An Entry of Unrelated Parts: Pomegranates, Pumpkins, Iphigenia, and the Large Hadron Collider
I am pretty wiped at the moment, though I had quite a lovely day after another long and rather boring week. I anticipate a pleasantly sedate weekend of chores and studying.
A friend of mine has close family friends in the area, and we went over to their place in Orinda to puppy-sit, help pick pomegranates, and just generally help out while being fed. The pomegranate tree had a veritable bounty of pomegranates, and we were both sent home with a goodly number of them, after helping to seed and juice some of them. We picked them in a lovely fall misty rain, giggling and squealing as the tree shed water on us, and as we found ever more lovely specimens of pomegranate. As we separated the seeds from the pomegranates that had already cracked open from ripeness, we exclaimed at their jewel-like tones and perfectly sweet tart taste. Opening a pomegranate feels like opening a treasure box, with the glistening ruby and garnet-colored seeds honeycombed inside, hidden among various compartments and membranes. I thought of all of the stories surrounding and involving pomegranates: how they are among the fruit to be found in paradise, heralded as one of God's greater gifts to man; how Perspephone ate four seeds in the Underworld; how they began in Persia and Central Asia, and then spread through the ancient world, until even they even reached damp New England and the new Spanish colonies. I liked spending a gray fall day picking and seeding them: it was like a burst of the Mediterranean and the garden.
We also scraped out a few pumpkins so they could be baked and then frozen for future holiday baking, and made pumpkin cranberry muffins with the frozen leftovers of last year's supplies. FYI, pumpkin cranberry muffins are A+, would eat again. Scraping out pumpkins, however, is considerably less charming and fun than dealing pomegranates. Pumpkins are pretty gross on the inside, yeah? But I did feel very satisfied and productive getting a bunch of pumpkins ready for baking. In fact, the whole day made me feel connected to the fall, and to the harvest, even in this one tiny insignificant way. It's one of my favorite things about Thanksgiving too: feeling connected and really involved in food and making it, in making yourself and others happy with the products of your own labor and the harvest. It's a pretty ancient urge and desire: just look at all of those harvest festivals. And while I'm no farmer or laborer to really have a claim on the harvest, I like these little connections to it. It's grounding.
Anyway, self-indulgent rambling aside, here are a couple links of interest!
I really enjoyed this short story by Rachel Swirsky, with art by Sam Weber: "A Memory of Wind." A look at Iphigenia, as she goes to her death as a sacrifice at Aulis. I was always struck by poor Iphigenia's death: sacrificed by Agammemnon for a fair wind to Troy. This story tells it from her perspective, as she slowly deteriorates into wind, losing more and more of herself as she gets closer to Aulis and her ultimate purpose/fate. It's haunting, and filled with Iphigenia's fury and love and courage and fear. The first person POV really works well here, as I was absolutely immersed in Iphigenia's life and mind. I love myth retellings and reimaginings, and this a great one. It is a compliment to say that this is the kind of story I love reading at Yuletide too.
And a radically different link: bird-related accident nearly overloads Large Hadron Collider. Between this and scientists thinking that the future may be trying to sabotage the LHC, I am seriously beginning to wonder about the wisdom of turning the damn thing on. Because seriously, a passing bird dropped bread into the LHC, and if it hadn't been caught, it might have significantly damaged the LHC and the lab. And the even more hillarible (yes, hilarious + terrible) thing is, they're guessing about the whole bird thing, because they can't think of any other way the bread got there. Maybe this is one of those instances that's theoretically possible according the laws of quantum physics, but just wildly, crazily improbable, like how there is an infinitesimally infinitesimal chance that you could walk through a wall, given the right random configuration of atoms and empty space.
I wonder if perhaps increasingly unlikely accidents will keep occurring to the LHC, like some sort of demented infinite improbability machine whose only goal is to keep us from finding the elusive and perhaps dangerous Higgs boson. Maybe some poor bastards in the future are trying desperately to keep us from turning the LHC on lest we cause, idk, some sort of calamitous world-ending event. Or perhaps, with these strange occurrences, we will enter ever more improbable universes until we reach some sort of quantum dead end of weirdness.
Seriously, this is all so deliciously improbable and weird that I want to write some sort of amazing absurdist sci-fi novel about it. It would be equal parts To Say Nothing of the Dog, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Flashforward.
This entry was originally posted at http://yasaman.dreamwidth.org/322702.html, with
comments there.
A friend of mine has close family friends in the area, and we went over to their place in Orinda to puppy-sit, help pick pomegranates, and just generally help out while being fed. The pomegranate tree had a veritable bounty of pomegranates, and we were both sent home with a goodly number of them, after helping to seed and juice some of them. We picked them in a lovely fall misty rain, giggling and squealing as the tree shed water on us, and as we found ever more lovely specimens of pomegranate. As we separated the seeds from the pomegranates that had already cracked open from ripeness, we exclaimed at their jewel-like tones and perfectly sweet tart taste. Opening a pomegranate feels like opening a treasure box, with the glistening ruby and garnet-colored seeds honeycombed inside, hidden among various compartments and membranes. I thought of all of the stories surrounding and involving pomegranates: how they are among the fruit to be found in paradise, heralded as one of God's greater gifts to man; how Perspephone ate four seeds in the Underworld; how they began in Persia and Central Asia, and then spread through the ancient world, until even they even reached damp New England and the new Spanish colonies. I liked spending a gray fall day picking and seeding them: it was like a burst of the Mediterranean and the garden.
We also scraped out a few pumpkins so they could be baked and then frozen for future holiday baking, and made pumpkin cranberry muffins with the frozen leftovers of last year's supplies. FYI, pumpkin cranberry muffins are A+, would eat again. Scraping out pumpkins, however, is considerably less charming and fun than dealing pomegranates. Pumpkins are pretty gross on the inside, yeah? But I did feel very satisfied and productive getting a bunch of pumpkins ready for baking. In fact, the whole day made me feel connected to the fall, and to the harvest, even in this one tiny insignificant way. It's one of my favorite things about Thanksgiving too: feeling connected and really involved in food and making it, in making yourself and others happy with the products of your own labor and the harvest. It's a pretty ancient urge and desire: just look at all of those harvest festivals. And while I'm no farmer or laborer to really have a claim on the harvest, I like these little connections to it. It's grounding.
Anyway, self-indulgent rambling aside, here are a couple links of interest!
I really enjoyed this short story by Rachel Swirsky, with art by Sam Weber: "A Memory of Wind." A look at Iphigenia, as she goes to her death as a sacrifice at Aulis. I was always struck by poor Iphigenia's death: sacrificed by Agammemnon for a fair wind to Troy. This story tells it from her perspective, as she slowly deteriorates into wind, losing more and more of herself as she gets closer to Aulis and her ultimate purpose/fate. It's haunting, and filled with Iphigenia's fury and love and courage and fear. The first person POV really works well here, as I was absolutely immersed in Iphigenia's life and mind. I love myth retellings and reimaginings, and this a great one. It is a compliment to say that this is the kind of story I love reading at Yuletide too.
And a radically different link: bird-related accident nearly overloads Large Hadron Collider. Between this and scientists thinking that the future may be trying to sabotage the LHC, I am seriously beginning to wonder about the wisdom of turning the damn thing on. Because seriously, a passing bird dropped bread into the LHC, and if it hadn't been caught, it might have significantly damaged the LHC and the lab. And the even more hillarible (yes, hilarious + terrible) thing is, they're guessing about the whole bird thing, because they can't think of any other way the bread got there. Maybe this is one of those instances that's theoretically possible according the laws of quantum physics, but just wildly, crazily improbable, like how there is an infinitesimally infinitesimal chance that you could walk through a wall, given the right random configuration of atoms and empty space.
I wonder if perhaps increasingly unlikely accidents will keep occurring to the LHC, like some sort of demented infinite improbability machine whose only goal is to keep us from finding the elusive and perhaps dangerous Higgs boson. Maybe some poor bastards in the future are trying desperately to keep us from turning the LHC on lest we cause, idk, some sort of calamitous world-ending event. Or perhaps, with these strange occurrences, we will enter ever more improbable universes until we reach some sort of quantum dead end of weirdness.
Seriously, this is all so deliciously improbable and weird that I want to write some sort of amazing absurdist sci-fi novel about it. It would be equal parts To Say Nothing of the Dog, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Flashforward.
This entry was originally posted at http://yasaman.dreamwidth.org/322702.html, with
comments there.