Did Texas execute an innocent man?

From kottke.org:

"Did Texas execute an innocent man?:

Cameron Todd Willingham was convicted of intentionally starting a fire that killed his three children, sentenced to death, and after many failed appeals, executed by lethal injection. Now it appears that the investigators who made determination of arson were acting more like forensic mystics than forensic scientists in making their decision. The state of Texas may have executed an innocent man."

This is just one reason why I will never support capital punishment. 

W.H. Auden: "September 1, 1939"

W.H. Auden: "September 1, 1939": "

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,”
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

—W.H. Auden

Feral Houses

An interesting article in good magazine. What happens in the rust belt when plant growth takes over abandoned houses? Photography by James D. Griffioen. 

For those of us trying to figure out how to understand these places in which we live, metaphors are important. Griffioen chooses “feral” wisely. Feral houses are no longer domesticated, having reverted to a different state, like horses in the west who roam free of any rider, stable, or whip. They have transmuted into a different state of being, yes—but they do be. They are not, nor are their neighborhoods, as many like to call them, “dead.” (When Forbes published a list of the cities that have lost the most people this decade, they called them the “fastest-dying cities”—Cleveland and Detroit are on the list.) These cities, as Griffoen shows us, are teeming. Growth is everywhere.

Siebe Warmoeskerken - Krop Creative Database

Photographer: Siebe Warmoeskerken - Krop Creative Database

Polaroid Cameras and Film are Back

Last Polaroid cameras and film to be sold at Urban Outfitters tomorrow.

As a big fan of Polaroid film, this is great news.

[Via OhGizmo!]

Friday Poem

June Meditations

by SANDY LONGHORN

 

Start with a bird—a blue heron

coasting over the reservoir—

and a tree—a loblolly pine,

planted for paper and pulp,

dropping its rusty needles.

What does it take to be awake

in this particular world?

To be called is to be culled

from the thousands, to vow

to be eye- and ear-opened.

Start again with the confluence

of two rivers—a violent togethering

brought on by gravity and eons

of geologic sift and shift.

What does the one called forth

demand of the world?

Start here with the field

of strawberries and the flock

of blackbirds laying siege.

The one heart-shaped

fruit plucked and eaten

in advance is enough.

via 42opus

Updating

I'm in the process of updating the blog template. Things may look funny for a while.

Dan Brown to kill publishing or save it?

As the number of media outlets covering books shrink, and as fewer stores—think Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com—control more of how books get promoted and displayed, you don’t want your little first novel (or your potential blockbuster, more likely) to be hit by an avalanche of Dan Brown articles, TV interviews,  and step ladders. “It’s standard procedure to try to determine when other houses are publishing important books,” says a marketing executive at Penguin. “We often change our dates accordingly.” That, and the need, ever more desperate, to make sure your book lands at the top of the dwindling number of bestseller lists; because those lists are relative, no self-respecting publisher would want to put his Patricia Cornwell, say, up against Twilight author Stephenie Meyer, even more so if they have previously landed at No. 1 so a good part of an agent/author’s job is manipulating that pub date.

Still, it’s simply not possible to release only one book at a time, and even Doubleday has some big names that can’t help but compete for floor and media space with the megastar.


via bookninja.com