Dutch Antelope, as seen from bicycle. Zeist, Netherlands.
Heavy mists on the Hudson, as seen from my train at dusk.
I recommend a visit to the Pierpont Morgan Library & Museum, located on an unassuming block in Manhattan’s sqaulish midtown. Among the highlights are J.P. Morgan’s private library of rare books, a three-story wrap-around affair complete with secret doors and vaulted ceilings. The guard pointed out the hidden entrance that Mr. Morgan would use to escape the house. “Only a man would build something like that, you know?” she said.
A revolving selection of books from the collection are on display in beautifully lit vitrines. Here is The Book of the Senses:
The Morgan Library is also hosting a terrific little gem of a show, Drawing Surrealism (now thru April 21st), which includes, among others, several exquisite compositions by Joseph Cornell:
The New York Times and The New Yorker both have reviews.
A dusting of snow on the pond today.
Alejandro Guijarro - Momentum (2010-12)
“The artist travelled to the great quantum mechanics institutions of the world and, using a large-format camera, photographed blackboards as he found them. Momentum displayed the photographs in life-size.
Before he walked into a lecture hall Guijarro had no idea what he might find. He began by recording a blackboard with the minimum of interference. No detail of the lecture hall was included, the blackboard frame was removed and we are left with a surface charged with abstract equations. Effectively these are documents. Yet once removed from their institutional beginnings the meaning evolves. The viewer begins to appreciate the equations for their line and form. Color comes into play and the waves created by the blackboard eraser suggest a vast landscape or galactic setting. The formulas appear to illustrate the worlds of Quantum Mechanics. What began as a precise lecture, a description of the physicist’s thought process, is transformed into a canvas open to any number of possibilities.”
1. Cambridge (2011)
2. Stanford (2012)
3. Berkeley I (2012)
4. Berkeley II (2012)
5. Oxford (2011)
(Source: likeafieldmouse)
From photographer Tim Flach’s incredible anthropomorphic mindbender More Than Human.
(via boredpanda)
If you are infrastructure geek like me, may I recommend two of the classics: John McPhee’s Uncommon Carriers (FSG, 2007) and Kate Ascher’s The Works: Anatomy of A City (Penguin Press, 2005).
Uncommon Carriers is a brilliant collection of McPhee’s essays on tug captains, coal train engineers, UPS sorters, and long distance truck drivers as they move goods across the planet. Every time I want to remember how to write about a little piece of obscure beauty, I read McPhee. The man can write like it’s his job, which it has been…for fifty years. No bullshit, just a voice spooling out game. He is the documenter of our peculiar time.
The Works should be on your coffee table. And every coffee table. It’s a beautiful, diagramatic smorgasbord (produced by—ahem—Penguin Press) of how and why New York City operates behind the curtain—everything from the high pressure Catskill aqueducts to subway tunnels to snow plowing to maritime cargo traffic to trash collection to stop light synchrony to the system of pneumatic mail tubes that still grace the city. I wish I could download this graphical perfection and inject it directly into my veins.
Today was put-in day on Tivoli Bay for the Hudson River Ice Yacht Club. The ice was fine despite a dusting of snow and the occasional enlodged water chestnut. Here’s a 1931 article from Popular Mechanics about ice boating, which still holds the record for fastest form of non-mechanical land travel.
One of my new favorite moving diagrams, taken from a stop motion animation film by Hill Side.
(Source: devoureth)
“Cake Ramp” by Brock Davis
(Source: brockdavis)
An Author Interviews his Translator:
Niek Miedema: Well, you must also have a love of your native language. The language you translate into should never reveal its origins and sound pure. In many ways, translating is like writing, except that someone else has done the construction part of it. But the language has to be reinvented.
Reif Larsen: What do you mean by reinvented?
Niek Miedema: When I translated your book into Dutch, the text shouldn’t sound like English, even though the Dutch reader will realize that Spivet is speaking and thinking in English all the time. But in the translated text he should speak unadulterated, idiomatic Dutch. So in that sense he has to be reinvented, as if he were a Dutch boy, even though he crosses the Midwest and ends up in a tunnel under Washington DC. Even his dog’s name had to translated, to make sure it was not an American dog. In the translation, he is a Dutch dog.
Highlight #45 from our Hollywood Celebrity Homes Tour: the diminutive garage of champion zitherist and pretty nice guy Winston “The Laser” Coangello.
Highlight #19 from our Hollywood Celebrity Homes Tour: the limestone mansion of Warren Herbert Frost, amateur astronomer, obsessive flosser, and inventor of kazoo.
Highlight #32 from our Hollywood Celebrity Homes Tour: the famous winter sex palace
of lion tamer Shankar T. LaBalls.
This man invented science.
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