Gilt

15 Responses to Gilt

1. Peter says:

   January 1, 2009 at 2:45 pm

   Love the shifting font size. Great blend of means and message. And I love “how he shifted into the sun-struck glare of baser metals!”
2. dale says:

   January 1, 2009 at 4:29 pm

   I love the poem but I’m afraid I’m being dense about the picture. All I can think of is a gigantic cedar berry, and although I can imagine relations to El Dorado, I think that’s just because I can imagine relations between any two things if I think hard enough :-)
3. Lady P says:

   January 1, 2009 at 5:57 pm

   Well, here’s my opportunity to prove I’m not merely an uncritical vacuumer of your work… the picture doesn’t work for me. I love the way the lines follow the contour of the leaf, and the words themselves, but what’s that thing in the middle of the image? some kind of quince? a fool’s pear? I fear you have to make allowances for the botanically challenged among your audience. Assuming it’s a form of plant of course. Which it may not be.
4. Theriomorph says:

   January 1, 2009 at 7:13 pm

   Happy New Year, Dave – enjoying this series and wishing you delight in the coming year.
5. Dave says:

   January 1, 2009 at 7:57 pm

   Hi everybody. Happy New Year! Let’s make this into a contest: Name the Strange Roundish Object in the Digital Postcard. Points will be awarded for creativity, not necessarily for correctness. I mean, i know what I took a picture of, but what the picture actually contains — and how it relates (or not) to the middling text to its right — is and should remain open to conjecture. Conject away!
6. Peter says:

   January 1, 2009 at 10:48 pm

   From the value the text associates with it, I assumed it was the pitam of an etrog, removed only after its use last Sukkot. (The brown leaf cinches your intended connection with that fall feast.) Am I wrong? Because I’m prepared to take back that “Great blend of means and message” remark I made.
7. JMartin says:

   January 1, 2009 at 11:06 pm

   Ponce de Leon introduced oranges in Florida. The word orange may have derived from “or,” the French for gold. Moving west, there is an Eldorado, Oklahoma, a state in which conquistadors and Osage Indians overlapped. So the resultant base metal equivalent:

   The osage orange
   a compound drupe
   chartreuse and bumpy
   the dysfunctional fruit
8. JMartin says:

   January 2, 2009 at 10:50 am

   Or perhaps the type of gourd used for medicine rituals by Zuni ancestors in New Mexico, when the “black conquistador” searched there for El Dorado.
9. Dave says:

   January 2, 2009 at 12:13 pm

   Now you’re talking! You must’ve read my poem. (Funny, you don’t seem like a masochist.)

   Peter, I think you’re off by an an order of magnitude there. But I sure enjoyed reading about the pitam.
10. JMartin says:

    January 2, 2009 at 3:14 pm

    Absolutely no masochism (tango or foxtrot) required for Cibola, but certainly an uninterrupted block of time and attention. I need to print (and therefore really read), once plumber determines whether leaking frig about to drop through floor into basement. And what gremlin alters circuit breaker cheat-sheet when my back turned?

    2009 already mocks me.
11. Dave says:

    January 2, 2009 at 4:09 pm

    First a “black conquistador” mention, then a Tom Lehrer allusion – signs of advanced autodidacticism, I’ll wager. But do look after that fridge. It sounds both dangerous and inconvenient.
12. Rebecca Clayton says:

    January 2, 2009 at 6:47 pm

    Hmmm. Not all galls are divided into three parts, are they?
13. Lady P says:

    January 2, 2009 at 7:23 pm

    Hahahahahahahahaha.

    But surely it must be a goldenrod gall!

    (I’m sad you’ve removed this from the series… did it deserve demotion?)
14. Dave says:

    January 3, 2009 at 10:29 am

    Rebecca – :)

    Lady P – In point of fact, it’s an oak apple gall. You probably don’t have that exact species of wasp over there.
15. barb jensen says:

    May 21, 2010 at 2:56 pm

    I was going to guess oak gall, but the foliage in the background confused me. Aat least now I know what a pitam of an etrog is.