It fascinates me that people believe there is some sort of contrast between the “inspiring” messages of Steve Jobs, like his Stanford commencement speech, and his ruthless, destructive style of doing business as reported in and around his newly-released biography. There’s no difference between Oprahfied messages about pursuing your dreams and radically self-serving behavior. Maximize one, and you maximize the other. If you’re going to sanctify self-involvement, don’t criticize it for attaining its natural outcome.

Call the girl asleep on the bench an avalanche:
swiftness is not her calling, but she will forgo stillness
to become the eel in his big glass world, otherwise known as a jar.
Call the boy on the terrace an insect. His thoughts, minuteness.
Call him Yashpal, Surinder, Joseph, Millipede. Don’t
call it to his face, or his million legs will crumble. Call that love
Call this century a fortress. The girl and the boy waking
to the oddness of brevity every day. Call their year a
novel, but say it lightly. Call it a novella, then.
When they step out into the city, call it a brothel. Call
them like their mothers; call them “cacophony” and
“dissidence” and they won’t know what you’re talking
about. Call that love, again. Call this narrative
a momo. Steamed. They’ll eat it for lunch, and step out
into a riot. Call it drama, and they will meditate through it.
Call this violence victimhood. Call academia buggery.
Call poetry trivialising loss, and
don’t go back to the beginning. 

– Deepika Arwind, published in The Caravan, October 2011

Graphically indistinguishable from U+00A1, Temherte Slaq differs in semantic use in Ethiopia. Temherte Slaq will come at the end of a sentence (vs at the beginning in Spanish use) and is used to indicate an unreal phrase, often sarcastical in editorial cartoons. Temherte  Slaq is also important in children’s literature and in poetic use. Debate is needed among Ethiopian scholars to determine if inverted exclamation mark is acceptable.

— “A Roadmap to the Extension of the Ethiopic Writing System Standard Under Unicode and ISO-10646,” Asteraye Tsigie, Berhanu Beyene, Daniel Aberra, Daniel Yacob

1. If you work hard, and become successful, it does not necessarily mean you are successful because you worked hard, just as if you are tall with long hair it doesn’t mean you would be a midget if you were bald.

2. “Fortune” is a word for having a lot of money and for having a lot of luck, but that does not mean the word has two definitions.

3. Money is like a child—rarely unaccompanied. When it disappears, look to those who were supposed to be keeping an eye on it while you were at the grocery store. You might also look for someone who has a lot of extra children sitting around, with long, suspicious explanations for how they got there.

4. People who say money doesn’t matter are like people who say cake doesn’t matter—it’s probably because they’ve already had a few slices.

5. There may not be a reason to share your cake. It is, after all, yours. You probably baked it yourself, in an oven of your own construction with ingredients you harvested yourself. It may be possible to keep your entire cake while explaining to any nearby hungry people just how reasonable you are.

6. Nobody wants to fall into a safety net, because it means the structure in which they’ve been living is in a state of collapse and they have no choice but to tumble downwards. However, it beats the alternative.

7. Someone feeling wronged is like someone feeling thirsty. Don’t tell them they aren’t. Sit with them and have a drink.

8. Don’t ask yourself if something is fair. Ask someone else—a stranger in the street, for example.

9. People gathering in the streets feeling wronged tend to be loud, as it is difficult to make oneself heard on the other side of an impressive edifice.

10. It is not always the job of people shouting outside impressive buildings to solve problems. It is often the job of the people inside, who have paper, pens, desks, and an impressive view.

11. Historically, a story about people inside impressive buildings ignoring or even taunting people standing outside shouting at them turns out to be a story with an unhappy ending.

12. If you have a large crowd shouting outside your building, there might not be room for a safety net if you’re the one tumbling down when it collapses.

13. 99 percent is a very large percentage. For instance, easily 99 percent of people want a roof over their heads, food on their tables, and the occasional slice of cake for dessert. Surely an arrangement can be made with that niggling 1 percent who disagree.

Occupy Writers

There is no ripeness which is not, so to speak, something ultimate in itself, and not merely a perfected means to a higher end. In order to be ripe it must serve a transcendent use. The ripeness of a lef, being perfected, leaves the tree at that point and never returns to it. It has nothing to do with any other fruit which the tree may bear, and only the genius of the poet can pluck it.

Henry David Thoreau, The Journal, 1837-1861

I see perception more as a plane that intersects the cone of being emanating from each thing-point:

The ultimate expression or fruit of any created thing is a fine effluence which only the most ingenious worshipper perceives at a reverent distance from its surface even. Only that intellect makes any progress toward conceiving of the essence which at the same time perceives the effluence.

Henry David Thoreau, The Journal, 1837-1861

1. Being
2. Language
3. Consumption
4. Christ
5. Relations
6. Earth
7. Time
8. Lack
9. Mind
10. Occupation

Let mind be more precious than soul; it will not
Endure. Soul grasps its price, begs its own peace,
Settles with tears and sweat, is possibly
Indestructible. That I can believe.
Though I would scorn the mere instinct of faith,
Expediency of assent, if I dared,
What I dare not is a waste history
Or void rule. Averroes, old heathen,
If only you had been right, if Intellect
Itself were absolute law, sufficient grace,
Our lives could be a myth of captivity
Which we might enter: an unpeopled region
Of ever new-fallen snow, a palace blazing
With perpetual silence as with torches.

—Geoffrey Hill

I hate the present modes of living and getting a living. Farming and shopkeeping and working at a trade or profession are all odious to me. I should relish getting my living in a simple, primitive fashion. The life which society proposes to me to live is so artificial and complex—bolstered up on many weak supports, and sure to topple down at last—that no man surely can ever be inspired to live it. I believe in the infinite joy and satisfaction of helping myself and others to the extent of my ability. But what is the use in trying to live simply, raising what you eat, making what you wear, building what you inhabit, burning what you cut or dig, when those to whom you are allied insanely want and will have a thousand other things which neither you nor they can raise? The fellow-man to whom you are yoked is a steer that is ever bolting right the other way.

Henry David Thoreau, The Journal, 1837-1861