welcome

Video

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 03:08:12 -0400

Many thousand glittering motes Crowd forward greedily together In trembling circles. Extravagantly...

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 04:53:59 -0400

Many thousand glittering motes
Crowd forward greedily together
In trembling circles.
Extravagantly carousing away
For a whole hour rapidly vanishing,
They rave, delirious, a shrill whir,
Shivering with joy against death.
While kingdoms, sunk into ruin,
Whose thrones, heavy with gold, instantly scattered
Into night and legend, without leaving a trace,
Have never known so fierce a dancing.

Photo

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 15:36:23 -0400

"The fact that there was scant basis for my sense of affinity was precisely what gave my presumed..."

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 18:35:40 -0400

“The fact that there was scant basis for my sense of affinity was precisely what gave my presumed connection potency; what one can’t explain away keeps echoing inside one as the explicable never does.”

- Pico Iyer, Cities of Sleep

Sally Mann, “Ponder Heart” (2009). “In the late-winter...

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 06:46:00 -0400

Sally Mann, “Ponder Heart” (2009). “In the late-winter afternoons for half a decade, I photographed my husband of forty-two years,” Mann told me. “With the weak sun coming through the studio windows, we were warmed by the woodstove and his two fingers of bourbon. I loved it, this work: the quietude; the muted burble of NPR; the exposures sometimes so long that he fell asleep. In this picture, a relatively short exposure, he was braced against the glass, holding still for the counted-out minutes. You see that slight movement at the tips of his fingers? That is the beating of his heart.” From the series “Proud Flesh,” exhibited at Gagosian Gallery/Courtesy Gagosian Gallery and Edwynn Houk Gallery.

— Posted originally on the New Yorker for Valentine’s Day

i love this band

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 17:55:10 -0400

i love this band

dearscience: Castello Diga di Pontechianale by Night

Sun, 02 Jun 2013 17:29:25 -0400

dearscience:

Castello Diga di Pontechianale by Night

one more

Tue, 28 May 2013 15:18:56 -0400

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

- Dylan Thomas

happiness!!!

Mon, 27 May 2013 12:45:04 -0400

happiness!!!

Video

Sat, 25 May 2013 07:03:18 -0400

I'll start with your cheeks

Sat, 25 May 2013 06:48:00 -0400

Dear Ben,

I wanted to write to apologize for missing our date. You see, when I was supposed to be leaving the office to come meet you I froze up. It honestly felt like I was glued to my chair. Not because of work pressure or anything, that’s all fine. In fact my boss told me today that he was happy with the company newsletter that I put together, so that was nice. No, so what happened, I think, is that I scared myself. You know how animals try to make themselves look like they’re dead or something so that predators can’t see them? I think it was sort of like that. Frozen.

Why, is the obvious question. And I wish it hadn’t come to this, but I need to let it out. I really want to eat you.

There is just something about you that whets my appetite and I can’t seem to control it. Maybe if we only saw each other after large meals that would help. We should try that sometime. Though, it’s not exactly linked to hunger. It’s more like… I guess it’s more like greed. I’m greedy for you. I need more than just an hour of your company, laughing with you, pressing my shins against yours. Honestly, I wish it didn’t have to be like this. Would therapy help? Freudian? Jungian? Cognitive behavioural? I hear that’s all the rage these days. Can anything help with unlearning a reflex? Did Pavlov’s dogs ever stop salivating when they rang that bell? All questions, no answers.

Anyway.

I’ve been trying to work out the sequence, you know, of body parts I’d eat. It’s not as easy as it sounds. The things that look the most delicious are also important for making other things look delicious. And if I were going to eat you, I’d really want to make the most of it. Wasted opportunity otherwise. So yes. I considered the cheeks. Yours are so fleshy, full of good humour. But then, perhaps going for the face right away is a bit much. A chunk of neck could be nice. Or wrist. I could sink my teeth right into your thigh, for example, drool from my lips dribbling down your leg. It’s funny - when I picture it you are serene, you understand. You pat my head and pass me a napkin.

It sounds crazy, but I really think that you would. Maybe that’s why I’m writing this now. I recognize the look in your eyes when we talk about the future, the past. I can almost feel the rush of blood through your body, warming your stomach, smashing into your skin. It echoes in me. It’s like that thing you mentioned – resonant frequency. Remember when we watched the video of that bridge whipping in the wind, like a skipping rope? The steel rippling and twisting. You told me it was because at some point the reverberations running through the bridge made it hit the sweet spot, until it finally expressed its maximal oscillatory response. Those were the words you used: maximal oscillatory response. I mouthed them with you, when I asked you to repeat yourself. Chewing them, relishing the crunch of maximal, the roundness of oscillatory.

Right. Well. I suppose I’ve said what I needed to. So sorry again for missing our date.

Speak soon?

xo Maggie

Photo

Sat, 25 May 2013 05:56:00 -0400

a competitive angle

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:10:00 -0400

This week I’ve learned He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, another poem by W.B. Yeats. This was suggested to me by someone in the lab because he wanted to learn it, so I challenged him to a poetry learning duel!
Friday is the showdown, but it’s already in the bag.

Had I the Heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night, and light and the half-light
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

explore-blog: From the history of how coffee changed the world,...

Tue, 14 May 2013 10:01:38 -0400

explore-blog:

From the history of how coffee changed the world, early foreign and American coffee-making devices, 1922:

1—English adaptation of French boiler. 2—English coffee biggin. 3—Improved Rumford percolator. 4—Jones’s exterior-tube percolator. 5—Parker’s steam-fountain coffee maker. 6—Platow’s filterer. 7—Brain’s Vacuum, or pneumatic filter. 8—Beart’s percolator. 9—American coffee biggin. 10—cloth-bag drip pot. 11—Vienna coffee pot. 12—Le Brun’s cafetière. 13—Reversible Potsdam cafetière. 14, 15—Gen. Hutchinson’s percolator and urn. 16—Etruscan biggin.

Audio

Fri, 10 May 2013 08:01:32 -0400

this is definitely far too ambitious… proposed may reading...

Fri, 10 May 2013 00:00:37 -0400

this is definitely far too ambitious… proposed may reading list

"the cold winds of insecurity… hadn’t shredded the dreamy chrysalis of his childhood. He..."

Thu, 09 May 2013 14:53:00 -0400

““the cold winds of insecurity… hadn’t shredded the dreamy chrysalis of his childhood. He was still immersed in the dim, wet wonder of the folded wings that might open if someone loved him; he still hoped, probably, in a butterfly’s unthinking way, for spring and warmth. How the wings ache, folded so, waiting; that is, they ache until they atrophy.””

- Harold Brodkey, The State of Grace

This gave me chills. Listen to the entire story on the New Yorker fiction podcast, here.

love these

Tue, 07 May 2013 16:02:30 -0400

love these

another slow week

Tue, 07 May 2013 10:23:00 -0400

There is too much happening. Too much real life. Too much.

Here are two poems, once again sent to me by the venerable Dr. Thanos. These are by Kiki Dimoula. At this point I think I have learned an equal number of greek and english poems!

The Plural

Love:
noun, substantive,
extremely substantive,
singular in number;
gender not feminine, not masculine, gender defenseless.
Plural the number
of defenseless loves.

Fear:
substantive,
singular to start with plural afterward:
fears.
Fears of
everything from now on.

Memory:
noun, proper name for sorrows, singular in number,
singular only,
and indeclinable.
Memory, memory, memory.

Night: substantive, gender feminine,

number singular.
Plural in number
the nights.

The nights from now on.

—-

Not one excepted

Dreams are so antisocial.
No friendships or bonds
they sooner see us than vanish
a spark exposed to a squall.

Anthropophobia?
Perhaps injured vanity
since they work down in the mines
of chances lost.

They too had other
dreams, you see

My love is bursting through my heart, My skin is splitting, hulk-like, the muscles pouring forth. My...

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 00:00:34 -0400

My love is bursting through my heart,
My skin is splitting, hulk-like, the muscles pouring forth.
My love,
A greedy child with sticky hands
Clutching to his mother’s skirt,
Begging to be seen, to be heard.
My love did that once, you know.
I need them all to know;
To approve and acknowledge my luck -
For that is all that it is -
How easily it could vanish!
We cling, sticky and petulant,
and pray for the wheel to stop turning.