Merton & Barber on Serendipity

Today’s “word book” is Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber’s The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A study in sociological semantics and the sociology of science (2004), a true gem of a book and one of the few on my shelves that is concerned with a single word and its connections. (The F Word is […]

snow day serendipity

A posting by Mark Liberman at LanguageLog about the Psychoacoustics Lab at Harvard nudged the memory cells and set off a train of associations. The PAL was located in the basement of Memorial Hall (arguably Harvard’s ghastliest building, though there are many claimants to that title), right across Quincy Street from the house where I […]

The Blue Ship Tea Room, et seq.

Last night’s evening woolgathering on the day’s activities and discoveries (which is usually an hour or so after 9, accompanied by something tasty in the liquid line) found me reminiscing about the Blue Ship Tea Room, an uber-funky restaurant on Boston’s T Wharf in the 1940s and 1950s, which I visited with my parents on […]

Georges Perec provokes

Seeking a Question for tomorrow night’s Convivium, and being these days much engaged with books and with the computer keyboard, I let Serendipity take its well-known course and picked up a book that I had bought some years ago and read perhaps a third of. Always meant to get back to it: Georges Perec Life […]

apprehensive Cucurbita pepo

Here’s one of those bits of visual serendipity that keeps me barreling down the figurative mountain of photographic wonderment. Ever on the lookout for interesting patterns in rocks, and especially for little faces peering up at me, I collected this one a few days ago: I wish I understood better the geological processes of formation […]

Photography in time and space: technologies of memory

Among the axes of my engagement with photography are projects that work with collections of purchased studio portraits (Abandoned Ancestors and Bluenose Physiognomy) and with my own images of cemetery memorials. These efforts mostly deal with strangers who have departed from the living world, and so I keep an ear to the ground for material […]

links for 2007-11-19

CogDogBlog on Unknown Flowers and The Most Amazing Story of Web Serendipity this one warms the cockles and reminds us of the wonder that we’re participants in (tags: whoa writing webstuff)

Incorrectitude

Good Old Serendipity (in the form of the 11 Sept 2007 iteration of WFMU’s Antique Phonograph program) brought me to Rosetta and Vivian Duncan, and some googlement ensued: Wikipedia articlefrom vaudeville.orgMidnight Place articleI’m Sailing On a Sunbeam (1929, via YouTube)…and Mean Cicero Blues from Jeff Cohen’s delirious Vitaphone Varieties blog What caught the Old Ear […]

links for 2007-04-20

www.interstitiallibrary.com “The Interstitial Library’s Circulating Collection is located at no fixed site. Its vast holdings are dispersed throughout private collections, used bookstores, other libraries, thrift stores, garbage dumps, attics, garages, hollow trees, sunken ships, th (tags: ephemera negentropy) Serendipity, Inversion, Idiosyncratic Categories and Junk: Tools for KM? Uncyclopedia and Interstitial Library and Borges …Everything is […]

Grand jeté

The Glossary of Ballet may turn out to be a fruitful source of imagery. Patrick Lambe is really onto something over at Green Chameleon, and it fits remarkably with my Pirouettes thread. Today’s post points to and quotes wittily from The Interstitial Library and Uncyclopedia, and I’ll reproduce a couple of bits here to tempt […]