October 31, 2001
tip me over and pour me out
So... very... tired... Haven't done any reading or gone to Latin class in about a week; so much for literacy.
Eureka! Aaron/PasteMob explains the tuna:
... and T. explains the epigraph:
Confidential to T.: I accidentally deleted your last missive, and your email address with it. Gah! Can you re-send it? Pleeeeeease? I'm so terribly sorry!
Met up with the Seattle Bloggers again last night. What a friendly bunch of technophiles. A list of them has been compiled by the energetic Daniel Talsky and there is a discussion group if you would like to join it and be notified of future events. Bless Jish for setting the whole thing up.
Revelation of the night: Jim/Everything Burns picked up a copy of the Codex Seraphinianus for $30 at Half Price Books... AARGGH! I swear to god, those people have no idea of the value of half their own inventory. Anyway, Jim, you're my new best friend, at least until I can get a gander at that book, at which point I will promptly drop you until I remember that you said you had a copy of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.
I have been laughed at for recalling the title of the Stendhal book as "The Charnelhouse of Parma." But only two letters differ!
Someone writes in the diablog:
I am Mighty Morphin' Procrastinator!
"Mighty Morphin'," eh? Not sure what to say except that our tastes all change as we mature, and I really don't think the volume of reading you do is at all important compared to whether you feel like you're getting anything out of what you read. Anyway, it sounds to me like you put tons of energy into your blog and online discussion groups and stuff. You probably read way more words per day than I do, you almost certainly know way more internet people than me, so I don't really see a problem...
To which someone responds:
You're right as ever. I was trying to put a rosy spin on it, and ended up not addressing the actual issue.
When I have trouble reading, I tend to go to the library where there's nothing else to do but read. If I'm feeling the need for a density of ideas to crunch through, I go to Barnes and Noble (comfy chairs, no pressure to buy) and read through the prefaces of books I'm interested in reading someday... they often contain analysis of the books along with a summary of the good parts, which is just enough spice to pique my interest.
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October 30, 2001
bastard tuesday
Apparently, Aaron/PasteMob was in the Boston Globe on Tuesday (10/23), not Sunday. (City pages, B2.) Here's the photo they took of him, and apparently the blurb read:
Wohoo! Go Aaron!
I really like yesterday's dagmar_chili, ("twilight of 5violet ..."). Maybe she's embarking on a new symbolist phase.
It utterly, utterly breaks my heart to see that Anne Carson will be giving talks in Vancouver this Thursday and Friday (via eclogues). If you live in Vancouver, please go, so I can live vicariously through your experience. I probably live better that way, too. Did I mention that last week I opened up my copy of In the Western Night, purchased 1994, to find the following written on the flypage in an unfamiliar hand:
Whose participation in class today was generous, and terrific --
All best,
Frank Bidart, Dec. 19, 1995
...and I was like, what the fuck happened? I don't remember being in a class with Frank Bidart in 1995? But then the more I dwell on it, like worrying at a loose tooth with my tongue, the more clearly I can make up this partial memory of how he must have driven from Wellesley to visit one of my professors and he must have liked what I had to say. Like Daffy Duck in Disneyland -- I can't track down the actual link, but there was some study recently on how easy it is to implant false memories. The researchers asked all these people questions about their childhood trips to Disneyland and then snuck in a question about "Do you rememer Daffy Duck being there?" and all these people said that they had, even though Daffy Duck is actually a character from Warner Brothers.
A. and I have been spending an awful lot of time at Dolce Vita, the new gelateria at 2123 Queen Anne Ave. at the top of Queen Anne hill in the old Crusty Loaf bakery space. It's a comfy wood-paneled cafe replete with Italianophile memorabilia and really nice staff (they were running ads in the Stranger this summer that said, "Starving artist? Come get a job at Dolce Vita"). They're too new to be on Citysearch, but business is thriving so much that they've started branching out into espresso, donuts, cookies, and these incredible paninis...
From Gog, Magog, Chevron, and Shrub via New Improved Mushrooms via my referrers:
And all our allies lineing up behind
us
Badweather friends
Dare's oil in dem dare heels don't ya
know
Will some one take me down to the Caspian Sea an drown me.
What's with this new Thon du Sac (apparently, "tuna of bag") thread over there on the right? Hm? (I used to be bothered by this site's comparatively small audience but now I'm grateful since it lets me get away with capers like this. You guys are a damn weird bunch!)
Changed the font sizes of my CSS because of some tips I picked up from Lukas/Lukwam. Mac users, can you read this? Let me know either way.
Oh yeah, go read the metafilter text ad-vertisers, since they've been kind enough to donate money toward the Internet community...
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October 29, 2001
bastard monday
New Seattle Times article today: Death, one drink at a time.
I am so sorry. I can't stop drinking. (The rest is illegible.)
Those journalist bastards, damn them for making me cry.
And as for those angels at filepile, bless them for making me laff with this Hamlet remake -cum-Scooby-Doo that actually scans.
Brain, brain, brain. Dead, dead, dead. Day in bread. La de da.
Anita wanted to know if I was going to participate in Weblogs.com's new "push" model, and I'm afraid that for right now the answer is sorry, no.... When one updates half a dozen times a day, it kind of gets to be a pain in the butt. If you're interested in update trackers, you can check out Ray Davis/Bellona Times's Weblog Updates site, which has a nice selection of lit-rit blogs presented in subhonkeresque format. A smaller subset of these blogs, including this one, is tracked here.
James/Mindful Link Propagation mentioned to me that he'd stumbled across Ella Minnow Pea, a playful novel that brings to mind the Pesos family. Basically, through some complicated setup, the book contains the letters of a bunch of people who live on an island with a shrinking alphabet. Apparently the book gets 'progressively quirkier and more inventive as alternative spellings ("yesters" for "yesterday") and word clusters ("yellow sphere" for "sun") come to dominate the language.' Rock!
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October 28, 2001
sunday
I saw a wonderful, utterly faithless, lovingly presented new/old translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses in the bookstore the other day: Arthur Golding's translation from 1567. Featuring such clearly Latinate words as "hittenmysse" (hit-and-miss).... One of the Amazon reviewers praises it as "a veritable storehouse of strange, funny, quaint Elizabethanisms that didn't quite make it into Shakespeare or the other mainstream writers of the period." Here's one of the sample pages, oh my god, iambic heptameter rocks so hard! It's like a doubled-up Emily Dickinson ballad meter (aka "The Yellow Rose of Texas) see, let me halve up the lines for you:
With plaine and simple foode,
That on the earth of natures gift
Without their travail stoode,
Did live by Raspis, heppes and hawes,
By cornelles, plummes and cherries,
By sloes and apples, nuttes and peares,
And lothsome bramble berries...
Wish I had time enough to read it, and also to read Chapman's Homer, and Dryden's Virgil.
(But at my back I always hear
Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
There poetry shall not be found,
Nor, in my vault, shall echo the sound
of pages turning: worms shall try
My well-preservèd library...)
A bunch of blatantly spurious self-advertisements for a certain website have been deleted from the Diablog. Forgery will not be tolerated! Even if the guilty culprit happens to be one of the most entertainingly inventive webloggers... Let no one accuse this site of favoritism.
And a recent flattering comment was deleted within hours of its being posted, on the grounds that I'd prefer it not go to my head. The question was, how do those webloggers manage to keep up with 20 sites a day and pursue other interests (e.g. reading)? I don't know how they do it. Me, I certainly fall far short of that 20 site/day mark (5 is more like it), and I don't read anywhere near as much as I would like. But far as I can tell, the secret to being impressively well-read is two-fold: Don't have a day job, and don't have a life. I've got one of the two down pat, and it's really helped me get more reading done. You should try it!
- Withnail & I
Me too, man. Me too. Except for the "smiling on Tuesday" part. 'Cause, see, whatever day you re-emerge from a tricyclic-induced pseudo-coma, that day becomes Monday, spiritually, a Monday of the soul. Even if it could put you under all the way through Friday afternoon. So there must be a better solution, though getting myself fired is probably not it, and I'm working hard on figuring this out.
My achievement of the weekend: UTF8ToUnicode in VBScript (which, if you haven't heard of it, is one of those "toy languages" that give C programmers the fantods). Having to do bit manipulation without the luxury of hexadecimal numbers, bitwise operators, or the left and right shift was nearly the death of me (through irritation), though of course it all came up roses in the end, except that the black-box layer between our VBScript and our SQL database is munging all the high-byte characters somehow. No wonder I try to drown my sorrows in books...
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October 27, 2001
a grey, cold, happy saturday
Tra la la, this new router I'm getting is going to spare me from $25/month in static IP fees. It'll be a dent in my next credit card bill, but like they say, you gotta spend money to save money, right? Anyway, stay tuned for a couple days of downtime in the next week or two while I get this baby renumbered. (Fervent thanks to Seattle Bloggers Jerry and Shawn for suggesting it! Click on them, for they Know Stuff!)
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October 26, 2001
friday (at last!)
This has been the longest week...
This diablog thing is so much fun! Lots of high-quality reader input, less pressure to reply via email (which, if you have't already noticed, I suck at). Improved the diablog return interface, fixed a ton of bugs in the handling of HTML tags, gave up on fixing others. Added support for <img>, line breaks. Moved the comments section to the right for the benefit of Lynx users (i.e. me), (although you guys still won't be able to see the magnificent gray boxes that distinguish the words of others from what comes directly out of the maw of Gaw.) Anyway, let me know if you have other suggestions.
Now that the amanita thread has quieted down, I'm going to move it into the main area for preservation, because I like it so.
Which I love because it indicates both the possibility of broadening one's mind on a journey and the possibility of flattening one's face in a pratfall.
I was talking to B. the other day, who is about to leave for Bangkok, and a friend of his mom's, while trying to give him travel advice, kept on describing various parts of Thailand as "trippy" so often that B. had to wonder whether his mom's friend had seen the entire country on acid, or what...
"There's something that I've never seen before
The flowers often bloom at night
Amanita is the name they cover over everything
Wow, someone's a real amateur(?) mycologist here. I think "The Lost Judgment Mushroom" would be a great title for a book. Oh yeah, and man, did anyone catch R.E.M.'s surprise gig at the Crocodile on Tues.? Certainly not I.
I think this one is a hoax...
This one has GOT to be a hoax!
Try "it"? :) Those indefinite antecedents get me every time. But I guess we're all born with a passport to the undiscovered country.
...
Oh that is disappointing. I should have hoped they would have the class to at least use the pale blurry "censored" areas, which wouldn't clash with the rest of the video.
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October 25, 2001
free wig with purchase of large wig
And I with thee will choose to live.
(I finally got around to reading Il Penseroso, once I realized that the poem itself was not actually in Italian.)
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October 24, 2001
here, drink this down, we've been here way too long
Glamourous, cool people always slink into Halloween parties glittering. What do pathologically shy cheapskates do? Tear some holes into an old shirt and fishnets, daub purple lipstick around my eyes and try to make my lips pale with foundation, then give up... I have to think of something... There must be something I can do with the princess Maud dress. Nothing matches, but nothing clashes badly enough to be a "statement." Nothing fits. My hair isn't yet long enough to be messy.
A. reminds me that the literal definition of "apotheosis" involves bodily ascension into heaven. Also, R.G. reminds me that Aphrodite is supposed to have emerged from sea-foam that gathered around the severed genitals of Uranus after his son Cronos cast them into the sea. And yes, I did a Google search on "severed genitals" in order to find that link for you.
Stevens wrote on the birth of a lesser Aphrodite: The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage.
And here's Glaucus's lament, from Keats's Endymion via Bulfinch:
At things which, but for thee, O Latmian!
Had been my dreary death? Fool! I began
To feel distemper'd longings: to desire
The utmost privilege that ocean's sire
Could grant in benediction: to be free
Of all his kingdom. Long in misery
I wasted, ere in one extremest fit
I plung'd for life or death. To interknit
One's senses with so dense a breathing stuff
Might seem a work of pain; so not enough
Can I admire how crystal-smooth it felt,
And buoyant round my limbs. At first I dwelt
Whole days and days in sheer astonishment;
Forgetful utterly of self-intent;
Moving but with the mighty ebb and flow."
I think I forgot to mention that James/Laboratorium is back. Or, even if I did, here it is again: James is back with more of that cultural analysis you love so well. And while I'm at it, let me plug Aaron again, now that he's conveniently bookmarkable in his new incarnation of Aaron/PasteMob. There is a partially obscured picture of me somewhere on that site, see, the tissue dims and thins...
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October 23, 2001
tuesday
I made a few listmania lists the other day.
The amanita thread going on over there on the right is really fun to follow; thanks, folks. I like "Flowers of Guatemala" quite a bit, because it's pretty, but I confess I've got Curve's "Horror Head" on repeat in my brain -- that's the song that goes (wordlessly): do re, re mi, mi fa, la fa, over and over again for five minutes. Have been listening to it all day, trying to avoid the Bach (Well-Tempered Clavier) that's been prescribed me.
Spending a lot of time at work really pays off. I had one of those think-outside-of-the-box breakthroughs around 7:15pm, when the lights went out in my office, and so I'm kicking back for the night, watching taped-up episodes of Buffy. It looks like my fyevrit vampyr, Dru, is going to get a lot of airtime this week. Good deal.
And late coffee and oranges in a sunny chair
And the freedom of a green parakeet upon a rug
Are all very well
But it's Monday friggin' morning!
And I'm late!
You're real late, bucko, since you posted that on a Tuesday morning!
Oh yes. Someone's been sending in that sentence repeatedly, he says it's because of its historical relation to current events. It means "Carthage must be destroyed" Anyway, Carthage is female, so it ought to be delenda. Wheelock's explains the phrase.
Comment:
ceteram censeo carthaginem delendam esse (or something like that)...
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October 22, 2001
monday
A very windy day. Waited at the bus stop, leaning forward on my elbows, looking down at the pavement between my feet: one oval, yellow leaf; tiny glittering puddles; a little soil. My mind, as well, blowing all over the place.
Seems today that the city is composed of beauty and evil. The evil is mostly ugly, and not very much of the beauty is good.
People on the street talking about something, I don't know what. "I've tried my whole life just to get beyond it."
And the Seattle Mariners have edged out anthrax in the headlines, so of course I can't stop thinking about those powders -- and ancient evil (malum antiquum) -- and Paul Muldoon's line about the British attack on the American Indians: "They gave us six fishhooks / and two blankets embroidered with smallpox." (Meeting the British, 1987.) And then RobotWisdom links to a history of mad honey (the passive deployment of grayanotoxins in warfare in 67 BC), and then Robert Graves' foreword to my edition of his The Greek Myths writes:
So it makes me wonder what it would be like to try some of that -- just like if you were to receive an envelope with cyanide, or some anthrax to inhale, wouldn't it cross your mind for a split second? When you remember the other worlds that lie just under or within your own? A friend sends in a link to Rimbaud's The Drunken Boat, asserting that it describes a drug-induced odyssey so transfigurative that the author can never recover. Here's a few excerpts:
where mingle with flowers the eyes of panthers in human skins!
But, truly, I have wept too much! Dawns are heartbreaking.
O let my keel split! O let me sink to the bottom!
If there is one water in Europe I want, it is the black
cold pool ...
What happens when someone dies, or trips on acid, or takes ketamine, or Prozac? Some chemical starts or stops, a change invisible to the human eye... Your body is right where it was, and do we even have a name for that kind of travel? There are other worlds next to our own, death seems like just one of those worlds, don't you ever want to visit? And the scariest thing about them is that I couldn't be sure of finding my way home from that, no, quite to the contrary.
...
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October 21, 2001
sunday
O Stephene, fortunem diem natalem!
So here's the skinny on the new feature which someone just named "diablog": you can post some text directly into the layout of geegaw, and the last few things posted will appear in this area on the right. Every so often, if I see something that seems to be a response to something I blogged, I'll move it into this right-hand column below the relevant entry. And I'll remove stuff from the bottom when the list gets long. Sound fair?
Some clever little entries so far... thank you, anonymous writers.
...
breakthrough in chiliology
[the following entry has been retroactively edited for gender]
At some time well after my initial phase of ardent Dagmar_Chili fanhood, I reached the point where many of her entries began to make sense, and they got even better. I want to share this with you because I know a lot of people are like, "Oh, Dagmar Chili, that site's all bluster and no substance." So here's a dagmar_chili entry, and my translation of it follows:
While buying a toffee pigeon and left a durnup it to the sing, they heard this poisonous thing on the radio. Luckily they are all obscure nonentities. Then they went to heaven if they think so, if that's what they start getting them in the center for using directions
Which means:
"While I was buying my morning coffee, some of the townfolk were listening to a program about anthrax on the radio. Luckily they are all obscure nonentities [thus won't be targeted]. Then the terrorists went to heaven because they believed they would. That's how they start recruiting terrorists in the Middle East, the ones who rely on others' directions."
And after three damned months I think I've also figured out the principle behind her nonsense period, where each line of verse has been rearranged as an anagram according to certain positional rules, for example:
n,n abs demdecCesrhhls
nch'rglheobhaoirtleh, cTetst b
s nc at lin howw tpcfchhfwhtae
turns out to be:
Chess blend, send charm
To the trench's light, clobber a
spent clown whiff. Hatch watch.
Note that the first line of the poem is a chiasmus of sound, like the first line of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan", so I mean, this one knows her stuff, okay? More forthcoming, as I have time for it...
Comments:
I suppose Dagmar is a woman's name, so I've changed my pronouns accordingly. But I have no idea what "left a durnup..." means.
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October 20, 2001
saturday
NME has an article about that Pagan Poetry video I linked to earlier (if you missed it or had trouble downloading earlier, it's at Bjork.com and zippy-fast now that it's hosted by Akamai). Anyway, sounds like it's not a stunt double at the end. Uh. The director Nick Knight says, "Her dress stops just below her breasts and she's sewn pearls into her skin. She approached me with the idea. Her original idea in Iceland was to sew pearls into her nipples. She wanted to show her sexuality." Yowza.
...
Comments:
October 19, 2001
friday
At some point many winters ago, Susan/Sugarspun looked cold, so I gave her my scarf. Months passed, I entirely forgot about the matter, and then in the spring she presented me with this lovely, brief, silky-mauve, handmade wool scarf in sort of a lacy-nubby knit. She had knitted it herself to replace the one she had lost, can you believe it? It's now one of my favorite accessories of all time. Anyway, Susan links to the Fantod Deck, an Edward Gorey-based system of divination.
Feeling grim. I've decided that I'm suffering from a lack of bodily awareness. That's what you call it when you find yourself shivering in wet hair and a towel, having spent the past hour surfing for sweaters on the internet and making a mental note which of them you are going to buy once you regain the courage to leave the house. No wonder I get sick all the time.
So I dried my hair, pulled on my doodly jeans and a genuine Irish wool sweater Rachel bought for me on her honeymoon (there's a hole in the shoulder that I keep sewing up and it keeps reappearing), and turned the heater on. The house looks like it was hit by a williwaw, I'm going to clean it up today. I'm going to make some flashcards for Latin class and pay up all my outstanding bills with some money I took out of my savings account last week.
The third and fourth fingers on my left hand hurt from where I think I slammed it in a door, in my sleep, last night. I woke up with my hand wedged between an icepack and the pillow, and a vague memory of a bolt of pain in the middle of the dark. Clumsy me.
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October 18, 2001
thursday
I have cool, hand-decorated, furiously-scribbled-upon-with-ballpoint-pen-during-a-week-of-hellish-meetings old/new jeans. Here's a photo of part of them.
Buffy reruns started screening on FX a while ago, and ever since the beginning of the second season there's been something campy and touching about it. Juliet Landau plays my favorite vampire. She says wonderful things, like "Miss Edith speaks out of turn. She's a bad example, and will have no cakes today." Or, to one of her child-victims, "My mummy used to sing me to sleep at night. Run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch... She had the sweetest voice. What will your mummy sing when they find your body?"
Seduce the one you love with Trance Words. Eww. And it gets worse, with Embedded Commands Techniques.
A couple of my trance words: "sweetie," "alienated," "panda."
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October 17, 2001
wednesday
135,000 people were killed in the fire-bombing of Dresden...
RE the new War Vote computer worm - please tell your parents and unsavvy friends, if they are MS Outlook users and you haven't yet upgraded to Outlook 2002 or installed the right security patches, then they shouldn't double-click on the attached file called WTC.EXE. Or any file ending in .exe, for heaven's sake. But apparently if you're more worried about your snail mail, you can steam iron your letters before you open them. Holy shit, it's that simple? --via Ray/Bellona Times.
I have all the spine of a boiled noodle. The exciting new "get your war on" comic that's getting linked all over, they talk about what's better than anthrax. (Wave to Lukas and others who have recommended the www.mnftiu.cc guy). Anyway, I'm worried about my family, which lives all over the place. I know it doesn't make any sense after having lived through two military coups, countless threats of being bombed by China, etc. as a kid -- whereas nothing bad has happened yet, that we know of, within a thousand-mile radius of Seattle -- but still.
Comment:
O visitors and surfers from outside of the continental United States, I ask you: What country do you live in, and how quickly can an English-speaking programmer get a work visa there?
From Robert Graves' autobiography:
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October 16, 2001
tuesday
Given up on the summer's (sumor's) hopes of writing (wrntan) this site (guiegaue-dotte-comme) in Latyn, now having hopes for a broekn sort of pseudo-Olde or Myddle Englishe? E. g., thou, nom. // thee, acc. // thy, thine, gen. I wish i had the time to read this old english grammer page or more than a couple pps of this blah blah fucking blah sittin meetings onder telephone sitting meetings coding meetings all the livelong day
...
Oh boy. I am so late for work. But very tired (sleepy), can't hardly stir.
i am toad:
an:
more here.
I don't think Gibbon's that bad. A better example is Milton's Areopagitica or the opening of Johnson's preface to Shakespeare and of course of course of course the 'Oxen' chapter of Ulysses!
I guess you got a 100% streak, old boy. Oh, happy bloomsday+4mo, everyone.
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October 12, 2001
friday
Now that Aaron's Fiction, Ltd. project is starting to amass some substantial archives, I am pleased to introduce him to whichever of you web readers haven't seen it linked off of proleptic and I think some other sites? The deal is: you send him 5-10 words or phrases, and he takes an hour to type up a short story based on them. He's been setting up shop in Au Bon Pain with a typewriter and a little card proclaiming his services, which frankly, rocks extremely hard. From my favorite so far, which was written for his dad:
PLAN: Spend all day slamming the front door.
DESIRED RESULT: A great big hole in the ground swallowing the house, like
Mom said.
RESULT: No hole. Mom angry. No additional discipline for harnessing self
to handrail of front stairs, though.
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October 11, 2001
briefing for a descent into hell
A cynical rendition of the current geegaw
title ("Write 'pax' across the window pane"). (14K .WAV file)
Someone sends in the text of Catullus 85, Odi et
Amo, "since you seem to like Latin so much." This is great, because
it was Frank Bidart's homage
to this very same poem that sparked my first interest in Latin.
Also of note: Anselm Dovetonsil's brilliant interpretation of the same,
Otis and
Amos.
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October 10, 2001
wage "bellum" on their hineys
I like this Mr. Scotchy
comic, also
alert in
Sector Eleven.
I want to say something further about "Monkey Gone to Heaven," which is
that the
lyrics revolve around the death of the old gods in the modern world -
e.g. the Poseidon figure "got killed by ten million pounds of sludge from
New York and New Jersey" but that it ends with what I find to be a deeply
affecting [movement toward|claim for]
a world beyond our own, and powers greater than our own. Expressed in
charming occult-numerological terms! But of course, none of it would be
worth a darn thing without Kim Deal and Joey Santiago.
At some point today I wanted to point out the irony that a site named
MetaMeat is written by a vegetarian,
anyway, he writes in to respond:
Indeed! But I also have to put in an honorable mention for the lyrics of
"Weird at my
School." Because yeah, that happens. -P/mM
Show Studio has an amazing
music video for my favorite new Bjork song, "Pagan Poetry." (NB: may not
be appropriate to watch from work.) (via Fred/Metascene)
Am told, almost certainly by Toadex/Dagmar_chili:
Wage "bellum" HIR HEN STEINOY!! Wkers!!!age ihe fuc [bu
October 9, 2001
blah blah blah
Shivering in the shower waiting for the air around the hot water to
heat up, reminded me of a book from my
childhood, Madeleine L'Engle's Many
Waters. That's the one where the kids go "Take me someplace warm and
sparsely populated," and end up in antediluvian times, battling nephilim.
"Many waters cannot drown love" was the title, I loved it well.
Which came to me in the shower, small caps and all:
OPPOSE THE
TALIBAN:
BOYCOTT
HEROIN
...
In a trash mood, diet down the drain. Surfing fashion websites, pigging
out on ramen and pistachio ice cream. Just saw an ad for Prozac Weekly on TV. So
like, my moods could cycle on a weekly basis instead of a monthly one?
Also, check out this black
wool blazer, and and and this ruby
"reefer" coat, and the following sumptuous
grey and ivory,
and multicolored
wool sweaters, lots and lots of sweaters! It's cold out here! But, armored
with a new fiscally responsible resolve, I shall not fall for the tactics
of the corporate manufacturing behemoth! I have not made any clothing
purchases since the 19th of August!
But my parents have been informed that, for my birthday, some
boots
would be deeply appreciated. And
I know they will get them for me, because I know how much they want me to
stop thinking about the dead.
And parts of the poem by Li Bai, the famous one that ends
"There is another world beyond the world of men," keep popping up in my
head. Here's one version. Wish
I could find the original.
Don't
miss this, the selected works of Chilled the Fresh, click on the
names of the Authors to see more gutsplitting hilarity (via Ray/Belladonna)
I am told:
Rock me, Joseph
Alberto Santiago... (apparently it's a line from a live version
of "Monkey Gone to Heaven")
Yeah I should listen to the Pixies more (Where
is my mind?). I like
your taste in music ;-) But I still hate getting up in the morning.
the pixies own your ass, you just be leasin'
That's a pretty good list you have there. I
really
love some of that stuff.
In particular, the Pixies and Liz Phair. I love her. I have such a
crush on her. Oh man. She went to Oberlin, just like me! - Lukas
^_^ ...Actually, today I have been listening to There Is a Light That
Never Goes Out.
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October 8, 2001
si non valetis, non valeo
In which Alice once again reveals herself to be a woman of shamefully
mainstream tastes
... blame whoever it was who mentioned the Pixies. Songs to which I
have danced in front of the wide mirror in my room, on repeat, with the
lights off, a partial list
Songs to which I have curled up on the carpet in front of my stereo and cried, on repeat, similarly incomplete and in roughly chronological order
...
Someone writes in anonymously:
Someone else writes in, sadly,:
To which I reply, in these times, grateful am I just to be alive and to have the vigor to get up in the morning.
Okay, more comments coming in (I should just set up one of those "comments" links that are all the rage these days).
Oh no, getting up in the morning is not fun at all, but I'm still grateful that I'm strong enough to do it.
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October 7, 2001
good-bye to all that
This Handspring Visor accessory "personal massager" comes with two electrode pads, uses EMS (electronic muscle stimulation) to deliver tiny shocks to your muscles to help you relax. (thanks Lauren/Proleptic)
Published in 1883, English as She is Spoke is probably the worst English phrasebook ever written. And beautiful in its own found-poetry way, Part One in particular reminding me of the Ben Marcus:
Calamary Large lobster
Dorado Snail
A sorte of fish Wolf
Hedge hog Torpedo
Sea-calf.
Then there are three pages of dialogues that you simply cannot miss, a section of instructive anecdotes, and an 'Idiotisms and Proverbs' section ("Friendship of a child is water into a basket."). This is way too good to be not a hoax. (Thanks, as ever, to S.)
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October 6, 2001
mus sum... Minimus sum!
I wish I was 7-10 years old again so I could study Latin with Minimus the Mouse, the new and apparently fairly popular British effort to start teaching Latin at the primary school level. According to the official website, 'several schools report lists of children waiting to join the clubs; a little girl fainted at school. She had eaten no food all day "because Minimus club starts tonight and I was too excited... " ' Instead, have spent the day making flashcards. But I really want to be reading Minimus: Starting Out in Latin, even though I know I'm of an age where I should be reading the Teacher's Resource Book instead...
The Onion has an interview with Judd Apatow, of Freaks and Geeks, lately of Undeclared.
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October 5, 2001
links from friends
Via MeFi, a funny palindrome: "Rettebs iflahd noces, eh? Ttu, but the second half is better." (thanks Tobey)
Also a bawdy Latinate poem, The Lay of Ancient Rome, by Thomas Ybarra. Excerpt:
And said, on starting homus,
"Hic labor --- opus est,
Oh, where's my hic--hic--domus?"
Java applet: Chinese clock tells the time in Chinese characters. (thanks Dirk, who also writes "Renoir may have said it also, but Utrillo was the painter who actually exposed himself (usually to the very prim and proper English ladies out on a "daring" tour of Montmartre) and yelled "I paint with it!" -- he was an alcoholic -- his mother, the model-turned-painter, Suzanne Valadon, had him start painting to distract him from drinking. He was the best-selling painter of that time period.")
CaterinaAndStewart/Caterina have a new and very cute puppy. May many years of good health lie ahead of him.
Jessie recommends Laura Flanders's columns at workingforchange.com.
Mitsu/SyntheticZero recommends the new weblog [sub]cult(u|r|e).
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October 3, 2001
happy birthday lisa
Oh my god, I am so busy. Happy birthday Lisa I love you. That is all.
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October 2, 2001
Pereant
Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt(screw those who wrote our words before we did.)
"Madness & booze, madness & booze.
Which'll can tell who preceded whose?"
"I paint," Renoir said, "with my penis." (quoted here) Also, "I never think I have finished a nude until I think I could pinch it." (WebMuseum). Then Rilke wrote,
Ach, aber met Versen ist so wenig getan, wenn man sie früh schreibt. ("God fucking damn, verses don't amount to jack shit when one writes 'em as a young 'un.")
...
It's 'cause I just started taking Latin class, at night school, yesterday. We haven't learned any actual words yet, but I'm jumping the gun, trying to translate a little of Stevens' "Banjo Boomer" without any knowledge of declensions, etc., and with the aid of the Tufts English-Latin dictionary. If you have any corrections please send them in!
...
The mulberry is a double tree.
morum arbor biforis est
Mulberry, shade me, shade me awhile.
morum, obumbra me, brevi obumbra me
A white, pink, purple berry tree,
arbor albineus, arbor rubeus, arbor morum purpureus,
A very dark-leaved berry tree.
folium tenebrarius arbor mora
Mulberry, shade me, shade me awhile.
morum, obumbra me, brevi obumbra me
...
It's Stevens' birthday today. He would have been 122. (thanks A.)
October 1, 2001
sick day
Back from a very brief jaunt to Chicago, liked it quite a bit. Eyes gratefully gobbled up the substantial Joseph Cornell collection on display at the Art Institute, though actually I had come down with bronchitis which reached its zenith/nadir that day, and was too tired to see the entire exhibit...
Ina's, right across from the Erotic Warehouse, makes a very tasty vegetable hash for breakfast, the Bongo Room almost as good and with a more yuppie vibe. Maitre d' slapped A. on the back with an encouraging "Come on, sunshine" -- maybe that's Midwestern hospitality, or maybe just gayness.
The Field Museum of Natural History was glorious if faded around the edges, with instructional captions like "I'll trade you this useful rock for two alligator teeth," a flesh-eating vulture mask, etc. The rest of our Chicago was comprised by, in no particular order: a fenced-off yard full of animals turned to stone, a very clean and homey writer's garret, pear soda, several restaurants that failed to actually exist, a statue of Christopher Columbus brandishing long talons that made him look like the wicked ruler of some fantastic land, a Banana Republic billboard featuring a guy in a blazer and blue checkered pants which made us hope for a GAP ad of the ilk "Everybody in bustles", and then an obscene bakery hat sigil, white-on-blue on a poster we drove by. A disjointed summary but hopefully it is enough to jog the memory and let imagination fill in the rest.
Now I'm staying home sick from work. A beautiful day outside and everything. Yargh! I have the immune system of a jaundiced two-year-old, and the petulance. At least there are good bread and vine-ripened tomatoes to snack on, and books to read.
...
Maybe I'd just gotten used to it in Seattle, but plastered over just about every shop front in Chicago were copies of the American flag on newsprint.... Jessie said some newspaper had run it as a centerfold recently.
We were sitting on the El and talking when a young man jumped up, pointed a finger at some point a little right of Nathan's head, where a dirty-looking man was slumped in a corner, and erupted into an earsplittingly loud stream of invective. "You brush past me and call me n*gger, you dare brush past me and call me n*gger. You trash. You piece of trash. Our country is in a time of war, we're supposed to stick together, and you dare stand there and mumble n*gger at me. God damn you. God damn you to hell. We're going to go to war, and you'll get drafted, and you're going to be on the front lines, and then you're going to be the first to die. You're going to die. And you deserve to die. Damn you," and kept on doing so, for at least as long as we were on the train.
I keep on saying that this site was meant to function as a distraction, and that for real & important news, please refer to the links at the top of this page. But the counter of days just rolled over today, it's a new month, and I still can't seem to keep the feeling of menace and dread from creeping in between these lines.
...
Anyway, Ray/Bellona Times writes
If not that (or after that), then one should witness.
If one has nothing to witness and no expertise to offer, one might as well deal with one's own despair as quietly as possible and continue with one's existing duties as effectively as possible.
Disheartening when not numbing--but otherwise rarely worthy of notice--is weakness before the temptation of fallacious "engagement": the inability to turn away when one can neither act or witness. For natural joiners, such weakness might be expressed in flag-waving (whether red-white-and-blue or rainbow) and "FUCK BIN LADEN" or "GIVE PEACE A CHANCE" T-shirts and tuneless warbling of Kate Smith or John Lennon hits, while the natural non-joiners will instead be heard carping and nattering to themselves like so many nervous rodents.
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