Tragic and Damning

This was on the front page of the NYT homepage for one hot second and then got yanked to the World section, and not even to the top, but buried like 12 stories down behind China not wanting to report on protests and rising oil prices. What is going on?? Why are we in this shitty war???

Gathering Firewood, 9 Afghan Boys Killed by NATO Helicopters

Und Now, für a Little Comic Relief

Part of the deal when one communicates only with cats and doorpersons and does not check the weather regularly is that one finds oneself in unexpected situations, such as in a torrential rainstorm, or wearing woolen stockings when it is an unseasonable 65 degrees in November. I dropped by my apartment this morning to pick up mail and water plants and work a bit on organizing my bookshelves. Three hours and several shelves of LOC call numbers later, I looked up to realize that I had been severely, gloriously snowed in! The windows looked like huge lint traps from a load of your whitest whites, making the living room into the inside of a very large and cozy dryer.

So then I knew that fate had spoken and decided to continue with my organizational quest guiltlessly. Looking through all my books, I realized it would also be a good time to plan the course I'm going to teach later this spring, an introduction to art history for high school kids. The goal is to get kids who wouldn't necessarily be headed there interested and excited about college. I'm going to interpret that broadly as: "how awesome is art history?!" If you were lucky enough to have a high school teacher or college prof hit you over the head with how awesome something you'd never realized existed is, then you know what I'm talking about.

The rest of the evening was spent geeking out on the course, planning the raddest visual comparisons, group activities, drawing up lists of goals, thinking about all the different methods for talking about art that I'm going to introduce them to, looking up all my art history heroes on wikipedia, and getting sucked into reading Ernst Gombrich's children's history of the world, most of which is right there on google books.

But all of this is not what I came here to tell you. What I came to say, or rather, quote, is a cute anecdote told to wikipedia by Erwin Panofsky's particle physicist son, Wolfgang. It is this:

Panofsky was known to be friends with Wolfgang Pauli, one of the main contributors to quantum physics and atomic theory, as well as Albert Einstein. His son, Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky, became a renowned physicist who specialized in particle accelerators. His other son was a meteorologist. As Wolfgang Panofsky related, their father used to call his sons "meine beiden Klempner" (German: "my two plumbers"), which revealed the usual attitude of the German elite educated in the humanities, who looked down upon those trained in the sciences.

Unlike Gombrich, who wrote an entire history of the world for children, Panofsky seems to have had a little of the Sarcastic Patronizing Dad in him. For some reason - and probably because I never had to experience it myself - I find this very cute.

Unsere kleine Bücherwurm

Winter Solstice Is My Favorite Day

Winter greetings to you, dear reader! Are you getting enough sun? Have you noticed that the winter solstice is my favorite holiday. Every year it rolls around and I have an urge to remark on it publicly. Shortest day! Longest night! Witchy vibes! And this year, also, a real live lunar eclipse, not seen for some 537 years or something. Did you see it? Don't worry, someone else saw it for you! I thought I would. I made sure I could see the old moon out the window, but when I looked for it again at the appointed hour, she had moved and I could not go outside to look for her because this is a doorman building and I have a mental block about it. Why? Because I have a strong aversion to being watched coming and going.

This is also why I rarely post on FB other than 'liking' your posts, dear reader, and perhaps as well my deep ambivalence about this blog. (Did you notice it?) But, there are other considerations. One of these is authenticity. Can blogs be considered old media yet? I'll say this: there are blogs I love. I've mentioned some of them before. Sometimes I will go and read through the entire archives of a blog that no longer exists and it's like reading an awesome dog-eared copy of a long-forgotten experimental novel. A narrative-less, impressionistic, vaguely personal, but often secret-coded novel by a person I know or don't know or met once and never saw again, but feel I know somehow. And it is good. I think the more FB and tweets and all that other stuff I can only imagine eclipses blogs, the more I'll feel alright about them (blogs). Good news for you! And future me, who may come back and read the archives of my previous self. I cannot wait. It is already happening.

Some other obvious things I want to say. Sometimes, frequently, I forget stuff. The other day, I saw some people in Bayridge kill a possum with a stick. (Sorry.) It was a real middle-of-the-night mob scene that I thought at first was a random middle-of-the-night pickup street-hockey game but turned out to be not, and it was disturbing and awful. I will spare you the details, but it was gruesome. And then I forgot all about it until a few days later, when I was on the phone with E and suddenly remembered. So, reflection, records, memories. Can blogging make you less solipsistic by helping you remember stuff that happened? Or is the fact that it happened to you make it about you, and therefore actually still solipsism? Does the fact that I forget the stuff that happens make me more or less solipsistic than remembering everything in minute detail and/or blathering on about it in a public diary? (These questions are so 1999! Old media!)

So, I am staying at a friend's, having a mellow time with Leo and a cat (my friend's cat) in a beautiful, well-heated apartment that is not in Bayridge. I am translating and writing and watching many movies on instant and discovering television shows that I had never heard of (Soap? Anyone? Only after midnight), and generally communicating only with animals and doorpersons. It's really cold, but not as cold as Moscow, I imagine, or Canada. The other day I thought I understood Heidegger, but now that I think about it, I've already forgotten what I think I understood or how I thought it was relevant to anything I'm doing. Tonight, I will have people over for dinner and then go pick up someone from the airport and then maybe continue having dinner with all of them together. The days will get longer and I will write some chapters and then one day, I will visit the West Coast and see the desert again and I will try to hold it all in my head.

Guess What I Do for Adventure?

MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON from Dean Fleischer-Camp on Vimeo.

Connect 4

What the heck us linked in and hi5 and all these other weird networking sites? Do these people know they're spamming me, or is there a whole online world I'm not even aware of? What about the whole other real world I'm not even aware of? When will my inbox get an invitation from there?