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Friday, October third, 2008
Dave Marc Fischer says Pynchon will be publishing a new book soon, a "noir detective story." This would be terrific! Seems like all my favorite living authors are coming out with new stuff! (via Conversational Reading.)
 Update: Penguin Press has confirmed it will be publishing the book; they are not talking about its contents.
posted afternoon of October third, 2008: Respond
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 First, just got to say this image (of houses in Uummannaq, shot by Nathan Gallagher) is one of the prettiest things I've seen all week. Uummannaq is the last human settlement they will see on their voyage north, as Robyn says it is "the last place we will visit on this trip that has an ATM."
Francesca Galeazzi did a performance piece yesterday, walking out onto the snow field of the Jakobshavns fjord with a cylinder of 6kg carbon dioxide and releasing it into the unspoiled beauty of the wilderness. My first reaction to this is visceral disgust -- sort of, "You find a spot that's untouched and you 'pollute it' just to show that you can? What's the point, just to show yourself as a human and an asshole?" But her follow-up post from this morning makes what seems to me like a really good point: Some of my fellow voyagers were upset about my piece because they could visualise that black â??nastyâ?? cylinder full of CO2 in a way that they couldnâ??t, if I told them that every time they drive their car for 30 miles they emit the same amount of carbon dioxide. So I wonder if the societal shift that I was advocating with my performance could be achieved if we would find a more direct way to visualise the Carbon impact of the resources we use! This contextualizes the performance piece in a really useful way -- I think my original reaction is kind of the response she is looking for, and that she's trying to extend that visceral disgust to everyday polluting activities.
posted morning of October third, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, September 30th, 2008
 A boatload of artists is visiting the cold waters of the north, to see what they can of Greenland and its environment before that environment vanishes. You can read their ongoing account of their expedition, with pictures and video, at capefarewell.com; and more images at their Flicker page.
posted morning of September 30th, 2008: Respond
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Enjoy the holiday! Enjoy the coming year!
posted morning of September 30th, 2008: 3 responses
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Monday, September 29th, 2008
 Johan Huibers, a creationist who lives in Schagen, Netherlands, has built a working replica of Noah's ark ("working" should be taken with a grain of salt here: two key benchmarks that I don't believe have been passed are (a) loading it with pairs of every animal species and (b) launching it in a 40-day inundation) "as a testament to his faith in the literal truth of the Bible." It is 1/2 scale (so I guess would only hold half the world's species, or a singleton of each species), which is still quite incredibly large. He has populated it with stuffed animals, which seems a bit like cheating...
posted afternoon of September 29th, 2008: Respond
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Ellen has written an update for Lola's Diary, about Lola's old age.
posted morning of September 29th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, September 26th, 2008
(Warning: not-completely-coherent post by upset and angry blogger:) The Republicans have scuttled an agreement to address the crisis in our banking system. Paul Krugman (whose blog The Conscience of a Liberal is absolutely vital reading right now) notes an interesting exchange between Henry Paulson and Nancy Pelosi: In the Roosevelt Room after the session, the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., literally bent down on one knee as he pleaded with Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, not to "blow it up" by withdrawing her party's support for the package over what Ms. Pelosi derided as a Republican betrayal.
"I didn't know you were Catholic," Ms. Pelosi said, a wry reference to Mr. Paulson's kneeling, according to someone who observed the exchange. She went on: "It's not me blowing this up, it's the Republicans."
Mr. Paulson sighed. "I know. I know." So the point is, if he knows, why isn't he -- why aren't responsible Republicans -- doing something about it? They have been spending the last 30 years building up and enabling and empowering the most vile, reprehensible elements of their party. Change at this point is their responsibility and their burden.
 Note: and as far as, "What can we-who-are-not-'Responsible Republicans' do?", it seems to me like all we can do is concentrate the power of the Republican party in the hands of the irresponsible crazies -- the Republicans who can be forced from office by Democrats are more likely to be of the "RR" type, is how it seems to me anyways. Kind of paradoxical but giving power to RR's is giving power to those they enable.
posted morning of September 26th, 2008: Respond
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 The Apostropher links to photos of an abandoned train station in Abkhazia (originally posted by LiveJournal user zyalt). Just beautiful. Reminds me a bit of the beautiful (if not nearly as ornate) abandoned train station in Liberty State Park, in Jersey City.*
The ru_sovarch community at LiveJournal has lots more photos of old architecture in and around Russia. *Note: Hm, it just occured to me I should specify that said station is not really that beautiful anymore; for about the last 10 years it has been converted into a park building, with a new floor put in and is basically unrecognizable now.
posted morning of September 26th, 2008: Respond
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Tonight we're going in to the city and listen to Spike Lee and James McBride discussing their new movie, Miracle at St. Anna. The talk is sold out! Exciting -- I'm looking forward to that star-struck feeling I get from being in the same room as an author whose work I respect. This movie looks like it's going to be really interesting! Afterwards we will meet up with my sister and who knows? Maybe watch the presidential debate. If McCain succeeds in cancelling it we will just hang out and commiserate about the times and the mores.
posted morning of September 26th, 2008: Respond
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Thursday, September 25th, 2008
Saramago says (apologies for the roughness of the translation):
I suppose that in the beginning of the beginnings, before we invented speech, which is as we know, the supreme creator of incertitude, no serious doubt tormented us about who we were, about our personal and collective relationship with the place where we found ourselves. The world, obviously, could only be that which our eyes see at each moment, and furthermore, as important complementary information, that which our remaining senses -- hearing, touch, smell, taste -- appreciate. At this initial hour the world was pure appearance and pure superficiality. Material was simply rough or smooth, bitter or sweet, sour or bland, sound or silent, smelly or odorless. All things were that which they appeared to be, for the simple reason that they had no motive for appearing some other way or for being some other thing. ... I imagine that the spirit of philosophy and the spirit of science were manifest on that day, when someone had the intuition that appearance, being the external image that consciousness could capture and use as a map of knowledge, might also be an illusion of the senses. It is more often used in reference to the moral world than to the physical, the popular expression that says: "Appearances can be deceiving." Or illusory, which is more or less the same thing...This scribe has always been preoccupied with what was behind mere appearances, and now I'm not talking about atoms or subatomic particles, which, as such, are always the appearance of something that is hidden. I speak, yes, of current issues, routine, everyday, for example, the political system we call democracy, one that Churchill called the least bad of all known systems. He did not say the best, he said the least bad. For that which we are seeing, which it seems that we consider more than sufficient, and that, I believe, is an error of perception, whether we recognize it or not, we will be paying every day of our lives. Let us return to the matter.
posted evening of September 25th, 2008: Respond
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Yglesias 
WSJ article on the new currency in federal prisons (since cigarettes were banned): it is 
is ten years old! For this month they have made their January 2001 index 