But he (loquacious always) said,

‘The stones will miss his knees now he is dead.

The friendly ants will kiss him to the bone.

You are loved most where you will not return’

(He said) ‘but need no love, once you have gone.’

(an extract from The General, by Dom Moraes)

elephant in the room

dear blog. this evening i met an old friend and it made me want nothing more than to drink myself silly. i walked out of this meeting onto the street gazing into people’s faces indifferently, searching for the closest grocery store, craving the cool bitter taste of beer at the back of my throat.

what can i say? that in the time we have not seen each other, we have each decided to wear, or abandon our spectacles; to roll up shirtsleeves or abandon shirts altogether, pluck or knit our eyebrows so they look older and foreign in our (lets face it) altogether unchanged faces. why do we meet old friends? i look forward to meeting again, skirting about so many important things that have happened and feigning enthusiasm about an unspecified unshared present.

as i’m in a sentimental mood this evening, i leave you with a a song that is similarly so: surrender, by olof arnalds.

have this, too: villanelle at sundown, by donald justice

good night, yo.

something for the weekend

it’s the end of the week and i’m sure noone’s in the mood for substantial reading (or, for that matter, thought at all.) so in the spirit of making your is things experience (a phrase i’m in the process of copyrighting) as friction-free as possible i lightly toss in your direction…a salad. no, no. it is brain food that i toss you, friends! in the form of this sweet video by google, grandly named zeitgeist 2010, which offers a review of 2010 according to its most popular search terms.

i actually have two more interesting things to share, from a podcast i listened to last night. but i’m tired now and so will leave you these two tantalising words: gravitational anarchy! wait for it, yo.

happy weekend!

there’s cutlery, a tablecloth some hennessy

it’s wednesday, everyone! and, as my trusty desktop calendar informs me, we’re a mere 23 days away from 2011. yes, it’s an early start to the new year jitters this year, so i can save you from additional and accumulated panic on the 29-31^st. I’ve actually found a number of interesting things to share with you today. the first of these is a short paragraph of prose that appeared in The Owls a few days ago; i found the first line particularly resonant and lovely. it is, i suspect, just a little precious– a tone i seem to gravitate towards in a lot of my reading, for better or worse. nonetheless, i hope you enjoy it and the vivid accompanying visual.

this next link is really quite exciting, and particularly relevant to what this blog is based on: things. Because there are things, and there is things, but there certainly is no getting away from things. i mean material objects, of course, but also so much besides that needs no name but thing. i’m attracted to its lack of ceremony—to reduce each person, animal, emotion, thought, object to a thing, without getting tied up in hierarchies or the complications of naming and knowing.  And so learning about thingd and thefancy today thrilled me a little; these concepts seem to me so perfectly contemporary (and unapologetically so). i’m probably making too much of it, but this mashable article really did read like a manifesto for the (my) times.

and this final one is about a review by the grand dame of book reviewing michiko kakutani…written in the voice of brian, the dog from family guy. no joke. i wasn’t going to include this at first because my links so far have been fairly nyt-heavy, but this is too good to pass up on. i’m only including this brief link, which contains the gist of the story. the review in its entirety is, to be honest, not as amusing as one might expect.

good night!

we’re merely mammals,

it’s been a lovely but exhausting weekend, peppered with some (but only very little) guilt over not updating this ostensibly daily space. which brings me ponderously to the issue of this dailiness– a quality not so much imperiled as (it would seem) completely impossible. dear blog– why, you ask, do i worry this much about one link, taken from one random source, that i may or may not broadcast to about five friends? why must this be done on a daily basis? why must this be done at all? the thing is, in my mind this blog has expanded disproportionately to represent all of work-life balance, my interest to read new and varied things and more contentiously, my ability to write (about) these things. that is why it seems as if the discipline and detail (or lack thereof) with which i tend to this blog are real and important, tangible indicators of how well i am able to live my life. which, as you may or may not agree, is as important a thing as there can be. that complaint now safely out of the way, i revise this ambitious daily project to a thrice-weekly one instead– to be updated every monday, wednesday and thursday.

i’ve been meaning to put something up here about the wikileaks issue, which i’m still undecided on. the reception to it, i’m sure, will set some sort of precedent to how sensitive information is treated in future. it means so much for journalists and historians and just ordinary citizens living in countries with governments. thinking of it (and so many other things like it) makes me glad to be alive now, in such an exciting changeful world.  that said, however, my link on the subject is no fine-boned analysis but this hilarious, disapproving article by charlie brooker.

“…By the year 2022, there’ll be a naked photo of everyone on the planet lurking somewhere in the interverse. You might as well take a really good one this afternoon, while you’re young and pliable, and upload it yourself before some future peeping-tom equivalent of WikiLeaks does it for you.” damning!

(opinions, anyone?)

de-lovely

i’ve been neglectful of this space for half a week, but believe me when i tell you that my reasons were both sound and just (have two adjectives been more suited to sit side by side?). to compensate, i have two lovely bits of reading for you today. in a slight revision of my weblinks-only policy, both of today’s links have quite a lot to do with the books i’ve been reading this past week. (being as i am a believer in the great digital future, and having referred to stories and music as ‘content’ one too many times in the recent past, i tend to be ever so slightly embarrassed about my preference for material, smellable soilable books over their virtual counterparts. but onward.)

the first book, which i completed just this weekend, is what are you like?, a novel by anne enright, who i have decided must surely rank as one of my favourite writers. it is a slowly-seeping sort of writing until: you find yourself (hypothetically) engrossed in the third page of chapter seven on a hard-won corner seat of the bus, looking up at a traffic junction to see not the cluster of strangers that surrounded you when you boarded, but a profusion of individuals, each leaking histories and incomplete sentences from the pores of their skin. suddenly a sideways glance or a bandaged finger takes on the significance of mountains, and your breath catches at how sad and hilarious this is. and now, with apologies for this barrage of adjectives, i offer you this small, online-available sampling: natalie, by anne enright.

the other book i have been reading this week is what is the what by dave eggers, which i expected to be slippery and postmodern and full of linguistic acrobatics, but has instead turned out to be full of heart and sinew, a hard book that tells one incredible story. the book is a fictionalised autobiography of valentino achak deng, one of sudan’s ‘lost boys’. it is a hefty 500 pages but it’s the first time in very long that i have gone through a novel so quickly; the narrative is gripping and profoundly disturbing, perhaps never more so than at its halting, jagged attempts at humour. the experience of reading this felt akin to reading an incredibly well crafted reader’s digest human interest story in the ’90s rather than a contemporary work of fiction; an observation that i only mean as praise. (reader’s digest! this sentence sounded dated even before i had typed the full stop. perhaps this is what growing older is about.) so the link i have is not to another piece of lyrical/meditative/tremendously evocative writing, but to this lovely cut-and-dry infographic i came across two days ago.

i’ve already found a link to share tomorrow, wish me the time to put it up here!

has beans will travel

i am above all things an avid lover of food and drink, and nothing pleases me quite so much as some cake and a strong cup of coffee. could there be a more heart-gladdening sight than a sweetly misshapen slice of cake, shedding crumbs of delight as it is greedily lifted from platter to plate? could there be a more invigorating puddle of ingredients in a cup than sugar and milk and fragrant flavourful coffee? at six thirty am, on my second cup of the day, i balefully narrow my eyes at those of you who are composing well thought-out rebuttals in favour of any alternative beverage. no, there certainly can be no thing more good than coffee.

while i drink vast quantitites of the stuff, though, i’m afraid my quality standards aren’t very high. having grown up in a house of tea drinkers, i didn’t know till relatively late in life that coffee doesn’t naturally come from instant granules. so it is only lately, and with some trepidation, that i have begun to learn about the various kinds of coffee beans, and grounds, and methods of extraction. why only last month, having received A Salary of My Own, i looked into acquiring a french press for the first time. i realise, though, that this is a treacherous path to tread on. it is likely to bring me in the way of feelings of inadequecy and resentment, as i grow increasingly unable to afford the sophisticated gadgets and beans of the true coffee connosieur. oh, happy days when to be a snob meant only to thumb my nose at one brand of instant coffee over another, or sneer at the sweet coffee-flavoured concoctions at starbucks (while duly consuming them).

oh no, i’m reading about the big leagues now. and gazing wistfully from afar. for one day i too will be this person:

” he poured just an ounce and a half of hot water over the grounds, “to get what’s called the bloom,” he explained. The grounds indeed swelled, flowered. “You’re letting the gases escape,” he said, so that the coffee would have a cleaner (and, I supposed, less flatulent?) flavor.”

read the full article here, and deduct some snob points from your day’s tally: loving coffee without being a drip, at the nyt.

not pulling any

i came, i wrote, i never came back. my first post might have been a dismal failure at setting the precedent for daily blogging, but having no readers i need not yet apologise.

today’s thing is a volatile mix of violence and…cuddles. for some time now i have been quite interested in the act of punching another person. (this interest is all theoretical, of course, since i am very rarely angry and even then, not particularly angry. consequently, the thought of anyone responding to their rage by rolling up their palms like a pair of old socks and launching them into another person’s face is a plainly comic one. in real life? surely not!

but there is something gritty and not slightly romantic about a solid old-fashioned punch. the curving hook of a rapidly advancing arm, the brace and wobble of faraway knees, knuckles raising into knobbly white dents under elastic skin. and then the whole sorry song of thock crunch phwoom, a busy frequency travelling up the very private diagonal from ear to skull. the imaginary physicality of these is of course no less than the accompanying visual– two lumbering men rolling up their shirtsleeves in a bar. the delightful squalor of raised eyebrows and smirks and busily texting fingers “zomg u’ll nvr guess wat hpnd aftr u left!!!”.

which is all a long winded way of saying, a punch seems to convey something–physically as well as culturally– to both giver and recipient that a slap or shove or drop-kick cannot manage to. punching panda bears on the street? wrong. punching men in 8ft panda suits and body armour? reason to visit new york #95867.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/nov/24/punch-panda-new-york-artist

super sad true

hullo! today’s thing is this an incredibly personal, not-particularly-bookish book review by alice gregory at n+1.

http://nplusonemag.com/sad-as-hell

i’m not putting this up here to be ironic or self-referential in any way, but because it rang so close to home and made me feel hopeful and sad in equal measures. (just like the gap-toothed, broadly grinning portrait of myself next to my father’s computer does). i hope to see you tomorrow, and do let me know if you chance upon an interesting article that you’d think i would like to read. (you have no way of knowing this yet, but in time my reading preferences will reveal themselves.  for now, content yourself in knowing that it is two in the morning and i have come across this link in a slightly haphazard, slightly drunk fashion. content yourself.)

virtual love,

s.