Links for Later

1. Two for Tennis
2. Lawrence Wilkerson refutes Dick Cheney thusly
3. DOJ blocks AT&T/T-Mobile merger
4. Thirteen Keys model predicts Obama re-election despite "lack of charisma and leadership"
5. A film producer with blindsight and a need to make only "serious movies"

Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day

By Delmore Schwartz

Calmly we walk through this April’s day,
Metropolitan poetry here and there,
In the park sit pauper and rentier,
The screaming children, the motor-car
Fugitive about us, running away,
Between the worker and the millionaire
Number provides all distances,
It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now,
Many great dears are taken away,
What will become of you and me
(This is the school in which we learn ...)
Besides the photo and the memory?
(... that time is the fire in which we burn.)

(This is the school in which we learn ...)
What is the self amid this blaze?
What am I now that I was then
Which I shall suffer and act again,
The theodicy I wrote in my high school days
Restored all life from infancy,
The children shouting are bright as they run
(This is the school in which they learn ...)
Ravished entirely in their passing play!
(... that time is the fire in which they burn.)

Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!
Where is my father and Eleanor?
Not where are they now, dead seven years,
But what they were then?
No more? No more?
From Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day,
Bert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume
Not where they are now (where are they now?)
But what they were then, both beautiful;

Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.

Links for Later

1. The failures of macroeconomic modeling (DSGE, EMH, CAPM, Chicago School, New Keynesians, Grand Theft Auto)
2. The failures of cost accounting, or Why Amazon Can't Make a Kindle in the US
3. Throughput accounting as a remedy
4. Another op-ed critical of White House strategy
5. Tim Ferriss profile
6. People who just don't get evolution
7. Steve Jobs, Norman Foster and "sandpile management"

Grant Morrison in Rolling Stone

Rolling Stone has a nice post-Supergods interview with Grant Morrison, including a description of his magical invocation of John Lennon:

"I put all the Beatles albums in a circle, a magic circle, wore my clothes from the band, tight trousers, Beatle boots, had a Rickenbacker guitar, and I had 'Tomorrow Never Knows' on a loop and I just played it, and I took this tiny lick of acid, just to give an edge. Basically, I got this image, this thing, like a huge Lennon head made out of music. It gave me a song – it's a pretty convincing John Lennon song."

At a Los Angeles book signing for Supergods with Way in late July, Morrison whips out a guitar and plays the song given to him by the floating Lennon head. "Keep taking the pills/Keep reading the books/Keep looking for signs that somebody loves you," he sings in a rough tenor. The audience laughs at first, then falls silent. He gets to the bridge – "One and one and one makes two/If you really want it to" – and the melody suddenly sounds like it could be on the White Album, or at least pass for Oasis.

Way, for one, is convinced. When Morrison performed the song in front of his two-year-old daughter, she started to dance – something she'd never done when her dad played guitar. "I was like, 'Well, clearly this is a John Lennon song,'" Way says. "Clearly!" Or maybe not. As Morrison observes in Supergods: "Things don't have to be real to be true. Or vice versa."

The New Heresy

Rick Perry has some very interesting friends.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Borges

On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I'd seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny -- Philemon Holland's -- and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon -- the unimaginable universe.

-from "The Aleph"

Quote of the Day

"The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him."

-Leo Tolstoy

(via boingboing)

Links for later

1. Interview with Alinea's/Next's/Aviary's Nick Kokonas
2. Nick Kokonas, part 2
3. DNA origami for metamaterials

Links for Later

1. Rafael Nadal, conceived as a brand
2. Dionne: Obama needs to go big or he'll go home
3. William Gibson on cities
4. Miguel Serdoura's tutor for the baroque lute

The Joy Formidable - Whirring

Surfer Blood - Swim

True Blood

This week, 500 year old vampire 19 year old miscreant Lyle Bensley crept into a woman's home and bit her on the neck in an attempt to "feed" and is currently sitting somewhere quiet. I love this country.

Quote of the Day

"I’ve been accused of not being macho enough to direct the Avengers. Oh yeah, that’s right. Well guess what: I happen to be very macho, so if you see me in a bar and you don’t think I’m macho, don’t talk to me. You walk away unless you want a cosmo all down your shirt. ‘Cause I will. I will pour it."

-Joss Whedon

Links for Later

1. The Memory Palace of Andy Drucker: how to multiply two ten digit numbers (and perform other tasks) very slowly in your head using Flickr photosets
2. Obama and the Left
3. More on Obama and the Left
4. Dan Savage
5. Jonathan Ive
6. Sample filtering affects results of psychological experiments

Two from L'Hote

Two great posts in a row from blogger L'Hote: First Principles, in which the basic mainstream liberal agenda is articulated and compared to the Administration's track record, and The Contempt Gap, which looks at the attitudes of the media and the libertarian left toward the core left.

Anderson Cooper Cracks Up

Gerard Depardieu gets very merry, urinates ex-lavatorially on a plane, AC gets very merry on air.

Barnaby Bright - Gravity

How to Fix the Economy in one Quote

This isn't hard. Hire people to build things with the free money the world is offering us.

-Jay Ackroyd

Links for Later

1. Jaron Lanier profile
2. The Day Borders Got the Wobblies
3. Scott Sumner on the War on Drug Users
4. A candle shaped like Morrissey's head
5. How Groupon affects the Chicago startup community
6. Rick Perry's Fed Up is Effed Up
7. Joshua Walters is a bit bipolar
8. Alan Richman gets good food, weird response from M. Wells
9. 50 tips on writing
10. Republicans + Islamists = Christian Dominionists
11. Diary of a Revolutionary Guard conscript

I Think Continually Of Those Who Were Truly Great

I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul's history
Through corridors of light where the hours are suns
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

What is precious is never to forget
The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.
Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light
Nor its grave evening demand for love.
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields
See how these names are feted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life
Who wore at their hearts the fire's center.
Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their honor.

-Stephen Spender