A Short Film I Made Earlier this Year in Response to Chris Marker's La Jetée

A meditation on time.

I did the music, soi-disant, too. I think of it more as "bodily organic ambience" than music. bio-soundtrack.

I love how Chris Marker's later super-short films fit in so beautifully with YouTube's and other social media's re-shaping of consciousness and attention span. Let's call it neo-span.

Stopping an Argument Going Nowhere

As a boy, I stood in drowned sneakers

and held up to the sun a crayfish

between my thumb and forefinger,

just plucked from the creek,

its pincers gyrating and pinching air,

trying to reach back far enough

to scissor skin and win release

from pain by pain. Win release

from pain by pain. Even in the dark places

under stones in creeks, whatever stones,

whatever other kingdoms, this immutable

is known. The dark imbricated plates

of her body were soft bronze. She knew me

enough. She’d treat any animal the same

and be blameless, not dwell as we do

after we use our natural defenses

to return to where we can breathe.

I’d call a friend over to see tiny dark eggs

she strummed under her body’s shields,

then drop her for the pleasure of seeing

that tiny splash, the dark zing backwards

into her watermind. She’d flex her entire body

and her big scoop tail would shoot water

through water as she flew to the safe

underplace. Each language, its dark, protective stones.

I am not a boy. I no longer lift

the roofs of stones from creatures.

Let dwell, let dwell.

Time is water and we must breathe under it.

Each in the darkness it calls home.

I Have a Poem in the Current Visual Voice

I love seeing what people come up with each month.

The whole ekphrasis thing. No ideas but in translation.

It

It is never finished.
I wake and walk barefoot
to the backyard,
past the spider universe
of the abandoned nook garden,
branches of everything-all-at-once
strangling or loving, who knows;
should I have said roses
in a poem, pedigree, pedigree
I have no use for.
Something wilder than roses
grows there and through me,
the birds getting excited
at my approach, summer
through us, they flee
in terror but will circle back
as soon as I’m gone,

as soon as I’m gone.

FDA Approves Ebola Vaccine with 100% Success Rate

Merck has developed an Ebola vaccine with a 100% success rate which has been approved by the FDA.

This is really wonderful news for the planet, especially when you look at the 2014-15 outbreak in West Africa where the death toll exceeded 28,000 people. Viruses with an ability to spread through casual contact in an age of global air travel are nothing to shrug off.

Technically, Ebola is not spread though "casual contact." If we use a CDC definition of the term. But if we use a civilian definition of the term, one might want to argue the point.  It's spread through bodily fluids. But then: "If a person sick with Ebola coughs or sneezes, and saliva or mucus touches another person's eyes, nose, mouth, or an open cut or wound, these fluids may spread Ebola." That's pretty darn casual. And it can acquired by touching such fluids on door knobs or other surfaces if one then transfers that inoculant to a mucus membrane such as one's mouth, nose, eyes, etc. That's a pretty common occurrence. Again, sounds pretty casual. Few people on the street or in their office in Kinshasa or anywhere else are going to be wearing gloves and goggles the way scientists going into Ebola zones wisely do. A co-worker's sneeze might mean Ebola transmission. So the word “casual” in “casual contact” when used in relation to Ebola might just be a misleading term used in a sedative phrase intended to quell public panic.

The different strains of Ebola have varied wildly in terms of mortality, with some variants having a mortality rate as high as 90% .

So a vaccine is really great news. It’s a cause for celebration. At least until the next plague says “Surprise!” It’s a never-ending war. Probably long after humans finally stop going to war with other humans, there will still be that microbial war and its many active fronts. The enemy is within. It has been a vital part of our evolution and the evolution of everything else alive.

I've recommended a book on this topic before and I will again today. If you want to read a well-written account of the first time scientists went to war against Ebola, check out Laurie Garrett's nonpareil The Coming Plague (1994). The long chapter "Yambuku" in the book gives a harrowing account of the first Ebola outbreaks, which occurred virtually simultaneously in Zaire and South Sudan (1976) and the international scientific response to them. This book was eerily prescient and forecast much of what was to come with the new millennium. And it's some of the best nonfiction writing you will ever encounter. 

Time Leaks

"Mysterious blocks of flotsam, about the size of a chopping-board, bearing the name 'Tjipetir' (a plantation in the Dutch East Indies—now Indonesia—operating in the late 19th and early 20th centuries), have been washing up on the beaches of northern Europe for some time through 2013 and 2014. They are believed to be blocks of gutta-percha from the Japanese liner Miyazaki Maru, which was sunk 150 miles (240 km) west of the Isles of Scilly in 1917."

"No, Wittgenstein did not invent the emoji"

Did you realize this was almost a thing?