The Rose, the Bear and a Belly Raspberry

I’ve gone to the Thirsty Bear for a Winter Bock before the SFMOMA panel on the Rose, but I have only been able to last an hour at the Jay De Ferro and the Rose Symposium. I kept falling asleep. I hope I was not snoring. “So,” he said, “you’re an expert on beer and wine?” I told him, “I just know a little about a lot.” I should have know better, I return for a cask conditioned porter. It seemed a little flat. Too long on tap, I supposed. “I’ll call you in a year,” she said as she got into the taxi. They were blonds, two babies and a daddy doing belly raspberries. The third blond has an older rich boyfriend or at least she would like to have one. It would not be me.

Quiet the place lies / Under the sun’s green thumb / As if marauding winter would never come – Barbara Howes – Collected Poems, 1995 p30

We’re going to San Francisco. There’ll be some lovin’ there. Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair

True rationalism must always transcend itself by recurrence to the concrete in search of inspiration. A self-satisfied rationalism is in effect a form of anti-rationalism. It means an arbitrary halt at a particular set of abstractions – Alfred North Whitehead – Science and the Modern World, 1925 p200

Nothing succeeds like failure. Nothing fails like success.

This is the scholiast’s black mass: we sit / And fret to see each Poem impaled, dead / As butterfly on pin, as dried eggshell. / Necromancer of learning, a black bat / With wing extended over literature – Barbara Howes – Collected Poems, 1995 p28

Rule of Three - make three points, three ways, three times

Rule of Three: say it three times - - the first time that you suggest it they will look at you like you are an idiot; the second time you suggest it, people will ponder over it; and the third time they will tell you about this great idea that they have

Dangers do not exist ‘in themselves’, independently of our perceptions. They become a political issue only when everyone becomes aware of them; they are the products of social stagings which are strategically defined, covered up or dramatized with the aid of scientific materials – Ulrich Beck – World at Risk, 2008 p8

Everything I needed to know about writing I learned from Country and Western music

As the present moves experientially towards entropy, feelers are cast toward different times and other spaces, dialogues are opened up with voices formerly excluded by the strong present of Western modernity – Andreas Huyssen – Twilight Memories, 1995

It oohs and aaahs as mommy pretends to eat baby’s right hand. Daddy holds up a squeaking green frog toy. The infant grabs at it.. Erin, that’s its name, has turned its attention to the pair glasses lying on the table. She grabs at the spectacles. Another baby is still sleeping in its mother’s lap. That mother has her back turned toward me. I can see only a part of the tiny cranium of her little one. “Shall we head back guys?” They re-assemble - two infants, two prams, two sets of parents. Getting all of the blankies and other baby paraphernalia together takes at least seven minutes. They leave. The café is quite once more. You can now hear Radio Triefe playing on the sound system. This was a mix compiled by Walter. He is proud of his newly learned CD burning skills.

But don’t / expect now to return for more. Whatever more / there will be will be / unique as those were unique – Denise Levertov – The Great Unknowing, 1999 p46

A recent “Public Policing Polling” survey asked its respondents “Do you think that Barack Obama legitimately won the Presidential election, or do you think that ACORN stole it for him?” – 26% responded that they though ACORN had stolen it; 62% thought that it won it legitimately and 12% were unsure. 52% of the Republicans surveyed thought that ACORN stole the presidency.

Cheep credit, obtained to chase the American dream of a house and a car is the ultimate enabler of human addiction for distinction: when subprime mortgages go bust, envy is to blame not greed – Mark Kingswell – Harper’s Magazine (Nov 2009) p77

Percentage of patrons who have accessed the Internet from that place in the past month:
        Library                       38%
        Coffee Shop               18%
        Community Center      14%
        A bar                          11%
        Fast Food Rest             6%
        Church                          5%

Culture as experiment, the museum as laboratory of the senses, is abandoned to a regressive notion of culture as museum of past glories - Andreas Huyssen – Twilight Memories, 1995

Soccer is being played in the snow in northern Spain. The rain falls mainly on the plain.

The most unlikely writers stand shoulder to shoulder; / One studies incongruity as one grows older – Barbara Howes – Collected Poems, 1995 p34

Economic choices are never heroic – not in a market economy anyhow.