. . A recent article in the New York Review of Books made me curious about Reiner Maria Rilke, the German Poet. It made me realize that I know very little of him. For instance, I cannot remember Rilke as having ever been a subject of the German literature class in my high school. Perhaps … Continue reading
. . I like those golden days, some leaves light up just as you walk by, holding on to the twigs, looking down on their companions that have given up and lie shriveled on the ground. . . Last year I may have been here but landmarks change, no two leaves are alike, seasons are … Continue reading
Now with 13 years covered by 3100 tweets retrieved in my archive, I’m at liberty to look through everything I observed and quibbled on and criticized and got excited about. It is all twitter, and feels like twitter, and scrolls up and down like twitter, but it is really a corpse; it’s all in … Continue reading
I posted this last of my tweets on October 31, 2022: “Folks, it has been a good run. I joined 2009 and made many friends on-line, found unexpected connections. Twitter’s format lends itself to the aperçu, to the anecdotal, and this is why I liked it. Five years ago, my Nobel Prize brought me many … Continue reading
It must have happened to you, too. You walk south in Hudson River Park, along the bank of the river with its glittering water. It gets hot in the sun, and at first you don’t want to acknowledge the inconvenience since you have not done this for a long time, and why let … Continue reading
. . Today’s picture of Svante Pääbo, 2022 Nobel Prize winner in Physiology or Medicine , reminded me of iconographic images I have been collecting, of scientists contemplating their work in staged paintings or photographs. They include two striking photographs of me with my beloved ribosome, one at the Wadsworth Center in Albany, and one … Continue reading
. Reviewing the COVID-19 experience in the last two and a half years makes us pause and wonder how the public health response was managed. Beyond the obvious incompetence of Trump, there were chaotic decisions by the CDC and WHO that contributed to the terrible toll of the pandemic. A Nature article that just came … Continue reading
. I recently found this image on Twitter — sorry, I didn’t keep track of the source. It reminded me of a stone I once found in Ierapetra, in the 1960’s, a blue-green stone with quartz inclusion marking an exact letter ‘Z’. I called it Z-stone and carried it around with my possessions for years. … Continue reading
. “Trapped on earth but still lofty in spirit” . 🙂 😛 😎 😉 😀 🙂 😛 😎 😉 😀 🙂 😛 😎 😉 😛 😎 😉 😀 🙂 😛 😎 😉 😀 🙂 😛 😎 😉 😀 Here is a brief vacation from the daily anxiety from watching our nation drift into utter chaos … Continue reading
. This is the picture I took several years ago in MOMA’s courtyard. Five women chatting, oblivious to the monstrous event right in front of their eyes. A friend recently commented on my photograph: that it reminds him of Auden’s poem “Museé des Beaux Arts,” an ekphrastic treatment of Breughel’s ‘Icarus.’ All three, Auden’s poem, … Continue reading
. . Fasces = a bundle of rods with a projecting axe blade, carried by a lictor in ancient Rome as a symbol of a magistrate’s power, and used as an emblem of authority in Fascist Italy. The bundle originally stood for “united, we are so much stronger.” But the peculiar way the pieces … Continue reading
. On February 4, 1944, my parents’ house in Germany was hit by several phosphorus bombs, and the roof and third floor were destroyed despite extended efforts by the fire department. Other houses in the neighborhood were hit on that day as well. Some burnt down entirely to the ground. I was three and a … Continue reading
I saw this photograph on twitter of a man on a ladder positioned such that his face was replaced by the face of a gigantic station clock. . (Why is a clock said to have a face? A face even with hands, like Humpty Dumpty’s, except attached in the middle, where the nose should be?) … Continue reading
. TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Snow 2. Berries 3. Pink marker 4. Firework 5. The eternal form of the circle . 1. I took a walk on one of the first days of this month. Only a few lumps of the last snow still lingered on the ground. New Year’s is always a season of … Continue reading
. . I’m putting these four pages, part of the January 6th Committee’s letter to Ms. Ivanka Trump, into my blog for their historical significance. The letter is in the public domain and appeared on Twitter today. https://january6th.house.gov/sites/democrats.january6th.house.gov/files/2022-1-20.BGT%20Letter%20to%20Ivanka%20Trump%20-%20Cover%20Letter%20and%20Enclosures_Redacted%202.pdf .
. . The German literary journal Signaturen-Magazin featured a passage from Heinrich von Kleist as a “found piece,” which made me interested in downloading the whole essay from the Gutenberg Projekt’s internet site. I find von Kleist’s observations highly cogent, and validated by my own experience: “if you wish to know something, and cannot find … Continue reading
. . Evidently an art installation of the popular German tale, Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten. Archillect (@archillect), who posted this on twitter, failed to include a credit. Since I have long forgotten what this story is about, I consulted Wikipedia: “It tells the story of four aging domestic animals, who after a lifetime of hard work … Continue reading
. . Carl Sagan, prophetic, in 1995: (as it appeared on Twitter 12/26/21. The actual bibliographic reference is Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, Random House 1997) “Especially a kind of celebration of ignorance” is one of the poignant phrases in Sagan’s prophetic essay. This trend, I perceive, started with Ronald Reagan, and everything went … Continue reading
A “Black Box” capsule, filled with documents predicting the coming doom on earth, which motivated the construction of the capsule. Self-referential. “Black box is a term used to call two separate pieces of equipment, a cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and a flight data recorder (FDR). Black box information storage devices are … Continue reading
