Month: January 2008

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Link: Unphotographable: a text account of pictures missed

Unphotographable: a text account of pictures missed
A neat blog with weekly(ish) posts, each describing a brief moment in time as if it had been photographed… Great to use as prompts or something for exercises, or even just to get ideas flowing.

This is a picture I did not take of a Muslim man, pushed to the limit by an evangelizing Christian, who swaggered in front of the Muslim, mocking Islam and calling the man schoolyard names, nor is this a photograph of the punch the Muslim man landed on the Christian man’s ear, a punch thrown from behind,

[From Unphotographable: Muslim vs. Christian Over Chicken]

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100 Words: Lightning

When I was in gradeschool we spent the summer months swimming at crystal lake, behind my house. But you had to go all the way around the lake to the bathhouse and show your passes to the recalcitrant lifeguards. My parents said we couldn’t swim on our side of the lake because a drunk guy had once fallen in and drowned. Every once and a while our swim sessions would be cut short by megaphoned monotones warning of lightning so would everyone please exit the water immediately. Grudgingly we swam to the docks and hoisted ourselves onto the wet wood.

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Describing Metal

I sit down at my desk, pen in hand, headphones on, and click “play” on my iTunes playlist. How do I define this music that I love so? Is there a constant between these many disparate genres? It seems more like a series of spectra in various dimensions. Metal is a vague identifier that describes a subset of this multidimensional space, the boundaries of which are far from definite, and certainly not objective. I hypothesize that there are general lines within which most fans of this genre could agree to label “metal’. Sub-genres are sure to extend beyond this commonly held space, and not all sub-genres will occupy its entirety, necessarily (since some begin on the fringes and then continue into the distance). . Here are a few spectra I can identify..

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14 Pieces of Music, 14 Lines of Text

1. Dockwood underfoot, skin bearing jeweled splinters under ocean spray
2. Walking in metallic coiled space under life’s dictate.
3. Simply, I stand awash in life’s bittersweet brightness
4. Borne under aged framing, stretching to show yourself through gauzed nylon.
5. Attempt to reconcile, the old and new; the familiar and the strange; the absurd and the appropriate, that is living in the world.
6. Nature’s lively bouncing, flitting over a veneer of brutal evolution.
7. Awestricken, gazing upon the world as if on its first day, though the history of a people is far from free.
8. When the beating of wheels against track under mourning dissonant time.
9. Ear to thorax, hearing the sounds from a world to which we are outside, I glimpse the essence of life and its living. (img by Troyek)
10. Repeat the slightly similar repeat again straining against forms immemorial and straight culturality to express
11. Floating metal breaths over rolling hills.
12. Celebrate life’s beauty without forgetting its melanchollies
13. Unabashedly, we look into the furnaces that forged this people from the ore of time in the bowels of the earth, in all our glorious good and hideous evil.
14. Emerging, disassociating, yet warmly familiar and recalcitrant, relaxed under one’s own weight.

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William Faulkner on Art & The Impossible

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist’s way of scribbling “Kilroy was here” on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

[William Faulkner]

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Digital Story Brainstorm: Mongolia, A Land of Contradictions

Mongolia. A land whose name is more powerful than her government. The nation that brought us the great Chinggis Khaan, Man of the Millenium, and his as yet unsurpassed empire. Yet today she must sell herself to the west, desperate for third neighbors who care more about her politics than her coal and gold. One of the original lands of Buddhism, the creators of the Dalai Llama, yet increasingly filled with sparkling Mormon churches and ecstatic evangelists.

Yet the sky continues to truly rule this land.

FDf;lkdjsfl; GAHH.

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10 Sentences I Wish I’d Written

  1. Do thy worst old Time;
    despite thy wrong, my love shall in my verse ever live young

    (from Sonnet 19 by William Shakespeare)

  2. Listen: imagination is all we have as defense against capture and its inevitable changes.

    (Alexie, ‘Captivity’, D’Agata p297).

  3. In the mind, words are heard bone-dry without the benefit of breath.

    (Field, Thalia. “A [therefore] I”, D’Agata 420)

  4. Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now.

    (from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe by Douglas Adams)

  5. The Dean at left, a lean yellowish man whose fixed smile nevertheless has the impermanent quality of something stamped into uncooperative material, is a personality-type I’ve come lately to appreciate, the type who delays need of any response from me by relating my side of the story for me, to me.

    (from Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace)

  6. “And that,” put in the Director sententiously, “that is the secret of happiness and virtue— liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.”

    (from Brave New World by Aldous Huxley)

  7. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’

    (from 1984 by George Orwell, p32)

  8. I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.

    (Addie Bundren from As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner)

  9. Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

    (from Light in August by William Faulkner)

  10. ”. . . and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forgot the words . . .“

    (William Faulkner)

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100 Words: Furniture & Maps

Sunday [Furniture]: 4500 BC: The first piece of furniture appears in in the Malaysian river delta silt deposit area. We know this with a high degree of certainty, since the area’s silt is quite effective at preserving ancient artifacts. Especially fine upholstery. Yes, the first piece of furniture also bore the first example of fine upholstery. This exquisite upholstery was not surpassed for over 5000 years, when a 19th century seamstress created what her husband thought to be a fairly bland sofa slip-cover. Little did he know, it was the finest specimen of its kind to exist in over 5500 years.

Saturday [Maps]: I love maps. There is something about them that captivates me, causing me to plaster my walls with them. When you walk into my room, you are assaulted by an array of maps. Directly ahead is a 15th (I think?) century map of the world, in all its hand-drawn, distorted glory. On the left, an enormous map of Mongolia with land-use contours that stretch from cool greens and blues to the flaming reds and oranges of the Gobi. To gaze upon a map is to see into its world; whether it be 15th century Europe, or 21st century Mongolia.