"Delight in Disorder" - Robert Herrick
A sweet disorder in the dress
kindles in clothes a wantonness;
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction;
An erring lace, which here and there
Enthrals the crimson stomacher;
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribbons to flow confusedly;
A winning wave, deserving note,
In the tempestuous petticoat;
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility;—
Do more bewitch me, than when art
Is too precise in every part.
Thankful for my two nephews: Thaddeous and brand new Baby Blayne, 7lbs. 10 oz. of cuteness
"The Last Days of the Polymath"
[…] The word “polymath” teeters somewhere between Leonardo da Vinci and Stephen Fry. Embracing both one of history’s great intellects and a brainy actor, writer, director and TV personality, it is at once presumptuous and banal. Djerassi doesn’t want much to do with it. “Nowadays people that are called polymaths are dabblers—are dabblers in many different areas,” he says. “I aspire to be an intellectual polygamist. And I deliberately use that metaphor to provoke with its sexual allusion and to point out the real difference to me between polygamy and promiscuity.”
“To me, promiscuity is a way of flitting around. Polygamy, serious polygamy, is where you have various marriages and each of them is important. And in the ideal polygamy I suspect there’s no number one wife and no number six wife. You have a deep connection with each person.”
Djerassi is right to be suspicious of flitting. We all know a gifted person who cannot stick at anything. […] Just knowing about a lot of things has never been easier. Never before have dabblers been so free to paddle along the shore and dip into the first rock pool that catches the eye. If you have an urge to take off your shoes and test the water, countless specialists are ready to hold your hand.
And yet you will never get very deep. Depth is for monomaths—which is why experts so often seem to miss what really matters. Specialisation has made the study of English so sterile that students lose much of the joy in reading great literature for its own sake. A generation of mathematically inclined economists neglected many of Keynes’s insights about the Depression because he put them into words. For decades economists sweated over fiendish mathematical equations, only to be brought down to earth by the credit crunch: Keynes’s well-turned phrases had come back to life.
[here]
Cepheus B: A cloud of molecular hydrogen in the Milky Way about 2,400 light years from Earth (via Smithsonian)
1E0102.2-7219, a supernova remnant in the Small Magellanic Cloud (via Smithsonian)
turn-of-century (Victorian) postcard
by Jason Munn
by Jason Munn
“Pigs” (feat. Jefferson Street Band) - DM Stith
new Sufjan Stevens song, “All Delighted People”
