I have stolenthe idea that I saw in RSS

and which you maybe have already seen today.

Forgive me it is hilarious and I can't help it.

[via austin kleon]

"I lied in my ad. I hate Wallace Stevens." Mike Twohy, New Yorker, 1995.

Alex Ross on Wallace Stevens:

Stevens' grandeur is an inch away from absurdity, if not in the thick of it. This is by intention. He liked to deflate solemnity with silliness. His humor is his least noticed attribute, probably because it is so widespread. Even his titles---"The Revolutionists Stop for Orangeade," "The Emperor of Ice-Cream"---undercut their own pomposity. Sometimes I think Stevens was a collegiate prankster who never gave away the joke he played on literature.

This bothers me more than it should:

The parking meters reduce the walking width of the sidewalk. Without room for two people to pass comfortably, someone gets forced off onto the grass. Thus, long dead streaks of dirt. It's a car's world.

A good wake-up poem from Wallace Stevens:

The sun, that brave man, Comes through boughs that lie in wait, That brave man.

Green and gloomy eyes In dark forms of the grass Run away.

The good stars, Pale helms and spiky spurs, Run away.

Fears of my bed, Fears of life and fears of death, Run away.

That brave man comes up From below and walks without meditation, That brave man.

I think this pairs nicely with one from William Carlos Williams, "El Hombre":

It's a strange courage you give me ancient star:

Shine alone in the sunrise toward which you lend no part!

I've been going back and reading Wallace Stevens lately. I first came across his poetry a while back in a college modernist lit class, and keep coming back every so often. For the next couple days I'm going to go on a little Stevens bender around here, sort of like my Frans Masereel festival a while back (which was ruined by pesky lawyer-types, but that's another story). To start things off, a bit from a New York Times interview with Wallace Stevens. Stevens worked a regular day job in insurance while writing his poetry in the evenings.

Regarding the inevitable work-by-day, muse-by-night question which he has been asked for upward of forty years: "I've always skipped answering that. I prefer to think I'm just a man, not a poet part time, business man the rest. This is a fortunate thing, considering how inconsiderate the ravens are. I don't divide my life, just go on living."

Later in life Stevens even turned down a gig at Harvard because he didn't want to leave his insurance job. There's a refreshing lack of self-pity. Selling insurance is fine. Writing poetry is nice, too. Just a guy doing things he likes.

I'm no different from anyone else, just a run of the mine person. I like painting, books, poems. In my younger days I liked girls. But let's not stress that. I have a wife.

New Wearable Feedbags Let Americans Eat More, Move Less.

The Brooklyn Museum has some great photos on Flickr. Currently in the commons are a great set of old lantern slides in Egypt, and a lot of images from the 1900 Paris Exposition.

In the Paris set, it's cool how the primitive coloring job kind of flattens the images. They look almost like paper cut-outs or watercolor:

New York Times Magazine has a feature on guerrilla gardening. The Guardian has a short video of the gardening guerrillas in action before a little confrontation with the police.

I've really been loving The Big Picture, the Boston Globe's photojournalism blog.

The existence of welfare state is one of the main rationalizations for undercutting the greatest anti-poverty campaign the world has ever known: immigration. ...And unlike the welfare state, immigration has and continues to help absolutely poor people, not relatively poor Americans who are already at the 90th percentile of the world income distribution.

"If reason ruled the world, would history even exist?"

On his first trip outside of Poland, an editor gave Ryszard Kapuściński a copy of Herodotus' The Histories (which I've never read or read much about, besides this recent New Yorker article). The book became his off-and-on companion for the rest of his career in journalism. Kapuściński re-narrates Herodotus journeys talking all the while about what it is to travel, to know the world, to try to learn and understand it all.

The book makes for a scattered memoir, but the sections about Herodotus' work are pretty good. I really liked his way of humanizing all these long-dead people:

What sort of child is Herodotus?... Is he obedient and polite, or does he torture everyone with questions: Where does the sun come from? Why is it so high up that no one can reach it? Why does it hide beneath the sea? Isn't it afraid of drowning?

And in school? With whom does he share a bench? Did they seat him as punishment, next to some unruly boy? Or, the gods forbid, a girl? Did he learn quickly to write on the clay tablet? Is he often late? Does he squirm during lessons? Does he slip others the answers? Is he a tattletale?

and later:

I imagined him approaching me as I stood at the edge of the sea, putting down his cane, shaking the sand out of his sandals, and falling at once into conversation. He was probably one of those chatterboxes who prey upon helpless listeners, who must have them, who indeed wither and cannot live without them; one of those unwearying and perpetually excited intermediaries, who see something, hear something, and must immediately pass it on to others, constitutionally incapable of keeping things even briefly to themselves.

And again, in writing about Xerxes after he flees the battle of Thermopylae:

And flee he does, abandoning the theater of war before the war's end. He returns to Susa. He is thirty-something years old. He will be king of the Persians for another fifteen years, during which time he will occupy himself with expanding his palace in Persepolis. Perhaps he felt internally spent? Perhaps he suffered from depression? In any event, insofar as the world was concerned, he disappeared. The dreams of might, of ruling over everything and everyone, faded away.

Kapuściński went to some rough places (e.g. Maoist China, the heart of Africa at mid-century, etc.). Parallel to Herodotus, he has the occasional wondering digression into modern political absurdities. Here's a bit about dictators and mobs and ruling over a populace without focus:

It is an interesting subject: superfluous people in the service of brute power... Their neighborhoods are populated in large part by an unformed, fluid element, lacking precise classification, without position, place or purpose. At any moment and for whatever reason, these people, to whom no one past attention, whom no one needs, can form into a crowd, a throng, a mob, which has an opinion about everything, has time for everything, and would like to participate in something, mean something.

All dictatorships take advantage of this idle magma. They don't even need to maintain an expensive army of full-time policemen. It suffices to reach out to these people searching for some significance in life. Give them the sense that they can be of use, that someone is counting on them for something, that they have been noticed, that they have a purpose.

Yes we can? Then again, power makes for paranoia (interesting parallels here with "Tales of the Tyrant"):

What animated Xerxes: he wanted to have everything. No one opposed him, because one would have had to pay with one's head for doing so. But in such an atmosphere of acquiescence, it takes only one dissenting voice for the ruler to feel anxiety, to hesitate.

There's a lot to like here. I ended up skimming most of Kapuściński's reminiscing, but it all moves pretty quickly and the Herodotus sections are worth it.

Photos of celebrities playing table tennis. There are nine of Fidel Castro.

A wiki with a list of academic blogs divided by field. I love the category for "Professions and Useful Arts."

What should we be without the sexual myth,The human revery or poem of death?

Castratos of moon-mash---Life consists Of propositions about life. The human

Revery is a solitude in which We compose these propositions, torn by dreams,

By the terrible incantations of defeats And by the fear that defeats and dreams are one.

The whole race is a poet that writes down The eccentric propositions of its fate.

---Wallace Stevens

I like the idea of a corporate artist in residence. Surely a few companies would buy into it?

Bed?ôich Smetana in an commercial for a Czech beer which inspires The Moldau.

La Scala is going to stage an operatic version of An Inconvenient Truth. Hmmm.

I like this brief survey of conducting styles, comparing their approaches to a work that everyone has heard.

It is upsetting when we have to conclude that someone is "simply a bastard." Partly, we are upset because of the initial offense that led us to conclude that. But we are also upset because, as tolerant, educated, broad-minded, empathetic people, we want to have a better explanation. We want to be able to attribute people's behavior to legitimate differences in philosophies, perspectives, cultures, priorities. When we cannot, we feel that we have failed, and we are angry at having been put into such a narrow-minded, thoughtlessly reactive position.