Here’s Yoshi helping my pack up after a day at Temboo.
Tim
Here is a great. . . whatever it is that we call Tumblr accounts that do stuff like this. I guess “blog” fits. Whatever.
Here is an awesome video that I found via the aforementioned blog:
American Christians: “I Ain’t Rendering Shit to Caesar!”
Here is a delightful conflation of prejudice and rights. If your beliefs prevent you from performing your job, you accepted that job in bad faith. This kind of equivocation is disgusting, and I hope she gets the sacking she richly deserves over it.
Innovation Won’t Save You
Here is a little reflection by celebrity aggregator Jason Kottke about the fate of the bookshelf. It ends like this: “As the bookshelf industry scrambles to retool, a Kindle cozy industry rises.” This is. . . one of those stories about the way people change with the times that you can only reflect upon for about two minutes, because if you think about it any more than that, you end up facing a pretty stark and kind of depressing reality. The slack created by the collapse of the old industry can’t possibly be picked up by the new industry, so things get even more sluggish and everything continues to go to hell.
The Grim Truth
Even Portland graffiti artists want you to shut up and do as you’re told.
Absent Friends
A couple of nights ago I read “The Wasteland” out loud to C, and I’ve been keeping the containing volume around and reading from it sporadically since. I am surprised at how much I still like it. I imagine that a lot of people go through an Eliot phase at some point, and then decide that the whole thing is a little too severe and get on with things. Sadly, it seems I am a bit stunted this way.
The other thing that has been standing out about it is how contemporary the apocalyptic tone feels. I mean, every era arrives at the conclusion that the world is going to end on its watch, but the particulars tend to vary. The sort of traditional return of the messiah has a certain feel, and the nuclear holocaust of my youth had a rich texture of its own.
Eliot’s interwar poetry sees the impending end of the world as a collapse into filth. Society recedes until all we have left is squalid savagery. In our political climate in which not taking any responsibility for anything is the ne plus ultra, this all starts to feel very familiar. It’s pretty shocking how quickly a handful of maniacs can reverse so much progress.
Baboons Domesticating Dogs
Not much in the way of context, but this is definitely pretty interesting.
The Return
As has been mentioned elsewhere, I was in France for a while. Now I’m back. I’m not. . . thrilled. Now I’m kind of figuring out what’s going to change and what’s going to stay the same. As you probably know, C is moving out some time around September in order to teach in a slightly less harrowing environment. While this is a bit complicated, to say the least, it’s also probably a bit of an improvement in terms of everyone’s mental state, and if our contacts become less frequent, at least the odds of me feeling appreciated during them will be increased.
The big thing, though, is a sort of shift in my sort of mental state regarding my, I don’t know, let’s say “condition” for lack of a better word. I think that in a lot of ways living with C and S has created a sort of suspension or deferral where I’m sort of waiting for things to happen in regard to them, and now that’s gone so I have to do things now, which is going to be strange. I’m not sure I’m up for that any more. I’m not even really very clear on what things are. I guess I’m just going to have to keep my eyes open.
Something Actually Interesting About Malcolm Gladwell
Background information:
As you are probably aware, Malcolm Gladwell is a man who makes his living repackaging conventional wisdom with glib, offbeat twists. He allows the dullest of the hegemonically enfranchised to feel clever and iconoclastic, so he’s quite a success.
You may also know that Neil Gaiman is a fantastic comic writer, and a perhaps somewhat rougher novelist. He is also married to Amanda (Fucking) Palmer, but that’s neither here nor there. Slightly more salient is that his hair is beautiful enough to corrupt to American legal system.
Bear these facts in mind as you read the following dialog.
Me.: What are you doing?
C.: Reading the New York Times.
Me.: Yeah, how are rich people saving the world?
C.: (baleful glare)
Me.: What does Malcolm Gladwell say about it?
C.: I don’t know.
Me.: Can’t hear him through his hair?
So then C says she doesn’t know what Malcolm Gladwell looks like, so we head to Google Image Search. She just searches by name, my search string is “does malcolm gladwell look retarded or what?” The whole point of this post is that one of the images that this search returned was this one:
So there you have it, in a sufficiently strong wind, Neil Gaiman’s justice-destroying hair makes him look like Malcolm Gladwell. It’s a crazy world.
Green
C and I just finished The Book of the New Sun. Throughout it, and increasingly at the end, the narrator asserts that when his world’s sun is restored the vegetation will be of a darker green. Presumably this means that he’s used to leaves that are a bit washed out for lack of nutrients, but as I was gallivanting about on Mount Tabor the other day it occurred to me that it was a little odd, as we tend to associate a lighter green with renewal.
