To the Throat // The Age of Men is Over (2018) // Feminazgul
https://feminazgul.bandcamp.com/album/the-age-of-men-is-over?t=1

The Man-Moth
by Elizabeth Bishop
—Man-Moth: a newspaper misprint for “mammoth”
Here, above,
cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight.
The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,
and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon.
He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties,
feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold,
of a temperature impossible to record in thermometers.
          But when the Man-Moth
pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface,
the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges
from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks
and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings.
He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky,
proving the sky quite useless for protection.
He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb.
          Up the façades,
his shadow dragging like a photographer’s cloth behind him
he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage
to push his small head through that round clean opening
and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light.
(Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.)
But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although
he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt.
          Then he returns
to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits,
he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains
fast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly.
The Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way
and the trains starts at once at its full, terrible speed,
without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort.
He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards.
          Each night he must
be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams.
Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie
his rushing brain. He does not dare look out the window,
for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison,
runs there beside him. He regards it as a disease
he has inherited the susceptibility to. He has to keep
his hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers.
          If you catch him,
hold a flashlight up to his eye. It’s all dark pupil,
an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens
as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids
one tear, his only possession, like the bee’s sting, slips.
Slyly he palms it, and if you’re not paying attention
he’ll swallow it. However, if you watch, he’ll hand it over,
cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.

our new wall art :) 

GOLGATHA IN MY FATHER’S GARAGE
by Blaike Marshall
I dreamt I crucified my father in the garage.
Galvanized flesh to oak, a nail for the bottle
of pills taken all at once. Another for the son
she decided to keep, the rest for the days
we don’t discuss. The twin beams
conjoined at the torso, taller than I would ever
remember him, sang psalms that flipped
the flow of the Nile; waters running
red as always, with blood or wine, outlining
the delta in his palms. The air felt like the coast
before the hurricane, or an air after streets
have burned. And if a veil was torn, I didn’t hear it.
Resting in the plunging lump of his narrow neck—
an apology to me or himself, something we have
never shared. Between his outstretched arms hung
an air that felt like the only air I would breathe
from there on, an air that was always his.

 
Sugar // Trophy (2005) // Made Out Of Babies
https://open.spotify.com/track/1C61pWO5nKbwe3Ndi1OzlF?si=vcLQIAuNQzSt0fbVaqEVXQ

current mood: okay!
current music: …an invocation by faetooth
current beverage: junmai sake and sapporo
current activity: about to watch an episode of twin peaks!
goal for today: make progress on my bryozoan lab ✓
i’m looking forward to… a nice night with alison :)
i’m feeling grateful for… the katmai bears! i’m so excited for the cameras to go online
notes: had to really fight to have a good day today but i managed it!

 
rapakivi (left) and antirapakivi (right) in polished granite. the right picture actually has three large examples (and at least one smaller one); this granite has more antirapakivi than rapakivi. the alkali feldspar in this case is orthoclase!

 
my friend victor asked me to make cover art for his new EP and it’s finally out so i can tell you guys about it! also LISTEN TO ITTTTTT if you’re at ALL into techno, he’s amazingggg (plus deception features glial cells)—it’s on spotify, bandcamp, and soundcloud. you can follow victor on insta @/victor_trumpets ^_^ now see me talk about my art
about the cover art: i took a nepheline syenite thin section and put it in XPL to bring out its interference colors, then overlayed the albite twinning from a labradorite slide (so my thanks to my school’s mineral collection!)—this was all done by tracing and editing pictures taken with a leica xpl microscope in procreate. i played around with color and orientation for a while with a lot of input from victor until we landed on this! i’m happy with it and the part i think is cool and the reason i was so excited to tell you guys about it is that i basically made a frankenstein mineral—this is something beautiful, made up of two real minerals, that couldn’t occur in nature. it’s taking the art of the rocks i’m looking at and creating my own!
side note: i knowwwww the text isn’t lined up perfectly and it’s driving me CRAZY i sent a second file with it fixed but it’s off by a single pixel so i don’t think he spotted the difference T_T i’m still really happy with how it turned out though!!

one of the talks today was about the end-Permian extinction (the biggest mass extinction by FAR) and while the extinction itself is super interesting it made me curious about the stages of reef recovery in the Triassic. here’s a paper i’m reading (not finished with yet) about it: https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/article/51/11/1011/627616/Prolonged-and-gradual-recovery-of-metazoan-algal

the paleo event was super fun! i’m not going back for the third day since lectures were only yesterday and today. i learned a lot, filled out gaps in things i already knew some about, and got to practice the art of interpreting others’ research (not so simple as you’d think!). i also got to hang out with some other members of the geoscience department at the department’s booth in the vendor tent, which meant getting super sweaty but also a lot of fun conversations and asserting the supremacy of invertebrate paleo over vertebrate paleo (the event was very cretaceous-vertebrate-heavy). really good two days but now i’m super tired!