magazines

Can I just say I’m quite enjoying the summer issue of Geist? Sure, I didn’t even make the shortlist for their postcard story contest, and their crossword puzzle hurts my brain every time, but there’s a lot of intriguing stuff inside the issue, even for a non-Canadian like myself.

Like, for instance, this article about Banff, which I know only from Heather‘s descriptive recountings. In it, Stephen Osborne writes:

Presenters adopted a par­tic­u­lar style when dis­cussing mat­ters of the­ory and tech­nique: voices dropped from con­ver­sa­tional reg­is­ters into flat­tened monot­o­nes, the rate of deliv­ery accel­er­ated and the lan­guage tended to thicken under the weight of too much jar­gon. During one such pre­sen­ta­tion, a vol­un­teer from the book table said to me, you know, none of us under­stand a thing of what these peo­ple are say­ing. I assured her that under­stand­ing was not required in the avant-garde.

The author of Eunoia described a plan to embed or implant a poem en­coded in the lan­guage of recom­bi­nant DNA into the bac­terium Deinococcus radio­du­rans, a name that he pro­nounced fiercely, fre­quently and at daunt­ing speed. He had taught him­self genet­ics, he said, and later he said that he was a self-taught geneti­cist. The bac­terium in ques­tion, which he referred to in the diminutive as radio­durans, is expected to out­last the solar sys­tem, the galaxy and what­ever else there is to out­last, with the result that the poem encoded within its DNA — which, I recall him say­ing, would at some point dur­ing its five-billion-year dura­tion gen­er­ate a new poem, also in the lan­guage of DNA — would be the old­est poem in the universe.