even*cleveland: american museum of natural history

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this weekend

Last weekend was a bit of a bust. Thunderstorms meant that my parents' flight got grounded, then cancelled. Then there were no more flights to be had, so no visit. This weekend is going to be better.

Pimm's in a park uptown (or Peau d'ane in a park downtown)
boro
longtime companion
there's so much I want to say to you
bloody bulls
the river and exquisite corpses

And on Monday: the wheel printer. Happy weekend.

Photo from the archives of the American Museum of Natural History: Museum staff at work on the Tiger Diorama in the Hall of Asian Mammals, February 1934. ©AMNH Library/Image #281096.

gemstones

Photos from The Morgan Memorial Hall of Gems at the American Museum of Natural History. I went last week to see the Wittelsbach-Graff diamond (very, very shiny).

I love the patterns and mounts they use to display the jewels. Like hundreds of very sparkly thumbtacks in arcs, fans and grids.

bones

Justine Cooper: photo of Cretaceous dinosaur bones. They were excavated almost 100 years ago and are still sitting in storage at the American Museum of Natural History.

Full slideshow here. Via Hollister Hovey.

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

V. Woolf

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

Italo Calvino

Why didn't she try collecting something? It didn't matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end to the little curiosities one could easily pick up.

Henry James

this weekend

gemstones

bones

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