Freespace

My favorite bookstore

This is my favorite bookstore, Hein & Co. bookstore in Jackson, California. Of course, there's Powell's in Portland, but I rarely get there. Hein & Co. Is the best browsing bookstore I've been to. Great selection, great prices, great cats.

Friday poetry

Don Marquis is, alas, little rembered today. He was a newspaper columnist and humorist who wrote a series of poems supposedly authored by a cockroach named Archy, who banged out his work on a typewriter by leaping head first on the keys.

the lesson of the moth (1927)

i was talking to a moth
the other evening
he was trying to break into
an electric light bulb
and fry himself on the
wires

why do you fellows
pull this stunt i asked him
because it is the conventional
thing for moths or why
if that had been an uncovered
candle instead of an electric
light bulb you would
now be a small unsightly cinder
have you no sense

plenty of
it he answered
but at times we get tired
of using it
we get bored with the routine
and crave beauty
and excitement
fire is beautiful
and we know that if we get
too close it will kill us
but what does that matter
it is better to be happy
for a moment
and be burned up with beauty
than to live a long time
and be bored all the while
so we wad all our life up
into one little roll
and then we shoot the roll
that is what life is for
it is better to be a part of beauty
for one instant and then cease to
exist than to exist forever
and never be a part of beauty
our attitude toward life
is come easy go easy
we are like human beings
used to be before theybecame
too civilized to enjoy
themselves

and before i
could argue him
out of his philosophy
he went and immolated himself
on a patent cigar lighter
i do not agree with him
myself i would rather have
half the happiness and twice
the longevity

but at the
same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry
himself

archy

Conservative tea

Here's my question: is conserative tea made with Goldwater?

Beautiful libraries of the world

My friend Pagona passes along this great blog post of beautiful libraries in the world. Unbelievable. How could you everactually get any reading done in any of these? (I've tried reading in the Library of Congress Reading Room and found it virtually impossible.)

This is how grownups govern...?

I certainly sympathize with Schwarzenegger's side. But is this really necessary?

Democrat admits Democrats cannot resolve the pension problem

HT: A&G

Friday poem

"Lying" by Richard Wilbur

To claim, at a dead party, to have spotted a grackle,
When in fact you haven’t of late, can do no harm.
Your reputation for saying things of interest
Will not be marred, if you hasten to other topics,
Nor will the delicate web of human trust
Be ruptured by that airy fabrication.
Later, however, talking with toxic zest
Of golf, or taxes, or the rest of it
Where the beaked ladle plies the chuckling ice,
You may enjoy a chill of severance, hearing
Above your head the shrug of unreal wings.
Not that the world is tiresome in itself:
We know what boredom is: it is a dull
Impatience or a fierce velleity,
A champing wish, stalled by our lassitude
To make or do. In the strict sense, of course,
We invent nothing, merely bearing witness
To what each morning brings again to light:
Gold crosses, cornices, astonishment
Of panes, the turbine-vent which natural law
Spins on the grill-end of the diner’s roof,
Then grass and grackles or, at the end of town
In sheen-swept pastureland, the horse’s neck
Clothed with its usual thunder, and the stones
Beginning now to tug their shadows in
And track the air with glitter. All these things
Are there before us; there before we look
Or fail to look; there to be seen or not
By us, as by the bee’s twelve thousand eyes,
According to our means and purposes.
So too with strangeness not to be ignored,
Total eclipse or snow upon the rose,
And so with that more rare conception, nothing.
What is it, after all, but something missed?
It is the water of a dried-up well
Gone to assail the cliffs of Labrador.
There is what galled the arch-negator, sprung
From Hell to probe with intellectual sight
The cells and heavens of a given world
Which he could take but as another prison:
Small wonder that, pretending not to be,
He drifted through the bar-like boles of Eden
In a black mist low creeping, dragging down
And darkening with moody self-absorption
What, when he left it, lifted and, if seen
From the sun’s vantage, seethed with vaulting hues.
Closer to making than the deftest fraud
Is seeing how the catbird’s tail was made
To counterpoise, on the mock-orange spray,
Its light, up-tilted spine; or, lighter still,
How the shucked tunic of an onion, brushed
To one side on a backlit chopping-board
And rocked by trifling currents, prints and prints
Its bright, ribbed shadow like a flapping sail.
Odd that a thing is most itself when likened:
The eye mists over, basil hints of clove,
The river glazes toward the dam and spills
To the drubbed rocks below its crashing cullet,
And in the barnyard near the sawdust-pile
Some great thing is tormented. Either it is
A tarp torn loose and in the groaning wind
Now puffed, now flattened, or a hip-shot beast
Which tries again, and once again, to rise.
What, though for pain there is no other word,
Finds pleasure in the cruellest simile?
It is something in us like the catbird’s song
From neighbor bushes in the grey of morning
That, harsh or sweet, and of its own accord,
Proclaims its many kin. It is a chant
Of the first springs, and it is tributary
To the great lies told with the eyes half-shut
That have the truth in view: the tale of Chiron
Who, with sage head, wild heart, and planted hoof
Instructed brute Achilles in the lyre,
Or of the garden where we first mislaid
Simplicity of wish and will, forgetting
Out of what cognate splendor all things came
To take their scattering names; and nonetheless
That matter of a baggage-train surprised
By a few Gascons in the Pyrenees—
Which having worked three centuries and more
In the dark caves of France, poured out at last
The blood of Roland, who to Charles his king
And to the dove that hatched the dovetailed world
Was faithful unto death, and shamed the Devil.

(c/o Carol Peters)

Hey, whadda ya know?

This is unintentionally hilarious:

How can we most effectively weaken property rights…?  [F]raming property as bundles of rights and forewarning of limitations weakens perceptions of ownership and decreases resistance to subsequent restrictions….  The potential applications of this research to property theory are numerous. Legislators, judges, and regulatory agencies craft legal measures that respond to, or even capitalize on, strong, pre-existing frames of citizen-owners.

Yep, I’d say that’s about right!

(HT: RSR)

My Chapman talk on Lochner

I recently spoke to the Federalist Society at Chapman University School of Law (my alma mater) on the subject of Lochner and of constitutional protections for economic liberty in general. I recorded the talk and you can listen to it here. (It's a big file and takes a while to download.)

Neighbors mistake dead man for Hallowe'en decoration

For four days.