“Renaissance paintings are often as crowded with people as a car would be in one of China’s 46 subway systems today. Yet neither in the time of Jesus nor in the time of Masaccio was either the Middle East or Europe densely populated. Life would have been agrarian, with plants and animals everywhere humans went. But these frescoes were not painted to show life as it was. They were simplified models whose purpose was to teach the stories and values.”

Spencer Glendon, “Equinox greetings: hard to believe“

Barbara Kassel: “My objects are chosen for their formal properties and their ability to evoke narrative and symbolic aspects.”

Några utdrag från en intervju med fysikern (även om han verkar röra sig över ämnen på ett spännande sätt) Tom McLeish:

Om hur det ena kan leda till det andra:

It’s not that ideas come in universities, and we apply them in industry. It’s much more nonlinear and complex than that. My own research later in soft matter, for example—my first big bite of a new puzzle—had to do with what happens if you take these long-chain molecules and branch them into tree-like or cone-like structures. After all, we’ve learned that part of their key physics is that two strings can’t cross each other in three dimensions. That was a fundamental interaction, what we’d call a topological interaction. So it became obvious to ask, what happens when one changes the topology of the molecules themselves? And the answer is whole new emergent properties leap out, and that was fun to explore for quite a few years, in collaboration with chemists and engineers and computer scientists and industrial scientists, too. So that gives you an idea of soft matter, and the latest thing that’s happening is, of course, that we are made, life is made, of soft materials. So you’ll now find myself and other soft-matter physicists engaging more and more with biologists and together exploring how the physics of biological cells and biological matter works.

“Science Is a Long Story: A Conversation with Tom McLeish, Part One”, Marginalia, 3 februari 2023

Om betydelsen av sinnen:

Fascinatingly, one really important property, which later became a real key to its physical physics, is that when you stretch rubber, it gets warm. And if you take a stretched rubber at room temperature and you relax it, it cools. So there’s strange thermodynamics going on. It’s called the Gough effect, after a man named John Gough who lived in the Lake District. And, very interestingly, he was blind from birth, so he had to develop his other senses, his non-sighted senses, in his exploration of the science that he loved, and I think it’s really a wonderful thing that he discovered an effect that other people completely missed because it’s a very subtle change of temperature. Anyone can detect it. Just stretch a rubber band on your lower lip, which is sensitive to temperature. This is what he would do. So the Gough effect goes back to the nineteenth century.

“Science Is a Long Story: A Conversation with Tom McLeish, Part One”, Marginalia, 3 februari 2023

Om “hur det får lugna ner sig lite”:

And all that quantum-mechanical stuff had to calm down for a few decades before people went back in the sixties to say, “Well, now we know a bit more mathematics than this. What was this fascinating program on complex fluids that that was going on before we all got excited about quantum mechanics?” That’s slightly tongue in cheek, but only a bit. That’s the potted history.

“Science Is a Long Story: A Conversation with Tom McLeish, Part One”, Marginalia, 3 februari 2023

Jag är alltid på jakt efter beskrivningar av vardagliga skrivsätt och metoder hos författare. Kathy Acker verkar ha haft en speciell relation till sina anteckningsböcker. Det här kommer från biografin över Kathy Acker, Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker, av Jason McBride:

In lined, spiral-bound notebooks of various sizes, in handwriting that is loopy and almost childlike, Acker chronicles the ups and downs of her relationship with Neufeld, other sexual affairs, her half-hearted attempts at employment, gossip about writers, her own fragile mental and physical state, her dreams, her cats, books she’s reading, her thoughts on writing, compositional methods, memory, and representation. Even when broke, she usually used, as she would for the rest of her life, a Montblanc fountain pen. For the most part, these entries are rapid, raw, and intimate, a punctuation-free stream of consciousness, where one event or thought suddenly gives way to another, and subjects and subjectivities shift without warning or signpost. Seemingly factual events butt up against, or run headlong into, fantasy and dream. As in her later writing, friends, lovers, and colleagues appear frequently, their names unchanged.

Veckans Missiverna handlade bland annat lite om Arno Schmidt.

Skickat till fyra glada prenumeranter idag: Missiverna – Oulipo/Lascaux/Habermas/sci-fi Bolero.

Boston Review: “The Unfinished Project of Enlightenment” (juni 2020).

Jag har några tabbar öppna:

• En artikel/recension av en bok med texter av Alexander Grothendieck (se tidigare inlägg). Som vanligt mer poesi än fakta.
• “TogetherNet is an open-source software that invites groups of 10 or fewer participants to build community archives through practices of consent.”
• Pepys dagbok, som börjar om för tredje gången.
• “A review of the book Becoming Geological, edited by programmer, writer, performer, artist and explorer Martin Howse.”
• Ett samtal med Jon Fosse.
• “I Spent 3 Years Alone Building A Log Cabin” (YouTube).
• Ivan Illich: “Computers are doing to communication what fences did to pastures and cars did to streets.” Silence is a Commons (PDF).
• Bernur om Lust och fägring stor.
• Jenny Odell: “THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A FREE WATCH: Special Investigative Report for the Museum of Capitalism” (PDF).
• 2022 års bästa album, listade av skribenter hos AllMusic.
• Robin Rendle: “An Internet of Zines“.
• Richard Polt, “Heidegger’s Typewriter” (PDF).
• “How Stuart Hall’s identities framework can help understand the rise of Discord and Telegram“
• Sara Hendren: “a classroom is for readiness” (har låtit vara öppen länge).
• “Doldisen som kläckte Darwins geniala idé“, om Alfred Russel Wallace, 200 år snart.
• Nature: “Escaping Darwin’s shadow: how Alfred Russel Wallace inspires Indigenous researchers“.
• Också Nature: “‘Disruptive’ science has declined — and no one knows why“, om den här artikeln: “Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time“.
• Tiny Desk-konsert med The Smile.
• Inventaire.
• “The Rubenstein Library’s disruptive copy of A Curious Herbal“.
• Phil Gyford om sitt 2022:
  
  Also I felt an urge to retreat a bit from the physical world to the internet. A conscious decision to spend more time on the computer and online, which is not the kind of thing Medium-writers, or opinion columnists, or New Year resolution writers encourage, but still. I think it’s part of not being 100% happy here, and wanting to be where my people are. If I can’t hang around friends and other interesting people in nearby streets and coffee shops, then I’ll spend more time hanging around them online. That encouraged me to try making something new.
  
  
• The Verge: “Bring back personal blogging“.

Jag har länge velat ta upp det regelbundna nyhetsbrevandet, som jag gjorde tidigare med Missiverna. Många utkast har skapats men aldrig skickats. Men nu gör jag ett mer rejält försök, även om det första utskicket bara gick till mig (men går att läsa i arkivet). Jag väljer bort att ha en särskild struktur eller form för dem (som tidigare, med minst 10 punkter, etc) även om det då kanske blir svårare. Kanske tvingar det mig att måla lite mer. Det heter fortfarande Missiverna, men börjar om från scratch med prenumerationer. Läser du här (har ju ingen aning!) så går det bra att prenumerera.