fallen verses

I don’t think I am alive: Taslima
Monday, 31 December , 2007, 17:27Kolkata: Confined to a ’safe house’ somewhere in New Delhi and shut out from the world except for phone calls and emails, Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen will ring in 2008 in a no man’s land of fading hope, despair and crushing loneliness.

“I am only breathing. I don’t think I am alive like you are. Can anybody live like this? It was beyond my imagination that in a secular democracy this can happen to a writer,” Nasreen told IANS from her room in an undisclosed New Delhi destination on New Year’s Eve.

Nasreen, who has been living under state protection since November 2007 when she was removed from Kolkata after street riots over her “anti-Islam” writings, has been virtually told by Indian officials that that she could either continue to stay in the national capital confined in a room or leave the country.

This reinforces my belief that there is no secular country. They all seem to be full of rabid religious nutsos bent on world domination.
(via Poetry Hut)

Over at …eats bugs. there is a post about a speech Larry Lessig gave at TED.  Click here, watch the video.  He says please, I will issue imperatives.  But open it in a new window, I’m not done here.  So then I went over to www.TED.com where there are so many videos on such an amazing array of topics, I don’ think I can begin to pull it all in.  It is awe-inspiring.  It puts me in mind of how Lovecraft’s Call of Cthulu begins:

…Some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality… the we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

It’s rather refreshing to think there are enoughs others out there, enough for this conference to exist, who find the madness exciting.  Along with Larry Lessig’s talk about copyright, Malcolm Gladwell talks about pasta sauce, Steven Pinker talks about veiled threats, and Erin McKean talks about the nature of the dictionary and the English Language.  On the one hand, she gave an eminently quotable talk but on the other she seemed so excited about her topic (not an entirely bad thing) it didn’t seem reality could keep up with her.  But you have to give mad props to anyone who uses the word “synecdochically.” The title of this post is a quote from her speech which I’ve embedded below.

(via World of Psychology)

Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship

danah m. boyd
School of Information
University of California-Berkeley

Nicole B. Ellison
Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media
Michigan State University

Abstract

Social network sites (SNSs) are increasingly attracting the attention of academic and industry researchers intrigued by their affordances and reach. This special theme section of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication brings together scholarship on these emergent phenomena. In this introductory article, we describe features of SNSs and propose a comprehensive definition. We then present one perspective on the history of such sites, discussing key changes and developments. After briefly summarizing existing scholarship concerning SNSs, we discuss the articles in this special section and conclude with considerations for future research.

 And it was billed as a Poetry Slam.  It was a bit overbilled: no twinkies for the prize, no raucous drunk crowd of judges, no whooping or hollering or booing or snapping or feminine hissing or masculine grunting, or, in fact, much of anything at all.  Four poets mumbling: cliches of Minnesota, religion, bipolar disorder, and sexual assault (that rhymed) and one poet rocking the house with an amusing piece about ice cream.  Doesn’t everyone love ice cream?  I wonder, as I read more poetry, if I am a poetry snob.  That I know about such poets as Cristin O’keefe Aptowitz, Taylor Mali, Patricia Smith, etc, am I ruined for truly amateur regional poetry?  Am I just too familiar with the best of the spoken poetry world or am I too judgmental, too critical, too… me.

As a note, I did not compete.  But, judging from that crowds response, it would not likely have been well-received had I.

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.