6.29.2011

Quote of the day

Leo Babauta:

"Take your expectations, and throw them into the ocean."

6.14.2011

R.I.P. Hedda Sterne, 1910-2011

New York Times obituary here.

I wrote about her previously.

6.13.2011

A man after my own heart.

Joshua Klein on the intelligence of crows:



link here.

6.08.2011

Three Years

Two poems from Pamela Gillilan:

Two Years
When you died
all the doors banged shut.

After two years, inch by inch,
they creep open.
I can relish
small encounters,
encourage
small flares of desire;
begin to believe as you did
things come right.
I tell myself that you
escaped the slow declension of old age
leaving me to indulge
this wintry flowering.

But I know
it's not like that at all.



Four Years
The smell of him went soon
from all his shirts.
I sent them for jumble,
and the sweaters and suits.
The shoes
held more of him; he was printed
into his shoes. I did not burn
or throw or give them away.
Time has denatured them now.

Nothing left.
There will never be
a hair of his in a comb.
But I want to believe
that in the shifting housedust
minute presences still drift:
an eyelash,
a hard crescent cut from a fingernail,
that sometimes
between the folds of a curtain
or the covers of a book
I touch
a flake of his skin.

"Two Years" can be found in The All Steel Traveller; "Four Years" from the anthology Staying Alive, edited by Neil Astley.


6.06.2011

Sigh.


Really, I'm not one to clutch at my pearls over politicians' private lives (I make an exception for the ones pushing "Family Values™"), but how can someone as media-savvy as Anthony Weiner be so stupid? Don't answer that question.

Now I hope we can go back to talking about the really important stuff. Nah.

6.05.2011

Sunday music



Gillian Welch, "One Monkey Don't Stop the Show".

Three frogs atop each others' shoulders seek White Star Coffee


as Cory Doctorow says:
This old White Star Coffee ad seems to have come from a contrafactual Jazz Age in which Chairman Mao's graphic designer moved to America to work for a commercial illustration firm.
(via boingboing)