flood

USPS is still delivering to the manatee mailbox.

blocked bees

hair

I read about Edward Posnett's Harvest: The Hidden Histories of Seven Natural Objects on a blog kept by Matthew Wills, who posts about animals he sees around the place, the place being New York and surrounds.

In his post about Harvest (https://matthewwills.com/2019/08/25/to-market-to-market/) mention is made of human hair being used to soften dough.

When I last went to the barbers in Glenhuntly (for a number four) the floor was covered in hair. I asked the barbers what they did with it all. It goes in the bin. What else can you do with it? Someone has used it to make rope for nets. I remembered the dough-softening fact. The barbers didn't believe it and I promised to provide evidence.

I put in a request with Glen Eira Library to purchase a copy of Harvest. It's yet to appear, but a copy is on the shelves at Bayside Library. The cover's different to the one Wills posts - a close up of feathers (duck eider?) instead of negative etchings of the seven natural objects - and there's an endorsment by Robert Macfarlane on the front, who I'd never heard of, but it looked and sounded like a stamp of authority: 'Exceptional... fascinating... a pleasure and an education'.

Bayside has catalogued Harvest under the category 'Comp & Bus' (...puters & ...iness?) which is odd. The book is about trade, but it's more about a search for trade that might demonstrate some kind of sustainable non-exploitative, human animal plant symbiosis, as opposed to the

[t]housands of hides a week, hundreds of thousands of hides per year, millions over decades, an immense chain of skin and flesh stretching from the pampas of Argentina to the tanning pits of Cheshire. 

Except for, kind of, Icelandic eiderdown, Posnett finds no such thing. The book's got nothing to do with computers. The British Library gives it the subject 'Luxury goods industry' which adds to my feeling the last chapter, on guano, may have been tacked on.

Unlike most library books I borrow, I read the book in full, in part aloud. There is no mention of the use of human hair to soften dough. Rereading Wills' review I see the mention is in a link to Vice. The next time I get a haircut I'll write the link down for the barbers on a card. This is may be more convincing evidence than providing a photocopy, or the name of a book.

By the by, around the corner from the barbershop is the home of the barbers' father, also a barber. He lives in a large house with a row of pollarded locust trees along the front fence, these he crops to a tight bole at the end of each summer (I guess it's the old man who does the cutting, though I've not seen the actual prune in action, just the haircut.)

soul vampire

Can I have one of your chips?

This is unfair, the old man is very upset

But Scott does appear to be extracting an

Essence from him through consolation.

Blackbird song

annoying musique concrete

two-second riffs of tape 

rewinding dictaphone

play it forward hear the devil

the same feeling as 

watching video games on TV

motion sickness

blackbird sickness

falling asleep to 

a conversation outside 

or reading in poor light

I wish for a crow