The weather is getting cooler. After two warm days the
temperature dropped. It is the first day of autumn. The date of the equinox
seems to drift. Someone said it had to do with the moon. Sort of like Easter, I
asked, but I doubted that the moon had anything to do with it. I looked it up
on the Internet. It gets complicated but basically has to do with the fact that
our rotation around the sun is not divisible by the number of the earth’s own
rotations. It is same reason that we skip a day every four years except for
those divisible by 100. Here is something I didn’t know – the actual length of
the year varies slightly due to the influence of the other planets.
Hegel is not the winter / yellow in the pines: the sunlight
has never / heard of trees: surrendered self among / unwelcoming forms:
stranger, / hoist your burden get on down the road – A R Ammons – Collected
Poems, p56
Costa Rica (bold) – 440 – the dog gets a biscuit.
You have the cutest dog ever. I love seeing him every
morning. And I smile as she strolls to her car carrying two cups of hot coffee.
One in each hand.
No one wished
to seize power / or to be subject to it. / No one wanted to fall victim / to his own or others’
delusions. / No one volunteered / for crowd scenes and processions, / to say
nothing of dying tribes - / although without all these / history couldn’t run
its charted course / through centuries to come – Wislawa Szymborska – Poem s New and Collected, 1957-1997, 1998 p255
My dog smells, well,
Like a dog
I smell like a man
A woman douses
Herself
The dog and I
Need a bath
I am told
We need an unnatural
(artificial)
flavor
It is their opinion
It is their opinion
If I had to
choose between the Doors and Dosteyevsky, then of course – I’d choose
Doestetyevsky. But do I have to choose? – Susan Sontag – Where the Stress
Falls, 2001
August saw the highest jump in the number of US homes that
received an initial default mortgage notice – 33% from July to August – in four
years. 3.7 million more homes are in the foreclosure process than there would
be in a normal housing market. August saw 78,880 default notices issued.
We have entered an age of insecurity – economic insecurity, physical
insecurity, political insecurity… Insecurity breds fear – Tony Judt – Ill Fares The Land, 2010 p12
60% of of insurers in the US have no risk management plan
for assessing climate risk. Only 18% of property and casualty companies have
formed climate change policies or explicit oversight of climate risk
We go through
life mishearing and miss-seeing and misunderstanding so that the stories we
tell ourselves will add up – Janet Malcolm
There are nearly as many incarcerated workers in the US
economy as there were slaves prior to the Civil War.
Private privilege is easy to understand and describe. It is
rather harder to convey the depths of public squalor into which we have fallen
– Tony Judt – Ill Fares The
Land, 2010 p17
Half of all Americans will suffer an episode of mental illness during their lifetimes. Up to almost
5% of all Americans during any given year will suffer “a diagnosable mental
disorder [that] has substantially interfered with, or limited one or more life
activities.”
No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far
greater part of the members are poor and miserable – Adam Smith
A chipmunk can stuff up to 34 beechnuts into its cheeks at
one time
Money is mysterious and getting more so - Mark C Taylor – Confidence Games, 2004 p57
Teaching in itself accounts for about 15% of a student’s
achievement outcome while the impact of poverty has four times that impact. No
Student Left Behind is in reality not a program to improve education but a
program to in improve the return of capital invested in the education industry.
It creates opportunities for private
investment in the educational process and guarantees the continued
profitability of private enterprise endeavors. The unstated goal of No Child is
to help large corporations earn money at public expense. Look at the footprint
of the companies involved in testing, consulting, counseling, re-training and
management in the educational industry.
The hell bent
strategy of opening new markets to sell more widgets, and internalizing more cheap labor in a growing empire of
capital, arrived both at diminishing returns and at the limits of the globe –
Joshua Clover – The Nation 4/25/112 p32
I travel beneath gray skies
This is where I sit
I read and sip lukewarm
Coffee
The ladies think my
Little dog is cute
I smile
They see me everyday
They say
Am I a professor
They ask
This is a college town
A small one – both the
Town and
its school
The building housing
The coffeeshop was built
In 1853
Across the river the border
War raged
The dog lifts his rear
Leg and
pees
The coffee has long
Gone cold
Before the cup has been
Emptied
A contrail forms in
The sky
There would
seem to be some resemblance between the way Eros acts in the mind of a lover
and the way knowing acts in the mind of a thinker – Anne Carson – Eros the
Bittersweet, 1986
We [humans] are biologically adapted for cooking. Cooking
foods may have started as long as two million years ago. Because cooking softens
food, it thereby adds to the amount that could be consumed without endlessly
chewing all day long. Chimpanzees spend as much as a third of their waking
hours feeding, while humans spend only about 5% of their time doing so. And their diet can be very boring.
People
are much less likely to question an institution when they are making money from
it hand over fist than when the are suffering from hard times – Peter Kolchin –
American Slavery 1619-1877, 1993 p87
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