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Bruce Sterling's recent talk on dead media (and what they might look like, resurrected) is, as Sterling's speeches always are, entertaining and engaging. [worldchanging]

Internet Clocks, Counters and Countdowns

“My bad.”

There are days in which contemporary American history seems merest zombie lockstep, and days when someone manages to articulate the truth of that history. Yesterday, due to James Carrol, at the Boston Globe, was one of the latter.

I am reminded again, as I often am these days, of W.S. Merwin's poem (1967):

THE ASIANS DYING

When the forests have been destroyed their darkness remains
The ash the great walker follows the possessors
Forever
Nothing they will come to is real
Not for long
Over the watercourses
Like ducks in the time of ducks
The ghosts of the villages trail in the sky
Making a new twilight

Rain falls into the open eyes of the dead
Again again with its pointless sound
When the moon finds them they are the color of everything.

The nights disappear like bruises but nothing is healed
the dead go away like bruises
The blood vanishes into the poisoned farmlands
Pain the horizon
Remains
Overhead the seasons rock
They are paper bells
Calling to nothing living

The possessors move everywhere under Death their star
Like columns of smoke they advance into the shadows
Like thin flames with no light
They with no past
And fire their only future