geegaw.com

working set

part 1 of our Women bringing in the moolah series Do female execs produce better stock returns?

also-- the tale of one happy li'l guinea pig & a bunch of very sad shy ones--

pre/post

For those of you who enjoyed the sheep stories: this mysterious message appeared in my inbox a few days ago:

I am Nell Zink. Long story. www.shats.com/AR. -N.

Indoor Sun Shoppe sells sunlamps, dawn simulators, and other seasonal-affective-apparatuses online.

Still rootin' for dordie:

Touch the vision
Within the resonate.
Off walls my deafening.
On nothing concentrate.

of the magi

It's gift-giving time at Chez Gaw, A.'s birthday being only a couple days from today. His find, with which I am immensely pleased: A Humument, a "treated Victorian novel," making art and poetry out of a found text. My gift to A: a pair of back-to-back novels-in-woodcuts, The Idea/Story Without Words. Also proferred the new comics anthology Little Lit, edited by Spiegelman and Mouly, with gorgeous folk tales illustrated by David Mazzuchelli and Lorenzo Mattotti among other people. (Comics hipsters note: the collection also contains a couple throwaway pages by Chris Ware and Charles Burns, and one story by Dan Clowes).

This weekend my dad got a chance to meet Pearleen Chan, Singaporean computer pioneer!

Happy belated birthday liquid gnome.

Buried in his verbal hemorrhage is the dagmar chili dot com very very short essay contest: "rules of the contest is, smoke ezzzzzzzz much dope as you can get your little green men into." Which for me, is "none" (heh).

pre-birthday assessment

Tomorrow I am 23. Sadly, I didn't write anything this year, but,

managed to start saving money

wrinkles (smile lines around the mouth and a funny little horizontal groove between the brows) and the occasional white hair

started investing in exercise videos, so lately I've been working out maybe 4 times a month. nevertheless,

physical condition continues to deteriorate

learned CSS, Javascript, DHTML; foray into ASP, ISAPI

moderating a women's list; did some volunteering with Laura

cooking skills have improved significantly

eating a little healthier

dressing a little more fashionably, I hope

nearing the final stage of my green card application

And next year I hope to:

eat lots of whole grains and veggies

take a brisk walk most mornings before work

go hiking on weekends, identify local plants/animals

be less angry, smile more, etc.

write!!!

Geegaw one year ago.

I can no longer avert my eyes: The cuckold, his squeeze, his wife, her lover. Writes the wife:

- LoveShackBaby Needs Help Poll -
Who do you believe I should end up with?
Thunderstruck (Gord)
IslandJack (Steve)
Flutterbymee (Tracey)

the magic feather

Schizophrenia transmitted by cats? (via rw) The article casually mentions the widely agreed upon statistic that some organic mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are correlated with winter and spring birthdays. (This is true in both hemispheres - thankfully I was born in blazing tropical heat.)

Chat with Stewie from Family Guy. You can see the effects of the alcohol kicking in as it goes on...

buy nothing day

Elsewhere, a friend is slipping through a crack in a teacup and I don't know what to say about it. But Sylvia Plath's experiences with electroshock therapy are chronicled in her poem The Stones:

... I lie on a great anvil.
The flat blue sky-circle

Flew off like the hat of a doll
When I fell out of the light. I entered
The stomach of indifference, the wordless cupboard.

The mother of pestles diminished me.
I became a still pebble.
The stones of the belly were peaceable,

The head-stone quiet, jostled by nothing.
Only the mouth-hole piped out,
Importunate cricket

In a quarry of silences ...

(note the poem's peculiar parent, neuroticpoets.com)

Whaddaya know, bloghop changed their ranking algorithm and our very own Jouke hit number 1 on the pop charts. I'm thrilled, and fruitlessly racking my brains for a crafty way to celebrate.

tryptophan

Our two local papers (the Seattle Times and the Post-Intelligencer) are on strike. In the meanwhile, daily local news is being provided by the strikers themselves. Very cool.

When it gets too noisy in Seattle, who to call and what to do.

'European nations and environmentalists are stepping up their demands that the United States commit itself to cut emissions of so-called "greenhouse" gases, which trap heat in our atmosphere and are warming the planet.'

A perfect vacation package in Washington State's Olympic National Park, for people who are in much better shape than I. Maybe it's to work toward.

mundan

Man, you know, I would absolutely love to be Sally Tenpenny, but I just ain't that funny or mean and I live in Seattle not SF. Really, I'm not her. I swear it on everything I hold sacred. I probably have more in common with this randomly selected internet chick than I do with ole S10P, who is probably a guy IRL. Now - please - let us never speak of this again.

Guglielmi's paintings do remind me of the landscapes in Enola Gay. The imposition of an apocalyptic feeling. Add a hint of science fiction to anything and it's improved considerably - poetry (Enola Gay), chick action TV (Dark Angel), sodas (Go Go)...

pavan

Looks like Kortbein, formerly of His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, is back at last! with a new name and a slightly different format. Today he's talking about William Carlos Williams.

I finished the entire His Dark Materials trilogy in a 24-hour period. Whew. The last book, the one that just came out, scared the bejeezus out of me. I couldn't sleep for thinking of that Auden poem,

And the crack in the teacup opens
    A lane to the land of the dead.

I do hope we end up doing a pot-luck Thanksgiving instead of going to a restaurant. I'm dying to try out these new vegetable recipes I have.

While walking through downtown tonight, walking very quickly with my headphones on and the music turned up loud, I passed a woman carrying a heavy bag, walking quickly in the other direction. She was being trailed by three young black men who were taunting her sexually, loudly, and laughing. On her face was a strained, fixed smile. I thought: I know that smile.

return

Home and very tired. Eastbound airplane reading: The Gastronomical Me (MFK Fisher) and Alias Grace (Margaret Atwood).

Westbound reading: the first two volumes of Philip Pullman's children's fantasy-cum-Paradise Lost revisitation, His Dark Materials, whose allusiveness, complexity, and grandeur surprised me. (Though it ain't Tolkien, Tolkien is a bit too much for me. This angry theology primer, filled with cute talking animals, is more my speed.)

my menagerie

Aeryllium, balamine, cread, dyrie, elorid, flossolia, gyacinth, holanthe, ialopy, jerosene, kament, letal, mova, nocyte, oen.

Some time ago, Douglas Wolk (who I'm fairly sure doesn't know me from Adam) posted the following to a mailing list I'm on:

Nell Zink, who is a very long story to describe, wrote three rather amazing, deeply unusual science fiction stories back in the mid-'90s--two short and about lambs, the other somewhat longer and less consistent and also partly concerning a lamb. I've read the second short one ("Science Fiction Story #2") aloud to a number of people, and the response is usually "the world MUST KNOW about this person."

Here is the first of those stories.

stakes and signs

The Perl Poetry contest restores my faith in machinekind with the following computer-generated quatrain (for Dirk):

Troll ignominy build join rattlebrained
Azan prosector hydrothorax mog
Defoliate accomplice holt constrained
Back prostatectomy numb door incog

Psychedelic drugs are being studied for their potential to cure OCD: time to call Dr. Hilarius (via Randomonium).

Original 1966 NYT review of The Crying of Lot 49.

I've stolen today's font from the gorgeous typography weblog Lines & Splines, which Gavin McG. pointed out over email. He also noted this pair of incredible Fluevog aluminum shoes, which look like nothing I've ever seen before.

(How do you like the new font and its default size? Remember, if you have Javascript and cookies enabled, you can use the "edit font size" buttons on the right to make it bigger.)

Lesson of the day: you absolutely can not use American pancake mix to make pa jun (the Korean savory scallion pancakes featured in this month's issue of Saveur). Faithful execution of the original recipe, however, results in a wonderfully simple comfort food. Here's my simplified version:

Combine 1 cup flour, 1 tsp salt, 1/4 tsp pepper, 3/4 cup water, 1 raw egg in a mixing bowl (adding ingredients in order).

Snip the roots and ragged tips off a bunch of scallions, then lay them down on a non-stick skillet. Heat the skillet over medium high heat.

Pour about 2/3 of the batter over the scallions and cook for 2-3 minutes. (Refrigerate the remaining batter - the mini-pancake it'll make is good for a midnight snack.)

Flip the pancake over using two spatulas. Cook on the other side until well done, in my experience another 2-3 minutes.

Slice like a pizza, then dip in a sauce made from 3 tbsp. soy sauce and 3 tbsp. vinegar (never hurts to shake on a couple drops of chili oil).

Next stop: Okonomiyaki!

leeks and loons

Jen points out the Victorian Sex-Cry Generator.

(Er, I had the wrong link up a couple hours ago - accidentally linked to some kind of porn site. So sorry!)

[Notes From the Front Lines Of the Technology Revolution] my dad writes, "since I have deleted some 200+ WINDOW system files, I am concerned my WINDOW is not working properly or adequately, even though I can still email and browse the internet...."

"This is Radio Norwich, and that was Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell, a song in which Joni complains that they 'paved paradise to put up a parking lot', a measure which actually would have alleviated traffic congestion on the outskirts of paradise, something which Joni singularly fails to point out, because it doesn't quite fit with her blinkered view of the world. It's 4.37 a.m. and you're listening to ' Up with The Partridge '...."

sleeping

It's cold out here, but the breath doesn't cloud, and the black pools on the sidewalk are still water, not ice. Nevertheless, it's hard to take the three mile walk to the nearest decent bookstore, when one can stay inside drinking peppermint tea and reading stories about perfect travel, like London on a shoestring.

According to the Progressive Review:

The most ironic factor in the Florida election was the fact that over 400,000 largely black ex-offenders -- 31% of black men in the state -- have been permanently barred from voting thanks to the authoritarian justice and prison policies backed to the hilt by Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

- and of course, that's a demographic with a strong tendency to vote Democratic.

Got new glasses on Friday, with an uncanny resemblance to Enid Coleslaw, not in an entirely flattering way: I could easily pass for one of the people who work the night shift at Barnes and Noble, bless their geeky little hearts. Oh well, I'm only gonna be young once...

He "Digesteth Harde Yron".

precog

Tried and failed to get past the first page of The Varieties of Religious Experience this afternoon; I had a much easier time with The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick, written and illustrated by R. Crumb.

You absolutely must listen to Anne Sexton read this poem Her Kind, unremarkable among Anne Sexton poems except for being available on audio.

On Going Mental.

There is nothing to do. I shall be good as new.

legends of porkishi

Dictionary of Difficult Words

Ghost World gallery from Fantagraphics

Oop, I just conducted a 90 minute job interview with a bobby pin half-falling out of my hair. (At least I wasn't the interviewee.)

revelation -> contrition -> absolution

I was listening on the bus to two little kids as they made up stories about these three imaginary porcine wrestling champions (Stephanie McBacon, Porkishi the Pork, and Grandmaster Fatty) when they started laying into presidential candidate Texas Governor George W. Bush (you've heard of him, haven't you?)

--Daaaamn, Bush, you make a snail look fast!
-- You make the pigeons look tasty.
-- You make a rat smell goooood.
-- You made my tennis shoes fall off.
-- You make the ocean look like a drop of water.
-- You take your baths in the Pacific.
-- When you sit on a rainbow, it rains skittles.

Remember when collaborative art was fun?

ether

If you thought Dagmar_Chili was weird check out her My Little Pony redesign - total 80's girl nostalgia trip

Also, over email she points out the Journals of Sylvia Plath, whose excerpts online are pretty freaky esp. August 3.

- got a nice line from 'distorted scream' log featuring Moby the adorable cat - wants to know where my pretty background image went. What background image?

Looks like my election-based mourning was premature. Portrait of the undecided voter.

goddamned florida

Our age has seen the chilling face of evil (via the lovebirds)

I called in sick again this morning because I still felt queasy and achy. Then the phone rang. I didn't recognize the voice and I was too out of it to figure out what was going on. Turns out it was Judith calling from the airport. She told me she'd blown all her cash in Vegas and was on the lam hiding from her creditors. "I had a blast last night in Dallas with Denise," she explained, "but when the Cheneys took out a contract on me, I knew it was time to skip town." There's only one thing a girl can do in that position, which is shop, so we tried on the charming new arrivals at Ped and then danced across the street to Ardour to pick up some gauzy handmade sweaters. I was worried about maxing out Judith's credit card until she flashed it at me with an impish grin: the name in raised letters said HEATHER CHAMP. Whee!

I told her she was more than welcome to stay on our couch, but she declined. She had a redeye flight to catch, and was mysterious about her destination.

If you spot her, let Heather know.

..:::;;

This is the first time I've heard of "Landslide Lyndon"

[.......In 1948, Lyndon B. Johnson wouldn't have won the Democratic nomination for U.S. senator without the backing of dead voters in Jim Wells County. .........]

"Yes ol' Landslide Lyndon.... them stiffs got up from the grave and marched to the polling booth, sign the polling record, in alphabetical order with the same pen and handwriting, them marched back to the graveyard, ..... all this without anyone seeing a thing...... Or so it's said....." »

feeling in the pipeline

Today this site celebrates the birthday of the long-ago-lost pen friend who initiated me into the world of Italo Calvino, Philip Dick, Neuromancer, the Throwing Muses, the Cocteaux, the Innocence Mission, and pre-med almost a decade ago. I remain a loyal fan of everything but the last item on that list. B., I send you my best thoughts, wherever you are.

The Zen TV Experiment via lemonyellow:

The problem is not that TV presents us with entertaining subject matter, but that TV presents all subject matter as entertaining. This transcends TV and spills over into our post-TV life experiences. TV trains us to orient toward and tune in to the entertainment quality of any experience, event, person. We look for that which is entertaining about any phenomenon rather than qualities of depth, social significance, spiritual resonance, beauty, etc. In this sense TV doesn't imitate life, but social life now aspires to imitate TV.

Is this a problem?

& the grand prize

& the grand prize goes to TH for:
no delicacies
by Ingeborg Bachmann, translated by Margitt Lehbert

Nothing pleases me anymore.

Should I
dress up a metaphor
with an almond blossom?
crucify syntax
on a light effect?
Who would rack their brains
over such superfluous things--

I have learned an understanding
with the words
that exist
(for the lowest class)

hunger
        disgrace
                tears
and
                        darkness

With the uncleansed sob,
with despair
(and one day despair will drive me to despair)
in the face of all this misery
the number of sick, the cost of living,
I will manage.

I don't neglect writing,
I neglect myself.
The others
Lord knows
can use words to get by.
I am not my assistant.

Should I
take thought captive, march it
to an illuminated sentence cell?
feed eye and ear
with the choicest word morsels?
research the libido of a vowel,
calculate the collector's value of our consonants?

With this head crushed by hail,
with writer's cramp in this hand,
under the pressure of three hundred nights,
must I
tear the paper,
wipe away the instigated word-operas,
thereby destroying: I you and he she it

we you?

(Should really. The others should.)

My part, let it be lost.

dwarf lamprologines

Now that Mulder's laying low playing Merlin-in-the-tree, Scully gets to do that cornball tough-woman-on-her-own schtick that, no matter how poorly acted, always hits me right in the plexus. Whoo! Now only 7 days till part II of the season premiere, and 9 days till the next episode of Dark Angel.

Gore needs to stop running his ads. Every commercial I see makes me want to vote for Nader more, even though that's 1/2 a vote for Bush.

The October-November 1998 issue of Poetry had a translation of Ingeborg Bachmann's Keine Delikatessen which was easily five times better than the uninspiring version I've got. (If you click on the link, take care to read Jessie's review: it's spot-on). If anyone with access to a decent library could dredge up this poem, I would be forever grateful. (Update: I got one! See above entry for details.)

ref: the German and the babelfish

Sadly, I speak not one word of German, and fail completely to re-translate it from memory:

Nothing pleases me anymore.

Shall I
grace a metaphor
with a spray of almond blossom?
Or crucify syntax
for a light effect?

...

My work, let it be lost.

emerald shatter/give me strength

Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise?

An evil kneel & adore.
This is human. Hurl, God who found
us in this, down
something . . . We hear the more
sin has increast, the more
grace has been caused to abound.

.::

Today Paul muses about all the delightful and strange music that comes from islands like Iceland and Scotland. I second that and third it: New Zealand.

Of what's available on Amazon, I enjoyed not-recent Alastair Galbraith and the Cakekitchen. A. also pointed out The Pin Group ("Coat") and Roy Montgomery.

thin ice

Sleep has been shallow and my dreams just thin processions of nebulous ideas. Writing about them is like trying to collapse a wave form - "there was a jungle animal, like a giraffe, or an elephant wearing a bow tie, sitting backwards on a chair, with the chair fallen over, to form a figure like the number 4 rotated 90 degrees clockwise."

BROADCAST CALL TO PEOPLE I KNOW IN REAL LIFE: are you interested in alpha-testing the product I've been working on for the last 15 months? Mail me for more details.

lyrical interlude a la DF:

They make rude remarks about me
They wonder just how wild I would be
As they egg me on and keep me mad
They play me like a pit bull in a basement, and for that

I'm asking, will you Mary please
Temper my hatred with peace
Weave my disgust into fame
And watch how fast they run to the flame

Overheard on a DL: 'This summer, I realized that I have a personal mission statement. It is to "Create Economic Parity for Women through Technology".' ... I am deeply moved.

'Weblog farewells' are being collected, over at chesslog. You don't have to stop writing your weblog, but you get all the fun of pretending you will, kinda like faking your own death so you can see who comes to your funeral.

From a Mark E. Smith interview transcript via Metascene:

A couple of years ago I got this commission to write six episodes of, funnily enough, it was going to be like an X-files thing, so I said I'll do the six 25 minute stories. So I spent all this time doing it, and the music, and got all these people to help me with the scripts, got them all ready, went to the TV station and they said, Oh we've changed our minds, the new directors. [...]

So I burned half of them. [laughs] And I used the ones that were left for bits of Nearly Man. I started getting deliberately obscure myself. That was the fun bit of it. I had people reading out parts of the script in the wrong tense [laughs]. The third person. They'd say, this can't be right, can it, and I'd say, No, leave it, it's great [laughs].

I would have liked it to be about an hour and a half long, more speakers, and using these stereos you can get now where the bass is behind you and the drums are in front of you, this glorified furniture. I thought it would be good to have the voices like that, so that there's someone talking behind you.

Oh, and Lehman's not a loser, I'm just disappointed in him because I really don't care for Malley's work at all...

simmering

Was told at work: "I'm not going to deal with this, I'm going to go outside and smoke a cigarette." ... And I thought I was stressed.

Pikachu's own Nintendo64

Dagmar Chili writes:

in an interview of Ashbery I came across this, his clever way to give an exam in a poetry-writing class---
"So in order to pass the examination time I had to think of various subterfuges, and one of them is to use one of Malley's poems and another forbiddingly modern poem - frequently one of Geoffrey Hill's "Mercian Hymns". And asking them if they can guess which one is the real poem by a respected contemporary poet, and which one is a put-on intended to ridicule modern poetry, and what are their reasons. And I think they are right about fifty per cent of the time, identifying the fraud . . . [the] fraudulent poem."
http://www.jacket.zip.com.au/jacket02/ivja1988.html

apparently David Lehman would fail such a test:
http://www.jacket.zip.com.au/jacket02/lehman02.html

Conclusion: David Lehman is a loser! Sigh... I did like his book "Signs of the Times" quite a bit, although I've oft been bitterly disappointed in his actual poetry...

A. reminds me: 'Sigur Ros aren't mainstream, they're "mersh"!' Hee hee.

Our fifth(!) anniversary is coming up, three weeks from today. Nice-restaurant-in-Seattle suggestions much appreciated.

remember the short-lived wren glass diaries

I don't think they look very bad.

A long long time ago, a computer wrote this:

So much light and a woman awoke without a world
& be the shuttle of water, stone don't see.
Fire streaks the top, stopped looking. And my silences
are flapping like paper so that we may write
our bodies out to know 1) Something unsaid 2)
The man and mine, and every bed

I plan to be in Boston 11/17-11/20 to hear my brother perform in concert. I shall be staying with fantastic Lisa and her scrubbed-till-hypoallergenic cats who, if they ever think of me, think of me with mixed feelings.

I am too easily influenced.
Too much air more diffuse by the grass.
Convulsions ensue, in the strong sea.