5-Dimensional Kanban Board

The best smell in the world is the petrichor of impending rain. When the downpour is just about to start--has already started elsewhere--the feeling is so certain. There is no doubt that when it smells like rain, it will rain. But when will it rain? When does the rain actually start? Will it be a deluge? A sprinkle? Will we notice the rain? The olfactory system gives us an early warning, too vague to really serve us. The city of B ███ is full of such warnings. From a young age, the children of the town grow up learning to look, listen, feel for approaching trains. “You know a blind woman was hit by a train just last year?” Smell never comes into it. Used to be, the smell of coal lingered for minutes after a train roared through town. Now the only coal in B ███ is stuck in the walls, only showing itself in the tinderbox house fires and occurrence of black lung. The town died with the railroad, and like the railroad it limps forward. It ferries people into the city to the southeast. B

Decadent Beginnings, Symbolist Endings The Decadent movement was an artistic movement of art and literature from the late 1800s. Some place the beginning of the movement with the 1857 publication of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal , others as late as Anatole Baju’s magazine Le Décadent , first published in 1886. Decadent literature was the primary mode of French literature from the beginning of the belle epoque through about 1900, and the many schools of literature at the time, including Parnassism, Naturalism, 1 Symbolism, and Decadentism proper all fall under its purview. This decadent umbrella is primarily comprised of a group of themes which are themselves constitutive of much of what the Decadent movement represented. They include, in no particular order: Theophile Gautier’s Parnassian declaration “ l'art pour l'art” (art for art’s sake), the assertion that there are no deep or primordial truths, the preeminence of artifice over the natural, the modern city as a hive