January 2009
43 posts
Obama's laid-back first week →
“I think Girl Scout cookies should be a smaller box and a bigger donation. ...”
– Harriet of West Chester, in Sound Off, a section of Daily Local News, the local newspaper in my hometown of Downingtown, Pennsylvania
Simic on DC
from this:
[Simic’s] war-torn beginnings have influenced much of his poetry and indeed his political views.
“I got invitations to the White House, but I didn’t go,”
The poet laureate has an office with a parlour overlooking the Capitol and from there he formed numerous opinions of the national political culture. “Washington is the capital of a corrupt empire fighting two hopeless wars...
My Google Reader Shared Items →
In case anyone’s wondering why the frequency of my posts to this Tumblr has dropped off, I put a lot of the content on my Google Reader shared items feed. You can subscribe to that as well if you’re hankering to keep tabs on what I’ve seen and liked on the Internet.
What Is Postmodernism? -Bruce Ellis Benson →
Dr. Benson describes postmodernism in 1,000 words. I have night classes with him Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights this semester on this topic. Some of the comments on this article are worth glancing at (link at the bottom of that page). Also, Dr. Benson is good friends with Brian McLaren.
Digg comment on abortion
in reference to this article:
I like how social conservatives get all riled up about abortion. They call themselves pro life. Save that fetus they say. You’re a murder they think. But they also don’t like teaching contraceptives. Or funding sex education in schools. Or education in general. But save the fetus if it does happen. And then when the baby is born to a 15 year old mother...
CollegeHumor: Why You Should Always Log Out →
Secrets of Stradivarius & Guarneri Violins... →
A Digg commenter had this to add:
I attended a lecture by Nagavary about his theories and techniques, followed by a concert of music played on both a Strad and on one of his violins. The audience all thought his instrument sounded at least as good if not better than that particular specimen of Stradivarius. Another secret of Stradivarius (or rather, all thoroughly played old violins) is humidity...
Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov →
Bonus Clerihew
I’m withholding this one from my blog for now.
Richard Cheney, slick and brainy. Get out quick. You’re a Dick.
Matrix Cat Fight →
Just watch.
“Kennedy loved a fine cigar — so much, in fact, that he once called his...”
– America’s 10 Unhealthiest Presidents
Guy Designs Cool Mirrors Using Math →
Including a non-reversing mirror! Also car mirrors with no blind spots or distortion.
The Curious Case of Forrest Gump →
“Benjamin Button was great. I also enjoyed it 15 years ago when they called it Forrest Gump.”
Bush Drops Fake Cowboy Shtick →
Bush sells the ‘ranch’ as soon as his presidency ends and gets a house in a posh Dallas neighborhood. That may be the thing he did best: convincing America that the son of President George H. W. Bush was down-to-earth, just one of the guys.
Bow and Literacy →
A chimpanzee that can not only spell, but understand the connection between phonemes and spelling AND intuit grammatical rules. He expresses his thoughts, and often tells lies. This is astounding.
“The passion for playing chess is one of the most unaccountable in the world. It...”
– H. G. Wells
“All I want to do, ever, is just play chess.”
– Bobby Fischer
Wiki: Arrested Development: intertextuality and...
Intertextuality and reflexivity
Scene referring to Burger King and product placement: Tobias: “It’s a wonderful restaurant!” Narrator: “It sure is!”[8] The show is highly intertextual and reflexive, features commonly associated with postmodernism. For example, Arrested Development often alludes to the past work of its cast and crew through the restaging of familiar...
Wiki: Sit Down, Shut Up →
Animated TV show in the works from Mitch Hurwitz with voices from Will Arnett, Jason Bateman, Henry Winkler, et al. Quick video from those three here.
David Cross: Why Was Arrested Development... →
Bushisms: Put "Miss Him" →
Distance
The texts are insistent: it takes two points to make a distance. The cubit, for instance, is nothing till you use it. Then it is rigid and bracelike; it has actual strength. Something metal runs through every length— the very armature of love, perhaps. Only distance lets distance collapse.
- Kay Ryan
Sonnet to Spring
The brown, unpleasant, aggressively ribbed and unpliant leaves of the loquat, shaped like bark canoes that something squashed flat, litter the spring cement. A fat-cheeked whim of air— a French vent or some similar affair— with enough choices in the front yard for a blossomy puff worthy of Fragonard, instead expends its single breath beneath one leathery leaf of loquat which flops over...
Bad Patch
It is not comical like grease with its brief release from traction where a Model T spins off and liberates a crate of chickens to the cooking pots of poor Italians. It was not witnessed. There was no vehicle. It is too late to call for sets, hire on people.
- Kay Ryan
The Cabinet of Curiosities
It’s hard for minor monsters born with more of one thing than others— the curse of double vision in a single head, or double ears. If they are people their careers are always troubled— self-accused, God-hobbled— the spilling cup they took for a blessing— their lives spent mopping up, apologizing.
- Kay Ryan
Losses
Most losses add something— a new socket or silence, a gap in a personal archipelago of islands. We have that difference to visit—itself a going-on of sorts. But there are other losses so far beyond report that they leave holes in holes only like the ends of the long and lonely lives of castaways thought dead but not.
- Kay Ryan
Hope
What’s the use of something as unstable and diffuse as hope— the almost-twin of making-do, the isotope of going on: what isn’t in the envelope just before it isn’t: the always tabled righting of the present.
- Kay Ryan
A Cat/A Future
A cat can draw the blinds behind her eyes whenever she decides. Nothing alters in the stare itself but she’s not there. Likewise a future can occlude: still sitting there, doing nothing rude.
- Kay Ryan
Silence
Silence is not snow. It cannot grow deeper. A thousand years of it are thinner than paper. So we must have it all wrong when we feel trapped like mastodons.
- Kay Ryan
Learning
Whatever must be learned is always on the bottom, as with the law of drawers and the necessary item. It isn’t pleasant, whatever they tell children, to turn out on the floor the folded things in them.
- Kay Ryan
Why Isn't It All More Marked
Why isn’t it all more marked, why isn’t every wall graffitied, every park tree stripped like the stark limbs in the house of the chimpanzees? Why is there bark left? Why do people cling to their shortening shrifts like rafts? So silent. Not why people are; why not more violent? We must be so absorbent. We must be almost crystals, almost all some neutralizing chemical that really does...
Caught
If something gets caught like a bone in the throat it isn’t right. We know this with fish: it isn’t impolite to cough. Our life is at risk. But there are so many wrong thoughts we refuse to release massaging our own throats like pâté geese.
- Kay Ryan
To the Young Anglerfish
The angler’s lure required 500 separate modifications to attain its exquisite mimicry. - Stephen Jay Gould For now and for the next 400-plus generations, the hornlike symptom on your brow will itch and be subject to irritation. At that point it will begin to resemble a modification useful for tricking food. It will at last begin to begin to do some good. Meanwhile, the problems of life...
New Clothes
The emperor who was tricked by the tailors is familiar to you. But the tailors keep on changing what they do to make money. (Tailor means to make something fit somebody.) Be guaranteed that they will discover your pride. You will cast aside something you cherish when the tailors whisper, “Only you could wear this.” It is almost never clothes such as the emperor bought but it is always...
Crib
From the Greek for woven or plaited, which quickly translated to basket. Whence the verb crib, which meant “to filch” under cover of wicker anything—some liquor, a cutlet. For we want to make off with things that are not our own. There is a pleasure theft brings, a vitality to the home. Cribbed objects or answers keep their guilty shimmer forever, have you noticed? Yet...
Stars of Bethlehems
Throughout the sky there are cinders black as the night. These are the unborn stars awaiting their source of light. The night is gritty with things to hit, should something go on in a city or the outskirts of it.
- Kay Ryan
Full Measure
You will get your full measure. But, as when asking fairies for favors, there is a trick: it comes in a block. And of course one block is not like another. Some respond to water, giving everything wet a little flavor. Some succumb to heat like butter. others give to steady pressure. Others shatter at a tap. But some resist; nothing in nature softens up their bulk and no personal attack works....
All Shall Be Restored
The grains shall be collected from the thousand shores to which they found their way, and the boulder restored, and the boulder itself replaced in the cliff, and likewise the cliff shall rise or subside until the plate of earth is without fissure. Restoration knows no half-measure. It will not stop when the treasured and lost bronze horse remounts the steps. Even this horse will founder backward...
Lacquer Artist
There is a nacreous gleam in certain areas of the mind where something must have been at some time— perhaps many somethings, judging by their pearlescence; maybe the same weightless pleasures or the same elusive lessons repeated and repeated with the patience of the lacquer artist seated at his task—eighty coats per Japanese box.
- Kay Ryan
Living with Stripes
In tigers, zebras, and other striped creatures, any casual posture plays one beautiful set of lines against another: herringbones and arrows appear and disappear: chevrons widen and narrow. Miniature themes and counterpoints occur in the flexing and extending of the smaller joints. How can they stand to drink, when lapping further complicates the way the water duplicates their lines? Knowing how...