Complete silence, a ban on bathing and a love of solitude are all part of the job description for a unique position that has become available at Tatton Park – after remaining vacant for the last 150 years.

Head gardener Sam Youd is appealing for an individual showing promise as a modern-day hermit to take residence in his Hermit’s Grotto garden, which will be on display at the RHS Show Tatton Park this month.[…]

The successful candidate must take a vow of silence and be able to live alongside a skull, to encourage human reflection.

@ Liverpool Daily Post (via Hermitary)

Ah, if only this were closer to home — it would be such wonderful research for the novel I’m working on.

As soon as we feel that the writing we are contemplating matters, our defensive system kicks in, and our fear that we can’t think well enough raises its ugly head. We are wrestled to the ground by the fact that we are trying to matter.

@ The Rumpus

And sometimes we are wrestled to the ground by the fear we have an idea with such potential that it deserves a better writer to execute it.

Animal Inventory: Towards the end of the book, you state that we need “to finally get past ourselves and our story and, through acts of deep, interspecies empathy…to become a part of [other animals’] story (p 175).” On the one hand this seems like a simple request, but on the other hand this requires a radical shift in perspective. Can you explain what you mean by this?

Charles Siebert: In one sense this involves us human beings collectively coming down off of our high horse, if you’ll excuse the old expression. The more we begin to see and understand ourselves as one more extension of the greater biological forces that created and control all life on earth, rather than as beings apart, entities anointed by some higher authority, the more the “inter-species empathy” I speak of, or what Gay Bradshaw calls the “trans-species psyche”, will be allowed to flourish. This will all still bring us to the same tough decisions and compromises that I alluded to earlier, but what a better premise it is to approach them from such a new collective interspecies empathy, as opposed to the ongoing parochial factionalism rooted in old rival religions and the false notion of human exclusivity.

Forest Walk proposes to document intercity at-risk streetscapes in Toronto. It also documents inviting lush, green, deep forest vistas, pathways and clearings outside the city. The images take the form of a series of banners dislocated from their original setting. The streetscape banners are installed in the forest at the Tree Museum while the forest images are installed on Bloor Street, in Toronto. […] The exchange of images and locations in the project explores urban dreams of reconnecting with nature and the vulnerability of existing forest areas. Both zones—city and country—are at-risk in a rapid-growth world economy and its related global warming.

~ Dyan Marie @ The Tree Museum

Also, Artisan Woods and another Tree Museum

The problem inheres in the notion of simplicity: if both its preferred subject and its preferred approach are simple, what is it that justifies the minimalist enterprise? In other words, what saves minimalism from banality? For Nicholas Serota and Richard Francis, the answer lies in the fact that minimalism reinvests the ordinary with interest and attempts to persuade us that the apparent banality of our quotidian experience deserves immediate, direct examination: “By shifting emphasis so emphatically to direct experience Minimalist art makes a clear statement about the nature of reality. Its apparent simplicity is the result of rigorous focusing, the elimination of distraction. It is neither simple nor empty, cold nor obscure. Minimalism reorders values. It locates profound experience in ordinary experience” (Saltzman).

~ Warren Motte, Small Worlds: Minimalism in Contemporary French Literature

For centuries, monkeys and apes have fascinated artists from both East and West. The depictions range from serious to humorous, entertaining to thought provoking. On this 150th anniversary year of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species come explore simian symbolism through the ages. Highlights of this exhibition include an ancient Egyptian canopic jar lid that depicts Hapi the baboon headed god; a medieval manuscript with a blue winged monkey trying to imitate the birds in the border; a cut glass Libbey pitcher with engraved social commentary on Darwin; and a mischievous monkey created by Picasso as an illustration for the writings of Comte de Buffon, an eighteenth century French naturalist who influenced Darwin.

@ Toledo Museum of Art (via)

BERLIN (Reuters) – A fox has been unmasked as the mystery thief of more than 100 shoes in the small western German town of Foehren, authorities said Friday.

A forest worker stumbled upon shoes strewn near the fox’s den and found a trove of footwear down the hole which had recently been stolen overnight from outside locals’ front doors.

As stories break from their shackles, mighty publishing will take on the liquidity of Flickr groups, rapidly assembling and dissolving.

The roles of publicists, agents, editors, and writers will become fluid. An “imprint” will constantly shift in ownership and focus.

Flickr showed us the changes in publishing. But like the future, the changes were unevenly distributed. They’re catching up.

~ The Storybird Blog

One such fluid collaboration is developing around Shya Scanlon’s novel Forecast, to be serialized across forty-two journals and blogs in the near future, including a chapter at Necessary Fiction. Hosts are still being sought, if you’re interested and have a site to involve.

Finding Our Sea Legs is currently in its final edits, and should be published by the shiny, new Kingston University Press towards the end of the year. The book is about ethics, experience and storytelling, and explores how stories might be capable of giving us a way of thinking through ethical experience without recourse to the language of certainty. It also features, amongst other things – more nautical metaphors than you could ever wish for; curious tales of talking fish; a contest between Immanuel Kant and a palmwine-stealing god from Maluku, East Indonesia; and a flock of philosophical woodpeckers.

~ Will Buckingham @ thinkBuddha

I’ve never visited the Faroe Islands, but my old best friend, Eric, has. He studied abroad in Denmark. He never watched them hunt puffins, but he watched them hunt whales. Each summer, men in boats drive migrating pilot whales to the shore. After the whales are beached, other men rush into the freezing water and use knives to sever a massive artery. The bay fills with whale blood. Many activist groups disagree with the hunt. They call it barbaric and boycott Faroese cod. They live in New York, Berlin, London, and most of them work in offices.

I work in a cube on the fifteenth floor of a building downtown. In a good wind, the building sways. During a real storm, when the rain beats hard against the windows, you can look out and almost pretend that you’re on a boat. But in my cube, I face a wall. I have to stand at the enormous windows in a conference room and coax the bay or the low clouds into a raging sea.

@ AGNI