A pretty good explanation of political correctness:

"You 'can' wear whatever you want, say whatever you want, and think whatever you want about whatever you want. All the time! Yaaay! But if a group of people comes to you and says, 'This thing that you are doing is hurting us,' and you keep doing it for fun, then you are a dickweed!"




From: A Complete Guide to ‘Hipster Racism’
http://jezebel.com/5905291/a-complete-guide-to-hipster-racism?tag=racism

"'But I went to college — I can't be racist!' Turns out, you can."

Isthmus

A CNF essay I wrote got published in Issue 1 of the Devilfish Review. Checkem out, if you're bored.

http://devilfishreview.com/

50/50

"Florence was the home of Giovanni Boccaccio, born in 1313, author of many works, including The Dacameron, a cycle of a hundred stories supposedly told by a group of ten young people over the course of ten days in a luxurious retreat from the horrors of Florence... . Boccaccio called his work a commedia, which in the parlance of the time meant 'any play or narrative poem in which the main characters manage to avert an impending disaster and have a happy ending'"

bodies detached from distant

hinges muse over

what the taupe and blue

mid-scale damask

shows once rubbed

raw.

the wonder is whether the tuft and husk

prove geomantic or

peel back

to a panel equally

aritificial.

almost

one might imagine the two toying

with buckles

and tongue-thighs,

heavy with something

deep

in the spine

call it what you want:

a pommel

parabola

some last fiber of felt, old

and itching--

a thing not ever,

if honest,

capillary.

and,

if you are honest

with yourself,

you, whose thoughts remain in words

find no chapel in here

I vocalized eccentricities I wanted you to remember

while I watched you fold paper cranes.

White space/Erasure

I never know

and how

you say

but you dont.

get .

sick.

this is unclean

and i eat out of the bowls.

The truth is

My first time I used an earring.

and every time that i

would

i kept secrets.

the word is platino. the heaviest.

like the ankle, it is (con)vexed.

I believed you about the

aurora borealis

but nothing else.

and

all along,

I kept your cold.

my dent de lion.

What you should

no,

is

You

will

mat fibers,

and

you say

You’ll be

fine.

Why was six afraid of seven?

It wasn't. Numbers are not sentient and thus, incapable of feeling fear.

(from anti-joke.com)

An excerpt from Susan Buck-Morss's essay, "Universal History"

A final image, a third rebus, is appropriate. Adam Smith...wrote that the work of slaves was dearer to their masters than that of freemen, and he condemned slavery as an intolerable obstacle to human progress. Yet he was fully aware of the enormous profits of the sugar plantations--particularly in Barbados and Saint-Domingue--despite the fact that all the work was done by slaves. Was it not, then, a case of disavowal that Smith's only weakness was consuming lumps of sugar? An eyewitness recalls:

'We shall never forget one particular evening when [Adam Smith] put an elderly maiden lady who presided at the tea-table to sore confusion by neglecting utterly her invitation to be seated, and walking round and round the circle, stopping ever and anon to steal a lump from the sugar basin, which the venerable spinster was at length constrained to place on her own knee, as the only method of securing it from his uneconomical depredations. His appearance mumping the eternal sugar was something indescribable.'

Rococo by The Arcade Fire

An elegy:

Anti-logic is not alogic,

we are certain

of nothing

outside
our own falsifications.

---

I forgot about the wind here up until this morning when I was walking and thinking of you and the sun revealed itself in a compelling way to my eyes. It was orange and heavy with atmospheric dust and across the lake the snap-hooks fastened to the flagpole banged incessantly against the aluminum. They clanged (clung), they did, and their tautophony reminded me of tired thirsty kings in Tartarus who roll big rocks and can’t alleviate their thirst.

The rest of the day and every day all day I hear rattling bugs like birds dried to skeletons and sound boxes, and I remember how miraculously quiet it is in November when hearts stop and everything crystallizes. I choose to believe it's kind of God to kill his insects like he does with the cold-- freezing being one of the nicest ways to die.

Speaking of birds, I get bothered when I think about the way you called her your heron. The only bird I’ve ever been is Isis in 5th grade, when I made myself wings from bed sheets and glued feathers for a collaborative project on Egypt. Someone else’s mother did my makeup and made me a necklace out of felt and plastic jewels and I thought I was as beautiful as Cleopatra: the one with no hair on her knuckles.

The other sound I hear a lot is the generator across the street which is really just a big mechanical cricket on the college’s engineering building. There they teach my friend nathaniel that objects only work one way with one intended purpose, and they don’t work backward. You can’t push a rope, he tells me, and he pops his ear with the knuckle of his forefinger. I understand that it’s beside the point, but if you dipped the rope in water and froze it, I think you could push it.

Anyway, I hope you aren’t kept awake by the sound of insects more consistent than obsession. Last week I stayed up reading about Isis and her lover Osiris who was cut up in 14 pieces and thrown into the river. She spent along time trying to find him. I like to imagine her waist deep, sifting through reeds and silt beds, lunging at his pieces flowing further down the current.

Feedback?

....

5 New, great words:

1. ratiocinate

2. sfumato

3. transom

4. internecine

5. apposite

4 Staple Foods

1. Sun Chips

2. Popcicles

3. Fruit Smoothies

4. Leftover Pizza

3 Annoyances:

1. Cicadas

2. Androcentrists who are ignorant and detached enough to call the oppression of women 'an unfortunate thing' (and link it to men not stepping up to their biblical, masculine role)

3. Ockham's Razor

2 Favorite Tragic Figures

1. John Proctor

2. Lady Jane Grey

1 Proclamation:

1. I'm no longer using microwaves. I'm scared of them.

What is a Prijatel?

"What is a Prijatel, you might ask? Prijatel is the accumulation of all things sarcastic into a hodgepodge of sexiness "

-Nick Lyon.

Yep.

Sophia’s daughter returns from the university and settles in the basement. She declines offers of beaded jewelry and summer dresses fashioned from manufactured prints. She relents on shoes and together Sophia and her daughter take greying roads to the bank.

She asks her daughter about the word she used at the dinner table. The girl had directed it at her father and he had found it confusing and foreign.

“So ‘patriarchy’ means don’t let your husband boss you around?”

While the girl explains the girl makes towers and steeples with her hands. Sophia listens but she feels the way a child feels when he's overturned a rock. She feels wonder, and somewhere, the longing to burrow her body into the hot moist earth, between ants and thick ambivalent slugs. The girl uses words with syllables rippling like panicked centipedes, complex and evolving systems, words with impenitrable pillbug shells. Sophia wishes that her own father would've helped her lift her rock, that her mother would've told her she could've been one of these bodies emerging from the earth.

And like, colors, you know?

From John Olson's article "Strange Matter" in the The American Scholar...

Mass is not what it seems. This is because we inhabit a world of weight, density, texture, and tangibility. The realities produced by calculus and differential equations make no sense to us, literally. Our perceptions are keyed to specific sensations. Roughness, weightiness, smoothness, sharpness, dullness. Foods are sweet or bitter or a combination of the two. Some things are warm and dry, others cold and wet. We cannot conceive of a reality not immersed in such responses. Not without faith in numbers. Trajectories and orbital mechanics. Energy and force. Momentum and inertia. Some of these are available to our senses. We all know what velocity feels like. But when someone tells us that there is more space in an ingot of steel than there is steel, we balk at the truthfulness of such a statement. We might readily agree, based on what we have learned in science. But it still seems beyond the reach of imagining. Because if there is more space than steel in an ingot of steel, what does that say about us? Are we ghosts? Clouds of atoms? Symphonies of molecules? Waves of light and radiant heat? All improbable, all incredible revelations. But the fact remains: a three-ton ingot of steel is mostly space. If an atom were the size of a 14 story building, the nucleus would be a grain of salt in the middle of the seventh floor.

Two instances come to mind: Dr. Samuel Johnson dismissing George Berkeley's ideas of immaterialism with his famous "I refute Berkeley thus," and then kicking a rock; and Jack Kerouac's address to an audience at the Hunter College Playhouse on November 6, 1958, during a symposium titled "Is There a Beat Generation?" It was there that Keroauc said, "We should be wondering tonight, 'Is there a world?' But I could go and talk on 5, 10, 20 minutes about is there a world, because there is really no world, cause sometimes I'm walkin' on the ground and I see right through the ground. And there is no world. And you'll find out."

Kerouac and Berkeley were right. Johnson's rock was essentially a phantasmal, a cloud of subatomic particles. He was kicking a dream.

An excerpt from my assigned sixth-grade journal

If I could be any age I would be 21. I would be 21 because I would be able to drive, I would be an adult and I can live on my own.

The only downside of 21 is you are grown-up and so are your friends, so you might not get to see them as much as when you were a kid. Plus you have to make an important discision of what you want to be when you grow up. I want to be one of the following: singer/songwriter, author, actress, teacher, journalist, photographer, or acting coach. I COULD be all of those things, but not really. My friend Maureen wants to be a pharmisist. She wants to be Maureen the famous pharmisist. We always joke about it.

I want to be a singer/songwriter, or author. I want to create books or songs about racialisum, drugs, alchol, disease, and world peace. I think maybe people will listen to me, because I am famous. I think its a stupid reason for someone to listen. We should listen to everyone.

These subjects (prejudice, drugs, achol, disease, and world peace) are very important to me and then after I am famous, I'll create commercials so people will send money to a special organization for disease and cancer. Alchol is an important issue because of drunk driving. I want to do commercials about drunk driving to prevent people from driving drunk. Its almost impossible to prevent prejudice, but drugs I would give money to programs like DARE.

I think I like being a kid more then an adult, when you grow up you can't do a lot of fun things or anything. Yes, there is a downside to not being able to drive and having a bed time, and not being able to see rated R movies. But being grown up is worse. I would like to be my sisters age (19) because she told me when she is at college she can do almost anything she wants, but she must wake up really really early. I think its also KIND OF cool to be an adult because you can have kids and get married. I guess thats also kind of cool.

Summer 2010: an update

1. Metaphysics: No.

2. Writing: No.

3. Reading: Yes.

4. Abscess: Yes.

5. Peanut Butter Banana Milkshake: Yes.

6. Vegan: No.

7. Radiolab: Yes.

8. The Yeah Yeah Yeah's "Hysteric" (Acoustic Version): Yes.

This isn't me.

For Those Who Live Alone

Almighty God, whose Son had nowhere to lay his head:

Grant that those who live alone may not be lonely in their

solitude, but that, following his steps, they may find

fulfillment in loving you and their neighbors; through Jesus

Christ our Lord. Amen

From the Book of Common Prayer