European outliers

All Kant and no Kierkegaard makes Jack a dull boy.

I'll be phoning it in for Christmas

Waiting at the the coffee shop, where the Christmas music is running nonstop.  Next up: "Here Comes Suzy Snowflake," which turns out to be as formulaic a baby boomer Christmas tune as I've ever heard.  Charmless.  Even the vocals sound bored.  Expert tip: when you're out of tuneful holiday song ideas, go far out, go big, go camp.  Bonus points for, choreographed neck snaps and arm-windmills.  Exempli gratia: "It's Turkey Lurkey Time."

what is man?

Here we have Alexis de Tocqueville's remarkable passage, in Democracy in America, so like the wisdom books of the Hebrew scriptures, in particular Ecclesiastes.  The idea that man has the notion of knowledge - but not knowledge itself - is a particularly direct correspondence.

There is no need to traverse earth and sky to find a wondrous object full of contrasts of infinite greatness and littleness, of deep gloom and amazing brightness, capable at the same time of arousing piety, wonder, scorn, and terror. I have only to contemplate myself; man comes from nothing, passes through time, and disappears forever in the bosom of God. He is seen but for a moment wandering on the verge of two abysses, and then is lost.

If man were wholly ignorant of himself he would have no poetry in him, for one cannot describe what one does not conceive. If he saw himself clearly, his imagination would remain idle and would have nothing to add to the picture. But the nature of man is sufficiently revealed for him to know something of himself and sufficiently veiled to leave much in impenetrable darkness, a darkness in which he ever gropes, forever in vain, trying to understand himself.

U TT

I will miss him.  We all miss men of that generation.  Diligently providing for their families, practicing their professions with competence and ingenuity, a little remote, filled with a well earned dignity.  And he: an island of honesty in a sea of corruption, whose waves beat on him and his family relentlessly.  His integrity was firm, and would not erode.  Only his heart stopped; his family and spirit go on.

Rubik's Cube

Imagine a chest of many drawers - above and below, side by side -  such as a card catalogue cabinet.  Now imagine the cabinet with its drawers removed: one imagines an empty grid of supports and rails for the drawers.  But it ought to be possible to create a chest of drawers in which each drawer is supported and guided only by the surrounding drawers (or, at the edges only, by the cabinet).  I wonder if such cabinet of such construction actually exists.

the small vices

Goodness comes with unseen gifts in her shy pockets; evil goes with pockets stuffed and your refrigerator door left open.

pavé

I dreamt last night that I awoke to see a beautiful bit of driftwood, covered in the most perfect dew, lit by the first shaft of morning light, pale and pure.  No morning dew was ever this perfect, so like diamond spheres. 

But as my eyes adjusted, the driftwood was in fact my hand: I was covered head to toe in this beautiful dew.  I glistened like a jewel.  And so did you: I got up and met, it seemed, everyone I had ever known, and we each shone in our shrouds of perfect dew, lit by the low, dawn light.  I especially saw two beloved and elderly relations, who sparkled as brightly as any.  We were all barefoot on an expanse of soft mauve sand, like a shore with no ocean in sight.  I asked one of you if the dew would evaporate and was told that no, this dew was mineral oil and would last. 

I woke again, truly this time, and showered for work, for a moment transfixed by the streams of water coming from the showerhead, sparkling under the light of a 60 watt bulb.

It was a vision of heaven, more nearly than any I ever dreamt.

pavé?

Kim Jong-un purged his uncle from North Korea's ruling elite for, among other crimes, "dreaming different dreams."  George Orwell would be proud.

superannuated

Modern medicine sets us up to grow so old that we are, in the final few years, half-buried alive.

hydraulic pressure

What rare thoughts and feelings must belong to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi today.

Mandela

No leader of the first rank has been more like Washington, in mode of power, carriage, context and, withal, in goodness.

One-third of Zorro

The slash is well named. It is brutal punctuation.

too young to be spry

"Pert" is one of those adjectives best avoided that are, all the same, just so much fun.

imagine

What if there were a Fred Rogers for middle age?

the varieties of prayer

A friend invited me to his baptism last week, which was held in the small, trendy pool of an upscale, design-conscious midtown hotel (congruously named Grace Hotel).  The pool was in a humid room planked in reclaimed wood, with art projected onto the ceiling. 

There were about twenty candidates for baptism, five pastors to counsel, immerse and pray over them, a many-versed hymn accompanied by guitar, and a short sermon on the meaning of baptism and on the old scene by the River Jordan that could have been delivered by a country lay preacher in the 1800s - though this pastor spoke from the notes on his iPad. 

All were in swim shorts and tshirts, street clothes.  One young man, his green hipster t-shirt had an oversized print of a cassette tape on the front, was flowing with tears as he went down, then rose from the water radiant, crying, overcome.  Through his wet tshirt, you could see the big tattoo of a sixteenth note on his back.  Two of the congregation reached down to help him up from the water, a third dried him, reaching for a folded towel from a mismatched stack. 

There was a crowding around this corner of the pool, as each of the baptized emerged, a sense of love and desire to create and hold a feeling of some kind - one I know well from my own baptist past, though I could only watch it at this phase in my life.  They had gathered by the river.  Deep in the city, the folk will have their ways.

the varieties of prayer

When Burmese Buddhists take leave of their elders - parents, great aunts, and so forth - they kneel before them, bring hands together and touch forehead to ground, give thanks, ask forgiveness, and receive a blessing.  This is the gadaw.  A great act of mutual love, which I have again seen in my home, this morning.

fitness to purpose

Androgyny is almost as beautiful as intellegence.  And both?  Man.

like ants

One function of lawyering - shameful but real - is as a form of offensive irritant deployed by well-funded or otherwise well-supported parties.  Won't talk to us, will you?  Fine.  We'll dump a can of lawyers on you.

hooked

Village connectors: U Bein's Bridge; the Roosevelt Island Tram.

vortices

Hell is an orgy of strangers, forced to the moist immediacy of unknown, interior flesh, pressed against an itching suburban globe of pale, tufted polyester, abraded by scentless smell, hotly unwarm, clammy but sweatless: ceaseless, empty intimacy.

simply so

Life is better with a spouse at one's side.

angels

Last night we watched Sylvain Chomet's The Illusionist, a lovely, fragile thing - as tender as an old man's heart.  The animation is of a water-colored style, given its corners and shapes by thin, hand-drawn lines.  And then there comes a moment so beautiful, subtle, right and startling, my jaw actually dropped and I clapped my hands.  Do not let me spoil it for you:

Our gentle protagonist is in a little boat, nearing the dock of the village where he will perform his magic act.  We see his aged back and small stack of luggage in the boat.  And then, as if the dreamlike animation were in fact there, a couple of drops of water appear on the "lens" of the "camera."  It is an entirely aesthetic moment that sends one's whole mind racing.  A chill ran through me.  I wondered how many people even noticed it - it is there for less than a second.  I look online, and of course viewers do notice it. 

The moment is the second of three feats of special visual magic that exceed even the level of great animation.  The first feat, only a little less great, is that an animation of a magician performing his stage tricks should contain no magic at all.  And yet the magic is there.  It is only the drawing of a rabbit being pulled out of an empty hat.  And yet the viewer is still startled and pleased, as if by a real illusion.  As animation itself naturally is.

The third feat is the peculiar interlocking - deliberately not quite integration - of the hand-drawn with the computer effects that appear now and then to give the ripple of water in a bay, or the dance of a match flame, or the drift of countless feathers caught by a breeze.  The hand-drawn and the computer effects set one another off.  They work together, but not as one.  The effect, again, is to create a world that is meant not to become quite real, but to be artifice: to be seen as illusion.

water drop

One thinks of the wealth of detail - of data - that exists within a few moments in Dallas.  Movements, microphones, cameras, people, campaign politics, weather, civic arrangements, anatomy, emotion, dictaphone belts, school books, lenses, motorcycles, pavement, freeway intersections, mowed grass on a knoll, sunglasses, neckties, necks, chrome - on and on.  And as teeming a whole exists - but unexamined - in every collection of human moments, anywhere.  One really could write a book: Six Seconds in Your Kitchen: 12:30:00 to 12:30:06pm, Friday, November 22, 2013.

coming home

Why not marriages of more than two?  (Not as a matter of law or society, but simply as a matter of private good.)  Chiefly, I think, because the love of one other can be unconditional - and can be unwavering - in a way that a love of more than one cannot.  Because comparisons between two are inevitable, and there is something lovely and needful in present love of the incomparable.  And only one may be both incomparable and present.

talking in tongues

It can be difficult to convince a secular person that religious fundamentalism is attractive to many people, here and abroad.  That it is the kind of religion they like and choose.  That hardly makes it good or true - but for some reason many secular folks want more.  They want to believe that religious fundamentalism is not only wrong and harmful, but unattractive.  This despite the fact that in other aspects of life - diet, excercise, fashion, what-have you - the same phenomenon exists in more trivial forms: a significant number of us will be attracted to things that are strenuous, demanding, alienating and - in their implications - both judgmental and potentially transformative.  Cross-Fit, vegans, goths, gamers.  And in the absence of liberal education or similarly special conditions, this will rarely express itself in the mode of liberal spirituality.

overheard

Two middle-aged friends walking down the crowded sidewalk in front of me:

"my head is spinning"
"that's because you have crystals in your ear"
"but my head is always spinning"
"once you get sick you have crystals in your ear; they keep spinning"
"my brain doesn't know where I am"
"there's an EMT who can flush out the crystals, not many doctors specialize in it"
"he can't hurt me?"
"you have to trust me on this one"
"I can't eat anything"
"I couldn't walk without my hand against the wall when I had crystals"
"I can't eat kale any more"
"I know it's not convenient but you have to see him"

Then a stranger, abreast of me and hearing all this, calls out:

"Jesus! Don't listen to her!"

Good.  The voice of a modern day Samaritan.

a feature, not a bug

A church (or synagogue or mosque, etc.) rises through mainstream social strata at its peril.  Ordinary folk do not want to join a congregation that reminds them of their place.  So how may a church survive the monetary fruits of frugal, virtuous living?  By separation - by weirdness - the creation of an alternative social structure set apart from the mainstream.  For example, the Mormons or the Hasidic Jews.

shibboleth

Freedom.

next

I will try my hand at some parables, which are populated aphorisms.

wrapped in foil, oozing hot fat

The difference between a city and a large city:  A city is a concentration of order, maximal at its center, that holds back the frontier, as a sodium vapor street lamp holds back darkness.  The large city is a cavernous order of frontiers within.  At night, on the trail and in the metropolis, the smell of charcoal, the occasional orange spark curves skyward, the chow wagon and ladle, the food cart at 4am.  Skewered meats, desires, ambitions.

Hillsong

I've been to camp meetings in South Carolina, folded chairs on sawdust under a tin shed roof, and I've been to what is in fact a camp meeting in New York City, folded chairs on the sticky wood floor of a dance club, making a buck on Sunday morning by renting to the only comer.  One had shape note, the other had PowerPoint lyrics.  One was loud, the other was - louder.  Both were thin intellectually, but filled with things to think about - the depth of yearning, the felt need, the hands stretched out and up.  The people will have their churches, and ambitious religious leaders will find the shapes and notes to gather them in.

what the internet is for:

To permit me, eventually, to discover the wrestler Gorgeous George.

policy

I'm told the Chinese call Burma "the beggar with the golden bowl."  Just so.

an abstract one

To be part of any group is to be a fraction.  To be whole, one must never ultimately be a member of any group.  (Unless, in concept, that group were ultimately subordinate to one, which is to say that the other members are the only members of the group, ultimately.)  To be incidentally, or even rather deeply in groups, or paired, may of course be good and is not my concern.

a technical one

Like a lever, or any of the other simple machines of mechanics, the lien is one of the simple machines of law.  A machine because it functions upon ownership and credit, two of the fundamental substances of law.  A creditor's lien upon that owned by the debtor secures the credit.  This assembly, taken as a unit, forms a security.  Because a security may be taken as a unit, it may be traded if there is a market that permits it.  This, of course, is true both in the abstract and in fact.  Securities, in their variety, multitude, combination and contexts, are the subject of much legal work.

Bankruptcy law concerns itself with the orderly resolution of unsecured credit.  This orderliness is the substitute for security.  All bankruptcy lawyers - and all good securities lawyers - are bilingual and can deal with the complex mixtures of secured and unsecured credit (including that logically necessary hybrid known as undersecured credit).  Yet the two modes are deeply different: secured lending is mechanized at its root.  Unsecured credit in its fundamentals involves no legal machine. 

They are as different as a cord of wood and a wooden wheel.

a modest one

The philanthropist's hand falls from the book half-read, head droops, and a half-dreamt, half-thought ogre reappears: that a painless plague that afflicted a random nine-tenth of the world with infertility, and the rest with the inability to have more than a couple of children, then disappeared after a generation, leaving the children normal, only to reappear every thousand years or so, yet unpredictably, might be a greater kindness than any good heart or head might do.  The philanthropist's reawakens, shudders, and turns the page.

eve

An evil, once boring, has nothing to commend it.  Goodness endures even its bouts of dullness.

photo essay

 

NYT: Obama’s Portable Zone of Secrecy (Some Assembly Required)

I request the cone of silence!

Each would appear to be open on the bottom.

why can't we have nice things?

Chiefly due to having other nice things.  The Beijing Olympic Stadium - the Bird's Nest - apparently cost half a billion dollars.  Even if it actually cost twice that, this is approximately the cost of a single underground corridor at the new World Trade Center in New York.  Surely wages and benefits, cleaner air and such account for much of this.

money and merit

One reason it is so difficult for people to think clearly about the relationship of money to merit is that the relationship clearly exists among small, adjacent differences (though imperfectly and subject to corruption), but hardly exists among big, distant differences (though occasionally).

For example, it is false to the point of offensiveness to think that the difference between peoples with high average incomes (say, the Swiss), and those with low average incomes (say, Cambodians), is merit.  Or that the difference between an American with average income and an American amongst the 100 wealthiest is merit.  Not so.  Across these gulfs of difference, merit and wealth hardly correlate.

But merit and wealth (or cost) do correlate reasonably well within small, adjacent groups of difference - that is, within a market.  The more expensive law firm in a given city is not always better, but is a better bet, absent more information.  The more expensive stenographers in a given city are probably better than those who are less expensive.  The more expensive can of soup of the same basic sort (presence or absence of meat, organic or conventional) on the same shelf is very probably better.

With a few sentences' development, this point is readily grasped, indeed one most of us already know.  But money is such a seductively easy, abstract quantity - such an available measuring stick - that it is a matter of constant occupation to some (and itself explains much of the market for success literature) to wonder why someone is a hundred times wealthier.  The reasons for this are unlikely to be within an individual's control.  But what such a person is far less likely to wonder about - but would benefit more from - is why a neighbor or sibling is, say, nearly twice as wealthy.  The reasons for that will usually include some items for action and improvement.

for example, St. John's

Western modernity is distinguished in part by the sheer quantity of entertainment ingested by each person, along with other matter designed for mass consumption.  It is impossible to see this as either neutral or an entire good, yet it explains much, perhaps most, of our differences with seemingly backwards people of other places and our own past.  Indeed, it goes beyond quantity - the chief quality of western entertainment is its capacity, like a powerful glue, to stick and spread.  We must be very careful to distinguish our considered mores from our cultural preferences.  This is one of many reasons why Westerners must be liberally educated: this work of self-separation.

thought experiment

I agree with Orson Welles that pornography cannot be great art.  Certainly erotic, even "pornographic" elements can belong to great art, as elements of a larger story, as a lure, as a heightening effect, or otherwise.  Just as phallic elements may be part of great Mayan architecture.  Or as illuminated tantric manuscripts may be artistically excellent.  In relation to that excellence the pornographic content is mere accident.  But leering at rutting cannot itself anchor aesthetic greatness.  I reach this conclusion more by the lack of counterexamples, but also by thinking through the capsizing effect that pornography would have on an artistic work.

I suppose if any art form could sustain greatness while being pornography - it would be dance.  One can hypothesize a ballet or other modern dance number involving actual sex.  But the problems - of dehumanization, of interruption, of capsizing - are obvious enough to reinforce rather than weaken the conclusion.

beyond Chagall, newly

Three sickle moons rise over a yellow chair.
Reeds whipped by wind beat the barns they grow beside,
A visible wind of grey chalk dust and blue,
A choking fog, dry, not cool or warm: color.

And only color, that cakes the fur of cats,
The slinking cats, each low to the ground to breathe,
Not choke in chalk, not cake their lungs by gasps
Of blue-grey wind that drives them to shuttered barns.

They squint for a gap, their noses to the ground,
Wanting some way inside, or under floor boards,
They crawl behind the bases of flogging reeds,
Circling the barn foundations, ever moonslit.

Chagall, newly

Three sickle moons rise over a fallen yellow chair.

gut feeling

To lack success is felt to be socially naked, as the destitute are naked.

yuck

To smoke a cigar is somewhat pleasant.  To have smoked a cigar is not.  One carries a dry, cottony mouth of bad flavors for hours.  Which is exactly what one would expect from putting a wad of smoking leaves in one's mouth.

olympia

This morning's early subway ride was a poem of happenstance, all perfectly true:

1) Propped against a wall, sitting on the sidewalk, a woman, maybe 40, still pretty, dirty.  Drunk, with her malt liquor can in a paper bag.  I pass and she cries out, as if burning: You are an imbecile.

2) I step down into the subway station, and a Sikh, maybe 30, looking dazed, mutters at me then loses interest.  As I pass, his eyes turn to the clock overhead and he says, mechanically and softly, as if recalling a truth: It is 3:52.

3) Waiting for the train.  Construction workers climb up from the tracks, about eight of them, a Whitman's Sampler of manhood.  They gripe, joke, and call out to their co-worker on the opposite platform.  The thick-necked guy with the earring is laughing loud, square-bodied and cocksure.  A just-smaller fellow orbits him without realizing it.  The older foreman's face has started to turn jowly, but he is still in his prime, is given deference, stands just apart.  And the miscellaneous men, actually looking miscellaneous, not quite belonging, waiting to go home.

4) The Sikh has walked over to them.  He says, in an unsteady shout: Can I ask you a question?  His tone is so unnatural, his loudness so out of range, that they take him for crazy and laugh at him nervously, but somehow not offensively.  The Sikh sits on the bench they'd gathered around.  He leaves them alone; they leave him alone.  Somehow he seems the bird and they seem the tree.

5) The tree protects the bird.  The bird quiets the tree.

6) The train comes, creeping in.  Construction.  An empty car except for one couple, walled in by their luggage, wrapped heavily in tape marked Аэрофлот: Russians.  She is fat but beautiful.  Cheeks like small apples, and a pink complexion.  And he?  Leni Riefenstahl would have cast him, and given him an undressed, sporting role.  His elegant frame is just strong enough, and his face structure handsomely implies brutal capacities.  But the blondness, as I focus in, is bleach.  And his nervous eyes tell all, as he turns to her.  She, not he, is their strength.

7)  I arrive at my station and step to the escalator.  I pass the small lady in a Muslim veil of cream-colored cotton and feel her tense.  She is afraid of me, the passing presence behind, and in my mind I think to her: peace.

aday

Life must be more than waiting to die.

motive

It is nearly death to be truthful regarding the salience of luck.

up

In fact the city does sleep.

Carousel of Progress

• palimpsests
• blackboards
• transparency films
• display screens

palimpsest

The online headline is "Saudi Man Beats Servant."  One imagines the headline "Man Beats Servant" running continuously, from the beginning of the human race to now, not as mere fact, but as the endless, creeping flow of pitch that  bin d s    o  u  r    c  i  v   i   l   i    z    a    t    i    o    n.

Disneylandia

Disneyland is, fundamentally, a vitrine.

yule log

Even within the tribe, the dances are kitschy, as Christmas is to the Christian.

the way we never were

Reading a biography of Disney, it is remarkable how the golden ages - of turn-of-century America, or of his studio - never occur except in the imagination, but there occur strongly.

The actual struggle of America or of Disney to rise directly transitions to the disillusionment of power and structure.  There is no intervening golden plateau in time.  But there is a golden plateau in imagination - the hopes of youth and the security of experience drawn together onto a mental plane, a central clearing, that becomes a permanent, though unreal, stage for the enactment of what never was.

When I was an undergraduate, my writing style came from a deliberate effort to complement - even match - the material being written about.  (This was made easier by the fact that I was writing mainly about written material.)  And the style also grew from an attempt to present things in an order of natural development: each section would be presented when it was done brewing, no sooner or later.  My idea was to create nothing - only to give new and fertile ground to the material and let what grew - grow.

Disney had something of that approach to America: it was a cultural rather than artistic relationship.  And that is the sense in which Disney is authentic.  To watch a "Silly Symphony" is to watch a tribe of 1930s Americans watching their nimblest members perform a new ritual dance (sound animation) in a new clearing (the cinema) to whole tribe's satisfaction.  To visit Disneyland is to visit a tribal festival, enacted by a 1950s American tribe, for itself.  (Unlike a World's Fair, which is nominally for others: the "public".)

The Disney festival is, for example, supremely commercial because the 1950s American tribe is so.  It has a fantasy-driven relation to the outside world because that is what the tribe has.  It idealizes Main Street because that is what the tribe does.  The satisfactions and embarrassments derive largely from that cultural correspondence:

Disney gave the American tribe many of its ritual dances and costumes.  They evoke a time that wasn't, but an imagination that is peculiarly true to the tribe and thus quite unlike the fantasy worlds of loftier and more literary artists.

a simple one

You have enough.  You already had enough.  You are going to have enough.

each of us

I have no special love for Koyaanisqatsi or Naqoyqatsi, but Powaqqatsi is a glory.  Out of the masses, the eyes betray personality.  Individuality is not a social construct.

sleepless

Thinking of Hegel: Your actions are your soul. Your thoughts and motives - your feelings and memories - are real and relevant, but only in the same manner as your body. You are deepest not within yourself but at your very edge - in contact with and in motion within the world.

fur

Honesty is naked, but that will never do.

aloft

I look down on the tops of sunlit, densely white clouds.  The wind carves patterns into the tops of these clouds precisely like Gobi desert sand dunes.  What we are looking at, when we see these clouds, dunes - or deep ocean waves - is not moisture, sand or water, but wind.

kit house

As Sears and Montgomery Ward helped us move West, Amazon helps us move online.

pipe tobacco

Smells are the glue of memory.

massive

There is a silent majority, in the sense that the majority is silent, and must ever be so.  The ordinary virtue is the virtue of refraining.

Westgate Mall

My mind reels in disgust at violent evil, and knows that, in reeling, it forms part of evil's invitation.

because it makes them less alone

One who turns the pages of old philosophers shouldn't wonder that dogs stop at every corner to smell for the piss of those who came before.

King Walt

Will to power through sweetness.  Just imagine creating something you will name "Main Street, U.S.A."

The Long Goodbye

A beach is a kind of temple, as courthouses and hospitals are temples, at we come in contact with power.

glories

Beryl Reid's portrayals of Connie Sachs in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People.  Nobody has so threaded the needle of laughter with a string of tears, or so given us the bathos of intelligence unharnessed and put to pasture, the bow unstrung.

36°30′

A test of an American's historical literacy: can that person connect our Civil War to our relations with Latin America?

Pelosi, McConnell

Power is derived from the governed, but the governed are not themselves powerful.  The people project their need for the powerful onto whom they choose (though they often do not admit they chose).  Then some, only some, of those chosen, show the capacity to reflect and shape that power back onto the people.  Those are the powerful, and their power takes many shapes.  Some are powerful without being obvious, like McConnell or Pelosi, others are old-school, dick-swinging mensch like LBJ or Robert Moses.  On the contemporary political stage, Merkel is the prime example of this old-school, untrammeled version of power - good, bad and indifferent.

big city

It's a big city. We have a store Specializing in Stretch Fabric.

prompted by appellate brief writing

Triangles work uniquely well as metaphors and to structure arguments because it is easy for the reader to grasp that there are exactly three straight paths from the triangle's three points.  Tell readers that there are three things - animal, vegetable and mineral, say - and they readily grasp that there are three relationships: animal to vegetable, animal to mineral and vegetable to mineral.  This clicks with the reader.  It occupies the sweet spot between simplicity and complexity that gives a satisfying intellectual click.  Tell the reader there are four or more points, and the relationships fall apart in the mind.  No click.  Tell the reader there are only two points, and there is no intellectual satisfaction: it all seems too easy, simplistic.  Again, no click.  This does not mean points may come only in threes.  But it does mean that there has to be an underlying order when there are more than three points:  Four to seven points along a straight line - each leading to the next, each building upon the last - can be satisfying.  And it is always possible to collect miscellaneous points summarily and separately, leaving the main points organized in some satisfying configuration, untroubled by the small fry.

reader

Every departure is a book of small leavings.  The climactic exit comes only towards the end.  But eventually the cover shuts as certainly as it had opened, with that startling realization that the game is afoot.

Auda ibu Tayi

You tell me what is honorable, and I'll tell you where you belong.

an interpretation

Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

Taken in context, this is a scripture about taking things a step at a time and not troubling ourselves today with what will be trouble tomorrow - a compound exhortation to savvy sequencing and childlike blitheness. Neither is very deep nor at all original, and each is a crude aid to the simple. Valuable for what they are, though, and appropriate to the audience hearing the sermon.

But the single observation is also intelligible in isolation, and deeper. Taken apart, I understand this scripture thus:

• As admonition: Brethren, add no evil.
• As observation: Our labors are hard enough even when we work timely and well.  So do not add yesterday's troubles to this day's by procrastination.
• As theory: The presence of evil is a natural result of material entropy and human disagreement.
• As encouragement: Evil is but one aspect of our time - it neither overtakes nor is the whole - it will press but not break us.

hum

Short sleep, caffeine soup, the thud
of papers served "Official Business"
And what to do with them.
Mile markers of pages typed,
Hot blue sky of baked thought.

Back home a nettled comfort,
Domestic kiss,
The dust of mutual imperfections settles
Thinly but there -
The need for constant cleaning
Of what moral entropy flakes
From two scalps.

This is good, this somewhat garden,
This oxidizing happiness;
At 35 I am not flattened,
But I am not shiny now.

Our love is a 2004 Honda Accord.
A nice love, a reliable love, a well-equipped love.
It gets us around, it doesn't let us down,
It is better than our friends' cars.
They ask us about car maintenance,
And we are good shade tree mechanics,
Generous with advice and hand tools.
We keep our mats vacuumed
And the oil changed.
Our cloth seats are fine:
Don't leather seats burn in the summer?

Fancy things make us nervous anyhow,
We'd feel obliged to slip-cover our hearts.
The honest wear, the pucker in the driver's seat back,
says this is yours.

And, we have good friends.
I have a lot of ands,
But not enough sleep.

When I get 8 hours in,
I slumber past the thrum of ands.
But when I don't,
I am terribly awake
And the particles,
The small words,
The twitchings of minor muscles,
Swarm over me and - there!
Conspire to be apparition.
With frosty whisper of
a long, middle passage.

Episode 13

Of Night Vale. The one where they figure themselves out. 

Jonathan Edwards

Congregationalism.  Constitution.  West.  Emancipation.  WWII.  Hubble.  I believe in America.

long love

Love grows long and then anything can remind you.  A pasta sauce seems a little like him in attitude, a tree smells a little like him, you detect little shards of him anywhere.  The mystics must have been like this in their later years of adoration.

bad puns

Apparantly there's a Congressman named David Camp.  I hope he becomes president.

comme les autres

Politically or socially, the shutdown is analogous to a national strike.  A small - but not that small - bloc of the public puts its foot down and says no.  The Tea Party, French farmers, Welsh coal miners.  Their values differ, they may all be doomed to fade, eventually, they all do collateral damage - similarities and differences.  But, fundamentally, an American variation on a national strike of the sort that roils other democratic societies.

a six-course life

Il faut laisser du temps au temps: You have to give time time. - François Mitterrand

inward travel

Perhaps mental objects relate to thought and memory precisely as physical objects relate to acceleration and space.

Or, if you prefer:
[With respect to mental objects]
memory : space :: thought : acceleration

we age

I look at my old writing, a decade old.  How I deteriorate.

Astoria now

A warm night that smelled like an easy, suburban Christmas of pot roast and Duraflame.

Liebnitz

A zero fell to pieces and made the world.

very regular

Zero, One, Two, Infinity.

pot culture

There was a half-smoked joint on the floor of my office elevator just now.  I kicked it into the gap between the elevator floor and the 42nd floor landing.  Maybe a rat will eat it.

yeah, yeah

The French have their si.  The contradicting yes.  (Of course it is also used for emphasis, but all emphasis is implicit contradiction.)  For lack of a si, we English speakers are forced into the use of no or any of its negative kin as a kind of whole-word prefix to an affirmation: No, I'm going.  Or else we made the affirmation bigger: Oh, yes!  Or we do without.

one line plays

Didn't you call last night?  Well, somebody didn't.

quick

An unstrung bow soon becomes naught but a strange stick.

waiting for something

The answer is to stop asking. 

an obscure one

"Remember: Gatorade is basically soda, so give them water, and maybe orange slices, when they play."

assembly

Like each other great city, New York looks big, but is much bigger than it looks.  Across from my law firm is a public school building that houses an elementary school in the lower floors and a high school in the upper floors, about ten stories in all.  They are conducting a fire drill on the sidewalks.  A sea of children - about three thousand in all, I'd guess - organized into tight rectangles managed by teachers, each with a red binder.  I can see them out the window, sunlit and looking like confetti in their bright, juvenile clothing.  The short youngsters towards East 57th Street and the lanky teenagers on East 56th.  The motorcades to the U.N. General Assembly pass in the orange-coned special lane, heads of state with their entourages, yet another layer to this phyllo dough city.

Luxembourg

If there is no benevolent deity, patience is not a cardinal virtue, but only a tactic - though very often a good one.

glories

Horses' gaits.

glories

Sutton Foster singing at Café Carlyle.  Sitting there, happy and in love, his hand touching mine under the linen tablecloth as we near a decade, murals aglow behind Sutton, her eyes locked with mine as she purrs.  The pianist, really accompanying - setting off long low vowels with slightly staccato notes, pulling back altogether for her riffs.  The quiet a capella duet with her musical friend who is married tomorrow.  The lovely wine, the wide open smiles of prosperous men, dined and wined, then drunk on her performance.  Waves of understanding: so this is what Woody Allen was getting at, what the Upper East Side has going for it, what this organ of New York's cultural viscera is doing.  A pearl of song in an expensive casket; its lid lifted an hour each evening.  Will we be back?  Perhaps when old, when seventy, to remember last night.  It will still be there.

school is in

It is 7 am.  My N train pulls into the 59th and Lex subway station.  There, at the foot of the down escalator, a mother glares up the descending steps, draws down into a half squat - I suppose to improve her view up the escalator - and, sounding like a drill sargeant, yells "Hustle! Hustle! Hustle! Come! On! Hustle!"  She punctuates each echoing word with a big, meaty clap of her hands.  I exit to the sight of two bleary-eyed pre-teens half sleepwalking, half running, down the moving steps to catch the train, backpacks tugging heavily behind their downward gait.

hymn

Nothing sings quite like need, especially for deliverance.

Carousel of Progress

If I could reintroduce one happy fiction to American thought, it would be a sort of futurism or utopianism.  We did better with those dreams than we are doing without them.

greek key

A certain amount of illusion is called for in the construction of anything that depends in any serious way on the regard of others.  To present a naked form invites contempt or, worse, misapprehension.  Even a paper cup is printed with some sort of design.  This is more than decoration.  It makes the thing more there.

a mean one

It's unkind of me, but there are some people who should not be walking down the street toting 2(x)ist and Victoria's Secret shopping bags.  The mental images are unfortunate.

zippo

Eventually, the threads of a screw strip out and the screw's head is tapped out from too much rough turning.  Ruined, irreparable.  We all feel like that busted screw sometimes.  We feel that way precisely because we are not made of steel - we feel and are flesh and blood.  And that is our rescue: we heal.  Our threads come back into neat alignment and our heads return to the ready unless we mistake ourselves and our substance.

vicera

Everything is messy inside.  That's why foreign policy isn't done in glass houses.  (Except lately?)

wasting time

If I were a snitch, man!
Yubby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dum.
All day long I'd tattle with delight
If I were a stealthy man!
I'd never play the face card.
Yubby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dum.
All day long I'd weasel and play dumb.
Ya ha deedle deedle, bubba bubba deedle deedle dum.
If I were a subtle-sliding snitch,
Sly ol', shifty-eyed ol' little man.
...

spaghetti squash

Most of my dreams repeat, but last night's dream was new.  I'm in the apartment, sometimes in the living room, other times in the kitchen, later in bed.  It is daytime.  Every few minutes, I notice a new gap or wide cut in my body.  Each is painless and bloodless and I do not notice them until I see them with my eyes or feel them with my fingers.  I feel no fear, only curiosity at their great depth.  Each cut goes almost through to the other side.  One cut is on the pad of my thumb, and goes clear through to the thumbnail: I can see its inner surface, backlit like pale stained glass by the sunlight coming through my bedroom window.  Another cut is to my thigh, another to my side, just below my ribcage.  There was no blood, no pain, no muscles, bones or organs.  Instead, there was only an excellent view of stringy, pale, slightly translucent flesh that was precisely like that of spaghetti squash!  I am certain that spaghetti squash is the object whose memory was used to paint these wounds in my mind's eye.  (We ate a lot of this and other varieties of squash growing up.)  The picture above nails it, right down to the slight glow of light through the thin, scraped out part of the squash.  It is rare that I can show, with good accuracy, a scene from a dream, but the picture above is very nearly what my thumb looked like (except that there was no fork, and nothing spilling out).  Awake, all of this seems gross, but in the dream it did not seem so.  Instead, there was just a sense of curiosity satisfied - so that's what I look like inside - and curiosity not satisfied - where are these gashes and cuts coming from?  My brothers and sisters will find it amusing that, after so much reluctant eating of squash as children, one of us eventually dreams that he really is made of the stuff.

above and below

The obvious is overcome,
Is made foundational,
Built on, and lost.

For example,
We worshipped the sun once,
When needs were plain as light, warmth, food.

But we think, we are more than needs,
We aggrandize, we sell:
Sun King, Sunkist^©.

Somehow, briefly,
These cloud the sun itself,
So that I say: "There is the sun."

And probably you ask yourself:
"What's his reference, What's the
Antecedent?"

But I'm pointing
To that orb in the sky
That is not harvest, nor king, nor

Lawrence of Arabia's sun,
roasting Gasim, nor the
Homeric dawn,

Nor the solar,
Capital-S Sun that
Anchors our massive galaxy.

We thought our way to those objects.
Instead, the arcing sun,
that hot circle

of light above,
Glimpsed momentarily,
Then tabernacled with reasons.

hate

Sitting in a hospital to look after someone else, my healthy body hangs heavy and awkward.

The feeling of our bodies as constant threats, as ever-present sources of ruin, like sleeping with a coiled cobra. The feeling that, while healthy, our bodies are gaudy, showy things - that I am as indecent and vulgar walking around this ward in a healthy body as I would be to wear an actual crown.

And then the queasy sense that it might be the other way round - that the physical self is the master and keeper rather than the kept: that my body has me at gunpoint - kidnapped!  That our bodies keep our souls as playthings, as whores, to be kept until tiresome - and then my body will kill me.

Nightmares. Awful and imbalanced thoughts.

Perhaps I should be in hospitals more, around death and misery more often. Then I would sit through a hospital night, sleep in a vinyl padded chair unperturbed, and not see old women wheeled past, not smell the morbidity, not hear the machines beeping, the patients moan. I would just think about the work I brought with me.

Was there ever so wondrous and humane a thing, so necessary and good, that was yet so hateful and disorienting, as a hospital? Those intense cross-currents and resources of moral and physical force are what make a hospital, like a courthouse or a prison or a military base . . . a real temple: the house and ministers of something to be reckoned with.

stepping out

A favorite - on the sidewalk or at work - are older ladies whose clothes are fussy, old-fashioned, but put together.  Church ladies, older secretaries, daytime museumgoers.  Stiff bows, jewel-tone synthetic structured jackets, undyed wool in loose weaves, patent leather flats.  But more, the carriage and expression of the ladies themselves.  Poised, ready, unhurried but going somewhere, soft and sure.  They and the world have worked out an understanding, and neither crosses the other.

now

To hide is vice.  But once lit bright, what will show?

glories

Legos are a fine example of how something extraordinary may be made to seem simple, even obvious.  Legos are to toys as Mark Twain is to tall tales: unsurpassed.  The blocks are a marvel of geometry, their interlocking, exact proportions are a joy to think through and graph out.  Their manufacture is precise, and of just the right formula of plastic: from a single material is achieved the correct function, form and color, with durability.  This is a beautiful achievement: there are no gaskets, coatings or paint.  That, only the right plastic could manage, an example of synthetic material that is the opposite of cheap.  The right form and the right material give Legos their wonderful snap/unsnap quality, which is satisfying to feel and hear, giving a sensation of creative construction backed by soundness.  A construction of Legos, unlike blocks, holds fast.  They therefore invite engrossment: a sustained investment of a child's playful effort.  Their play value is unsurpassed. 

There is nothing showy about a bucket of Legos, but everything worthy.  Naturally many of the themes and sets and so on devolve to ordinary toy silliness, but I can think of no better toy than a big bucket of ordinary Lego bricks.  Det bedste er ikke for godt.

David O. Ives, narrating

The styles of writing used by lawyers range wide.  But they center on spare passages that go from point A to B in a straight line.  Point B is usually first in conception.  It is where we want to go.  As advocates, the required outcome is often a given, or relatively so. 

Point A, then, is the variable and the focus of effort; it determines both the first impression and the path traveled to the destination, Point B.

Whole briefs may be well written without deviation from this linear style.  This implies nothing rigid or mechanical: there are as many straight paths to even one given point as there are radii to a circle's center.  And points lead in chain from one to another, the preceding supporting those that follow, A and B, then B to C, and, finally, Z.

Most briefs must employ a second type of treatment, however: a sweeping look from a point arrived at to survey the surrounding ground.  Defensive passages are most often of this kind.  We are often saying, first, that from those grounds this follows: Point A to Point B.  But then we often must then say, to guard the ground newly won, that nothing prevents what followed from being so, and in particular, none of several prominent apparent troubles are actual: Point B becomes a perch or vantage point from which we survey the surrounding ground and discuss the prominent features.

Defense is a special interest of the advocate, but the sweeping survey can support the linear progression in another way, since the surrounding features may be positive as well as negative: describing positive surrounding features show the reader that the outcome urged is desirable.  This is, if you like, offense - secondary to the primary offense, which is linear.  Commonly this secondary offense is a policy argument, or direct recognition that the outcome urged is not only correct or permitted, but in fact right and just - even, occasionally, beautiful.

These patterns, of course, scale from small to large: the sentences making littler point, the paragraphs their own, and the larger passages carrying the great points.  In each, the style yields linear advances followed by panoptic sweeps.

This style is not exclusively legal, though when it is not, it risks being high-brow.  It need not be; some uses of the style are delightful.

For a short example of this style that is at once high-brow, popular, workaday and delightful, see an old station identification sign-on from WGBH public television.  It is a hybrid of legal notice and mission statement; it hits all the bases required by FCC regulation, media and charity law, but speaks to its public in a popular mode.  Being television, the panoptics can occur in the visual, and do, freeing the narrative to be almost entirely linear, though there are a couple of panoptic sentences.  There is no need for defense, this being a station identification and not an adversarial argument, so the panoptics are of the second kind and devoted to invoking delight and a feeling of rightness.

A couple of smaller observations on this WGBH ident, which delights me:

First, it begins with a "This is..." sentence: a humble rhetorical workhorse and a favorite of mine for beginnings, here perfectly deployed.  Pointing and identifying - either "this is..." or simply the gesture of pointing - is one of the earliest acts of communication by any child, as it probably was for the human race.  This is powerful because it is fundamental. 

Second, there is the dated but beautiful use of the verb to cope, a good example of the use of certain simple words possessed of uncommon depth.  The depth of the to cope is that it bears both the more contemporary connotation of struggling to dealing with, as one copes with an adversity, as well as the deeper, older connotation of ably dealing with, as a mason copes with stone.  The WGBH use is a rich balancing of these implication, though unfortunately the worse for wear, since the years of intervening usage have pushed these connotations out of balance and so far towards struggles and sufferings and away from valient effort that we hear "to help to cope" and visualize a good person comforting an aging friend in a hospital rather than a strong person helping another cut stone.  When writen, I think to cope would have richly conveyed both struggles and successes: a possibility lost to the shifting sands of usage.

The Castro

San Francisco is an old dame of the stage.  She looks less well in the sunlight, but is sapphire in shadows, shrouds of mist, clouds that roil and roll as if time-lapsed.  Her drag is sincere, but her glitter is beaten leaf-thin by long habits of irony.  Had Wilde grown old and become a city, San Francisco would be his glorious, tawdry dotage.

dreamscapes

In my dreams, the locations of my life - Astoria apartment, childhood home, the law office I work in, even the commute - have their counterparts.  Recognizable, but warped.  Larger and more beautiful, but often threatening.  This seems to be common.

I work in a midtown Manhattan skyscraper, the upper twenty floors of which belong to my firm.  In my dreams, it is the same, except that there is a coffered, high-ceilinged, dim and creepy food court and conference area at the top.  One floor down from that, four small corner balconies, reached from the 46th floor landing of the fire stairs.  (The top floor of our offices is, in fact, the 47th.) 

When in my dreams I step out onto these balconies, they are windswept and ominous: grey clouds roll above and below, obscuring the street.  Sometimes I just go out there myself to be outside and feel the heavy wind try to pull me over the edge.  Other times I go with whoever in my dream I'm talking to.  They dislike my pressuring them to do so.  I don't know why I do pressure them.  Other times I'm chased onto these balconies, or take refuge, hiding there, from whatever greater danger roams within.

to others

A lack of ambition and love results simply in a lack of existence outside one's head.  Unless one has both the talent and luck of Emily Dickinson.

Great ones

This is the first year I've seen dragonflies right in Manhattan. Big, jungly ones. The first I saw this summer was novel enough that a high-power lawyer I was walking with stopped to snap a picture of it with her blackberry to send to her husband. The third made a trend. And this one is the first for which I've realized that I've lost count. This one is brown rather than sapphire. But it gets the blog post. Fly with pride, brownie!

cocktail party

T.S. Eliot urges in his last play that we remember that we are not just persons, or even bodies, but also, simply, objects.  That our quality as mere objects is part of our being.  As when we fall out of bed, or get smacked by an unseen tree limb in the dark, or plow heedless through a spider's web the next morning.

Hacienda Temozon

A gentle grandeur, born long ago by now-slumbering industry. A fabric, wove of sisal and wealth, worried into softness by the hands that work it.

sightings

Back in the mid-eighties, in upstate South Carolina public schools - and I'm sure elsewhere - you could see boys with long, wide rattails, waved or permed, dropping from the back of an otherwise buzzcut scalp of blond-brown hair. 

And there he was, in my subway car this morning.  Not just the crimp-waved rattail, but the bored, slouchy attitude, the braces, the striped tshirt with the elasticity at the neck all given out, just hanging.  He pushes past the woman to exit first, his small rudeness not aggressive or hurried, just careless and selfish, shoulders plunging and rising with his loping gait.

Common 1980s middle school white trash.  Released back into the wild, after a thirty year hibernation.

up

Ambition and possession are foundational.  The possessions need not be material and it is best the ambition not be.

preacher

There are forms of thinking that build, and that break down.  Ecclesiastes, or a mindset in Qohelet's vein, can pour acid that will dissolve anything.  The value of love itself?  Thought of that kind pours on, sizzles, and it is seen as conditional, the faulty, then treacherous, then futile and then - pop - nil.

out of the corner

Imagine a race of alien explorers who pass our planet, who simply drive by: as anyone might pass the local library, without even taking the foot off the gas or turning to glance; as a New Yorker crosses Times Square, heedless; as a political staffer might pass the monumental core of Washington, seeing nothing and concentrating on his groceries; as a museum goer passes a masterwork, having already seen too many paintings.

bump

"My yoke is easy and my burden light."  More generally, the work of entertaining one's self beyond a simple degree is a burden, spurs ennui, a grind.  We are, alas, made for the plow and not the surf.

advantageous

I am happy to hear others' problems.  But I do not want to tell my own.

pump

I remember the first time I went to Harvard, and it was by subway (locally known as the T).  The recorded voice called out the stations along the Red Line from South Station: “Downtown Crossing” where the doors open on both sides. “Park Street”, the first subway station in the US. “The next stop is: Charles/Massachusetts General Hospital.”  Suddenly we were above ground, the Charles River in view, the cupolas of Harvard's houses and schools distantly visible above the trees: we were about to cross into Cambridge, and behind, the wonderful hill over the bay that is Boston, the intellectual bastion of America, bulwark of our revolution, nursery of our best ideas.  Back underground.  “We have arrived at: Kendall/MIT.”  Closer.  “We have arrived at: Central.  The next stop is: Harvard Square.”  What a rush!  We pass the ghost station, the old Harvard station, now sealed shut, its platforms still dimly visible through the windows, then a screech as we turn a sharp corner, and the great cavern, all 1970s civic architecture, of the current Harvard Station.  The doors open, we pour out, I exit up the steps marked “To Harvard Yard.”  And there, one of the great iron gates, its inscription: “Enter To Grow In Wisdom.”  Through that gate, I could see the old Yard’s well and pump, its wooden handle there to grab and work up and down, to feel that I was there and that this Harvard, this great well, its centuries-old pump still working, was mine.  That is how Harvard greeted me.

the life of the mind is lived on the skin

The glory of Pepys diary is that the life of his mind was in the doing, the activities, the little resolutions to alter behavior, the pride of learning to use a slide rule, the function of a rabbet, the quality of tar.

ingestible, injectable television

I suppose a fair number of drug addicts get into it by way of boredom. Same as other addictions. Wonkavision. 

invertedbrate

One needn't see plants as reaching for the sun. Like moles, they burrow for food. They are at their most, down there, leaving only their branching tails sticking out, wagging upward, belching oxygen and sucking in sun, but feasting, snout down, in the moist earth.

provision

Old age is the child of the childless. 

grass

Life rides out into the prarie and is sustained, for its season, by the gradual consumption of its ration of possibility.

notes on Auden

Law is society.
Law is rule.
Law is a great piece of code.
Law is accounting.
Law is the field of play.
Law is the glove of force.
Law is the mind of power.
Law is the heart of restraint.
Law is the mountain pass.
Law is the mountain range.
Law is the railing by which we steady ourselves across the passage of time.
Law, like love, is a feeble thing that conquers all.

payment

Time is the infection.

snipers

The clouds that do not rain twist our hearts.  We sweat of them.

flash, trickle

Modern sculpture certainly has its moments: indeed, moments are mostly what modern sculpture has.  The faucet sticking out from a bronze cloud.

limits

On the one hand, excessive ambition is ugly.  On the other, it is low and unattractive to treat life as if its goal were to find a hole to crawl into.

glories

The heat wave breaks and the weather is warm, not hot, the air embracing, not sticking with humidity.  I cross streets and head to work.  There: on the sidewalk, waiting, the young couple, a sort of perfection.  He, standing, block shouldered, next to the phone booth, similar to it in tallness, dimension and form, a Latin slab of young power, seeming carved not born, gentle and content next to his wife.  She, beautiful as only a young mother, fat and short, can be beautiful, lovely as every best apple or peach would wish to be, lit by her own light, happy in the way of those unsmiling in an open privacy of maternity.  Their infant, unseen in a loose sheet, passes from her to him.  She breathes a thinking breath.  Her pink polo shirt is not tight, but her breasts are ample.  His blue polo shirt a field of sky.  The flowing sheet, of soft yellow and white, their treasure within, hardly catches the breeze, drapes between them, falling from his cradling arm like flag from its mast: a blazon of parenthood.

interstices

If there is other intelligent life, I suppose it is as likely to be here on Earth, yet unseen by us, as it is to be elsewhere.

a local one

Policy aside, Michael Bloomberg's mayorship has been a signal act of public service.

shallow

Perhaps you've seen the inverted water bottles used with cages for rabbits, hamsters, and the like. The bottle feeds a steel tube, which is sealed by a small steel ball.  The animal, licks the bearing, lifting it, and a little water flows.  Click click click is the sound as the little ball falls back into place between licks.  A little steel click click click.  That's what I hear when I click my mouse at work - the same clicking.  And really, as a I read through the news online, what's the difference?

weep

I have never been sympathetic enough.  Brokenness in others repelled me when it did not tempt me as an opportunity for advantage.  But this is mostly because I feared and loathed - and fear, and loathe - brokenness in myself.  There are substances that are weak once broken, and others that weather breakage and persevere.  God willing, we - you and I - have that persevering strength.

next, on thinking with cliches

Blank canvases invite bad painters to think - this time it will be different!

indigo

My crowded subway commute gave me a few minutes to stare at a teenage boy's tattoo, which started just below his left ear and nearly covered that side of his neck: I love you Mom and Dad.  My mind leapt to what my parent's reaction would have been.  But what of his parents?  Anything from comedy ("just don't expect us to get one of those for you, son!"), to mild gratification ("that's nice, what's on tv tonight?"), to aesthetic critique ("that flowing script is all wrong - we would have preferred black letter"), to anger ("you'll never get a job now"), to - nothing (if his parents are dead and the tattoo is in remembrance).  My own reaction, of course, was to think about it: it is stating the obvious, but a lot of instinctive behavior - these rudiments of cultural and tribal mores - is about stating the obvious in mysterious ways.  And like the markings in Revelation, this boy's tattoo is, in its way, a mystery, of the "Behold! I show you..." variety.

Kant

Maps are the best metaphors, literally.  The best maps are metaphors, metaphorically.

unenlightened self-interest

They they stand, in every rush-hour subway car, like sentries: commuters against the edges of the doors, forcing those exiting and entering to squeeze between them, single file, slowing everyone, even themseleves.  They are the totems of limited human intellegence, of the power of the lowest common denomenator of workaday, small scale, self-defeating greed.  I think of these people every day: they force their crummy little lesson upon me.  They tell me that we are greedy, stupid and boorish.

bdellium

The application of fragrance is an ancient thing.  I like to look at an ancient sculpture or Edwardian painting and imagine: she is perfumed with jasmine, or he smells of lavender, or myrrh.

provenance

That "1" and "2" marking classes on European train cars.  There they have been, and are.

thank you internet

Aha!  I was walking down the sidewalk, thinking to myself. "FTM drag queens: I bet there are."  And, of course there are.  Cool.

cay

I've slowed down - am slowing down.  Becalmed, perhaps.  I must find new wind and the right placement of sails.

sermonette

Bitterness is poison. The bitter die alone. 

El Paso

Among the snake oil salesman's greatest tricks has ever been to seat the new amongst the choir, turn, tell his own troubles, swallow the concoction himself and offer - you - the rest of the bottle.

couger talk

"Where did you find him?  Amber Alert?"

banality

At the moment, the Egyptian channel I am watching is running an endless string of commercials.  For potato chips, DVD players, baby diapers.  It is strangely terrifying.

from the kitchen table, children beside

Bach could not have written for the journey, yet he wrote to flight, by TGV, by jet. Let fields or clouds fly past the window as one hears what is baroque, as one sees what is sped up, yet calm, crowded with life and arrangement. Nature itself is baroque when passed by with attentive reality.

steel flight

Hoist points:

A mighty engine lifts

Or may be lifted.

Winglets:

A spreading wing holds firm

But more gently.

Life vests:

Secreted with their kin

Ever ready. 

Shoulders:

As real as Chicago

Hold me between.

Boeing:

Private yet national

Of me apart.

Above:

Home and Earth beneath me

While I'm soaring.

aboard, glories

Out from my seat, I see the great left wing of this triple seven, stretching at its tip upward, away from the Atlantic below. A secondary flap makes its slight movement, and we are kept level, aloft, and in good cheer, at mighty speed. My apartment would fit through the maw of either engine depending from these wings. The luxuries of the Zeppelein were not so great. Even here in economy. 

nullipara

Childlessness and the bearing of children alike carry a heavy burden of justification - seldom carried.

channels

Boston and Amsterdam. Commercial trade and highly rationalistic religious movements are the beginning and catalysts of tolerance.  The hardness of Calvinism and Puritainism eventually become the firm pavement to congregational, then democratic, then liberal belief. 

Snowden

Well yes, of course, systems administrators are latter-day switchboard operators.  Imagine if Sarah from the Andy Griffith show ever fled through Moscow!  Moscow, Tennessee, that is.

Tweed Courthouse

What does luxury do?  Many things, I'm sure.

Sometimes luxury glows: Tut's golden funeral mask really would be less beautiful without its precious materials and workmanship, indeed without its pharonic coiffure and false beard - that is, shorn of its branding.  But it takes centuries to entomb the cultural ugliness of the artifact and centuries more for the patina of patrimony to develop. 

Contemporary luxury glows best when it is, actually, popular.  The British royal wedding was luxurious in a way that designed for masses to luxuriate in it, and was thus a distant and effective cousin to well-appointed public parks, which were meant to be, in the old fashioned phrase, elevating.  But all this must be done carefully and, forgive me, by the right people.  Misappointed luxury is a mess, enjoyable only as a shtick: Dame Edna.  A showman's luxury is for a simpler, sometimes dirtier, cultural phase: Frédérick Lemaître (as portrayed), with his dandified cane and coat, Liberace, drug pushers with their diamond-capped teeth.

So, often, luxury sickens: little need be said here, except that sickening luxury is a winking, syphilitic thing, beguiling even as it pustulates.  A crust of jewels is often a social crime that almost as often half-hides, half-advertises the actual crimes leading to acquisition.  The manicured, coiffed, neurotic, primped and pimped dog - a symbol of personal, social and moral disorder - Trouble.

Usually, luxury asserts: it is a kind of boldness, or big-toothed smile, or warning.  And that is half of why luxury sells: it promises to sell you.  The nicest paper we buy is to print our resumes on.

Sometimes luxury coddles: sensitivities - real or imagined, natural or acquired, rational or affected - are recognized and dealt with.  The incredibly soft scarf occasionally adorns an incredibly sensitive neck, like a dressing of gauze.  More often, such scarves eventually render the neck more sensitive.  In either case, luxury is a thing to be consumed, to cozy up in, to hold and squeeze as a child does a teddy bear.  That is the other half of why luxury sells: it is a little ball of ownable comfort, occasionally excused as an investment.  Luxury in this very common form is a teddy bear, and usually as infantile.  Lotions.

And thus, luxury often teaches: the needs and tastes implied by luxury are taught deliciously, because indirectly.  Why should there be swans in the lake? Why shouldn't there be steak sauce on the table?  Why are courtrooms expensively appointed?  What is the blindness that necessitates revolution?  There is much to be learned in art musuems, and an important minority of the lessons on offer from art - especially the applied arts - are the lessons of luxury.

Always, luxury signals: any of the foregoing.

sightings

In the subway, the old man who seems to be wearing a suit because it is the only thing he has to wear outside the house.

pivot

My mind knows its needs.  I find myself slowing, now and then, and it is frustrating.  I have so much to do.  But something is being considered, cooked up, within.  Some unseen timer's bell rings and there, enabled by the pause, is a new understanding, well worth the temporary dip in productivity.

March

From my perch at the shoe shine shop, I see the morning's latter commuters pass. Soldiers of many armies. Some their own sole troop: an army of one. Others, like me, of the great professional guilds, phalanxed. Most of two loyalties, officers of the family brigade, making their daily expedition to reinforce some corporate redoubt. 

day by day, trench to trench.

Fight.  It is wisdom.

fear

If I were to wish evil on a society, I could do it no greater harm than to see much of its male youth unemployed. I feel like Francis Urquhart to say it, but some sort of public service conscription is preferable to that.

ask Mr. Malaprop

And there he was, nervous, shaking, perspiring audibly.

empty rooms

A nightmare: my head empties of loved ones and self and only work and pleasure remain.

Manhattan Island

People live and thrive in different particular habitats.  Each person is compatible with a few at most, and that uncomfortably.  Some of us are riverine, others live in the forest canopy.  None of us are truly global.  The things I know how to do - some of which are, in fact, impressive - would be naught in most settings.

Saugerties Lighthouse

We're born to work, after all? Yes, but  peace and beauty and nothing to do are a fine alternative. 

Gorgias

Philosophy distances when it does not debilitate.

after Nash

In city apartments
The best dog breed is that
Better known as a cat.

gulp.

Unless your roots are blessed with location and sunk deep enough to tap water, you must engage, you must run, you must race, you must win your water.

shepherd thyself

The memory of possibly repeatable happiness is the whip that drives the great human herd from within.

on the take

Man is another of the grasping animals.

go

In New York City, stamina is a kind of intellegence.

eulogies

Children are life after death.  The childless fear a final scene like Dirk Diggler's.

spooky juices

Lived faith is not, generally, belief, but a social undertaking that yields belief.  The non-social adjunct to faith is not belief but spiritual wonder.

Radok Blocks

The screen itself may be manipulated in a presentation.  Ordinarily this is not done, or if done, to create a buzz, rather like the ripple of blank verse across a play's dialogue or the expression effect of an organ with a true swell division.  If heightened, it becomes more than a finish: a marquetry and physical poem.

Llewellyn

In business, practice is a second law.

now

I look out to the dawn sky, familiar strips of rose and pink, mauve and blue grey, and up through the foreground, a dragonfly, more carried by the rising draft than flying.

rippling

Good writing flows in a clear, cold stream of lucid concision past shoots of flowering style.

dawdling

The silent cry of young people in developed countries these days, unheard even by themselves, is: Oh, for a seizing purpose!  I know plenty of quack purposes, some of which would convince most of them.  But I don't know one that, really and firmly, touches bottom.

malaprop

I was telling a friend of mine about an inconsiderate thing a group of kids did the other day and he replies: "You should have read them the fifth!"

not helpless

One of the great lessons of childhood is how to cope with one's own incompetence.  To learn to manage dependence, conditional trust, and the dance of pressing forward with letting it be.  Taken into adulthood, we apply these lessons in obvious ways (with doctors, police) and subtler ways (showing willingness to play along while maximizing the chance one does not have to play undesirable games at all).

to have and to hold

What is the ultimate toy for a child?  Not in any esoteric sense, nor in terms of cherished individual memories, but in at large, for ordinary fun and development?  Candidates that come to mind for me: a sandbox; blocks; stuffed animals.

connections

Was there ever so delicious a queen as Dryden in Lawrence of Arabia?  Rains gets as much out of his knuckles, physically, as he gets out of his arch intonation of lines.

But what is going on between him and Lawrence?  Lawrence does seem to be a little more than a promising personel dossier to Dryden - perhaps a protege?

That strange first scene alone together, in which Dryden conspicuously unlocks his office's doors, with their panels of frosted glass, yet Lawrence immediately notices a sculpture and says that's new!  Has he been inside before?  Often before?  Or is it just that he is so aware of archeological finds that he can recognize recent additions to the British catalogue on first sight?

homogenized

How strange to think there was milk in 1947.  It lasted a week or so in the icebox.

an obscure one

"Paris is burning.  There is enough space on the floor to do all that you intend to.  We're not going to be shady, just fierce."

at ease

A gear is made to spin,
But wants to sit on its pin.

A spade has a taste for the garden bed,
But leans against the shed instead.

A box of tools is a happy crew,
Dreaming of nails and bolts
and Phillips-head screws.

pleasures

Aha!  A sentence in a brief I'm writing works better as a chiasm.  Late night made more fun:

The Supreme Court declared that “[a]n elementary and fundamental requirement of due process in any proceeding which is to be accorded finality is notice reasonably calculated, under all the circumstances, to apprise interested parties of the pendency of the action and afford them an opportunity to be heard.”  Mullane, 339 U.S. at 314.  The Supreme Court recognized, however, that actual notice is not always possible.  It therefore held that due process requires actual notice to known parties but that for unknown parties, reasonable publication notice is sufficient.

layering

Truly, life is confection.  But being so, is the more real.

His eye is on

Work began early for me so I stepped out to get coffee and a pastry.  Rounding the sidewalk corner from the coffee stand, fiddling with the lid of my disposable cup, I stepped onto an unwary little house sparrow.  I felt the bird before I saw it, sensed the queasy pressure of its little body underfoot, and could only slow my landing stride a bit.  The sparrow was fast and strong and spread its wings against the sidewalk and pulled against the grippy vise of rubber sole and rough concrete that clamped it.  It escaped!  It all happened in a fraction of a second and left both of us a little stunned.  I stared down at the bird; for a moment it staggered.  The sparrow flew unsteadily away; as unsteadily to work trod back the lawyer.

perspective

There's another risk besides a reputation for exaggeration to making a mountain out of a mole hill.  It's that others will conclude you're small.

wagons get hitched, too

New bosses mean new workers.

colors

We pull out of my station for the morning's subway ride to the office.  The conductor: "This is an important messages from the MTA, New York City Transit.  Please do not hold the doors open by sticking your blue backpack in the rear of the train into the doors.  Thank you for riding, and have a good morning."

I exit onto the midtown sidewalks behind a prosperous mother with her little boy's hand in hers, walking beside her.  He's perhaps 4 and she is pointing out basic building features to him as they walk along: "That's a sliding door.  That's a column.  Those are stairs.  That's a drain."  He seems half interested, but then stops and points his fingers, "Oh, Mommy, look at that!"  She looks in the shop window and says, bringing him back to pace, "Oh, that's just a design."  They go on.  A second later I pass and look in to see a boldly patterned rug, crimson and canary yellow, hanging in display.  For those who care to see it: bright above the drain.

pasties

A good writer knows how to shove the eels into the pot and hold the lid down firmly until the water boils.  So says someone struggling to write.

now

Familiarity also breeds contemptibility.

as if Bea Arthur were your spokesperson

A distinct New York City voice is found in advertising and commercial tag lines that lay flat and heavy as the thick steel plates that cover street excavation.  Ess-A-Bagel: "EVERYTHING ON A BAGEL."  A local home furnishing chain called BETTER YOUR HOME.  Papaya King: OUR FRANKFURTERS ARE TASTIER THAN FILET MIGNON.  Fairway Market: LIKE NO OTHER MARKET.  The flat absence of lilt; the nearness to threat: the heavy charm of words meant to be read not heard in the mind.

wages

Some adult lives amount to the funding of bad habits.

folk Freud

When a suckling babe bites the nipple, the flow of milk stops.  And this is the ideal in punishment: there is correspondence and proportion. 

The correspondence is to what the babe wants: milk is wanted, and it is the supply of milk that is interrupted.  The correspondence is not to what the mother suffered.

The proportion is to motivation.  A young babe had little or no motive to bite and the interruption in suckling is for only a few seconds.  An older baby, perhaps, is motivated by temper, and the interruption is longer.

This ideal applies throughout human punishment: when possible, the punishment should correspond to the desire connected to the crime and should be proportioned to counter the bad motivation, with a margin sufficient to public safety (this is why fines and imprisonment should, in my view, be indexed to wealth as well as sized to harm).  Practically, this is often a sharp, sudden, sizable interruption to the flow of what is desired: power over others, money, pleasure, and so forth.

Now, the ideal may not be possible.  And when it isn't, aim for correspondence in time, that is, immediacy, and for limited cost, that is, avoiding excess trouble, resistance, and risk of resentful learning of the wrong lesson.  It is in this light that corporal punishment, never ideal, may be the least bad option.

crime on tv

We Americans came together this week to watch a lot of live porn.  And when it was over, we stood up and cheered.

folk anthropology

I think we have a faculty for alertness to threats to the group we perceive ourselves as belonging to.  The same thing that makes herds circle and flocks of birds fly in unison at the sight by one of a cat, while the squirrel they surround is unperturbed.  We know, but this faculty within us does not know that what is on the other side of a computer or television screen is not here unless there are visual cues that mark the situation as other.  That is why we respond to violence in foreign locales with prayers and sympathy, but with nothing like the riveted alertness an American news watcher presently feels, watching news in Boston.  And it is interesting and important and sad - so there is nothing to push back against the instinct to alertness that rivets the viewer.  Add that it is visual and violent and has villans (unlike a fertilizer plant explosion that was objectively much worse and at least as deserving of attention) and that this is going down in locations that anyone can feel they know (Cambridge, MIT, etc.), and finally that it is one of those landmark shared experiences (I remember where I was when...), and you have a very powerful package.  Of course, for someone who actually lived for years in Cambridge, I can't help the silly, self centered thoughts: that was my 7-Eleven!; that was my Target parking lot!; can you imagine shutting down the whole T?!

formation

What I am saying is: don't give children the vote, precisely because they will be voting citizens.

nursery

The groundsoil of a healthy democracy is not itself democratic: generally happy homes, a civic disposition to neutral sympathy and open public space, usually bought at the (heavy) price of fierce protection of the literal and figurative perimeter.  But democracy itself drops unhealthy leaves - tricks and traps, stunts and Huey Longs - onto that soil, that must either be swept away or outweighed.

JFK

Absence makes the heart see farther.

confounded contraption

Electronic devices deserve more of that word's Victorian connotations.

sayings

Some day I'm going to tell him how the cow ate the cabbage.

party time

Marriage is for others than the couple, first and foremost.  Even the couples' benefits of marriage are chiefly benefits from others, including via the state.

curmudgeonly

Nothing gets lost in translation.  I might as well say my furniture gets lost every time I leave my apartment.  What's awry is the overburdened idea of translation itself - which we somehow set up as Calvin and Hobbes style transmogrification or, worse, as nearly the same as translation in its theological meaning.

spiritual gloves

A certain steady, impermeable incomprehension is how human goodness usually best approaches certain evil.  No explanation, no reformation, no easy sympathetic self-identification, nor even investigation beyond establishing the fact of evil: only capture. 

glories

Fargo's ending, actually better than many of Shakespeare's denouments: Marge Gunderson looks back at the killer she's captured, through the rear view mirror of her sherriff's car.  "So that was Mrs. Lundegaard on the floor in there. And I guess that was your accomplice in the wood chipper. And those three people in Brainerd. And for what? For a little bit of money. There's more to life than a little money, you know. Don't you know that? And here ya are, and it's a beautiful day. Well, I just don't understand it."  She turns the keys in her car's ignition, shakes her head softly, and drives towards town, joined eventually and silently by cars called in for reinforcement, their red squad lights turning against the white winter, in slow procession.

plectrum

Sightings:  On the carpeted floor of a Manhattan law firm ("high atop the Acme Buiding"), in fact, right outside my office door: a guitar pick.  Stranger still: inspection reveals that it was well used.  I accuse: Col. Mustard, in the Library, with the candlestick!

N Train

As sand through an hourglass do we exit a crowded subway car.

baubles

Childhood memories:

• The crabapple tree in the side yard, and crabapple drink.
• Magnolia cones dropped from the magnolia tree, and their red seeds, with little strands of sticky silk behind.
• Waiting for the red flag on the mailbox to go down so that I could run check the mail.
• The "room" back in the woods made out of briars and bramble.
• The little red building behind our house, and inside, the wave of white painted on the wall.
• Riding bikes to the gas station for hot dogs.
• Pine rosin on our hands from climbing the trees.
• The scales for weighing vegetables at our aunt's farm stand and poking our uncle's tractors under the shed.
• Watching Dad crank open our camper trailer at the state park campground, brushing our teeth in the little camper sink and sleeping on the childen's side of the camper, vinyl curtain drawn, listening to Mom and Dad on the other side, talking quietly to one another in the night.

Thatcher

For better and worse, there are those who make the world their theater, with a kingdom for a stage, princes to act, and monarchs to behold the swelling scene.  Where they find the strength to stride so, God only knows.  Some are monsters, none are angels, Thatcher was neither.  And those that are neither, despite our qualms, make the world - and indeed ordinary living - more of the beautiful adventure that living ought to be.

chilling

"In Pakistan, things fall out of the sky all the time."

broken

The horse pulls the wagon because he cannot see a way out from habit.

neighbor's wife

Social norms of monogamy are partly - and importantly - a matter of civil peacekeeping.

like units

Money makes a poor story.  Money eludes our sense of time.  Money is a numeric abstraction and we are concrete innumerates by nature.  Money is important.

good clean fun

Ooh, the tourists sitting next to us walked out of "The Nance" because they were offended.  Didn't take them long either: just a quick escalation in body language communicating disgust and repulsion, then glances to one another and departure.  That made the show much more fun.  And, to be fair, we weren't expecting a minute long baring of freshly bathed, hairy ass either, nor the glint of stagelit testicles dripping with bathwater, nor some believably acted horny anonymous-sex fueled kissing.  It's ok to walk out if you don't like that.  We and the rest of the New Yorkers and Nathan Lane-loving tourists stuck around.  And - oh yes - the elderly lesbian couple sitting on the other side of us up in the balcony were doing some discreet petting by the time intermission snuck up on us.

No, "The Nance" wasn't great writing - just good writing with a few bits of new and solidly written pathos and, mostly, the good grace to get out of the way now and then and let us enjoy a good twenty minutes, combined, of beautifully resurrected genuine old burlesque chestnuts.  That you won't find anywhere else.

Robert Bringhurst

I had it all under control.  Less furtive calligraphy when alone at home.  No more guilty amazon.com purchaces of old books on letterforms, page composition and poster script.  But now it all gets out of hand: letterpress books of essays on the physical act of reading; old used copies in German of theories of stroke width in written and printed lettering; a survey of Soviet typefaces.

This is what happens when I don't have enough work to do.

flags and eagles and tanks

"James J. DiFidele, Esq., Attorney at Law", reads the small billboard in Queens.  The visual is basically unsuprising: a bald eagle, a waving American flag, the attorney himself, nicely coiffed, smiling and confident, photo cropped at mid-chest.  All perfectly normal.  But, but - he is wearing a tank top.

Carnegie

Certainly Bach's St. Matthew Passion is the greater of his surviving passions - taken as whole works.  But the St. John Passion is mostly greater minute for minute.  Although greatness, at this level, is nearly absurd: it is as if I said that, taken as a whole, Earth's landmass had greater beauty than its oceans.  But that, by the square meter, the ocean is often more exciting.

Actually, that's exactly what I'm saying: that Bach's Matthew is land; his John is sea.

thank you Karl Llewellyn

What the Uniform Commerical Code does in basic situations, it does very well.  How long do I have to deliver goods?  There's an answer for that.  It is a thing of beauty, rivalling, perhaps excelling, the Bankruptcy Code for its cohesion and beauty of purpose.

windows and arms

One of the useful things I carry from philosophical reading is attentiveness to unit selection.  The mind selects units automatically in most contexts, usually correctly.  Awareness of unit selection permits both correction of the occasional error and sometimes the opportunity to shift the perspective of others to our advantage.  And it illuminates the occasional disorientation that comes from lapses in automatic unit selection.  One stares sometimes, and a written word becomes letters, or a spoken word becomes mere sounds.  On my walk to work this morning, I saw a construction worker carefully carrying a large iron pipe.  I thought: Why so careful?  And then I saw that he was protecting the relatively delicate threads at either end of the pipe from scraping against the scaffolding above or concrete sidewalk beneath.  The threads and not the pipe were at issue.  So far, so good.  But when I looked up, not at all attentively, there was a moment when the commuter in front of me was not a commuter, but only an arm floating in a sea of background.  My mind had abstracted the threads of the pipe from the pipe and then, momentarily, done the same to the commuter: disembodied his arm.  To clear this, I looked up at the buildings.  My mind persisted: floating windows, abstracted from the buildings to which they belonged.  And then, the buildings come back, the commuters come back whole, all is back.  This all occurred in less than a second.  Units.

folk biology

Somehow it doesn't suprise me that a mammal's mouth is both for eating and vocalizing: it is easy to imagine the vocal capacity as layered on.  Nor that my mouth can be used as an alternative to the nose for breathing: redundancy for meeting the most immediate need through double purpose makes perfect sense.  Nor that smell is co-located in the nose.  I could go on.

But I suppose I am suprised that ingestion and respiration converge in the throat, and that liquid elimination and reproduction converge in the same organs.  After all, each of both pairs of functions are basic - and they don't seem to do anything for one another but potentially interfere.  (We have all had the experience of nearly choking on a swallow of water that goes down wrong.)  The idea that this is a matter of merely efficient doubling up doesn't satisfy.

But it does make for an elegant double-wye symmetry.  One imagines a shape like this: >--<  ; and that is, after all, an anthropomorphic configuration.

named galleries

Art museums are inverse cemeteries.  When some rich men die, their treasures are unburied.

illiberal

Harems were, of course, an expression of someone's freedom.

401k

We are all, in some ways, refugees - did we but know it.  Full freedom is not an option.  The question is: what will I surrender to?  What I will to be is smartly in thrall.

"Look up, Hannah!"

That is how Chaplain begins the great melodramatic coda to his famous speech at the end of The Great Dictator.  Somehow I have matured into an appreciation of great melodramatic efforts.  Bach's, Chaplain's, others'.  Something in me says - for the great artists, it is nothing to be afraid of.  Only a mountain to climb.

aq!

I have what I hope is a permanent suspicion of the feelings of consumption and the corresponding determination never to identify as a consumer.  But I do understand that it is one of life's simple pleasures, and good, to enjoy buying a coffee, a rug or a ticket to see a show.

at the next turn

But then, really, what did you expect life to be.  Those who bend life to their will are served more by the blind curves than by the purpose.  Did they but know it.

the museum of lost idioms

Would you like me to place the call?  Place.

glories

The Carter family, from station XET, Monterey, down Mexico way.

of course

It is important not to show relief when things are going your way in a difficult negotiation - win almost with a yawn.

rhetoric lesson

Robert Moses, inveighing against the rigid elitism of the board of the Metropolitain Museum of Art in the early 1940s, called them:

"snooty trustees who do not know and care what the public is thinking."

The lawyer in me wants to amend this to "snooty trustees who do not know or care..."  But then read these in alternative and see why Moses had it right: the and points to the public, while the or reaches back to the trustees.  The forward-leaning emphasis is more effective: it is still cutting, but more prescriptive - there is a stronger hint of constructive principles.  My alternative is merely cutting. 

It is a small word that makes a small but perceptible difference.

loaded

It is strange to hear an investment banker tell you how much he loves gambling at casinos.

Hubble

We see color and cloud,
As we saw chalise and wafer,
Bearing the transmuted.

after Blake

Prefer wise errors to foolish perfection.

mirror

I have poor gaydar, but relatively strong ltr-dar.  If a guy - particularly a gay guy - is in a long relationship, I can see it.  There's a sort of sweet ripeness to him, just going soft.

sightings

Today in the office elevator: a well dressed woman carrying a hatbox!