tweet of the day
The Decade Since
I realize now that those in history whose lives were short and mean and threatened by sword and disease gathered and told stories not as leisure, but as desperately needed distraction, and reassurance that they were not alone.
So if art cannot contain or describe this event, and if for now the suffering is too keen to be alleviated by parable… if stories are for the moment not as critically needed, as courage, as medicine, as blood, as bacon, they can at least revert to this social function. As time goes on, this will all pass away into memory, into a story with a beginning and a middle and finally an end.
The above quote is from John Hodgman’s McSweeney’s column on September 25, 2001, where he discusses narrative in the context of the attacks. This morning, for probably the first time since maybe 2002, I sat down and actually pondered the events of 9/11. I sat and looked through the many photos provided by The Atlantic and read columns from that strange time, reflecting on what this would all mean. I still don’t know how I’m supposed to feel about it a decade later, but I think most striking is the sheer sadness and emotion captured through the lens and in the words that were written.
I jokingly told a friend last night that I remember where I was the last time someone asked me if I remembered where I was on 9/11. Nowadays, I tend to think in broader terms about September 11th – namely how we’ve responded with irrational fear to the slightest threat of terrorism in our post-9/11 reality. But I had a moment this morning where I felt almost shameful at how much I had allowed things to gloss over in the years since. Not in a hollow sort of “remembering 9/11 as a form of dime store patriotism” way, but more in how much we’ve let the genuine feelings of unity and pride we felt for our neighbors slip, thrown away as talking points in elections or manipulated as tools of demagogues.
If September 11th was ever meant to be a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, I sometimes wonder whether we’ll ever get the closure of a happy ending.
dear clusterflock
Anything at all.
“Are dey anti-American or what?” (Part II of a remembery)
Almost home from the memorial service and luncheon. At the last controlled intersection.
WHOO-OOP! BOOM!
We had a green light. We collided with a speeding ambulance. I’m still convinced the siren only kicked in at the very last instant.
I was in the Death Seat. Had a driver less skilled than Jon been at the wheel, I might have been toast. Or at least a disjointed fowl. I still wonder about the person in the ambulance and about the effect of the impact.
Medical personnel. We refused medical assistance. Next: a pair of cops. A man and a woman. The woman was nice. She clearly felt bad when she learned we were driving home from a funeral. At last we were let to go home. Jon took to bed, as you might, too.
A knock at the door. The nice woman cop. She’d stopped by to return Jon’s insurance card, which she’d tucked into the sun visor of her cop car.
She was a true-blue Chicago type. Southwest-side accent.
“Dat’s nice ya got da flag out. Nobody on my block’s got da flag out. I’m thinkin’, Are dey anti-American or what?
“Tell your husband again. I’m sorry about his mother.”
I didn’t tell her that it was our landlord who’d hoisted the flag.
“People love America” (Part I of a remembery)
This has to be a brilliant hoax, I thought. “Due to the national emergency,” I read, Logan Airport had been shut down indefinitely.
I’d gone to Logan’s website to try and figure out when Alice might be leaving Boston for Chicago. Alice is Jon’s cousin; we hoped to see her at the memorial service for Leah on September 14. Leah was Jon’s mother.
I got a similar message at the O’Hare website. Something wasn’t right.
I checked a couple of news sites, then turned on the TV. Then woke Jon.
Later, he said, “I heard you say a couple of planes had crashed into the World Trade Center. I didn’t realize . . . ”
” . . . that the World Trade Center no longer exists?”
quote out of context
He was really in my face, and I said, “you know, nobody stands in front of a Mark Rothko painting and says, ‘this isn’t true.’ ”
headline of the day
Florida woman bites elderly man in “vampire” attack
Some people like it, some people don’t like it
The Oracle
Dear Google,
How are you? I am fine. I have a couple of queries, so back the hell off with the auto-fill answers for right now, okay?
So, seriously, how do you know so much? If I could access useless information as quickly as you do, I would get totally laid. Lightning-quick responses to trivia questions are an absolute panty-dropper—everybody understands that women can’t resist a guy who can do that.
spam name
Winston Winston.
The Blessed Virginal Creeper
St. Mary’s Cemetery. Galena, Illinois.
photo out of context
tweet of the day
quote out of context
Some people say that I Google like a motherfucker, but I prefer not to use language like that.
A Mocking Bird doesn’t hold a candle to this
Whitney Cummings on lady writers
I talked to Whitney Cummings last night at a Paley Center event for her new sitcom Whitney. I asked her about her views on lady writers having difficulty in the industry and she had this to say:
“I don’t know, I guess I’m confused when people say that, I guess I don’t see that. I know the numbers might say that. I don’t think its because they’re not qualified, I think it’s because they don’t want to do it because it’s a shitty gig. It’s the same reason women don’t play football, because we’re not stupid enough to play a sport that you have to put on a helmet to get in there, it’s a bad idea. I think a lot of women are qualified to higher level writing jobs but they’re kind of like “This is torture, I’m going to do something that’s easier and more fun.” I think it’s the same reason that there’s less female comedians, it’s just a really grueling life and they are not masochistic, they’re smarter.”
I don’t know what I think about that, exactly.
the only reason I hate fall
is because now I have to exert even more effort to ignore football related stuff on the web.
Meg Hourihan on the passing of her cat, Bodhi
The semester before I got Bodhi, I took the best class I’ve ever taken. We studied Buddhism, Deconstruction, Emily Dickenson, and Walt Whitman. I read every word of “Leaves of Grass” again and again, and in times of great sorrow I always come back to it:
They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death;
And if ever there was, it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.All goes onward and outward–nothing collapses;
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
while Texas burns
Gov. Perry avers that we can handle ourselves down here, and I believe it. That’s why he’s slashed the Forest Service (an agency swollen with vampires, and vegans) budget and cut fire department funding by 75 percent, leaving us with a hose and a prayer. The hose isn’t doing much, but I can tell that prayer is helping. In fact, I know it’s helping.
As Perry is keen to remind us, Texas has the power to secede from this sinful Union if we feel like it, leaving the rest of the country to wander around with no infrastructure, eating each other like in The fucking Road, stymied, burned to bubbles and unable to follow-through on its own metaphors, sort of like Texas right now, actually. Well this is how we want it, I think!
the last path made on the moon by humans
Images and video of the Apollo 12, 14, and 17 landing sites as captured by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
“The new low-altitude Narrow Angle Camera images sharpen our view of the moon’s surface,” said Arizona State University researcher Mark Robinson, principal investigator for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC). “A great example is the sharpness of the rover tracks at the Apollo 17 site. In previous images the rover tracks were visible, but now they are sharp parallel lines on the surface.”
2. The past and future are equally real
This isn’t completely accepted, but it should be. Intuitively we think that the “now” is real, while the past is fixed and in the books, and the future hasn’t yet occurred. But physics teaches us something remarkable: every event in the past and future is implicit in the current moment. This is hard to see in our everyday lives, since we’re nowhere close to knowing everything about the universe at any moment, nor will we ever be — but the equations don’t lie. As Einstein put it, “It appears therefore more natural to think of physical reality as a four dimensional existence, instead of, as hitherto, the evolution of a three dimensional existence.”
From an article relaying ten concepts about time.
(via the browser)
Smog, To Be of Use
(thanks, Tim)
Love Candy
what’s the difference between the alligator and crocodile?
(via laughing squid)
‘Rather, what it means to be human has always been in flux, a compromise between extremely different ancestral components’
A quick overview of the idea there may be no pure lineation for modern humans, that even pre-Out of Africa humans may have interbred with other species the way post-Out of Africa humans interbred with Neanderthals.
(via marginal revolution, I think)
