Five Bullets 8.16.24
The Voynich Manuscript, Flight b741, Synesthesia & more
Good morning and Happy Friday!
We’ve been having some great weather this week in New York City- mid 80s, low humidity, and plenty of sunshine - and today is another beautiful day.
This week I took a look at my June updates post and reviewed what I set out to work on at the beginning of the summer and how I’ve been progressing. Over the past two weeks I’ve managed to publish a weekly blog post in addition to Friday’s newsletter but I wasn’t able to accomplish the same this week. Currently I’m working on a longer post based on a book I recently read which I hope to complete by next week.
I love this quote from artist Georgia O’Keefe:
“I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again”.
What has occupied your summer months?
This week’s bullets:
Aging: Ursula K. Le Guin on Growing Older and What Beauty Really Means. Maria Popova’s The Marginalian shared some insightful words this week from Ursula K. Le Guin on cats, aging, and beauty. “Dogs don’t know what they look like…Cats know exactly where they begin and end.” Le Guin uses her observations on pets to write about how beauty changes as we age as well as our identity:
“For old people, beauty doesn’t come free with the hormones, the way it does for the young. It has to do with bones. It has to do with who the person is. More and more clearly it has to do with what shines through those gnarly faces and bodies.”
Books: An Intoxicating 500-Year-Old Mystery. For decades, Cryptographers, scholars, and enthusiasts have tried to make sense of the Voynich Manuscript - an entirely unreadable 234 page document with strange, mystical illustrations of naked women and star maps presumably from the Medieval period. No one is certain if the document is a hoax or encoded. Medieval scholar Lisa Fagin Davis found that the document was written by five authors, was meant to be used like a manual and that someone may have spilled their drink on it. Subsequent research teams have figured out that the text does appear to be a language, though still an unknown language, rather than a code. Davis says of the manuscript, “Its an actual object, it exists in space and time, it has a history, it has physical characteristics, and because of that, it has a true story. We just don’t know what that true story is yet.”
Music: Australian psych/garage rock band King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard has a new album out! Flight b741 marks the band’s 26th (!!) studio album. The record has a punchy blues rock sound which reminds me of 1970s British and American rock bands. The band said they didn’t have a main concept or theme to this album and just wanted to have fun. Gizzard starts their North American tour this week with two three-hour marathon sets at Forest Hills Stadium. See you there!!
Podcasts: John Jeremiah Sullivan on Longform’s final podcast. It seems every month I include something about Sullivan’s writing (he’s one of my favorite writers) but after a friend suggested I check out the Longform podcast I found that their last episode was with Sullivan (I’m late to the mark with Longform). Since reading Pulphead I’ve been on a search to read everything Sullivan has written but podcast interviews with the writer are few and far between so I’m looking forward to diving into this one.
Science: My Synesthesia Transforms Speech into Text I ‘See’ in My Head. “My brain automatically transcribes spoken words into written ones in my mind’s eye. I ‘see’ subtitles that I can’t turn off.” Ticker taping is a form of synesthesia in which speech is transformed into visual words in a person’s brain. Not much is known about ticker taping but recently a few scientists have started studying the potential advantages and disadvantages of ticker taping. Scientists and researchers said that studying ticker taping and other forms of synesthesia can help us better understand how the brain works. Perhaps ticker taping is connected to dyslexia or can illuminate how the brain areas dedicated to speech, vision, and reading are related.