in statu nascendi

This month's issue of Nachrichten aus der Chemie is a special issue on science communication and for the occasion I was asked to observe myself during my writing process and do a piece about how I write. I guess for the future AI apocalypse and beyond this may turn out to be an archaeologically relevant thing as evidence that in the early 21s century humans were still able to write stuff.

Anyhow. I followed the process of my writing the feature on migrations and movements across the ancient Mediterranean, which appeared in Current Biology in July. I called the meta-piece "in statu nascendi" which of course is chemical lingo (and Latin) for something in the process of being born, but the journal chose the title:

Vom Gedanken zur Geschichte (From the thought to the story)

which is also nice, especially in its emphasis on thought, which may soon disappear ...

This appears on page of the September issue, so the citation is

Nachrichten aus der Chemie 2025, 73, issue 9, 74-76.

At the back of the same issue I also have one of my tongue in cheek columns, this time making fun of the epidemic of tripartite titles. The main publisher of my German books used these a lot, and I found many of them annoying, but a recent investigation of citations of published papers seems to suggest these titles work. So that fits in with the communications special as well, in a tongue-in-cheek way. The title is also tripartite (and alliterated) of course:

Titel, Thesen, Tintenkleckse

Nachrichten aus der Chemie 2025, 73, issue 9, 112.

PS I haven't been very good at tracking my publications in German either here or on the website, but there should be around 10-12 each year in Nachrichten, half and half of the serious and not so serious type. This communications special piece was out of the normal sequence.

27 missing movies

Films not shown, special edition

After seeing Oxana at the cinema, I also watched the documentary I am Femen on YouTube (in Germany, it doesn't seem to work in the UK). After that the youtube bots launched an effort to show me all sorts of former Soviet Union / Eastern European films with age restriction, so I am trying to keep track of the interesting things I am discovering here. (Films from 2021 onwards I will also add to Films not shown.)

Losing innocence in Alma Ata (Теряя невинность в Алма-Ате) - Kazakhstan 2010. The first Kazakh film I've ever seen, though most of the dialogue is in Russian. From female director Zhanna Issabayeva (Жанна Исабаева) this is a collection of 13 stories on sexual beginnings, all very cute and also educational, as I knew nothing about that part of the world.

Metronom - slightly troubling Romanian film from 2022 (also added to my films not shown list for the 2020s) about teenagers in 1970s Bucharest discovering Western pop music and getting in trouble for it. I watched it on this YouTube channel, which specialises on Romanian films.

School of Senses - Érzékek iskolája Hungarian film from 1996, the colours look more like 1980s to me, which would put me off normally, but it does have visual poetry and a very watchable female lead (never mind the horrid bloke).

Лето, или 27 потерянных поцелуев (27 missing kisses) - Georgia 2000, Nana Dzhordzhadze, starring Nutsa Kukhianidze Released in Germany in June 2001 but not in the UK. Here is a version dubbed in German which I don't normally approve of but Georgian is really a language I know nothing about! (Apparently, as I just found out, it is part of the Kartvelian family which has no known relation to any other language family.)

The film may well be my favourite in this list so far. The protagonist is a blatant manic pixie dream girl, but the setting in post-Soviet Georgia offers striking visuals from the crumbling factory to the derelict ship and the old village with its rarely used cinema, so there's plenty of cinematic interest even if you have seen too many manic pixies in your life. Watch out for Pierre Richard.

A few days after watching the German copy, I watched it again in the Russian version (with the original soundtrack but the Georgian and French dialogue overdubbed) which revealed that our manic pixie speaks Georgian to her young friend but Russian to most other people and to herself. (The first version which Youtube found for me was dubbed into Czech, so I've now put the Russian version at the top, as it's the closest to the original version I could find.)

I learned that manic pixies always leave and enter the house through the windows, preferably in their night gown.

As this entry goes live, I am still discovering new stuff in this rabbit hole, so watch this space (although I may not reach the 27 movies of the title). Here are a few that I haven't watched yet:

Plemya - Ukraine 2014 - a film entirely in Ukrainian sign language ...

Do svidaniya mama - Russia 2014, Svetlana Proskurina

45m2 - Greece, 2010, Stratos Tzitzis - does Greece count as Eastern Europe?

Bonded parallels - Armenia 2009, Hovhannes Galstyan

Intimnuye mesta (Intimate parts) - Russia 2013, Natasha Merkulova / Alexey Chupov

the algorithms also came up with one movie I've actually seen when it was new:

Rouge baiser (1995) (where the rouge is an allusion to communist activities).