geegaw.com

Just started reading The

Just started reading The Heart is a Lonely Hunter but got caught up in surfing the web for travel opportunities instead. Via MamaMail,

One man gives freely, yet gains even more; another withholds unduly, but comes to poverty. A generous man will prosper; he who refreshes others will himself be refreshed.

Proverbs 11:24-25

link clearinghouse

Television rockt tonight at the EMP. I think I'd like to take guitar lessons with Richard Lloyd, who does go on a bit; here's an excerpt:

Most people think that Tantra is just spiritual sex, and is what allows Sting and myself to screw for hours and hours upon end (not with each other). Those who think this have got it way wrong.

The idea behind Tantra is that if the universe is made of one cloth, of one weave or sewing pattern, then the whole thing is sacred, including all the things which are frowned upon. . . . This is something like the hologram, and this is why in Tantra the forbidden things have been made objects of worship, sex only being one of them. For the Pythagorians it was numbers. For the hermeticists, vibration. For you and I, rock and roll.

Stephen writes "This would be pretty interesting if it weren't written by a total jackass" - first in Slate's Thai curiosities series, a visit to a Buddhist cult.

The end of a legend - TV actor Leo McKern dead at 82.

Fun facts: "The diet of a wild giant panda is 99 percent bamboo, with the remaining 1 percent including other grasses and the occasional rodent." - the Baltimore Sun

and naked shingles of the world

            What I want to know, dear are-you-there,
is what it is, this life a shadow and a dust-road have,
            the shape constantly laying herself down over the sparkling dust
she cannot own --
            what can they touch of one another, and what is it for . . .

There were shadows in the shadows, and in there were cuts.

- Jorie Graham, from "Imperialism"

Bargain Proust, in beautiful edition I would buy if I didn't already have two sets.

forms, flames, and the flakes of flames

Slept for practically the entire weekend, though I was delighted to bestir myself to leaf through antiques and beads at the Fremont Sunday Market . . .

Fever makes movements that health cannot imitate.

- Pascal, Pensees, #350

[Poetry] is the graph of the mind's movement.

- Philip Whalen, quote repeated from below

Ergo, fever makes poetry that a graph of the mind's health cannot imitate.

Making is the mirror in which we see ourselves.

- Bidart, Advice to the Players

A Mood Of Quiet Beauty

The evening light was like honey in the trees
When you left me and walked to the end of the street
Where the sunset abruptly ended.
The wedding-cake drawbridge lowered itself
To the fragile forget-me-not flower.
You climbed aboard.

Burnt horizons suddenly paved with golden stones,
Dreams I had, including suicide,
Puff out the hot-air balloon now.
It is bursting, it is about to burst
With something invisible
Just during the days.
We hear, and sometimes learn,
Pressing so close

And fetch the blood down, and things like that.
Museums then became generous, they live in our breath.

- Ashbery

Busy, busy, tired -

Busy, busy, tired - 5 hrs sleep and between lunch yesterday and lunch today, I've only had time to eat some apples and juice. Need to get some rest or else I'll get sick again . . . so I'll lie low on the weblogging front for a little while.

Black sky, white moon

Black sky, white moon low and full.

One of the Seattle Zen monasteries recently relocated to my neighborhood, so we went to their guest night tonight. The chanting part felt like church - trying to sing along to the Liz Phair-like melodies, and make sure I get up and set down at the same time - and the place reminded me of my grandparents', musty with incense smoke from the joss sticks and gilted plastic-looking statues. But the sitting practice was nice. Felt like a better person afterward.

Hurrah! After a three-month

Hurrah! After a three-month dry spell, Aaron's back in business. . . . The shifting tenses of his newest story, #54, call to mind the naive-yet-brooding lostness of Lorenzo Mattotti's comic Murmur.

Once, I was assigned to the ocean for a week. Servants spoon-feed you and whisper to you that you will have a case soon. Then they spin you around overhead in a machine while a voice shouts, "We all go around the sun!" It is an excellent punishment, but I do not like being punished.

The words he was given: squelch, disseminate, heliocentric, fault line, flavonoids, blind luck, anteater, amblyopic, spoon-fed, pronk. Unbelievable . . .

back from the city of angels

The entrance to the Museum of Jurassic Technology in L.A. is so plain, and the building itself so narrow, you could easily walk right past it without noticing. But when you're standing in the blazing white sun outside its iron door at five of noon waiting for the museum to open, all the details take on an aura of some lost, exotic time: an empty recessed alcove in the wall, a modest fountain, the ironwork of the door, the discreet bronze plate by the bell stamped with the museum's name and instructions to ring for admittance. Inside was a series of small, dark rooms with exhibits only partially illuminated. It took almost a half-hour for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, and another hour to realize that I'd explored less than half of the museum and that the place seemed to stretch on forever.

A.'s favorite display was the room documenting American trailer parks, with tiny plasticine replicas of the earliest, home-made mobile homes. Joel seemed most impressed by the lesson on how to give your sickness to a dog by sharing a bowl of milk with it. I think Julia was seized with the impatience to get home and start creating things, at least, I thought I saw a little of that fire in her eyes.

Lawrence Weschler's essay about the place emphasizes the hoaxes that are intermingled so believably with the actual exhibits - and they're entertaining, in a '100 lies' kind of way - but what really sticks with me was the idea of a personal museum, and how pure a form of self-expression that was. I imagined a fairy godmother had given David Wilson's weblog three wishes, and it chose (a) three-dimensionality, (b) all the time in the world to research its topics in depth, (c) the solidity lent by a decades-long stream of visitors and tourists. She waved a wand and somehow one man's vision coalesced into stone and glass boxes and velvet backdrops. Now that is the sweetest dream . . .

P.S. - Mission of Burma play the EMP on Wednesday!

everybody must get snubbed

Happy things: Free magazines from the library trade-in bin. Eggplant. Cheap jewelry. Google. Funny, smartass diabloggers babbling on about Brian and some guy named Jesus.

Josh, who's finally come back from his hiatus, writes in email:

There's a beat-up old Volvo in my neighborhood, driven by a girl around my age, that I've noticed because it has poetry painted on its doors. I had never gotten a good look at it before, and when I could read it (like when walking by) I didn't want to pause long, and be caught staring, so all I could catch made it sound like bad love poetry, or worse, bad lyrics.

But the other day walking by, I finally realized that I could just google part of the poem and find out what it was, if it was 'anything'. (I don't know why this hadn't occurred to me before, since I google everything else I can't place - probably because it was outside in the actual world.) So I caught 'only centuries delayed', and went home to find that it was Emily Dickinson's no. 511.

511.

If you were coming in the Fall,
I'd brush the Summer by
With half a smile, and half a spurn,
As Housewives do, a Fly.

If I could see you in a year,
I'd wind the months in balls —
And put them each in separate Drawers,
For fear the numbers fuse —

If only Centuries, delayed,
I'd count them on my Hand,
Subtracting, till my fingers dropped
Into Van Dieman's Land.

If certain, when this life was out —
That yours and mine, should be
I'd toss it yonder, like a Rind,
And take Eternity —

But, now, uncertain of the length
Of this, that is between,
It goads me, like the Goblin Bee —
That will not state — its sting.

then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty

Aesthetics of the Main Part of Life

The late early and the entire middle
Are the main part of life. Be as kind
As you can in this part, and get done
What it seems to you has to be done.
If you find time for it, have a good time.

Kenneth Koch 1925 - 2002

C.f. A Primitive Like an Orb

Also - a eulogy from Toadex:

Kenneth Koch, yah I remember Kenneth Koch, he could reel off verse, he could speak in measured verse, you could tell Kenny, "For the next half hour I want you to only speak in dactylic tetrameter," and boy he would manage, and smoothly.

I don't know what happened to Dan Fitch either. But a little frog tells me he's still alive and kicking.

lament for the makers

He has done petuously devour
The noble Fred, of bloggirse flour,
Yellow of Lemon, and Apathy,
          Timor 404is conturbat me.

(after William Dunbar)

~ ~ ~

Even though no one reads this site I do not think anyone who reads this site is guilty of such foolishness, I still feel compelled to issue my heartfelt plea: please do not name your website after your favorite author, do not adopt the pen name of your favorite author, etc., because what you're basically doing is creating a Google bomb and making it much harder to find scholarship about that writer on the web.

Anyway, if you make up a name that's basically unique, like, say, "Rebecca Blood," it'll be a lot easier for you to query search engines to see who's been talking about you.

tea and cakes and ices

Consolation for Frumpiness, part two:

Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)

- Eliot, "Prufrock"

I guess I'm just in a sour mood from just four hrs sleep last night. Here's one nice thing, though: a bag of sweet Rainier cherries on the left, a bag of almonds on the right. Alternating bites first from one bag, then the other.

A somewhat disturbing Japanese lesson from the folks at JList:

Opening a bag of chips along its spine, so that the bag is spread out with the chips sitting on top, is called "omanko ake" (oh-MAHN-ko AH-kay), which literally means "to open so that it resembles the female private region."

But I initially went there to get the URL for their ironic T-shirts, which are a level further into irony than the stuff at engrish.com (see "World of Pain" below), because when you knowingly buy a T-shirt that says in Japanese "I am a filthy Caucasian worm," that makes it cool somehow.

happy birthday laura

Sun's setting.

Cleared half my room of its furniture, put a chair in the middle of the empty space, put a candle on the chair, and lit the candle.

Watched a moth beat its wings against the window for a few minutes before it gave up and flew off.

Nothing to do for the rest of the evening but read a poem, eat some brownies, and call my best friend.

Today was a tiring day. Today was an excellent and tiring day.

I'm finishing up The

I'm finishing up The Waves, which is only the second novel by Virginia Woolf I've read, and what strikes me about the book is the same thing that struck me about To the Lighthouse: how precisely she's able to describe the process of consciousness, and how mental voice-overs are layered over a basis of wordless action.

Here's the aging Bernard remininscing about his youthful interior narrator:

Once I had a biographer, dead long since, but if he still followed my footsteps with his old flattering intensity he would here say, 'About this time Bernard married and bought a house. . . . His friends observed in him a growing tendency to domesticity. . . . The birth of children made it highly desirable that he should augment his income.' That is the biographic style, and it does to tack together torn bits of stuff, stuff with raw edges. After all, one cannot find fault with the biographic style if one begins letters 'Dear Sir,' ends them 'yours faithfully'; one cannot despise these phrases laid like Roman roads across the tumult of our lives, since they compel us to walk in step like civilised people with the slow and measured tread of policemen though one may be humming any nonsense under one's breath at the same time - 'Hark, hark, the dogs do bark,' 'Come away, come away, death,' 'Let me not to the marriage of true minds,' and so on.

I remember feeling like that, but this month there's been a weird silence in my head — not even a "Hark, hark, the dogs do bark" but just waiting around for something to happen. I never finished the last three books I got from the library. This weekend I tidied up the house and took my dresses to the dry cleaner's. What I couldn't find a place for, I dumped into a shopping bag and hid in the closet. Put blackout curtains across the wall of windows in my bedroom, so maybe I'll sleep okay tonight, rain or no rain.

How to Make a

How to Make a Crop Circle, from a bunch of loony "cereal artists."

positive mental attitude

"Who writes this stuff?" - Juliet's resume is very funny and moving. It almost conveys how cool of a person she is in person.

In a not-too-dissimilar vein, I blogged the original Alter Ego game a couple years ago, but this web-based port is even more addictive because I can keep the little browser window open all day. It's a game that lets you choose the life you could have lived, and relive it from start to finish. It's really hard to win. This most recent round, I'm going to die a bachelor because I completely forgot to buy anything . . . my only possession is a cheap watch (obviously the game indicates very little about the real life of the player). Anyway, so far all my girlfriends have left me at the altar. But there's always the next life! (thanks Leuschke)

When I write my book to be titled The Consolation of Poetry, this poem will be the backbone of the "Consolation for being frumpy and kind of a slob" section: (back then "still" also meant something like what "always" means now):

Still to be neat, still to be dressed,
As you were going to a feast;
Still to be powdered, still perfumed:
Lady, it is to be presumed,
Though art's hid causes are not found,
All is not sweet, all is not sound.

Give me a look, give me a face,
That makes simplicity a grace;
Robes loosely flowing, hair as free:
Such sweet neglect more taketh me
Than all the adulteries of art;
They strike mine eyes, but not my heart.

- Ben Jonson

welcome to walsh world

I thought I was jaded but the new photos on engrish.com had me in stitches, even better than the illustrated "Vice Guide to Getting a Tattoo in the Magical Language of Asian" (that's the one with the "Ramen" tattoo in it, I wish I could find a scan of it. A transcript of the text is here if you're willing to scroll down about 40%).

in lieu of a haiku

One of the garden sprinklers a couple houses down from my apartment building, I don't know, exploded or something. From a block away you could see it shooting up into the air, a couple stories high, coming down in clouds of fat droplets - clouds that pulsed larger, rhythmically, in slow-motion.

Two blocks north of where I live, a patch of honesty grows. The green pods are slightly mottled with mauve and the seeds are a darker mauve. When winter comes they'll grow into their beauty, turn silvery and transparent. Until then, their ruddy green health camouflages them in the surrounding foliage.

A quarter mile farther north, the view really starts to unfold. Houses that sell for seven figures. Woman my age in a silver BMW convertible with a scarf from Burberry folded neatly on the dashboard. The young girls of WashPIRG walking up and down each block, their clipboards empty.

Another few blocks. Solitary rose in a patch of weeds. Shell-pink petals in the colorless dead grass.

here, have some more manna

L. and I drove out to the coast over the long weekend for the vacation I needed very, very, very, very badly. We soaked in sulfurous hot springs and communed with the scraps of algae floating in the water (a sign in the locker room explained, "It's Not Skin"). Then we biked up and down the highway by the beach. The sun blazed, the sky and water were blue, and yellow dandelions blazed in the grass by the side of the road. The following were spotted: bunnies, deer, cows, horses, goats, emus, and possibly some kind of raptor, and a picture of a vole.

This morning: the long-awaited, life-renewing rain. Slept for nine hours. Tried an Affogato for the first time (a shot of espresso poured over a scoop of espresso-flavored gelato). Met someone new and completely perverted. Seared a piece of sashimi-grade ahi for dinner, with sauteed broccoli and zucchini coins over rice.

Now if you read BoingBoing at all, the remainder of this entry will be redundant ~ ~ ~

Pork rinds don't give you heart disease, Snackwell's gives you heart disease. When will they make up their minds?

Apparently this awesome, scary-smart ex-coworker of mine completely dominated a computer Rock-Paper-Scissors contest back in 1999, but that's not the funny part. The funny part was the bot he entered in the "Unofficial Super-Modified Category":

Fork Bot was based on an idea that Dan Egnor came up with a few minutes after hearing about the contest. Since "library routines are allowed", his elegant solution was to spawn three processes with fork(), have each one make a different move, and then kill off the two that did not win.

But believe it or not, this thing only placed 3rd . . . the two programs that based it cheated even worse.

Finally. Downloaded the trial version of Triptych (similar to Tetris but with a physics engine, so the pieces bounce around and stuff while you try to aim them, and the requirements for making blocks disappear are considerably more lenient). It was nice . . . too nice, as a stoner says about opium in the Iain Banks novel I read over the weekend. So I uninstalled it.

often he reckons, in the dawn, them up

Lately, the days it doesn't rain have been rough. Too much sun or something. I've been up since, oh, seven minutes before sunrise. A dark bedsheet draped over my folding screen covers up part of my picture windows but still it's bright in here, torch-bright. It seeps through the blankets and sheets and whatever I put over my eyes.

So after a couple hours I got up and brought my discman into bed with me. The music sounds thin and worn, like cloth handled too much, but it helps erase whatever's hounding me, whatever that is. I don't know what that is. I need music that's like code, something to help me completely forget who I am.

Philip Whalen
1923 - 2002
"[Poetry] is the graph of the mind's movement."

via Synthetic Zero

. . . & yeah, it looks like P22 has a ton of cool stuff, e.g. various artist handwriting fonts (Michaelangelo, Da Vinci, Monet, Van Gogh, Edward and Josephine Hopper, John Cage).