A Brief Reconciliation: Organic Solvents and Poetry

Owing to dichloromethane's (CH2Cl2) high volatility, it is an acute inhalation hazard; and in large doses in the bloodstream, the chlorocarbon's metabolic product is carbon monoxide (CO).

Dante Alighieri composed La Vita Nuova, a prosimetrum (alternating prose and poetry pieces) for Beatrice Portinari, a nine-year-old girl, who he first saw (at age eight) and followed until her death (1290), to write "that which has never been written of any woman."

Heptane (C7H16) can be used to distinguish bromine from iodine in aqueous mixtures: bromine remains brown in heptane and iodine turns purple.

Swedish psychologist and poet, Tomas Tranströmer concludes the poem, "Vermeer" with twin paradoxes:

The airy sky has taken its place leaning against
the wall.
It is like a prayer to what is empty.
And what is empty turns its face to us
and whispers:
'I am not empty, I am open.'

Nitromethane (CH3NO2) can fuel the combustion reactions in a automobile due to its high oxygen content, which enables it to burn less atmospheric oxygen in comparison to the hydrocarbons in octane:

4CH3NO2 + 3O2 → 4CO2 + 6H2O + 2N2 : 14.6 kg of air to combust 1.0 kg of gasoline versus 1.7 kg of air to combust 1.0 kg of nitromethane; one stroke of an engine's cylinder can combust 8.7 times more nitromethane.

Nitromethane has a lower energy density than gasoline, which makes it impractical for non-racing purposes.

This is the first stanza of Charles Wright's translation of the Italian poet, Eugenio Montale's "Nella Serra" or "In the Greenhouse"

The lemon bushes overflowed
with the patter of mole paws,
the scythe shined
in its rosary of cautious water drops.

S'empì d'uno zampettìo
di talpe la limonaia,
brillò in un rosario di caute
gocce la falce fienaia.

Tetrachloroethylene (C2Cl4), also known as "drying-cleaning fluid" was used in the early 20th century to treat ankylostomiasis or hookworm infestation, which has since been implicated with cancer. In 2007, the CDC reported that the Marines and their families stationed at Camp Lejeune drank water contaminated with C2Cl4 from the nearby wells for thirty years.

Anne Sexton's "The Double Image," inspired by W.D. Snodgrass's "The Needle's Eye," related her troubled relationship with her daughter. Here is the poem to its last:
...
I needed you. I didn’t want a boy,

only a girl, a small milky mouse

of a girl, already loved, already loud in the house

of herself. We named you Joy.

I, who was never quite sure

about being a girl, needed another

life, another image to remind me.

And this was my worst guilt; you could not cure

or soothe it. I made you to find me.

(Chemistry and poetry both involve linkages of chemical or verbal units. Ezra Pound's definition of an image is "...an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time." Reactive intermediates or chemical complexes can extenuate this meaning from Pound: that which is used up in the reaction can be signified in an equation (the written manipulation), but it cannot be determined experimentally since the time interval is too short.)

I will work on this* TBR

Madonna - Bedtime Story

(Let's get unconscious...with the art of allusion: Magritte, Varo, Sufi dervishes, psychokinesis.)

Calendar Transiences: Belief on a Breeze

1. Circles in the Sand
   
   According to the Homeric hymns, Pallas Athene possessed "owl-gray" eyes or γλαυκῶπις – glaukōpis.
   
   Interstitial, connective tissue in animals cells is the stroma (strôma or bed-covering) versus the parenchyma (parénchyma or something poured in beside) in the cells of plants.
   
   Van Gogh painted all of his self-portraits with green eyes.
   
   A notable quotation from D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love: "Her father was not a coherent human being, he was a room full of echoes."
   
   The half-life of Adrenocortiotropic hormone in the blood is ten minutes.
   
   Meth mouth, or the characteristic decay patterns of methamphetamine users, can be attributed to drug-induced changes (due to the acidity of the powder?), xerostomia and neglected oral hygiene.
   
   Before its pharmaceutical use, valproic acid was used as a metabolically inert organic solvent.
   
   In a study at the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago (2006):
   "Loneliness is a Unique Predictor of Age-Related Differences in Systolic Blood Pressure" : lonely people have blood pressure readings as much as 30 points higher than non-lonely people, perceived stressors and depressive symptoms aside.
   
   The Kappa number signifies the lignin content (for delignification) and bleachability of wood pulp.
   
   A former biomedical use of the oxidizing potassium permanganate solution (used for determining Kappa no.):
   self-inducing abortions.
   
   Sandro Botticelli was fully aware of the classical implication of the sea shell (as the vulva) when he painted The Birth of Venus.
   
   Overlooking the volcanic lake (30 km from Rome), Lake Nemi, is the sacred grove of Diana; and thus, Tiberius and Caligula were the Nemorensi of the sacred spot.
   
   According to Sister Miriam Joseph, in preparation for the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy) the trivium consisted of:
   
   Logic, as it is concerned with the thing as-it-is-known,
   Grammar, as it is concerned with the thing-as-it-is-symbolized, and
   Rhetoric, as it is concerned with the thing-as-it-is-communicated.
   
   In a human eye, the cornea accounts for two-thirds of its refractive power and the crystalline lens comprises the remaining third.
   
   The first man-made polymer, polystyrene, was discovered from the resinous exudate of the Sweetgum tree, storax.
   
   Why would a sphinx--which signifies her wont, "to strangle"--be usually typified as a woman with a beast's body? Is this perhaps some view into her chthonic nature?
   
   Later, the chthonic is, according to Jung, the unconscious earthly impulses of Self: envy, lust, deceit; all of which carry a feminine embodiment.
   
   

Une Vieille Maitresse Subtitled Trailer

Pale Surmises: Thursday's Upended Schedule

0645 Awake with sinus headache
0600 Note French idiom calendar tear-away: Escaladons ce mur. // Let's climb up that wall.
0700 Prepare tea (Moroccan mint sachets) before snow-filled window
0720 Watch deer
0800 Get picked up by classmate for breakfast; classes cancelled
0840 Cruise vacant streets, taking advantage of unplowed roads, pajama pants, and anti-lock brake slippage
0900 Fish-tail in major thoroughfares, adjust to driver's heedless (hungover?) attitude
1000 Finish cranberry-orange-speckled, shortening-clotted scone from local fast-food bakery, Panera
1030 Refuse the invitation to waste more time, citing the need to get home to shower
1100 Return to an empty house, attune to European Graduate School lectures, Catherine Breillat (45 min)

1105 Immerse throbbing head in bath-water, while listening to lecture on newest film, Une Vieille Mâitresse

1140 Pull up Philip Glass's latest piece on his website, Book of Longing: score for the poetry of Leonard Cohen
Comment: Leonard Cohen does Leonard Cohen the best.
1200 Open the book that I purchased yesterday with a psychic affinity, leaving a stack of half-warm potential

purchases before the Barnes & Noble cash-wrap, among them: Abe's The Woman in the Sand and
Bukowski's Betting on the Muse. A postcard (I placed there) falls out of the new book: a black-and-white

photograph of pies spread before a psychiatry conference.
1400 Doze off in book, awake to blueness of burnt-out reading lamp bulb...experienced as a flash of insight
1410 Get dressed, electing not to iron
1415 Roast garlic in oven with Neil Young looping in kitchen: Safeway Cart

1430 Scrape garlic on large chunks of ciabatta, eat with pickled asparagus, carrots (the entire slimy package)
1500 Go for a sunglassed-walk listening to Neil Young's album Sleeps with Angels
1615 Return with the resolve to finish the project destined for: a subtle book [screen], a desk, a frame of reference?

A perfect day, Elise - PJ Harvey

This song, from the album "Is this desire?" is an allusion to the J.D. Salinger story, which was published in New Yorker magazine 31 January 1948, "A Perfect Day for a Bananafish." The song and its contents are interwoven with inexplicable anxiety and its result such as that on the day of Seymour Glass, whose disposition frightens a girl in an elevator as he makes his way back to the room with his ambivalent wife, Muriel. He lies down on the twin bed next to hers, and fires a bullet through his right temple.

To Start After...To Start Again

Louise Glück's Celestial Music

I have a friend who still believes in heaven.
Not a stupid person, yet with all she knows, she literally talks to god,
she thinks someone listens in heaven.
On earth, she's unusually competent.
Brave, too, able to face unpleasantness.

We found a caterpillar dying in the dirt, greedy ants crawling over it.
I'm always moved by weakness, by disaster, always eager to oppose
vitality.
But timid, also, quick to shut my eyes.
Whereas my friend was able to watch, to let events play out
according to nature. For my sake, she intervened,
brushing a few ants off the torn thing, and set it down across the road.

My friend says I shut my eyes to god, that nothing else explains
my aversion to reality. She says I'm like the child who buries her head in
the pillow
so as not to see, the child who tells herself
that light causes sadness--
My friend is like the mother. Patient, urging me
to wake up an adult like herself, a courageous person--

In my dreams, my friend reproaches me. We're walking
on the same road, except it's winter now;
she's telling me that when you love the world you hear celestial music:
look up, she says. When I look up, nothing.
Only clouds, snow, a white business in the trees
like brides leaping to a great height--
Then I'm afraid for her; I see her
caught in a net deliberately cast over the earth--

In reality, we sit by the side of the road, watching the sun set;
from time to time, the silence pierced by a birdcall.
It's this moment we're both trying to explain, the fact
that we're at ease with death, with solitude.
My friend draws a circle in the dirt; inside, the caterpillar doesn't move.
She's always trying to make something whole, something beautiful, an
image
capable of life apart from her.
We're very quiet. It's peaceful sitting here, not speaking, the composition
fixed, the road turning suddenly dark, the air
going cool, here and there the rocks shining and glittering--
it's this stillness that we both love.
The love of form is a love of endings.