My point is: if you're a writer in Vancouver, there's an obvious temptation to figure out the enigma of a city that's a cross between a multi-ethnic Floating World Shangri-La and a shabby netherworld of boarded-up storefronts, discarded heroin needles, and basket-carts of the homeless rattling through the back lanes. It might be interesting to know how a poet sees this West Coast patchwork...
Only Bollywood does more to unite India than its railways. The statistics beggar belief: every year, Indians take 5.4 billion train trips, 7 million per day in suburban Mumbai alone. New Delhi Station sees daily transit of 350,000 passengers, which is roughly five times more than New York’s LaGuardia Airport, and enough to make Grand Central look like Mayberry Junction. The railways’ total track mileage rivals the length of the entire U.S. Interstate Highway system, even though the United States is three times the size of India. Among human resource problems, the railways of India are an Everest. Its employees outnumber Wal-Mart’s by a figure comparable to the population of Pittsburgh. The world’s only larger employer is the People’s Liberation Army of China...
Old art becomes impenetrable (which is not to say, unenjoyable) when we no longer have the will or the knowledge to re-create the mindset of its makers and audience. The Goddess of Discord hangs high up (and abominably lit) in the Turner gallery of Tate Britain. The figures are hard to read, the colour dim. But mental distance is the real difficulty. The dragon high on the mountainous horizons that defends the Garden of the Hesperides looks absurdly like a huge crocodile – Ruskin estimated its length at about three-quarters of a mile. Thinking geology while retelling mythology, he also points out that the scaly wrinkles of its back are a very good representation of the broken surface of a glacier...
Kebab meat, consisiting of roast lamb and spices, had traditionally been served with rice but in a moment of inspiration Mr Aygun saw that the future lay in putting the meat inside a pitta bread.
That allowed customers who had been drinking to wander off into the night with their food and eat it as they stumbled home.
Mr Aygun once said: "I thought how much easier it would be if they could take their food with them..."
The Four Children then entered into conversation with the Blue Bottle-Flies, who discoursed in a placid and genteel manner, though with a slightly buzzing accent, chiefly owing to the fact that they each held a small clothes-brush between their teeth which naturally occasioned a fizzy extraneous utterance.
'Why,' said Violet, 'would you kindly inform us, do you reside in bottles? and if in bottles at all, why not rather in green or purple, or indeed in yellow bottles?'
To which questions a very aged Blue-Bottle-Fly answered, 'We found the bottles here all ready to live in, that is to say, our great-great-great-great-great-grandfathers did, so we occupied them at once. And when the winter comes on, we turn the bottles upside down, and consequently rarely feel the cold at all, and you know very well that this could not be the case with bottles of any other colour than blue.'
'Of course it could not;' said Slingsby, 'but if we may take the liberty of inquiring, on what do you chiefly subsist?'
'Mainly on Oyster-patties,' said the Blue-Bottle-Fly, 'and, when these are scarce, on Raspberry vinegar and Russian leather boiled down to a jelly.'
'How delicious!' said Guy.
To which Lionel added, 'Huzz!' and all the Blue-Bottle-Flies said 'Buzz!'
At this time, an elderly Fly said it was the hour of the Evening-song to be sung; and on a signal being given all the Blue-Bottle-Flies began to buzz at once in a sumptuous and sonorous manner, the melodious and mucilaginous sounds echoing all over the waters, and resounding across the tumultuous tops of the transitory Titmice upon the intervening and verdant mountains, with a serene and sickly suavity only known to the truly virtuous. The Moon was shining slobaciously from the star-bespringled sky, while her light irrigated the smooth and shiny sides and wings and backs of the Blue-Bottle-Flies with a peculiar and trivial splendour, while all nature cheerfully responded to the cerulaean and conspicuous circumstances.
In many long-after years, the four little Travellers looked back to that evening as one of the happiest in all their lives, and it was already past midnight, when - the Sail of the Boat having been set up by the Quangle-Wangle, the Tea-kettle and Churn placed in their respective positions, and the Pussy-cat stationed at the Helm - the Children each took a last and affectionate farewell of the Blue-Bottle-Flies, who walked down in a body to the water's edge to see the Travellers embark.
As a token of parting respect and esteem, Violet made a curtsey quite down to the ground, and stuck one of her few remaining Parrot-tail feathers into the back hair of the most pleasing of the Blue-Bottle-Flies, while Slingsby, Guy, and Lionel offered them three small boxes, containing respectively, Black Pins, Dried Figs, and Epsom Salts: and thus they left that happy shore for ever...
Warlord Sun King: The Genesis of Eco-Baroque is an installation being developed by Bruce Conkle and Marne Lucas and will be shown at Marylhurst University's The Art Gym in Gallery 2 from February 22 to March 25 2009
There is a line of reasoning which accepts that totalitarian ideologies were shaped by apocalyptic and utopian thinking, while insisting that liberal humanism is entirely different. They - the Nazis and communists - may have been deluded and irrational; we - enlightened meliorists - have purged our minds of myth. In fact, the belief in progress in ethics and politics, which animates liberal rationalism, is itself a myth: a view of history as a process of redemption without the Christian belief in a single transforming event, but nonetheless a faith-based narrative of human salvation. It is obvious that human life can sometimes be improved. Equally, however, such gains are normally lost in the course of time. The idea that history is a process of amelioration is an article of faith, not the result of observation or reasoning.
