November 27, 2001
packing
Geegaw.com and its siblings will be
unavailable from tomorrow - 12/14ish, because the web server they all live
on will be sitting, unplugged, in my new apartment. Sorry, thanks, your
patience, &c.
Pulled my bed out from the wall, into the center of the room. Piles of books all up and down the far wall. Most as tall as my shins, some as tall as my shoulders.
Right before going to sleep, read from Charles Wright's The World of the Ten Thousand Things,
Next to the step I'm sitting on,
Sticking his huge head
Into each tiny, white envelope.
And when I woke up, my mind was filled with dream-urgency from this bewildered dream-thought: that the bumblebee had been threading a needle, and that was the reason for its precise little dips in and out of the flowers.
, , ,
Without explanation, someone sent in the URL to some British zine called Borbonesa. Doesn't matter much to me; can't get it over here...
, , ,
I shall be 24 years old on the 28th. New smile lines, rather deeper on the right side of my mouth. In the last year, I:
And next year I hope to
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November 26, 2001
which stinking, rose / bloodied
"Warning: Tickets not to be taken internally." But I'd had a hope, to extinguish, with root-fire, a fire in interior air. Can't scrub off what comes from inside you. Can't wear what you've already given away. Just, clad in the remnants, hope the air itself can forgive it. A rattle on the ebb and flow. A chicken in the pipe.
The entire phenomenological universe's logischebinden approaches null, apparently. Hic. Sic.
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November 25, 2001
the stones
A sick dog eats dirt, or else it does whatever it is that sick dogs actually do. In today's tachiyomi session (which I misspelled "sesshin"), Harold Bloom was telling me to read Turgenev in a kindlier voice than usual, so I have half a mind to follow.
I read the first three cantos of the Inferno in the Sinclair (prose) translation, having lost all patience with Pinksy's phony terza rima halfway through. In my interior proscenium, Pinsky's Dante comes across sounding like Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver. It's unbelievably annoying. Most impressed by that new translation by the Hollanders, whose first canto flowed much more liquidly than Sinclair's, with no need to restate things for clarity, not to mention that it has an appealing heft in the hand and is typeset in a lovely clear font.
I was so full of sleep
when I forsook the one true way.
The movers come in three days, I hope we'll have the lease signed by then. It'll take QWest a couple weeks to wire up the DSL in our new conapt, so remember, if you try to read this site then you'll get a server not found error, and oh yeah, when was the last time I actually picked up the phone and called anyone? Sore throat anyway, today, hurts to talk.
, , ,
There is a new dagmar_chili from some point this week, entitled PLANET TORTURE OVER PAROLE. It's about mercy and war: the title describes the experience of living on a suddenly alien-seeming home planet where the authorities choose to torture people instead of paroling them. "Fritz" is a derogatory name for Germans in wartime, but here I think the author Toadex is referring to a generic enemy of no specific nationality. The "padre," a military-religious authority figure (possibly a chaplain?), instructs his soldiers to call the Germans and threaten them with the atomic bomb-- in response, the soliders dub his plan "A meek way to spend it, but a bright way to scold," -- essentially, that this kind of verbal posturing would be ineffective ("meek") if one's intent were to deploy (or "spend") as much artillery as possible; however, the chaplain's aims are ultimately pacifistic, he hopes to threaten ("scold") the enemy into surrender, and the soldiers approve of this plan: they find it a "bright way."
Probably due to an overdose of Pynchon, Toadex then switches to a riddle rooted in physics. Entropy is the invisible thief that cools a dinner steak into a slab of rubber and robs the heat from our windows. (Though it's worth noting that the image of steak cooling on the table, uneaten by a family's conscripted sons, is a common one from wartime as well.) While Maxwell's demon fights entropy by directing hot or cold atoms to one side or the other of its compartment, Toadex's personified Entropy-demon combats Maxwell by "haybaling the fake sand" (using a pitchfork to haul the neatly selected atoms) out of the rear of the compartment. I'm not sure how this part of the poem relates to the first part. I wonder if war can be seen as a process by which two opponents or compartments systematically disorganize each other, so that the ultimate victor is entropy itself.
, , ,
A. likes a work to be seamless and organic. I like it when the seams of the piece's construction occasionally appear to peek through, like the awkwardness of that Loud Family line:
Maybe it really is a task and I'm not up to the task.
Maybe the answer is don't ask.
Of course, sometimes it's done artfully and sometimes just ba(l)dly, and I only like instances that fall into the former category.
We both find L. E. Sissman interesting, I guess. "Tras Os Montes" is the name of a region in Portugal, means "beyond the mountains," and (elbow, elbow) it's a metaphor for death, get it?
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November 24, 2001
stalemate del porpoise
Ah, me old grampuses kicking at the walls of the urinal-laboratory. I drop enormous sugar-encrusted frisbees upon their aged heads! I shall run down the drugstore to get ventilation, and cheese! I want that prosciutto sandwich with arugula, I want it for the butter. For she loves best who loves the unwell.
Oink. C'est le cochon!
Kangaroo, fangs, boxing gloves, trampolining the urinal-laboratory. Just about set to drive a hole right through. To appease it, I warm some milk with blackberry honey in an old enamel saucepan James gave me.
Time to learn the goddamned third declension already, instead of reading my horoscope in bastard English (not surprisingly, I am "Serpent... this liar," "possessive and inaccurate.")
O great serpent! O magne serpens! Magnus serpens, magni serpentis, magno serpenti, magnum serpentem, magno serpente. Magni serpentes, magnorum serpentium, magnis serpentibus, magnos serpentes, magnis serpentibus! Librum incendere!
- 3 loads laundry
- 1 load dishes
- changed sheets
- cooked dinner
- wrote brief (1-2 page) essay
- scrounged up disks of ancient DOS based software
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November 23, 2001
dia del mi amor
After six years, we share so many references, our friends think it's a secret language.
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November 22, 2001
dia del turkey (y del dios)
Another great way to become my new best friend: give me a pair of knee-high boots. (Offer no longer valid, as now I have some!) My mom had a pair when she was my age and everything. Tomorrow I shall sashay around town pretending to be the proprietress of ClinkClank. I'm so content with my new acquisition that Buy Nothing Day will be a piece of cake. Best of all, they're secondhand, so there's been no unnecessary expenditure of cow... hurrah!
, , ,
I didn't read the Rimbaud, just more Interzone, but then I fell asleep and dreamed all these random dreams where I was running around town, shopping for clothes and going to a lecture and waiting in line for the sushi restaurant to open and such, but the interesting part was that, while all this dream stuff was happening, I was carrying around the Rimbaud book, which got progressively more beat up, its spine torn with cardboard leaking out and all the pages badly folded or dog-eared.
I may try to read the Anals of Chili instead.
1yo Lynda Barry acid trip 'The Visitor' gave me chills.
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November 21, 2001
Exhausted, happy, invisible, crumpling
Exhausted, happy, invisible, crumpling up paper, laughing.
It's been a long time since I opened a book, aside from reading bits from Consuming Psychotherapy and one of the Interzone anthologies. Tonight I shall tackle the Rimbaud biography.
, , ,
Dreamt a couple weeks ago that I was at a party, on a boat, with a bunch of people I know. They were all shooting up, but since we were at sea, it was really tricky and they kept getting blood all over the needles, and then throwing them down on the floor with disgust and grabbing new ones, so the floor was filling up with these bloody needles and I was having trouble keeping my balance and I realized that, of course, I had bare feet.
, , ,
Yep, the reason for next week's downtime is that I am secretly running away to Brazil to hang with Rog. Naw, it's just going to take the phone company a couple weeks to wire up the DSL in our new apartment, so the Geegaw box will be just sitting there sadly not plugged into anything, but it'll probably be healthy to take a break.
, , ,
My dream two nights ago was in a place I'd dreamed before, a neighborhood that's half South End of Boston and half Urdaneta Village in Makati, in a red brick house with white trim on a curved road at the bottom of a sloping hill, where the curve of the road cups the house.
Dream places I have been more than once:
Lost in a Taipei where the streets have taken on some of the configuration of the Tokyo subway system, while preserving their North-South-East-West nomenclature,
The secret tunnel behind a panel of the living room in the house we lived in while I was in elementary school (the only house I can remember living in),
A warren-like maze of collegiate alleged "dorm rooms" which in actuality look suspiciously like the rooms in those three-floor Victorian houses that dominate Somerville, except beautifully renovated with synthetic pine floors.
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November 19, 2001
VLADIMIR: I claim this
ESTRAGON:
VLADIMIR:
- Samuel Beckett, All About Toons, antepenultimate .WAV
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November 17, 2001
Scored a 12 out
Scored a 12 out of 18 on AllLookSame.com. Well, it's kind of hard to tell by facial features, but fashion style and makeup helps.
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November 16, 2001
VLADIMIR: A charnel-house! A
ESTRAGON:
VLADIMIR:
[. . .]
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November 15, 2001
Yeah, diablog will be
Yeah, diablog will be back in a couple weeks. Right now between heavy job workload and moving preparations and our volunteer moderator going on vacation, I wouldn't have time to monitor it anyway. Also, I'm still working out a lot of grumpiness issues right now.
~ ~ ~
Well, whaddaya know! Gee, thanks, Internet!
The n+12 experiment kind of worked, kind of didn't . . . I was incredibly stressed by the time I got to #12, in fact my jaw is really killing me, and the problem is that the completion of tasks begets additional tasks, hydra-like. On the other hand, there is a feeling of accomplishment . . . and Fall tix.
Well, the Puget Sound Cinema Society is apparently branching out into some sort of cooperative distribution mechanism (for their contact information, follow that link). I don't know any Seattle filmmakers, although I suppose I "know" an online Berkeley one, but I thought maybe one of you kind people would be able to spread the word.
~ ~ ~
MetaMeat is back from its brief, meaty little vacation.
I hate how salt frosts the inside of a black vase, like a spreading snowflake. I hate its sickly potato-chip smell.
I bet if I do n+12 things today, my life will become manageable!
~ ~ ~
QUIZ: Are you Toadex Hobogrammathon?
1. Sviatoslav Richter: genius or madman?
(a) With a virtuosity surpassed only by his sheer musical insight, let
rise, Richter deserves ever inch of his legendary stature.
(b) He was a great pianist, but I still can't get over the plastic
lobster thing.
(c) Curneac, curneac. I am the wpdhfjshf
2. How do you feel about Charles Olson's Maximus Poems?
(a) The intriguing rhetorical stance they take ultimately fails to
disguise the hollowness of Olson's psychobabble.
(b) They comprise a first-rate doorstop or monitor stand.
(c) Axcet dineth wha firstfalln wilhelmina. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; axcet
pitse r siebnaw.
3. Are you at all interested in Zen Buddhism?
(a) I've dabbled in it some. I'm most interested in the neurological
changes it's been documented to cause in the brains of its practitioners.
(b) It's a doctrine that's been so romanticized by American Hollywood
culture that I can't see it as anything more than orientalist
commercialization.
(c) snigats rimpel. Who aoudav esget. Ethel Bemry laughs, "Arf romf
" and so, Ether Bammel. Frog litho feather fold, tow hasty mold, meth
tea.
~ ~ ~
And so with a 49,497-word soliloquy, written with inhuman (most likely mechanical) speed & imprecision, delivered by the book's first and possibly only character, Toadex's novel ends: not with a bang, but with chutzpah.
When I see a number that pretty, I have to factor it. Let's see, (7 x 7,071) = (7 * 3 * 2357) = well, by authorial fiat, 2357 is hereby a prime.
I am Jack in the beanstalk on deck. I sold my cow for beans & can't get rid of my albatross. Anyone want it, make me an offer:
Excuse me, every day the mouths yawn wider. I need more acid juice. Every mouth hurts. Either the purple kind, that don't sting, or the white, that do.
~ ~ ~
Valeo!
Can't help but tread on the downtrodden, a thousand greeny candles or buckling planains. Each starts as an outspread hand, then slowly the veins begin to show. It moves down, closer to the earth. It darkens into earth-colors. It rinses into the skeletal. It ends as dirt, invisible, eclipsed by a flashier generation.
Our abundance is a municipal pestilence, next thing you know they'll be genetically engineering spiders to spin nappies to contain what can barely contain itself.
Really should have had the seaweed and small fish soup, instead of pasta and Pringles from the vending machine. Now I am oversalted and still craving cheeeeez, almonds and cheeeez. My ossi substitute: amaretti cookies, prepackaged from Larry's. Everyone's writing a novel these days. Go, budding novelists, go!
When I am snarky I want to post lists like "Top ten weblogs that make me wish the web had never been invented." So I try not to post at all. Because man, work sucks lately. I'm working with a few overworked genius-saints and a choir of buffoons who think that BVTs are something you put on in the morning, one leg at a time.
~ ~ ~ acadamium
Who would've guest
the mulberry falls so far from the world of light
Who would've guest
how tasty would be the meat
Words: eight hundred and thirty-
one
two
three
four
Doing quite well, thank you very.
~ ~ ~ aramanth
It existed. It existed.
I haven't really replied in a while now, sorry guys . . .
~ ~ ~ amaretti
Chewy bones. #nova
Apricot sit, like into almonds
hallowed, but cranky.
Find the caesurae at the bottom of the box
like a plastic nickel
with the wrong head stamped on it.
Don't footloose me. It's nothing but what rank has been like for the past, oh, month or three. It makes me turn on the ol' blue comet so you'll always get the backup face, the Janus-blank stare. How do you like them apples? (-- sliced thin; dipped in honey)
I am totally going to break out now, I swear.
~ ~ ~ rochebaron & honey
The new Frytopia is almost too beautiful to look at, and now I must redecorate.
~ ~ ~ ossa dei morti
Celebrity sightings lately. Sent to Steph:
Someone showed me your site.
The novel, Notable American Women, is coming out in March from Vintage. The Artspace book is called The Father Costume and has images by Matthew Ritchie. It is scheduled for April or May, 2002.
Ben
~ ~ ~ exsultabunt ossa humiliata
The moral of the story is, monkey grease will turn your sawteeth into platinum scuffs. I mean, the story has no morals, just the hole in the inside of your wall where gravity has turned upside down so that, wherever you are, you are falling.
The moral of the story is the flaw in the story.
This is what I was trying to think of: "On the scales of grief, it weighed more than I . . ."
"That large dark shape you are sensing is the specter of the third declension, which we shall not be covering until chapter 7."
Songs: Ohia, 13th, at Paradox. !
~ ~ ~ restruction
I get such a slow start at dawn when the buzz drifts in from outside. That's the sound of green-gold branches falling from the trees, caught in a shapeless net; each stump that remains looks like a dozen faces. It takes a couple minutes for the oxygen to flood back in and once it does I wish it out again, hands curling in the pajama circuit. Overhead, Ben does his morning laps, like some kind of tumbling vulture.
From Pearls, some equivalence classes for you:
{ adroitly, dilatory, idolatry }
{ canter, cretan, nectar, recant, trance }
Place your hair on the scales (thanks ---), "teeth and knuckles and ankles and bony stuff that didn't crack and belt buckles, things that wouldn't melt."
~ ~ ~ aoi sora
The fifth pleasure is to walk north, uphill, in the soft haze of early winter, in a shoegazer dusk. This is the kind of light that makes women beautiful, and men seem savage. Traffic lights burned out downtown tonight, and cars piled up, and I held myself back at the edge of the curb until the goose-colored ambulance blew past. Whenever that cold gust hits my face, it feels like laughter, and I fall forward.
The first and second pleasures are to touch. I stretch out my arms in a crucifix shape. I am the world. Pleps on all sides . . . waiting outside doors, I let them in, I turn them into other doors . . .
Dressed in blue, creaking in black cars. Lifted up the hood and the eye'd winked out and we hooked up the wires and the face melted flat. Tomorrow we may be ashes, or yesterday. Also I am behind on my email. It's hard to write like a thinker, when we are such hollow forks, men and women both, and clamoring and always half-admitting it. O stulti forks, weave together thy tines! . . . but they never do. The word for this is schisme.
Noted in the habitrails: Certain of my coworkers subscribe to the Roach Motel philosophy of source control . . . And the old beverage holder gets all seismic by its second go-around.
~ ~ ~ moku
"To avoid embarassment, don't fly with underwire": have you heard that one? When the lead pellets started raining down the water spout, everyone ran out into the street, ducking or trying to catch them. We were walking south at the time, squeezing through the crowds, and you said, "That's the loneliest man in the world, how does he stand it?" But I never saw you point to anyone.
We were so much younger then, when will they forgive us?
Catheter wheel, chrome, in the tinny chamber.
~ ~ ~ hodie
From virgo to virago, they're shoring up the mild sleeve of iniquity. Such a white, dry autumn we've been having, with clear skies brittle as china.
O Barley, dour bandito,
all hards and sharps and no quixotic
bulb from a mother's socket,
no bolt of electric
Arkansas to shore and scold you.
So grateful am I, that I could care less now, and choose not to. Thrilled to scan minds through locked doors, and my dearest shadows puddle below stairs just writhing for some involuntary acrobatics.
It's like half of a miracle that I can shut my eyes again, a feeling so nice I did it twice. Now (the instructions continued) peel off the lids and press them against a cold metal, or ice. How these restorative rituals whip us back to teenage glitter-shadows, I could never figure out.
Rub them with salt; an eyelash; whiplash. Now sit and wait while I take my daily sting, with tea, with lumps, with toast.
~ ~ ~ cras
Dear diary, that sliver of quartz still plagues me. It must be stuck in my craw. I threw out the rest, but I don't get it. Is this stuff really supposed to be good for you?
Dear diary, life is banal. Late lunch/early dinner: Campbell's canned minestrone. Surprisingly, not that bad. Dreaming of plates of cream, kernels of corn, cream of corn soup, creamed corn.
~ ~ ~ hori, sed
Dear diary:
Had a tattle and a lump at the public waterworks, tum woke up with spat feeding a stuffed sausage into last night's blender. Igitur I dug into my parkway and whipped up a life-quartz -- blood-colored altoid -- zinc kick kicked it in, wracked me with nausea. Felt like falling over into the mud twitching my paws . . . Luckily errabam blindly into the Volkhaus, got given acid juice to dilute it. How do most people take them every day? I guess I did too, as a larva . . .
Love, Emily.
~ ~ ~
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November 7, 2001
erdenstague
Hey, this is extremely silly: Bloggus Caesari, a weblog by Julius Caesar. I cannot believe there are almost six months of archives. This is the most excellent example of a charalog I have yet read. (via Brandon/Blog Veritas)
Extremely silly part II: Paul Ford ventures a pseudo-archaelogical interpretation of the San-X cartoon series, including a certain "Lazy Panda Zombie" : "The zombie is a panda. But it will not eat brains because he is too lazy. Get up, lazy panda, and eat brains! You are so lazy! But he is too lazy. All right, no brains today!" Where have you been living for the past year, Paul? In a cave? Oh, right, Israel.
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November 6, 2001
flurstag
The purple monkey says: "I'm all alone... Wait, I've got an idea! ... I could be your buddy. ... Click here to download Bonzi Buddy." That monkey gives me the creeps.
Aside from the monkey and the girls, it would've been another straight shot for everyone's whoopingest cowboy of fama magna:
...
I dreamt a lot of things. I think I dreamt that I should make up a list of the Nine Pleasures. I woke up and thought, what, only nine?
1. A.
2. ...
... as a calm darkens among water-lights...
7. Wallace Stevens
8. assorted cheeses
Jen, who I think is no longer linkable, and Jim, who is, had both mentioned Invisible Library, "a collection of books that only appear in other books."
And oh, this is really beautiful -- Thucydides, Sept. 11th, and empowerment through learning, (thanks J.):
...
Just what I needed to cheer me up, a nice bright sock full of chili. I gather she is writing a novel now. Thank you Dagmar! (... who writes back to recommend the following songs by The Fall: Garden and Wings.)
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November 5, 2001
katilstag
It's cold this morning, very cold. Lots of dreams about walking in misty forests or swimming in Elliott Bay (past corpses of suicides-- that was a creepy one). Dreamt that it was Gwen who was moving out of the apartment I want, and that she left the door to the balcony open so the plants would be able to come in at night, so as a result the fog rolled right into the bedroom, and it was damned cold.
Tiring but fun weekend, it's been a long time since I stayed out past 2am. Lots of work to do this week.
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November 2, 2001
freitag
I don't know much about philosophy, but it often seems to me as if the world were full of things that are not the case.
[Stephen: "What the HELL are you talking about?"]
Uh, whatever. Still braindead, need to catch up on missed Latin, don't know when I'll have time this weekend. On the bright side, looks like we may have a chance at moving into some real peachy digs in the next month. Instead of drawing my blinds closed to block out the people walking by, I could have a view of the bay...
P.S., confession: I lied. I have no idea what the hell dagmar_chili is about. But at least we know that it is "BEST Viewed in Netscape Nagivateur 4.61"...
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November 1, 2001
donnerstag
Steve/Snarkout (literateur, gossip, and fully absolved tuna culprit) found the false memory study I was thinking of. Not Daffy Duck in Hollywood, but Bugs Bunny in Disneyland. And I just tried to write "Daffy Duck in Holleywoode but bugs Boney is Dinsneynand," so obviously I have been working too hard. But thank you Steve.
I finally caught up on sleep last night and yet I'm still flooded with lots of oddball daydreams, waking dreams, so that my real life hardly seems real. Right now I feel like I'm not actually here, but that I'm swimming in a school of fish (NOT TUNA), or flying in a flock of birds -- it's not clear which. I'm in my element, but I don't feel like it, and as the ghostly stream or throng floods past me, I'm helpless to change its course. Like the outside elbow of a river, or the outermost ring of Saturn. My life seems so perfect, I don't think I could find an apartment or a job or anything better than what I have now, but I'm so frustrated with everything in it, as though it all keeps me from what I truly want, which is something I don't know. (I know I resent my job because it eats into time with A. and with my books. But if I left it I would miss it badly.)
I can't even imagine what it would take for me to write something meaningful and utterly individual. Stamina and social skills, I think. I think I kind of have most of the other stuff.
I pray that (...). I know I said I don't care, but I do.
From the paeanut gallery:
Why, yes! That was 20 months ago, at around the time of the first Seattle Bloggers get-together. God, I can hardly believe anyone's been following this site for that long....
Oh hey, poetbot.com is free.
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