11 March 2012

Creaturely

It is very difficult, nigh impossible, to avoid creatures, even when one wants to. Today I saw two mice, innumerable birds, and what I can only attempt to describe as a pigeon trapped in the speaker system at the local train station. There were, at least, bird sounds, and not of the pleasant chirping sort, being broadcasted for all on the platforms. A proper cyborg!

But a creature must not be a cyborg to get my attention. The Lord Howe stick insect, endemic to Australia, was thought for many years to have been wiped out by rats. As adults, they are 6 inches long, and cannot fly, and thus are a supremely easy catch. Here is one of these magnificently vulnerable creatures hatching:

Nor must creatures necessarily be real to hold my interest. Evolution, apparently, plays no part in how absorbing I find them, as is evidenced here:

I'm off to glue strings on my face now....

21 February 2012

a list of common and uncommon collocations, encountered in my reading of the last couple of weeks


measures for the prevention of accidents
men of worth
invariably declined
extensive insights
chains of association
restless capital
prevailing sense
neurotic restlessness
disorganized capitalism
primary ghost
resident specter
unplanned sadness
violin curves of the church
ragged claws
the republic of translation
practiced insomniac
subliminal recesses
linguistically biodegradable
ontological heart condition
the shadow of God
the hidden world
uncertain step
tempting comestibles


17 February 2012

If you're feeling crunchy...

you may find some relief in:

1. Jethro Tull
Yes, cravats and vests and flute-playing can make an honest man of anyone.




The absolute best in gross gourmandism.

3. Animal friends
May I suggest the following 15th century pals from the holy land?


Or perhaps spirit bears are more your style? Sitting around in the mossy forest with this guy, gnawing on some fish, doesn't sounds half bad.

14 February 2012

The Vegetable Lamb: Number 3

At long last, dear readers, it's half-way fit for public consumption!

Number 3

The Vegetable Lamb: Number 3

This issue of The Vegetable Lamb is an exploration of stasis, of absolute zero, but it is also a how-to guide for upsetting it. If you've had enough, it cries, bend that line into an arc! Let everything go to hell in a handbasket! Imagine a ferret fighting a moose!

Find out more on MagCloud

02 February 2012

In the 1960's...

...Pluto was still the 9th planet, Mars had vegetation, and "galaxies slipped between one another like phantoms." And Canada was making films like this.

...Mick Jagger knew how to dance, people could still sing sad songs on T.V., and the inclusion of a sitar was virtually mandatory.

...men wore feathers and striped pants, standing around meant standing around, and moccasins had not yet been appropriated by sorority sisters.

...everyone trustworthy had sunspots on their shoulders, tents were translucent, and hammocks (and the sharing of them) were de rigeur.


Essentially I'm wishing summer would hurry up and descend upon Germany like California.

21 January 2012

Things we like X, or, suggestions for staying animate

1. Dancing around a burning orange, or, rather, a burning orange candle. I know it is totally possible and not an internet myth because I tried it out (successfully) tonight. Why are pith-wicks so utterly charming?

2. Project Nim, a 2011 documentary directed by James Marsh. Like Man on Wire, Marsh's previous film, this is poignant, and entrancing, and more than a little heartbreaking, but it's also a lovely meditation on what's worth emulating in our closest evolutionary relatives, and what's worth leaving behind.




3. Speaking of animals, they make excellent film collages. I like the bears especially, in this old piece by Joseph Cornell.

4. Gotye's 'State of the Art', a song about a Cotillion electronic home organ gone mad. It's a cautionary tale, I suppose, but I want one for my flat. I give you all full license to dance around the burning orange whilst listening to this very song.



16 January 2012

Things we like IX, or, why I'm willing to stick it out till the apocalypse

1) Edward Gorey’s AMAZING ENVELOPES;

2) The sensation of not having died in a plane crash;

3) When aforementioned yet still relatively obscure Hungarian authors try to suddenly go all hipster on you (“I’m sure I could name ten new rock groups from 2011 that you haven’t even heard of”), and you can retort (at least in your head), “With all due respect, Mr. Krasznahorkai, two erotic gay photographers from Berlin introduced me to Joan as Police Woman in 2007 when we [my friend and I] were circumstantially obligated to share a group train ticket with them,” and not be exaggerating. 

4) Charlie Chaplin AND Buster Keaton IN THE SAME FILM

4) The beautiful things Robert Downey, Jr.’s hair must be doing under that hat:







15 January 2012

Anybody want a peanut? or, Email Exchanges Part I

We both subscribe to, and are sometimes overly obsessive about, a certain tumblr that posts magnificent scientific illustrations. The author, or compiler, or whatever title you'd like to assign to someone who uploads things to the tumblr, periodically answers requests for certain types of material. Usually they are not very funny, but one reading "Do you have an illustration of a peanut by any chance it's for a tattoo" I found inexplicably hilarious. I sent it to Madeleine, and the following exchange ensued.

Madeleine: HAHAHAAA! lauren, will you get a peanut tattoo with me? i realize now that i've subconsciously always wanted one.

Lauren: YES. the question is....where? i say behind the ear. because i've always wanted peanuts behind the ear.

Madeleine: i think the natural correspondance between the shape of ears and the shape of peanuts is a sign from god.

Lauren: if my ears were placed together (without brain!), and made whole again, they would be indistinguishable from a very large peanut.

Madeleine: our brains are, then, by analogy, merely unshelled peanuts! i've long suspected as much.

Lauren: but usually you get two peanuts out of one shell...what does this mean? are we reviving aristotelian visions of love?

Madeleine: but — as no human brain is perfectly symmetrical (oh the price we pay for our fine motor skills and abstract reasoning!), no two peanuts can truly be 'two peas in a pod.' they are attached to each other only tenuously!

All of which, combined with the abnormally large amount of peanut butter consumed today, makes me wonder-- how often do we eat these (however-tenuously-connected) peanut pairs? Are none at all kept together in the production process? Even faced with smooth peanut butter, no paste can asimilate everything perfectly. We shall never really know what it is we spread.

In defense of winter


Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.  ~ Dorothy Parker

To be fair: I like birds, and I like plants. And, to be fair: it is January, and spring has yet to rear its fool head. But every year I start to get nervous with the first sun rise after the winter solstice, because it means that spring is coming, and spring means summer. 

There is a character in the book I’m reading now (The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai) called Mrs. Eszter. Early in the book, she has an unnerving encounter and afterwards she walks through her village, in the dead of winter, growing stronger and more herself with every step, because she 
genuinely belonged to that class of people who ‘sicken with spring and collapse in summer’, for whom enervating warmth, incapacitating heat and the sun blazing in the sky were a source of terror . . . for it is only winter that can clear their vision, cool their ungovernable passions and reorganize that mass of loose thought dissolved in summer sweats.
YES, I shouted to myself as I read this, FINALLY THERE IS SOMEONE LIKE ME. The next hundred pages or so had me hoping that my resemblance to Mrs. Eszter (a rather sinister character) ended with this predilection for winter, but still — in this respect we are remarkably similar.

Winter, for those of us in the north, is our own little taste of Antarctica: blissful white emptiness. No one is going to harass you with shrieks of “It’s such a beautiful day!” and no one is going to criticize you for feeling quiet and indoorsy. Winter is a relief.

It is also an enhanced awareness of the breath, of the texture of protective things: woolly mammoth sweaters, spiced apple cider, soft voluminous blankets and fires to bake gingerbread. Winter encourages introversion (people, at least the ones around me, are infinitely saner in winter), and with it compassion — ‘the season of giving’ finds its natural home in the snowy months.


Last semester I was translating a small, lovely book all about winter, December by Alexander Kluge and Gerhard Richter. Each day in December gets its own short story, with a few (like the 6th, 10th, and 18th) getting more than one; each story takes place in a different year, though most revolve around WWII or German Unification in 1989. My favorite story is the 30th of December, 1940, in which the son of a rabbi and his friend, who have escaped from Germany to England, sit on the banks of the Cam in the middle of the night, discussing the death of Abel. In the course of this discussion, they introduce the idea of two incompatible wills: the Sommerwille (the will of summer) and the Winterwille (the will of winter). They agree, in a roundabout and Talmudic sort of way, that what it is possible — and perhaps inevitable — to want in summer evaporates in winter, and vice versa. They also agree that evil is nothing but a displaced or “untimely good.”

Their conversation is in many ways a strange tangle, and actually there are large chunks of it that I don’t understand, but I merely want to use this reasoning to defend winter from its gloomy reputation as the dark and deadly season. There is a good in winter, even if it seems a misplaced one (a misplaced turning of the year, or a misplaced celebration of light); more importantly, there is a type of thought — the kind that requires an intact, that is to say unmelted, brain — which is possible only in winter. 

It’s that lack of yapping. That’s what does it for me.