One fish

Postcards from the edge of consciousness - Sensory deprivation goes from CIA torture manuals to a yoga studio near you >nautilus

Research suggests that something rather remarkable happens when sensory stimulus from the external world is reduced to nearly nothing. REST, or Restricted Environmental Stimulation Therapy, as floating and the related dry chamber methods are known to researchers, has been shown to slow the heartbeat, reduce blood pressure, and release muscle tension.

But the sensory experience of floating is like nothing else. The only sounds come from inside the body: the whooshing rush of each breath filling then escaping the lungs, the echoing thump of the heart in the chest. At some point (has it been five minutes? 10 minutes?), I realize I can’t tell if my eyes are open or closed. When I twitch my eyelids to check, the sound of the ensuing blink is a resonant boom. A rumbling begins somewhere behind my right ear, as if a truck is coming around the curve of my head, and as it thunders past, I realize an air bubble has been loosed from my hair. There are subtler noises as well, a regular swish like the hem of a woman’s dress brushing a marble floor—my blood circulating.

Two fish

Three artists, one love story - When Margaret Kilgallen died, Clare Rojas married her husband, adopted her daughter, and inherited an imposing artistic legacy. >the new yorker

Kilgallen, a book conservator at the San Francisco Public Library, drew upon old typography, hand-lettered signs, and the gritty urban environment of the Mission, where she lived and worked, to evoke a wistful, rough-edged West Coast landscape.

Rojas kicks herself now for how naïve she was, underestimating the power of Kilgallen’s legacy. “For years, I’d paint something and show it to my mom or Barry, and say, ‘Does this look like Margaret’s work? Is there anything of her in this?’ If there was any inkling, the way they’d squint their eye, I would get rid of it. Which really got in the way of my narrative, if I wanted to paint a woman. Which was what my work was all about.”

Red fish

Perfect Compromise - Welcome to the nerve-wracking reality of being Finland. >postcards from harpers

Welcome to the nerve-wracking reality of being Finland. To a casual visitor, it seems like yet another Western European country, a placid paradise with its abundance of bicycles, its obsession with its own mid-twentieth-century design, and stores that close punctually at six in the evening. The Finns feel otherwise. When they go to neighboring Sweden, they say they are “going to Europe.” As it happens, neither country is a member of NATO, but only Finland has a long land border with Russia—and a living memory of having been invaded by the Soviet Union.

Several of my Helsinki acquaintances actually begged me not to interview Bäckman. When I asked why they continued to include him in events and panels, a publishing friend told me that there was a Finnish saying that explained the phenomenon, although she apologized for using it: “You need color in your vomit.”

“What is a greater Russia?” I asked. “Well, it is a bit early to say,” said Bäckman, and then he got that bursting-with-happiness look again. “There is the geographic concept of Russia, but there is also Russia in people’s hearts, and that’s a broader concept. You could say that, in a way, we are a part of Russia already.”

Blue fish

The boys who loved birds - In 1989, the man in front of me hatched a plan to transform the Iron Curtain into an eco-corridor >the big roundtable

To get the story right I would have to follow a stranger into a minefield. Still, something about the man put me at ease. With his dimpled cheeks, olive vest, and soft leather shoes, Kai Frobel looked like a teddy bear on safari. Placing one foot in front of the other, and keeping several paces between us, just in case, I followed him into the former wasteland.

Years later, Kai would discover that the birds nested near a tunnel that the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police, used to smuggle spies into the West. “The West German border police knew this tunnel, and every time I went there I had on a green parka, binoculars, camera, and gum boots—looking like a soldier spy,” he says with a laugh. “They thought I had some connection to East German soldiers.”

Apart from rooks and spies, the only thing that actually crossed the border with any regularity was East German trash.

Review fish

Gary Rivlin’s ‘Katrina: After the Flood’ >nyt

Even so the local economy is thriving, poverty rates are lower than before the storm, graduation rates are higher, and after a flirtation with bankruptcy the city has a budget surplus. New Orleans swarms with young people, many of whom are rising to positions of influence in public life. In his recent State of the City speech, Landrieu sounded triumphant: “We are not just rebuilding the city that we once were, but are creating the city that we always should have been.” New Orleans has always been a place where utopian fantasies and dystopian realities mingle harmoniously. May New Orleans always remain so. Or at least may it always remain.

Funny fish

garfield minus garfield

letsdoit fish (oc writing)

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