December 2009
99 posts
Without the weak nuclear force, then, it seems unlikely that a universe could contain anything resembling complex chemistry, let alone life. Yet in 2006 [physicist Gilad] Perez’s team discovered a set of physical laws that relied on the other three forces of nature and still led to a congenial universe.
-Alejandro Jenkins and Gilad Perez, “Looking for Life in the Multiverse.”
El Cerrito, CA
The garden in winter.
I have a cold.
—Lincoln Ashbury.
The lover leaps in the volcano!
It’s ten feet deep,
and inactive—
—Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow.
Starting up
an old computer.
It carries the weight
of old discoveries.
—Gojira Toho.
Answers every
where you look but no question
anywhere to be found.
-Cid Corman.
Real duration is that duration which gnaws on things, and leaves on them the mark of its tooth. If everything is in time, everything changes inwardly, and the same concrete reality never recurs. Repetition is therefore possible only in the abstract: what is repeated is some aspect that our senses, and especially our intellect, have singled out from reality, just because our action, upon which all...
Tex Avery stayed at Warners till Leon Schlesinger fired him in mid-1941 (their dispute was over the final forty feet of a film called The Heckling Hare), and Chuck Jones animated or helped animate seven Avery pictures, 1936-37. It’s arguable that the truly mad and memorable Avery emerged at MGM, 1942-55. To that period belong, for example, the films, notably Little Rural Riding Hood, that...
Wealth, fame and power are exclusive, hence competitive, hence precarious. Unlike mental and spiritual values, they do not multiply when shared; they cannot be distributed without diminishing one’s own portion.
-Huston Smith, “Hinduism,” The World’s Religions.
Defending Paul de Man’s rather slim academic publishing record— his first book, Blindness and Insight, appeared when he was 51— [Frank] Kermode says that in view of the density and strangeness of the work, and of its author’s fame: “It would take a very tough dean to say that de Man had underproduced.”
—Robin Wood, “The Subtleties of Frank...
The H(arry Lime)-Man.
[The basic plot of Beauty and the Liquid Men (U.S. title, The H-Man)] concerns supernatural, formerly-human creatures, the horrific results of H-bomb exposure, who return home to dissolve and absorb others. And its setting was a landscape of seedy nightclubs, lurid characters, and drug smuggling, making it more akin to the gangster potboilers being produced at the time…This mixture of...
Barton Keyes: You know, you, uh, oughta take a look at the statistics on suicide some time. You might learn a little something about the insurance business. Edward S. Norton: Mister Keyes, I was RAISED in the insurance business. Barton Keyes: Yeah, in the front office. Come now, you’ve never read an actuarial table in your life, have you? Why they’ve got ten volumes on suicide alone....
passion: late 12c., “sufferings of Christ on the Cross,” from O.Fr. passion, from L.L. passionem (nom. passio) “suffering, enduring,” from stem of L. pati “to suffer, endure,” from PIE base *pei- “to hurt” (cf. Skt. pijati “reviles, scorns,” Gk. pema “suffering, misery, woe,” O.E. feond “enemy, devil,” Goth. faian...
The Gospels paint a picture that is very different from the cozy stable scene on the Christmas cards. They speak of deprivation and displacement. The Messiah himself is an outsider. There is no room in the inn, so Mary has to give birth in the 1st-century equivalent of an urban alleyway. As victims of Herod’s tyranny, the Holy Family become refugees; other innocents are slaughtered. If we...
I have always been a voracious reader of what I call invisible literatures— scientific journals, technical manuals, pharmaceutical company brochures, think tank internal documents, PR company position papers— part of that universe of published material to which most literate people have scarcely any access but which provides the most potent compost for the imagination.
—J.G....
(adj) pawky (cunning and sly) “the pawky rich old lady who incessantly scores off her parasitical descendants”- Punch
—http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=pawky
He sighed and whistled, bending his old head. He said, “you can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the …appalling …strangeness of the mercy of God.”
—Graham Greene, Brighton Rock.
Be near me, Lord Jesus, I ask Thee to stay Close by me forever, and love me, I pray. Bless all the dear children in thy tender care, And take us to heaven, to live with Thee there.
—“Away in a Manger,” author unknown.
“We must sound the historical topboard, then, like someone testing a musical instrument, if we wish to hear the fading resonances of the Coeur— its convulsion, its fall, its disappearance as a kingdom of the World. Less acute researchers allow themselves to be deafened by a catastrophe which, they reason, goes through the fabric like the explosion of a bomb: but we know that by now it...
Down in the basement, I hear the sound of machines.
—David Byrne, “Life During Wartime.”
Rumbles deep underground are caused by water being controlled by the sun and moon…
—http://www.contracostatimes.com/search/ci_14056565?IADID=Search-www.contracostatimes.com-www.contracostatimes.com
The museum at Sutro’s Baths inspired awe and curiosity. Artifacts from around the world and from other eras graced Sutro’s museum. Old Woodward’s Gardens provided some of the exhibits, puchased when they closed. Many of the exhibits had the air of a bygone morbidity. The statue of a Chinese man who had plucked each hair from his body and inserted it into his likeness to...
The Lineup (1958).
What is so lyrical about the ending, in San Francisco’s Sutro museum, is the Japanese-print compositions, the late afternoon lighting, the advantage taken of the long hallways, multilevel stairways in a baroque, elegant, glass-palace building with an exposed skating rink, nautical museum, and windows facing the sea with eye-catching boulders…The Siegel touch is...
Fesenjan
Serves 4-6
2 tablespoons butter or oil
1 medium onion, thinly sliced
6 ounces ground walnuts
½ cup pomegranate syrup
2½ cups chicken stock
Salt to taste
Pinch of cinnamon, nutmeg and black pepper
A few threads saffron, dissolved in a tablespoon of hot water, optional
1 pound leftover turkey, dark meat, cut bite-size (or meatballs, lamb, or chicken)
Lemon, sugar, as needed
Pomegranate...
One could simplify the problem by assigning to film noir qualities such as nightmarish, weird, erotic, ambivalent and cruel…Twitching and stigmatized, an unknown breed of men rose up before us. Their lot includes mild-mannered hit men (Alan Ladd in This Gun for Hire), indiscriminate brutes (William Bendix), and the clear-eyed menacing organizers (Everett Sloane in The Enforcer). It also...
the guests at Gatsby's subatomic party.
By the end of the 1950s, so many subatomic particles had been discovered that some physicists referred to their list as a “particle zoo.”
—http://www.scienceclarified.com/Sp-Th/Subatomic-Particles.html.
In addition to the Higgs Bosons, there were the Axions, the Squarks, the Sleptons, the Photinos, the Gluinos, the Zuinos and the Winos (pronounced...
“Oftentimes in reading it, every word seemed to touch my heart. I felt a harmony between something in my heart, and these sweet and powerful words. I seemed often to see so much light exhibited by every sentence, and such a refreshing food communicated, that I could not get along in reading; often dwelling long on one sentence, to see the wonders contained in it; and yet almost every...
But it wasn’t the big predators [of the Amazon jungle] that [Fawcett] and his companions fretted about most. It was the ceaseless pests. The sauba ants that could reduce the men’s clothes and rucksacks to threads in a single night. The ticks that attached like leeches (another scourge) and the red hairy chiggers that consumed human tissue. The cyanide-squirting millipedes. The...
The Hulk is cast as the emotional and impulsive alter ego of the withdrawn and reserved physicist Dr. Bruce Banner. The Hulk appears shortly after Banner is accidentally exposed to the blast of a test detonation of a gamma bomb he invented. Subsequently, Banner will involuntarily transform into the Hulk, depicted as a giant, raging, humanoid monster, leading to extreme complications in...
One expected source of gamma rays is the mutual annihilation of dark matter particles in our galaxy. While the nature of dark matter— which makes up 90 per cent of the matter in the universe— is unknown, physicists think it is made of weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs… Two WIMPs, each with a mass of between 50 and 200 gigaelectronvolts, can annihilate into two...
Everybody’s got something to hide except for me and my monkey.
—John Lennon.
Everywhere a deranged horticulture was running riot. Vivid new shoots pushed past the metal debris of old ammunition boxes, filing cabinets and truck tires. Strange grasping vines clambered over the scarlet caps of giant fungi, their white stems as thick as sailors’ bones…The jungle wall of cycads, giant tamarinds and tropical creepers crowded the beach to the waterline, and the...
Pee Wee Russell…has always remained something of a musical entity unto himself. The impact of Beiderbecke can be traced in his work, but beyond that Pee Wee is unlike any musician who ever lived. His spidery, almost fragile, melodic inventions are full of unexpected turns and starts that sometimes leave the listener spent from prolonged anticipation of disaster. As Russell once explained his...
Curiously enough the label “artificial” is applied in art to what unquestionably belongs to our ordinary, everyday perception of reality. The explanation is that the pattern of life is far more poetic than it is sometimes represented by the determined advocates of naturalism. So much, after all, remains in our thoughts and hearts as unrealized suggestion.
—Andre Tarkovsky,...
It is true that animals also produce. They build nests and dwellings, like the bee, the beaver, the ant, etc. But they produce only their own immediate needs or those of their young; they produce one-sidedly, while man produces universally; they produce only when immediate physical need compels them to do so, while man produces even when he is free from physical need and truly produces only in...
I cannot deny that my life has not followed quite the ordinary course. The reasons for that are inherent in the conditions of the time, rather than in me. Of course certain personal traits were also necessary for the work, good or bad, that I performed. But under other historical conditions, these personal peculiarities might have remained completely dormant, as is true of so many propensities and...
got the epizootic today...
In epizoology, an epizootic (from Greek epi- upon + zoion animal) is a disease that appears as new cases in a given animal population, during a given period, at a rate that substantially exceeds what is “expected” based on recent experience (i.e. a sharp elevation in the incidence rate). Epidemic is the analogous term applied to human populations.
—Wikipedia.