fallen verses

Courtesy of the Academy of American Poets.

Video: The Gift Economy of Poetry
by Robert Hass
From the inaugural Poets Forum, presented by the Academy of American Poets on October 20, 2007, at Marymount College in New York City. On the second panel of the day, Robert Hass, Galway Kinnell, Nathaniel Mackey, and Ellen Bryant Voigt answered questions about “Aesthetic Lineage and Originality” from critic and founding editor of Parnassus, Herbert Leibowitz.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbUbEA-nWRM]

Sometimes, hypocrisy would be comfortable.  The downside to supporting freedom as a political ideal, is that it has to apply to everyone.  Even when you have to support the right of sick, deluded, bigots to spout their hateful nonsense.  That utterly objectionable Phelps female should be set free and then publicly reviled by everyone.

Shirley Phelps-Roper, you are a demented fuckwit.

(Courtesy of  Eugene Volokh)

Early morning thoughts on death

I have no idea why, on this morning made earlier by the time change, I was thinking about death. Specifically mine. I have no reason to believe it’ll be happening soon, but whatever. Now, get ready to look at me as if I’m nuts. I want to live forever. Not in the crazy Highlander sort of way, but really. I would love to see how humanity changes as time goes, how our cultures and societies change to survive themselves. How people view choice, consequences, responsibilities when their next ten-thousand years is on the line. These ideas fascinate me and I would love to see the answers unfold. That being said, I realize it is unlikely. Science, at the moment, isn’t capable of making this happen, so, in however many years it will be, I will die. I don’t really fear death. As an atheist (more or less) I think it’s just the end, done, over, blah. I imagine dieing may be unpleasant. The only tragedy there is that I will not be able to use the experience in my writing. Then there’s this corpse sitting around. I don’t like the idea of having my body hermetically sealed away and rotting. I don’t really like the idea of being turned to ash, either. I heard once about some Scandinavian country (I think) turning bodies into fertilizer and planting trees in ‘em. I like that one, and it prompted this poem (still a tad rough):

Viscera / Ephemera

The perfect blossom is a rare thing,
you could spend your life looking for one
and it would not be a wasted life.
The Last Samurai

Such silly flesh
for such luminous minds:
white steel of the skeleton,
red cords of the muscle.

We are all born of star matter,
conceived in heat and passion.
A fusion explosion kept
by a web of neuron and synapse
contained and focused.
Like a lantern,
I shine light in these pages.
These bits on the screen
like shadows in Hiroshima.

After the slow burn,
when I am carbon, salt,
and assorted heavy elements,
take and make of me a cherry tree:
blossoms beautiful and ephemeral.
“They are all perfect.”

To sum up a worldview in six words is a challenge, but here we go:

Truth by Science, honour by art.

-courtesy a t-shirt by Express

In what is, likely, a vain attempt to start a meme-like propagation  of the question, what t-shirt best conveys your philosophy, oh you few readers?  Comments space available for slogans or permalinks.  Tune in next time, where I may discuss how boring Robert Frost is, or when I have time to write the post.

I haven’t much to say about this. It’s a good, if lengthy essay. I found the link on both Mind Hacks and World of Psychology.

Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism

Christine Rosen

For centuries, the rich and the powerful documented their existence and their status through painted portraits. A marker of wealth and a bid for immortality, portraits offer intriguing hints about the daily life of their subjects—professions, ambitions, attitudes, and, most importantly, social standing.

…

Today, our self-portraits are democratic and digital; they are crafted from pixels rather than paints. On social networking websites like MySpace and Facebook, our modern self-portraits feature background music, carefully manipulated photographs, stream-of-consciousness musings, and lists of our hobbies and friends. They are interactive, inviting viewers not merely to look at, but also to respond to, the life portrayed online. We create them to find friendship, love, and that ambiguous modern thing called connection. Like painters constantly retouching their work, we alter, update, and tweak our online self-portraits; but as digital objects they are far more ephemeral than oil on canvas. Vital statistics, glimpses of bare flesh, lists of favorite bands and favorite poems all clamor for our attention—and it is the timeless human desire for attention that emerges as the dominant theme of these vast virtual galleries.

Although social networking sites are in their infancy, we are seeing their impact culturally: in language (where to friend is now a verb), in politics (where it is de rigueur for presidential aspirants to catalogue their virtues on MySpace), and on college campuses (where not using Facebook can be a social handicap). But we are only beginning to come to grips with the consequences of our use of these sites: for friendship, and for our notions of privacy, authenticity, community, and identity. As with any new technological advance, we must consider what type of behavior online social networking encourages. Does this technology, with its constant demands to collect (friends and status), and perform (by marketing ourselves), in some ways undermine our ability to attain what it promises—a surer sense of who we are and where we belong? The Delphic oracle’s guidance was know thyself. Today, in the world of online social networks, the oracle’s advice might be show thyself.

According to a Reuters article, “President Hugo Chavez railed against a new trend in beauty-conscious Venezuela, giving girls breast implants for their 15th birthday.”

It seems Chavez disagrees with this practice, calling it “the ultimate degeneration,” and supporting “Western-imposed consumerist icons such as Barbie dolls.”

1. I do not support socialist doctrine. At all. From what I read on the news sites, the people seem to like Chavez. I don’t care.

2. I am rather fond of breasts (on women, go ahead, call me an objectifying, misogynist pig, whatever…) but I have no inherent preference for larger or surgically augmented breasts. Nothing against them either, I consider it a personal choice of the woman (or, in some rare but conceivable case, man) who wants to have her body altered.

I have to agree with Chavez. I don’t think it’s appropriate to be giving 15 year old girls breast implants. While I hesitate to use the phrase “too young” it seems the appropriate one. I don’t know how Venzualan law compares, but, in the US, at 15 a minor cannot enter into contractual arrangements. I think putting them into a situation resulting in permanent and artificial alteration of the body (and not on the small scale of ear piercing) for reasons of pure vanity is exposing a particularly shallow view of women in society.

Eh, the typing is getting terrible and I have little more to say. I don’t like this idea. Now, if these “presents” were given at 18, 21, 35 or 80, I wouldn’t feel as much apprehension about the act, but at least let these girls get to know their bodies as adult bodies before changing them.

…that we should responsibly use schools to teach people truths.  Reality has no agenda.

The table depicts the relative risk for abstinence-only education the rate of diagnosis for STIs and rate of pregnancy in comparison to controls. The confidence intervals are also indicated. In this chart a movement to the left would indicate a reduction in relative risk for these indicators and would favor abstinence-only education. Note that not one of these studies shows a statistically significant improvement with abstinence-only education; for all of these studies all but one of these studies the confidence intervals cross 1 indicating that there was no overall improvement in outcomes. (Ed. The one study that shows statistical significance showed that abstinence-only education actually increases the rate of STIs and pregnancy. I missed that on the first pass.)

…

Abstinence-only education is a waste of money and time, and it needs to stop. We should throw that money into more aggressive abstinence-plus programs. Furthermore, we should continue to assess whether and what kinds of abstinence-plus programs are effective at generating improved outcomes. It may turn out that abstinence-plus programs are not effective either, and we need to accept that as a possibility. But for the time being, they appear to be the best option, and I think we should run with that.

Read the whole post over at Pure Pedantry.

Now, honestly, I have a somewhat different relation to them than the mothers being banned from facebook for posting photos of breastfeeding, but that is still a ridiculous decision.  Tara at Aetiology and PZ at Pharyngula are spreading the word.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g]

This is a genius film, and it’s so forward-thinking and inclusive that Professor Michael Wesch, who created the video, put his theories into a YouTube-spreadable form so that the digitally inclined masses — millions, possibly billions depending on how viral this gets — could learn from it. It’s an example of Blogville’s culture of generosity at its best.

via Write Now is Good

To all my readers from Qatar.

Happy 69th birthday to Ryoji Noyori (????)!
Happy 42nd Birthday to Carlos Irwin Estévez!

We should take a moment to remember the deaths of Oliver Cromwell (1658), Ivan Turgenev (1883), and e. e. cummings (1962).

And, of course, loads of other things have happened on September 3rds Throughout history:

• 36 BC - In the battle of Naulochus, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, admiral of Octavian, defeats Sextus Pompeius, son of Pompey, thus ending Pompeian resistance to the Second Triumvirate.
• 301 - San Marino, one of the smallest nations in the world and the world’s oldest republic still in existence, is founded by Saint Marinus.
• 590 - St. Gregory I becomes Pope.
• 1189 - Richard I of England (a.k.a. Richard “the Lionheart”) is crowned at Westminster.
• 1260 - The Mamluks defeat the Mongols at the Battle of Ain Jalut in Palestine, marking their first decisive defeat and the point of maximum expansion of the Mongol Empire.
• 1650 - Third English Civil War: Battle of Dunbar (1650)
• 1651 - Third English Civil War: Battle of Worcester - Charles II of England is defeated in the last main battle of the war.
• 1666 - The Royal Exchange burnt down in the Great Fire of London
• 1777 - Cooch’s Bridge - Skirmish of American Revolutionary war in New Castle County, Delaware where the Flag of the United States was flown in battle for the first time.
• 1783 - American Revolutionary War: The war ends with the signing of the Treaty of Paris by the United States and the Kingdom of Great Britain.
• 1798 - Weeklong battle of St. George’s Caye begun between Spanish and British off the coast of Belize.
• 1838 - Dressed in a sailor’s uniform and carrying identification papers provided by a Free Black seaman, future abolitionist Frederick Douglass boards a train in Maryland on his way to freedom from slavery.
• 1855 - Indian Wars: In Nebraska, 700 soldiers under American General William S. Harney avenge the Grattan Massacre by attacking a Sioux village, killing 100 men, women, and children.
• 1861 - American Civil War: Confederate General Leonidas Polk invades neutral Kentucky, prompting the state legislature to ask for Union assistance.
• 1870 - Franco-Prussian War: the Siege of Metz begins, which will result in a decisive Prussian victory on October 23.
• 1874 - The congress of the state of México elevates Naucalpan to the category of Villa, with the title of “Villa de Juárez“.
• 1878 - Over 640 die when the crowded pleasure boat Princess Alice collides with the Bywell Castle in the River Thames.
• 1892 - English football club Nottingham Forest played their first league game, it was against Everton FC and ended 2-2.
• 1914 - Giacomo della Chiesa acceeds to the papacy as Pope Benedict XV.
• 1929 - Dow Jones Industrial Average reached all time high at the time (381.17), which was shortly followed by the Crash of 1929.
• 1933 - Yevgeniy Abalakov reaches the highest point of the Soviet Union - Communism Peak (7495 m).
• 1935 - Sir Malcolm Campbell reaches 304.331 miles per hour on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, becoming the first person to drive an automobile over 300 mph
• 1939 - World War II begins when France, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia declare war on Germany after the invasion of Poland, starting the Allies.
• 1942 - World War II: Uprising of the Jewish ghetto in Lakhva occurs.
• 1943 - World War II: Mainland Italy is invaded by Allied forces for the first time in the war.
• 1944 - Holocaust: Diarist Anne Frank and her family are placed on the last transport train from Westerbork to Auschwitz, arriving three days later.
• 1951 - The first long-running American television soap opera, Search for Tomorrow, airs its first episode on the CBS network.
• 1954 - The People’s Liberation Army begin shelling the ROC-controlled islands of Quemoy.
• 1954 - The German U-Boat U-505 began its move from a specially constructed dock to its final site at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry.
• 1967 - Dagen H in Sweden: traffic changes from driving on the left to driving on the right overnight
• 1976 - Viking program: The Viking 2 spacecraft lands at Utopia Planitia on Mars.
• 1991 - In Hamlet, North Carolina, a grease fire breaks out at the Imperial Foods chicken processing plant, killing 25 people.
• 1994 - Sino-Soviet Split: Russia and the People’s Republic of China agree to de-target their nuclear weapons against each other.
• 1995 - eBay founded.
• 1997 - A Vietnam Airlines Tupolev TU-134 crashes on approach into Phnom Penh airport, killing 64.
• 2004 - The Beslan school massacre ends in the deaths of approximately 344 people, mostly teachers and children.

For the American readers, enjoy the barbecues and the sales for which the underpaid, under-benefited customer service peons do not get the day off.