װעלן עפֿענען די טירן פון דער וועלט אויפסנײַ
We went to the Harvard Museum of Natural History and the Harvard Art Museums. At the former, we saw exquisitely rendered rotting and blighted glass fruit by Rudolf Blaschka—apricots shriveled with brown rot, softly splotching pears, strawberries furred with blue mold. You wouldn't want to eat them, but it is a masterstroke to make a material as brittle and glinting as glass look sticky, squishy, sunken, fuzzy, bruised. I was especially fond of the magnified field of Aspergillus, globes of spore-clusters on jelly-translucent stalks in a squiggling network of hyphae. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch took some pictures, mostly of the glass sea creatures also by the Blaschkas and the hallway of deep-sea black-light paintings. We said hello to the Kronosaurus, because it's just good manners. The Chilean rose tarantula really was a beautiful rose-gold color on the fine hairs of its legs and the shield of its back. At the latter, we mostly wandered around among the modern and contemporary art on the first floor; we meant to check out the special exhibitions on the third floor, but there kept being another room of Impressionists, or Surrealists, or the Berlin Secession. I love Lyonel Feininger's Avenue of Trees (1915) like I'd like it on my wall, the fractured prism of a fairy-tale wood, an Angela Carter story you're already disappearing into. His Bird Cloud (1926) is the same crystalline fragmenting of a world, but I've seen skies with exactly that quality of light. The evidence of El Lissitzky and László Moholy-Nagy suggests that I like Constructivism, or maybe I just like anybody who likes Victory Over the Sun. I understand why Max Beckmann kept The Fire (1945) with him till the end of his life: however chilly the circumstances of its painting, it is warming to look at. I wish very much that the information for Robert Smullyan Sloan's Negro Soldier (1945)—which is even better in person, one of those penetrating portraits that studies you back—included the model's name.
We were supposed to meet my parents for break-fast at Mamaleh's, but due to a problem with broken track-switching on the Red Line that made our train take half an hour from Harvard to Davis, rather than throwing ourselves back on the grenade to Kendall, we opted to meet them instead at Porter Square Books and I am just as glad we did, because I got the surprise present of running intorushthatspeaks. Then we went to the restaurant and some of us had reubens and some of us had whitefish and most of us had knishes and I personally had a bowl of borscht with a thin dicing of cucumber and a thick garnish of labne and half a bagel covered with very savory chopped liver and mustard stolen from my husband's knish. We got our pictures taken in black and white in their semi-antique photo booth, although we misjudged the number of photos in the strip, so we are only hanging around one another's necks and smiling, not kissing for the flashbulb. The staff heard it was my birthday and brought me a slice of apple and date crostata with a candle lit in it. Rob gave me a beautiful little black-and-white-and-gold enamel pin of a mimic octopus, which now lives on my lapel above the Elder Sign of NecronomiCon. The rest of my birthday will be celebrated on Friday when my brother's family can make it.
I am home now and it is a new year and our cats are warm. The world is complicated. It's the one we've got. Right now, I am not unhappy to be in it.
spatch took some pictures, mostly of the glass sea creatures also by the Blaschkas and the hallway of deep-sea black-light paintings. We said hello to the Kronosaurus, because it's just good manners. The Chilean rose tarantula really was a beautiful rose-gold color on the fine hairs of its legs and the shield of its back. At the latter, we mostly wandered around among the modern and contemporary art on the first floor; we meant to check out the special exhibitions on the third floor, but there kept being another room of Impressionists, or Surrealists, or the Berlin Secession. I love Lyonel Feininger's Avenue of Trees (1915) like I'd like it on my wall, the fractured prism of a fairy-tale wood, an Angela Carter story you're already disappearing into. His Bird Cloud (1926) is the same crystalline fragmenting of a world, but I've seen skies with exactly that quality of light. The evidence of El Lissitzky and László Moholy-Nagy suggests that I like Constructivism, or maybe I just like anybody who likes Victory Over the Sun. I understand why Max Beckmann kept The Fire (1945) with him till the end of his life: however chilly the circumstances of its painting, it is warming to look at. I wish very much that the information for Robert Smullyan Sloan's Negro Soldier (1945)—which is even better in person, one of those penetrating portraits that studies you back—included the model's name.We were supposed to meet my parents for break-fast at Mamaleh's, but due to a problem with broken track-switching on the Red Line that made our train take half an hour from Harvard to Davis, rather than throwing ourselves back on the grenade to Kendall, we opted to meet them instead at Porter Square Books and I am just as glad we did, because I got the surprise present of running into
rushthatspeaks. Then we went to the restaurant and some of us had reubens and some of us had whitefish and most of us had knishes and I personally had a bowl of borscht with a thin dicing of cucumber and a thick garnish of labne and half a bagel covered with very savory chopped liver and mustard stolen from my husband's knish. We got our pictures taken in black and white in their semi-antique photo booth, although we misjudged the number of photos in the strip, so we are only hanging around one another's necks and smiling, not kissing for the flashbulb. The staff heard it was my birthday and brought me a slice of apple and date crostata with a candle lit in it. Rob gave me a beautiful little black-and-white-and-gold enamel pin of a mimic octopus, which now lives on my lapel above the Elder Sign of NecronomiCon. The rest of my birthday will be celebrated on Friday when my brother's family can make it.I am home now and it is a new year and our cats are warm. The world is complicated. It's the one we've got. Right now, I am not unhappy to be in it.
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Thank you.