Dispatches since 2005
The journal
Announcements, new editions, travel, diving, cooking and the working life of a novelist — 3,179 entries, all of them here in full.
November 24, 2024 · 92 words
Packed
Among all the outstanding works I saw at the Corning Museum, this was one of the most impressive. Outwardly a modest genre painting, this turns out not to be a painting at all, but a mosaic— a micromosaic, to be specific. The picture is made up of thousands of tiny glass rods bundled together and […]
Read entry →November 23, 2024 · 191 words
Up the Pole
So here I am in Cambridge in 1987, punting along behind the Cambridge Backs. I hadn’t punted in 12 years, but my skills (such as they were) came back quickly enough, and I hardly collided with anything at all. It was nice the the river had a gravel bottom, unlike the muck at the bottom […]
Read entry →November 20, 2024 · 58 words
Elevator Games
Another Banksy rat, this one found in the elevator of the Fenimore Museum. I admit I don’t know what the hell is going on here, The rat seems to have a cassette recorder strapped to his chest, and his face is— exploding?— undergoing transformation? His paintbrush(?) also seems to have suffered. Your guess i
Read entry →November 19, 2024 · 84 words
Wave Action
This is a photograph of the 2012 solar eclipse in the South Pacific. We were on a ship a couple days’ voyage north of New Zealand, and it was following the track of totality across the water. Unfortunately the sea wasn’t completely still. I had set the camera for a long exposure, the ship rolled, […]
Read entry →November 17, 2024 · 109 words
On the Table
Some of you should recognize this. It’s at the Corning Museum of Glass. I’d ask something like “what is this?”, but it would open the doors to floods of Cyrillic spam, so it’ll have to remain a mental exercise. UPDATE: If any of you guessed that this was the Periodic Table of the Elements, you’d […]
Read entry →November 15, 2024 · 576 words
Shoveling It
In my last post, I mentioned that much of my life consists of dealing with bullshit, stuff that matters so little that there’s no sense of challenge or accomplishment in coping with it. Let’s take last week as an example. Firstly there was a cold snap, that climaxed on a full-on winter storm that knocked […]
Read entry →November 12, 2024 · 1,090 words
Love in the Wainscot
I’ve posted only a few times in the last months, which is an indication of how exciting my life has become. I bounce between two poles, Pain and Duty, and I don’t much care to write about either. Pain is always there, and Duty isn’t even interesting— it’s mostly being obliged to do stuff that […]
Read entry →November 9, 2024 · 270 words
No Accident
The Accidental War, the first book of the latest Praxis trilogy, is on sale through November 18 at Amazon for a mere $1.99. So far as I can see, the other online vendors have matched this price, so you can get it from your favorite online source. For those of you unfamiliar with the series, […]
Read entry →October 30, 2024 · 141 words
Palomar
This is the mirror blank for the Hale Telescope at Mt Palomar. It doesn’t look like a mirror because it hasn’t been silvered and polished. This 5-meter, 36-ton disk was cast at the Corning Glass Works in 1934, and is made of their brand-new miracle glass, Pyrex. The hot glass caused part of the frame […]
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