this week i

thought i saw a female eastern bluebird, did, did see way down east (1920).  silent film era single mother sobbing, emergency-baptizing dying newborn, ice river frogger finale.  lowell sherman as handsome as lon chaney.  maria poole, from belden, was at the sewing circle and says . . . .

 

 

watched anora at e street, another sham marriage consequences movie even though cinematic century later and so now with bright color loud sound

 

bad tisane hall of shamed, i'll stay with rooibos chai.  these days, diet dr. pepper as close as i get to the impossible tastes of morning after halloween

read the common good by noam chomsky, interviewed by david barsamian

although most people think the government has a responsibility to ensure reasonable, minimal standards for poor people, they're also against welfare, which is what the government efforts to ensure reasonable, minimal standards for poor people are called.  that's a propaganda achievement you have to admire

 the people who work in the mills ought to own them

the common assumption that the market system is spreading, which just isn't true.  what's spreading is a kind of corporate mercantilism that's supported by - and crucially relies on - large-scale state power

to actually see the slums in bombay and see people living in hideous, indescribable poverty...and these are people who have jobs - they're manufacturing fancy leather clothes that sell on madison avenue and in shops in london and paris

black males in harlem have roughly the same mortality rate as men in bangladesh

if you're much poorer than other people in your society, that harms your health in detectable ways, even by gross measures like life expectancy

thomas friedman..uses the zapatistas as an example of the anti-integrationist pro-safety-net position, and ross perot as an example of the anti-integrationist anti-safety-net position, and dismisses them both as crazy.  that leaves the two "sensible" positions, which are illustrated by clinton (integrationist pro-safety-net) and gingrich (integrationist anti-safety-net)

when poor people in central america vote for their own interests, the result is terror organized and directed by the superpower of the hemisphere, and supervised on the local level by the upper class of that country.  many countries are so weak that they can't really solve their internal problems in the face of us power; they can't even control their own wealthy.  their rich have virtually no social obligations - they don't pay taxes and don't keep their money in the country

let the people who borrowed the money pay it back

why hasn't foreign debt held back the development of countries of east asia?

japan, south korea and taiwan not only controlled labor and the poor, but also capital and the rich.  the debt went for internal investment, not export of capital.

japan didn't allow export of capital until its economy had already reconstructed.  south korea didn't either, until forced to remove capital controls and regulation of private borrowing, largely under us pressure, in very recent years.  (it's widely recognized that this forced liberalization was a significant factor in south korea's 1997 liquidity crisis.)

latin america has the worst income inequality in the world, and east asia has perhaps the least.  latin america's typical imports are luxury goods for the wealthy; east asia's have been mostly related to capital investment and technology transfer.  countries like brazil and argentina are potentially rich and powerful, but unless they can somehow gain control over their wealthy, they're always going to be in trouble

 

some of the rural workers in brazil have an interesting slogan.  they say their immediate task is "expanding the floor of the cage."  they understand that they're trapped inside a cage, but realize that protecting it when it's under attack from even worse predators on the outside, and extending the limits of what the cage will allow, are both essential preliminaries to dismantling it.  if they attack the cage directly when they're so vulnerable, they'll get murdered

 

in the early 1800s, bengal produced more books per capita than any place in the world

 

what's called the left includes leninism, which i consider ultra-right in many respects.  the leninists were certainly very interested in political power - in fact, more so than anyone.

leninism has nothing to do with the values of the left - in fact, it's radically opposed to them.  that was recognized at the time by mainstream left marxists like anton pannekoek, paul mattick and karl korsch.  even trotsky had predicted that the leninists would turn to dictatorial rule (before he decided to join them)

 

i'm not saying things are great now, but they are much better, in virtually every area

 

in the early 1960s, the south was a terror state

 

the rights of corporations were mostly given to them by courts and lawyers, not by legislation, and that power system could erode very quickly

 

john f. kennedy sent the air force to bomb south vietnam and you couldn't get a single person to think about it

 

that's been the story for a couple of thosand years or so.  go back to the oldest recorded texts and see what happens to the people who didn't march in the parade...like socrates

 

when i speak to elite audiences, i constantly get asked, what's the solution?  if i say obvious things like pick your cause and go volunteer for a group that's working on it, that's never the answer they want.  they want some sort of magic key that will solve everything quickly, overwhelmingly and effectively.  there are no such solutions.  there are only the kind that people are working on in massachusetts towns, in self-governing villages in india, at the jesuit center in colombia

 

speaking truth to power makes no sense.  there's no point in speaking the truth to henry kissinger - he knows it already.  instead, speak truth to the powerless - or, better, with the powerless

 

i don't even know what i ought to do

 

11/28

this week i

published on the shape of this year's privatized medicare market, both plans and premiums, also prescription drugs (and benefits and cost sharing)

small group lectured on survey methods.  eventbrite link posted to statistics & programming meetups, three hours discussing complex sample designs

received grandpa joe's death certificate to finish births and deaths dot xlsx, a 7x7 grid with six nearest ancestors.  namesake tonio 84.6 years older

write to the next animal to evolve to both tame this earth and recognize yourself in mirrors: if we humans suffer extinction, as species have before, if-then sentient life evolves again here and only here on this one eden of a planet, so impossibly far within our milky way from other intelligences for even correspondence, when you arrive, when you dig down and excavate our buried cities and inspect our iphones the way my day's paleontologists inspect dinosaur bones, i brim with pleasure just to think of all the cool shit that your newly-minted consciousnesses will learn about our crazy selves

watched chicxulub seafloor core sample mining day the dinosaurs died.  megafauna vaporized to texas, new mexico & beyond burnt, pelagic starved

distressed granite

shocked quartz

ten billion hiroshimas

on that day 66 million years ago when everything changed

soot and charcoal found in k-t boundaries suggest that much of the world burned

 

read the overstory by richard powers.  unlike the lorax, who spoke for the trees, richard powers prefers to let them do their own talking

and on the first day of spring, 1903, john hoel positions the no. 2 brownie and takes a full-length portrait of the sentient chestnut leafing out.  one month later to the day, from the same spot and the same hour, he takes another.  the twenty-first of every month finds him up on the rise.  it becomes a ritual devotion, even in rain and snow and the killing heat, his own private liturgy of the church of the spreading vegetative god.  his wife teases him without mercy, as do his children.  "he's waiting for it to do something interesting"

 

"my silk farm.  finish.  it never make one thread."

"maybe you should plant another."

"best time to plant a tree?  twenty years ago."

"yep, and you always said the next best time was now."

"wrong.  next best time, nineteen years ago."

 

the ironwood's fluted muscle

 

soon the world will be returned to the healthy intelligences, the collective ones.  colonies and hives

 

 humans carry around legacy behaviors and biases, jerry-rigged holdovers from earlier stages of evolution that follow their own obsolete rules.  what seem like erratic, irrational choices are, in fact, strategies created long ago for solving other kinds of problems.  we're all trapped in the bodies of sly, social-climbing opportunists shaped to survive the savanna by policing each other

 

if you want a person to help you, convince them that they've already helped you beyond saying.  people will work hard to protect their legacy

 

the generalist emblem of all trees.  thick, clotted, craggy, but solid on the earth, and covered in other living things.  three hundred years growing, three hundred years holding, three hundred years, dying.  oak

 

anyone caught smirking must sing "amazing grace" with his arms flung out

 

the guard who all the prisoners call john wayne says, "what if i told you to fuck the floor?  five seventy-one, you're frankenstein.  you, 3401, you're the bride of frankenstein.  okay, kiss, motherfuckers"

 

each of the world's seven hundred and fifty species of ficus has its own unique wasp tailored to fertilize it

 

greatest flaw of the species is the overwhelming tendency to mistake agreement for truth

 

he makes it through the portable nietzsche and continues with the complete nostradamus, burning it page by page in the woodstove as he finishes each one

 

life is as good as it has been since he fell out of the sky and into the banyan.  the truck radio drifts in and out through the canyons, like the songs are coming from the moon

 

savagery is a slippery slope

 

a frog tries to cross a busy street.  an ape defends himself with barrel bombs

 

when her tiny wooden doll's head twists off, she plants it in the garden, certain it will grow another body

 

she rides copilot in the beaten-up packard with the pine side paneling

 

if you carved your name four feet high in the bark of a beech tree, how high would it be after half a century?

 

pawpaw!  the only tropical fruit ever to escape the tropics

 

photosynthesis: a feat of chemical engineering underpinning creation's entire cathedral.  all the razzmatazz of life on earth is a free-rider on that mind-boggling magic act

 

the inscrutable generosity of green things

 

you and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor.  a billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways.  but even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes

 

life will not answer to reason.  and meaning is too young a thing to have much power over it

 

her supervisor apologizes for the state of the cabin they give her, on the edge of an ancient cedar grove.  there's no running water, and the varmints outweigh the new biped in biomass, many times over.  she can only laugh.  "you don't understand.  you don't understand.  it's the alhambra"

 

acacias alert other acacias to prowling giraffes

every one of the pieces bears a green tag reading $0

"photographs.  one a month for seventy-six years.  i come from a long and distinguished line of obsessive-compulsives"

 

"chestnut.  the redwoods of the east"

 

diagnosing schizophrenia..beliefs should not be considered delusional if they are in keeping with societal norms

huckleberry and currant, showy milkweed, tall oregon grape, yarrow and checkermallow.  she marvels again at how the planet's supreme intelligence could discover calculus and the universal laws of gravitation before anyone knew what a flower was for

so many substances in woodland pharmacies that no one has yet identified

before it dies, a douglas-fir, half a millennium old, will send its storehouse of chemicals back down into its roots and out through its fungal partners, donating its riches to the community pool in a last will and testament

"the game is definitely chronophagic."  he hears a little question mark pop up in a thought bubble on the other end of the line.  "time-eating"

stop sacrificing virgins

a sonoma chipmunk with giant chopstick incisors

 

a rotting log is home to orders of magnitude more living tissue than the living tree.  "i sometimes wonder whether a tree's real task on earth isn't to bulk itself up in preparation to lying dead on the forest floor for a long time"

 

cones - serotinous - that can't open without flame.  lodgepole pines hold on to theirs for decades, waiting for a fire to spring them

 

"you can replace forests with plantations.  you can also arrange beethoven's ninth for solo kazoo"

 

sassafras, those root-beer-scented twigs that stay green all winter

 

asylum laughter

 

in that dream, the trees laugh at them.  save us?  what a human thing to do.  even the laugh takes years

 

say it ain't so, smokey

 

the free bioregion of cascadia

 

potemkin forest, vista curtains only a few feet deep

 

"hungry?"  he remembers to lift his eyebrows just a hair..but confirmation bias will always beat out common sense.  all the data prove it.  "starving"

 

"pareidolia," patricia says..the adaptation that makes people see people in all things.  the tendency to turn two knotholes and a gash into a face

 

ovid her father gave her.  let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things

raises her glass..to tachigali versicolor

 

people aren't alone, and they never have been

 

but, of course, it's not the world that needs saving.  only the thing that people call by the same name

11/21

this week i

worked at rosemarie's, she dreamt rob lowe to be cast as elvis in upcoming feature.  joe (academic & drafting track) and i share two of three names, lightning struck sterling ralf gedraitis (guz) (academic & stenographic) at watkins glen raceway doing what he loved prompting rocco (rocky) (academic & clerical track) to renounce northern baptism, vote kennedy.  in south philly weekend days, google maps pronounced passyunk passanick, we questioned if clark kent can't find phone booths anymore he must use starbucks bathroom like the rest of us, "a latte & the four digit code please"

 

i found a frog

oh yeah it was just in the guyanese hilton

where are all the single ladies and who wants to marry ryan?

[extends fist as if with microphone] who wants to give a speech

i've seen that before

no i got that in the past six months, maybe you saw it at pizza hut

 

it fits right in

 

who's this kilroy character?

ben had given her this octopus prototype and it was all navy blue glitter in two pieces, but she had hung it in her car and it got too melty and the googly eyes turned cirrhosis of the liver brown and apparently her son got fixated on it when he was like two

taste of punjab is open 24 hours

is it really or is that just a google mistake

well i guess if the diner's full, i guess we'll head over to k-pot

pop rocks oreos aren't good enough for you?

do you like my rock cheeseburger?

she got into a fight with someone named rat, and then they tried to go back in the bar and the bouncer was like are you kidding me

i think pat sajak kind of liked being mean to people

what is this?

it's a mammoth in an ice cube

i wasn't asking literally

she has a backstock of six of the same stuffed animal and whenever he destroys it or does something disgusting to it, she just grabs a new one and is like, "oh it's just been through a rejuvenating bath"

there'll be a test on this later

ben brought this [oversized carnival plush] octopus to the beach and we went for a walk and when we got back seagulls were dragging it

 

what does pez translate to in spanish

fish

oh, they must think that candy's really disgusting

oh we feel so bad but i guess you'll never forget our wedding

watched freaks (1932)

never again will there be a story like this

can't a roman lady itch?

[to his conjoined-twin sister-in-law] i'm not going to have her spending her day in bed with your half of the hangover

one of us [gooble gobble]

read kokoro by natsume soseki.  leading character k, exceeding naming parsimony of kafka's trial, written contemporaneously

the meiji era, which lasted from 1868 to 1912..soseki was born in tokyo in 1867..soseki wrote kokoro in 1914, two years after the death of emperor meiji, and two years before his own death

if one wished to indulge in such fashionable pastimes as playing billiards and eating ice cream, one had to walk a long way across rice fields

a far profounder reason for sensei's silence

do you know what it feels like to be tied down by long, black hair?

pretending that my diploma was a telescope, i surveyed as much of the world as i could see

when you go, please take me with you

in a place where dogs barked at the sight of a western-style suit, the arrival of a telegram was a great event

like most cowards i suffered because i could not decide

in short, my uncle cheated me of my inheritance

it was not the custom for students to wear silk in those days

i still had the odd notion that good clothes, like a mustache, came after graduation

in our little six-mat room

i decided to leave the piece of ice out in the sun, and wait until it had melted and turned into warm water.  then, i thought, he would begin to see the error of his ways

but to my questions he gave replies so vague one could not tell whether they came from the mountains or the sea

yes, you are a haunting, albeit vague, figure that refuses to leave me alone

having failed to bury myself alive among books, i tried for a while to forget myself by drowning my soul in sake

in all the world, i now have only you to turn to

11/14

this week i

updated nhts to 2022.  lisa desjardins: with nine percent of the vote in, she's crushing it.  anonymous frenchman: ask a neighbor.  november 1st ft:

the mediterranean, he noted, was increasingly behaving like the caribbean sea. the warmer body of water helps to form hurricanes that can devastate the coasts of the us, central and south america, and the region's islands

hamtramck, a town near detroit where the mayor has backed trump

the test, pyongyang's first launch of an icbm potentially capable of striking the us mainland in almost a year, reached its highest-ever altitude and lasted 86 minutes, the longest-ever flight time for a north korean missile, according to japan's defence ministry

judicial authorities in argentina and venezuela both issued arrest warrants for the other's president in september

watched rivers of life season one.  one source of the nile from earth's highest non-volcanic, non-orogenic mountains.  rio branco rio negro visibly distinct ninety miles after mixing.  hoatzin claws in its wings, stinky.  river dolphins polyphyletic.  bolivia highest share of population in amazon basin

read in gratitude by jenny diski

'why didn't you just do what you were told?'

the game comes complete, straight out of the memory box.  i see them.  i see me.  all of us laughing.  me shrieking.  being tickled is a kind of torture - it has its own page on wikipedia

 asking questions didn't seem to annoy people

i often went barefoot around london

you behaved so badly, people kept, keep telling me

'you have an addictive personality'

fire and ice and everything nice

in the swedish arctic..clothing designed to make the peeing process a zip for men, but requiring for me, without a distance-spraying organ, to expose practically all of myself to the herd of untroubled reinder

i'd hoped for something like popeye's transfiguration after downing a tin of spinach, but i was still pretty tired in the days after

the tumor has shrunk a little, but, onc doc said swiftly, it was small to start with.  the lymph nodes too have decreased a little in size.  there was neither excitement nor disappointment in his manner.  it may be that he has the same air of studied neutrality in his everyday life, when eating a delicious meal or going over the top of a rollercoaster.  or, more likely, it is for work purposes alone, in order to prevent overexcitement or crashing disappointment in patients with unrealistically high hopes or fears

maths was invented to grapple with concepts that metaphor made murky

'i bet you've found faith now,' believers wrote to christopher hitchens when he announced he had terminal cancer.  he insisted he hadn't.  i'd never been envious of those who believe in an afterlife until now.  it would be so much cosier than dissolution

then there's my daughter chloe and her frighteningly large family - two small children and partner.  vast by my miniaturist standards.  one child good.  more than one, tempting fate

'there's nothing else we can do for you.'  doc language for 'you've failed us and you'll just have to die, which is not our specialty, so goodbye'

as i write there is a world refugee crisis

why the hell had i had those greedy, self-absorbed, terrifying parents if it wasn't to have something to write about?  it wasn't exactly superstitious, nor overtly religious (now one and the same thing)

the next morning i had a stitch in my forehead where the gravel had made a sizeable hole, and two enormous black eyes, like the mask of zorro.  'can you count back from twenty to one?' the student doc asked, checking whether i had damaged my brain.  i said 'yes', which i thought should be enough to put an end to this affair

'granjen, why are you so slow?' 'all the better to . . . '

as soon as she saw blood dripping from my wrist, she fainted and they thought she was the patient..i waved my bloody-razored arm at them to show what the situation was

always fancied, 'smoke gets in your eyes'

i lay on the sofa with an upturned hand over my forehead as i'm sure they were depicted in little women

11/7

this week i

listened to ambassador's greeting then balazs fulei play kodaly's dances of marosszek, liszt's forest murmurs (waldesrauschen) at dc hungary embassy

ichthyosaw attenborough & the sea dragon.  lazing on cold pebble beaches, letting fly accusations of cannibalism, really really thrilling and romantic

thank openxlsx maintainers, my issue in 4y3m2d.  & mushrooms, an extra f - referring to a region's fungi - to be added to mentions of flora and fauna

would work in a tattoo parlor if they let me wear metallurgy mask.  would that hammerhead shark break aquarium glass?  here, you deal with this:

 

lady godiva

'tween hump side saddle silk road

bactrian camel

 

 

 

read the bridge of san luis rey by thornton wilder

she lost her belief in the sincerity of those about her.  she secretly refused to believe that anyone (herself exempted) loved anyone.  all families lived in a wasteful atmosphere of custom and kissed one another with secret indifference.  she saw that the people of this world moved about in an armour of egotism, drunk with self-gazing, athirst for compliments, hearing little of what was said to them, unmoved by the accidents that befell their closest friends, in dread of all appeals that might interrupt their long communion with their own desires.  these were the sons and daughters of adam from cathay to peru

everyone drank chicha in peru and there was no particular disgrace in being found unconscious on a feast day

so he leaned against the tree in the dark, his knuckles between his teeth, and listened to his loud heart-beats

the twin brothers about fifteen years old were sitting at her knee and she was telling them the story of the crucifixion.  their large grave eyes were fixed upon her lips.  suddenly manuel had cried out loud: "if esteban and i had been there we would have prevented it"

on corpus christi day they gave belshazzar's feast where you were so wonderful.  now it was shameful

even memory is not necessary for love

 

10/31