These two performances make me imagine a story about siamese twins playing guitar in an old-time circus sideshow.
I have trouble believing this exists.
According to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, these are around twelve centimetres long and live almost a thousand metres deep. When I saw this video, I imagined the creature was blimp-sized. The spooky music didn’t help.
Brilliant and seemingly glowing, the bloodybelly comb jelly comes in different shades of red but always has a blood-red stomach. The sparkling display on the outside comes from light diffracting from tiny transparent, hair-like cilia. These beat continuously, propelling the jelly through the water…Ironically, at the depths where the bloodybelly lives, it’s nearly invisible to predators.
It’s a type of creature called a ctenophore, and according to one major study, it might be the earliest common ancestor to all animal life on earth.
[Found via Neatorama.]
I like this poem by Amy Lowell:
Autumn
They brought me a quilled, yellow dahlia,
Opulent, flaunting.
Round gold
Flung out of a pale green stalk.
Round, ripe gold
Of maturity,
Meticulously frilled and flaming,
A fire-ball of proclamation:
Fecundity decked in staring yellow
For all the world to see.
They brought a quilled, yellow dahlia,
To me who am barren
Shall I send it to you,
You who have taken with you
All I once possessed?
There’s something strange about it: it’s about a beautiful object, the language is lush, but there’s also anger in it, which seems to come out in the closing lines, and in words like “flaunting,” “flung,” “fire-ball,” and “fecundity.” It’s almost as if she’s swearing at someone who’s given her a flower in apology. I wonder who “they” are?
[Found via 3 Quarks Daily.]
There are some more of her poems on poets.org. This one jumps out at me too. It sort of reminds me of Charles Simic: the cityscape in the early hours, the sense of loneliness, dislocation and strangeness.
A London Thoroughfare. 2 A.M.
They have watered the street,
It shines in the glare of lamps,
Cold, white lamps,
And lies
Like a slow-moving river,
Barred with silver and black.
Cabs go down it,
One,
And then another,
Between them I hear the shuffling of feet.
Tramps doze on the window-ledges,
Night-walkers pass along the sidewalks.
The city is squalid and sinister,
With the silver-barred street in the midst,
Slow-moving,
A river leading nowhere.
Opposite my window,
The moon cuts,
Clear and round,
Through the plum-coloured night.
She cannot light the city:
It is too bright.
It has white lamps,
And glitters coldly.
I stand in the window and watch the
moon.
She is thin and lustreless,
But I love her.
I know the moon,
And this is an alien city.
“Ultraviolet is a unique, informative and thought-provoking experience. And if I stare at these pages long enough, maybe they’ll start to move.”
I have a new review up on PopMatters today. It’s about the book Ultraviolet by Dan Donahue.
The book features 69 posters (heh), all produced between 1967 and 1972 and covering a wide range of subjects, all of them groovy. Every page evokes nostalgia, perhaps a flashback, and conveys a strong sense of the wild power and energy of the times. Read more…
It was fun to write this one because I got to work in references to essays about psychedelic art, video clips from MGMT and Mallrats, a story about ecstasy and books, South Park, cat urine, and an (unfortunately failed) experiment with blacklight bulbs.
Marco Roth writes an interesting essay in n+1 magazine, and on its website, about a genre he dubs the “neuronovel,” and cites examples that include “Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (Tourette’s syndrome),” and “Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (autism).”
What has been variously referred to as the novel of consciousness or the psychological or confessional novel—the novel, at any rate, about the workings of a mind—has transformed itself into the neurological novel, wherein the mind becomes the brain … What’s strange is that science, as it moves in the direction of a total redescription of the mind in terms of the brain, may merely be replicating and systematizing the earlier insights of the psychological novel.
Part of his argument seems to be that some writers have sort of given up trying to explore the inner lives of their characters, or found themselves unable to do so, with the field of neuroscience becoming popular and accessible to a lay audience. Instead, the writers have resorted to using various neurological disorders, illnesses or conditions as metaphors (at best) or short cuts (at their worst) in portraying characters.
At least, I think that’s what he was saying. The idea of using neuroscience in storytelling has always seemed fascinating but dangerously gimmick-y to me. Not that I don’t like gimmicks: I love ‘em when they’re good. Anyway, there’s much more to his essay than that. Here’s another excerpt:
What makes so many writers try their hands and brains at the neuronovel? At the most obvious level, the trend follows a cultural (and, in psychology proper, a disciplinary) shift away from environmental and relational theories of personality back to the study of brains themselves, as the source of who we are … To put all this more simply, the neuronovel tends to become a variety of meta-novel, allegorizing the novelist’s fear of his isolation and meaninglessness, and the alleged capacity of science to explain him better than he can explain himself.
This relates to the story I’ve been sort of working on (off and on) for a while now, which, if I ever get it done, will probably be super-ultra-crappy-gimmick-y compared to the books Roth cites in this essay. I don’t know if this’ll change anything about how I’ve been thinking about my story, but it’s good stuff to mull over.
Also, “neuronovel” is awfully catchy. I wonder if the prefix “neuro-” will supplant (or join) the suffix “-punk” as a trend in book genres: neuro-noir, neuro-splatter-steamy-cyber-lolita-punk…
[Found via Mindhacks]
This beautiful book traces the history and development, rise and fall of kamishibai, a form of storytelling that was once phenomenally popular in Japan and now has all but vanished. Read more…
This is my latest book review on PopMatters: Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theater. The artwork in this book was amazing, and the writer made a good case for how this form of storytelling has been integral to the history and development of Japanese (and global) pop culture. I would like to see more collections like this one.
I loved the full-length kamishibai stories that were included, and also how the dust jacket unfolded into a massive, full-colour poster with all the key characters on it. It made me want to see footage of kamishibai performers from the 1930s and 40s.
This video should be on every rocket we send into outer space.
Hmm, I wrote “into outer”: is that the right way to say it? My brain is mushy. The guy at the 3:50 mark of this video looks like my brain feels today.
Found via Neatorama
A hard-boiled history of the lie detector revels in the seedy deceptions at the roots of the search for a truth-telling machine (plus: it exposes the kinky origins of Wonder Woman). Read more…
I have a new article up on Popmatters today. It’s a review of The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession, by Ken Alder. It’s an interesting, ambitious book, and writing about it gave me a chance to do some interesting side reading about the concept of truth, and how to lie effectively. Not that I’m any good at it (or that I’d admit to it), but how could the combination of science, pseudo-science, philosophy, history and kinky sex be anything but entertaining?
This is trippy and amazing. It’s an auto-tuned Carl Sagan song (!) featuring a solo by Stephen Hawking. It makes me want to watch it under a blacklight in a wood-panelled basement in 1980…I’ll be back in a little while.
Apparently this was made with samples from the shows Cosmos and Stephen Hawking’s Universe. It kind of makes me feel twelve years old. I wonder if there’s an ultraviolet black velvet poster of Carl Sagan, or the Cosmos logo. Okay, I think this video makes me high.
Found via mental floss.
This is a beautiful short film, called The Mysterious Explorations of Jasper Morello. It’s a “gothic horror mystery” and it features iron dirigibles, a plague, and steam-powered computers.
Nominated for an Oscar and for a BAFTA award, Jasper Morello is a short feature made in a unique style of silhouette animation developed by director Anthony Lucas and inspired by the work of authors Edgar Alan Poe and Jules Verne.
Found via Wondermark.
