What’s Up With The Title?

In 17th century England, one theory about bees was that they offered a model, not just for an ideal government and work ethic, but also for an ideal body.

The idea was simple: because they went out and gathered things, ingested them, and then, instead of turning everything they took in into shit, they produced honey. You could feed them honey, diluted three-fourths, and they would make more honey. They were a farmer’s fantasy, small agricultural perpetual motion machines.

Their ability to do that stemmed from their innocence—unlike humankind, they hadn’t fallen. They redefined purity, then: instead of understanding purity as a cloistered lack of experience, bees produced purity out of their wide experience of the world. They made honey out of the stuff other people turned into crap in their fallen digestive systems.

It’s the ultimate fantasy, even more so now that there’s an internet. We can stay uncorrupted no matter what we come into contact with, and we can take everything we read, everything we see, and make it—and ourselves—better.

So this is where I work at being a seventeenth-century bee. My success rate is decent–I’m at least as good at what I do as the average alchemist or investment banker.

About Me

I’m a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley and I write for a few other places. For some of those, see “Writings Around the Web.” My e-mail is lililoof@gmail.com. On Twitter, I’m @millicentsomer.

About This Blog

It’s broken up into sections–under the banner, you can browse stuff by subject. Some of those subjects: the Occupy movement, Chile, Milton and early modern science and sexuality, contemporary fiction and movies, cognitive science, feminism, and photos.

(Mom, I hope this explanation makes you feel a little better about the name of this blog.)