No part acts alone. The parts assist one another, and thus in the matter of gesture confirm one another; otherwise, there would be discord and lack of symmetry. ... Should any agent of the body make a gesture which the other parts of the body seem to deny, there is evident mental disagreement and physical awkwardness. The gesture will seem not suitable to the thought, although upon close discrimination the leading agent will be found to be responding correctly. Many an actor and public reader has been termed untrue and justly termed awkward because of a lack of unity in all the parts taken together.

From Florence Browne's edition of the New Popular Speaker and Writer, compiled and edited by Henry Davenport Northrop, which Miss Browne (of Manalona, Michigan) obtained May 14, 1902 and which she was good enough, one way or another, to put before me at a bookshop not so many years ago.

The image above is of an early class of pupils at the Franklin School of Methuchen, NJ, an area made famous by Thomas Edison's choice of it for the location of his famous research lab. You can see some of these same schoolchildren, all grown up in 1990, by clicking here.

When I was a child I thought that when politicians ran for office they were sent racing on foot around an enormous red, white and blue track, surrounded by all manner of people in the stands and the grassy bits between the track—winner takes all in a pure test of physical fitness. I was so enamoured of the idea that I often dreamed about the elder statesmen in their jogging shorts and tennis shoes, shouting fans all around, waving and yelling for their favorite candidates. I'm sure I'm not the only child who imagined this, it must be a common mistake.

"A child is nothing like a racing car...Souping up babies doesn’t work that way. The child is what she is. There is a certain irreducible if elusive core. Pushing, pulling, stretching, and shrinking will not really change it. There may be spectacular interim results. The baby may say the alphabet before she walks, master two-times or even ten-times table at three. In the long run, however, this forced precocity tends to be irrelevant..."
-Stella Chess (psychiatrist) and Jane Whitbread (writer), from Daughters, 1978

Patients with migraines know precisely when and how often and how long their headaches strike. They often come in with long lists. When you have a patient with lists, you have a patient with migraine.

-Dr Seymour Diamond, from an article in the 28 December 1979 Washington Post

The above image is from the U.S. National Library of Medicine's Images from the History of Medicine collection.

I couldn't be sadder to that Kurt Vonnegut has died. I don't have anything eloquent to say. I just feel like one of the last great American writers has gone, surly old windbag that he was.

Hear him speaking with NPR's Kurt Anderson here. Or read the obituary from the Guardian.

spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there) and
without breaking anything.

-excerpted from E. E. Cummings; poem, Spring is like a perhaps hand, from The Complete Poems: 1904-1962 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage.

The image above is a photograph of one of the moving rocks of Death Valley, which have provided something of a mystery for scientists.

What do I remember...

I remember blueberry bubble gum balls that turned my mouth blue and watching my parents play softball while playing 'Take Me Out to the Ballgame' on my little brown cassette player and playing kickball with the other kids on that same field and the lady next door who used to weave baskets and the babysitter who would shoot paper from rubber bands like my brother and the polar bear rug and playing Legos and me and my brother's make believe world of spies and getting hit in the head with a baseball bat and the candy shop and seeing my father jogging around the base while I was in day care and running around the dark closed up rooms of the officer's club while my parents had drinks with their friends. Sometimes the memories get mixed up with other memories from other places, from St. Louis or Florida, not from further up in Virginia, and I can't remember the names of any of the other kids that I played with, but I remember that birthday cake with the white frosting that my mom made that had crumbs from the chocolate cake mixed in with the frosting and I can remember the trees around the townhouse we lived in and long sidewalks and tall flag poles and cheese and fields, lots and lots of fields for playing games on.

The image above is a satellite image of Norfolk Naval Base, where I lived for a short time as a child with my family while my father, an Army man, attended a school or training to learn how to do I know not what. See also this new documentary on military brats.

Here's to finally discovering that the world really is a small as everyone else kept telling you...

It is surprising how many great men and women a small house will contain. I have had twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof, and yet we often parted without being aware that we had come very near to one another.
-Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist. Walden (1854)

The image above comes from the website of someone I used to know.

But what if your inner feelings and thoughts were brought to life, the facets of your character appearing before you and arguing out the case of each and every tough decision? Could you ignore what would otherwise be a purely internal monologue if your thoughts and feelings took shape in front of you?

The image above is taken from a performance by the Nederlands Dans Theatre.

"He speaks English in a rapid monotone, with lightly warped vowels; it's an ideal delivery system for oracular pronouncements."
This statement was made about the architect Rem Koolhaas in an article written about his attempt to renovate the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia, by Daniel Zalewski in the March 14, 2005 edition of The New Yorker.

For more info on the photo used above, please click here.