...not that it's completely over -- not by a long shot. In fact, the hardest parts are probably still ahead.

But, having turned in a rough draft, and not having blogged in quite some time, a few (admittedly biocentric) thoughts to round out the evening:

1) Quantitative genetics, for all the slack it seems to pick up from my cellular and molecular-centric friends is a lot cooler and powerful than given credit. In fact, it's probably a much better way to start to think about the cellular and molecular stuff that they try to futz their way through using their pathways and "DNA."

2) "DNA" is best put in quotation marks (to symbolize a hypothetical object) as often as possible -- especially in the following contexts:

a) 'Sure, I'll do your PCRs, I'll even run your "DNA" out on the little gel-thingy's you got going here, but don't ask me to really believe in your evolution bullshoy."

b) 'So I'm about to extract the "DNA" from this tissue, where do you keep the rubber piping so I can mouth-pipette the phenol-chloroform?'

I'm sure many of you would be able to come up with many others

3) Although, in my mind, somewhat bizzare, it's really nice to have a near inbred population like the Hudderites around...thanks, Doc Ober.

4) Mendel was a lucky bastard (pardon my French) -- from www.mendelweb.org. In fact, there's some dispute as to whether Mendel didn't make up his data...the centimorgan distances, apparently, just don't seem to work out.

5) Culver, Erman, and Botany Pond are arguably three of the most beautiful places on campus to see the sun rise over.

6) People in various stages of make-out at two in the morning at Botany Pond should realize that there are people who are leaving work at that hour...people who like to sing out loud and will walk past them no matter their stage of undress.

Good, good. That's enough for now.

Have you ever heard these pieces? There are two; a complete piano trio in d minor, Opus 9, and then a freestanding piece in g minor, chillingly labeled "opus posthumous." Music for the dead, by one of their own. The g-minor trio consists in a lone movement, self-contained, as though it knew it would never come to completion. It feels elegiac in a way the complete d-minor trio does not: despite a few typical Rachmaninoff outbursts, it is not an angry piece, but spends all of fifteen minutes repeatedly asking why? why?

The first few bars of the g-minor piece were one of my favorite bowing exercises when I brought home my brand-new cello. Rocking back and forth between two strings, counting. Like breathing. Playing the cello in general is like breathing; to this day I regret giving up the instrument (however wise a decision that was, since I really wasn't any good at it). When played well, it is the most natural and comfortable and completely human sound ever to emerge from an inanimate object.

I'm not sure how well Rachmaninoff knew this; an unrepentant pianist himself, there's no question which instrument dominates pretty much everything he wrote. Later musicians have been bothered by this. They've attempted to rearrange the elegiac trios for piano and orchestra, to balance the dynamics a little more. But my recording is of Rachmaninoff's own arrangement, piano-violin-cello, and I don’t see a balance problem (unlike my other favorite piano trio, the Fauré, where the strings sometimes get lost altogether). It’s a good recording, too: the instruments could easily be the voices of people sitting around a samovar, shaking their heads, lamenting. Why?

The concept of an opus posthumous is particularly surreal to me as I look back through my Movable Type entry list: Draft, Draft, Draft. If I were mowed down by a bus tomorrow, each of these would be an opus posthumous. But as far as I can recall, none of them are actually *about* death. That's what makes the g-minor piece so eerie: it's a piece specifically about death, ignored until the composer's own passing. Irrelevant that he was a prolific 17-year-old conservatory student when he wrote it; it's all the more funereal given that it never joined his corpus while he was alive. I wonder why not. The liner notes claim he first performed it in 1892. What happened then? Whom was he grieving? Why did he put the piece away and forget about it? Why?

A likewise young and very upset Rachmaninoff wrote the d-minor trio to express his grief at the death of Tchaikovsky, but it is damn near impossible to imagine this piece anywhere near a funeral. The first movement starts off appropriately enough, a stentorian piano supporting the violin and cello as they take turns keening. But this lasts for all of three minutes. The piece then begins to perk up, subtly, a few pizzicati, a few upbeat key changes, and then WHAM, you're back in Rachmaninoff country. Not yet five minutes into the first movement of a composition about grief, and the guy's already got the piano hammering fortissimo while the poor cellist and violinist are sawing away at their instruments like furies. "Could you put on something more relaxing?" my husband complains.

There are some remarkably beautiful lyrical moments in the piece, but not a single one manages to preserve any sense of calm. Invariably, a lilting exchange between the violin and the cello will crescendo into a far busier, heavier, more agitated fight with each other and the piano. Rachmaninoff mourned his losses like I wish I could mine: not passively, not numbly, but intensely, furiously, firing forth his anguish like a shaken bottle of champagne. This is a piece about life, crazed with life, flailing around awash in life. I have never yet managed to get any work done while listening to it.

I imagine it must be quite a compliment to have someone compose a piece of such intensity on the occasion of your death. Still, at my own funeral I think I'd prefer the Barber Adagio for Strings. (If I have a vote, which at that point I probably won't.)

Professor Dennis Hutchinson, asked by a prospective student recently whether the University of Chicago really was "where fun comes to die," replied, "Yes, but it is a vigorously contemplative death."

Amber Taylor, In Favor of Thinking, The Little Professor, Pharyngula, Reflections in D Minor and probably plenty of others are playing yet another blogosphere literary game, this time marking out how many books on some list they have read. I'm not going to trouble anybody by playing along (I've read only 20 of them), but instead wish to note the list's bad tendency to list plenty of good authors, but without listing their best books.

Ibsen is on the list, but with A Doll's House rather than Enemy of the People. Kafka makes the list, but with Metamorphosis rather than Hunger Artist. London's Call of the Wild is chosen over the superior Seawolf, Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera is neglected for the overrated (but still quite excellent) 100 Years of Solitude. War & Peace instead of Anna Karenina; Animal Farm instead of 1984; A Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo & Juliet make the list with nary a trace of Shakespeare's greatest triumphs-- King Lear and Othello. It's quite amazing, really.

I haven't read enough Austen to know, but my sense is Pride and Prejudice was a good choice there and Gatsby was a good choice for Fitzgerald, but generally the best works by these authors are being neglected in favor of some more famous works, which is fine if the list is supposed to simply show how much one is in tune with popular highbrow literature, but not if it's supposed to imply good taste. Sad, really, since the last thing we need to do is encourage people to think that all there is of Ibsen is A Doll's House.

Here, for example, is Crescat Sententia's list of the 100 top novels (as created by a democratic process by the then-members). While it doesn't perfectly map my tastes, it's still a definite improvement, and future such blog-memes should consider using it instead.

This study (via Gnostical Turpitude) showing that poets have shorter lifespans gives new meaning to the old couplet of Henry David Thoreau:

My life has been the poem I would have writ

But I could not both live and utter it.