Absurdity, Allegory and China

A media statement released by Knauf on January 9, 2009 concludes The company is conducting a thorough investigation and cooperating with builders that have contacted it. Studies and testing by nationally recognized experts are ongoing.  The testing has confirmed that copper has blackened and may be caused by low levels of naturally occurring sulfur gases. [...]

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Meditation Poet I am in the retreat, day sixteen and I can’t get my mind off of anapest; anapestanapestanapest like an owl swooping down through the dark. But I know in my heart, in the deepest, most sanctified center the word that is driving me crazy is a fucking dactyl. dactyldactyldactyl anapest is a dactyl [...]

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In the last four days I have posted twice about the toxic drywall problems in southwest Florida, which have been traced back to Knauf Plasterboard Tianjin Co. Ltd. And yes, that’s Tianjin, China, Beichen District to be specific. (See here and here or just scroll down the page.) If you’d like to see how this [...]

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The drywall problem in southwest Florida that has been traced back to Knauf Plasterboard Tianjin Co. Ltd. of China continues to grow. A January 14, 2009 story by Mary Wozniak in the Fort Myers, FL News-Press raises the possibility that the suspect wallboard may have been used in the construction of three charter schools in [...]

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“A fishing pole is a stick with a hook at one end and a fool on the other.” –Samuel Johnson There’s an old joke I heard nearly three decades ago concerning a Fish and Game warden named Joe, whose jurisdiction included a large, well-stocked lake. (I was living  in Wyoming at the time, and the [...]

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I. Novitiate Just Me & Rinpoche Rinpoche’s dressed in red again, I’m full of fidget and sitting pains; he warns it’s all my former lives in hell. He knows more than I ever can about making concrete karmic gains; I just pray for the ringing of the bell. “So look! Here I am today together [...]

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The latest Chinese product flap is coming from Florida, and it centers on a plasterboard company in Tianjin, the Knauf Plasterboard Tianjin Co. LTD., part of Knauf, a Germany-based multinational supplier of building materials. According to a story in the Fort Myers, FL News-Press by Mary Wozniak there have been 50 complaints of drywall from [...]

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Last night before I went to sleep I read the poem “At Marathon” by Guy Davenport (see below), and for whatever reasons – this poem, a week of reading Sophocles (though Aeschylus was present at the Battle of Marathon and had this fact inscribed on his tombstone), discussion/thoughts on Werner Herzog films along with a [...]

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It’s hard not to like TED Talks – “Inspired talks by the world’s leading thinkers and doers” – though sometimes the dazzle of the presenters/presentations burn brightly in the moment and then fizzle in memory. This probably has more to do with my memory than the message, but not all the time. Case in point: [...]

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Not surprisingly, Beijing is well represented in the New Yorker piece, Paul Goldberger: Architecture’s Ten Best of 2008. In Beijing, it didn’t matter what the Dow was, of course, since the Chinese government’s decision to make itself the world’s leading patron of architecture was dependent on other things, including cheap labor. In time for the [...]

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