I like to explore the places where art and science, and other apparent opposites, intersect in my work, both the scientific work and the art.
I like cats. I have two now. They are much wiser and more reliable than me.
My father's parents.
Anything good; blues, jazz, rock.
Artists who make me smile, scowl, laugh or cry & want to sing along:
Morphine & Mark Sandman (miss him), Tori Amos, John Lennon, George Harrison - who wrote the most beautiful rock song (While My Guitar Gently Weeps)- Fiona Apple because she is strong, angry & frail, the percussionist Evelyn Glennie (look her up), the great Mr. B. B. King, & of course Coltrane and Monk - but they are damn hard to sing. Unless you're Carmen McRae (miss her, too).
Nova. Secrets of the Dead.
The Simpsons.
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Ahab's Wife, by Sena Jeter Naslund, is the best book I've ever read. The NY Times wrote, "Naslund, Ahab-like, has taken on an overwhelming quarry in pursuing Melville, but, true to her maternal, liberal philosophy, she does not harpoon the master so much as harness his force to her own. That Naslund is unstintingly reasonable, empathetic and kind should not, however, blind one to the fact that she is, in the most nonaggressive way, rewriting American history, revising American literature and critiquing traditional masculinity. On the froth and foam and rage of ''Moby-Dick'' Naslund lays a cool hand, as if to say: ''There, there. Such a fuss about a fish.''
Magazines: Bitch (you MUST read this magazine!), National Geographic, the Atlantic, The Economist, Poetry.
My father.
Besides the late Cdr., I admire Margaret Sanger, Dorothea Dix, Florence Nightingale, Clara Barton, and Walt Whitman -all nurses who did wonderful things. They are either not known as nurses (Whitman, Sanger) or their astonishing achievements are overlooked. Florence Nightingale was a statistician and the first woman inducted into the stuffy, misogynistic Royal Statistical Society. She reduced the hospital death rate in the Crimean War from 42 to 2 percent. She was one of the pioneers of the science of epidemiology. And people still think she was a nice girl from an upper class English family who died of syphilis (the latter is probably not true). Dorothea Dix revolutionized the treatment of mental illness in the United States around the turn of the 19th C. Margaret Sanger made birth control a matter of public debate and empowered women to consider that they ought to exert control over whether or not to become pregnant. Clara Barton is the founder of the American Red Cross, and you know Walt Whitman better as a poet than as a Civil War nurse.