Alixandra (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} recombinantdna) wrote,@ 2008-07-25 16:04:00 |
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| Entry tags: | fiction, lists, literature, photos, quotations, science, sex, visual art |
July
I spent these past 12 days at my family's cottage in the Kawarthas. Much of my time was devoted to diligent work on the painting visible above. Other activities included daily swimming; writing; games of Trivial Pursuit, Slang Teasers (aka Balderdash), and Monopoly; a 1000 piece puzzle assembled by half a dozen collaborators; heated conversations about physics, grammatical mood, and the photocarcinogenic components of sunblock.
And, of course, reading.
I didn't devote myself to reading a single text, and so regrettably finished nothing -- rather, I dipped in and out of a multitude of novels and non-fictions, frequently reading passages aloud to my companions (a behavior they tolerated gracefully). I'd like to share with you a series of excerpts, many of which I did blurt out aloud or mark with a little dogear at the corner of the page.
I like to think that it betrays something of my thinking patterns that, when they are ordered carefully, each of the separately selected quotations shows thematic linkage to the quotation following it.
->James Watson
I was preoccupied with sex, but not the kind in need of encouragement.
(on his boredom with studying bacterial reproduction)
the Witching Hour: Book One in the Mayfair Chronicles
->Anne Rice
"Why are you being so foolish!" said Mary Beth with a bored, matter-of-fact air. "My God, everything has been fulfilled. And there is no limit to how many times the transmutation can be effected, and you can imagine, can't you, the superior quality of the mutated flesh and the mutated genes. This is actually a scientific advance of stunning brilliance."
Great Mambo Chicken & the Transhuman Condition: Science Slightly Over the Edge
->Ed Regis
The hope of the surgical team was that at some point in the distant future a fresh, new body could be cloned for Dora Kent from one of her old cells. Her old brain would then be placed inside the head of the new body [...] Once she was reanimated, in the cryonics jargon, Dora Kent would enter her "second life cycle" (also part of the jargon), and go on to lead a long and prosperous new life. A very long life, perhaps: she might live for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years. She might even become immortal.
Postcards from the Brain Museum: The Improbable Search for Meaning in the Matter of Famous Minds
->Brian Burrell
Not the smell of death as you might expect, or even the reassuring whiff of decay (which at least promises an eventual end to things), but a smell that reneges any hope of oblivion. It is formaldehyde, a fixative so powerful that it does to living cells what the pause button on the remote control does to pixels. And it does not discriminate. It will do the same thing to the skin of the careless anatomist as it does to the specimen he is preparing. And when you first walk into a closet full of preserved human brains, it will smell as though it wants to do the same thing to you.
I Know this Much is True (a novel)
-> Wally Lamb
"I think if I wash with the water from the river, it might help to heal my infection. Purify me. I'm unclean."
"Unclean?" I said. "What do you mean?" In the silence that followed, I forced my eyes down to his self mutilation. The scar tissue was pink and shiny, as soft looking as a newborn's. [...] "It looks pretty good now," I said.
"What?"
"Your ... your wrist."
"I meant my brain," he said. "I think the water might help heal my brain."
[...] I probably could have counted on one hand the number of times over the years when Thomas had acknowledged his sickness like that--when he hadn't taken the attitude that he was the reasonable one and the rest of us were crazy
the Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary
-> Simon Winchester
Every morning her would accuse people of trying to break into his room the night before, trying to molest him. He was being persecuted. Evil men were trying to insert metallic biscuits, coated in poison, into his mouth.
Dreams Underfoot (a collection of short stories)
-> Charles de Lint
" They're like . . ." His hands moved as he spoke, trying to convey what he didn't feel words alone could say-- a whole other language, she often thought, watching those long slender fingers weave through the air between them. '"They're just too much..."
"You've really seen them?" she asked.
'"Oh, yeah. Except not on the streets. They're floating up in the air, y'know, like fat little kites."
It was such a relief to know that they were real.
Pidgins and Creoles
-> Loreto Todd
A creole arises when a pidgin becomes the mother tongue of a speech community. The simple structure that characterized the pidgin is carried over into the creole but since the creole, as a mother tongue, must be capable of expressing the whole range of human experience, the lexicon is expanded and frequently a more elaborate syntactic system evolves.
