la carta ajena

[lacartaajena]

Overheard from my office

Young employee 1: John Lennon was assassinated?

Young employee 2: Uh,…yeah.

YE1: Here?

YE2: Yeah… I think so.

YE1: Outside the Dakota, it says.

YE2: …Yeah….

YE1: That’s so SAD!

[lacartaajena]

Turkey Fallen Dead from Tree

Startled from snow-day slumber by a neighbor’s mutt,

it banged its buzzard’s head then couldn’t solve

the problem of the white pine’s limbs

with wings nearly too broad for a planned descent.

Somewhere an awkward angel knows

whether it was dead before it hit the ground.

Any sinner could tell it was dead after—

eyes unseen beneath bare and wrinkled lids,

feet drawn up almost as high as hands.

I loved to watch thistle and millet

disappear beneath it in the yard.

As snow covers feathers that will still be

iridescent in the spring I remember seeing

a businessman take a dripping handful

of pocket change and throw it down

a subway grate beside a homeless man.

The coins bounced and clattered, vanishing

in the humid dark. The rich man said

now you’re having a shitty day too.

But it’s not a shitty day and won’t be

when I retrieve the bird and walk it—

toes curling stiff from a shopping bag—

to a houseless scrap of oak savannah

birdseed drew it from and dig it

into deeper snow so what was hoarded

by a man may by the thaw be doled.

  --Dore Kiesselbach

  (via)

[lacartaajena]

People live in one another's shelter.

Irish proverb, translated into English and etched on the wall of the Irish Hunger Memorial in Battery Park

[theeconomist]

[lacartaajena]

The wedding of two frogs in Nagpur, India, arranged by farmers hoping for rain. A looming drought there is manageable, but long-term changes to the monsoon might be catastrophic.

[lacartaajena]

There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.

Peter F. Drucker, probably not referring specifically to litigation, but offering an apt criticism nonetheless

(via)

[lacartaajena]

A Bed above the Abyss: Amnesiac Notebook

i. Awake

  Each entry consisting of the statements

I am awake or I am conscious

entered every few minutes:

        2:10 p.m.: this time properly awake.

      2:14 p.m.: this time finally awake.

      2:35 p.m.: this time completely awake.

       At 9:40 p.m. I awoke for the first time, despite my previous claims.

  This in turn was crossed out, followed by:

       I was fully conscious at 10:35 p.m., and awake for the first time

                 in many, many weeks.

  This in turn was cancelled out by the next entry.

    ii. Passport

  How large it grew, that first kiss, until I could board it each night,

a raft drifting out into the quiet lake. After twenty years

the great amnesiac HM never recognized

his doctor, and after lunch

gladly ate another: Time for lunch, they would tell him again.

You must be starving.

  God, I am starving.

Without a body, collection cannot precede

recollection: recollect a tongue, that skilled swirl

of its quick tip, a mouthful of familiars: smoke,

strawberry candy. Memory in the web

between dumbstruck and dura: dump and dune,

duplicates. What kind of game is this?

  I’m no longer a boy,

HM would say to his reflection, the surprise on his face

genuine. What kind of game is this?

The mirror a passport like any other, its picture

out of time, a foreign shock of untamed hair

even the photographer declared beautiful then.

  Then: the word smiles

like a stranger on your first day at school,

sitting on stone steps, worn with use.

    iii. Taxonomy

  “Red but not bird comes to mind.”

                 Only the kingdom of living names

  was missing there—bank, flagstone, sofa

                 remained, but not the blur at the feeder,

  the undersea creature on the card—

                  it’s a danger, a killer swimmer,

  they coaxed him—it’s called a

                  (waiting for the word to stir from its depth;

  how could he forget the ones who dressed,

                  fed, taught him word by word

  the order of the world? What noise does

                  that loss make?) (They looked suspiciously

  like his parents, he thought: strangers posing

                  unanswerable questions)—

  “It has no name, it has no need.”

  --Andrew Allport

  (via)

[lacartaajena]

Orlando Duque of Colombia dives 29 metres from a rock monolith during the first round of the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series at Islet Vila Franca do Campo

Photograph: Dean Treml/AFP/Getty Images (via)

[theparisreview]

But when I think of sorting through the boxes of my grandmother’s books—even the ones we couldn’t keep, or didn’t want—and what we found there, I am grateful not to have been handed her Amazon password instead. Among all the gifts of the electronic age, one of the most paradoxical might be to illuminate something we are beginning to trade away: the particular history, visible and invisible, that can be passed down through the vessel of an old book, inscribed by the hands and the minds of readers who are gone.

—Amanda Katz, “Will Your Children Inherit Your Ebooks?”

(Source: NPR)

[lacartaajena]

I was just thinking about this the other day -- or at least along these lines. I was thinking of books that one reads and then designates for a fellow reader, someone who's certain to love whatever one has just read. I wish it were still our practice to inscribe our books. I wish that we inscribed them at least with our names and the date upon which we read them before handing them off to fellow readers. I imagine people's books travelling among their friends and their friends' friends, names and dates tracking the books' readers as used to be the case with the cards tucked in the back of books from the public library.

[ilovecharts]

[lacartaajena]

Thanks to the Audubon's Twitter feed -- from "the original tweeters" -- I learned this morning that Olympic results used to be delivered via carrier pigeon. This is my sort of technology graph. Soaked with nostalgia.

Makes me wonder whether I shouldn't return to radio broadcasts of baseball games. Especially given that the Yankees just had their asses handed to them by los Atléticosde Oakland. Swept the Red Sox earlier this month, too. Looks like the A's are turning a corner.

[theparisreview]

[lacartaajena]

“When I was young, I thought Life: A User’s Manual would teach me how to live and Suicide: A User’s Manual how to die. I don’t really listen to what people tell me. I forget things I don’t like. I look down dead-end streets. The end of a trip leaves me with a sad aftertaste the same as the end of a novel. I am not afraid of what comes at the end of life. I am slow to realize when someone mistreats me, it is always so surprising: evil is somehow unreal. When I sit with bare legs on vinyl, my skin doesn’t slide, it squeaks. I archive. I joke about death. I do not love myself. I do not hate myself. My rap sheet is clean. To take pictures at random goes against my nature, but since I like doing things that go against my nature, I have had to make up alibis to take pictures at random, for example, to spend three months in the United States traveling only to cities that share a name with a city in another country: Berlin, Florence, Oxford, Canton, Jericho, Stockholm, Rio, Delhi, Amsterdam, Paris, Rome, Mexico, Syracuse, Lima, Versailles, Calcutta, Bagdad.”

—Édouard Levé, “When I Look at a Strawberry, I Think of a Tongue”

(via theparisreview)

[lacartaajena]

"What is the fair market value of an object that cannot be sold? . . . The object under discussion is 'Canyon,' a masterwork of 20th-century art created by Robert Rauschenberg that [New York art dealer Ileana] Sonnabend’s children inherited when she died in 2007. Because the work, a sculptural combine, includes a stuffed bald eagle, a bird under federal protection, the heirs would be committing a felony if they ever tried to sell it. So their appraisers have valued the work at zero. But the Internal Revenue Service takes a different view. It has appraised 'Canyon' at $65 million and is demanding that the owners pay $29.2 million in taxes."

-Patricia Cohen of The New York Times

(Image via)

[nprfreshair]

“We are made out of stardust. The iron in the hemoglobin molecules in the blood in your right hand came from a star that blew up 8 billion years ago. The iron in your left hand came from another star. We are the laws of chemistry and physics as they have played out here on Earth and we are now learning that planets are as common as stars. Most stars, as it turns out now, will have planets.”

Jill Tarter: A Scientist Searching For Alien Life : NPR (via nprfreshair)

[theatlantic]

[lacartaajena]

Will London Really Erase Banksy’s New Olympics Art? 

(via theatlantic)

[lacartaajena]

For You Today

Of course there is a jackhammer. And a view, like Hopper,

but happier. Of course there is the newspaper—the daily

herald of our powerlessness. Easy go, easy come: thwash,

the next day another, an example of everything that gets done

in the dark. Like the initiative of the crocuses from a snow

that was, as it works out, warming them. Or in this case,

the strange October weather warming them. There were the

conclusions we jumped to. To which we jumped. There was

pain, and then there was suffering. Of course there was my

ambition to offer you the world, but one that I have rearranged

to make sense. Here are all the sensations of being alive

at the turn of the twenty-first century, here’s how they ring out

against each other, here’s how one brings out the sense of

another, here is the yellow next to the fathomless blue.

  -Jessica Greenbaum

  (via)

[theparisreview]

[lacartaajena]

“Most people don’t grow up. It’s too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That’s the truth of it. They honor their credit cards, they find parking spaces, they marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don’t grow up. Not really. They get older. But to grow up costs the earth, the earth. It means you take responsibility for the time you take up, for the space you occupy. It’s serious business. And you find out what it costs us to love and to lose, to dare and to fail. And maybe even more, to succeed. What it costs, in truth. Not superficial costs—anybody can have that—I mean in truth. That’s what I write. What it really is like. I’m just telling a very simple story.”

—Maya Angelou, The Art of Fiction No. 119

(via theparisreview)

[chewablevitamins]

[lacartaajena]

The Peach Kings - Fisherman

(via chewablevitamins)