To map a cough, he teamed up with Dr. Julian Tang, a virus expert from Singapore. A healthy student provided the cough. The expelled air, traveling at 18 miles per hour, mixed with cooler surrounding air and produced “temperature differences that bend light rays by different amounts,” Dr. Settles said.
New research suggests that the type of television you watched as a child has a profound effect on the colour of your dreams.
While almost all under 25s dream in colour, thousands of over 55s, all of whom were brought up with black and white sets, often dream in monchrome - even now.
-'Black and white TV generation have monochrome dreams '
[via seed]
In 1913, Maisel explained, an Oregon state psychiatric institution began to cremate the remains of its unclaimed patients. Their ashes were then stored inside individual copper canisters and moved into a small room, where they were stacked onto pine shelves... Over time, however, the canisters have begun to react chemically with the human ashes held inside them; this has thus created mold-like mineral outgrowths on the exterior surfaces of these otherwise gleaming cylinders.
In the end, one wonders whether Literary Darwinism isn’t, at its core, the result of a deep-seated (and misplaced) fear common to those who use phrases like “our moral compass,” the sorts who worry about this or that position leading to “anarchy.” Gottschall writes, “Instead of philosophical despair about the possibility of knowledge, [literature professors] should embrace science's spirit of intellectual optimism. If they do, literary studies can be transformed into a discipline in which real understanding of literature and the human experience builds up along with all of the words.”
But Mr. Gottschall, literature is already a place where real understanding of the human experience can be found. I’m sorry that the insights to be found are not tidy enough for you. But we’re an untidy species. There are surely biological causes for that untidiness but locating them doesn’t do anything to clean up the mess. If you want to get closer to that mess, if you really want to face the immense clutter of the human-all-too-human, literature is a good thing to acquaint yourself with. If not, well … there are so very many professions.
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don't know the people who will feed me
I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn't even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don't, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness
and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
What Kafka’s stories have . . . is a grotesque, gorgeous, and thoroughly modern complexity, an ambivalence that becomes the multivalent Both/And logic of the, quote, “unconscious,” which I personally think is just a fancy word for soul. Kafka’s humor–not only not neurotic but anti-neurotic, heroically sane, is, finally, a religious humor, but religious in the manner of Kierkegaard and Rilke and the Psalms, a harrowing spirituality against which even Ms. [Flannery] O’Connor’s bloody grace seems a little bit easy, the souls at stake pre-made.
And it is this, I think, that makes Kafka’s wit inaccessible to children whom our culture has trained to see jokes as entertainment and entertainment as reassurance. It’s not that students don’t “get” Kafka’s humor but that we’ve taught them to see humor as something you get–the same way we’ve taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. It’s hard to put into words, up at the blackboard, believe me. You can tell [students] that maybe it’s good they don’t “get” Kafka. You can ask them to imagine his stories as all about a kind of door. To envision us approaching and pounding on this door, increasingly hard, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it; we don’t know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and ramming and kicking. That, finally, the door opens . . . and it opens outward–we’ve been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komish. (64-65)
-DFW, “Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness From Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed”
[here]
[via clusterflock]
God knows, I watch my fair share of movies and television, and they're powerful in their own ways. But I think fiction is more powerful. [It's certainly] a more powerful anodyne for loneliness. I enjoy TV, but I always feel lonelier after I've watched four hours of it. I feel like I've pretended to be with people but I really haven't. In fiction you both feel like the writer is talking to you and [that] you are intimate with people in a book; you can be inside their heads; you can hear their brains' voice[s]. I'll never be that intimate with anyone in person.
When I'm bored or restless I will watch television. When I want to feel like I'm talking to someone, I will read, and not read anything, I mean stuff that works.
Let us no longer speak of love.
Love is horseplay at its best
and good, I think, for just this life.
Let’s speak of something of ourselves
or of the way that we relate
that will endure beyond the grave—
but what? Your smart-ass comments,
no. Your anecdotes and hand gestures,
no and no. They’ll be the first to go.
And my rejoinders, punk-ass rhymes,
will soon be swallowed whole by time,
as will my money, my car, my keys.
Even our truest moments in speech
or touch, or listening to each other breathe
after making love and brushing teeth
and cuddling in blankets, spooning
habitually in our comfortable
nightly grave and rising like Jesus
to do it all again: All gone, and yet
without regret. When nothing’s left,
what’s there to mourn? Nothing itself?
Nothing will endure beyond the grave
(more wit), and nothing’s what
we’ll miss the most, I think (a trifle).
So actually let’s do speak of love
and horseplay, careless punches
to each other’s noses, awkward kisses,
dancing in our underwear near the edge
of the dumb void like the former
junior ringmasters that we are.
Let’s trounce the forbidden places
knowing that there’s less to life
than we had thought at first.
-Aaron Belz
It so happens I am sick of being a man.
And it happens that I walk into tailorshops and movie
houses
dried up, waterproof, like a swan made of felt
steering my way in a water of wombs and ashes.
The smell of barbershops makes me break into hoarse
sobs.
The only thing I want is to lie still like stones or wool.
The only thing I want is to see no more stores, no gardens,
no more goods, no spectacles, no elevators.
It so happens that I am sick of my feet and my nails
and my hair and my shadow.
It so happens I am sick of being a man.
Still it would be marvelous
to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily,
or kill a nun with a blow on the ear.
It would be great
to go through the streets with a green knife
letting out yells until I died of the cold.
I don’t want to go on being a root in the dark,
insecure, stretched out, shivering with sleep,
going on down, into the moist guts of the earth,
taking in and thinking, eating every day.
I don’t want so much misery.
I don’t want to go on as a root and a tomb,
alone under the ground, a warehouse with corpses,
half frozen, dying of grief.
That’s why Monday, when it sees me coming
with my convict face, blazes up like gasoline,
and it howls on its way like a wounded wheel,
and leaves tracks full of warm blood leading toward the
night.
And it pushes me into certain corners, into some moist
houses,
into hospitals where the bones fly out the window,
into shoeshops that smell like vinegar,
and certain streets hideous as cracks in the skin.
There are sulphur-colored birds, and hideous intestines
hanging over the doors of houses that I hate,
and there are false teeth forgotten in a coffeepot,
there are mirrors
that ought to have wept from shame and terror,
there are umbrellas everywhere, and venoms, and umbilical
cords.
I stroll along serenely, with my eyes, my shoes,
my rage, forgetting everything,
I walk by, going through office buildings and orthopedic
shops,
and courtyards with washing hanging from the line:
underwear, towels and shirts from which slow
dirty tears are falling.
-Pablo Neruda
[via belz]
The teacher sits with eyes closed.
When you play chess alone it’s always your move.
I’m in the last row with a firefly in the palm of my hand.
The girl with red braids, who saw the girl with red braids?
—
Do you believe in something truer than truth?
Do you prick your ears even when you know damn well no one is coming?
Does that explain the lines on your forehead?
Your invisible friend, what happened to her?
—
The rushing wind slides to a stop to listen.
The prisoner opens the thick dictionary lying on his knees.
The floor is cold and his feet are bare.
A chew-toy of the gods, is that him?
—
Do you stare and stare at every black windowpane
As if it were a photo of your unsmiling parents?
Are you homesick for the house of cards?
The sad late-night cough, is it yours?
— Charles Simic (Jackstraws)
[via it loved to happen]
#10: A man is already in heaven. It's kind of nice and calm although he still keeps his life-long fear of dying one day.
#71: All of her fears suddenly went away. 'From now on, I'll stay with my eyes closed,' she said to herself and almost immediately got the desire to open them.
Trees talk to each other at night.
All fish are named either Lorna or Jack.
Before your eyeballs fall out from watching too much TV, they get very loose.
Tiny bears live in drain pipes.
If you are very very quiet you can hear the clouds rub against the sky.
The moon and the sun had a fight a long time ago.
Everyone knows at least one secret language.
When nobody is looking, I can fly.
We are all held together by invisible threads.
Books get lonely too.
Sadness can be eaten.
I will always be there.
[via clusterflock]
the flesh covers the bone
and they put a mind
in there and
sometimes a soul,
and the women break
vases against the walls
and the men drink too
much
and nobody finds the
one
but keep
looking
crawling in and out
of beds.
flesh covers
the bone and the
flesh searches
for more than
flesh.
there's no chance
at all:
we are all trapped
by a singular
fate.
nobody ever finds
the one.
the city dumps fill
the junkyards fill
the madhouses fill
the hospitals fill
the graveyards fill
nothing else
fills.
-Charles Bukowski
Today as the news from Selma and Saigon
poisons the air like fallout,
I come again to see
the serene, great picture that I love.
Here space and time exist in light
the eye like the eye of faith believes.
The seen, the known
dissolve in iridescence, become
illusive flesh of light
that was not, was, forever is.
O light beheld as through refracting tears.
Here is the aura of that world
each of us has lost.
Here is the shadow of its joy.
1. Fist
It is impossible for me to remember
the cozy room I slept in as a child.
Somebody made my bed up to be paradise.
It was hard for me, a hard night, when I entered art.
The tendons in my wrist are visible.
What will I do now I have made this fist?
To loosen it feels weird, anticlimactic—
a misuse, a misunderstanding, of fists.
That's how it was with me that night.
And so, mysteriously, I lost my sweetness.
Weird, to feel intended for violence,
when what I wanted was an hour of rest.
Everything about you,
my life, is both
make-believe and real.
We are like a couple
working the night shift
in a bomb factory.
Come quietly, one says
to the other
as he takes her by the hand
and leads her
to a rooftop
overlooking the city.
At this hour, if one listens
long and hard,
one can hear a fire engine
in the distance,
but not the cries for help,
just the silence
growing deeper
at the sight of a small child
leaping out of a window
with its nightclothes on fire.
-Charles Simic
