May 2013
5 posts
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Nano-nose smell enhancement →
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The Book-Fairies
Mother always warned me about the book-fairies. I held them in greater awe than even the Christian God during the two brief phases in my life when I did live in fear of Him, first at the innocent age of five when I had my tonsils and adenoids out and was discovered to be seriously myopic. Then, less innocently, after I stumbled upon masturbation and became persuaded that each instance of the...
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Ice tsunami in Manitoba →
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‘Floating in a most peculiar way’: Astronaut Chris... →
LONDON – International Space Station Commander Canadian Chris Hadfield isn’t content with being a real-life astronaut floating 230 miles above…
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Rain in the Pines - La pioggia nel pineto
Shh! On the verge of this thicket I hear no human words. The voices I hear emerge as droplets loom on leaves. Listen. Rain strewn from scattered clouds falls on brittle pods of tarmarind, on needles of scabrous pine, on myrtle divine. Rain wets the effulgent bloom of broom, fragrant tufts of juniper, our idyllic faces, our bare hands. Rain soaks the spare fabric with which...
April 2013
14 posts
4 tags
Schafsofa
Hätte das Programm meiner Freundin Michaela geklappt, würde ich mich während meines Aufenthaltes in Wien zu Weihnachten 1973 in ihr Schwesterlein Bettina verknallt haben. In diesem Fall würde ich selbst in aller Öffentlichkeit um sie getrauert, aber als Schwager und nicht bloß als objektiver, emotionsloser Zuschauer, als ich nämlich später, nachdem sie frühzeitig an Brustkrebs gestorben war, ihrer...
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Chinon - קִינוֹן
Flashes of chaff in the sweet summer night, mayflies swarm up this quaint islet site
of a hushed-up auto-da-fé …
more
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Canada / Cannabis! The Great North leads world in... →
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“Der wichtigste Filter für die Informationsflut ist kein Algorithmus, sondern...”
– The best filter of the onslaught of information we face is not an algorithm, but one’s own head (Sasha Lobo, FAZ, 2013.02.25)
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Alba
From sleep the foiled lover fought like a salmon against a sluice of dream. Diffuse in the dawn beside him was a bare wisp of her flesh, the ache of a phantom limb in the form of a whisper he knew to be fake. There were birds. There was light. She was absent, but greeted him in spectral spray at his leap’s height.
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“Paul’s head simply exploded, since he had not kept up with recycling the...”
– So ist Pauls Kopf ganz einfach explodiert, weil er mit dem Hinauswerfen seines Geistesvermögens (aus seinem Kopf) nicht mehr nachkommen ist. So ist auch Nietzsches Kopf explodiert. So sind alle diese verrückten philosophischen Köpfe letzen Endes explodiert, weil sie mit dem Hinauswerfen ihres...
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March 2013
15 posts
3 tags
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“Oisive jeunesse
À tout asservie,
Par délicatesse
J’ai perdu ma vie.
Ah! que...”
– I love you, Tumblr: almost everytime I open you up, I think of these insuperable lines from Rimbaud. This stanza alone is worth all the pain of knowing French, all that endless buzzing in the head
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“Könnten wir da nicht eine unerwartete Zärtlichkeit seitens des Universums für...”
– http://alteritas.net/GXL/?p=1200
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“¿Cómo, muerte tenerte
miedo? ¿No estás aquí conmigo trabajando?
¿No te toco en...”
– http://minernm.blogspot.com/2011/05/juan-ramon-jimenez.html
Death, why should I fear you?
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“Ouais, après le pape des jeunesses hitlériennes, voici maintenant celui de la...”
– tiré d’un mail d’un ami canadien
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Ars poetica
We went to spot a trogon and I began to hum, picking paces down a path greater than their sum.
Milky lime, the river, sometimes smoky jade; in the brush, bromeliads; red orchids in the shade.
Cawing to the trogon as if we knew his sound, we surely drove him farther to the dim background
where flashes off the river flitted with the breeze and likenesses of birds flocked behind the...
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February 2013
7 posts
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“[Musil defines the sense of possibility, as opposed to the sense of reality, as]...”
– So ließe sich der Möglichkeitssinn geradezu als die Fähigkeit definieren, alles, was ebenso gut sein könnte, zu denken und das, was ist, nicht wichtiger zu nehmen, als das, was nicht ist. (Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Neuausgabe 1978. Reinbeck: Rowohlt, 1987, Band I, p. 16).
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“People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed...”
– —James Baldwin
Erratically Chasing Erato:
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The Horticulturalist (for Alfredo)
A flower in flight, the hummingbird flits from one lush shrub to another, shamming rhododendron ruffles, darting off to suck at drooping fuchsia, quick as the apprentice gardener reciting Latin names.
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Rilke, Liebes-Lied
How should I hold my self so it not brush against yours? How should I lift myself over you on to other things? If only I could press myself down in some lost dark place, into a strange, still abode where your own depths do not resound. Everything that touches us, you and me, draws us together like the stroke of a bow which makes two strings sing one voice. What instrument are we strung upon? Who...
January 2013
24 posts
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“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in...”
– Dwight D. Eisenhower, President of the US, 1952-1960 (Republican). Five-star general and Supreme Commander of the Allies in WW II.
Cited by Jill Lepore in The New Yorker, 28 January, 2013
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Rilke to Tsvetaeva, jealous over Pasternak
We touch from afar. But how? With airborne brushes our beating wings stir each other. Poets live alone. Sometimes another one comes forth, one who bears what we have borne.
Wir rühren uns, womit? Mit Flügel-Schlägen, mit Fernen selber rühren wir uns an. Ein Dichter einzig lebt, und dann und wann kommt, der ihm trägt, dem, der ihn trug, entgegen.
Val Mont Glion, Canton Vaud. 3 Mai 1926...
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Timbuktu mayor: Mali rebels torched library of... →
May those who destroyed these treasures and the Sufi shrines of Timbuktu rot in hell. These are not “rebels”, they are demons.
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