Lifted verbatim from David:
How is everybody doing?
(Comments are screened; I won’t post them unless you specifically say it’s cool.)
Month: November 2010
sad
via Scott:
Deaths in Iraq from January 2004 to December 2009. Blue is friendly/coalition forces deaths (3,771), teal is Iraqi government/military deaths (15,196), orange is Iraqi civilians (66,081), grey is insurgents and partisans (23,984). The lefthand chart is sorted by total, the righthand chart is sorted by date.
today I offer you plush toys
I chose to start with my books for a few reasons. For one, I have more books than I have anything else. There are more of them in my room than there are places to put them. They stack in piles, some here, some there, and they take up the entire top quarter of my closet, which could be better used for other things. For another, even though books are wonderful, they are heavy, bulky, and cantankerous to move. It was also a test of my determination. Few things carry as much resonance as a well loved book, so perhaps if I can be ruthless with my library, I can be ruthless with everything else as well. If I am to escape Vancouver, I will need to travel light.
“Half-heartedness does not reach into majesty.” -Rumi
I went through all of the books I own today and put most of them for sale on my new blog, minimalfox. (See Books: The First Wave for a glimpse into my long, long day). Deciding what to keep out of the wealth of words was a difficult process, as many of these books have been with me a decade, well loved and repeatedly read. The Summer/Winter Queen books, for example, would make such a perfect gift for Tony that I wince to put them available on-line, while it is only through sheer obstinacy that I managed to list my Kurt Vonnegut at all. But still, I was weak. Of the books from the closet, I listed only fifty. Of the books from the bookcase, I’ve set aside almost a third to keep.
If they all sell, however, I may barely have enough books to fill one small shelf, but I will have enough money to buy a winter coat, pay off the threatening part of my credit card, and save my web hosting.
That said, please take a look at what I’m trying to fund-raise with. Everything on offer can be found on my Sale Listings page.
lately I feel a lot like I’m dying
I am a shipwreck. My sorrow sits on my tongue with all the delicate heft of a humming bird’s skull, graceful bone, fluted lines, sharp enough to slaughter the heart of a flower, sweet as a metal pike. I wander my files, catalogue my house, looking for more things to sell, searching for a way to break through the notion that I will be trapped here past thirty, past every promise I’ve ever made. I do not sleep through the night.
it breaks my heart that it’s statisically likely that I will outlive Brian Eno
Brian Eno on framing improvisations:
And some of the other structuring ideas are completely conceptual in the sense that I might say, “Imagine it’s the year 2064 and all digital music has been destroyed in a huge digital accident, an electromagnetic pulse or something like that. So, all we know about the music between 2010 or 2030 is hearsay. There don’t exist any recordings. We’ve read about a kind of music that existed in the suburbs of Shanghai in 2015 to 2018, and this music was played on–” then you specify a group of instruments– “was played on, say, industrial tools, such as steel hammers, and augmented with samplers and various electronic versions of some Chinese instruments. And it was intensely repetitive and played at ear-splitting volume,” for example. So, we then, taking that brief, try to imagine what that music would be like, and we try to make it.
Found via Warren.