The Smallest Page on the Web
"Make your own hay culture." It sounds like—what, a rallying cry for
back-to-the-land populism? A slogan to encourage multiply-pierced
24-year-olds to found self-sufficient farming communes in upstate New
York? Well, it is all about that do-it-yourself spirit, sure, but
it actually has more to do with scum.
Wim van Egmond likes scum. Pond scum, to be exact. He wants you to like
it too, so he made a web page about it. And if you decide you like it as
much as he does, you'll want to make your own hay culture, which involves
boiling dry grass, waiting for bacteria to show up, and then adding pond
scum. You can't, after all, make pond scum without pond scum.
"The Smallest Page on the Web," as his fan page is called, is actually
about the things that live in pond scum. Small things. Microscopic
things. Van Egmond isn't a scientist; he's an artist whose
imagination was captured by these tiny organisms. And no wonder. His
photos are gorgeous, well-composed glimpses into a world where
everything is green and blue and clear and beautifully formed, a world
whose seedy, disreputable appearance to the naked eye conceals
mathematical precision. If Gourmet magazine is food porn, this is
bioporn.
It's not surprising that these photos are so exquisite. What you
might not have expected, however, is that the words that describe
these organisms are every bit the equal of their visual analogues.
The names themselves—diatoms, rotifers, ciliates, desmids—are both
delicately latinate or Greek-derived and appealingly concise. And van
Egmond's straightforward prose knows when to sit back and let the
phenomena he's describing take over, but also isn't afraid to offer
the occasional metaphor or simile as small and economical as its
subject. A diatom, we're told, is a "glass house of silica consisting
of two valves that fit into each other like a little pill box." As
for sun animalcules (another odd and vivid name), some of their
"relatives...that live in marine waters make beautiful glass skeletons
from which the axopods protrude."
In addition to the clear prose and fashion-mag-quality photos (What
would such a magazine be called? Cosmosis? OrganElle?), The Smallest
Page on the Web also provides ample links to articles in Micscape, a
British magazine for microscopy enthusiasts to which van Egmond
contributes. Here you can find articles on "The Fastest Contraction
in the Microworld," "The Cell From Hell," and "Stars of the Marshes."
And it also answers the question that should be on your mind right
now, namely, how fast is an amoeba? It should be enough to make any
microorganism swell with pride, or at least cytoplasm.
And if not? Well, diatoms who are glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
— Julia Lipman (julia@flakmag.com)
