What were my goals for 2011? According to this blog post, I had four:

1. Launch my own company. This one happened. Placeling is up and running – and if you own an iPhone and haven’t downloaded it yet, your first new year’s resolution should be to do so.
2. Meet a lot of interesting people. This one also happened, although not quite as I expected. By launching my own company, I’ve met a tonne of interesting people; now I need to figure out how to continue this in the new year
3. Do less, better. Yup, again, this happened. I focused on a few things in 2011 and it worked
4. Run a 3:10 marathon. Close, but no cigar. Ran a 3:15 in May. Tried again in October but ran a 3:18 instead. I need to retool how I run if I’m going to ever do this

And I had a secret fifth goal: start a family. And this one worked: my son was born in November.

So, what’s up for 2012?

Well, there are some unspoken resolutions: I’ve got to be a good dad, a great husband and a good CEO at my company. But those are tablestakes; you don’t really get any points for doing them as they’re expected.

Here – in no particular order – is what I’m going to try in 2012:

• Manage stress better: find a way to do yoga once a week plus one of running/biking/swimming/boxing. Cook more and make the meals healthier. I hit a low point in November where I was gritting my teeth; need to learn to be better at managing stress
• Be more creative: I’m going to finally use all the Arduino-related stuff I bought a few years ago: Wen and I are going to make a robot. I’m going to cook a new meal every week. I’m going to code for at least 30 days straight to really learn Rails. I need to blog more
• Not buy a book: I love books, but I’ve got a stack of unread books I’ve accumulated over the past few years. I’m going to read them all before I buy a new one. Heuristics and Biases: this is your year (NOTE: I’m talking to Wendy as I write this and she already predicts I fail; the gauntlet has been dropped)
• Get hyper-organize: I signed up for a year of Evernote plus I’m using Mint. We’ll see how this goes, but I’m going to try and get everything into the cloud and see if it changes how I think/behave

There you go. The 2012 list. Check in a year from now to see how it goes.

This is the Cortona 12L Swing Out Wastebin:

You’ll notice that it sits in my sink rather than underneath it where normal garbage cans are found.

And this is where my story of failure begins. For, despite my engineering degree, I could not figure out how to install the damn thing.

I thought the instructions might help, but they seem to be translated from Chinese by someone who only knows Urdu. That might explain why there’s a reference to an elusive bracket #4 that’s nowhere to be found (I’ll be dreaming of you tonight mysterious bracket #4).

Or perhaps that’s why the letter B is backwards on the ‘helpful’ template they provide.

Anyways, after a little over an hour of this I’m admitting defeat. If anyone’s looking for a teasingly-good-looking-but-ultimately-useless waste bin, just let me know. I can hook you up.

In the meantime, all is not lost as this ridiculous experience has at least moved me to blog again.

The slowly setting sun painted the city’s skyline in gold and orange. The city was silhouetted against an opal blue sky and mountains tipped with the last vestiges of a long winter. Crows cawed as they grouped for their nightly flight east; the sound was balanced by the gentle rush of white noise from the waterfall in our building’s amenity garden.

Convoys of angry police vehicles streamed across the Burrard Bridge as the smoke from various fires hung over the downtown core. Police helicopters circled overhead and occasionally one of their search lights would cut through the smoke like a laser.

On television pundits kept wringing their hands and rhetorically asking “how could this happen here?” while appearing genuinely stunned.

It was an oddly mesmerizing experience and one that I hope to never see in Vancouver again. Except that I’m pretty sure I will – and it won’t take another playoff run to make it happen.

-

Riots are funny things. A riot itself is a complex system with hundreds or thousands of actors involved; predicting when a riot is going to occur is remarkably difficult. You need a group of people (100,000 people watching a hockey game ought to do). Alcohol as an accelerant helps. But more than that, you need a reason for people to riot.

And what reason could people in Vancouver have for rioting?

After all, if you ask anyone in Vancouver if they like the city, they’ll tell you it’s the most awesome place on earth. The mountains. The beaches. A forest in the city. An incredible food scene and some of the best coffee in the world. Hell, it’s got everything but sarcasm.

But it’s also got one problem: if you’re a young person in Vancouver, you may not live a life that’s as good as your parents.

Before you tell me that I’m on crack and run me out of the city, some numbers.

Let’s do something any self-respecting Vancouverite would never do, and compare the city with Toronto.

According to Statscan, in 2006 there were about 2.1 million people in the Vancouver metro area and 5.1 million in the Toronto metro area.

If you were a full-time worker in Vancouver you took home almost exactly $54K versus almost $61K in Toronto.

The Vancouver worker is also a very different beast than the Toronto worker. Torontonians are more likely to be in manufacturing or finance (13.2% of workforce vs. 8.4% and 6.9%/4.8% respectively) whereas Vancouverites are more likely to work in a hotel (7.8% vs. 5.6%) or a hospital (9.2% vs. 7.9% – that difference is almost all nurses), in a school (7.1% vs. 6.1%) or a construction site (6.3% vs. 5.3%).

Toronto’s driven by its wealth of small to large manufacturers and the fact that it’s home to all of Canada’s major banks. Vancouver is much more tied to tourism, real estate and government services.

Why is this important? Well, people in Vancouver don’t only make less money, there’s less potential to make money.

In a city like Toronto where there are lots of companies, you get new types of jobs that just can’t exist in Vancouver. Want to work for a product design company? Investment banker? Insert your high-end, niche business of choice: they can only exist when you’ve lots of head offices.

Anecdotally, this is why if you’re a business person who works in Vancouver, your non-Vancouver friends always ask you “what do people do there?” and “why are there no jobs?” Statistically, about 1% more of people in Toronto’s workforce are considered to be “senior or specialist managers”.

Jobs in a hotel, on a construction site or in a school or hospital are great jobs, but they don’t offer you the same potential as other ones.

Those “Toronto jobs” are more meritocratic. If you’re really good at what you do, you have a chance to be disproportionately rewarded for what you do versus everyone else. You have opportunity; the downside is that it’s a highly competitive world.

If you’re a teacher or a nurse, your pay is fiercely regulated and no matter how good you are, you simply won’t earn beyond a certain amount. (However, your job security is nice and high)

All this talk of income is a little crass, so let’s look at the yin to income’s yang: cost of living – and in Vancouver it’s currently out of control.

Check out this chart from Canadian Housing Price Charts:

Look at Vancouver! We’re number one!

As you can see, housing prices are at an insane level – up almost 50% in a little over two years with a gap that’s widening vs. the rest of the country. Moreover, this trend holds across the city. The national papers are full of stories about Chinese buyers frothily overbidding on places in the West side of town, but prices are crazy everywhere. If you want to move out past Commercial Drive (a beautiful neighbourhood, but a long drive to the beach), you’re still looking at $800K for a two bedroom free-standing house.

Crack Shack or Mansion indeed.

We’re likely in a bubble, but who knows when it will end and that’s little comfort to the people who actually live here.

Housing prices are important because they’re the single biggest purchase most people will make and they’re key to what has always been a part of the Canadian experience: work hard, save money and buy a house to raise your family.

In Vancouver, this is breaking down.

If you’re a young person considering a career as a nurse or construction worker or teacher or hotel clerk you can pretty easily predict where your income’s going. And you can see that it’s going to be near impossible to live in Vancouver with anything close to the standard you thought you would.

You’re watching part of your life slip away.

The life you took for granted growing up.

The life you were always told you would have.

And that’s what takes us back to the corner of Georgia and Hamilton and a few fans starting to burn a car.

The widening affordability gap in Vancouver is not an excuse for a riot (For the record: I think every rioter should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. I applaud efforts like Identify Rioters) but it helps to explain why the riot started in the first place.

There’s a constant tension in Vancouver: it’s the fact that this is turning into a city that’s only affordable for the very rich. You feel this tension when college-educated people talk about being unable to buy a home. You feel it in the constant conversations people have about the price of things (a disproportionate share of time in Vancouver is spent talking about money; eavesdrop and you’ll see). And you feel it when condos open in the middle of nowhere and start at north of $300K for just over 600 square feet.

This tension in the system seeks a release and yesterday’s loss to the Canucks afforded it a chance. I suspect that’s part of the reason why there was so much looting in this riot vs. the one in ’94.

I’ve seen this before, too. When I was in France in 2006 there were massive riots by youth against the government over their future. There are parallels between that one and Vancouver yesterday.

Hopefully, the city will consider this when they try and figure out how to prevent future riots. This is not simply going to be a matter of dispersing crowds and cracking down on alcohol consumption, rather it’s going to involve Vancouver thinking about what type of city it really wants to be – for all Vancouverites – and making that come true.

1.

The two biggest buildings in my neighbourhood are the Molson brewery and the Lulu Lemon headquarters directly across the street from it. I learned the other day that the brewery has a bar on the top floor where you can grab a pint and look into the top floor of the Lulu Lemon building. There, instead of a bar, they’ve got a gym where all the women who work there exercise.

2.

I learned that many Chinese (plus Koreans and Japanese, according to the Wikipedia) hate the number four as it literally sounds like death. This leads to interesting situations in Vancouver condos, like my friend’s in Yaletown that is 37 storeys tall yet lacks a 34th, 24th, 14th, 4th or 13th floor. Plus there are no “number 4″ units on any floor. Let’s hope a lot of Italians don’t move here soon or we’re going to run out of numbers.

3.

I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in Vancouver. A lot of property developers are turning empty lots into temporary parks until they can sell enough units to break ground. I can’t imagine a more cruel joke for the neighbours: you temporarily gain a park until it’s replaced by a 26 storey building of overpriced units.

4.

I continue to be impressed by Apple’s attention to detail. I was at Emily Carr and looking at their industrial design showcase where they have an Apple PowerCD (for non-fanboys, this was a CD player that was briefly sold in the early 90′s). Despite not being sold for over 15 years, if you type it into your iPhone, they’ll auto-correct it to the proper, brand-approved capitalization.

5.

And speaking of Emily Carr, it’s that time of year when the grad’s show off their thesis projects. I’m blown away by the quality of the work and the focus on finding unique solutions to real design problems; the show compares really well with the ITP summer/winter shows that we used to go to in NYC. The following photos/movies do not do it justice:

I particularly liked this exhibit where you could hold up coded cards to paint on a virtual canvas:

Here’s a rundown so you can play along at home:

1. Kathryn Schulz on being wrong (@TED)

Great insight: feeling wrong feels a lot light feeling right. It’s only realizing that you’re wrong that feels bad.

2. Cormac McCarthy, Lawrence Krauss & Werner Herzog on science & art

Science. Art. History. What it means to be human. Where we might go. These guys do not see the world in the same way as you and I.

3. Salman Rushdie – Writer’s Block (The Moth)

How he finished one of his books. In a most unanticipated fashion.

4. State of Play

The curious, intriguing and awkward world of KidZania, where kids play at being adults.

5. Welcome to the Far Eastern Conference

The Stephon Marbury story: kind of like a basketball version of a Greek tragedy but set in China and actually a comedy.

6. The Straight Dope

The Wire is the best show on television in my lifetime and I’ve recently been re-watching it. So imagine my joy at finding this interview between David Simon (the creator) and Bill Moyers. Topics include the drug war, the importance of a free press and the future of America.

7. City Views

Jane Jacobs talks (in 2001) to the folks at Reason on cities. As a Canadian I couldn’t help but notice the line: It’s really surprising how few creative, important cities Canada has for its size, its population, and its great human potential and attributes.

8. Same Old New World Cities

Some interesting thoughts on how cities in Australia are going to have to change to address the 21st century. I like the approach of framing it in terms of “what does our country stand for?” and “what are the inexorable trends of the next 50 years?”

9. How Skateboard King Mark “Gator” Anthony Was Born Again As A Rapist And Murderer

A fascinating if, ultimately, unhappy tale. The last section of the story puts the rest of the well-written reporting into context.

10. The Coming Storm

Bangladesh as a preview for what climate change could mean: lots of change and a need to be incredibly adaptive. I’d also never heard of the fascinating char dwellers before reading this article.

11. The Missing Mahatma

A long essay exploring why there has not been a Gandhi- or MLK-like figure in the Palestinian conflict.

12. Heroin.com: Selling Junk Online

The Village Voice explores the business of selling drugs on Craigslist. As you read, be sure to look up some of their search terms and see if you can find some online drug ads (you will).

13. The Lost Canadians

If you ever look at a map of America you’ll notice the smooth border that is the 49th parallel and then the little hiccup that is the Northwest Angle. The Walrus investigates who these people are that live in this tiny sliver of America north of the 49th.

14. The Grand Tour

Last year when travelling, Wen and I couldn’t help but notice the arrival of Chinese tourists. For this article, Evan Osnos of The New Yorker goes on a European tour with a contingent of the Chinese middle class. The story is about much more than 5 European countries in 10 days.

15. Heartbreak Hotel

The story of the Stevens Hotel (now the Hilton) in Chicago. That’s the same Stevens as the recently retired supreme court judge.

16. Of Mines And Men

More on the Chinese. This time how they’re rebuilding Angola.

…If you imagine the 4.5 billion odd years of Earth’s history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 a.m., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day five-sixth over, has Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed twenty minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia. At 9:04 p.m. trilobites swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 p.m. plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow.

Thanks to ten minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 the Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 p.m. and hold sway for about three-quarters of an hour. At twenty-one minutes to midnight they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime barely an instant. Throughoutt this greatly speeded-up day continents slide about and bang together at a clip that seems positively reckless. Mountains rise and melt away, ocean basins come and go, ice sheets advance and withdraw. And throughout the whole, about three times every minutes, somewhere on the planet this a flashbulb pop of light marking the impact of a Manson-sized meteor or one even larger. It’s a wonder that anything at all can survive in such a pummelled and unsettled environment. In fact, not many things do for long.

It’s 2011.

Being lazy and using that as an excuse to pretend I’m bucking a trend, I’m going to take this first day of the new year to reflect on the year gone by and look forward.

1.

Let’s start with some not quite arbitrarily chosen numbers for last year.

90 blog posts

318 tweets

5,260 photos kept (and I delete about 2 photos for every one I keep)

66 Kindle books (can’t say I read them all)

12 countries

48 cities

38 people followed on Twitter

99 blog subscriptions (OPML if you know what that means)

2.

Travel was the biggest theme for 2010 as the numbers above attest. The year started in the snow of Whistler mountain and spring saw trips to Montreal and D.C.

Then, for a variety of reasons, we decided to leave NYC and the real travel began. Our first foray was upcountry to Yale/New Haven to sell Wendy’s car and then Toronto/Algonquin for a wedding.

The success of this led us on our world tour which has been been heavily documented.

3.

The numbers above illustrate a few more themes in my life:

• Digital narcissism. If, in the future, an anthropologist tries to understand my life, the period from about age 27 onward will be extremely well documented. Without realizing it, I’m leaving breadcrumbs to my personality-opinions, experiences, thoughts, musings-all across the web on an increasingly rapid basis. Perhaps in a few years time someone will write a computer program that will simulate my thoughts so well that it will be able to pass the Turing Test (however, I suspect this is highly unlikely)
• Attention is the biggest constraint in my digital life. It’s amazing that I can get the opinions and thoughts of over 100 people and organizations on a daily basis but I don’t have the right set of tools to digest it all. There are great tools for streaming it to me, but there is a distinct lack of tools to help me make sense of it all and coalesce the views and opinions of all these people. I need something that helps me filter their opinions for what I’m most interested in and then pulls out the main themes. Maybe this will finally arrive in 2011.
• Storage is the second biggest constraint in my digital life. When I was a kid we had a 20 Mb hard drive on our Mac Plus and I remember that it was hard to fill up. I just filled up my 250 GB hard drive. Where did all this come from? The 15,000 photos I’ve taken (1/3 in the last year), the 7,459 songs in my iTunes and the increasing number of digital books I’m reading. The easy solution would be to transfer all of this to the cloud. And I’ll probably have to unless I can keep doubling the size of my hard drive every three years (which could be possible). But I’m not sure I’m ready to trust the cloud with every last detail of my life. (And yes, there’s an irony that I’m saying this in a blog post)

4.

Here are some things that I enjoyed in 2010:

• Neal Stephenson‘s books. Having a Kindle made me realize that you can read anything on the subway and no one can tell what you’re reading. This is especially useful for authors like Neal whose covers can be questionable (why, oh why, do speculative fiction books have such stupid looking covers?) and invite silly looks. This year I read Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age and Anathem. Highly recommended.
• William Gibson‘s books. As you can see from above, 2010 was an exploration in don’t-call-it-science-call-it-speculative fiction. I re-read Gibson’s classic Neuromancer and followed it up with Pattern Recognition, Spook Country and Zero History. I don’t think I’ve ever read four books by the same author in one year before. (See here for some interesting thoughts on why you might want to read “science fiction”)
• A short list of great songs that come out this year (to find stuff like this, be sure to check out the Blissful Thunder radio show and the Hospital Records and XLR8R podcasts:
• • Would Know by Mount Kimbie
  • 10 Mile Stereo by Beach House
  • I Get Nervous by Lower Dens
  • Now You See Me by Emeralds
  • The High Road by Broken Bells
  • Revival by Deerhunter
  • Crazy by The Pack A.D.
  • Blue As Your Blood by The Walkmen
  • Good Enuf (Cash Flow Dub) by Major Lazer
  • Young Aren’t Young by The Hundred in the Hands
  • Little Oranges by B-Complex
  • Bowls by Caribou
  • Rill Rill by Sleigh Bells
  • Good Intentions Paving Co. by Joanna Newsom

5.

It took a while, but I found my resolutions from last year.

It’s a mixed bag of results: since we ended up leaving NYC and traveling, a lot of them – like cook more, meet more people in the neighbourhood, learn how to program an Arduino, take a class at 3rd Ward, etc. – became moot.

I did learn how to be a better Django programmer and created a very early prototype of some location-based software (more will be coming this year!). I also wanted to expose myself to a lot of new ideas; the twitter and blog feeds above did that.

I utterly failed in my efforts to redo this website, dress better at work or do a better job of staying in touch with my friends (damnit, why don’t you all read this blog and get on twitter?).

6.

So, what will 2011 bring? This year I’m limiting myself to four resolutions:

• Launch my own company. This one’s going to happen. More details to follow
• Meet a lot of interesting people in Vancouver. New year, new city, new set of friends. I’ve lived mainly in cities like Toronto and NYC where the fun comes to you. Vancouver is going to be different: I’m going to have to seek out similar-minded people. I’m thinking a lot of yoga, rock climbing, trail running, hackspacing and tech meetups to try and meet interesting folks.
• Run a 3:10 marathon. I really want to qualify for Boston and, while it’s a step change in improvement from my personal best, I’m going to give it a try. I also lost 15 pounds traveling, so I feel like this could be the year
• Do less, better. Life is too interesting and there’s too much to do. So I’m going to try and do fewer things with more focus. I don’t know how this will play out, but we’ll see.

And with that, happy new year!

I said that I’m willing to give it a second chance, but that I had absolutely no idea where to begin. This led to a slew of recommendations that I’ve decided to share with the interpipes community.

So here, without further ado, is a selection of recommended poems. Before sharing them though, a note on how to read them. JB recommends the following three rules to get the most out of each poem:

1. Read them out loud
2. Read slowly
3. Follow the punctuation, not the line breaks. If there’s a line break, don’t stop: keep going until the next comma or period

Here are the poems:

Philip Larkin

High Windows

When I see a couple of kids

And guess he’s fucking her and she’s

Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,

I know this is paradise

Break

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives–

Bonds and gestures pushed to one side

Like an outdated combine harvester,

And everyone young going down the long slide

Break

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if

Anyone looked at me, forty years back,

And thought, That’ll be the life;

No God any more, or sweating in the dark

Break

About hell and that, or having to hide

What you think of the priest. He

And his lot will all go down the long slide

Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Break

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:

The sun-comprehending glass,

And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows

Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

Source

Sad Steps

Groping back to bed after a piss

I part thick curtains, and am startled by

The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.

Break

Four o’clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie

Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.

There’s something laughable about this,

Break

The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow

Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart

(Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below)

Break

High and preposterous and separate -

Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!

O wolves of memory! Immensements! No,

Break

One shivers slightly, looking up there.

The hardness and the brightness and the plain

Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare

Break

Is a reminder of the strength and pain

Of being young; that it can’t come again,

But is for others undiminished somewhere.

Source

Toads

Why should I let the toad work

  Squat on my life?

Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork

  And drive the brute off?

Break

Six days of the week it soils

  With its sickening poison -

Just for paying a few bills!

  That’s out of proportion.

Break

Lots of folk live on their wits:

  Lecturers, lispers,

Losels, loblolly-men, louts-

  They don’t end as paupers;

Break

Lots of folk live up lanes

  With fires in a bucket,

Eat windfalls and tinned sardines-

  they seem to like it.

Break

Their nippers have got bare feet,

  Their unspeakable wives

Are skinny as whippets – and yet

  No one actually starves.

Break

Ah, were I courageous enough

  To shout Stuff your pension!

But I know, all too well, that’s the stuff

  That dreams are made on:

Break

For something sufficiently toad-like

  Squats in me, too;

Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,

  And cold as snow,

Break

And will never allow me to blarney

  My way of getting

The fame and the girl and the money

  All at one sitting.

Break

I don’t say, one bodies the other

  One’s spiritual truth;

But I do say it’s hard to lose either,

  When you have both.

Break

Source

Annus Mirabilis

Sexual intercourse began

In nineteen sixty-three

(which was rather late for me) -

Between the end of the Chatterley ban

And the Beatles’ first LP.

Break

Up to then there’d only been

A sort of bargaining,

A wrangle for the ring,

A shame that started at sixteen

And spread to everything.

Break

Then all at once the quarrel sank:

Everyone felt the same,

And every life became

A brilliant breaking of the bank,

A quite unlosable game.

Break

So life was never better than

In nineteen sixty-three

(Though just too late for me) -

Between the end of the Chatterley ban

And the Beatles’ first LP.

Source

Edna St-Vincent Millay

I Shall Forget You Presently, My Dear

I shall forget you presently, my dear,

So make the most of this, your little day,

Your little month, your little half a year,

Ere I forget, or die, or move away,

And we are done forever; by and by

I shall forget you, as I said, but now,

If you entreat me with your loveliest lie

I will protest you with my favorite vow.

Break

I would indeed that love were longer-lived,

And oaths were not so brittle as they are,

But so it is, and nature has contrived

To struggle on without a break thus far,—

Whether or not we find what we are seeking

Is idle, biologically speaking.

Source

Intention To Escape From Him

I think I will learn some beautiful language, useless for commercial

Purposes, work hard at that.

I think I will learn the Latin name of every songbird, not only in

America but wherever they sing.

(Shun meditation, though; invite the controversial:

Is the world flat? Do bats eat cats?) By digging hard I might

deflect that river, my mind, that uncontrollable thing,

Turgid and yellow, srong to overflow its banks in spring,

carrying away bridges

A bed of pebbles now, through which there trickles one clear

narrow stream, following a course henceforth nefast—

Break

Dig, dig; and if I come to ledges, blast.

Source

Leonard Cohen

What I’m doing here

I do not know if the world has lied

I have lied

I do not know if the world has conspired against love

I have conspired against love

The atmosphere of torture is no comfort

I have tortured

Even without the mushroom cloud

still I would have hated

Listen

I would have done the same things

even if there were no death

I will not be held like a drunkard

under the cold tap of facts

I refuse the universal alibi

Break

Like an empty telephone booth passed at night

and remembered

like mirrors in a movie palace lobby consulted

only on the way out

like a nymphomaniac who binds a thousand

into strange brotherhood

I wait

for each one of you to confess

Source

E.E. Cummings

Look at this

look at this)

a 75 done

this nobody would

have believed

would they no

kidding this was my particular

Break

pal

funny aint

it we was

buddies

i used to

Break

know

him lift the

poor cuss

tenderly this side up handle

Break

with care

fragile

and send him home

Break

to his old mother in

a new nice pine box

Break

(collect

Source

Kitty, Sixteen, 5’11″, White, Prostitute

“kitty”. sixteen, 5′ 11″, white, prostitute.

Break

ducking always the touch of must and shall,

whose slippery body is Death’s littlest pal,

Break

Break

skilled in quick softness. Unspontaneous. cute.

Break

Break

the signal perfume of whose unrepute

focusses in the sweet slow animal

bottomless eyes importantly banal,

Break

Break

Kitty. a whore. Sixteen

                                       you corking brute

amused from time to time by clever drolls

fearsomely who do keep their sunday flower.

The babybreasted broad “kitty” twice eight

Break

Break

–beer nothing, the lady’ll have a whiskey-sour–

Break

Break

whose least amazing smile is the most great

common divisor of unequal souls.

Source

Elizabeth Bishop

Filling Station

Oh, but it is dirty!

–this little filling station,

oil-soaked, oil-permeated

to a disturbing, over-all

black translucency.

Be careful with that match!

Break

Father wears a dirty,

oil-soaked monkey suit

that cuts him under the arms,

and several quick and saucy

and greasy sons assist him

(it’s a family filling station),

all quite thoroughly dirty.

Break

Do they live in the station?

It has a cement porch

behind the pumps, and on it

a set of crushed and grease-

impregnated wickerwork;

on the wicker sofa

a dirty dog, quite comfy.

Break

Some comic books provide

the only note of color–

of certain color. They lie

upon a big dim doily

draping a taboret

(part of the set), beside

a big hirsute begonia.

Break

Why the extraneous plant?

Why the taboret?

Why, oh why, the doily?

(Embroidered in daisy stitch

with marguerites, I think,

and heavy with gray crochet.)

Break

Somebody embroidered the doily.

Somebody waters the plant,

or oils it, maybe. Somebody

arranges the rows of cans

so that they softly say:

ESSO–SO–SO–SO

Break

to high-strung automobiles.

Somebody loves us all.

Source

Thomas Hardy

In The Cemetery

“You see those mothers squabbling there?”

Remarks the man of the cemetery.

“One says in tears, ”Tis mine lies here!’

Another, ‘Nay, mine, you Pharisee!’

Another, ‘How dare you move my flowers

And put your own on this grave of ours!’

But all their children were laid therein

At different times, like sprats in a tin.

“And then the main drain had to cross,

And we moved the lot some nights ago,

And packed them away in the general foss

With hundreds more. But their folks don’t know,

And as well cry over a new-laid drain

As anything else, to ease your pain!”

Source

Margaret Atwood

This Is A Photograph Of Me

It was taken some time ago

At first it seems to be

a smeared

print: blurred lines and grey flecks

blended with the paper;

Break

then, as you scan

it, you can see something in the left-hand corner

a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree

(balsam or spruce) emerging

and, to the right, halfway up

what ought to be a gentle

slope, a small frame house.

Break

In the background there is a lake,

and beyond that, some low hills.

Break

(The photograph was taken

the day after I drowned.

Break

I am in the lake, in the center

of the picture, just under the surface.

Break

It is difficult to say where

precisely, or to say

how large or how small I am:

the effect of water

on light is a distortion.

Break

but if you look long enough

eventually

you will see me.)

Source

P.K. Page

Deaf-Mute In A Pear Tree

His clumsy body is a golden fruit

pendulous in the pear tree

Break

Blunt fingers among the multitudinous buds

Break

Adriatic blue the sky above and through

the forking twigs

Break

Sun ruddying tree’s trunk, his trunk

his massive head thick-knobbed with burnished curls

tight-clenched in bud

Break

(Painting by Generalic. Primitive.)

Break

I watch him prune with silent secateurs

Break

Boots in the crotch of branches shift their weight

heavily as oxen in a stall

Break

Hear small inarticulate mews from his locked mouth

a kitten in a box

Break

Pear clippings fall

                   soundlessly on the ground

Spring finches sing

                   soundlessly in the leaves

Break

Break

A stone. A stone in ears and on his tongue

Break

Through palm and fingertip he knows the tree’s

quick springtime pulse

Break

Smells in its sap the sweet incipient pears

Break

Pale sunlight’s choppy water glistens on

his mutely snipping blades

Break

and flags and scraps of blue

above him make regatta of the day

Break

But when he sees his wife’s foreshortened shape

sudden and silent in the grass below

uptilt its face to him

Break

then air is kisses, kisses

Break

stone dissolves

Break

his locked throat finds a little door

Break

and through it feathered joy

flies screaming like a jay

Source

Charles Bukowski

History Of A Tough Motherfucker

he came to the door one night wet thin beaten and

terrorized

a white cross-eyed tailless cat

I took him in and fed him and he stayed

grew to trust me until a friend drove up the driveway

and ran him over

I took what was left to a vet who said,”not much

chance…give him these pills…his backbone

is crushed, but is was crushed before and somehow

mended, if he lives he’ll never walk, look at

these x-rays, he’s been shot, look here, the pellets

are still there…also, he once had a tail, somebody

cut it off…”

I took the cat back, it was a hot summer, one of the

hottest in decades, I put him on the bathroom

floor, gave him water and pills, he wouldn’t eat, he

wouldn’t touch the water, I dipped my finger into it

and wet his mouth and I talked to him, I didn’t go any-

where, I put in a lot of bathroom time and talked to

him and gently touched him and he looked back at

me with those pale blue crossed eyes and as the days went

by he made his first move

dragging himself forward by his front legs

(the rear ones wouldn’t work)

he made it to the litter box

crawled over and in,

it was like the trumpet of possible victory

blowing in that bathroom and into the city, I

related to that cat-I’d had it bad, not that

bad but bad enough

one morning he got up, stood up, fell back down and

just looked at me.

“you can make it,” I said to him.

he kept trying, getting up falling down, finally

he walked a few steps, he was like a drunk, the

rear legs just didn’t want to do it and he fell again, rested,

then got up.

you know the rest: now he’s better than ever, cross-eyed

almost toothless, but the grace is back, and that look in

his eyes never left…

and now sometimes I’m interviewed, they want to hear about

life and literature and I get drunk and hold up my cross-eyed,

shot, runover de-tailed cat and I say,”look, look

at this!”

but they don’t understand, they say something like,”you

say you’ve been influenced by Celine?”

“no,” I hold the cat up,”by what happens, by

things like this, by this, by this!”

I shake the cat, hold him up in

the smoky and drunken light, he’s relaxed he knows…

it’s then that the interviews end

although I am proud sometimes when I see the pictures

later and there I am and there is the cat and we are photo-

graphed together.

he too knows it’s bullshit but that somehow it all helps.

Source

Update: my second most literate friend has sent me another great poem that needs to be added to this post:

Thomas Kinsella

Mirror in February

The day dawns, with scent of must and rain,

Of opened soil, dark trees, dry bedroom air.

Under the fading lamp, half dressed — my brain

Idling on some compulsive fantasy –

I towel my shaven jaw and stop, and stare,

Riveted by a dark exhausted eye,

A dry downturning mouth.

Break

It seems again that it is time to learn,

In this untiring, crumbling place of growth

To which, for the time being, I return.

Now plainly in the mirror of my soul

I read that I have looked my last on youth

And little more; for they are not made whole

That reach the age of Christ.

Break

Below my window the wakening trees,

Hacked clean for better bearing, stand defaced

Suffering their brute necessities;

And how should the flesh not quail, that span for span

Is mutilated more? In slow distaste

I fold my towel with what grace I can,


Not young, and not renewable, but man.

Source

According to a recent visit to the German History Museum, at its apogee, the Roman army had 400-500 thousand troops to protect the empire’s 50-60 million inhabitants.

Today, the United States military has ~1.5 million active duty personnel and a similar number of reservists (source) to protect its roughly 300 million strong population.

Interestingly, this is roughly the same ratio of 1 soldier per 100 citizens. This is only two data points and does not a trend make, but I wonder if there’s some sort of permanent ratio that is simply the cost of being the world’s policeman – and it’s independent of technology/politics/history/etc.