According to this piece in today's New York Times, Edgar Allen Poe's poem "Eureka," derided at publication, anticipated developments in twentieth century cosmology.

"Eighty years before 20th-century cosmologists hammered out the math, Poe, it turns out, came up with a rudimentary version of contemporary science's best guess for explaining how the universe began.

Departing from conventional wisdom of the day, which saw the universe as static and eternal, Poe insisted that it had exploded into being from a single "primordial particle" in "one instantaneous flash."

"From the one particle, as a center," he wrote, "let us suppose to be irradiated spherically in all directions to immeasurable but still to definite distances in the previously vacant space: a certain inexpressibly great yet limited number of unimaginably yet not infinitely minute atoms."

The language is vague and convoluted, and some details are wrong (Poe had no concept of relativity, and it makes no sense today to speak of the universe exploding into "previously vacant space"), but here, unmistakably, is a crude description of the Big Bang, a theory that didn't find mainstream approval until the 1960's."

Note: The physicist who "mainstreamed" the Big Bang, David Wilkinson, died this past September. His obituary is here
6:42:34 PM    

The earliest documented instance of crossdressing in cyberspace, circa 1899. This is an illustration from John Kendrick Bangs' The Enchanted Typewriter, a satirical novel which features a typewriter haunted, for the most part, by the demonic ghost of Johnson's secretary Boswell, Boswell, who comes up from Hades to do some typing for the various other authors and dignitaries in hell, draws the novel's narrator into a series of comic dialogues spoofing everything from the New Woman to Golf. The narrator chats with the typwriter directly, and the machine responds with a clicking of the keys that the narrator is able to dechipher as speech.

Somewhere around the middle of the novel, however, the narrator attempts to strike up a conversation with the machine/Boswell, only to find that the typewriter is haunted, for the moment, by a female ghost: Xanthippe, shrewish wife of Socrates (the plate is an illustration of the moment of discovery). The narrator finds this greatly disturbing, not the least because of Xanthippe's resemblance to a turn-of-the-century feminist, For some time after that, he avoids talking to the typewriter because he is not sure of its gender: he's realized that he might be tricked into talking with Xanthippe when it's Boswell he wants.
4:04:01 PM    

The Bananas. These made it into the New Yorker last week: if you read Elizabeth Kolbert's Talk of the Town piece and wondered what seventeen thousand bananas would look like piled up on Washington Street in Dumbo, Brooklyn, this is what they looked like. According to Kolbert, artist Douglas Fishbone "débuted the project in Cuenca, with twenty-five thousand bananas, and he did it a second time, in the port city of Guayaquil, with forty thousand bananas. (Ecuador is the world's leading banana exporter." Festival organized noted that this scaled-down version "comments on globalization while offering a free snack."

The climax of the installation -- the moment when art turned to snack -- happened late in the afternoon on October 19th. Within minutes, leather-clad Dumbogoers and neighborhood kids cleared the street of fruit, leaving a mess of peels and collateral damage.
3:36:38 PM    

Final Solutions, part one: my friend Belinda goes to the Republic of Georgia to write an article about animal welfare. This means that she spends some time touring around with an animal control officer, who complains about the overwhelming number of feral animals on the streets. Apparently, in Georgia they electrocute such animals and toss them into lime pits; when's there's a power outage, which is frequent, the simply toss the unelectrocuted animals into the lime pits. Belinda asks the animal control officer she's interviewing what he thinks might be the best solution to the animal problems in the city. He gets a gleam in his eyes, and tells her. "We must kill them all. All of them. All the animals. Then, we can make a fresh start."
1:14:08 PM    

Still more performance from the Dumbo Arts Festival, Oct 18-20. In "Secret Confession Box," organized by Laura Barnett, two women dressed in white circulated with clipboards, urging spectators to write down their secrets on sheets of translucent paper. A third woman rearranged the sheets in a storefront, then tacked them to the window. If you waited, your secret would be posted, and you then join the other confessors who looked quickly at their own secret and then away, to preserve their anonymity.

Most of the secrets related, unsurprisingly, to infidelity. But several (perhaps due to inspiration?) concerned pets: pets who died unmourned, pets who lived unloved. Somehow, those confessions seemed more disturbing.
12:47:59 PM    

A hairdresser identified only as "Nelson" pared down haircutting to its sadistic bones at the Dumbo Arts Festival, in a performance called "Electric Chaircut." Nelson hooked up some electric shears to a feedback device on his backpack, and proceeded to hack into the hair of volunteers willing to be bound and gagged for the occasion. This woman lost what seemed like a third of her hair over a ten-minute period, sheared off randomly as Nelson circled around her.
12:27:44 PM