World first: Images of atoms moving in a molecule
Scientists recorded the first real-time image, which is a feat that captured movement lasting less than one millionth of a billionth of a second.
“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
– Zora Neale Hurtson, Their Eyes Were Watching God (by way of http://literaryverve.blogspot.com/ )
the power of the commonplace
“It’s possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things— a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman’s earring— with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader’s spine— the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That’s the kind of writing that most interests me.”
—Raymond Carver (via Vintage Books & Anchor Books)
the future of blue rocks?
Patrons have become as scarce as plaid slacks at many city-owned public golf courses, which led writers Peter Harnik and Ryan Donahue to wonder about the future of the land-grabbing sport, especially in increasingly crowded, park-hungry cities. What they found and reported in LandscapeArchitecture Magazine is that urban planners are remaking these green spaces to appeal to a host of new users, including runners, cyclists, soccer players, swimmers, boaters, gardeners, dog owners, and concertgoers.
Happy Hanukkah
Rachel Posner took this photo from inside the family home on Hanukkah 1932 via http://www1.yadvashem.org
I reblogged this from http://www.thedaily.com/
Almost a month
since I posted anything. I found my entries were appearing in odd places (e.g., facebook) and wanted to fix that before I added any more.
Today, I read about a publishing house called BookThug that publishes poetry. It was started about six years ago by a guy named MillAr, who is frustrated that “poetry has become like a secret language spoken by poets . . . My ambition as a publisher is to actually make this stuff really exciting again,”
MillAr also opened an online book shop named Apollinaire’s “that specializes in all the books nobody wants to buy” – mainly ultra-obscure, staple-bound chapbooks of contemporary poetry from small presses.
I’m so looking for recommendations that I wrote out a list of my favourite poets, and then reached for a few of their works for a reread. One of Donald Hall’s stood out especially:
White Apples
when my father had been dead a week
I woke
with his voice in my ear
I sat up in bed
and held my breath
and stared at the pale closed door
white apples and the taste of stone
if he called again
I would put on my coat and galoshes
*****
Perhaps later I will add the list, and maybe my poem about my father, if only to remind me of what I must learn.
More boys at Child Haven (Kathmandu, 2006), taken by Nat.
And then the boys
Another photo by Nat, one of the hundreds he too while volunteering at Child Haven in 2006.
