One of us has a twitter account

Bose was a famous trial of the 'electric kiss'. It was an attractive young woman - isolated was established - through the electrostatic latent drawn electrically charged. The men in the company were then challenged to kiss her. Once the brave volunteers brought his lips near her cheek, there is a spark jumped on the man and shrank back. .

Bonne fête Joni!

until it sticks:

I look again at Alexandra's face as she sat in the garden and I recall a sentence by Anton Chekhov, who was also a doctor. "The role of the writer is to describe a situation so truthfully... that the reader can no longer evade it."

John Berger
via wood s lot

Margaret Atwood

...what happens when that brightly lit arena expands so much that there is no green room in which the mascara can be removed, no cluttered, imperfect back stage where we can be ‘“ourselves”? What happens to us if we must be “on” all the time?

Atwood on Eggers at NYRB

Dante Dan Brown downtown/uptown in the NYRB

I will read most anything to hand, in a priority/accessibility matrix of proximity and effort-to-get-to sort of way. So there's a science-fictiony thriller title calling out from the paperback rack at the adjunct suburban library some months back so okay, Dan Brown, okay, but not the DaVinchy Code one. Cuz I won't willingly read that. Will, but not willingly. For reasons of past experience with pop-cult idiocy and crap-mind sludge-candy.
 So okay. I read it, the one calling out from the library.
Ghastly non-literary accumulation of words, clunk rhythms and poetryless gurge...but. It's got this NSA premise and seeming insider info context that was timely as shit, as I read it this summer(2013)...published in 1998, so written before that.
 It's like he has this grasp of some unspoken facts and unseen complexities of thread and no art to deliver it with, just the slog of a barely literate mind using the format of "book" to present the info. The halting testimony of an ESL witness to some off-camera disaster. A not-so-bright adolescent who just happened to be at the scene. A drooling stuttering oracle, gems of prophecy puked up in a stream of meaningless spew . In a social context where glib emptiness and confidently delivered nada sells, and the market's driven by retarded enlightenment baby-stepping toward  predicated and secured truths.
His moral stance in DF is right out of the pseudo-manly pulps of 50's sf, window dressing.
He's trying, his heart's somewhere near it, but again, it's like so much of the literary spew these last decades. Idiots who think art is purely a commercial artifact, useful for conveying some "thing", like truth or ethical instruction, as opposed to art being unavailable to consumer eval without reduction to commodity. Didactic use of the form without any recognition there's a higher business of art that won't be visible bent to the service of anything other than itself.
A horrible book, prescient and homely, not quite WTF, not quite yeah.

Until excavations began, a complex on this scale was not thought possible for a community so ancient. from a book ad at cryptogon

"Like a shadow gliding along beneath one's feet, the posthumous & bereaved life. Silent speech can ring deafening in the ears."
Joyce Carol Oates ‏@

Slingerland hated the railroad, and he could not see as Neale did, or any of the engineers or builders. This old trapper had the vision of the Indian -- that far-seeing eye cleared by distance and silence, and the force of the great, lonely hills. Progress was great, but nature unspoiled was greater. If a race could not breed all stronger men, through its great movements, it might better not breed any, for the bad over-multiplied the good, and so their needs magnified into greed. Slingerland saw many shiningbands of steel across the plains and mountains, many stations and hamlets and cities, a growing and marvelous prosperity from timber, mines, farms, and in the distant end -- a gutted West.

Zane Grey @today in literature

What "particle" means, in Higgs boson "particle", is "little tiny thing". Not "grain of sand".

Venus Transit Galleries

Happy Birthday April!

refuse to relinquish the love

Happy Birthday April!
Yes!

rivers and crocodiles

M-
It's not that I exactly forgot, but when it mattered yes, I did, unmistakably, unforgivably, but overall, no, I didn't forget, I remembered, the day before, and during, and after for a few days up to and including today ten days later. But not when it mattered most I guess, when for those few moments I was here, or rather "here".
At that time I forgot.
I have no excuse.
My shield is battered, but still with me.
So it's different than it looks, but then everything is, isn't it?
Was.
We sat on the porch and watched our hands,
deal the day away.
You and me.
Then.
Now.
Happy birthday, in the name of the pumpkin Buddha.
Then, now.
Whoever you were, whoever you are.
Wherever you are.

"...progress can only come through trying and failing and failing better"
-
"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

waka-waka genesis remix original thriller timberland james brown start where shakira world cup begin
here
hear
here

my blue mute form...

Courtney Queeney/Poetry Daily