Encyclopedias of Everything, Part 2 Taking inventory is not only an act of organization, but an acquisition. Listing the multiplicity of things in the world makes them our own, and we own the list as well. Taken to its extreme such a project naturally presents logistical problems. Where do we draw the line? At what […]

Encyclopedias of Everything Lately I’ve been dipping into the great encyclopedias, and I’m pretty sure I’ll never be the same. Last week I revisited two old favorites, Aristotle’s History of Animals and Pliny the Elder’s Natural History. Yesterday I spent seven hours reading from Alexander von Humboldt’s magnum opus, Cosmos. By the end of the […]

The Combinatory Agility of Words
There are certain authors I can’t read at night because their fountains of language induce an electrically charged insomnia. Whitman, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Beckett, Cormac McCarthy, and others have cost me many nights’ sleep and thousands of dollars in lost income. My attorney is looking into a class-action suit.

With spring about to bust loose around us, it’s hard to get away from  birdsong. Here’s another look at the subject, adapted from “Reading Nature at Pine Hollow,” a chapter in my forthcoming book about winter on the Great Lakes: Beethoven, Liszt, Wagner, Mahler, Ravel, and other classical composers were inspired to incorporate birdsong into […]

Virtuoso Performers I was up early this morning, listening to the dawn chorus. Is anything more emblematic of spring than the singing of birds? Several people have written to say that they enjoyed the links to bird songs in Friday’s “Liquid Bars of Melody” post. Steve Tracey reports from the Upper Peninsula that he staved […]

Liquid Runs of Melody I was awakened early this morning by a cardinal and a titmouse singing in the walnut tree outside my window. And I could hear also, in a kind of counterpoint to those bright and piercing notes, the tap-tap-tap of dripping eaves. Is it possible? Are rumors of spring true? Birdsong has […]

Harmonious Disarray What do artists’ still lifes, jazz, Japanese gardens, and literary lists have in common? The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley identified one thing, at least, in a letter in verse he wrote in 1820 while staying at the house of his friend Henry Revely (Henry once saved Shelly’s life after he fell into a […]

Literary Feasts Literature and music come closest of all the arts to matching the creative opulence and diversity of nature. Just as the 117 elements in the Periodic Table are the raw material for all physical matter, the 26 letters in our alphabet create a spoken/written universe of virtually endless variety. Putting letters and words […]

Armloads of the World That there is something rather than nothing has nailed many good philosophers to their chairs, but equally befuddling is matter’s refusal to remain an undifferentiated mist adrift in space. Lucky for us that individual atoms dance with other atoms, adhering, combining and recombining, arranging and rearranging, shuffling among themselves, piling likes […]

The New Lyceum A nice invitation has come my way from Northwestern Michigan College to speak May 17th at TEDx Traverse City, a local version of the acclaimed TED conferences that bring people together every year to share inspiring ideas. The national conference, TED2011, was launched yesterday in Long Beach, California, and runs through this […]