November 2009
62 posts
in praise of eating alone
Eating alone, there’s no obligation to make appreciative noises or come up with generic comments about the food. Instead, you think obsessively detailed compliments about the kind of bread or the commendable thickness of the cream cheese or how the colors complement each other.
Eating alone, there’s no obligation to look up or pace yourself with the other person. Instead, you look...
Every year on the day after Thanksgiving, I...
“So, what I guess I’m trying to answer or say is that I don’t - being inside my...”
– Charlie Kaufman (via sometimesagreatnotion)
Yes, yes, and yes.
“There are philosophers of science who argue that when scientists make categories...”
– Sports, sex, and the runner Caster Semenya : The New Yorker
(via kottke.org)
“I have never felt myself to be another man’s creature (here they come, how...”
– from Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country.
again: because it is on my desk and there are so many things to say and I am so tired; too tired to say them all. So here is this cautionary tale-in-a-sentence instead. If I can write one sentence someday this dense, this evocative, this telling—it...
4 tags
an accidental essay
newsweek:
Delson’s reading of Going Rogue for The Awl is a wonder.
Agreed:
Palin speaks only in rhetoric; which is to say, she speaks only in words she heard somewhere else; which is to say coherence cannot be expected.
Hence the quotes from Pascal, from Napoleon.
Which reminds me of another who speaks only in words heard from somewhere else, from whom coherence cannot be...
poems for a rainy night
Jim Harrison & Ted Kooser (from Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry):
Why do I behave so badly? Just because. That’s still a good answer.
The drunken man spills most of his importance on his shoes.
Raindrops on your glasses; there you go again, reading the clouds.
The birds, confused by rain clouds, think it’s evening.
(via my brother, several Christmases ago)
4 tags
Harry Chapin - Mail Order Annie
Related,...
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dilemma, part 2
[continued from part 1]
More concerns, re: the fate of my research -
2. The two major reasons for attempting publication were a) for my C.V. and b) in order to make it available for other readers, since I believe in what it says. The first is, at least in the near term, rendered irrelevant (see pt. 1). The second would be best served by making the article available online (ideally in a format...
“Figuring out how to monetize sociality is a problem. And not one new to the...”
– danah boyd
4 tags
dilemma, part 1
[Apparently I’m into multi-part stories this week.]
When I walked away from academia, I half-expected I’d be back within three years. Several brilliant and supportive professors had assured me my work was publishable, so I figured I’d submit an article or two to journals and see how that went. At the very least, I knew it was good research (new research), and it felt silly to...
Act I: It is terrible and rainy.
I stay late at work getting myself pretty confused about localization and Subversion, pack up, and hit Elliott Bay Books/Cafe. They have a terrible selection (or lack thereof) of children’s books, but a stunning selection of darling baristas who know me.
I walk North on 1st a mile or two through Pioneer Square, Pike Place, Belltown. It is fucking awful out....
I think I’m having an awkward attack. Is that a thing? anyway, everything is terrible and hilarious.
Some nights a whole poem is too much, but it gives up one sentence so perfect you want to paint it on all your doorframes and tattoo it on your ribs.
…What rage for order disordered her pilgrimage—so that for years at a time she would hide among strangers, waiting to rearrange all mysteries in a new light.
(yes, again Levertov, from “Olga Poems”)
langer:
(this is an ongoing debate outside of the film between Žižek and guys like Peter Sloterdijk on the status of belief and ideology in contemporary society, but this was probably lost on most viewers because Sloterdijk never said anything that got set in 50pt Gill Sans Ultra Bold over a soft-focus photograph of a woman looking woefully through the windows of a train passing through the...
“Laughter demolishes fear and piety before an object, before a world, making of...”
– M.M.Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel”
If you could rade threw any celebrities closet who would it be and why?!?
kaliem:
eatyourflowers:
fashionfever:
I would choose Vanessa Hudgens because I love her since of style.
blake lively?
Kate Bosworth or Diane Kruger. Diane looks amazing on the red carpet and off. Kate looks great on the red carpet but I love her every day stlye just a little more.
Well, first I’d “rade threw”...
“But that was on paper. And if we had learned anything from this story it was to...”
– Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper
Living Alone (II)
Denise Levertov:
Some days, though, living alone, there’s only knowledge of silence, clutter of bells cobwebbed in crumbling belfry, words jagged, in midutterance broken.
Starlings, as before, whistle wondering at themselves, crescendo, diminuendo. My heart pounds away, confident as a clock. Yet there is silence.
New leafed, the neighbor trees round out. There’s one, near my...
the mad ones
merlin, from “Three things about Marco Arment:”
like a lot of developers I’ve known, Marco feels things strongly, says things strongly, and he strikes me as a guy who really believes that some things are right and other things empirically are not. He’s got a strong voice and a lot of clear thinking to back it up.
This, which describes my favorite kind of person, is for Jason, who...
feast
psychotherapy:
The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other’s welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by...
aim higher, friends.
@ambersimmons:
RT @irishgirl In some circles, it appears that “geek girl” means “a hot chick who knows how to tweet.” Let’s aim higher, friends! #srsly
(1:39 PM Nov 9th from web)
See also [NB: not always safe for work]:
Geek girls are hot. Maybe it’s the glasses, the impression of intelligence…
Emphasis most definitely mine.
The weight on my shoulders.
langer:
Devil: Make eye contact with her, you idiot! Angel: But if I make eye contact with her she’ll think I’m creepy! Devil: How do you expect to ever have sex again if you can’t even make eye contact with a woman? Angel: Because then she’ll think I’m a creep who’s trying to have sex with her! Devil: You are! Angel: Am what? A creep? Or trying to have sex...
“I have a moral objection to paying for any kind of erectile dysfunction medicine...”
– Hullabaloo
Digby opposes spending taxpayer dollars on boners for old men.
(via moltz)
Living Alone (I)
Denise Levertov, “Living Alone:”
In this silvery now of living alone, doesn’t it seem, I ponder, anything can happen? On the flat roof of a factory at eye level from my window, starling naiads dip in tremulous rainpools where the sky floats, and is no smaller that long ago. Any strange staircase, as if I were twenty-one— any hand drawing me up it, could lead me to...
lkm:
“Danvers High parents recently got an automated call from the principal warning them that if students say or display the word “meep” at school, they could face suspension.”
— What’s wrong with ‘meep’? It’s all in how you say it - SalemNews.com, Salem, MA
The principal’s explanation is totally nonsensical.
I say meep when I run into people. Or when I do that...
wordnik:lonely →
I love this site. The “examples” section reminds me of my favorite assignment in high school: finding new words in the assigned books, then making sentences out of them. I loved doing that; once the teacher commented, “did you write these?” in apparent disbelief at the obvious time spent crafting my example-sentences.
And the twitter feed! It takes the site from reference...
moltz:
“Snyderman: A white man deciding a woman’s (deep breath)…deciding a woman’s responsibility in her own procreation. I mean I…I find it infuriating. I really think it doesn’t matter what side of the abortion issue you’re on, the fact that they are making health care harder and harder for women to navigate the system. I think it’s outrageous. Just outrageous.”
—
Dr. Nancy Snyderman quoted...
3 tags
“While it is said that everything is fair in love and war, the dictum is...”
– Salvador Plascencia (from The People of Paper, via my brother)
moving things around
Friday night, I got to hang out with a lovely small person. When I asked her what helps when she’s sad, she said:
Sometimes it makes me feel better to move things around.
So we did: all the friends lined up and went to the zoo (behind the chair).
I can see her point.
Look at that big lovely bookshelf with all its empty space for books. And all this new blog formatting.
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“If one wanted to say what it was seemed most insistent in either her work or her...”
– Robert Creeley on Denise Levertov
(with whom I am having a love-affair, for the second time, though very differently than before)
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Copyblogger:
What is good writing?
Ask an English teacher, and they’ll tell you good writing is grammatically correct. They’ll tell you it makes a point and supports it with evidence. Maybe, if they’re really honest, they’ll admit it has a scholarly tone — prose that sounds like Jane Austen earns an A, while a paper that could’ve been written by Willie Nelson scores a B (or worse).
Not all...
“The blazes caused about $25,000 in damage. Police are already investigating...”
– via SeattleCrime.com
Um, three fires within one block of 85th & Greenwood? I’m personally worried for Neptune, Mr. Gyros, and 826 (as well as obviously concerned, less-personally, for all the other great folks up there). That’s one of my favorite blocks in town.
this article about British drug policy just made... →
Several reasons:
1. Good for that guy who got fired. Good for his colleagues for threatening a mass resignation. That’s hardcore.
2. British people say hilariously stuffy shit like:
This morning David Cameron branded the row “unseemly”.
3. British news sites link to shit without proofing teasers for hilarity (right sidebar, midway down):
…which made me laugh...
tomatoes, then
Denise Levertov (“Libations”):
We agree on tomatoes, then—and happiness? yes, that too: we mean growth, branching, leafing, yielding blossoms and fruit and the sharp odor of dreams.
(photo from Muffet)