This is my contributions page on wikipedia. These are Wikipedia pages that have caught my interest lately:
- Cuisine of Lapland: The most valued berry of Lapland is cloudberry.
- Rodney Dangerfield: There are some pretty interesting bits in this entry. I like this old photo the best, plus this fact in the ‘homage’ section: Farrah Fawcett is sculpting a life-size bronze statue of Rodney.
- Charles Faulkner: I was trying to find Jorge Luis Borges’s essay called “The Fearful Sphere of Pascal,” because for some reason I thought it might help me to answer this comment. I looked around on google and on google books, but then I thought I’d check wikipedia to see if they had a link to electronic texts. Instead I found this at the bottom of Borges’s entry: Charles Faulkner – Studied personally with Borges. I followed the link to see who Charles Faulkner was, but…click on it yourself. I found another source that at least made me doubt this was a practical joke, but this is noltes to the bolties.
- Greek Fire:
- Medlar: I was trying to remember the name of this fruit for some time after I saw a still-life of it a couple summers ago in an art book. I remembered that it started with an ‘M’ and that when I looked it up in a dictionary it said it was an apple-like fruit that tasted horrible until it softened from rotting. Anyways, I was able to look it up on Wikipedia (starting at “fruit”). Apparantly it has a history in literature for being “used figuratively…as a symbol of prostitution or premature destitution.” I think D.H. Lawrence’s quote describing the fruit is my favorite: Wineskins of brown morbidity, autumnal excrementa … an exquisite odour of leave taking.
- Jaaniõhtu: I was working on the Benito story and was looking up to see if there was a holiday for the birth John the Baptist, and there is–in Estonia. It is actually the summer solstice festival as well, and then I realized that I just read about this in Bachelard’s Psychoanalysis of Fire, because of the traditional fire-related fertility festivals that Estonians celebrate on this day. Here is my favorite part of the article: Lovers go into the forest looking for the flower of the fern which is said to bloom only on that night.[1] The footnote goes on to clarify that ferns, of course, are seedless plants and thus never flower. Of course they are not really going into the woods for botany, but couldn’t they have picked a less counter-intuitive front than searching for a flower that won’t blossom, that is, in fact, seedless?
- Vladimir Nabokov [lepidoptery]: This past week I read Pale Fire, which was very enjoyable. I thought I’d check up on this guy, and it turns out he was also a pretty serious lepidopterist, or butterfly enthusiast. From the article: Nabokov never accepted that genetics or the counting of chromosomes could be a valid way to distinguish species of insects, and relied on the traditional (for lepidopterists) microscopic comparison of their genitalia. The Harvard Museum of Natural History, which now contains the Museum of Comparative Zoology, still possesses Nabokov’s “genitalia cabinet”, where the author stored his collection of male blue butterfly genitalia. “Nabokov was a serious taxonomist,” according to museum staff writer Nancy Pick. “He actually did quite a good job at distinguishing species that you would not think were different—by looking at their genitalia under a microscope six hours a day, seven days a week, until his eyesight was permanently impaired.”
