Simmering to a boil

How biodegradable is a book?
How biodegradable is an e-reader?
What is the carbon footprint of producing a book, tree ->paper, ink, so on..?
What is the carbon footprint of producing an e-reader, oil->plastic, plastic, plastic?

Library on fire...

Nearly

generations, clearly marked, like off ramp signs, easily missed or misplaced
boom or bust
come what must
this is us
driven to dust or ossified.

Study on Diabetes and Sugar

exclusion is the best revenge
refusal to even refute your existence
to blink dully and ask, uhm yeah, but what's for dessert?

Quote from the quiet

Washington Square, New York 1954, by André Kertész

"She couldn't even say when the love between them had begun to sicken, how long it had been gasping drearily over its own grave of rage and obligation. They had spent over a third of their lives together—a third, like sleep."

—Like Life

German Hipsters

Archiological find of the week, rare photo of ancient German hipsters
Schiller is teaching, and Goeth is in the crowd being a groupie.
There are some babes also known as groupies waiting for the after party.

Meditation on Help

when people say 'i love you' it has little to do with 'you', it has everything to do with how they feel about themselves and nothing to do with how they feel about you. when people say 'i hate you' it has little to do with 'you', it has everything to do with how they feel about themselves. we 'hate' the people we deem responsible for the pain or suffering in our lives.

similarly, someone offering to help you has little to do with 'you' and is based almost exclusively on how they feel about themselves. how to predict when someone will indulge the altruist within is very simple, if the party asking for help admits any competence or capability of getting on just fine without the party they have asked for help from, the helping party will feel almost slighted and abstain, thanks but no thanks. if the party asking for help gives up all 'dignity' and admits 'complete defeat' that only the helping party can rescue them from, the helping party will attend. it feels good to be a hero and lukewarm to be a volunteer babysitter.

LITERARY REVIEW: "SHOPLIFTING FROM AMERICAN APPAREL" by TAO LIN

This novel shows great promise of what is to come from this author and his generation. It is a pause before the storm of disaster and adulthood, a final clearheaded glimpse of youth before it is ravaged and weathered by age.

Sam has been arrested twice for shoplifting, and the following scene takes place several weeks after his second release from jail. Walking around with Robert, Sam recognizes someone he shared a cell with. Sam recounts to Robert that "the young Asian" was funny, and they decide to follow him. As they trail him, Sam and Robert laugh together, not at the young Asian in particular but at their own obscene ideas about him. After a few minutes the young asian realizes he is being followed and he confronts Robert and Sam, saying, "I didn't rape my sister, two guys raped my sister, ask anyone, ask one of my friends," and the scene ends.


I found this silencing and disturbing in the best kind of way, like, oh here we are "mere children" "fucking around" in a city, ha ha, ha, which shifts deftly in tone toward a darker more menacing reality of, "oh, not everyone in the world is fucking around." As a reader I felt deeply affected by this, and I was only a witness to a witness, to a witness. Just as in the greatest Greek tragedies, the real bloodshed happens offstage, it does not have to happen on the page for its reverberations to shake the reader.

Essentially, the reader of "Shoplifting from American Apparel" is a voyeur, preying upon characters who are voyeurs. Beneath a patina of isolation and ennui the innocence of these characters remains. They are intact, untouched, half members of the world at large. They are without a doubt divorced from childhood and adolescence, their remembrances of it are the most obvious proof that it is something they have lost, something behind them. Yet the characters remain outsiders to the kingdom of adulthood, they are part-time workers, scabs, without benefits or burdens carried by full-fledged citizens of adulthood.