Here we have a grab bag of artsy bits and bobs for your mid-week delectation. First up, if you live in New York, you should hurry along to the loveliest space in the city, Grand Central Terminal’s Vanderbilt Hall, to check out this galloping wonder:
http://vimeo.com/58803818#at=0
Dancing, noise-making horses in Vanderbilt Hall! Artist Nick Cave (this guy, not this one) creates soundsuits, full-body costumes that make music when you wriggle about. His first soundsuits were made out of twigs:
And then he moved on to space costumes and furry friends:
Here’s Cave talking about how the soundsuits came to be:
These look so joyous and silly, and are quite possibly the best thing you could encounter on your lunch-break stroll through Grand Central. Be sure to take a friend, or befriend a stranger, so you can trade secrets (or proposals) at the whispering gallery in front of the Oyster Bar.
Next up: the Northern Lights. Karl Ove Knausgaard has written a short and lovely essay to accompany Simon Norfolk’s photo series, “The Magical Realism of Norwegian Nights”:
Oh, that Arctic light, how concisely it delineates the world, with what unprecedented clarity: the sharp, rugged mountains against the clear blue sky, the green of the slopes, the small boats chugging in or out of the harbor, and onboard, the huge codfish from the depths, with their grayish-white skin and yellow eyes staring vacantly, or on the drying racks, where they hung by the thousands, slowly shriveling for later shipment to the southern lands. Everything was as sharp as a knife.
We love Knausgaard, and Simon Norfolk is well worth checking out, too. He’s best known for his eerie photographs of war zones and supercomputers: in this interview, he describes war photography as documenting “the military sublime.”
And finally, from Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything (a book my father has read six times, and can quote from at length, which is what makes Christmas dinner such a special occasion in our household), a few words on the astonishing atom:
Atoms really get around. Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so anatomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms—up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested—probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name. (The personages have to be historical, apparently, as it takes the atoms some decades to become thoroughly redistributed; however much you may wish it, you are not yet one with Elvis.)
I thought the Kindle might help—I’ll trick myself into reading by putting my book on a tiny screen!—but the Kindle is such an appalling device that mostly I just end up ranting instead of reading. I know, I know, a bricks-and-mortar bookstore dissing the Kindle—quelle surprise! But seriously, what a daft piece of technology. It looks like it was ripped from the dashboard of a 1982 Lada. The user interface was designed with someone other than a human being in mind (an excitable squirrel, perhaps?); it’s awkward to hold in bed, where all the best reading is done; and even with the font set at its tiniest size, it takes about three seconds to read a single page, meaning that every three seconds you have to jab at that dim little screen and hope the very next page comes up. Sometimes the very next page does come up; sometimes you jab a little too far to the left and the previous page comes up—ah, previous page, what happy memories of three seconds ago!—and sometimes the Kindle gets all whimsical and skips gleefully to an entirely random page, at which point you realize it was never intended to be used as an e-reader, but rather was designed to be a challenging electronic game called Find My Page! You can try to find your page by selecting “Go To” and then the chapter, but this is no help if you don’t remember the name of the chapter you were just reading, or if the chapters are hundreds of pages long. Or you can “go to” a Loc (location) in your book, but alas this is impossible, because you don’t know your location. Why would you? It’s an entirely meaningless number; a long book has thousands of locations; and memorizing the location at the bottom of each tiny, stupid page would take longer than reading the tiny, stupid page itself. So you’re screwed! Silly you! Pick a location at random, go back, pick another one, and now get ready to jab at that tiny, stupid screen eighty-three times until you reach the very next page. See? Ranting, not reading.
A few years ago, my friend 
I am talking, of course, about Coronation Street, the world’s greatest television program, and a show as mysterious to most Americans as cricket and Vegemite. I’ve been trying to introduce my boyfriend to the many joys of the Street, which mostly involves him asking me a series of urgent questions: “But why did that man blow up that van? Why are they pretending the tortoise is alive? Why is that blonde woman hiding all those onions? Is that her sister or her mother? What does ee-oop mean? What does any of it mean?!”
The best characters on the show are stong-willed women. Ask a long-time fan to list the most iconic residents of Weatherfield, and you’re going to hear about a bunch of stroppy women with gloriously British names: Ena Sharples, Elsie Tanner, Hilda Ogden (pictured at right and above in her rollers), Bet Lynch, Blanche Hunt.
You can enjoy hating Gail (née Potter; currently McIntyre; and previously Tilsley, Platt, and Hillman). Everyone hates Gail. Poor Gail. Husband #3 tried to kill her and her children by driving them into a canal; husband #4 drowned while attempting to fake his own death by drowning, the great twit. (Gail was charged with his murder, naturally.)
It’s strange that all birds don’t fly in the same way. After all, the air’s just the same at the same place and the same time. I’ve heard that the wings of aeroplanes all conform to the same formula, whereas birds each conform to a formula of their own. It has undeniably required more than a little ingenuity to equip so many birds each with their own formula, and no expense spared, either. Nevertheless, there has perhaps never been a bird that flies as correctly as an aeroplane; yet all birds fly better than aeroplanes if they can fly at all. All birds are perhaps a little wrong, because an absolute once-and-for-all formula for a bird has never been found, just as all novels are bad because the correct formula for a novel has never been found.
The second time I cried in an art gallery, it was at the Whitney in 2010, and I was with my roommates. We’d gone to see something else—three young men dressed like vagrants, playing harps and shouting, maybe?—and after we’d had enough of that, we wandered through the rooms until we came across 
