Archive for December, 2007
Untitled
Brompton Cemetary, London
“Sonnet XVII”
Loving you less than life, a little less
Than bitter-sweet upon a broken wall
Or brush-wood smoke in autumn, I confess
I cannot swear I love you not at all.
For there is that about you in this light–
A yellow darkness, sinister of rain–
Which sturdily recalls my stubborn sight
To dwell on you, and dwell on you again.
And I am made aware of many a week
I shall consume, remembering in what way
Your brown hair grows about your brow and cheek,
And what divine absurdities you say:
Till all the world, and I, and surely you,
Will know I love you, whether or not I do.
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
December 29th, 2007
A New Year’s tradition: some truly yummy words I learned in the past twelve months. I love adding to my vocabulary, though odds are I’ll never use a single one of these in conversation.
1. aquamanile
2. scacchic
3. imbricated
4. snowclone
5. quisling
6. apotropaic
7. ofermod
8. ephemeris
Earlier: words I learned in 2006
December 29th, 2007
National Geographic
I used to have a pet hooded rat, which is why I think the giant rat recently discovered in Indonesia is actually kinda cute. Plus, it’s almost as large as my cat! It would be hilarious to get them together.
You know, I hope the rat is sedated in this photo, and not dead. Hmm.
December 20th, 2007
Is there some sort of typological standard for disembodied medical hands? I took this picture in London, and thought nothing of it at the time - but it does strongly resemble the hands in Nicole Natri’s collage, and the descriptions of hands at the Spitzner museum. Hmmm. . . .
December 18th, 2007
Reader/medical student Niall Hamilton, photographer of microorganisms, sent me this oh-so-seasonal Christmas petri dish:
Niall says, “the black is a yeast species often found around bathroom sinks, and the snow is another yeast species (a pretty unremarkable environmental one).”
Looking at this, I can almost smell the LB. Nothing like a festive Christmas in the warm room!
This reminds me of the time I gave petri plates to my beginning biology students, with instructions to expose the plates to their fingers, doorknobs, pens, etc, then put them in the classroom incubator. Usually this assignment yields nasty yellow and white microorganisms, some hairy fungus, and a satisfying “euw, gross.” But the next morning, I was horrified to find neon-colored slime on many of the plates - bright red, hot pink, even orange! I was envisioning MRSA and looking around for antibacterial hand soap, when I found a plate with iridescent glittery colonies. Ack! It turned out that my female students had decided to test their lip glosses.
December 16th, 2007
Can a president who is not comfortable thinking about science hope to lead instead of follow? Earlier Republican debates underscored this problem. In May, when candidates were asked if they believed in the theory of evolution, three candidates said no. In the next debate Mike Huckabee explained that he was running for president of the U.S., not writing the curriculum for an eighth-grade science book, and therefore the issue was unimportant. - Lawrence Krauss, Wall Street Journal
Sciencedebate 2008: Join a bunch of concerned and intelligent people in the call for a presidential debate on science - let’s be confident that our next leader can, at the very least, pronounce “nuclear” correctly.
In a related vein, that naughty Saint Gasoline makes me laugh and then snort, yet again:
Sadly, I think you could probably persuade politicians to use this strategy - if you could make them, or the American public, understand it. Or get them to pronounce “Schrodinger.”
Someone should ask about quantum physics at Sciencedebate 2008. . . nah. That would be mean.
December 11th, 2007
Still frantically shopping? How about this anatomically accurate tee, from the musically named autumnomatopoeia (”legos, livers, and more. Oh my!”)?
Here’s an excellent gift idea list from Heather at Cabinet of Wonders.
See also my gift idea list. And Vanessa’s anatomy-related gift list at Street Anatomy.
December 11th, 2007
Metamorphosis
Almacan
Digital artist Almacan (Kazuhiko Nakamura) creates intricately detailed surrealistic portraits, equal parts Giger and da Vinci. This one reminds me of an insectoid Green Man about to disperse into the undergrowth. . . and also, strangely, of Richard Dadd’s Bacchanalian Scene. Almacan says:
I am inspired by surrealism and cyberpunk styles of art. I find myself drawn to 19th century machine designs and armor among other things from that time period as motif. All of these images have been created with a portrait style while still containing a puzzle type quality.
His work is available via his website and Deviantart store.
Via feuilleton.
December 9th, 2007
This stunning silver urchin ring and squid tentacle earrings are from emily amey.
The paperweights below, including “an exact replica of a mammalian heart,” are by Walteria living.
December 8th, 2007
I’m not the only one who liked Nicole Natri’s latest work. Check out the gallery poster for her solo show at Jr. Konsthallen, in Sweden, starting today. Congratulations, Nicole!
December 8th, 2007
I found this post on the NYT Health blog “Well”, by Tara Parker-Pope (when did the NYT switch to a blogging model? am I just oblivious?) Anyway, the post was mildly intriguing. But then I started reading the comments, and man, they just pissed me off.
The gist of the post is that some nutritional scientists demonstrated that, calorie for calorie, junk food is substantally more affordable than healthy food, especially fresh produce. This supports the premise that the obesity epidemic in this country - which disproportionately affects the poor - is at least partially due to the fact that the poor can’t afford to eat as well as the rest of us. (Other possible reasons include lack of education about nutrition, lack of time to prepare food from scratch, lack of access to quality grocery stores. . . need I go on?)
The annoying thing is that at least half of the comments are by people crying foul and calling the study junk science, because they, personally, are able to eat healthfully and affordably by doing such things as. . . .making large batches of lentil stew! Uh, yeah. The fact that you enjoy living on lentil stew means that junk food is really more expensive than it appeared to the researchers! Or something!
This is an example of a fallacy that simply must have a formal name, though I don’t know what it is: disbelief in the results of scientific research because the implications conflict with personal experience.
First, the validity of the science is independent of its political or social implications. Secondly, your personal experience, while no doubt extremely important to you, don’t mean diddly when addressing populations in bulk (no pun intended).
To balance the anecdote about living healthfully on the cheap by making bohemian lentil stew, I have a story about how my mom (a working single mother) used to serve instant (generic) gravy on (generic) Wonderbread when our money ran out. It wasn’t because she didn’t value health - this is the woman who didn’t let me eat sweetened cereal until I was 12 - but because she knew white bread was an extremely economical source of calories in a pinch. Why didn’t she make organic lentil stew by buying in bulk from Whole Foods? I know this is hard to believe, but we didn’t own a car, and there was only one supermarket in our town - hardly a Whole Foods. (Before you even start. . . no, there were no buses!) Given our impoverished state, did we eat at McDonalds? Rarely - because it was too expensive!
What is your immediate, knee-jerk reaction to that paragraph? Disbelief? Then I bet you’ve never lived in the middle of the country.
Believe it or not, there were and are large swaths of America without Whole Foods, public transportation, internet, cell phone service, Target, bagels, sushi, or farmer’s markets. Yet in my time living on the coasts, first left, then right, I have consistently run across something I call the Coastal Fallacy. This is a bizarre set of blinkers which compels people to deny the possibility of American lifestyles outside their realm of experience. They simply can’t imagine towns like the one where I grew up, because there aren’t any towns like that near them. It drives me absolutely crazy - except at cocktail parties, when I can make good use of the shock value in remarks like “my entire family has lived (or does live) in mobile homes,” or “I never met a Jewish person until college.” If you expect to understand this country as a whole, you need to accept that some parts of it are very different than what you’re used to, and that your personal experience does not define the opportunities available to others.
Tragically, most of the comments on the NYT post show minimal understanding of nutrition, science, or how the poorer half lives. And the commenters who give a location all seem to be, ahem, living on the coasts. But I was impressed by this comment, from msd:
One thing the posters here haven’t commented on is the feeling of psychological deprivation that comes with long-term poverty and how that contributes to poor food choices. It’s easy to live on rice and beans if you’re a grad student or a middle-class person going through a rough financial time. It’s another thing if someone feels they are part of a permanent underclass. It’s no wonder chronically poor people console themselves with of sweet and starchy mass-produced food. It’s the only way they can experience abundance.
That may not be scientifically supported, but it sure rings true, doesn’t it?
December 8th, 2007
Hare Floor Mosiac
4th century
Corinium School, Cirencester, Gloucestershire
Corinium Museum
Dan Chiasson’s book of poetry, Natural History (2005) is inspired by Pliny (the Elder, who wrote the original Naturalis historia) and Horace. Taking Pliny as a starting point may well be hubris, because Naturalis historia is an encyclopedic history of everything, a curiosity cabinet of words, imperfectly balanced between imagination and observation. (Pliny, less reliable than he was prolific, warns of basilisks, dragons, manticores, and the catoblepas: “its head is remarkably heavy, and it only carries it with the greatest difficulty, being always bent down towards the earth. Were it not for this circumstance, it would prove the destruction of the human race; for all who behold its eyes, fall dead upon the spot.”) Horace, in turn, wrote the Ars Poetica. I conclude that Chiasson is not easily intimidated.
What I like about Chiasson’s poems (and one reason Pliny makes a fit patron) is that they meld without apology or self-consciousness the lyric and the quotidian, the romantic and the scientific. The effect is sometimes invigorating, as in “Love Song (Sycamores)”:
Stop there. Stop now. I calculated that
the number of birds singing
on any given morning
was a function of the sycamores plus my hangover.
Sometimes the mix of slang and classics is distressingly weird. And when a poem makes me feel weird, I sit up and take closer notice than when I find it beautiful. This collection may pose as an encyclopedia, with titles like “The Sun,” “The Pigeon,” and “The Elephant,” but it confuses far more than it explicates, layering references and voices on each other until I’m sometimes not quite sure who’s speaking. Chiasson addresses one poem to himself, mentions himself by name in another, mentions or references a dozen other modern poets. This is a book of poetry you’re reading, in case you forgot. As in a museum, it’s disorienting and a little annoying when the nose hits the glass.
Yet I’m charmed by my feeling that Chiasson is, above all, teasing. This is a poet at play, a poet unafraid to stitch his own idiosyncratic collage-history of the world (one of the poems I like most is called “Made-up Myth”). That history is sometimes panoramic, sometimes intimate:
They are made of such strange dreams, bee-like dreams:
a peach orchard she never played in as a child,
where overnight the peaches never turned to stone. (”Made-up Myth”)
My favorite of all Chiasson’s poems appeared in the New Yorker, but not in Natural History, so I have obtained his permission to reproduce it here in entirety. It’s a riff on, of all things, a Roman floor mosaic, which was discovered in 1971 in Cirencester, England. (Corinium Dobunnorum was the Roman name for Cirencester, second in size only to London in 2nd century Britain.)
For a glass lagomorph, the hare sure has a lot of opinions. The poem is panoramic in both space and time, crossing years and nations the hare, buried in forgotten Corinium, did not witness. Yet to me its voice rings familiar: resigned, cynical, a tad plaintive, wry. What difference does art’s commentary make in the end, buried or re-discovered? Does it exist merely to give us what Whitman calls “the certainty of others” - the awareness of our place in the long continuum of life and history?
“Mosaic of a Hare: Corinium”
The New Yorker
Dan Chiasson
The boats pulling in, the boats pulling out, the top-hat
commerce of the “infant century,” crowds, crowds,
“the certainty of others,” the bomb
that filled the air with horsehair and the ambulance after:
why wouldn’t I hide in my little glass body? I have a clover sprig
made of glass to aspire to, with my glass appetite.
I raise certain questions about art and its relation to stasis,
yet I despise the formalists as naïve and ahistorical.
Here’s my problem with America: this “would be” that obliterates
all other moods, playing over and over in people’s heads,
the abstract optative that destiny works out.
I don’t have the luxury to think in terms of destiny.
What nobody seems to get about me is, though you’re made of glass
it doesn’t mean you don’t have appetites: I do. Or fears: I do.
The day the darkness took the whole basilica, I was afraid;
and equally afraid the day, centures later, they switched the lights on.
Let rabbits think in terms of destiny: Whitman, the great
American rabbit poet, the rabbits in the government,
the rabbits that light and the ones that snuff out the fuse,
and all their pretty rabbit children, waiting to be casserole.
Notes - “the certainty of others” is from Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry“. If you’re confused by the last stanza, note that hares are different from rabbits. I’m not sure, but I think the bomb refers to the assassination of the Nazi Reinhard Heydrich in 1942, who died ironically not from the blast, but from septicemia induced by horsehair and debris released from the seat of his car.
December 5th, 2007
In a great post at The Intersection, Sheril takes on sexism, science, and stereotypes. This is exactly why I like “The Big Bang Theory,” yet feel strangely uncomfortable watching it.
December 5th, 2007