zelia nuttall--year of the swastika

''with a veil over his eyes, he can see the stars of the big dipper at noon. those in power distrust his vision.'' i-ching, hexagram-55.


zelia nuttall had an interest in the swastika that bordered on worship, she wrote a book about it, "on the fundamental principles of old and new world civilizations", a 640 page book explaining how she had looked up at the heaven one night and a vision came to her, a starry-vision in which the big and little dippers were repeated four times around the pole star and appeared as two twinkling swastika to her.

once she got over the vision, she went back to her desk and it seemed to her that all of the research on symbols of mexican religion she had laboured with over the previous thirteen years was solved, and that she now held the key to the origins of the swastika, the four season calendar, the septimal counting system, and the triskelion.

her conclusion seems to come from a coincidence in the position of the seven stars of the big dipper on the four nights of the year that break the year into four seasons. on one of those nights the big dipper lies exactly to the north of the pole star, one night to the east one night to the south and one night to the west.

when a line is drawn from the pole star to the big dipper on each of these nights at twelve o'clock, they together form a bent line, repeated four times it does sort of look like a swastika. zelia nuttall thought that ancient star-watchers would of had the same vision as she did, and when they recovered from the vision, use the design as a symbol of the year of four seasons. a calendar sign.

palladio--book-ii,chapter-iii

''... the lavatories are at the side of the stairs and, although they are in the body [corpo] of the building, do not smell much because they were put in a place away from the sunlight and have some vents, leading from the bottom of the pit through the thickness of the walls, that let out at the top of the house.''

palladio, the four books on architecture; translated by robert tavernor and richard schofield.

something about dogs

after petting some ones new lap-dog i wash my hand at the kitchen sink, thit smiles and says the dog is clean. i say we always washed our hands at my grand fathers farm after petting the cats, dogs and other animals and i still do to this day. laughing, thit picked up the dog and let it lick thits face, even thits mouth, saying, no no no never mind what he says you are clean. that was that until a couple of years later when thit told me the dog had been dragging its ass on the carpet and so thit took it to the vet and was told the dog had worms of some kind, and that dogs with worms will drag their ass on something to get rid of the worms hanging on to them. ihk, i didnt think my dog could have worms, thit said.

formula for spam

''stuart pratt sherman engineered an experiment athletic and ingenious enough to deserve a seperate paragraph here. he wrote down, he says, some one hundred words on a sheet of paper, cut them apart, seperated them into piles according to parts of speech, shuffled them, and then aligned them and inserted punctuation--coming up, he says, with the following:

''[from "a note on gertrude stein", in points of view] red stupidity; but go slowly. the hope slim. drink gloriously! dream! simply pretty people through daffodils slip in green doubt. grandly fly bitter fish; for hard sunlight lazily consumes old books, up by a sedate sweet heart roar darkly loud orchards. life,the purple flame, simply proclaims a poem.''

b.l.reid, art by subtraction.