pages of the British Picador edition and was absorbed enough to believe I would not forget each highway and byway of the long journey, I find that now, looking back from beyond the final page, all the roads have concertinaed to form an impenetrable block.

Roberto Bolaño's 2666 has not affected my daily life, it has not caused any profound revelations, and the world remains unshifted. But for the complete absorption, everything of which Kirsty Logan dreams about 2666 didn't come pass, unless, that is, for all of its characters, adventures, ideas and slow-burning narrative tension, for all of its richness of colour and texture, the revelation is that the nature of existence will remain unclear and will never be resolved into coherence, not even in the most lengthy work of literature with all of its innumerable interconnections and possible all-embracing overall design.

Of course, if this is the revelation, it is certainly not profound. As well as the encyclopaedic power to capture life, the aura of modern literature is borne on the promise of such revelatory exegesis in which something more will emerge, so one is bound to be disappointed. The persisting presence of an aura explains the range of readerly reactions from obsessive dedication of those who see revelation in the mathematical system underpinning Dante's Commedia to Book Groups chatting about "issues" in the latest Jodi Picoult unit.

A banal point perhaps: the reader is always seeking more than the book itself. After all, it is a form of information storage and retrieval. With the incommensurability of modern literature, the violence of interpretation becomes necessary if it is to mean something other than an increasingly minor branch of the entertainment industry. It certainly needs to be forgotten in order to read. If we begin reading knowing incompletion will be the ultimate experience – perhaps even disharmony and disunity – then what are we reading for? We begin with the idea, as Kirsty Logan suggests, of the novel we are about to read as the Platonic Form of its kind, an ethereal presence in which all stories coalesce and conclude. Here it is, in our hands! So, when I say: "I've read Roberto Bolaño's 2666", do I know or care what I am referring to other than the same possible book Kirsty Logan has imagined? As I announce my reading, a whiff of cultural-oneupmanship begins to circulate. It alludes to secret knowledge, new power over those who have not read it and potentially over those who have read but have not comprehended its message. But I don't have that knowledge or power. What have I missed?

Nabokov said that the second reading of a book is always the first. The first is a blind reading. You have to read the book a second time in order to have read it once. So perhaps I should re-read Roberto Bolaño's 2666 in search of a subtler experience in which the disparate details begin to reach out to one another more clearly and the revelations become more profound. However, if Heraclitus is right, then that second reading is impossible. The second reading will always be the first and therefore blind. The second reading will always be the book to come. I have not read Roberto Bolaño's 2666. I will never read Roberto Bolaño's 2666.

Corky in Orbit (1962)

Juvenile fiction about space flight was one important way to build excitement about the space race. More importantly books about space flight both fiction and non-fiction were eligible to be bought using funds from the National Defense Education Act of 1958.

The Act's purpose, among other things, was to provide money to schools to update their libraries. This lead to publishers increasing their output of "relevant" space books.

Zimmerman, Naoma and Ruby Schuyler. Corky in orbit. Chicago: Reilly & Lee. 31 p. illus. 21 cm.

The fiction books all had very similar content. Similar to the "space monkey" books these would show children using the space flight technology.

Often you would also see children bringing their pets. Poodles and cats in space!

Letting children see themselves as astronauts was powerful at a psychological level. If they could imagine they could grow up to be astronauts they would be willing to learn the science needed to get there.

Junior Scholastic (March 28, 1958) "Dawn of the Space Age"

As I have blogged before, "Space in school" is one of my many interests. Junior Scholastic was a weekly newspaper aimed at older children. It shared what was going on in the world along with commentary, editorials, and jokes.

"Dawn of the Space Age" was a special section in the March 28th issue. It was a 25 page section reusing images from the Collier's series and the Disney space films.

As a result of the space race, manned space flight had to be digested and presented to children. A standard presentation included space history.



Robert Goddard was a newly resurrected American hero. Even though there was not very much coverage of him in the history books, the existence of the "inventor of rockets" being an American became part of our modern mythology.


Wernher von Braun was our second American space hero. Even though he had a long history in rocket research, the fact that he had once worked for our enemies was "tailored" in our celebration of the technological innovations he brought the United States.
Another part of the new mythology was telling children what their place was going to be in this new world. Here is the first page of a General Electric editorial (within this special section) telling children to study science and work hard.


There was almost always a series of questions about space flight such as "Why does a rocket work in space?" and "How much would you weigh on "X?".

You would also find many of the same authors writing explanations of aspects of space flight. Roy Gallant and Willy Ley were two of the more common ones.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_vintagescience_gallant/



Space was presented as the new frontier we were preparing to conquer. Like many other technological challenges of the time the time until we "won" was projected to be in the very near future. We would be figuring out manned flight and then move quickly on to a "city in the sky" ....................

Conquering the moon........

And on to the planets.......

Marvels of this Modern Age (1962)

Marvels of this Modern Age was a give-away with Eagle magazine. It reused some of the nice color pictures from the magazine in a collection of interesting modern stuff. My friends over at Project Sword Toys (http://projectswordtoys.blogspot.com/) love the Dyna Soar so here is yet another.

Dünyanın Merkezine Yolculuk

Yer altının mitolojik yaratıkları, stalaktitler... Hades'in dünyasına hoş geldiniz...

Photo: A Journey to the Center of the Earth, originally uploaded by voyageAnatolia.blogspot.com.

Space Age (1959)

Lots of space art goodness for today.

OK this one is for Michael S. We had been talking about this poster and I promised to blog about it when it got here.

Only identifying information on it is: Copyright 1959 Educational Posters #117 "Space Age"

This poster is one of those that gets stuck in your memory. I don't know when I first saw a copy but when I found images of it online a few years ago I kept trying to find one. Part of the problem is that all the identifying information is so generic: "Space age," "Educational Posters," etc.

What is special about it is that it is paintings of rockets, satellites, a flying saucer, and an astronaut. These are from a wide variety of sources including the Collier's series, the Disney series, and a few other interesting inspirations. Each image is labeled so I will give the label in case it is too small to see.

"Personnel Rocket" (Adapted from Lindberg "US Moon ship" model?)
http://www.fantastic-plastic.com/US%20MOON%20SHIP%20PAGE.htm
"Instrument carrying satellite" (From Collier's Bonestell 'Baby satellite')

"Relief Ship" (From Disney RM-1 'Circumlunar ship')



"3 stage personnel rocket" (From Collier's Klep illustration)


"Colony sphere" (Possibly from The Torchship "Lewis & Clark" from Time For the Stars by Robert A. Heinlein, 1956)
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3i.html


"Third stage unit" (From Disney 'RX-1' or 'XR-1')

"Flying saucer" (From the 1950 book "The Flying Saucers are Real")
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flying_Saucers_Are_Real




"Three stage rocket"



"Space station" (From Collier's Bonestell illustration or Lindberg "US Space Station" model?)
http://www.fantastic-plastic.com/US%20SPACE%20STATION%20PAGE.htm


"U.S. X-15"


"Research ship" (From Collier's Bonestell illustration)



"Exploration ship" (From Frank Tinsley illustration of "Light-propelled space ship")
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3p.html#tinsley

"Space reconnaissance ship" (From Frank Tinsley illustration "Space Scout" from 1958 book: The Answer to the Space Flight Challenge )
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3p.html#stine


"Weather eye satellite"
"Fourth stage passenger unit" (From Disney MX-1 or XM-1)


"Space suit and anti-gravitational unit" (From Collier's Klep illustration)


"Space reconnaissance and 3 stage propellant"


"Exploration ship" (Collier's Bonestell Mars Ship illustration)



"Observatory satellite" (From Strombecker "Manned Observational Satellite" model?)
http://www.fantastic-plastic.com/CONVAIR%20MANNED%20OBSERVATIONAL%20SATELLITE%20PAGE.htm

I have no idea who the artist was but it is signed.


Educational Posters evidently produced a number of posters for classrooms including HISTORY OF SHIPS, HISTORY OF FLIGHT, SPACE AGE and CHILDREN OF OTHER LANDS.


Sorry for the low quality photographs but I wanted to show as much detail as I could.