Latest Posts by dclcq - Page 4
You don’t pass or fail at being a person, dear.
Neil Gaiman The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Although you mention Venice keeping it on your tongue like a fruit pit and I say yes, perhaps Bucharest, neither of us really knows. There is only this train slipping through pastures of snow, a sleigh reaching down to touch its buried runners. We meet on the shaking platform, the wind’s broken teeth sinking into us. You unwrap your dark bread and share with me the coffee sloshing into your gloves. Telegraph posts chop the winter fields into white blocks, in each window the crude painting of a small farm. We listen to mothers scolding children in English as if we do not understand a word of it– sit still, sit still. There are few clues as to where we are: the baled wheat scattered everywhere like missing coffins. The distant yellow kitchen lights wiped with oil. Everywhere the black dipping wires stretching messages from one side of a country to the other. The men who stand on every border waving to us. Wiping ovals of breath from the windows in order to see ourselves, you touch the glass tenderly wherever it holds my face. Days later, you are showing me photographs of a woman and children smiling from the windows of your wallet. Each time the train slows, a man with our faces in the gold buttons of his coat passes through the cars muttering the name of a city. Each time we lose people. Each time I find you again between the cars, holding out a scrap of bread for me, something hot to drink, until there are no more cities and you pull me toward you, sliding your hands into my coat, telling me your name over and over, hurrying your mouth into mine. We have, each of us, nothing. We will give it to each other.
For the Stranger Carolyn Forché
A fact is what won’t go away, what we cannot not know, as Henry James remarked of the real. Yet when we bring one closer, stare at it, test our loyalty to it, it begins to shimmer with complication. Without becoming less factual, it floats off into myth. Italo Calvino’s Mr Palomar looks at the sky, his lawn, the sea, starlings, tortoises, Roman rooftops, a girl, giraffes and much else. He wants only to observe, to learn a modest lesson from creatures and things. But he can’t. There is too much to see in them, for a start. … And there is too much of himself and his culture in the world he watches anyway: the universe is littered with the signs of our needs, with mythologies.
Michael Wood
The witching hour, somebody had once whispered to her, was a special moment in the middle of the night when every child and every grown-up was in a deep deep sleep, and all the dark things came out from hiding and had the world all to themselves.
Roald Dahl
You licked houmous off my fingers which is one way to win an argument — Shailja Patel, Love Poem for London
jensenacklesmishacollins:
Ei talupoegadele - No to peasants.
...
The majority speaks Sense.
Why are we perfectly willing to ascribe agency to a strand of DNA (however “metaphorically”), but consider it absurd to do the same with an electron, a snowflake, or a coherent electromagnetic field? The answer, it seems, is because it’s pretty much impossible to ascribe self-interest to a snowflake. If we have convinced ourselves that rational explanation of action can consist only of treating action as if there were some sort of self-serving calculation behind it, then by that definition, on all these levels, rational explanations can’t be found. Unlike a DNA molecule, which we can at least pretend is pursuing some gangster-like project of ruthless self-aggrandizement, an electron simply does not have a material interest to pursue, not even survival. It is in no sense competing with other electrons. If an electron is acting freely—if it, as Richard Feynman is supposed to have said, “does anything it likes”—it can only be acting freely as an end in itself. Which would mean that at the very foundations of physical reality, we encounter freedom for its own sake—which also means we encounter the most rudimentary form of play.
David Graeber What's the Point if We Can't Have Fun
Ella M. Singer Somewhere in the Forest
Take your clairvoyance and apply it to your life in the physical, Presumptuous half-hearted homunculus, Self-destruction is the power without knowing what the function is.
Felipe Andres Coronel
look, it’s 01:32, and the notebooks in the pits of my drawers are not enough for the horror that is tropical disease biology studies…
I wonder, when you decide to voice your questions, when you send off your impressions, when you speak or write or type, out of the blue, to your unsuspecting peers, is it done with an obstinate hope that you will receive at the very least any kind of response? A measured reply, despite the overwhelming standard of there seeming to be so few who would not only appreciate the question, but would consider an answer at all.
In a manner that is self-deprecating, I think, I have been hunting for forms of connection that are more opportune for people who would rather not engage in anything so "aggressive" if "cute" without first throwing their daily habits into disarray. For whom such randomly expressed vexations of admittedly pretentious proportions pose as minor amusements, surprising puzzles, forms of performance art, and above all, a craving for approval–the latter, undoubtedly, many of my hurriedly scribbled down remarks are, but more, I suppose, a form of reassurance to myself that it is fine if I cannot help myself. Rather that than a kind of validation that is supposed to instill in me, over and over again, my sense of self-identity and worth. That would be very silly, don't you think? But it is to be expected that more often than not we will seem silly regardless, and are loved despite of it, than seem as we want to be, and are loved because of it. So herein then, ought we not to give free reign to the expectations of others, and to our own, and tailor our contentment accordingly?
From there has emerged, I reckon, the infamous, “Nevermind that,” for which I am chastised here and there alike. Yet it occurs to me that I do not dismiss so much myself, but what I see as the toil and burden for you to bear if I did not do so.
I have never thought of it like this before, or thought of any of it for the longest time, if only in passing sneer in relation to my own expectations of people. Suppose I have dismissed thinking about it entirely, but wouldn't that truly be considered as “settling”, after all?
Atlas Mountains by untidy souls on Flickr.
They were red, these pineapples, with traces of the yellow and the green you know of pineapples but much more of an ochre red, blossoms of rust. And they were not the monstrous things you find in supermarkets here, but small, scarcely bigger than an orange, all the better for sneaking into the small spaces where the light made it to the earth. In later months, when I saw a pineapple shining in a cone of sunlight, I would pick my way through the undergrowth, come up beside it, and look up to see what the pineapple could see, to find the sun that found this fruit.
Zia Haider Rahman In the Light of What We Know
Where are the limes, and what is to be done?
The Great North American Lime Shortage of 2014 has people panicked. As the heat of the summer looms, the national media is running frenzied articles, families are being ripped apart, bartenders are at each other's throats and lime hoarding is rampant.
Consumption (of limes) has risen dramatically since the 70s, and people have been living beyond their means, delaying the inevitable reckoning with citrus-fueled bacchanalias.
Globalization and the destruction of lime farming in the U.S. now means that most limes here come from Mexico. And this production has been severely damaged by a combination of bad weather (probably caused by global warming), bacterial infection (no doubt drug resistant) and, of course, drug cartels[1], who are supposed to be hijacking supply.
We will not inquire further into the ultimate causes of the lime shortage and simply discuss coping mechanisms (or, if you prefer, routes to salvation).
[1] If the war in Iraq did not guarantee cheap oil, and the drug war in Mexico does not guarantee cheap limes, then what is war good for? Also, at least according to the New York Times, drug cartels are taking over the avocado business too, so we should all be concerned. Maybe United Fruit will step in to save us all.
- Rishidev Chaudhuri
Meursault does not find–as a humanitarian would–that other people's lives are as important as his own, but, on the contrary, that his life is as unimportant as that of anyone else's. He thus reaches the state of self-detachment, coupled with love of life, advocated in Sisyphus, and becomes a true hero of the absurd, conscious of being an outsider, the hate-free target of everybody's cries of hate. ... "the only Christ we deserve."
Lev Braun Witness of Decline
Even apart from the "complementary" provision, Gramm quietly added another time bomb to the law, a grandfather clause, which said that any company that became a bank holding company after the passage of Gramm-Leach-Bliley in 1999 could engage in (or control shares of a company engaged in) commodities trading – but only if it was already doing so before a seemingly arbitrary date in September 1997. This was nuts. It was a little like passing a law that ordered you to leave the Army if you were gay in November 1999 – but if you were a heterosexual soldier as of September 1997 and then somehow became gay after 1999, you could stay in the Army. For nearly a decade, this obscure provision of Gramm-Leach-Bliley effectively applied to nobody. Then, in the third week of September 2008, while the economy was imploding after the collapses of Lehman and AIG, two of America's biggest investment banks, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, found themselves in desperate need of emergency financing. So late on a Sunday night, on September 21st, to be exact, the two banks announced they had applied to the Federal Reserve to become bank holding companies, which would give them lifesaving access to emergency cash from the Fed's discount window. The Fed granted the requests overnight. The move saved the bacon of both firms, and it had one additional benefit: It made Goldman and Morgan Stanley, which both had significant commodity-trading operations prior to 1997, the first and last two companies to qualify for the grandfather exemption of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. "Kind of convenient, isn't it?" says one congressional aide. "It's almost like the law was written specifically for them." The irony was incredible. After fucking up so badly that the government had to give them federal bank charters and bottomless wells of free cash to save their necks, the feds gave Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley hall passes to become cross-species monopolistic powers with almost limitless reach into any sectors of the economy.
Matt Taibbi 'The Vampire Squid Strikes Again'
life
Sometimes I think about what would have happened if Game of Life had been invented in antiquity. The concept is sufficiently simple for even a child to grasp and simplicity should have appealed to Pythagorean sensibilities…
Would they have developed standardized tokens for exploring the game, and would they have recognized it as a game?
Would there be biblical parables about the glider?
Would alternate rules have been considered heretical in the Middle Ages?
Would the R-pentomino have been thought an infinite growth pattern until some diligent mathematician, maybe an Arabic one in the 1000s, were to show the opposite by working out all 1103 generations?
Would the LWSS, the Gosper glider gun and related technology have been hailed as great inventions of the Renaissance?
Would the Gausses and the Eulers of this world have dedicated time to searching for new oscillator periods or spaceship velocities?
Would still lifes be tabulated by hand to stupendous numbers in the 1800s, and would these in modern days be memorized in a similar way digits of pi are now?
Would the entire concept have encouraged a considerably more rapid development of fields such as computability or signal processing?
Backwards/forwards time travel is overrated; I’d definitely rather explore alternate timelines…
Every winter an absent joy pains you and you walk under the rain one in two: you and the person you were in another winter. You speak secretly to yourself words you don’t understand because of memory’s inability to retrieve a previous emotion, and because of longing’s ability to add what did not exist to what existed. Such as the tree becoming a forest and the stone a quail, such as being happy in a prison cell you see wider than a public garden, and the past standing waiting for you tomorrow like a loyal dog. Longing lies and it doesn’t tire of lying because it lies truthfully. The lying of longing is a profession. ... It is the fusion of instinct in the conscious and the unconscious. It is lost time complaining of the sadism of the present.
Mahmoud Darwish 'In the Presence of Abence' Translated by Sinan Antoon
夾鏡鳴琴 35. Double Reflections and the Sound of a Lute 'Forty Scenes of the Yuanmingyuan'