Friday, September 19, 2008

The Way of the World: dog eat dog


Frans Snyders (1579--1657), Flemish painter. detail Wolves Hunted by Dogs. Otto Naumann, Ltd

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Blood: The Script of Life




Written in blood. From one drop to text, fashioning a script with life's liquid.
Blood, the liquid of life. Roy Porter, Blood and Guts.
Blood, the first seat of life, William Harvey.
Blood, the life stuff, Thomas Fuchs, Mechanization of the Heart: Harvey and Descartes

The Hand: According to Arisotle



God has provided us with two inner instruments with which to use outside instruments, the hand for the body and the intellect for the soul.
Aristotle, Problemata XXX 5(955b23),
William Schupbach, The Paradox of Rembrandt's "Anatomy of Dr. Tulp"

Saturday, September 13, 2008

Jennifer Koslow: Art and Kites




Jennifer, her brother Julian Benjamin Koslow, their first cousin Jonathan Rosen, and Susan Joan Rosen Koslow, Jen and Julian's mother and Jon's aunt, at an art fabricator's premises. Julian and Jennifer study Claes Oldenburg's Shovel. And then we flew a kite. The year 1978, the month September, the location, North Haven, Connecticut. Harold Olejarz, my husband, photographed us as we roamed this art treasure filled site, an art park off the beaten trail, free for the curious eye and open-minded.

Jennifer Lisa Koslow: The Great Leap into the Future


Jennifer was born on 13 September, 1970, on a glorious golden day at Mount Sinai Hospital, Manhattan. After a fairly brief labor, natural birth it was then called, she insisted on seeing the world immediately. I was rushed to the delivery room and after a few pushes, a beautiful girl baby, a perfect baby, appeared . How delighted I was to hold her in my arms and look at her as she first gazed into this wondrous world --and at me: who are you? Oh, my mother.
Now, thirty-eight years later she is a happy mother of twins, with a loving husband Pat Byrne. She has a doctorate in history, American History, and is an assistant professor of history at Florida State University in Tallahassee.

Jennifer was always exploratory; as soon as she was ambulant she would walk far away, without hesitation, across the meadows of Central Park in Manhattan. She showed was fearless, as this photograph indicates. Taken at an art fabricator's shop in North Haven Connecticut, in 1978, September, Jennifer leaps into the unknown with joyful abandon. This is the Jennifer I once knew so well.

Monday, September 1, 2008

Motion: Anaximander's Cosmogony



Did motion come into being at some time . . . or did it neither come--to--be nor is it destroyed, but did it always exist and will it go on for ever, and is it immortal and unceasing for existing things, being like a kind of life for all natural objects? . . . But all who say that there are infinite worlds, and that some of them are comming--to--be and others passing away, say that motion always exists . . . while all who say that there is one world, whether eternal, or not, make an analogous supposition about motion.

The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts, G.S. Kirk, J.E. Raven, M. Schofield 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 127. (1st ed 1957, G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven)