Hello Cruel World

Saturday, July 04, 2009

American Poem

I AM the people—the mob—the crowd—the mass.

Do you know that all the great work of this world is
done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the
world’s food & clothes.
I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons
come from me & the Lincolns. They die. &
then I send forth more Napoleons & Lincolns.

I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand
for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me.
I forget. The best of me is sucked out & wasted.
I forget. Everything but Death comes to me &
makes me work & give up what I have. & I forget.
Sometimes I growl, shake myself & spatter a few red
drops for history to remember. Then — I forget.

When I, the people, learn to remember, when I, the People
use the lessons of yesterday & no longer forget
who robbed me last year, who played me for
a fool — then there will be no speaker in all the world
say the name: “The People”, with any fleck of a
sneer in his voice or any far off smile of derision.

The mob—The crowd—The mass—will arrive then.

— Carl Sandburg

Labels: poems, poetry, USA

[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 7/04/2009 02:53:00 am

Sunday, June 21, 2009

Journeying

From Trip to Minneapolis (June 2009)

Philosophical observations (formatted as poetry)

…
Train views are like water,
always the same, changing always
fleeting, glimpsed, gone.
…
— Jo Walton

Labels: poems, poetry, travel

[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 6/21/2009 04:03:00 am

Monday, May 25, 2009

Neil Gaiman's wedding poem

A Wedding Poem

This for you, for both of you,

a small poem of happiness
filled with small glories and little triumphs
a fragile, short cheerful song
filled with hope and all sorts of futures

Because at weddings we imagine the future
Because it's all about 'what happened next?'
all the work and negotiation and building and talk
that makes even the tiniest happily ever after
something to be proud of for a wee forever

This is a small thought for both of you
like a feather or a prayer,
a wish of trust and love and hope
and fine brave hearts and true.

Like a tower, or a house made all of bones and dreams
and tomorrows and tomorrows and tomorrows.

Neil Gaiman's Journal: post-wedding post, Saturday, 19th August, 2006

Labels: celebrations, mortality, poems, poetry

[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 5/25/2009 09:40:00 pm

Sunday, April 12, 2009

For Easter

Opening Words

Denise Levertov

Easter has come to have associations of death & disease for me.

Labels: annual cycle, celebrations, easter, poems, poetry, religion

[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 4/12/2009 03:18:00 am

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

One of my favourite book titles

Things you see when you haven't got a gun by Harry (Henry Arthur) Hooton | National Library of Australia catalogue entry for this 1943 self-published poetry book by one of Oz's turbulent poets.
Review in 'Southerly' magazine (www.archive.org/ stream/ southerlymagass05howarich/ southerlymagass05howarich_djvu.txt)

(See also King's Cross)

Labels: Australia, history, language, literature, poetry, writers

[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 3/31/2009 11:45:00 pm

Sunday, March 29, 2009

An Anniversary Villanelle

One Art

Elizabeth Bishop

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Labels: anniversaries, mortality, mourning, poems, poetry

[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 3/29/2009 02:38:00 am

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Poem from Bluejo's Journal; Birthday; Testament

Bluejo's Journal, 14th October 2008:

She dances golden, in a drift of leaves,
she dances stark, skeletal, in the dark,
she dances in a cloud of solid green,
she dances with her branch and leaf and bark.

She dances with the birds, the wind, the street,
with child in stroller, with a hurrying nun,
with gardners, shoppers, lovers as they meet,
she dances, as we dance, around the sun.>

My late father's birthday. He now is "Rolled round in earths diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees".
Made my Last Will & Testament today. At least a first best draft of it (signed, sealed, witnessed). Avoiding for once my besetting sin of Making The Perfedt The Enemy of The Good, I settled for a simple, cut-down version which at least gives a start, and will avoid for my survivors the hideous mess I was landed in by Chris' death intestate.

Labels: anniversaries, legalities, mourning, poetry

[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 10/15/2008 01:42:00 am

Monday, October 06, 2008

Poem: Right there on edge on mountain lip see cloud

From Making Light's anecdotal thread, Pearls of great price, not to be devalued #268:

Right there on edge on mountain lip see cloud
swift move through sky, through steady clearest blue,
with every second become something new;
voices within declare you have been cowed
not knowing yet the force that is allowed
nor proper motion ready for its cue.
On neither side is the eternal view
but every sound right here is sharp and loud.
So you were eager then to find a space
just for yourself, and had so much to prove
and so much time; or so it was you thought
being a fool. Now there is little grace
for you to get into the rightful groove
and the robed judge has come into the court.

Fragano Ledgister October 05, 2008, 01:35 PM:
nielsenhayden.com/ makinglight/ archives/010613.html#298677

Labels: mortality, poetry

[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 10/06/2008 12:41:00 pm

Friday, May 30, 2008

On Certainty, Fallibility, etc.

The problem has been noted, sadly, for some time

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts. — Bertrand Russell

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
WB Yeats, The Second Coming

It is also put clearly, passionately, and with references to its possible effects in the 'Knowledge and Certainty' episode of The Ascent of Man, by Jacob Bronowski; quoted in The Danger of Knowing for Sure, and here, as well as part of discussing 'Science', mostly under the heading "science as a candle in the dark".

There's even scientific studies of a related phenomenon. My link to this has gone dead, so here's info to track it down with.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology - December 1999 Vol. 77, No. 6, 1121-1134
Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments
Justin Kruger and David Dunning, Department of Psychology, Cornell University

Labels: bronowski, certainty, poetry

[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 5/30/2008 01:22:00 pm

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Five Years

Dirge without Music

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.
Crowned with lilies and with laurel they go: but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains – but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,–
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
(via)

Labels: anniversaries, mourning, poetry

[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 3/29/2007 04:59:00 am

Saturday, September 30, 2006

Twisted

A poem
...
Nothing has changed.
The body shudders as it shuddered
before the founding of Rome and after,
in the twentieth century before and after Christ.
Tortures are just as they were, only the earth has grown smaller,
and what happens sounds as if it's happening in the next room.
...
— Wislawa Szymborska

Conscience

Labels: poetry

[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 9/30/2006 10:59:00 pm

Sunday, March 05, 2006

Erich Kastner, writer - part of his story
Erich Kastner at the Looniverse
www.thelooniverse.com/books/kastner.html

To establish the proper atmosphere, this is as good a place as any to show a sample of the bill you got for having your husband killed by the Nazis for political, or any, reasons.
Hangman's Bill

Yes, you were supposed to pay for the execution (or else...) It comes to a total of what now must be well over $6000. They even charged you 12 cents for the stamp to send you the bill.

A Sample of Erich Kastner's Poetry
Kennst du das Land, wo die Kanonen blühen?
Du kennst es nicht? Du wirst es kennenlernen!

Do you know the country where the cannons bloom?
You do not know it? You will get to know it!

[Mein Gott! I actually know the poem this is based on - I did an amateur translation of it, used on Chris' Memorial Site.]

Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn,
Kennst du es wohl? Dahin! dahin

Do you know the land where lemon blossom grows,
This land you know? To there! To there;

And in the year of 1933 my books were burned with dark festive splendor in Berlin, on the large square next to the Opera, by a certain Mr. Goebbels. He triumphantly called out the names of twenty-four German writers, who symbolically had to be eradicated for eternity. I was the only one of the twenty-four who had appeared in person to witness this theatrical insolence...

Crystal Night, 1938
When, on November 10 1938 at 3 o'clock in the morning, I drove up the Berlin Tauentzien in a taxi, I heard glass tinkling on both sides of the street. It sounded as if dozens of wagons full of glass were being turned over. I looked out and saw, on the left and right, a man standing in front of about every fifth house, each using an iron rod to smash store windows with mighty blows. The job done, he walked over to the next shop with a measured pace and, with powerful calmth, dedicated himself to that one's still intact window-pane.
Except for these men, wearing black breeches, riding boots and civil jackets, there was no human being in sight. The taxi turned into the Kurfürstendamm. Here, too, men were standing at regular distances and with long bars smashed "Jewish" show windows. Each one seemed to have some five to ten windows for a job. Cascades of glass fell down, crushing on the concrete. It sounded as if the entire town existed of nothing but crashing glass. It was a drive right through a madman's dream.
Between Uhlandstraße and Knesebeckstraße I asked to stop, opened the door and was just putting my right foot on the street, when a man emerged from the nearest tree and softly and energetically told me: "Don't get out! Drive on at once!" It was a man in hat and cloak. "But listen", I started, "I just wanted to…" "No", he interrupted threateningly. "Getting out is forbidden! Get on your way at once!" He pushed me back into the car, beckoned the driver, threw the door shut, and the driver obeyed. On we went through the ghostly "splinter night".

Labels: poetry

[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 3/05/2006 11:26:00 am

Monday, April 25, 2005

Cats, Butterfly weight, Haiku Earrings, Schiavo subtext, etc
How not to get a good nights sleep
www.livejournal.com/ users/ james_nicoll/ 75978.html
New rule: before strapping on the CPAP mask, check to make sure that no cat has thrown up in it.

Sleeping Cats
www.livejournal.com/users/james_nicoll/75445.html
... was experimenting with sleeping next to me last night, so I didn't get much sleep ...
...
Having seen RESIDENT EVIL 2
... It's not a horror film. It's a video game film. You can always hit replay on a video game so there's no element of tension, no possibility of permanent loss.
I've proposed what I call "Less Virtual Than It Looks Reality" games (in which the dangers to the character in the game are translated into real danger to the player) to various companies but they all lacked my visionary nature. They call it "negligent homicide" but I call it "artistic vision."

In breaking news: Fox announces PONTIFF!
CNN is reporting that Fox has signed a deal with the Vatican for the next big reality show, PONTIFF!. This will use the format of shows like SURVIVOR and THE APPRENTICE, mapped onto the selection process for the next Pope.

www.googlism.com

Andrea Dworkin Has Died
susiebright.blogs.com/ susie_brights_journal_/ 2005/ 04/ andrea_dworkin_.html
April 11, 2005

www.faultline.org/ place/ pinolecreek/ archives/ 002241.html
Creek Running North
April 11, 2005
Andrea Dworkin, 1946-2005

www.faultline.org/ place/ pinolecreek/ archives/ 002239.html
Vanessa cardui
I watch the painted ladies flying north.
Hundreds of the butterflies pass me in any five-minute period. They’ve been headed north for some weeks, nourished by a spectacular growth of annual flowers in the Mojave and deserts south ...
It's really rather impressive. This blizzard of orange and black crepe crossing mountains, desert valleys, going from country to country, no luggage nor passport, orange and black wings thinner than crepe and fueled by tiny sips of flower, and they're moving faster than I can run. Each is just slightly more substantial than a thought, maybe a tenth of a gram of chitin and water and light. But probably ten thousand butterflies will pass me on my hike, a kilogram of flying stained glass shards. My hike covers five and a half miles. Extrapolate from there: many tons of butterflies are moving north in California today.
Butterflies hate cameras, I find. With the lens stowed safely in my pack the painted ladies linger in my gaze ...
When stealth and slyness fail, a cheating hunter uses bait. I park myself near a black sage in flower ...

Philadelphia Flower Show, 2005. Photos - very large files.

Haiku Earrings
www.livejournal.com/ users/ davidgoldfarb/ 3747.html
The concom got Elise Matthesen to come out and sell her jewelry. On Sunday she did haiku earrings. This is the process:

Elise lays out a bunch of small earrings on her table.
You pick out one or a pair and bring it to her.
She gives you a title.
You write the haiku that has that as the title.
You put the haiku where the earrings were.
Now you own the earrings.
Optionally you grant her the right to reproduce your haiku in a chapbook and/or a card to be strung on a necklace.

My earrings had two beads: the upper was an oval with pointed ends, a shiny yellow, with a picture of an oval-shaped leaf, strung through one
end; the lower a clear blue faceted ball.

I took them to Elise. She asked me, "Silly or serious?" (I found out later that she had asked someone else, "Ancient or modern?".) I chose serious, and received 'The Price of Immortality'.

The Price of Immortality

I read this to Elise. She smiled. "Yes," she said. "That's the haiku that goes in that place."

Farthing, by Jo Walton -- A beta read, gloat gloat. This is supposed to be out sometime this year from Tor Forge, but I haven't seen it on their schedule yet. A mystery novel set in an alternate timeline where Rudolf Hess actually managed to make peace between Nazi Germany and the UK. Very powerfully written, one of the best books I read all year.
www.scratchings.net

David Scott Marley
www.livejournal.com/ users/ wild_irises/

Debbie N.
www.livejournal.com/ users/ therealjae/
10:28 am - The New Yorker killed Terri Schiavo
Apparently, I'm not allowed www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/LondonFreePress/ News/2005/04/04/981625-sun.html to make public entries about the thing I really want to be talking about today (is blogging journalism? is a livejournal a blog? my head hurts.), so I'll take on the New Yorker instead. One of the things that's struck me about all of the verbiage devoted to the Terri Schiavo case is that there's been very little mention of how she was reduced to a permanent vegetative state in the first place. Amidst the discussions from both left and right about whether a brain cavity filled with spinal fluid actually qualified as "life," why is "look, bulimia can kill you!" not being shouted from every rooftop? As one of the few publications that actually mentions the disease in conjunction with Schiavo, the esteemed New Yorker might have an answer for us. Hendrik Hertzberg writes, in the column "The Talk of the Town" for the April 4th issue (emphasis mine):

Terri Schiavo was born on December 3, 1963, near Philadelphia, the first of three children of Robert and Mary Schindler.
As a teenager, she was obese -- at eighteen, she weighed two hundred and fifty pounds -- but with diligence she lost a hundred pounds, and by the time she married Michael Schiavo, in 1984, she was an attractive and vivacious young woman. By the end of the decade, she had moved with her husband to Florida, was undergoing fertility treatments, and had slimmed down further, to a hundred and ten pounds. On February 25, 1990, Terri suffered cardiac arrest, leading to severe brain damage. The cause was a drastically reduced level of potassium in her bloodstream, a condition frequently associated with bulimia.

Do I really even have to subject this to an analysis? Perhaps I do. All right, then. The above paragraph implies not only that a young woman who weighs two hundred and fifty pounds can be neither "attractive" nor "vivacious," but also the inverse, i.e., that losing a hundred of that two hundred and fifty pounds will automatically make you both of these things, even if you lose that weight through bulimia. Even worse, it reduces bulimia -- a disease in which people starve themselves by self-induced vomiting or abuse of laxatives -- to "diligence," and praises a dead woman for having the disease that killed her. A disease which it goes on to mention in the *very same paragraph*. Never mind that many healthy young women exist who are attractive, vivacious, *and* fat. Never mind that a young woman with bulimia, a disease which, among other things, causes feelings of ill health, is most likely anything but "vivacious." Never mind that one of the U.S.'s foremost magazines turned an opportunity to educate people about bulimia into a subtle propagation of the demonstrably false ideology that arguably killed the very person they were writing about. Never mind that the truth about what science has learned about fitness and fatness -- that there is no provable relationship between so-called obesity and poor health -- is out there for anyone who wants to read about it:

http://spinnendevriendjes.blogspot.com/
Dutch language blog about my daily life and my cats

Labels: bulimia, butterflies, cats, Chris Clarke, earrings, Elise, natural history, obits, poetry, writing, కామ

[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 4/25/2005 08:11:00 pm

Tuesday, April 19, 2005

These recipes are not for 'Babe' lovers (Warning: Your arteries may clog up just reading). www.gumbopages.com/looka/archive/2005-04.html#6

www.abqtrib.com/albq/nw_science/ article/0,2668,ALBQ_21236_3699656,00.html

... 300 million years ago, 8-foot-long millipedes (arthropleura) were in control of the landscape in New Mexico ... "This is basically the Tyrannosaurus of the Pennsylvanian period (325-280 million years ago), millions of years before dinosaurs evolved." (Picture of a smaller specimen [ http://mas.scripps.com/ALBQ/2005/04/14/041405_dig3_e.jpg ] The largest one is only known from its footprints.) Evidence of the creatures has also been found in Nova Scotia and Scotland ... Arthropleura died out at the end of the Pennsylvanian, probably because the amount of oxygen in the air was reduced from 30 percent during that time period to closer to the 21 percent we have today, ... They just couldn't survive at that size in modern air," Lucas said.

houseochicks.com/hoto.html (anatomy puppets)

www.muppetcentral.com/news/2005/040605.shtml muppet wizard of oz

The best book on vampires, ever, is Paul Barber's Vampires, Burial and Death: folklore and reality, published Yale UP 1988 [Well, that's one person's opinion. Might check this out - find a LINK]

news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/ story.jsp?story=630165
Oxyrhynchus Papyri decoded

... The papyrus fragments were discovered in historic dumps outside the Graeco-Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus ("city of the sharp-nosed fish") in central Egypt at the end of the 19th century. Running to 400,000 fragments, stored in 800 boxes at Oxford's Sackler Library, it is the biggest hoard of classical manuscripts in the world.

The previously unknown texts, read for the first time last week, include parts of a long-lost tragedy - the Epigonoi ("Progeny") by the 5th-century BC Greek playwright Sophocles; part of a lost novel by the 2nd-century Greek writer Lucian; unknown material by Euripides; mythological poetry by the 1st-century BC Greek poet Parthenios; work by the 7th-century BC poet Hesiod; and an epic poem by Archilochos, a 7th-century successor of Homer, describing events leading up to the Trojan War. Additional material from Hesiod, Euripides and Sophocles almost certainly await discovery.

Oxford academics have been working alongside infra-red specialists from Brigham Young University, Utah. Their operation is likely to increase the number of great literary works fully or partially surviving from the ancient Greek world by up to a fifth. It could easily double the surviving body of lesser work - the pulp fiction and sitcoms of the day.
Speaker A: . . . gobbling the whole, sharpening the flashing iron.

Speaker B: And the helmets are shaking their purple-dyed crests, and for the wearers of breast-plates the weavers are striking up the wise shuttle's songs, that wakes up those who are asleep.

Speaker A: And he is gluing together the chariot's rail.
These words were written by the Greek dramatist Sophocles, and are the only known fragment we have of his lost play Epigonoi (literally "The Progeny"), the story of the siege of Thebes.

Labels: poetry

[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 4/19/2005 02:54:00 pm

Wednesday, March 16, 2005

How Imanent Will is not all in forming Destiny & History
Mar. 14th, 2005
07:09 pm - that's entertainment

By gum, TV can indeed teach, and occasionally there are the most delicious morsels dropped into the educational mix: night before last I was unable to stop wathcing two successive programs on vulcanology (on the Discovery Channel), one concentrating on the titanic 1815 blast-off of most of an Indonesian volcano called Tambora. One scientist (the world's primier expert on Pompeii) was excavating what turned out to be a carbonized household on the slopes of what's left of Tambora while another, working with the logbooks of the British Navy in the Pacific, constructed a computer model of the recorded impact of the blast on the world's weather (though this was not known at the time). Love the idea of His Majesty's ships, being mostly underemployed, as floating meteorological stations since in their boredom they took temperature, wind, and other sky-and-water type readings every two to four hours and recorded them, along with their exact position on the ocean at the time.

The plum in the pudding, however, was this: because of the sun-blocking effects of so many tons of Tambora being thrown into the upper atmosphere and blown round the globe, the summer of 1816 was the coldest on record in Europe (and New England, where people referred to it as "eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death"), leading to huge crop failures, famine, and, of course, bread riots in France. One of the places hardest hit was Switzerland, where that summer consisted of three solid months of cold, driving rain.

Now, think back: who was vacationing in Switzerland in the summer of 1816? In a rented villa on the shore of Lake Geneva? One of 'em had a club foot, and another was his doctor, and then there was the wife of another poet -- ? YES!! A little party of talented British literatti. Fortunately for us, all their picnics got rained out and their hikes were quenched by chilly temperatures. What did they have to do except go back indoors and, when the parlor games gave out, sit down by the fire and *write*?

Hence, "Frankenstein", and Dr. Polidori's short vampire piece, and I forget what else -- but what else do you need? A vast mountain blows its stack in southeast Asia, creating the largest volcanic death toll in recorded history (they said 117,000 but to that you'd have to add the secondary deaths of all those Swiss farmers who quietly starved in their high, muddy valleys, and similar victims elsewhere); and out of all this catastrophe, however indirectly, comes one of the totemic monsters of modern times, and the seed of his alter-ego the blood-sucking vampire!

Ah, history -- the gradual revelation of its elegant interconnections ranks among the best entertainments in the world.

Comment on
www.livejournal.com/users/suzych/17258.html
Mar. 14th, 2005
07:09 pm - that's entertainment

"The Year Without a Summer" caused by Tambora naturally also caused
disruptions to crops and the health of both humans and their animals. The
resulting wave of famine and disease in Europe caused rioting there, while
nearly a hundred thousand died from them in Indonesia, and there were
similar problems in the North-East USA and Russia. It's generally accepted
that this also inspired "The Last Man", (1826) by Mary Shelley.

http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/mws/lastman/index.html
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/SheLast.html

I read this some years back, and one thing that was interesting was that it
was set in the 21st Century, yet much had not changed, e.g. in transport
and communication. It rather made me wonder whether it was Mary's own
mindset, or that the idea of constant, world-overturning change hadn't yet
set in. It also makes you wonder what basic things people looking to the
future now would miss.

See some notes on eruptions in the introduction of the Geophysical Research
Letter, vol 32, in February 2005 at http://star.arm.ac.uk/preprints/437.pdf
. It also mentions the very disruptive, eruption of Laki, in Iceland --
not as explosive, but much longer-lasting, in 1783-84. I wonder if this
may have contributed a few straws more to the French Revolution in 1789?

This poem is also supposed to be partly inspired by that dreary year

Darkness
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swing blind and blackening in the moonless air
Morn came and went – and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light:
And they did live by watchfires – and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings – the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consumed,
And men were gather’d round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other’s face;
Lord Byron (1816)

while the extraordinary sunsets after Krakatoa's eruption are thought to
have helped inspire Edvard Munch's "The Scream", if you read his
description of the scene that had such an impact on him.
http://www.yog-sothoth.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&p=37280
http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/enviro/EnviroRepublish_1007062.htm
(Based on When the Sky Ran Red: The Story Behind "The Scream" by
Donald W. Olson, Russell L. Doescher, and Marilynn S. Olson | Sky &
Telescope | February 2004, p. 28-35 )

[tag: environment]
[tag: history]

Jan. 26th, 2005
10:59 pm -
gigantism in Amerika

Labels: poetry

[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 3/16/2005 11:26:00 pm

Tuesday, March 08, 2005

Traffic Koan
Xopher ::: March 03, 2005, 05:35 PM
My favorite Zen koan is "When the traffic increases, it becomes nothing; when the traffic decreases, it becomes something."

This is known among the Wise as the Traffic Koan.

Faren Miller ::: March 04, 2005, 11:01 AM

Xopher, re your "zen koan" on traffic, a ways above, here's something from a recent Jon Carroll column on SFGate: "I have a mantra that I say. Perhaps you would like to learn it. 'All the atoms within me were once the atoms of the sun. All the water within me was once part of the great oceans of the world. I am by the universe and of the universe, and I embrace all suffering and transgression, for I am it and it is me and holy mother of God that son of a camel's placenta just cut across four lanes to tailgate an airport shuttle that of course is going 15 miles above the speed limit and oh look here comes a Camaro it's a race pigs pigs pigs may you rot in hell, and I love every creature because I am part of every creature, amen.'"

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/docs/2005/02/28/#friday
FRIDAY, 4 MARCH, 2005
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen

Poem: "Writing" by Howard Nemerov, from The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov. © University of Chicago Press. Reprinted with permission.

Writing

The cursive crawl, the squared-off characters
these by themselves delight, even without
a meaning, in a foreign language, in
Chinese, for instance, or when skaters curve
all day across the lake, scoring their white
records in ice. Being intelligible,
these winding ways with their audacities
and delicate hesitations, they become
miraculous, so intimately, out there
at the pen's point or brush's tip, do world
and spirit wed. The small bones of the wrist
balance against great skeletons of stars
exactly; the blind bat surveys his way
by echo alone. Still, the point of style
is character. The universe induces
a different tremor in every hand, from the
check-forger's to that of the Emperor
Hui Tsung, who called his own calligraphy
the 'Slender Gold.' A nervous man
writes nervously of a nervous world, and so on.

Miraculous. It is as though the world
were a great writing. Having said so much,
let us allow there is more to the world
than writing: continental faults are not
bare convoluted fissures in the brain.
Not only must the skaters soon go home;
also the hard inscription of their skates
is scored across the open water, which long
remembers nothing, neither wind nor wake.

www.yarnharlot.ca/blog/tsffaq.html

Knitters Without Borders
This page is the home of Tricoteuses Sans Frontières or Knitters Without Borders.
TSF was born as a response to the tsunami disaster on December 26th 2004, but exists to fundraise for Médecins Sans Frontières/ Doctors Without Borders.
[tag: NGO] [tag: knitting] [tag: poems]

Labels: poetry

[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 3/08/2005 02:10:00 am

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

A few interesting things, including reflections on some unpleasant numbers

How to Write an Epic Poem
http://www.ehow.com/how_3334_write-epic-poem.html

Related eHows:
Write a Short Story http://www.ehow.com/how_3337_write-short-story.html
Write a Sonnet http://www.ehow.com/how_3335_write-sonnet.html
Write a Haiku http://www.ehow.com/how_3336_write-haiku.html
Find a Literary Agent
http://www.ehow.com/how_2716_find-literary-agent.html
Write a Limerick http://www.ehow.com/how_3332_write-limerick.html

http://elisson1.blogspot.com/2005/02/on-friday-we-blog-them-cats.html
Another Friday cat-blogger - see also
http://www.flickr.com/photos/49756365@N00/4193674/ (Marble eyes - cat photo)
see also
http://www.flickr.com/photos/plebon/4149980/ for another cat photo from a
contact of mine.

Readers Digest building garden waterproofing - the home page
http://www.projex.com.au/wolfin/

Collection of links to arty blogs (much in French)
http://awad.over-blog.com
www.fotocompany.com (the other kind of arty pictures ... )
( some pretty flowers at http://www.arcticzoo.com/archives/2004_01.html
along with some other links, thoughts & stuff that it find mildly
interesting )

Some observations from an absorbing discussion thread at Whatever, John
Scalzi's blog.
http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/003416.html
The state that has the lowest incidence of divorce in the US is
Massachusetts, which as we all know is so flamingly liberal that they even
let the gay people get married, to other gay people, even

I call myself a recovering catholic. Being a recovering catholic is like
being a recovering alcohilic; If you're an alcoholic, you're always an
alcoholic, you're just in recovery; the same thing goes for being catholic.

Getting a Sense of Proportion
(A very dangerous thing, according to Douglas Adams, see HHGG2 )

You are here (Solar System)
http://www.troybrophy.com/projects/solarsystem/index.html
This is a work in progress... 1 pixel = ~1,000 km; images are to scale with
each other (This page does not display properly in Safari and Opera; they do
not support super-wide tables or images, apparently.)
http://www.troybrophy.com/projects/solarsystem/planetaryscale.html
1 pixel = ~1,000 km; planet sizes are approx. to scale

http://www.topleftpixel.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=239
A PhotoShop tutorial on processing a very popular image from topleftpixel.

And the unpleasant bit, not an unexpected set of stories, but good to see
that some people are picking them up.
http://suburbanguerrilla.blogspot.com/2005/02/in-memoriamtoday-im-going-to-d
o.html
Monday, February 21 was "Presidents' Day" holiday in the USA. This may be
looking at the effect of the current president. Some extracts. (NB these
are US casualties, we're not looking at Iraqi civilians, etc, here.) The
site has links to different sources.

"It's difficult to estimate what the total number is," says John Pike,
director of a research group called GlobalSecurity.org which publishes an
informed estimate that goes well beyond what the Pentagon has released.

"You have to say that the total number of casualties due to wounds, injury,
disease would have to be somewhere in the ballpark of over 20, maybe
30,000," says Pike... [In November 2004]

Information about the number of US casualties in Iraq is available
on a web site of the Pentagon or known as the "War Hub" at www.pentagon.gov.
This information covers only those who are officially US citizens enlisted
with different military services.

Hired security contractors, or mercenaries, and recruits who are not
citizens who enlisted to obtain a "green card," are not counted or
mentioned. A large number of the green card recruits are from Mexico and
Central America. There are no organizations to look after their rights or
help them once they're in Iraq. Most of them are buried in Iraq when killed
... It is estimated that as many as 40% of the US troops serving in Iraq are
green card recruits.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 20 (UPI) -- A soldier who served in Iraq apparently hung
himself with a bedsheet last week at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, but
the Pentagon did not count that death two days later when it announced "a
very small increase" in the suicide rate from Operation Iraqi Freedom ...
The Pentagon said it is not counting suicides among troops who killed
themselves after they left Iraq ...

Thirty-six journalists - and 18 media support workers - have been
killed since the beginning of hostilities in Iraq in March 2003, according
to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

At least nine have died as a result of American fire, said Ann
Cooper, executive director of the CPJ ... [including] Mazen Dana, a
43-year-old Palestinian [who] was described by Reuters as one of its finest
cameramen ... According to [various] sources, Dana's family, when
interviewed after the murder, had stated to investigators that Dana was
murdered because he was shooting video footage of mass graves of US soldiers
--- i.e., soldiers killed who were not counted in the official Pentagon
casualty figures --- for a television documentary on the subject for
Reuters.

Which makes an interesting companion to The Onion.
http://www.theonion.com/opinion/index.php?issue=4108&o=2
The Soapbox By James W. Henley
"I support the occupation but I don't support our troops"

Labels: poetry

[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 2/23/2005 08:29:00 pm

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

a buncha stuff
Byron v Southern Star Group Pty Ltd (1997) 73 FCR 264 (Lehane#J)

<199808>{^(<199707>^)}

[Related proceedings see (1996) 136 FLR 267; 22 ACSR 553;

15 ACLC 191

<199708>

(Noted 15 C & SLJ 197) (CA)

(which affd Southern Star Group Pty Ltd v Byron (1995) 123 FLR 368;

13 ACLC 1,622 (Young#J));

and Byron v Southern Star Group Pty Ltd (t/as KGC Magnetic Tapes)

(1995) 123 FLR 352; 13 ACLC 301 (CA)

(which set aside Southern Star Group Pty Ltd (t/as KGC Magnetic Tapes) v

Taylor (No#2) (1991) 9 ACLC 1,211 (Rolfe#J, 07/06/1991)

(which had related proceedings see (1991) 4 ACSR 133;

9 ACLC 386 (Rolfe#J, 18/02/1991))]

----

{^(STYLE & CONNEXIONS?^)}
{^(Southern Star Group Pty Ltd v Byron (1995) 123 FLR 368;^)}
{^(13 ACLC 1,622^)}
{^(<199701>^)}
{^([Earlier proceedings see Byron v Southern Star Group Pty Ltd^)}
{^((t/a KGC Magnetic Tapes) (1995) 123 FLR 352; 13 ACLC 301^)}
{^((which set aside Southern Star Group Pty Ltd (t/a KGC Magnetic Tapes)
v^)}
{^(Taylor [No#2] (1991) 9 ACLC 1,211 (7/6/1991));^)}
{^(and (1991) 4 ACSR 133; 9 ACLC 386 (18/2/1991)]^)}
{^((123 FLR 352)^)}
{^(<199607,Appl & Cons>Cohen v McWilliam (1995) 38 NSWLR 476^)}
{^(<199703,Refd>Queensland v JL Holdings Pty Ltd (1997) 71 ALJR 294^)}
{^((9 ACLC 1,211)^)}
{^(<199212,Cons & Appr>Group Four Industries Pty Ltd v Brosnan^)}
{^((1992) 10 ACLC 1,437^)}
{^((4 ACSR 133)^)}
{^(<199412,Appl>Perrins Roofing Pty Ltd v Hain [No#2] (1992)^)}
{^(15 Qld Lawyer Reps#7^)}

{^(@ SEE ABOVE?^)}
{^(Southern Star Group Pty Ltd (t/a KGC Magnetic Tapes) v Taylor [No#2]^)}
{^((1991)^)}
{^(Southern Star Group Pty Ltd v Byron^)}

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/mind/surveys/smiles/index.shtml

http://www.wherethreadscomeloose.com/links.html#20050202
or possibly
http://www.wherethreadscomeloose.com/links.html#20050221

02/21/05
• "There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. Some kind of high-powered
mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and
too rare to die."

• Dr. Gonzo, Hunter S. Thompson, is dead. Apparently a self-inflicted
gunshot. Very sad.

A few HST links:
• His entry on Wikipedia and a collection of quotes.
• A fansite, The Great Thompson Hunt.
• An archive of all his ESPN.com articles.
• An interview which he postponed for 20 minutes because he was completely
engrossed in the film version of "Sense And Sensibility."
• A February 2003 interview with Salon.
• An October 2004 essay on the presidential election for Rolling Stone.
• An interview in which an equipment failure nicely demonstrates what a
difficult man he could be.
• Illustrator Ralph Steadman's website, from which I took the image
illustrating today's blog entry.
• An excerpt from the biography "Hunter" by E. Jean Carroll.
• A 1991 profile of Thompson.
• A website focusing on his first book, 1960's "The Rum Diary," with photos
from that era and an excerpt of the first chapter.
• The IMDB page for Terry Gilliam's superb film version of "Fear And
Loathing In Las Vegas."
• An interview with Gilliam about the film.

• Update: Rox Populi has another collection of links, better than mine. (via
Pharyngula)

http://roxanne.typepad.com/rantrave/2005/02/the_good_doctor.html
21 February 2005
The Good Doctor is Out
A Hunter S. Thompson Random Reader

(note: http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/gonzo_gone/ pours acid on James
Lilek's opinion of HST)

NYT Obit
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/21/books/21hunter.html?ex=1266728400&en=d6490
d85ff582f3 5&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland
Hunter S. Thompson, 67, Author, Commits Suicide

Christian Thompson/Reuters

By MICHELLE O'DONNELL

Published: February 21, 2005
Featured Author: Hunter S. Thompson
A retrospective on the career of the gonzo journalist, including book
reviews, an interview and a book excerpt.
• Photographs

READERS' OPINIONS
Forum: Join a Discussion on the Life and Death of Hunter S. Thompson

Michael R. Brands/Associated Press
Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter S. Thompson, the maverick journalist and author whose savage
chronicling of the underbelly of American life and politics embodied a new
kind of nonfiction writing he called "gonzo journalism," died yesterday in
Colorado. Tricia Louthis, of the Pitkin County Sheriff's Office, said Mr.
Thompson had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his home in Woody
Creek, Colo., yesterday afternoon. He was 67.

Mr. Thompson, a magazine and newspaper writer who also wrote almost a dozen
books, was perhaps best known for his book, "Fear and Loathing in Las
Vegas," which became a Hollywood movie in 1998. But he was better known for
his hard-driving lifestyle and acerbic eye for truth which he used in the
style of first-person reporting that came to be known as "gonzo" in the
1960's, where the usually-anonymous reporter becomes a central character in
the story, a conduit of subjectivity.

"Nobody really knows what it means, but it sounds like an epithet," he said
in an interview that, for him, journalism "can be an effective political
tool."

Hunter Stockton Thompson was born in Louisville, Ky., on July 18, 1937, the
son of an insurance agent. He was educated in the public school system and
joined the United States Air Force after high school. There, he was
introduced to journalism, covering sports for an Air Force newspaper at
Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. He was honorably discharged in 1958 and
then worked a series of jobs writing for small-town newspapers.

It was in the heat of deadline that gonzo journalism was born while he was
writing a story about the Kentucky Derby for Scanlan's magazine, he
recounted years later in an interview in Playboy magazine.

"I'd blown my mind, couldn't work," he told Playboy. "So finally I just
started jerking pages out of my notebook and numbering them and sending
them to the printer. I was sure it was the last article I was ever going to
do for anybody."

Instead, he said, the story drew raves and he was inundated with letters and
phone calls from people calling it "a breakthrough in journalism," an
experience he likened to "falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a
pool of mermaids."

He went on to become a counter cultural hero with books and articles that
skewered America's hypocrisy.

"He wrote to provoke, shock, protest and annoy," Timothy Crouse wrote in his
book "The Boys on the Bus," about the 1972 presidential campaign.

Mr. Thompson's pioneering first-person, at times over-the-top, writing style
influenced a generation of writers.

As a young man, he was heavily influenced by Jack Kerouac and wholeheartedly
followed Kerouac's approach in which the writer revels in his struggles
with writing.

Among his books were "Hell's Angels," "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,"
"Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72," "The Great Shark Hunt,"
"Generation of Swine" and "Songs for the Doomed."

Related Links
http://elisson1.blogspot.com/2005/02/gone-zo.html

http://www.livejournal.com/community/note_to_cat/
Monday, February 21st, 2005
11:34 pm
[quextico]
Chester,
I'm sorry you have (apparently) lost the ability to jump either onto the bed
or the windowsill, and instead have to wander around my legs and / or stand
up on the back of the chair. It's also extremely unfortunate that you have
inexplicably lost the ability to make a sound, except for the occasional,
piteous, barely-audible squeak. Such a travesty for an 8-month-old kitten.

On the other hand, I was quite happy to be able to provide a bare shoulder /
arm for you to claw to the bone catch yourself on as your most recent
miscalculated attempt to land on the windowsill resulted instead in a brief
trapeze act on the curtains next to the computer.

Ah. It appears you've regained your ability to leap tall buildings (and
bedframes) in a single bound.

I'm so happy.
http://www.livejournal.com/community/note_to_cat/797134.html#cutid1

http://www.livejournal.com/users/ilwarden/
'The Serpent Wise Deals Death To Lies' (Jeremy)
(earlier blog is http://www.livejournal.com/users/anachronic/ )

http://www.camelotbooks.com/catalog/product_info.php?manufacturers_id=79&pro
ducts_id=1 904
My Eyes Are Nailed, But Still I See
By David Niall Wilson & Brett Alexander Savory
Introduction by Seth Lindberg

http://deliriumbooks.com/nailed.htm

http://memegen.net/viewmeme.pl?meme=1074748476
Memegen lets YOU create your own quizzes and tests that work with blogs or
journals like LiveJournal or Xanga

Book virus
I caught the virus from Womzilla. It goes:

Grab the nearest book.
Open the book to page 23.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the text of the sentence in your journal...
...along with these instructions.

If the men are darker, it is pastes in slender strings they'll eat, or
tubes, always farinaceous, as the dictionary says; but more often on
Anglo-Saxon fare the potato takes place before any foreign macaroni or
spaghetti.

http://www.ehow.com/how_3334_write-epic-poem.html
How to Write an Epic Poem
Related eHows:
Write a Short Story http://www.ehow.com/how_3337_write-short-story.html
Write a Sonnet http://www.ehow.com/how_3335_write-sonnet.html
Write a Haiku http://www.ehow.com/how_3336_write-haiku.html
Find a Literary Agent
http://www.ehow.com/how_2716_find-literary-agent.html
Write a Limerick http://www.ehow.com/how_3332_write-limerick.html

http://elisson1.blogspot.com/2005/02/on-friday-we-blog-them-cats.html

http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/003416.html
The state that has the lowest incidence of divorce in the US is
Massachusetts, which as we all know is so flamingly liberal that they even
let the gay people get married, to other gay people, even

I call myself a recovering catholic. Being a recovering catholic is like
being a recovering alcohilic; If you're an alcoholic, you're alway an
alcoholic, you're just in recovery; the same thing goes for being catholic.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/49756365@N00/4193674/
Marble eyes
Taken by Gina's Photos!

Labels: poetry

[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 2/22/2005 09:57:00 pm

Saturday, November 27, 2004

Plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose
There's an old saying: "The more things change, the more they stay the same." The French have it too (see heading).

With the current kerfuffle about problems with the New South Wales rail system, when, searching for some important legal papers, I stumbled across these comments in a collection of old songs, I thought some people might also find them illustrative of Santanya's saying that "those who forget history are condemned to repeat it." Note the dates below.

If I can wrench some time and mental energy away from burgeoning "urgent & important" demands I may be able to write about how better public transport is an important part of answers to a large number, perhaps a majority of the problems discussed in "the meeja".

www.crixa.com/muse/tot/index.htm
AUSTRALIAN RAILWAY STORY
A Continuing Project: Concerning the Culture Associated with Australian Railways.

Objective
Further the collection and documentation of songs, poems and stories that reflect on the contribution railways have made (and continue to make) to the social history of Australia

unionsong.com/muse/tot/voices/voices16.htm
Railway Voices a CD of Australian railway workers stories with songs and poems

Brian Dunnett electrical fitter, Loco Workshops, Chullora
Undoubtably the 1970 period which led up to the election of the Wran government was the first real occasion that the public actually got itself involved in the debate about public transport. The argument between road and rail lead to the closing down, in the 1960s, of our tramway system, and that appeared to be the way in which rail as a whole was heading. The thing that intervened in that process, and as encouraged people to look again at rail as a system and a more efficient means, both of moving people and certainly bulk goods, was the energy crisis, the environmental questions that arose in the 1970s. People were in fact forced to look at the enormous increase in the usage of diesel and the cost, not only the cost factors involved but, but the energy crisis dominated a lot of the debate. It was stirred on here, I think, by the Green Ban movement in Sydney and elsewhere that it created a basis of interest about well ... what do you do with your cities?
...
Now what ... what had occurred was the NSW government, Askin, brought to Australia a British expert, so called expert, Phillip Shirley, who had been connected with the British run-down of rail and that government was quite openly speaking about 10,000 jobs. The repercussions of that within the union movement was enormous, very sharp divisions, and it was the railway unions that discovered that they had some unity of interest with the public, that formed the "Save Public Transport Committees". Granville had that effect of bringing home what railway workers had been saying, that if you neglect a system, if you don't spend money on maintenance, if you don't do the right thing, well then you're in for trouble.

TRAIN TRIP TO GUILDFORD
A song by John Dengate (1975)
John Dengate - guitar and vocals.

Waiting, waiting for the twenty past four to arrive;
Mate, the twenty past four doesn't run any more,
The next train's the quarter past five.

Time means money, they say,
And I must get to Guildford today
Did he say platform nine for the Liverpool line?
Do I have to change trains on the way?
Indicator, please won't you indicate soon
With your little round light that this platform is right;
I've been waiting at Central since noon.

This old fellow here next to me
Caught the bus up from Circular Quay;
He scratches his arse with his pensioner's pass
But he's on the wrong line for Narwee.

Waiting, waiting, for the twenty past four to arrive;
Mate, the twenty past four doesn't run any more,
The next train's the quarter past five.
Come on you timetable mob, I'm desperately short of a bob,
I'm in my good gear and I'm right off the beer
And at Guildford they say there's a job.

Indicator, please won't you indicate soon
With your little round light that this platform is right;
I've been waiting at Central since noon.

The service is worse than a fraud And the fare's more than I can afford
But I'll never complain - here comes the train
to Guildford And now I'm aboard.
But it's Wentworthville, Pendle Hill;
We're rattling towards Emu Plains.
I should have got out when I heard someone shout
At Granville, "You have to change trains."

Waiting, waiting for the twenty past eight to go back,
But the twenty past eight is half an hour late
And I think I'll lie down on the track.

Labels: poetry

[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 11/27/2004 10:20:00 pm

Thursday, November 11, 2004

A Poem After War
Back

They ask me where I've been,
And what I've done and seen.
But what can I reply
Who know it wasn't I,
But someone just like me,
Who went across the sea
And with my head and hands
Killed men in foreign lands...
Though I must bear the blame,
Because he bore my name.

Wilfred Gibson (1878-1962)
www.warpoetry.co.uk/FWW_index.html

www.firstworldwar.com/poetsandprose/gibson.htm
www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4980

Labels: poetry

[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 11/11/2004 11:11:00 am

This is my blogchalk:
Australia, New South Wales, Sydney, English, photography, reading, natural history, land use, town planning, sustainability.