May 23, 2014 Sleep Aid Minutes from the Second Annual Meeting of the American Society of Microscopists By Secretary, The American Society of Microscopists It’s late, and you’re still awake. Allow us to help with Sleep Aid, a series devoted to curing insomnia with the dullest, most soporific prose available in the public domain. Tonight’s prescription: “Minutes from the Second Annual Meeting of the American Society of Microscopists,” published in 1879. Eric Earnshaw, After Lunch, 1942 The American Society of Microscopists met in Second Annual Convention, pursuant to the final adjournment of the First Annual Session, in the Central School building, Buffalo, New York, at ten o’clock a.m., August 19th, 1879; the President, Dr. R. H. Ward, in the chair. The Rev. Dr. Van Bokkelen, of Trinity Church, offered prayer. Then, on behalf of the local Microscopical Club, Dr. H. R. Hopkins welcomed the visitors with the following address: Mr. President and Gentlemen: let us exchange congratulations upon this the occasion of the second meeting of the American Society of Microscopists. I most heartily congratulate each and all of you who have the pleasure of remembering that you assisted in the work of founding this society, and I also congratulate all of you who have the opportunity of attending the second meeting and of enrolling your names among the lists of its members. I also ask you to congratulate the citizens of Buffalo upon the fact that the second meeting of this society is held in our city. I congratulate you upon the hearty cordiality with which you are made welcome by every member of your local committee, and the various societies and associations which that committee represents, and I ask you to congratulate us upon the cheering prospects that our expectations of the pleasure of listening to your deliberations are so near fruition. Again I congratulate you upon the fact that there is an American Society of Microscopists, and I believe that the work of recording what Americans have done and are doing for the advancement of this department of science can safely be trusted to the future of the Society. With this thought in my mind, I must congratulate you upon the prospect of having with you one who has had the rare good fortune to teach the world how to make objectives, whose angles extend far outside the limits which authorities had fixed as the boundaries of the possible. Let us give all honor to the modest yet noble American, Mr. Charles A. Spencer, at once the father and the genius of Modern Microscopy. Read More
May 22, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Gatto Nero By Sadie Stein Corinne May Botz, The Roehrs House, Franklin Lakes, New Jersey Back in the day when video stores existed and I used to patronize them regularly, I depended particularly upon the judgment of a cinephile clerk named Will. One day, I went into his Brooklyn store and found someone different behind the counter. I explained to him what I was looking for: A creepy psychological thriller/horror movie along the lines of Don’t Look Now, The Innocents, the original Wicker Man, Haunting of Hill House, Burnt Offerings, or Audrey Rose. (I added that, despite its mediocrity, there were things I liked about Skeleton Key.) In short, I tend to like a not-too-silly movie dealing with ghosts and the occult. I am especially drawn to those set in the 1970s, in which everyone is seemingly punished for the naivete of belonging to a happy family (just as a decade later one would be punished for being a teen girl). Catholic clergy is a plus. Hammer horror, serial killers, vampires, zombies, malevolent animals, and monsters of other kinds need not apply. We discussed this earnestly for some time and he determined that I must rent the 1981 version of The Black Cat, loosely based on the eponymous Poe story. As he seemed to understand exactly what I was looking for, I was very excited and set aside a whole evening for viewing. Read More
May 22, 2014 Look A Rookery of Pterodactyls By Dan Piepenbring Pause Play Play Prev | Next In celebration of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s birthday, have a look at these illustrations from the original serialization of his novel The Lost World, which appeared in The Strand Magazine from April through November of 1912. Conan Doyle’s novel tells of an expedition to South America, where—wouldn’t you know it?—dinosaurs still roam the earth. Everyone associates Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes, but The Lost World also left its mark on popular culture: though Conan Doyle borrowed a large part of its conceit from Jules Verne, it remains the paradigm for a sort of swashbuckling supernatural adventure, full of bumbling professorial types and out-of-their-depth journalists and strapping, granite-abdomened men in pith helmets. It’s served as the source material for everything from The Land That Time Forgot to Land of the Lost and plain old Lost, and, of course, for Michael Crichton’s The Lost World, the sequel to Jurassic Park. This is no country for Jeff Goldblum, but these illustrations, full of terror and adventure, do seem like the sort of thing Steven Spielberg and George Lucas might have hanging in their offices—and there’s definitely something of that Industrial Light & Magic awe in Conan Doyle’s vivid description of a pterodactyl nest: Creeping to his side, we looked over the rocks. The place into which we gazed was a pit, and may, in the early days have been one of the smaller volcanic blow-holes of the plateau. It was bowl-shaped, and at the bottom, some hundreds of yards from where we lay, were pools of green-scummed, stagnant water, fringed with bulrushes. It was a weird place in itself, but its occupants made it seem like a scene from the Seven Circles of Dante. The place was a rookery of pterodactyls. There were hundreds of them congregated within view. All the bottom area round the water-edge was alive with their young ones, and with hideous mothers brooding upon their leathery, yellowish eggs. From this crawling flapping mass of obscene reptilian life came the shocking clamor which filled the air and the mephitic, horrible, musty odor which turned us sick. But above, perched each upon its own stone, tall, grey, and withered, more like dead and dried specimens than actual living creatures, sat the horrible males, absolutely motionless save for the rolling of their red eyes or an occasional snap of their rat-trap beaks as a dragon-fly went past them. Their huge membranous wings were closed by folding their forearms, so that they sat like gigantic old women, wrapped in hideous web-colored shawls, and with their ferocious heads protruding above them. Large and small, not less than a thousand of these filthy creatures lay in the hollow before us.
May 22, 2014 World Cup 2014 The (Midfield) Engine That Could By David Gendelman Kyle Beckerman. Photo: Warrenfish, via Wikimedia Commons There are eleven positions on a soccer team, each with its own character. None is more glamorous than the striker, whose job is to score the goals in a game that has so few of them. None is more romantic than the goalkeeper, who stands alone as the team’s last line of defense, the only player who can use his hands in a sport that depends on the use of the feet, the head, and every part of the body but the hands. None is more celebrated than the Number 10, known sometimes as the fantasista, the team’s playmaking superstar who’s asked to supply the creativity that can undo the most rehearsed and structured defense. Yet despite the spotlight that shines on those players, the midfield position situated just in front of the team’s defensive backline is perhaps the most critical of all. Depending on a coach’s preference, a team’s formation, or a player’s talents, that position can be a defensive one, an offensive one, or a blend of both. In most every case, though, it’s the pivot on which the rest of the team turns. “There’s a reason why they call it the engine of the team,” said Taylor Twellman, a soccer analyst for ESPN. “It controls so many things. The game is determined on the strengths of your team in that position.” Traditionally, the role of that player has been a defensive one, and it often still is. Kyle Beckerman, who sports a powder keg of dreadlocks that makes him easily identifiable on the field, has filled the role for the United States team: his hard tackles and deft touch have made him one of the best holding midfielders, as the traditional name of that position is known, in Major League Soccer, where he is the captain for Real Salt Lake. “The biggest thing is that it’s a transition position,” Beckerman said. In a game where possession changes hands (or rather, feet) constantly, this is no small thing. When your team is attacking, Beckerman said, “you’re trying to sniff out things before they happen.” This could mean making a tackle that would allow the rest of the team time to catch up to the play—and, at the same time, risking a mistake that would leave the team vulnerable behind him. The way Beckerman performs it, that tackle is often a hard one, straddling the line between a referee’s whistle and a yellow card, and usually incurring the wrath of the opposing team’s fans. Read More
May 22, 2014 On the Shelf Beauty Is Not Truth, Truth Not Beauty, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Keats was wrong, scientists say, kind of. Keats’s drawing of the Sosibios Vase, c. 1819 Was Frank O’Hara the social-media whiz of his day? Well … “O’Hara’s Lunch Poems—like Facebook posts or tweets—shares, saves, and re-creates the poet’s experience of the world. He addresses others in order to combat a sense of loneliness, sharing his gossipy, sometimes snarky take of modern life, his unfiltered enthusiasm, and his boredom in a direct, conversational tone. In short, Lunch Poems, while fifty years old, is very a 21st-century book.” With apologies to Keats, beauty is likely not, in fact, truth; nor, by transitive property, is truth beauty. “The discourse about aesthetics in scientific ideas has never gone away … Today, popularizers such as Greene are keen to make beauty a selling point of physics … the quantum theorist Adrian Kent speculated that the very ugliness of certain modifications of quantum mechanics might count against their credibility. After all, he wrote, here was a field in which ‘elegance seems to be a surprisingly strong indicator of physical relevance’ … We have to ask: what is this beauty they keep talking about?” “The Chinese name diseases based on symptoms, so diabetes is known as ‘sugary pee.’” A few doctors wish to remedy this. “Beginning in the late 1930s, Richard Edes Harrison drew a series of elegant and gripping images of a world at war, and in the process persuaded the public that aviation and war really had fundamentally disrupted the nature of geography … Harrison dazzled readers of Fortune with artistic geo-visualizations of the political crises in Europe and Asia. The key decision he made was to reject the Mercator projection, which had outlived its purpose.” The anxiety (and ecstasy) of influence in Bob Dylan: “With the help of Google Books, Scott Warmuth, a fan from New Mexico, has been delving deeper into Dylan’s recent writing and finding all kinds of odd, uncredited borrowings. Passages from Dylan’s memoir, Chronicles: Volume One (2004), were taken from disparate sources: from H. G. Wells, Jack London, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald; from Tony Horowitz’s nonfiction book “Confederates in the Attic,” a travel guide about New Orleans, and an issue of Time, from 1961 … Dylan’s ‘appropriations were not random. They were deliberate. When Scott delved into them, he found cleverness, wordplay, jokes, and subtexts.’”
May 21, 2014 The Poem Stuck in My Head Robert Creeley’s “The Dishonest Mailmen” By Dan Piepenbring Robert Creeley by Elsa Dorfman, 1972. Photo via Wikimedia Commons I first came across “The Dishonest Mailmen” my sophomore year of college, when, having become so enamored of Robert Creeley’s oft-anthologized poem “I Know a Man,” I decided to buy a new edition of his collected poems—an indulgence, for someone without an income who was supposed to be reading Milton. (For the record, I carry around a lot of guilt about shrugging off Milton.) I read “The Dishonest Mailmen” and identified with it immediately for reasons I didn’t understand, and indeed for reasons that specifically elude understanding. In its fifty-some words, it conjured equal measures of anger, tenderness, and apathy, an intoxicating combination … “for a student,” I almost wrote, but what I mean is for anyone. Still, there’s something in that couplet—“I see the flames, etc. / But do not care, etc.”—that remains to me the most profound evocation of a heart-heavy nihilism that seems to afflict people exclusively in their late teens. Mainly, let’s be honest, it afflicts white guys studying literature in their late teens, who don’t know what to do with themselves or how to talk to people or how to live unselfishly, and who are able to voice this not-knowing with increasing, brooding eloquence, and who are thus infuriating to themselves and others. Read More