You like spaghetti, George? I like spaghetti? I like board games. I like grabbing the trifecta with that long shot on top. That ozone smell you get from air purifiers. And I like knowing the space between my ears is immeasurable. Mahler’s first, Bernstein conducting. You’ve got to think about all the things you like and decide whether they’re worth sticking around for. And if they are, you’ll find a way to do this.
Rube, Dead Like Me: Season 1, Episode 2
“Long ago, in the poverty-stricken hills of southern China, a village banished its children to the forest to feed on wild fruits and leaves. Years later, when food stores improved, the children’s parents returned to the woods to reclaim their young.
To their surprise, their offspring had adapted to forest life remarkably well; the children’s white headdresses had dissolved into fur, tails grew from their spines and they refused to come home.”
Lemur slideshow: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/09/22/science/092308-Monkeys_index.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
Biologist Pan Wenshi Helps a Region and a Species, the Langur – NYTimes.com.
And nothing more exposes the hypocrisy of financial elites riding the coattails of those who revere small-town religious values than a downturn that highlights the vast gulf in power between the two key components of the conservative coalition. Even cultural conservatives will start to notice that McCains tax policies are geared toward the wealthy investing class and Obamas toward the paycheck crowd. Even the most ardent friends of business have begun to argue that a re-engagement with sensible regulation is essential to restoring capitalisms health.
E. J. Dionne Jr. – Whose Elitism Problem Now? – washingtonpost.com.
The UK website If You Could is the project of design firm HudsonBec and asks this question: if you could do anything tomorrow, what would it be? This week’s print series answers the question with wonderful prints from Rob Ryan and Jason Munn.
If You Could : Print Series : August 2008
Stone Age embrace: A remarkable triple burial -- containing a woman and two children who were 5 (left) and 8 years old, their limbs entwined -- was discovered at the Gobero site during the 2006 field season. Pollen clusters found in the sand indicated the three had been buried on top of flowers. The skeletons showed no sign of injury and had been ceremonially posed and buried, along with four arrowheads. The image appears in the September 2008 National Geographic. (Credit: Mike Hettwer (c) 2008 National Geographic)
This morning I’ve been reading stories in the New York Times, Science Daily, and National Geographic, all based on the findings of Paul Serno and his colleagues and presented in a paper on PLos ONE. They tell of people who lived and died in the Sahara when the Sahara wasn’t dry, and the articles gave me that awe-filled, castles-in-the-air feeling that was so much more common in childhood, when the whole arc of human history seemed to whoosh up and past like a train.
Says John Nobel Wilford in the Times article:
A girl was buried wearing a bracelet carved from a hippo tusk. A man was seated on the carapace of a turtle.
And in the photo above, two children reach out to their mother for thousands of years.
Whoosh.
“…it preserves a small zone for the playful, the useless, and the unauthorized.”
–Matt Greenfield, writing in The Valve about Ramsey Scott’s “Even the Hardy Boys Need Friends: An Epistolary Essay on Boredom.â€
The quote above refers to Wayne Koestenbaum’s practice of assigning his grad students a two-page “lyric essay” each week in lieu of a final paper. This was common practice in my own graduate program at New School University, where I studied under people like David Lehman, Laurie Sheck, David Trinidad, and Susan Wheeler. I remember that one of the “essays” took the form of a collage about Wordsworth poem.
But I fear it was my own common practice through my whole education, even when more traditional essays were warranted. For better or worse, I could never figure out how to obey without also resisting.
