Friday, June 30, 2006

Boil 1.95

"Antheil and Joyce. I don't suppose you ever hear much about those sort of people in Hollywood, but my husband wrote the first criticism of Ulysses that ever appeared in America."
"I wish I had a cigarette," said McKisco calmly. "That's more important to me just now."

F.S. Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night, 18.

Thursday, June 29, 2006

Wednesday, June 28, 2006

From behind 1.99

Often I sit alone at night, staring with the eyes of the mind into the blackness of unborn time, and wondering in what shape and form the great drama will be finally developed, and where the scene of its next act will be laid. And when that final development ultimately occurs, as I have no doubt it must and will occur, in obedience to a fate that never swerves and a purpose that cannot be altered...

H.R. Haggard, She, 314.

Sunday, June 25, 2006

File 1.60

We are perhaps au fait with the idea that the British Navy, the so-called "wooden walls of England", was at one time assembled from the totem species. We may equally recognize that oak trees were central to the construction of the Norse longboat, and the Viking's wider project of rape, pillage and civilization on the Atlantic littoral. But who would have thought that the inks used to fill da Vinci's notebooks, or to complete the line drawings and paintings of Duerer, Rembrandt and van Gogh, not to mention the score sheets of Bach, were all derived from an excrescent growth on oak trees caused by parasitic wasps? Oak galls, found especially on the Aleppo oak Quercus tinctoria, were the raw stuff of human letters for hundreds of years.

M. Cocker, "Westminster Hall from an acorn", TLS January 13 2006, p.6

From behind 1.98

Germany vs. Greece


via purselipsquarejaw

Thursday, June 22, 2006

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Boil 1.94

A Fish licence for Eric the half-bee. More info here.

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Boil 1.93


Overheard IRC quip: I have a liberal arts degree, would you like fries with that?

Monday, June 19, 2006

Spoil 1.75

This so strangely negative but disturbing mood lasted some little time [...]
J. Conrad, Nostromo, 9.

File 1.59

Geneticists have drawn up the most accurate tree of life yet and pinpointed what they believe to be the organism from which all other life on Earth evolved [...] at the bottom of of the evolutionary tree, dubbed the "last universal common ancestor" from which all other life sprang.
Our oldest ancestor turns out to be very similar to disease-causing bugs of today.
Guardian Weekly March 10-16, 2006, 19.

Sunday, June 18, 2006

From behind 1.97

Archaeological Site Yields Dental Surprise: Researchers have found a 4,500-year-old burial in Mexico that had the oldest known example of dental work in the Americas. Link

(via monochrome)

Thursday, June 08, 2006

hyssyttely

Together in electric dreams

Wednesday, June 07, 2006

hyssyttely

Caresses

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

From behind 1.96

"There is little to tell about me, a life somewhat in the shadows; he who does not see it directly will notice nothing about it." "In reality it is very calm around me, never too calm, moreover." And to Milena: "My state of health is not essentially different from what it was in Prague. This is all. I will not venture to say more; what is said is already too much."
M. Blanchot, Friendship, 263.