They’ve been living with us for over a year now, two little South Asian transplants. Recently I put them both outside after a long winter punctuated by the spit and wheeze of the radiator, and they seemed to notice right away the sun on their long arms, reaching up towards it like hungry birds. They [...]
Things I Hear When Cicada-Tympana Thrum
Jul 28th, 2010
A small, straight twig, held steady between the spokes of a rotating bicycle wheel as it speeds up, slows down, speeds up, slows down, falls still, and then is set to spinning again. The last gasps of an aerosol can, shaken and sprayed by a determined hand, liquid and air shunted out together through a [...]
Camping, or the Art of War
Jul 27th, 2010
故曰:知彼知己,百戰不殆。不知彼而知己,一勝一負。不知彼,不知己,每戰必殆。 So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss. If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you may win or may lose. If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will always endanger yourself. —Sun Yat Sen, [...]
The Naming of Things (Part II)
Jun 29th, 2010
In Part I of this essay, I told you how a short story by Swedish writer Lars Gustafsson presented me with what seemed like a useful analog for talking about how I experience scientific nomenclature. This second part of the essay probably won’t make much sense if you haven’t read the first. As a reminder, [...]
The Naming of Things (Part I)
Jun 28th, 2010
Last Saturday night, I heard a reading of an extraordinary story by Swedish writer Lars Gustafsson, published in his 1981 collection Stories of Happy People. The piece takes as its central character a severely mentally retarded individual, following him from boyhood to middle-age in a dense fourteen pages and constructing a delicate contrapuntal narrative in [...]
Oiling The Devil’s Darning Needle
Jun 6th, 2010
In the fall of 1889, just past the height of bug-season in his home state, Henry C. M’Cook—then-Vice-President of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and Vice-Director of the American Entomological Society—wrote a lively article for the North American Review in which he outlined ways of mitigating the reign of the pestilential mosquito. Four [...]
The Virtue of Stiffness
Jun 1st, 2010
I realize how determinedly morbid this is going to sound after telling you not three weeks ago that I am obsessed with death, but at 7 o’clock this morning I got down on my hands and knees in the bathroom to pull the stiffened body of a dead cat out from underneath my claw foot [...]
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Twitter: gruntleme- A small brown egg, cracked from mishandling, tucked into a cotton reliquary? Such is greatness: We revere even what Darwin broke. #cnftweet
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