Ramblings & ephemera
From Roger Ebert’s “Go gentle into that good night” (Roger Ebert’s Journal: 2 May 2009): Van Gogh in Arles wrote this about death: Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why? I ask myself, shouldn’t the shining dots […]
Posted on May 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, commonplace book, history, language & literature, religion | Comments Off on Van Gogh on death
From Roger Ebert’s “Go gentle into that good night” (Roger Ebert’s Journal: 2 May 2009): What I expect will most probably happen [when I die] is that my body will fail, my mind will cease to function, and that will be that. My genes will not live on, because I have had no children. Perhaps […]
Posted on May 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, commonplace book, language & literature, religion, science | Comments Off on Roger Ebert on death
From Roger Ebert’s “Go gentle into that good night” (Roger Ebert’s Journal: 2 May 2009): And there is Shakespeare, who came as close as any man to immortality. In my plans for life after death, I say, again with Whitman: I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you […]
Posted on May 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, history, language & literature | Comments Off on Immortality, poetically
From Philip Larkin’s “Aubade“: I work all day, and get half drunk at night. Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare. In time the curtain edges will grow light. Till then I see what’s really always there: Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, Making all thought impossible but how And where and when […]
Posted on April 18th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, language & literature | Comments Off on From Philip Larkin’s “Aubade”
From Steven Weinberg’s “Without God” (The New York Review of Books: 25 September 2008): It has often been noted that the greatest horrors of the twentieth century were perpetrated by regimes – Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China – that while rejecting some or all of the teachings of religion, copied characteristics of religion at […]
Posted on April 18th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, politics, religion | Comments Off on Totalitarian regimes adopt the trappings of religion for themselves
From D. T. Max’s “Notes and Errata*: A DFW Companion Guide to ‘The Unfinished’” (The Rumpus: 31 March 2009): He explained that endnotes “allow . . . me to make the primary-text an easier read while at once 1) allowing a discursive, authorial intrusive style w/o Finneganizing the story, 2) mimic the information-flood and data-triage […]
Posted on April 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, language & literature, on writing | 5 Comments »
From Allen Abel And Madeleine Czigler’s “Submarines, bananas and taxis” (National Post: 24 June 2008): Depicted in frescoes and canvases from the early Middle Ages onward in the robes of the betrayer of the Christ, “Judas yellow” devolved into an imprint of depravity, treason and exclusion. … By the 12th century, European Jews were compelled […]
Posted on March 8th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, history, religion | Comments Off on A history of the negative associations of yellow
From Anna Gosline’s “Death special: How does it feel to die?” (New Scientist: 13 October 2007): Death comes in many guises, but one way or another it is usually a lack of oxygen to the brain that delivers the coup de grâce. Whether as a result of a heart attack, drowning or suffocation, for example, […]
Posted on December 8th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, science, weird | 1 Comment »
From Vaughan Bell’s “Ghost Stories: Visits from the Deceased” (Scientific American: 2 December 2008): The dead stay with us, that much is clear. They remain in our hearts and minds, of course, but for many people they also linger in our senses—as sights, sounds, smells, touches or presences. Grief hallucinations are a normal reaction to […]
Posted on December 7th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: religion, science | Comments Off on Hallucinating the presence of the dead
From Carl Zimmer’s “The Return of the Puppet Masters” (Corante: 17 January 2006): I was investigating the remarkable ability parasites have to manipulate the behavior of their hosts. The lancet fluke Dicrocoelium dendriticum, for example, forces its ant host to clamp itself to the tip of grass blades, where a grazing mammal might eat it. […]
Posted on November 24th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: science, weird | Comments Off on 50% of people infected with personality-changing brain parasites from cats
From Charles C. Mann’s “America, Found & Lost” (National Geographic: May 2007): It is just possible that John Rolfe was responsible for the worms—specifically the common night crawler and the red marsh worm, creatures that did not exist in the Americas before Columbus. Rolfe was a colonist in Jamestown, Virginia, the first successful English colony […]
Posted on November 21st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, politics | Comments Off on How the settlers changed America’s ecology, radically
From Glenn Greenwald’s “A tragic legacy: How a good vs. evil mentality destroyed the Bush presidency” (Salon: 20 June 2007): One of the principal dangers of vesting power in a leader who is convinced of his own righteousness — who believes that, by virtue of his ascension to political power, he has been called to […]
Posted on October 11th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, law, politics | 1 Comment »
From Wade Davis’ “Wade Davis: an Inuit elder and his shit knife” (Boing Boing: 26 September 2008): The Inuit didn’t fear the cold; they took advantage of it. During the 1950s the Canadian government forced the Inuit into settlements. A family from Arctic Bay told me this fantastic story of their grandfather who refused to […]
Posted on October 6th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history | Comments Off on An elderly Eskimo & his unusual knife
From Steve Marsh’s “Homage to Mister Berryman” (Mpls St Paul Magazine: September 2008): Berryman’s last words to Kate came on that January morning—he told her he was going to campus to clean his office. He had never said that before, she says, but Kate, who was attending Al-Anon meetings at the time, was trying “not […]
Posted on September 28th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, history, language & literature | Comments Off on John Berryman’s suicide note
From Atul Gawande’s “Final Cut: Medical arrogance and the decline of the autopsy” (The New Yorker: 19 March 2001): … in the nineteenth century … [some doctors] waited until burial and then robbed the graves, either personally or through accomplices, an activity that continued into the twentieth century. To deter such autopsies, some families would […]
Posted on April 12th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, history, science, security | Comments Off on Graveyard shifts and torpedo coffins
From Atul Gawande’s “Final Cut: Medical arrogance and the decline of the autopsy” (The New Yorker: 19 March 2001): The Roman physician Antistius performed one of the earliest forensic examinations on record, in 44 B.C., on Julius Caesar, documenting twenty-three stab wounds, including a final, fatal stab to the chest.
Posted on April 12th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, history, science | Comments Off on Earliest recorded autopsy
From William Shakespeare’s Henry VI, part 1 (IV: 7): BURGUNDY: Doubtless he would have made a noble knight; See, where he lies inhearsed in the arms Of the most bloody nurser of his harms! inhearsed: laid as in a coffin
Posted on January 16th, 2007 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: language & literature, word of the day | Comments Off on 1 Henry VI: inhearsed
From William Shakespeare’s Henry VI, part 1 (IV: 7): TALBOT: Where is my other life? mine own is gone; O, where’s young Talbot? where is valiant John? Triumphant death, smear’d with captivity, Young Talbot’s valour makes me smile at thee: When he perceived me shrink and on my knee, His bloody sword he brandish’d over […]
Posted on January 16th, 2007 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: language & literature | Comments Off on Talbot describes his son’s valiant death
From William Shakespeare’s Henry VI, part 1 (IV: 5): TALBOT: Then here I take my leave of thee, fair son, Born to eclipse thy life this afternoon. Come, side by side together live and die. And soul with soul from France to heaven fly. (Talbot’s son refuses to flee & leave his father, even though […]
Posted on January 16th, 2007 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: language & literature | Comments Off on 1 Henry VI: Talbot says farewell to his son
From William Shakespeare’s Henry VI, part 1 (III: 4): Scene: Paris – The Palace BASSET: Villain, thou know’st the law of arms is such That whoso draws a sword, ’tis present death, Or else this blow should broach thy dearest blood. Blackstone in his Commentaries (IV. 124): “By the ancient law … fighting in the […]
Posted on January 15th, 2007 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, language & literature, law | Comments Off on 1 Henry VI: capital punishment for fighting in the king’s palace