SCALES #22: pumpkin harbor traversal
Hello!
Starting to feel like Real Fall here in the Bay State. A spooky house sprouted overnight across the street from my apartment. I recently drove out to Western Mass and driving up through the hills, the ponds & marshes & [MOOSE GLYPH] NEXT 5 MI. signs, surrounded by trees touched with reds and yellows, all felt very New England fall to me. It made me think of Rob MacFarlane's recent piece, and how despite having been here now for a few years I still have a pretty surface-level knowledge of the names of the New England natural world. (See also: the wondrous Twitter thread he kicked off soliciting collective nouns for tree species.)
My favorite sight of the drive, though, has been the fog—a product of these transitional days with warm days and cool nights. Low-lying early morning fog along the coast fades away as you ascend eastward toward the Worcester Hills, but then can reappear as you descend into the Pioneer Valley. And, along the way, from 202, you can just see the fog spread across the basin of the Quabbin Reservoir: Natural wonder, human-built conditions. (Not to mention that nagging "climate changey" feeling about this kind of fall weather.)
▢ ▢ ▢
A welcome surprise to discover that the last Met Artist-in-Residence episode of The Memory Palace considers two 1868 works by Edmonia Lewis, American expatriate in Rome, and Oberlin-educated sculptor of African American and Ojibwe descent. (Another Memory Palace piece on the ice exports from Cambridge's Fresh Pond.) Nerdily known to me as a source of organic matter-rich water samples, The Great Dismal Swamp was also an important site of maroon settlements. Ear Hustle continues to be great. It's a pleasure to listen to Janina Ramirez condense a millennium of abbey life in the British Isles into one hour. A raw and honest Should We. Babes of Science is back!
▢ ▢ ▢
The different manifestations of Facebook as three-dimensional slices of some strange hyper-dimensional object. Sasha Hemon writing for television (with the Wachowskis and David Mitchell!) is a look into how the creative skills of a person working in one medium both do and do not translate into another. The 13th-century birth of modern accentual-syllabic poetic meter includes the delightfully-named Orm's Ormulum. Inventor Mary Hallock Greenewalt's 1920s light-music hybrid, the "Nourathar"—the juxtaposition of the Eakins high society portrait and the technical patent drawings! "(McPhee, asked about this, gently correct him: It is cubic feet per second, not cubic gallons.)" A process-centric video with the producer of SZA's "The Weekend" is part of the digital native counterpoint to Ways of Hearing. "Long live the group chat".
▢ ▢ ▢
Edmonia Lewis' sculpture "Hygeia" in Cambridge's Mount Auburn Cemetery, at the grave of Harriot Kezia Hunt (1805-1875): advocate for women in medicine (the first woman to apply to Harvard Medical School, she was denied admission twice), abolitionist, and women's rights activist. (Photo from Wikimedia.)
▢ ▢ ▢
"Giant pumpkin traverses Boston Harbor carrying Revere resident." Ah, the traditional start of fall!
—Adam