tended by poet Frances Donovan
Five things to be grateful for today:
I don’t check my RSS feed as much as I used to. You could either blame my job, for giving me more to do, or possibly Hulu and Netflix, for giving me more passive entertainment options. Personally, I blame either G.W. Bush or global warming.
Seriously, though, I came across a wonderful post on Information is Beautiful about horoscopes and word analysis (apparently the latest fad among statisticians — and you know those crazy fad-conscious statisticians).
You could just take a look at it yourself and draw your own conclusions from the data. Or, you could keep reading this post for another 60 seconds and learn that it reminded me of something Douglas Adams said in one of his later novels. I can never remember if it was The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul or Mostly Harmless or one of the other ones, so I haven’t been able to look it up. I’ll paraphrase it, though, like so:
You take something as inherently chaotic and unpredictable as human nature. You apply an arbitrary set of rules to it. Et voila, your rules work.
Most of the scientists I’ve met don’t like data that can’t be hammered down to at least two significant digits, which means that they read their horoscopes only furtively. I find all that crystal woo-woo stuff great fun and enjoy learning the arbitrary rules of divination systems with the same glee that I enjoy learning the arbitrary rules of grammar, social mores, and fashion.
What I found particularly stunning — poetic, even — was the meta-horoscope those crazy statisticians over at Information is Beautiful were able to create from their analysis. And I now present to you, the poem the statisticians wrote.*
Ready? Sure?
Whatever the situation or secret moment, enjoy everything a lot.
Feel able to absolutely care. Expect nothing else. Keep making love.
Family and friends matter. The world is life, fun, and energy.
Maybe hard. Or easy. Taking exactly enough is best.
Help and talk to others. Change your mind
and a better mood comes along…
From “Horoscoped: Do horoscopes really all just say the same thing? We scraped & analysed 22,000 to see.” at http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2011/horoscoped/
*I edited it slightly because I can’t stand center-justified poetry and feel really strongly about the serial comma.
Reposted from Goodreads (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/141961890)
Helen Scully’s prose is lush and fluid, like the flood waters of the Mississippi. She sweeps you through three generations of the Riant family, from the golden days of the Civil War hero founder through its decline and rebirth in the midst of the Great Depression. One book jacket blurb describes this novel as “Southern Gothic,” and the prose does have a dreamy, decadent quality. At times I found the story depressing but appreciated its proto-feminist ending. One can only wonder how much was inspired by events in the lives of the author’s own family.
From page 33: “She felt a surge of power as she focused on the empty road, and its vision on this particular morning made a print in her mind. Soon she would strike out; great things awaited her, travel and love — the courageous search. Where would it take her in this life? … As she turned and stalked back through the sweet stirrings of the garden, she felt an urge to expose herself alongside the flowers, but knew she could not, not yet. Suddenly violent, she lashed with her new parasol against the elephant ears in her path. Then, sap on her shoes and in the webs of her fingers, moth wings in her hair, she returned by the same routes through the dark and chilly downstairs, sipping cold black coffee until sick and unable to sit still, waiting for the house to wake.”
From page 311: “None could guess where Imogene’s search had taken her, but by then the heat had gotten to all of their heads. No behavior seemed out of the ordinary. That was the season, hotter and hotter, the season of blueberries, plums, thunderstorms, storm drains overflowing with the smell of swamp, shutters closed against the sun.”
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise– William Blake
Blake was an early Romantic poet. Studying him at Vassar had a tremendous impact on me, although I’m sure Professor Beth Darlington had a lot to do with that as well. There’s an excellent biography of him at Poets.org. He was quite a radical for his days — among other things, he taught his wife to read and write and had her work side by side with him in his engraving shop. (Of course, he also used to wake her up in the middle of the night to sit with him when he wrote, so I doubt I would have found him an ideal mate). He created and perfected a style of printing that allowed him to reproduce the delicate watercolors he used to illuminate his own poetry. Vassar’s special collections contains one of the original editions printed using this method. I don’t believe it survived him.
Tricycle’s Daily Dharma quoted this poem recently. It’s an excellent illustration of the Buddhist principle of nonattachment and also a reminder that spiritual principles repeat themselves over and over again across cultures, races, and places.
Dear Apple:
Yes, your products are sexy and nicely designed and I lust after them with all my heart, especially after being inundated with ads in which comely young people dance around and smile and socialize with them. But your UI quotient is not as high as you think it is. After one week with a new iPod touch, I’m remembering the other reason I went over to The Dark Side back in 1998. I’ve been walking around for the past 10 years thinking it was because of your major strategy FAIL in forcing people to shell out huge amounts of cash for your platforms and hardware, only to discover that none of the software they needed would work on them.
The other reason, Apple, that I left you for your eveel cousin PC/Windows back in 1998 can be summed up in one work: CLUNKe.
As in, your shit is CLUNKY, Apple. Now that I’ve had a decade or two to appreciate the joys of tweaking settings and whatnot (“fiddling”, as Army Guy would call it), I can see that your sexy, cleanly designed UI isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s clunky because in order for a design to be spare it can’t have as many dials to twiddle and buttons to click. It’s clunky because, unless someone is paying close attention, she can lose $12 worth of apps while updating the OS of their hardware. It’s clunky because it’s resource-intensive and resistant to intermittent fix-ups. It’s clunky because it’s not customizable. And it’s clunky because it doesn’t play nicely with any kind of hardware but yours.
Not everyone in the world can afford to pay through the nose for upgrades every two to three years, Apple. And not everyone has hours and hours to lose on your support forums, or upgrading their entire operating systems.
Once upon a time I thought I was an Apple person. But since then, I’ve learned I’m not an Apple person, a Microsoft person, or a Linux person. I’m a pragmatist. I want what’s inexpensive and easy to use. I suppose I’ll just have to suffer through the indignities of not being the first girl on the block with the new shiny white toy, and wait for the 3G version of your products. Preferably as a Christmas/birthday present from my favorite Silicon Valley techie.
Sincerely,
Me
Excerpted from After Maillol
Night
Night strides across borders.
Hush, she commands the barking dogs,
the searchlights, the buckling barbed
wire fences. She cradles
the earth in her gleaming limbs
until the only sounds are those of mingled
breaths, the quick intake of the child’s,
the drawn out sobs of the aged
and the ill. Beneath her steady wings
soldiers dream of tilling fields,
prison doors slide open.
— Marguerite Guzman Bouvard
The Unpredictability of Light
Word Press. 2009: Cincinnati, OH.
I was in high school and half in love with a boy from Texas. I was only half in love with him because I thought that’s what you were supposed to do with boys. Well, he was awfully cute. And I was 13 years old and full of hormones. Like me, he was a child of hippies. Unlike me, he was unabashed about it.
He pulled a slim volume from his locker — the locker so close to that other boy who got me into so much trouble. It had a yellow spine and a black-and-white photograph of a girl perched on top of a pile of rubble. It was called The Pill Versus the Springhill Mining Disaster, by Richard Brautigan.
“He’s a minor LSD poet from San Francisco,” he told me. “I thought you might like it.”
Even then, I was known for liking and writing poetry.
It was the first book of poetry anyone ever gave to me like that: spontaneous, easy. With the perspective of time, I can see that maybe he was as half in love with me as I was with him. We ended up embarking on a relationship far more intimate and complex than anything you’d see on Glee. It’s hard to say who broke my harder: him or the other boy I loved at the same time, in a more carnal, conventional manner.
But that’s a story for another time. Right now what I want to think about is that moment when he handed me this slim volume, the same one that sits on my desk beside me now, a little time traveler through the decades.
And the wonder of discovery when I first saw a poem like this in print:
The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster
When you take your pill
it’s like a mine disaster.
I think of all the people
lost inside of you.
sun shines on first snow
bright from the dramatic sky
winter blue, pine green
cold earth longing for
a warming blanket of snow
frozen moss, still green
leaves against grey sky
winter’s chill but still yellow
carpeting the ground
standing on sunshine
while all around you winter
winches tight its grip
Garden of Words 