Misappropriation of Public Space is no longer Just a Misdemeanor ( Up to 30 Days in Jail and/or a Tousand Dollar Fine)

This was another case of inappropriate use of public space when the chairman of the nursing faculty committee that had sent her that letter telling her that her teaching did not meet their academic standards held a conference with her. She brought all her documentation. She was pointing and explaining and he was telling her that it had no relevance. I could feel the anger in her voice. Either she was paranoid or had managed to piss someone important off. He maintained that the process was above suspicion but all this evidence could not be considered because it did not meet the committee’s criteria. All the issues that she was raising needed to be taken up in another process, he was proclaiming. She would have to make an appeal to them. He was very polite and perhaps naïve. She probably was not paranoid considering the nature of his conciliatory behavior and his willingness to have such a meeting outside of the system ( a little guilty consciouse on his part). I don’t think she is paranoid – having had too much exposure to bureaucratic behavior myself – but she sure was whinny. She said that she had been praying for him and that they had turned a joyous time of the year into a hell for her. Why did they have to come here and become an embarrassment – such a public places is no place for such a conference – no place at all.

It’s been three years. Your scent still lingers; // your scent gone and yet never ending. / But now you’re gone, never to return – Li Po – The Selected Poems, 1996 p18

Numbers are to mathematicians
What words are to poets
Stanzas and formulas
      Are synonymous
Fibonacci all in a row
      At the carnival
It all adds up


A poem has symmetries
Words have recursive sequences
The order is not random
     This can be proven
     They are interrelated
I am elated


A formula does exist
My proof consists in showing
That an infinite sequence
Can be captured by
      Something finite

And so now maladies of the soul have emerged, unhappinesses which are complicated products of the distance we have set between ourselves and the world – Robert Macfarlane – The Wild Places, 20 p203

Factoid: Contractors now compose 69% of the US Department of Defense’s workforce. At present there are 104,000 contractors in Afghanistan. The number of Defense contractors there rose by 40% between June 2006 and September 2009. The number of armed contractors there doubled during that time period from 5,000 to 10,000. With the coming surge there will be an additional 56,000 in the country. There are also a number on none Department of Defense contractors there (3,600 Department of State and 14,000 USAID). A year from now the likely number of US-funded civilian personal on the ground in Afghanistan may exceed 220,000 and costing in excess of $16 billion a year

Our armies moving down White-Ascent Road, / Mongols probing along Sky-Blue Seas - // Soldiers never return from those forced / marches ending on battlefields. Countless // guards lookout across moonlit borderland / thinking of home, their faces all grief – Li Po – The Selected Poems, 1996 p26

Where power and expertise coincide, there truth will be self-evident

It’s no surprise, Eastern seas become / Western streams shallow and clear, // or the melon-grower at Ch’ing Gate / once reigned as Duke of Tung-ling – Li Po – The Selected Poems, 1996 p30

Searching for historical analogies we latch onto historical themes intuitively: French collaboration, inter-war Britain, the American dis-union. We plunder the past to gain knowledge about the present but understand neither. But at least we are not ignorant – we have analogous situations.

That winter hour, upon the summit ridge with the stars falling plainly far above, it seemed to me that our estrangement from the dark was a great and serious loss. We are, as a species, finding it increasingly hard to imagine that we are part of something which is larger than our own capacity – Robert Macfarlane – The Wild Places, 2009 p203

How sad that time should be
      So momentous
So as not to be allowed to write
      About the mundane
We are making history and this
Is no time to waste
     With nonsense


What a lose that one cannot
      Eat history
Or that I cannot embrace the hero
     Who is made of steel

No one understands now. Those who could / hear a song this deeply vanished long ago – Li Po – The Selected Poems, 1996 Po p28

Factoid: Between 1680 and 1820 the flow of migrants across the Atlantic included about five African slaves for every European settler