geegaw.com

Someone teasingly writes

Someone teasingly writes:

Feeling generous today, thought I'd send this little gift -- a translation of "Keine Delikatessen"

Yay, o generous one, I'd be delighted to see it. I already have a beautiful translation by Margit Lehbert, courtesy Toadex, and an inferior one by Peter Filkins, and if yours isn't one of those two, it'd be interesting to compare.

(On second thought, maybe my anonymous correspondent was just trying to answer an old and long-ago answered plea . . .)

Nota: Insomnia's glamor is

Nota: Insomnia's glamor is entirely undeserved. At least the apartment is tidy, bills paid etc., due to a manic spurt of activity from 4 till 8. The oddest thing: "at 5 A.M. the sound of bare feet upstairs", just like in the poem. At 6, the dawn: a few chilly moments on my veranda, looking out over the city and the spare white brushstrokes of Mount Ranier on a canvas that changed from lilac to peach.

I am, outside. Incredible

I am, outside. Incredible panic rules.
People are blowing and beating each other without mercy.
Drinks are boiling. Iced
drinks are boiling. The worse anyone feels, the worse
treated he is. Fools elect fools.
A harmless man at an intersection said, under his breath, "Christ!"

That word, so spoken, affected the vision
of, when they trod to work next day, shopkeepers
who went and were fitted for glasses.
Enjoyed they then an appearance of love & law.
Millennia whift & waft  one, one  er, er. . .
Their glasses were taken from them, & they saw.

Man has undertaken the top job of all,
son fin. Good luck.
I myself walked at the funeral of tenderness.
Followed other deaths. Among the last,
like the memory of a lovely fuck,
was: Do, ut des.

- Berryman (dream song #46)

Son fin - "its end."
Do, ut des - "I give so that you may give."

nor women neither

It turned out to be quite a nice day, so after our garlic and cheese pizza slices with spicy red pepper topping, and moving the car from barely licit to fully licit parking space, I sat on the balcony wrapped in a protective layer of plastic and Laura stood inside wielding the toothbrush while the fresh air wafted the dye fumes away. Laura says she now understands why people have hair dyeing parties; I'm glad she had fun since I think we were both suffering from performance anxiety from my being a little bit of a closet control freak. Post-dyeing hair turned out to look pretty much exactly like the digitized projection below, but with bonus Secret Blonde Streak, and also a lot of the black hair got lightened to dark brown due to my insistence on leaving the dye in for twice as long as the manufacturer's absolute maximum allowable time. A. gave the results his seal of approval, then we all watched Withnail and I, which made fishing a single hair strand out of a dark purple goop with disposable bamboo chopsticks seem like parfaits at the Grand Hotel.

By the way, that "Malaysian Cherry" bit is not some delusional patriotic fabrication on my part: here's a picture of the product packaging for proof.

Confidential to Dr. Gift of Cheese: Happy birthday, you lucky bastard(ette)!

narcissism is the most boring thing of all

Ahem. I may not be beautiful or cool, but at least as of today, I am zebra blonde; and hopefully tomorrow, with Laura's help :), I will be Malaysian (Zebra) Cherry, approximately #801020 on my monitor. Through the wonders of digital imaging: both the actual and the projected future color:

abashed

Yeah, I guess I should have known about the Stevens thing. Thanks to those of you who wrote in explaining the reference . . .

The "purse" question is just because I've been thinking idly about how much we end up expressing ourselves by what we buy and what we have, and not just clothes -- waiting in the supermarket checkout line and looking at the imported Mexican beer people and the organic veggies/tofu people and pork rinds people go by. I mean, I know it's a trope, but I can't keep from judging people on this despite how meaningless I know it is. Though I know I'm more than just one of the pack-of-ramen-and-a-foodie-magazine people. Well, this worldwide inter-connected graphical computer network is a beautiful invention. I can put up whatever pixels I want for you, try to get you to help me in collaboratively creating whatever mood or discourse, and change it at a second's whim, and laugh at the stories of people who live halfway around the world. Over dinner we couldn't agree what year OJ Simpson's Bronco chase had happened, so V. just took out her cellphone and looked it up on google. I'll take this over those projected 21st-century jetpacks any day.

Tired of "subsisting on a thin film of caffeine and evil" as Danelope put it, I was thrilled to read this poem posted by Moira the Constant Reader. I mean, what is poetry for if not to voice our inarticulate angst?

On a Seven-Day Diary

Oh I got up and went to work
and worked and came back home
and ate and talked and went to sleep.
Then I got up and went to work
and worked and came back home
from work and ate and slept.
Then I got up and went to work
and worked and came back home
and ate and watched a show and slept.
Then I got up and went to work
and worked and came back home
and ate steak and went to sleep.
Then I got up and went to work
and worked and came back home
and ate and fucked and went to sleep.
Then it was Saturday, Saturday, Saturday!
Love must be the reason for the week!
We went shopping! I saw clouds!
The children explained everything!
I could talk about the main thing!
What did I drink on Saturday night
that lost the first, best half of Sunday?
The last half wasn't worth this "word."
Then I got up and went to work
and worked and came back home
from work and ate and went to sleep,
refreshed but tired by the weekend.

Alan Dugan

Also, searching for information on dyeing Asian hair blue and skipping over all the Anime fan pages, I found "Liralen" Li, whom the cute girl from Real Genius was based on, at least in part, or so she says.

My class's president and social organizers decided to ask me in on an interview being done by the movies producers and so there I was in one of the fanciest restaurants in Pasadena wrapped in a slightly oversized sweater that I'd knit myself one night when I was cold, talking blithly about life at Caltech without, from what folks say, a single breath. One of the most amusing things in my life was, fifteen years later, seeing that movie with a roomful of my friends from Temple Square and, the minute Jordan introduces herself in a long string of breathless sidetrains having the entire room turn to just look at me afterwards. That was most amusing. As Cera says, she has my voice.

Well, she's not exactly the same girl every nerd boy of my generation has been dreaming of for the past ten years - I mean, she's not some beautiful actress playing a geek; she's pure geek. And it looks like she's totally happy just plain being a geek, totally independent of gender, which I think is great, but which seems so alien to me . . . I mean, doesn't every geek girl just want to be beautiful and cool?

equae

Er, would the entity who posted the following couplet some time ago please stand up and explain its origin? Inquiring minds wanted me to ask.

The exceeding brightness of this early sun
Makes me perceive how dark I have become . . .

. . .

"Red and slippery I carry myself in my pockets" - why, it sounds like Cardinal Tuna Fish has been reading this site. Yes, I see how purses, and questions about purses, wander into potentially sexist territory. But most guys I see on the street have messenger bags, or jackets, or backpacks, or those lovely wide-legged pants with the capacious pockets. And "What's in your pants?" was too rich a question for my blood.

Here is my favorite passage so far (from Sisters by a River). It is dreadful and funny like so much (too much) animal cruelty is.

When Beatrix and I were about four, we did a frightful thing, we tried to ride the tame rabbits with the most drastic results, we had seen pictures of children riding rabbits and thought we could do the same, but we couldn't and for years people said `these are the children who squashed the rabbits.'

. . .

O you literalists, what is in the wallet, knapsack, gourd, water skins, bindle, shopping cart, or other carrying device which you bring with you as you go about your daily rounds?

As the owner of a small Cydwoq backpack, I have been told that my carrying device is a "purse" so many times that I guess I think of it as one. But how many purses can accomodate Wheelock's Latin, a 150 page notebook, Sisters By a River a cell phone, a wallet, a small clear Tarepanda bag containing lip balm, lip gloss, and inhaler, laminated map of Seattle, and day planner (if only barely)?

a few notes

1) In love, still lonely.
2) Only likes to eat soup.
3) Buys used books for the handwritten epigraphs.
4) Cats as serpents.
5) Bright coins on the ground.

Year Zero, interesting poem by Joshua Clover. Kind of a cross between Carolyn Forché and Jorie Graham and Mark Levine. Forche's political indignation, hints toward Graham's gestures toward philosophy; but the specific content remaining vague, only intimations of wordless apocalpyse.

Meetings in the cold warehouse on the outskirts of the Year Zero.
In the red suburbs of the Year Zero.
In the other night on the other side of permission you could have her or a police car on fire if you preferred the second you wore a black square on your jacket or in your hair.
The machine flower the machine music blotted out all other sounds still you could not get it loud enough.

I ast google: what is the greatest gift that one can give? An google sed:

the gift of new life (organ donation)

the willingness to be with what is (counselling)

to help in one small way to their betterment (helping the unfortunate)

the gift of self

to reveal oneself (uncredited but widely repeated homily)

teaching Torah

a virgin heart (argument for celibacy of priests)

knowledge (argument for storytelling)

New question for the diabloggers: what is in your purse today?

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April 22, 2002

Yeah, I accidentally linked

Yeah, I accidentally linked the wrong URL to the art exhibit below (fixed now), also I didn't have time to go last weekend, and the Kac piece won't load on my machine so I don't know how crappy or not it is. Busy, more later :)

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April 21, 2002

true love, in the rectum

Email account back! Mike R. is a hero! AT&T is philosophically unsound.

My cellphone is a used Kyocera 2035a from eBay, but it's weird. I bought a new 2035a last summer from Verizon and promptly lost it, but that one had two-way text messaging and all sorts of cool things that its replacement (same model# and everything!) seems to lack. Plus the battery life on this crappy one is a scant 30 hours! Grr! In two months, when my current Verizon contract runs out, I plan to replace it for sure.

Paul/Metameat is up earlier than usual today, and waxing long and impassioned on the failure, frailty and necessity of love. Therefore, I conclude, spring must be here at last. Don't miss this one.

To do: laundry; shopping at Ikea; Latin; go see Gene(sis) art exhibit at the Henry which (I hope) is maybe the next best thing to being able to see Paul Perry's amazing work in the flesh; planning for upcoming secret project . . .

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April 20, 2002

After failing three times

After failing three times to add a new phone number to my list of contacts, my cellphone just bluescreened and rebooted. "Memheap.c: c." What the hell? My cell phone has memory allocation?

Did zero political action today. Zedoing!

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April 19, 2002

rrr

"For this, be sure, to-night thou shalt have cramps" -Prospero

It has been a good week starting when I ran into a friend I hadn't seen in almost three years. It has been a bad week starting when I was at the Elysian and the girl I was sitting next to got carded and I did not.

Having stumbled upon this blog Team Monkey on a quest to find out what color I should dye my hair ( ?), I found Abercrombie and Fitch T-shirts, with slogans like "Wong Brothers Laundry Service - Two Wongs Can Make It White." Now that is really terrible. Of course, now that they are forbidden, I want one . . . but it would not only would that be betraying my Asian sisters and brothers, but it would be financing sweatshops and all sorts of evil things.

Get It Before They Ban It, a.k.a. I Suppose I Will Have To Settle For: For Good Luck Rub My Tummy, or Happy Dream Opium Den ("Where Good Fiends Meet").

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April 18, 2002

saddest little meat robot

So Ben Marcus did the whole reading in character, albeit solo, and read the section on Naming as though it was notes from an experiment he had really conducted. I don't know. Plus, at the end of the reading, he said "Any questions?" and gave the audience like five seconds to come up with questions before he said, "Fine. Goodbye then" and walked offstage.

It was a weird crowd; almost no one seemed to have read his book, it seemed more like they were there for the spectacle. I felt lonely being there by myself. I saw two guys run into each other who had first met each other at the Neal Pollack reading. Some woman who had been to the Jorie Graham reading was comparing Marcus to Graham (both of them "challenge the language"). A lot, lot, lot of people were having conversations about publishing - "I've been rejected by McSweeney's more times than I can count." "Yeah, me too." Also some guy who wrote the article on the back page of this week's Tekbug ("How to Sleep in Your Car") was there with his writing group, I overheard him saying "I gave four pints of plasma yesterday. I'm writing an article on giving plasma. I fainted, too. It'll make good material." Mmm-hmm.

Maybe his new illustrated Father Costume book will cheer me when it comes out (Amazon has a photo of it now, at the above link).

Can't get through to my email account today . . . "^C 327 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100% packet loss."

I liked this post by Zsa Zsa Batman on alt.religion.kibology, via Robot Wisdom:

when you get a tattoo on the sole of your foot, you can go to a bar and show the bottom of your foot to cute boys for, like, that day, and then your tattoo falls off and starts looking all 'distressed' like really old shit does, and maybe you got that tattoo just because, like, you were trying to make cute boys like you even though you are OLD, and maybe some cute boys like all old-timey worn-away shit, but all those ones are gay, and mostly, they only like stuff that's FAKE like that, like, where you pay extra money for professional homosexuals to bang up your furniture because that makes it real authentical.

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April 16, 2002

1000 technologies of ecstasy

We should put John Ash-Berry on Strawberry Shortcake's invitation list, along with Blueberry Muffin, Huckleberry Pie, and Raspberry Tart. (Apparently the series went ethnic in later years, with new Mexican characters Cafe Ole and his Burrito Burro, and the Asian scamps Almond Tea (eww) and Marza Panda (yay!)).

Jim and Bhikku made me laugh tonight, bless them.

. . .

Be not afraid, the isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.       *

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;       *

Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang       *

4.

On this shore the harbours shift --
a mile, two miles or ten --
inland, forgetting their purpose.

Sand fills them or silt,
sealed gulfs lose their salt,
yet the quays remain
and granaries mumble
the names of emperors.

- John Ash, in "Forgotten Orchestras"

. . . which can be found in his slender collection The Anatolikon (click on that link - I only wish I could someday attract reviewers as thoughtful and literate as that Kevin Maynard).

P.S. John Ash writes exactly like John Ashbery does, minus that berry goodness.

P.P.S. Despite the giant painting of a pussy on the cover of his book, I am fairly sure that Ash is gay.

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April 15, 2002

no Brainy

I don't keep up much with contemporary poetry, but all signs seem to point to Mark Ford being the inheritor of John Ashbery's mantle. For one thing, Ashbery cited Raymond Roussel as one of his 'other voices' (non-mainstream poetic influences) and what should the seminal work on R.R. be but Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams, by Mark Ford, preface by Ashbery.

What I've read by Ford seems to share some core sensibility with Ashbery - individual lines or sentences don't seem to have been composed, but instead found. They have the form and cadence of cliché, but their content is novel and often apparently nonsensical: like TV homilies in which key words have been substituted. Hallmarks of, er, Hallmark™ sentimentality: emotional punctuation (lots of rhetorical exclamations and questions, lots of ellipses) and Thiebaud-colored candyfloss idealism sit side by side with comically vulgar and slangy language.

As with Ashbery and Stevens before him, Ford was completely opaque to me until I read an article about him by Helen Vendler -- in this case, The allegories and mimicries of Mark Ford, reprinted from the TLS without permission.

Ford has two books out: Soft Sift and Landlocked. Neither is available in the US at present, but I have a copy of the latter and would be willing to discuss trading photocopied packets with anyone who has a book of poetry they think I might be into (e.g. something by Olena Davis). (I also have a bootleg copy of Mark Levine's Debt, obtained by Paul K. At Great Risk, if you should need one.)

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April 12, 2002

slow movements & vanishing timbres

hungry to pluck again from the thousand
technologies of ecstasy

the slow movement of K. 218

- Frank Bidart, "For the Twentieth Century"

I'm vomiting.
I broke down today in the slow movement of K. 365.

- Berryman, "Despair"

Josh has been writing about what it is that makes a song memorable. "There is psychological research to the effect that people's timbral memories are not as powerful as their melodic memories. . . . . Most of the parts I have the hardest time remembering are built out of the slightest melodies, or those which are the most stretched out."

What makes a passage of writing stick? Cadences, texture, rhyme? . . . ballad meter or tetrameter? . . . vivid images? . . . sex, humor, violence, scatology? Writing set to song may be most memorable. Jingles, but only the substantial ones.

John MacDonald found a corpse, put it under the sofa,
Waited till it came to life and hit it with a poker.
Sold its eyes for souvenirs, sold its blood for whisky,
Kept its bones for dumb-bells to use when he was fifty.

- Louis MacNeice, "Bagpipe Music"

. . .

I'm still utterly blank-headed from last night's Calpico martini (an unholy wedding of yogurt and vermouth). Cross Dorothy Parker with Marilyn Monroe's just elegant, how the EMP played three-card monty with our evening, and all sorts of long names whizzing past in the air.

Lately what I read seems desultory, scatterbrained, with saccades woven into the fabric, like the writers are skittish of language and of any sort of prophetic or authoritative tone . . . or is it just me, imposing my own skittish attitude upon what I read?

These three poems by Ange Mlinko on Jacket were printed in ascending order of goodness. "Violin wood of the reading room, violet snow in the window. [ . . . ] The mountebank insomnia has me."

The Bible, Walt Whitman, and Leo Tolstoy - a story by Catherine Daly, on Eyeshot.

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April 11, 2002

SCAN ME

Against my better judgment, the day turned into a day of domesticity. Did dishes and 4 loads laundry; took out trash, bottles, newspapers; donned dust mask and cleaned sofa, air vents; convinced the postman to carry the super-heavy box containing our new computer up to our apartment; sprayed sofa for dust mites; more of the above, which I'm sure won't interest you.

Then, before sleep, cursory review of the four principal parts of the second conjugation verbs; a Faulkner story ("The Tall Men"); and then the sound of the leaf-blower next door, signaling Friday morning, forcing me to admit that this entry has been backdated.

But, but -- three cheers for the diablog poets! Hip, hip, hip.

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April 10, 2002

'bird-nest arches and rain-stained-vaults'

Just about a year ago, while out shopping with Ray as a matter of fact, I picked up the flagship issue of this beautiful zine called Floating Holiday, which as far as I can tell doesn't exist anymore. So naturally, a month ago I sent an email to floatingholiday@yahoó.com, asking "What became of you guys? You don't have a web page or anything. And what ever happened to Shannon Holman, whose poems gave me chills?" No answer came, of course.

And now, today on a search for Dream Song #219, what should I find but Shannon Holman's very own home page, with tons and tons of poems. Jackpot! Sublime! I like "Hobo Alphabet," "Growing Up With Milk," "Confession" (a pastiche, hyperlinked).

These are useless gestures. Bag of bones,
I'll see you when I see you.

- from Gestures, 1993

Fa la la. I don't even want to know how A. found TheraDate.com: where singles can "meet other people of the elite group who use therapy to improve their lives. They are among the brightest, most verbal people in America." (It must be new because I can't find it on google.) I should also note that there's also JDate.com (for Jews) and EastMatch.com (for Asian-Americans) and I wouldn't be able to vouch for any of these.

Apropos of Paul's Angels, a friend reminds me of that poem by Wallace Stevens, "To an Old Philosopher in Rome":

On the threshold of heaven, the figures in the street
Become the figures of heaven

[...]

How easily the blown banners change to wings...

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April 8, 2002

more genes = better than

more genes = better than

Life is luxe, luxe, luxe -- if I can only just get out of bed in the morning. Wunderground.com predicts: "Tuesday - Rain devezczc seazfpwc1 sea ttaa00 ksea ddhhmm."

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April 7, 2002

gleanings from crampsville

John Felstiner was funny and kind, his talk more anecdotal than analytical. He shared some truly bizarre delusions of translators' grandeur -- like when (after years of immersion in/work on Celan) his second son Alex, at 2 1/2 years of age, asked if Paul Celan was his grandfather; and, later on, at a party, Alex picked up a toy plastic phone and said to him, "It's for you. It's Paul Celan."

He mentioned Denise Levertov's poem Feet, which begins with the memory of an ode by Neruda on celery. Felstiner, compulsively, researched the remembered ode (which turned out not to be an ode) and has reconstructed a hybrid translation (melding the actuality with Levertov's memory of it) - it'll be published in Two Lines soon . . .

One of Felstiner's favorite Neruda poems seems to be Alturas de Macchu Picchu ("The heights of Macchu Picchu"). You know I have no Spanish, but:

No volverás del fondo de las rocas.
No volverás del tiempo subterráneo.
No volverá tu voz endurecida.
No volverán tus ojos taladrados.

Apparently Spanish sentences start with "No" when they introduce a negation. Felstiner racked his brains trying to find an equivalent English construction that would preserve the "No" at the beginning of the sentences, whose literal transation would begin "You won't . . ." He finally settled on "You won't come back from time under ground. / No coming back with your hardened voice."

Oh yeah, Felstiner also lobbied Norton to put up audio excerpts of Celan on their web page. So there you have it.

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April 6, 2002

time under ground

Paul/Metameat and Jessie both exegized the mysterious diablog thread (thanks guys!), so I've composed a bastardized hybrid explanation from the two:

I think the reflexive verbs comment was in reference to the auto-translation of Dali, which left "hartarte" and "hacerte" untranslated, those being two reflexive verbs. So the "picky picky" comment was addressed to the auto-translator. Reflexive verbs, at least in Spanish, are verbs where the subject and object are the same. "Hacerte" means "to make yourself" and "hartarte" means "to gorge yourself." "Hartar" = infinitive verb + "te" = indirect object pronoun.

The troubling Michael Barrish/Oblivio has a new online writing gig, joining Paul Ford/Ftrain and a couple other men I never heard of, putting together a daily "broadsheet" at The Morning News.

Michael explains - and I find this interesting because I've been going over the exact same thing in my head, but with a different story, one not by Hans Christian Andersen; anyway -

My favorite story as a child was The Emperor?s New Clothes. I fancied myself the child, of course, the one who sees things for what they are.

Very little has changed in thirty plus years. To my own mind, I?m still that child. About the only difference now is the emperor. Yes, he still parades around in nothing, telling himself it is something, and a magnificent something at that. The only difference is who he is.

He is me.

John Felstiner speaks in Seattle tomorrow . . . hopefully the ghost (geist?) of Paul Celan will tag along.

Master of Fine Arts in Software. That's the degree I want.

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April 5, 2002

some bartenders have the gift of pardon

"Why are we living now and not some other time, not so lame?"

- Greg Bear, from Darwin's Radio

Walked home from work today, bareheaded in the rain, down Elliott Ave. for the last time. It had been muggy and hot all morning before the weather broke into a pale grey drizzle. Tiny raindrops landed on the lenses of my glasses, and turning the oncoming traffic into watery stars, then blurry moons as the rain got harder. Thus is the weather of the interior ventriloquist.

Twilight was bhikku-colored: the sky was the color of inner bhikku, and then the sky was the color of bhikku's borders.

This summer I am going to get all healthy again and then I'm going to take long walks in the western mountains, eschewing the treacherous ankle-spraining mossy rocks of the rain forest for the imagined delights of Hurricane Ridge. You'll be able to tell when I'm happier by how little I'll be blogging then.

Nota: certain diablog entries have gotten way too obscure even for me. Reflexive verb-wha? Any explanations?

Learned a new phrase today, "starch coma." Apparently this is what happens when you do Chinese for lunch, order too much Sour Chicken in Pink Sauce, and come to around 4pm finding your console window full of gibberish.

C:\>nfrm
'nfrm' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

C:\>nfrm
'nfrm' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

C:\>nfrm
'nfrm' is not recogn^C

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April 4, 2002

cover me with tarepandas, cover me with kotex

Read: bhikku.net - "desire of wings." I don't suffer from angels so often. More commonly, just the walking alone into a subtle beauty that springs up around you. It's a stringent, watery feeling, like whey, or green fruit.

surface.yugop.com - black ribbony macromedia animation drawing thing - via Laura!

From Beyond the Fringe's Shakespeare sketch 'So That?s The Way You Like It' (via

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April 3, 2002

Steve says, the Museé

Steve says, the Museé Mécanique has found a home. this is a good thing. Here is a photo of Ray/BellonaTimes at the M. M . . . In conclusion, it is 7 in the morning and I am awake because my soon-to-be-ex-favorite workaholic coworker scheduled an 8:30am meeting, even though she is a night person like me. I do not know what à rebours means exactly, but I can tell you that this early morning thing is against nature, good taste, and the grain of my physiology . .

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April 1, 2002

fuckwattage

So when they announced at our team meeting today that our project also needed to compile and run on Linux, my blood pressure briefly doubled . . . damn April fool's day, gets me every time. At least I'm nice and put the word "lies" in the URL of all my lies so that no one gets confused. I guess that was the point of setting aside just one day of the year for practical jokes; I just forgot.

I had no idea Sleator had been so popular, though. Yaay!

Creepy drawing of a young girl with a gun, from Chinese Pop Posters via 6 different ways.

Nota. Are all men named Damian completely out of their collective gourd? The nice programmer dude from my Latin class pointed out Damian Conway's Lingua::Romana::Perligata module. Basically, in Latin you can rearrange quite a few of the words in a sentence and preserve the meaning, because the word takes a different form in each role - like how English uses "he," "him," and "his" depending on what role "he" plays in the sentence. Thus, the Perligata is an extension to Perl that lets you inflect various bits of the code so that you can write statements in any order. So when you say "give me the 5th element of an array," you have to write the name of the array in the genitive (possessive) case. Operators like "+" (add) are spelled out as verbs and conjugated differently based on the type of variable they operate on: if they operate on a scalar, they're singular, but if they operate on a list, they're plural; and thus descend into the darkness of insanity . . .

More projects by Conway. Project titles are terse and frightening: "Tie::LazyHash - Hash look-ups that don't," "Sub::Junctive - Call subroutines by what they might have been called," and mysteriously, "Lingua::tlhInganHol::yIghun" (it's Klingon, I don't know what it means). I just hope I never, ever, ever meet this guy.

Rabbit rabbit (it's a blogger thing).

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