Blue Dot Real Good Chair Experiment.

I found this video through one of my favorite design blogs, Kitsune Noir, which is based here in L.A. The video, which effectively is a commercial spot for Blue Dot, a high-end furniture store, takes the concept of dumpster diving to a whole new level. I love it. This is what advertising should be.

I also have a thing for chairs.

Blu Dot Real Good Experiment from Real Good Chair on Vimeo.

It "couldn't cope with metaphor..."

excerpted from the AWP's The Writer's Chronicle:

Computerized Exam Markers Fail Hemingway, Churchill, Golding

Some of the world’s most well known writers have received failing marks when submitted to a new computerized marking system for British school essays, the Times Online reports. Winston Churchill’s 1940 speech exhorting his countrymen to “fight on the beaches” had a style that was too repetitive according to the computer. The speech was rated below average. William Golding and Ernest Hemingway came up short as well, ranking less than standard in the American equivalent of an A-level English exam. A passage from Golding’s Lord of the Flies was docked for its two-word paragraph: “A face.” Graham Herbert, deputy head of the Chartered Institute of Educational Assessors (CIEA), an umbrella body for exam boards and other organizations, said: “The computer was limited in its scope. It couldn’t cope with metaphor and didn’t understand the purpose of the speech. We also tried a passage from Hemingway. It couldn’t understand the fact that he had a very spartan style and (it) said he should write with more care and detail. He was also rated less than average.” This system, already in use in the United States, was created using a range of comments by human graders in response to exam papers. While the program recognizes sentence structure, other elements such as style and purpose are not recognized. According to Herbert, some children in America had “cracked the code” by learning to write in a style that the computer understood. This was called “schmoozing the computer,” he said. “At the moment we do not have a reliable and valid way of assessing English language using a software package, although this is something for which there is demand.”

Vegetable Love.

for The Restless Chef . . . a poet after my own turnip heart....

Resolutions.

I know it's fashionable to dismiss the practice of making New Year's resolutions as cliched and token. But I consider resolutions to be like a marriage of a good "to-do" list with the Consolation of Philosophy, and I am never one to look askance at a well-wrought to-do list, nor at Boethius for that matter, so I do engage in this little ritual.

Just before Christmas, I found the little white card where I jotted down my resolutions for 2009 last January. Out of six, I checked two completely off (find a church community I can live with and publish more) and made some progress on a couple others. Clearly, publishing my first book of poetry was the professional (and perhaps personal) height of my past year, although learning to put up five-dozen jars of Drunken Fig Jam was definitely a highlight. Too bad it wasn't a resolution.

I cringe at the fact that the first thing on my 2009 list of resolutions is also the first thing on my 2010 list--the ole "lose weight & get in shape" goal--not because it isn't a worthy or, lord knows, necessary resolution, but rather because it is the superlative cliche of the entire cliched act of making resolutions, as anyone who has sat through a round of network TV commercials in the past week can attest to. At least I don't smoke.

The trick to doing an acceptable list of resolutions is the Boethian half of the model I propose--it's no fair including such whimsies as "straighten desk" or "write thank-you notes" on a list of annual goals. These are the stuff of refrigerators and pocket calendars, not New Year's Resolutions. To have resolve, after all, is to dally with earnestness. One must be philosophical about the passing of time, if nothing else.

Nonetheless, I did include "going to the dentist" and "renewing my passport" on my 2010 list. I need at least a couple resolutions I can cross off in a slightly-more-than-philosophical sense.

Pink.

I found him in my Christmas stocking. I expect big things out of my desk this coming year.

Christmas Poem.

Each year, I write a Christmas poem for the annual card. I do this in the spirit of Robert Frost and Joseph Brodsky, neither of whom were known for being a Christian poet--or particularly religious at all, for that matter. I started doing it as a way to share a poem with a different audience, and as a challenge. It's hard to write a poem drawn from a biblical verse and the quintessential Christian story that is faithful to the text and contexts without being heavy-handed, literalizing, or dogmatic. I take neither my poetry nor my faith with dogma.

Last year, I wrote about the shepherds, and this year our pastors at the church used a line from my poem as the title of their sermon this past week:

In the Same Country

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field,
keeping watch over their flock by night. (Luke 2:8)


Night feels like the bottom of the well. He clenches closer.
Stars dance between the bodies of sheep, grasses rustle.

Against his back, the usual tree wanders with his breathing.
When the light comes, it is neither lantern nor stick nor sun.

The sky cracks open. His field is ablaze without flame.
He presses his face to the dirt, pants, cries out for the others.

Feathers graze his skin like a story. It is both old and new,
the telling of a memory, the song of a multitude in a single

moment. He hears it spoken on the wind, in the lit dark,
and, forever after, he will be shepherd to those words.

Driving down Lake Avenue, I looked over and almost had an accident when I saw the sign for the first time.

This year, I moved forward in Luke to the story of Simeon, which is rather a hard spot to find poetry in. He's a withered man, who wants to warn Mary about the crucifixion even as she is a new mother. But I took a stab (sorry for the pun) at it anyway:

Simeon at the Temple

And Simeon blessed them, and said unto Mary his mother,
Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of many
in Israel; and for a sign which shall be spoken against;
(Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also,)
that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.
(Luke 2: 34-35)


So that the heart may be struck
open. So that the piercings may undo
a body, running away in long tears
to ground itself back in the baby
on the straw, who soothes himself
to sleep under a star cast
into the universe not just for him.
So a sign may manifest. So it may.

Simeon spoke the words in his old
mouth. He saw his old skin, rippled
as a surface of water, lift the child
under the hewn sky. He felt all
his years returned to him
in the stares of the parents,
who marvelled to hear these
new words, from such a new man.

Merry Christmas to you and yours. Have a wonderful eve, and morning tomorrow! Now, back to some Eartha Kitt.

Lights.

Some of the lights of my life.