Consummation

The New Yorker, August 6, 2007

Consummated. My final paper, essentially the culmination of what I’ve learned over the course of this project, is finished (a little late, but much the better for it). It covers a slew of topics from my notebook and readings. Among them:

Frogs, Bd and habitat Loss; Bats, WNS and habitat loss; Bees and CCS; Holocene Extinction and the 5 Big Extinctions; language death and ethnocide; Oryx and Crake; Arks, Svalbard Seed Vault, El Valle and Zoos; megafauna; post-apocalyptic novels; man-made extinction; partulid land snails; modern technology and exploration; the internet; new species; old species; the hydrosphere; anthropology and Mark Twain; epibatidine; immortality; mortality; “The March of Time” a la Tom Stoppard's Arcadia; impermanence; “Benjamin”; the Golden Toad; and Kermit the Frog.

Ideas from Notebook, VI

Sigmund Freud, Sofa King

Hal Woodin and I ventured out to Doylestown – the other end of the earth, as far as Pennsylvania is concerned – traveling through areas of Philadelphia we had never encountered before. The Michener museum was interesting, as was the man for whom it is named, though George Nakashima’s workshop, we discovered upon arrival, was closed for the holiday weekend. Nevertheless…

Book carving, “China Can Say No”; feminism; Anna Kronick (”The Life of Joseph”); World War excesses: where and to whom did they go?; “King Lear” by Barry Johnston; King Lear by William Shakespeare; interconnectivity of words and their meanings; collecting; listmaking; self-referential art; James Michener; poverty, terrorism and ecology; the Order of Magellan; marketing; “The God Delusion”; atheism; Freud; “The World is Flat”; Bob Barsky; Robert Oerter; “The Black Swan”; “A Brief History of Time”.