not like you didn’t know…

…But seeing it in pictures is different.

The Geography of a Recession

While this is pretty scary looking, I would hope that rather than reverting to hysteria, we can take our fear and move with it in productive ways.  This means letting go of reactionary positions (of which simple fear is a part).  What does unemployment mean in terms of health? in terms of government services? in terms of goals (both as a nation and for each individual, be they one of the luckily employed, or one of the unlucky?  What does this mean in terms of the national stories we repeat to justify our way of life?  Where are the bootstraps to pulled in these images?

good chickens!

all library, all the time

This is a story about how serendipity in research is not always all that serendipitous.  Today is Saturday but I took the train down to the university to take notes on several library books there (thank goodness the library is open on the weekend, though only between 10 and 6).  I found my first book and made the great error of looking at the surrounding titles, finding no less than seven (7) books on ‘Literature and Science’.  In fact, I think they were all named ‘Literature and Science.’  And yes, they might be useful–but do I really have the time?  My annotated bibliography has 65 sources and none of these books are on it.  To my horror/joy (I don’t know which) several of the books are really interesting and relevant.  Ugh.

So.  I’ll be back in the library tomorrow.  This time I’ll pack a snack, since the cafeteria isn’t open at all on the weekends…

“I want to get tipsy from red wine and like everyone’s facebook statuses”

Garfunkel and Oates, my favorite of favorites

and, MORE:

Enjoy!

Signs & Wonders

Let me share with you The Good News… My apartment has been de-Christoed!  We emerge from our plastic sheath, our chrysalis, our white wrappings that have weighed so heavily on my soul these last couple of months!  This morning, as I was reading Barry Lopez, I realized that the light entering my windows was changing, that my ears were catching the German of people outside and above me, and that, yes, they were cutting away the plastic from the scaffolding…  Permit me some exuberance here, please.  I have been trapped these last couple of months, I’m sure I have complained about it here, and finally, I see the very gray sky of Berlin winter, which is not at all like the gray of the inside of plastic sheeting.  What I mean to say is Hallelujah.  From then on, I was struck throughout the day with the SIGNS AND WONDERS OF THE WORLD.  I read Wendell Berry after Lopez, and John Barth after Berry.  I did not bring my music with me on the train but instead read science poetry, things like:  “Logic is a mechanism/ made of infinitely hard material” (Steve McCaffrey) and “to be miniaturised is not small-minded” (Robert Crawford).  A man on the U-Bahn was reading Strunk and White (Elements of Style) and I thought, very naturally, omit needless words.

In the JFK library I discovered that there are, in fact, stacks in some German libraries.  Three floors of them at JFK, concrete, florescent light, tall shelves and metal staircases.  No Dewey, no Library of Congress, so of course I had no idea where the books I was looking for were.  But I found an oversized book, lying on the shelf (waiting for me?) called ‘The Confederate Soldier.’ Embossed cover and filled with illustrations, charts, lists of the structure of the Army of Northern Virginia for every single battle, compiled from what looked like newspapers and nineteenth-century publications.  It was so beautiful and useless.

We returned to this one Thomas Cole painting in class.  You know the one, ‘View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm – The Oxbow.’

Where is this place?  What is this river?  What are these place names?  Are their referents real or imaginary?  Are they the same for every person?

Now of course my day ended with Cartarescu drawing sperm with smiley faces and Siamese twins in homoerotic positions (please, don’t blame him, we are reading John Barth) so my mind is simply full of wonderment.  What does tomorrow hold?  It seems that a very small life can be heartbreakingly rich, if one just can see out the window.

 

Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity

“Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses — and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person “being” a genius, all of us “have” a genius. It’s a funny, personal and surprisingly moving talk.”

On TED, only 20 minutes long… very interesting.

Dante didn’t invent hell. He furnished it.

I’ve had a disastrous couple of days “working” on my thesis.  Wednesday I “worked” nonstop (8am-8pm) and accomplished little (nothing).   I’ve been distracted by feelings of being trapped, and alleviating these feelings by making sure I go out, on walks, to the library, to the university, etc.  But rather than clear my head and allow me to focus on my task (thesis), they only distract me further, take up my time, make me nostalgic for them moments afterward.  I am sitting down after this post with a great thermos of tea and writing my thesis.  Forget the research, I need to at least write down what I’m trying to say, maybe in poems.  I know that today is the 14th of November and I have to start writing.

I’ve just returned from a fruitful trip to St. George’s english bookstore in P-Berg, where I made 15 euros selling back books to them, and buying Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters and Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, both books I have been wanting to read for ages.  Mason & Dixon is 700 pages so perhaps not the most wise purchase in the middle of my thesis, but I need something for pleasure and it’s better if it’s not streaming movies/television.  Tam and I had a snack off Kolowitzplatz at the same restaurant we ate at last year around this tea.  I had a wonderful hot chocolate and piece of carrot cake, which is, I believe, the same thing I had last year.  Things can be strangely cyclical.  We talked about Teagan & Sara, who we are going to see in 2 weeks; on one hand, I know that I really need these fun things in order to stay happy and sane but on the other I understand that this just puts more pressure on my at-home time to be really really productive.  Honestly, it hasn’t been so far.

So, I’m going to make tea now (the big thermos, not my cute ikea one) and get going on this thing that I don’t want to do (thesis)…

get your funny here

From the impossibly pretentious ‘pages’ of McSweeney’s: Jeff Bercovici and Piper Weiss’s “Actuarial Tables.” Read it where you won’t be embarrassed to giggle out loud.

 

Know Your Quanta!

This is Me:

Also, have I mentioned that I seriously miss cats?  One cat in particular…

Read it and weep:

Although Kant does not explicitly mention the predictive role of differential equations in the process of Anticipations of Perception, the notion of differentiability introduced by infinitesimally calculus permeates his text.

From Constituting Objectivity: Transcendental Perspectives on Modern Physics, a text that as far as I can tell, is just a big giant book of Kant and Math.  The pages even have that crisp ultra-white color of incredibly dense textbooks.  You know what I’m taking about.  Oh dear.

But there is hope:

[...]

Both schools are mistaken, the venerable mole declared.

Birds and cats are optical illusions produced

by the refraction of light.  In fact, things above

 

Were the same as below, only the clay was less dense and

the upper roots of trees were whispering something.

but only a little.

 

And that was that.

 

Ever since the moles have remained below ground:

they do not set up commissions

or presuppose the existence of cats.

 

Or if so only a little.

From Miroslav Holub’s poem, “Brief reflection on cats growing in trees”

 

Lunch interview?

I do love this woman.  Interview with Elizabeth Grosz, my favorite theorist.