Author: stevekuusisto

No two things look alike. Memories of childhood are pure melancholy. Analogy is all we know for sure. That man's crutches are my grandparents. Shadows sway on the bookshelf. The third book on the left is like a house where Strindberg once lived and where he believed in ghosts. I once met a very old man in a working class bar in Helsinki who told me how he and his cousin used to knock on Strindberg's door and run away. 

This morning I am thinking of the Estonian poet Jan Kaplinski, Zen Buddhist and linguist. Now winter frost comes to the trees and early, too dark for neighbors, I bent to the frozen grass and found a maple leaf in ice–so perfect it was a child’s wish. And the moon, just past full, was imperial above black windows. My heart was loud under my shirt as I stood on the lawn. Soon the essence of things will be more visible. The leaves are gone now. 

"In 2000, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were born from the Millennium Declaration, which was an unprecedented global consensus to improve the condition of humanity throughout the world. 
Today the MDGs are seen as the centrepiece of the development agenda. 
Notwithstanding the breadth and the scope of the MDGs, persons with disabilities continue to experience inequalities that are closely intertwined to all the development challenges linked to the MDGs. Disability remains as both a cause and consequence of poverty. Reaching the Millennium Development Goals is unlikely to be achieved unless the rights and needs of persons with disabilities are considered in the process of development."

See full article at the Swazi Observer: http://www.observer.org.sz/index.php?news=33264

"A new study shows that it is more difficult to "move up" in America than other developed countries. In America, kids are more likely to stay at the bottom of the economic ladder if their parents had low socio- economic status. Weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz talks with Erin Currier, manager of the Economic Mobility Project of the Pew Charitable Trusts, about why the U.S. ranked worst for economic mobility among the countries in the study."

See the full story at NPR: http://www.npr.org/2011/12/10/143509344/moving-on-up-more-difficult-in-america

They are the cliche’s cliche, the alimentary canal’s exohpthalmic archetype, the bug-eyed hairy unmentionable, and the friend of Hollywood–which is a matter only explainable by the leisure class’ fascination with infanticide. Don’t kid yourself. Fatty Arbuckle was the Platonic model for the entire werewolf industry but nowadays you will have to look him up, which tells you how decadent the whole thing has gotten. I say bleep the werewolves with their industrial reaction formations and their vomit which smells of Thorstein Veblen and Carl Jung. Me? I give a shit about the polar bears. The polar bears are going extinct while America goes to the movies. A tinsel moon floats over Fatty Arbuckle’s bungalow and the screenwriter who lives there takes another Ritalin. Werewolves for everybody. There’s plenty of ersatz offal to go around.

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How beautiful to see we are still funny. Five people and no one is selling anything. Though one of us who has lost a lot of weight lifts up his shirt and I say if he keeps this kind of display up, a piano will fall on him. The dog walks into the room with her dish clutched in her teeth. A five point buck looks in the window. Any moment now, Dr. Doolittle will drop by for coffee. We are just laughing animals. Save the human textbook for tomorrow.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

My wife has purchased a product called a "Happy Light" which comes in a box with a picture of a twenty something woman doing a yoga exultation, arms out, broad smile on her face, seated before her lamp of Luxor. I remember that when I was twenty I had that same look most of the time. I'm excited because obviously this lamp is going to make me into a twenty year old woman. The box doesn't reveal whether the yogic girl is wise or curious or shrewd. Yoga is, in America, a semiotic signifier of eastern wisdom, but in the east, they know that any idiot can stand on one leg. I'm just saying. I'm going to approach this lamp with great care.  

Each morning the dream recedes like retractable claws. In the 19th century they believed it was always the same dream. You were afflicted all night long by the cruel father or voracious mother.  

The more enlightened among us see that you can dream of a library. 

Last night I dreamt something having to do with the Dead Sea scrolls. There were lots of badly dressed, vatic people who were vaguely happy. They were beside the water and believed they were loved by the divine. They had plenty of words to support this. 

There wasn’t a cruel mother in sight. Unless she was offstage somewhere. Perhaps dear old mum was the dead sea itself, but that’s so Vienna, don’t you think?  ƒ