Month: October 2011

Tony Woodlief contemplates it:

Sometimes I wake up in a hotel bed or my apartment and I forget where I am, what bed this is and what city this is. I shower and sometimes I shave and I mutter sentences that have no meaning because they are not in the right place. They are divorced from all place, these words like I don’t understand this and I can’t do this and Please help me. I mutter these sentences and I stop, the washrag over my face or the blade to my neck, and I wonder where the words came from, and who they are for, and why I am saying them, and if only God understands why we talk to ourselves in the bleary dark morning hours.

Only God understands if they are prayers or laments, and how words can be both, how every sentence spoken out of place is really just another way of saying: Where am I to go?

"October" by Frederick Seidel:

It is time to lose your life,
Even if it isn't over.
It is time to say goodbye and try to die.
It is October.

The mellow cello
Allee of trees is almost lost in sweetness and mist
When you take off your watch at sunrise
To lose your life.

You catch the plane.
You land again.
You arrive in the place.
You speak the language.

You will live in a new house,
Even if it is old.
You will live with a new wife,
Even if she is too young.

Your slender new husband will love you.
He will walk the dog in the cold.
He will cook a meal on the stove.
He will bring you your medication in bed.

Continued here. 

(Video: Ta-Nehisi Coates reads from Frederick Seidel's POEMS 1959-2009: "Boys," and "October," starting at 5:38)

In the prose poem "Crowds," Charles Baudelaire wrote:

It is not given to every man to take a bath of multitude; enjoying a crowd is an art; and only he can relish a debauch of vitality at the expense of the human species, on whom, in his cradle, a fairy has bestowed the love of masks and masquerading, the hate of home, and the passion for roaming… Multitude, solitude: identical terms.

Stefany Anne Golberg finds a parallel in city life today:

Like Baudelaire, we are perpetually immersed in the crowd.

In lieu of privacy in private, we have created a public privacy. Picture a bus in a contemporary American metropolis during a morning commute. We are all listening to music on our personal listening devices. Some of us also read email on a smartphone. … We are in a social space, absorbed in the digital crowd, but trying to be alone inside of it. When we go home at night, we are still in the crowd. We hop on our computers, consume information. We might go onto Facebook and talk to hundreds of friends at once, retool our image: What do I want to tell people that I like today? How do I want to look today? How can I expand the breadth of my crowd? The more people I am friends with, the more people I can see.

Like Baudelaire, we are watching, observing, hoping to find ourselves in the multitude.

(Photo by Zach Klein)

Not just a figure of speech: 

Sex can trigger transient global amnesia, as can other physically strenuous activities. People in their 50s and 60s are the most likely to experience an episode, but strangely, most people with transient global amnesia have it only once. In most cases, the amnesia is anterograde, meaning people have trouble forming new memories. Sometimes, people also experience transient retrograde amnesia, forgetting some portion of their previous memories. In the case of the 54-year-old woman at the Washington, D.C., hospital, the last day was a fog, and she had been forgetful and confused since having sex. … In one case reported in 1964, a man lost his memory the moment he orgasmed, causing him to exclaim, "Where am I? What's happened?"

Our favorite Portland pet photographer, Carli Davidson, captures another priceless visage, reminiscent of Bill the Cat:

I'm totally in love with this little persian kitten! Mushy is a 5 month old foster kitten who will hopefully be available for adoption soon. I'll keep everyone posted!

Follow her on Twitter here and Facebook here.

A new kind of culinary cannabis:

Adjusted for volume, "special" wines can range from under a pound of marijuana per 59-gallon barrel to over 4 pounds per barrel. The result is a spectrum ranging from a gentle, almost absinthe-like effect to something verging on oenological anesthetic. Henry views his wine as a digestif, "like a fernet." Recently he made a Riesling (unusual, in that most pot-infused wines are reds), mixing about an ounce of fairly dry (as opposed to fresh) marijuana ("I wanted less of a piney-oily texture") with the wine in a 5-gallon carboy. After about five months, he bottled the wine, unfiltered, in 375-milliliter splits marked only with a hand-drawn skull and crossbones on the cap.

He is, it goes without saying, a popular, popular man at dinner parties.

(Hat tip: Nerdcore)

Aurora, Colorado, 1.45 pm

Pretty reasonable:

First, if you've got something in your hands that can outperform Crown Victoria and Charger interceptors on the interstate, you're going to be relatively easy to spot – you won't be doing this in a stock Toyota. Second, you've got Little Brother to worry about – if you wax someone's doors at double the speed limit, they're probably going to call the police. Instant update to last known location and direction of travel, which allows retriangulation if you managed to create space.

You probably haven't, though, because even with vehicles capable of impressive top end speed, there comes a point where the vehicle is so functionally light you can no longer safely operate it in real world driving conditions. My top speed running code in a Crown Vic was 134 mph, which was frankly stupid – the suspension was floating so badly that driving over a heads-up penny probably would have sent me into a terminal fishtail. This all means that, while you may maintain some semblance of distance between yourself and the point car, you're very unlikely to be completely leaving them in your sonic wake.

(Hat tip: Kottke)

Rolling in the beats (live mashup) from Ithaca Audio on Vimeo.

"I never actively try to offend though. That’s churlish, pointless and frankly too easy. But I believe you should say what you mean. Be honest. No one should ever be offended by truth. That way you’ll never have to apologise. I hate it when a comedian says, "Sorry for what I said." You shouldn’t have said it. You shouldn’t say it if you didn’t mean it and you should never regret anything you meant to do," – Ricky Gervais.