via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
Hiroyuki Arakawa is a scuba diver in Japan. Yoriko is a fish. They have been friends for 30 years, seeing each other almost every day.
From Twisted Sifter:
One day, Arakawa found her looking exhausted and carrying an injury. So he did what any friend would do: he took care of Yoriko, feeding her crabs and nursing her back to health. Their decades-long friendship is proof there’s no greater bond than the one between man and fish.============================
via OUP Blog by Virginia DeJohn Anderson
“Birthplace of Nathan Hale Coventry Connecticut,” circa 1800. Image courtesy of the Yale University Manuscripts & Archives Digital Images Database. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
In September 1776, Nathan Hale and Moses Dunbar set out to support opposing forces in the American Revolution. Hale, a spy for the Continental Army, had volunteered to gather intelligence against the British. Dunbar had enlisted in the King’s Army and was commissioned to convince other young men to turn against the United States.
Both men were caught and executed before completing their missions – one remembered as a martyr and the other as a traitor to the American cause.
In the following excerpt from The Martyr and the Traitor, Virginia DeJohn Anderson compares the lives of these two men, and explores the differences that led them to a similar fate.
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Mal Waldron’s ecstatic minimalism.
via Arts & Letters Daily: Adam Shatz in The Nation
Mal Waldron performing in Amsterdam in 1995. (Frans Schellekens / Redferns)
On July 17, 1959, Frank O’Hara, shaken by the news of Billie Holiday’s death, wrote a poem, “The Day Lady Died.” In the last two lines, he remembers leaning against the bathroom door at the Five Spot, a jazz club in the East Village, “while she whispered a song along the keyboard / to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing.” Seldom has the power of jazz performance been conveyed with such speed and grace. Holiday and Waldron, her pianist, are having a conversation so quiet and so intimate that listening to it feels like eavesdropping. I have always loved this poem for what it reveals not only about Holiday’s stagecraft, but also about her affection for Waldron, who accompanied her from 1957 until her death. Holiday and Waldron were close friends as well as collaborators. Waldron helped her write the autobiographical ballad “Left Alone,” an account of romantic desolation that she never had the chance to record. He had known of Holiday’s addiction, but, as he put it, “Lady Day had an awful lot to forget,” and his debt to her was incalculable. She taught him the importance of a song’s lyrics: Words, as much as notes, could lend themselves to musical improvisation. The magic she worked with them rubbed off. To listen to Waldron is to feel as if he is speaking to you, and only you, because he never forgets the lyrical content of a song.
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Brian Dillon’s study of the essay is a beautiful and elegiac volume – having read it, I re-read it.
via the New Statesman by Stuart Kelly
It is somewhat unseemly for a critic to confess that their immediate reaction to a book is one of unremitting envy. But Brian Dillon’s study of the essay is so careful and precise in its reading of a constellation of authors – Derrida and Barthes, Didion and Sontag, Browne and Burton, Woolf and Carlos Williams, Cioran and Perec – that my overall feeling was jealousy.
Dillon is a writer on art and culture and a tutor at the Royal College of Art, and the author of an award-winning memoir from 2005, In The Dark Room, about losing both his parents in his youth. A remarkable meditation on memory, it shares with his other work – an examination of hypochondria, Tormented Hope, and his writing on the cultural significance of ruins – a wide and nimble range of reference as well as a sense of personal grief and literary anomie.
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via Big Think by Philip Perry
Chimpanzees in three West African countries – Guinea Bissau, Côte d’Ivoire (the Ivory Coast), and Liberia – have been observed taking part in strange behavior. They store a great number of rocks in the hollows of trees. Then, usually a male, takes one of the rocks, walks a distance away, grunts an utterance, and hurls the rock at the tree, leaving a mark on it. The rock is then placed back in the hollow to be reused in this manner again.
No chimps east of these countries have been observed doing this. What’s more, there seems to be no reason for it tied to survival. It has nothing to do with acquiring food, mating, or furthering one’s status. Researchers say it might be a unique display of male power, marking the border of their troop’s territory, or even a spiritual ritual.
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via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
A scrap dealer cleaning out a deceased engineer's basement in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania found two massive 1960s computers, magnetic tape data storage systems, and hundreds of tape reels, all of which was marked as the property of NASA. The scrap dealer called NASA to report what he found and the agency's Office of the Inspector General investigated. It turns out that the fellow was an IBM engineer who worked for NASA in the early 1970s and was given permission to save the stuff as it was being discarded.Continue reading
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via Interesting Literature
The greatest poems about vacations
Holidays can be a time for the family to spend time together, a time to get away from it all. Poets aren’t naturally drawn to happy times as a fit subject for poetry, but nevertheless they have occasionally treated the subject of holidays and vacations – whether the Christmas holidays, or summer holidays.
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via Big Think by Robby Berman
We’ve been picking up strange signals, discovering possibly habitable planets, and in general starting to feel a little bit hopeful about the possibility of life in some recognizable form elsewhere – perhaps a lot of elsewheres – in the universe. Now, though, like a splash of cold water to the face, a new study published in Nature Geoscience suggests that there may not, in fact, be life-sustaining liquid water out there. Or at least that it’s likely to be rare. For bodies without an active carbonate–silicate cycle, the study says, ”We find that the stellar fluxes that are required to overcome a planet’s initial snowball state are so large that they lead to significant water loss and preclude a habitable planet.”
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via Library Link: Shaunacy Ferro for Mental Floss
NU-ACCESS
By fusing two imaging techniques, researchers at Northwestern University have illuminated ancient Roman texts that had been hidden inside the binding of another book since the 1500s.
From the 1400s up until the 1700s, it was common for book binders to recycle parchment to create new books, leaving behind fragments of text from the original book hidden within the bindings. While researchers are aware that these hidden texts exist, they cannot be viewed without destroying part of the books.
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via OUP blog by Nicholas Lockey
anonymous portrait assumed to be of Vivaldi. International Museum and Library of Music of Bologna, Public Domain viaWikimedia Commons.
For many who at least known his name, Antonio Vivaldi is the composer of a handful of works heard on the radio or a drive-time playlist of 100 Famous Classical Pieces, featured in TV (and internet) commercials, movies and concerts by students, amateurs, and professionals. Pieces such as The Four Seasons (featured prominently in Alan Alda’s 1981 film, The Four Seasons), the Gloria in D RV 589 and the Violin Concerto in A Minor Op. 3 No. 6 (familiar to most students of the Suzuki Violin Method) are staples of the repertoire and frequently rank high on lists of popular classical music. As for the composer, the most widely known aspects of his biography have been that he had red hair, was a priest (nicknamed “The Red Priest” in his own lifetime), and that he taught at and wrote music (a lot of music) for an all-girl orphanage in Venice and directed the girls during their concerts.
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