M110 - Andromeda's Children

M110 I found on accident when I was looking for M31 (Andromeda). Given the luck I was having at that point I was pretty glad to find anything at all.  It is apparently a satellite galaxy of Andromeda, a little elliptical galaxy just making its way around Andromeda as Andromeda slowly crashes into the Milky Way.  Messier originally thought it was part of M31, so it didn't get it's own catalog nmber until 1967.  There are fourteen other known dwarf galaxies (siblings, I suppose) that orbit Andromeda.  Next time I will shoot for the other visible dwarf galaxy, M32, and of course continue to try to find a way to get a decent shot of Andromeda.

M110
Magnitude +9.4.
Near Andromeda
August 1, 2015 01:00

(click to enlarge)

The Vanished Library - Luciano Canfora

Luciano Canforia (trans. Martin Ryle), The Vanished Library, (U of CA Press, 1987)

This is a book that really, sincerely wants a map in its efforts to trace the history of the Library of Alexandria.

Major takeaway: there is astoundingly little information about the Library of Alexandria.  Scholars even debate exactly where it was in Alexandria (attached to the main palace? or nearer to the coast?) who precisely started it (certainly Ptolemy II was King, but was it Aristotle or Demetrius who planted the idea), what was in it (See Callimachus below), how big it was (estimates range from 40k to 400k), or even what exactly the word bibliothekai meant ("library" or "book shelf"? the latter explains why it is so hard to find where the books were precisely given the expectation of the former[77]).

Thesis of Book: it is very unlikely Caesar's soldiers are responsible for the infamous burning of the Library. More likely, it was several separate fires and disasters over the course of a few centuries.

Points of Interest

• Theophrastus, inheritor of the Aristotelean (Peripatetic) school, died and left his books to Neleus.  When Neleus was not elected as head of the school, he went home (Scepsis) and he took his ball with him (Aristotle's library) and explicitly thwarted the efforts of the Egyptian King (Ptolemy II) to make copies of Aristotle's library. Neleus is perhaps the most selfish man in history, and it is because of him Aristotle's library does not survive today.
• Callimachus wrote a tremendous, 120 scroll treaty called the Catalogues. This book outlined his system for organizing the world's largest library.  Unfortunately it is completely lost.
• The scholars who tended to the Library of Alexandria (Callimachus, Aristophanes, Demetrius) were not free to leave -- they were prisoners to the books, much like grad students.
• There is a huge connection between Ptolemy's library and Judaism / preserving Jewish texts (23).  Ptolemy wanted a copy of everything written in the world -- every book that came to his city was copied -- this led to a significant increase in tolerance of Jews in Ancient Alexandria.  This was also the moment the Septuagint was miraculously translated.
• The only library to rival Alexandria was the Library of Pergamum, which had a Harvard-Yale style rivalry with Alexandria that was mirrored in their different approaches to reading. Alexandrians were more interested in close reading, accurate translation, exposing forgeries, textual analysis, and setting into stone the meaning of words and works. At Pergamum, issues of textual doubt were mostly overlooked as anomalies -- they were more interested in "'hidden' meaning, the meaning that lay 'behind' the classical, and especially the Homeric, texts - the 'allegory.' as they called it, concealed in these poems." (49)
• Parchment was invented in Pergamum because the Alexandrian's wouldn't sell them any papyrus for their scrolls.  The words are etymologically identical.

Favorite quotes:
1. Ptolemy made it a regular habit to ask advice of the Jewish scholars, whom he admired for their even-keeled responses always grounded on the logic of godliness.

2. Libraries were originally inspired by world domination, putting whole new meaning to the old adage "knowledge is power."

Macedonian arms had made the Greeks masters of the entire known world, from Sicily to North Africa, from teh Balkan peninsula to Asia Minor, and from Iran and India to Afghanistan, where Alexander had halted.  They did not learn the languages of their knew subjects, but they realized that if they were to rule them they must understand them, and that ot understand them they must collect their books and have them translated.  Royal libraries were accordingly created in all the Hellenistic capitals, not just for the sake of prestige but also as instruments of Greek rule. And the sacred books of the subjects had a special place in this systematic project of collection and translation, because religion was, for those who wished to rule them, a kind of gateway to their souls.

The Museum of 4 in the Morning

I was born at four in the morning.  4:10 to be exact, or so says the certificate.  That's exactly how I'd start my memoir if I ever had the nerve to write a memoir, or if I even thought that's where I began.  In any case, I feel a special kinship for the Museum of Four in the Morning (mofitm) for its fascinating chronocritical obsession.

By asking its audience to crowdsource any and all cultural references to that specific time, the mofitm has compiled a significant archive of 4 ams.  A remarkable thing happens as you scroll through more and more references (there are nearly 600 of them, if we count by number of Tweets): what seems to be merely a time of the day (or the morning), quotidian in the truest sense of the word, emerges from anonymity fully clothed in culturally constructed self-consciousness.

The phrase is less of a time and more of a hyperbolic expression of lateness.  4 a.m. isn't a time so much as it is an idea and a feeling.  It's a hyperbolic expression of lateness.  It's a bipolar hour, a space full of either mania or sleep.  It becomes more and more apparent that nothing actually happens precisely at 4 a.m., that the specificity of the time 4:00 is almost universally a white lie.  It means, simultaneously: "exceedingly late" and "exceedingly early." It seems insist upon the marriage of such opposites--it is simultaneously a time of extreme inactivity and extreme activity, particularly comprising the unpleasant mash of the two together.  Which of the two (late or early) it means in any given context or usage is hard to determine, it seems to mean both at the same time.  Such paradoxical duality in a temporal statement would be no surprise if we were talking about, say "noon" or "midnight," those moments that seems to stand between two days, between am and pm, that announce themselves as temporally peculiar therefore merit their own names and titles ("the witching hour")... but who would have thought that 4 am would find itself turned into an idiom, an expression, into a temporal idea of comparable liminality?

I was born at 4:10 a.m., March 16, 1988. Pisces.




Lesson learned: 1) the exploration of sets of ideas grouped under relatively random or frivolous categories can bring surprising insights; 2) crowdsourced databasing is fantastic -- leads to a "natural" or seemingly organic growth of archives that refuses the prejudices a singular curator would necessarily impose on it 3) Umberto Eco would love this.

Unsorted thoughts.

Who ever thought the Big Dipper looked like a giant spoon was the most unimaginative of stargazers.  If anything it looks like a giant question mark in the cosmos.  Recently I saw it rising in the northeast, hooking slowly over the horizon, looming evermore overheard, a slowly rising crescendo of cosmic uncertainty.  Or maybe it's an interrobang -- ‽

It recalls, to me, pseudomorphically Thomas Cole's Oxbow -- though his was asking a different question entirely.  I should look up different cultures and their imaginings of the ursa major -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursa_Major

--
Lately I've been feeling the anxious urge to read a dictionary.  I wonder if anyone else gets this feeling.  I know Robert DeMaria surely does -- surely one feels only more anxious once you finish reading it.  I wonder which one I'll shoot at next.
--

I should apply for Triple Canopy and attempt to enact my dedications book.  Youth fiction has to be full of excellent dedications. Sci Fi has to have a rich compendium of dedications.  What I am talking about here is a database of dedications.  None of the boring ones -- the boring ones ("to my mom" "to my adoring husband" "thanks for putting up with me") can be cataloged as a statistic: i.e., 95% of all dedications are total boring drivel, saccharine redundancy befitting the speeches professional athletes give after winning a championship. Who cares about a precise statistic anyway? Let's just say it: 99% of dedications are totally boring. But then again... so are 99% of most things written! The collection of dedications I have so far are in completely different genres.. there needs to be a good categorization.

What is the point of the dedication exactly: the theory of dedicating.  OED: "3.a. To inscribe or address (a book, engraving, piece of music, etc.) to a patron or friend, as a compliment, mark of honour, regard,"

It is a moment of humility (turned funny / ironic by the lack of it often) written, ideally, at the end of such a project, at which someone acknowledges a single figure or source without which the book wouldn't have been possible.  It's the acknowledgement (but it is not the acknowledgements: I regard that as an entirely separate genre of writing) that everything ever written or made is built on the creation of something previous; the ol' Sagan adage: "to make an apple pie from scratch one must create the universe" -- in this way one could see the research and focus on dedications as one way of tracing influence.

The American literature category seems to be a good one.  It could actually be a useful resource to have such a database available.

American children's literature could be a sub category of that.  This is really a matter of going through the shelves.  19th century books have probably already been scanned and the work can be done online.  20th century might require a lot of just flipping through teh shelves and photographing.



[return to this..]

----



I need to get better at teamwork, that is, sharing ideas and working together with others to enact them.  Otherwise they all just die in my head.
Color pianos. Playing images.

Grandma June

June Arlene Yarborough

One of the most important things my grandmother ever taught me is that there is always more toothpaste in the tube.

Always.

Phenomenologically speaking, the toothpaste tube is a bag of holding, Felix the Cat's magic bag, an infinite space that can always collapse further with sufficient kneading (needing).

Barry Lopez - Arctic Visions

1. Order of the Universe

Barry Lopez's fine ecocriticism ("green" writing, if you will) was a pleasure to read.  I've read him in other contexts -- he is a superb writer, a modern St. Francis.  Chapter 5, "Migration," Lopez's extended meditation on the migrations of humans, birds, whales, life, and time across the Bering Strait immediately calls to mind Chapter 87 of Moby-Dick, "The Grand Armada" where Ishmael engages in a similar sort of meditation as the Pequod nears the straits of Sunda. My favorite line from that chapter (as Ishmael is surrounded by an enormous pod of whales):

And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely revelled in dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.

Lopez says much that is worth comparing.

Watching the animals come and go, and feeling the land swell up to meet them and then feeling it grow still at their departure, I came to think of the migrations as breath, as the land breathing.  In spring a great inhalation of light and animals. The long-bated breath of summer. And an exhalation that propelled them all south in the fall. (p.162) 

Both Ishmael and Lopez come to feel themselves made tiny, suddenly sucked into something so much greater than themselves. For Ishmael, he is surrounded by a deistic calmly whirling clock of sperm whales -- Lopez experiences something more mystic and deist, but fundamentally wedded to an understanding that the landscape is part of something much greater than anything contained within human reason.

2. Limits of Taxonomy

This is, perhaps, the most important quote to take from Lopez in relation to this exhibition.

We delineate the life history of the ground squirrel. We list the butterflies: the sulphurs, the arctics, a copper, a blue, the lesser fritillaries. At a snap [CAMERA]. We enumerate the plants. We name everything. Then we fold the charts and the catalogs, as if, except for a stray fact or two, we were done with a competent description.  But the land is not a painting; the image cannot be completed this way.

Here Lopez quashes the uniquely human attempt to understand the universe by means of quantification, replication, documentation, etc. Fundamentally: you cannot photograph this: it is already gone. The limits of catalog quantification -- I think of Melville trying to quantify the Galapagos Islands in The Encantadas only to show, by the attempt to do so, the failure of science, of taxonomy, of mere numbers, to really understand anything about the islands themselves.  In doing this, Melville responds and mocks the efforts of Charles Darwin's scientific catalogs of birds around the Galapagos -- Melville wasn't on board with the theory of evolution immediately.  We see a similar sort of mockery of the limits of scientific quantification in "Cetology" -- but this point is made constantly through the course of Moby-Dick, in which chapter after chapter attempts to explain what the heck whales are through the lens of just about every theory, methodology, discipline possible only to ultimately come up short.  We can see Lopezand Melville poking holes in the attempts of the explorer, the scientist, the prospector, to understand the landscape. "No!" they tell us, "you need a poet."

3. TIME

Lopez:

 ...Time pools in stillness here and then dissipates. The country is emptied of movement. George De Long called it "a glorious country to learn patience in." Time here like light, is a passing animal. Time hovers above the trundra like the rough-legged hawk, or collapses altogether like a brid keeled over with a heart attack, leaving the stillness we call death.....But even here time is on the verge of collapse....the Arctic is a long, unbroken bow of time....it is possible to feel the slope of time, how very far from Mesopotamia we have come. (p. 171-2)

Lopez makes an important point, one that is closely wedded with the environmental/global warming aspect of this exhibition: we must respect the nonhuman conception of time. The geological conception of time. Time as fundamentally not operating on any human scale, but a time completely separate from humans and humanity. In this sense, the Arctic is a vast symbolization of the fact that the world existed without us, existed before us, will continue after us (as the white whale swims on), and is not subject to us. Lopez (and Ishmael) see in the whale and in the Arctic a separateness from us, and a oneness with something greater -- both whale and the Arctic topple Humanity off its 19th century, puritan pedestal as master of the world, top of the food chain, king of the hill.  Lopez sees in the Arctic that our ancestors (Dorset, Thule, Eskimo) too were a part of the very same migratory chain that carries whales birds caribou and porpoises north and south again every year.

4. Lopez as Ishmael 

At the end of the chapter, we see Lopez transform fully into Ishmael as he asks himself: 

"In moments when I felt perplexed that I was dealing with an order outside my own, I discovered and put to us a part of my own culture's wisdom, the formal divisions of Western philosophy--metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and logic--which pose, in order, the following questions. What is real? what can we understand? How should we behave? What is beautiful? What are the patterns we can rely upon?  As I traveled I would say to myself, What do my companions see where i see death? Is the sunlight beautiful to them, the way it sparkles on the water? Which for the Eskimo hunter are the patterns to be trusted? The patterns, I know, could be different from ones I imagined were before us." (202-203)

If we can agree that Barry Lopez is a "Green Writer," then we can certainly agree that Ishmael is too. The two are concerned not just with describing the outward appearances of the landscape around them, but also constantly coming to higher, metaphysical understandings of the universe and their place within it through their extended meditations. For both of them, the landscape becomes an inexhaustible fuel for the engine of their metaphors. The Arctic is a poetic landscape.

5. Ethnography

In Lopez descriptions of tools and ethnographic artifacts, I was overwhelmed by a divergence in Arctic and Western thought -- these tools, objects, carefully crafted with utilitarian purpose.  "A student working a Thule site on Ellesmere Island told me about a harpoon head she had found. 'All they had to do with it was catch a walrus. But they made it beautiful.' she said.  The admiration one feels kneeling over the pathetic remains of an early ASTt campsite can be very deep. What tenacity. What courage.  Another sort of feeling comes over one at a Thule site. One misses any sense of remoteness or separation and feels instead profound respect. A  powerful, dignified people, one imagines. The delicate and robust tools, as the student said, are beautiful." -- for Westerners, God is in the details. Beauty is in the details. Like Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling, painted in such fine detail as no one below would have been able to see, God existed for Michelangelo in the details.  But here, in these artefacs, we see the same concern for detail on a completely different scale.  It is no longer God in the details, it is survival. Survival is in the details. In understanding the different freezing points of different types of caribou fat. In the careful craftsmanship of the harpoon head described by the student. And the museum-goer will be overwhelmed (I hope) just like the student, by that beauty in the details. The beauty of survival. This is am important point to convey in your exhibition when presenting the ethnographic artifacts.

Eco on Lists

Umberto Eco's book on lists is one of those books you wish you had written yourself. In honor of his genius work on a topic I know so very well, here is the beginning of a list I wish I had started long ago:

Favorite words --

glib

scumble

abecedarian

deipnosophist

twee


I used to keep so many lists of good words and I fell out of the habit sometime (somehow!) in graduate school.  Back to this.  Add it to my New Years Resolutions.

New Years Resolutions 2015

These came late, but I have some goals here:


1. Long term goal: Become a member of the Newbery Medal committee and Caldecott committee so I can officially read and judge children's books.  How does that even work?  How fantastic would that be?--to meet the people at these conferences, to have direct insight into the world of children's lit?  I wonder if I could get Steven Brown into this idea.

2. Exercise more. 5x/week.  So far so good.

3. Become a Resident Tutor so I can better participate as a friend and mentor in this fantastic community of young geniuses noodling about in Cambridge.  Re-orient all your random art projects to include the skills and interests of your students.  Collaborate.

4. Figure out what the hell I'm going to do with my stocks.  Keep my eye on that.

5. Travel someplace interesting this summer.  I think I need to walk a great distance. "Yet everyone on earth feels a tickling at the heels; the small chimpanzee and the great Achilles alike."

6.  Finish your dissertation prospectus. This is actually goal number 1.

7.  Re-write your old papers and publish them in non-academic places.  This is a silly goal but I want to do something with them.  No one really wants to read academic journals and only two of these papers are worth the effort.  Publish your stuff all over the place where people actually like to read and you can have more fun of it without all the academic futzing.  Orient your research so you can justify traveling to neat collections in the process.

8. Try and win that darn Bowdoin Prize. Quit telling people about it because Steven Brown will kick your butt at this thing.

9. Drink more water.  Lots more.

10. Get higher than a 4.5 on your Q scores.

11. Gracefully turn 27.

12. Structure your movie-watching more productively.  Something old, something popular, something artsy.  Brattle Theater should help you here.

13. MUCH more effort to eat my meals with people. Spend more time tasting your food and paying attention to all the interesting people you're surrounded by.

14. Sunday should be a day for learning to cook something new, and making it in amounts that it covers your lunch for a couple days.

15. More lists, thanks to Umberto Eco.

16. Once you get your camera, start hunting Messier objects.

hmm I suppose I should think about long term goals...

=Learn Italian and Spanish conversationally.
=Work on your Melville & Renaissance research with an i Tatti fellowship.
=Work with Rachel Sussman on her chrono-art.
=Find a way to make it to the AZ telescope, Mauna Kea, and Chile.
=Study under a Hilla Rebay fellowship.



Summer Reading Lists:
Read through the Newbery books.
Read through the Hugo Award books.
Read through your compiled Education books, and begin working on that philosophy.
Lists: Umberto Eco has given words to something you've always loved.  The organizing aggregative force of lists...

In memoriam Walter Liedtke

My favorite memory of Walter Liedtke was when he was giving our intern group a tour of the Dutch and Flemish Galleries of the Met, and, gesticulating vigorously, he unintentionally, unmistakably, loudly, rapped the surface of one of the Met's Vermeers with his knuckle.

The whole gallery went absolutely silent.

And he just went on... "When you're a curator, you can do that sort of thing!" 

What a tremendous loss.