September 2010
What is The Arabian Nights? →
In between all the stuff I had to say about Th. Kittelsen, I mentioned a childhood infatuation with The Arabian Nights. I didn’t realize what it was was so complicated.
Contrarianism, or perhaps hipness, compels you to dislike certain things. You don’t want to like a song that’s a huge success on American Idol or as the soundtrack to a sappy montage in the latest Hollywood rom-com. You don’t want to wear clothes that everyone’s wearing because they saw them on some fucking unironic teen drama. And you most certainly don’t want to...
Some Favorites
It’s been a year since I updated my list of archived treasures. Although this experiment didn’t last long, I still keep a link to my favorite posts from the archives in my footer. For the benefit of new and old readers alike, and especially for myself, here’s an update. Like I did last time around, I encourage everyone reading this, if you have a blog, to do the same: show us...
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Crewdson, Twilight
Magic realism has two strings to play on: it either treats the marvelous as ordinary, or the ordinary as marvelous. The latter is probably not part of any reputable critic’s definition of magic realism, but at the very least it’s closely related, and it’s a strategy that artists often use in tandem with traditional magic realism, which is to say “fantastic as...
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The Qlobe →
A quine is a program that, when run, outputs its own source code (reading the file itself is cheating). This one is several cuils more extreme. Ranks up there with the most twisted, ingenious code I’ve ever seen. How it works? “Please read the source.” (via)
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When I die, I want science and medicine to take whatever organs they find a use for — not that I expect them to be useable once I’m done with ‘em — and then I want to be cremated, and I don’t give a shit where they put my ashes. Why would I? I mean, how could I? There won’t be any me to give a shit, and lacking a metabolism there won’t be any shit to give,...
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A Dictionary of the Near Future →
Someone should tell Douglas Coupland that you only get to be the voice of one generation.
The concept, “a dictionary of the near future”, could easily have been so much more than this vapid op-ed. Ah, well, I’ll get back to reading hate the future.
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Anxieties
The leaves are losing their color, the afternoon light is dying, and suddenly I’m taken by the fear that all color will die with it. The world is drab, gray-blue and getting gray-bluer; as it does, every hue blends into a uniform non-color until it’s dark, so dark my eyes must rely on the rods, those cells that sense nothing but light or darkness, but never color, and I try to imagine...
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Forget Park51. Today was the Swedish election, and a party called Sverigedemokraterna (SD) is dangerously close to the coveted spot between two coalitions, neither of which has a majority in parliament alone. This position might be unfamiliar to you if you’re accustomed to a two-party system, but it’s basically what happened in this year’s British elections: neither of the two...
The Point has quickly become a great source for long-form writing. I just wish they’d put all their stuff online. I’d be willing to pay for some of it, but I don’t want them to cut down a tree to print it on, then charge me more than the magazine itself for shipping and handling. These articles are just words: they don’t depend on or leverage the print medium at all.
Even...
“Behold the mighty dinosaur
Famous in prehistoric lore,
Not only for his power...”
– Bert Taylor, a Chicago Tribune columnist, in 1912 re: the hypothesis that some dinosaurs had an extra brain in their butt (spoiler: nope, they didn’t).
Su Song →
Su Song was an 11th century Chinese polymath who constructed a water-driven astronomical clock tower so complicated that none of his successors could reassemble it. I also hadn’t heard of him until just now.
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Egil's Saga →
Inky links to Njal’s saga, which wikipedia says “has a deservedly high reputation as the greatest Icelandic saga.” National pride compels me to dispute this: my favorites were always the sagas that take place in Norway. (They were all written in Iceland.)
There is the momentous Heimskringla, of course, but the story I’m most personally connected to is Egil’s saga,...
“Good sense is the most fairly distributed commodity in the world, because nobody...”
– René Descartes.
Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg? →
Thanks to dig the cat and Greg Brown for alerting me to this three-part essay on Fenton’s photograph. Now that I’ve read it, I recall seeing this saga before, but I never put in the effort to read it.
As it turns out, there are two versions of the Valley of the Shadow of Death photo: they are near identical, except for the presence of cannonballs on the road in one and the lack of...
Domesticated Cyborgs →
Cooking acts as a supplemental external stomach. Once humans acquired this artificial organ it permitted them to evolve smaller teeth and smaller jaw muscles and provided more kinds of stuff to eat. Our invention altered us.
I like the idea behind 50 posts about cyborgs. Not only are cyborgs awesome, but on a meta-level I appreciate the way the project is formulated: here are fifty posts about...
Hessdalen light →
Hessdalen, a valley in Norway, is well-known for its unexplained light phenomena. There are many places around the world where weird lights, glowing orbs, etc. allegedly have been observed, but Hessdalen has some hard data that most of these places lack: in addition to eye witness accounts, an automatic measuring station has been continuously monitoring the lights since 1998, recording about 20...
Aokigahara →
Aokigahara (青木ヶ原?), also known as the Sea of Trees (樹海 Jukai), is a 35 km2 forest that lies at the base of Mount Fuji in Japan… The forest, which has a historic association with demons in Japanese mythology, is a popular place for suicides; in 2002, 78 bodies were found, despite numerous signs, in Japanese and English, urging people to reconsider their actions. Due to the wind-blocking...
Scaphism →
Scaphism, also known as the boats, was an ancient Persian method of execution designed to inflict torturous death.
The naked person was firmly fastened within a back-to-back pair of narrow rowing boats (or a hollowed-out tree trunk), with the head, hands and feet protruding. The condemned was forced to ingest milk and honey to the point of developing severe diarrhea, and more honey would be...
“In Mrs. Song’s house, as in every other, a framed portrait of Kim Il-Sung...”
– From Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea, by Barbara Demick. (North Korea, previously.)
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Conceptual bats (strained metaphor)
The most natural thing in the world, surely, is arranging stuff into objects and processes, things and transformations of those things. Given the stream of sensory data that assaults us every day, it seems entirely elementary that we should make sense of the world through objects and their transformations. I certainly can’t think of a better way to understand the world; it seems downright...
“Photography is a very lonely medium. There’s a kind of beautiful loneliness in...”
– Alec Soth. Also: “Everyone says, ‘How do you find hermits?’ And the answer is: on the Internet.”
