November 30, 2002
A. finished his novel!
Aside from that not much has been going on here. We celebrated our anniversary and my birthday by swarming out to eat at gourmet restaurants like a pair of crazed starving rodents then going back to the hotel and resting like a pair of worn-out gluttonous rodents. December is the month of getting healthy and part of health is having fun. Plus I wouldn't mind putting on a few pounds if I could be assured they'd be in the right places (though these assuredly won't be).
Bill got me the Monsters, Inc. DVD. I laughed so much it hurt. Laughter is the best medicine, right?
Tales from Earthsea was fun, easy reading and moving. I hadn't read an Earthsea book since finishing the trilogy sometime in the 1980s, so these stories seemed like feminist revisionism. I think the review in NYRB said Le Guin had repented making the trilogy as sexist as it was (and deservedly so -- I used to pretend-swoon in our basement/den in our house in Manila, and stumble around more in the dark, so I could be more like Tenar, the one female main character in the entire three-book series. At least the women in Tales are a little less powerless . . . .
Also. Got a haircut, took off 3 inches. (Less hair to wash = more energy saved.) Also started my first sweater today (I need some excuse to see Liz, plus I haven't been to knitting group in a while). It's basically a modified version of this. (I hope to replace all the hard bits, i.e. the cuffs and the neck, with easy bits from the Yarn Girls' guide). For dinner, first I sauteed and ate a medium yellow onion (with olive oil, salt, sugar and vinegar), then a zucchini (with olive oil, salt, garlic, and milk), and topped it off with five ounces of baked teriyaki salmon. It was all incredibly tasty.
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November 29, 2002
This man here is wheezing. Get him an easement.
Thanks for your well-wishes. I wish I could reply but my email is down. (As are the tzo.com nameservers that serve tensegrity.net - what a tragedy!) Also, hi Jason, it was nice to run into you on the street today.
Bhikku writes:
'At five and twenty, when the better part of life is over, one should be something; - and what am I? nothing but five and twenty and the odd months. What have I seen? the same man all over the world, - ay, and woman too.'
Oh, he was so wrong.
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November 27, 2002
the big quarter-century
Turn 25 tomorrow. Thanks for the birthday wishes. This year yoga changed my life. I've been exercising three or four times a week since the beginning of August. Also, I:
And next year I hope to:
One year ago
Two years ago
Three years ago
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November 26, 2002
you cannot petition the lord with prayer
. . . but I wish you could.
Mmm, I love aubergines. Simply adore them. Also the champorado sounds really tasty, but I don't have much of a sweet tooth myself. Thanks for the offer though!
Selva came over for lunch, which of course rocked, and delivered an early birthday present: The Describer's Dictionary. It's a little like Bhikku on steroids, except without the pictures, and less witty and more reference-oriented, but I love it! . . . Anyway, hey, anyone care to spill the beans on what's going on in the game these days? Schmoes like Selva and me are always the last to know.
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November 25, 2002
a premonition, I guess
Left work early. I was just too tired. Don't feel sick per se, no temperature, just drained and weak. My birthday in three days.
-- Montaigne, from "On Solitude"
Recently remembered something my mother taught me a long time ago, that it's bad luck to get a clock as a gift, because giving a clock, song zhong (or jung or however you want to spell the Mandarin for "clock") is a homonym for song zhong, making funeral arrangements.
I'm intrigued by bangus - yet another fish with a home page (though I like tilapia dot com better). I'm sure I had it in my childhood, but I don't remember it. Lumpia with cheese sounds fantastic, though.
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November 24, 2002
chewing out the devil and find yourself / minty mints are your breath's friend
Though we always celebrate it on the day before Thanksgiving, yesterday was A.'s and my 7th anniversary . . . !!
Begging pardon in advance for the rest of this month's entries. Stress and, well, stress are making me vapid.
I was just so completely floored by The Listening Post exhibit I thought I was going to cry. Billed as "the collective voice of the Internet," their achievement was in finding the right balance between canned elements (background music, intervals and chords) and live/random data (real-time chat room posts being read out loud by a speech generator), creating a haunting and evocative atmosphere instead of the pure noise and static I expected. If you live in New York, please don't miss a chance to see this next month.
The right new clothes can feel like a hug from the inside of your personal space. I went downtown and picked up a sweater (I have a solid eight year record of losing these) and skirt. Also leafed through the new Alain de Botton book. Am not looking forward to going back to work.
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November 23, 2002
I only need a person, keep my shoulders
Have already, need to finish reading: Carolyn Knox, McSweeneys' Lies, Crowley's Lies, Hollander Dante, Amichai (so nice thanks), Prisoner Handbook
Montaigne, Lingua Franca, (It seems to be D A R K all the time these days - less than a month from solstice)
Need to check out: Ungaretti, new Barbara Guest book, Merwin's Gawain, NEW JOHN ASHBERY!!!, ...
Ha, sustained visualization of lugaw was powerful enough to drag my ravaged carcass out of bed and into the kitchen. O the beauty of usage!
Dreamt:
NorthSouth.net turns out to be some kind of plumbing supplier.
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November 22, 2002
kaeru
Quitting job to work in bookstore, traveling Europe, getting dog, etc. mayhaps superfluous: occasional bouts of drinking = a more constructive/well-adjusted substitute; ?
"This kind of surrender is very productive, because dreams that run counter to reality waste a lot of energy." - Atlantic Monthly via UFO Breakfast via Bellona Times.
Consider practicing meditation (thanks A.), ?
I would breathe water.
- Plath, from "Full Fathom Five"
Sorry about Geegaw being down today; A. fixed it when he got home . . .
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November 21, 2002
Ignorant fish, who even wants the fly while writhing.
Woke up at 5 to the sound of a horn being leaned on. Threw open the curtains expecting to see an insistent cab driver, found instead a fairyland of thick fog lit from within by sodium lanterns, all pink yellow and orange. Does that foghorn echo all the way up and down the shoreline? Its sound was definitely familiar, as though I've heard it a hundred times in my dreams, and actually I'm sure I have.
Took the bus in to work, and as it sped across the lake, the water was every bit as white as the foggy sky, just a great white wall, which parted in two as we headed inland, divided by a brilliant white ribbon, perfectly flat, that just got brighter and brighter until it opened up into a clearing of blue sky and a sun I had to look away from.
Yeah, most people don't realize it, but during winter in Seattle, sunglasses are about as essential as a raincoat. . . though I myself rarely wear either . . . .
Confidential to Dorky: Oh, now I get it . . . I thought you were just being annoying, but that is actually pretty funny.
Confidential to Interlocutor of Dorky: Without your touching gallantry, I would never have figured out the joke on my own: thank you.
Here is an essay on a question that has plagued me for a while now: Do octopuses commit suicide? . . . The author says no, but by his logic, I don't see how it is that humans can be considered to commit suicide either . . .
Anyway, this why I don't eat octopus. Tako o tabenai or whatever.
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November 20, 2002
i fell in love again today, i think that's been every day this week
Reason 14,731,801 why A. is the bestest boyfriend ever: to make up for my mishap with (un)Lucky Pierre, he got me Quiet Violence, that impossible-to-find Arab Strap EP. And it is fantastically beautiful. I've been singing it under my breath all day.
And inconcinnity, wow, nice work! Now let's start looking for some of the other serious pyrotechnics: alterity, irruption, divagation . . . as in, "Wrong as a divagation to Peking."
But the poem-in-progress is stillborn. I wanted it to be about so many things. The world vs. the hidden world. The latter full of all the things we turn away from. Questions I'm happy to leave unanswered, that nevertheless keep me up at night. Heaps of rubies scattered in a dark basement.
with all foliage underground.
I want November to be over.
It was a blazing blue autumn day today, warm and electric. Felt more than well enough to come into work. Then in the afternoon Selva and I went to Uwajimaya and spent some time ogling the chocolate persimmons in the produce aisle.
by Ogden Nash
When people aren't asking question
They're making suggestions
And when they're not doing one of those
They're either looking over your shoulder or stepping on your toes
And then as if that weren't enough to annoy you
They employ you.
Anybody at leisure
Incurs everybody's displeasure.
It seems to be very irking
To people at work to see other people not working,
So they tell you that work is wonderful medicine,
Just look at Firestone and Ford and Edison,
And they lecture you till they're out of breath or something
And then if you don't succumb they starve you to death or something.
All of which results in a nasty quirk:
That if you don't want to work you have to work to earn enough money
so that you won't have to work.
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November 19, 2002
it eats you starting from your bottom
Asian? Hmm?
Was too fatigued this morning even to wash my hair thoroughly, kind of washed half of it and got tired and just rinsed the rest; whatever, the French wash their hair like once a week, and I usually keep it in a messy half-bun half-ponytail anyway so no one can tell: some nights it's still damp when I go to sleep, which just possibly might be the reason I'm starting to get sick again (but I may fight it off). I should've left work after lunch, to rest, but got all fixated on the idea of possibly being able to finish my current project three days ahead of schedule -- wouldn't that have been nice? But that didn't happen either.
brass, solder, oil paint, sanded window glass
Table, ivory elephant charm, rainbow, onion, hairdo, mollusk, Shabbos, violence, cuticle, melodrama, ditch, honey, doily . . .
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November 18, 2002
there is a kind of pressure in humans to take whatever is most beloved by them, and smash it
Went shopping yesterday for myself, came back with belated birthday presents for L. and M. Dark weather, suffocating under heavy cloud of perfume from a spilled free-sample bottle I'd had in my closet. I do not even like the scent. Window's been open for 24 hours but still it lingers.
Been listening to the Von Trapps' one good song, "Out in a Boat."
Ezra mentions "Sea Surface Full of Clouds":
Piano-polished, held the tranced machine
Of ocean, as a prelude holds and holds . . .
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November 17, 2002
aglets and eyewrenches
I have Toadex to thank for this dream anatomy picture, all captions in (apparently legitimate) German.
Hoodwinked! My impulse purchase of Aidan Moffat's import-only solo venture under le pseudonyme de Lucky Pierre turned out to contain none of that mopey Scottish voice I crave so, nor the vicious lyrics. Oh Aidan. You didn't think I was buying Arab Strap records because of your musical talent, did you?
Futurama tonight was a real weepfest. Note to self: If you ever get that dog you want, consider naming him "Seymour Glasses."
For the 20things.org charity auction, I was going to thread letters on a necklace to form one of the fragments from the new Anne Carson translations of Sappho:
or
But I have neither the talent nor the time, the former being the larger obstacle. So I'm writing this entry in its stead--
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November 16, 2002
it's your life and you can do what you want
Sulking, I weaselled out of all my commitments today and yesterday, did back-to-back yoga instead. The glories of the world struck me, made me aria, once.
Maximum recommended daily Internet consumption: 5 hrs/day?! That of most people I know: more than twice that.
On the bright side, my blood test results are back: I'm as healthy as a horse. (And not just any horse -- an especially healthy one.) So to celebrate, I took the Spark's death test and it has me passing away in 2062, at the ripe old age of 84. That's 24 down, 60 to go . . .
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November 15, 2002
a pelican of lies
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November 14, 2002
being of chinese-dissent
A passage from last week I feel a sudden affection for:
Forget which is what I do, to mail,
stab toward, and don't reach. Turn away mind.
A drag is slang for something boring (or "obnoxiously tiresome").
Toadex sent me a link to Poetry International, a website with a poetry blog and poetry editors from twelve countries . . . the Poem of the Week is in Chinese and you can see from the characters on the left hand side that there's some structural interplay going on, much more repetition in the poem than survives in translation, and some kind of linguistic (slang?) relationship between the phrases "fall in love" and "climb aboard", and some of the other verbs as well, -- basically that it's at least an order of magnitude more sophisticated than the English translation seems to indicate. Oh! This stuff makes me so mad! It's so frustrating to peep into the lit window of beauty like this, stuck out here in the cold and the dark.
evinces the gift. Being tragic with a book on your head.
- Les Murray, The Instrument
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November 13, 2002
i am a scientist / i seek to understand me / i am an incurable and nothing else behaves like me
Buffy tonight, aw man. What a drag.
This morning was kind of a drag too, but I took it okay, I guess, or maybe the day just got better. Another doctor's appointment, they drew blood for some tests. The weather was clear at lunchtime and I drove to the public library at Crossroads to return some CDs and comics. It cheered me that my top secret ultra-geeky birthday present to myself, from American Science and Surplus, arrived early! (It works great.)
(The other thing I may get for myself: Monkey Tennis.)
I want to see Punch-Drunk Love, and really want to see Far From Heaven with A.
Tilapia for dinner. Chocolate with currants in it for dessert.
Listened to the first movement of that Barber violin concerto over and over because I can't help but feel that the notes in there know me somehow.
An end to vacations in Ostend, an end to memorizing
all of Keats's "Endymion," an end to weeding calendulas.
An end to it: spending at Henri Bendel, an end to fat rear ends
for some people. An end to telephone blunderbores, an end to
stones flying through the air toward injuries. An end
to problems of the endocrine gland, an end to having to
know all endings for cases and tenses, and an end to tension.
An end to irresponsible benders, but no end to a
new blender which blends splendidly. Perpend:
an end probably to the enclitic ne, an end to the expensiveness of
endive.
As a pendant lost from a chain's end, an end to mendaciousness.
Day in, day out, an end to endless wrath, an end to a century, and a
millennium;
an end to strife anent human rights, an end to endemic hate.
An end to codependence, an end to the word endomorph.
An end to demented emendations, and on to an amendment of life.
- Caroline Knox
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November 12, 2002
. . . of the ring, the flies, or the dance
Mitsu pointed out the ultimate in "Similar Minds": Google (ironically Synthetic Zero is not listed as one of the related sites!).
. . .
Made out like a bandit Sunday, and thanks for the gifts and loans. I was thrilled about the celadon vase (my favorite color), Yehuda Amichai collection, and (on loan) McSweeney's #8 and Crowley's Book of Lies, just in time for my upcoming birthday.
Speaking of which I'm trying to think of a good way to celebrate my quartercentennial (I thought if quadricentennial was the 400th anniversary, then quadracentennial would be the 25th, but the word doesn't appear to actually exist). It'll be Thanksgiving day, so a plane trip that weekend would be prohibitively expensive (I've looked). Tattoos and piercings are out of the question, and the weather's a little gloomy for hiking. Hmmm . . .
"...Voters came out strongly to express support for huge tax cuts for the rich, reduced corporate oversight, relaxed environmental standards, geostrategic unilateralism, and an ideologically hardline conservative judiciary... Oh what'd you think you were voting for?" -- Jon Stewart
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November 11, 2002
crotchety in my age
[Update: the below link broadcasts your email address in referrers! So please don't take the quiz unless you have a good proxy server and a disposable email address . . . the Similar Minds guy says he'll fix it in a couple days]
Was bitterly disappointed by the Similar Minds similar-mind-finder, whose best feature was that its quiz was relatively short and easy to answer . . . it tries to give you a list of bloggers/journallers who have a similar personality. I think it needed just a couple more questions, for a more precise matching algorithm:
28.
0
1
2
3
4
I can spell.
29.
0
1
2
3
4
The world is just clamoring to learn what color
pants I am wearing today.
But how lame it was of me to get my hopes up. (Via Graham)
One of the world's thousand languages must have a word for people-who-cursorily-leaf-through-your-poetry,-pretending-to-like-it,-in-order-to-get-your-opinion-on-their-poetry. I want to learn that language. (Update: right, "workshopper." Like a grasshopper but with work instead of gras. I am afraid of becoming a "workshopper.")
From tonight's harvest:
to I never. I owe a fit a fever a triangle
lightly tapped a tuning fork whose shouldn't tapped nothing.
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November 10, 2002
lebensmürche?
Yukino/Selva/whatever has the NaNoWriMo work-in-progress up here.
Q: What's better than 1000 Blank White
Cards?
A: Hugh MacLeod
(via Bellona Times)
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November 9, 2002
zeno's word count
A recent stanza:
Quaaaaaack.
Oh, help! I have become entangled in an undertaking simultaneously decadent, dangerous, and deathly boring. . . .
- J. K. Huysmans, Against Nature
- Montaigne, 1:20, tr. M. A. Screech (yes I finally got it!!)
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November 8, 2002
spit them up and chew them out
Ha ha, it turns out that the email address I use for this website hasn't worked for some time now (maybe several weeks) and I just, well, just never paid attention. Anyway it's fixed now.
I lay down a long time ago not expecting to get up ever.
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November 7, 2002
happy 28th birthday leo, who doesn't read this site
Sheets of rain, the sky simply slapping down these liquid sheets on us. Woke up from a dream in which the main actor of a play had stopped in the middle of delivering his lines, transfixed by a vision he was having of his dead father talking on the stage -- but though he strained to listen, he couldn't hear his father's voice, just a slow warble and scratchy hiss like from blank recording tape played backward.
Woke up with that same melancholy, liquid feeling, as though something lovely from the past had crept out of hiding during the night and then rushed back into its hole at daybreak, leaving behind just the barely discernible scent of its absence. . . .
Two bruises this morning, not from some freaky unidentified disease, but from vigorous games of air-hockey and Dance Dance Revolution!
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November 5, 2002
election day ship party
Bum bum bum, a dark day for history. America is a country full of masses of mysteriously and inexplicably right-wing voters.
O Canada . . .
~ ~ ~
Couldn't sleep last night because I was so keyed up. Took out my Dance Dance Revolution pads for the first time in almost exactly a year, and discovered -- surprise -- that I'm so rusty I'm just stumbling my way through each track. Going to head down to Gameworks when it opens, I think.
I wasted a lot of time yesterday when I should have been writing. The verse is succumbing to entropy anyway. Occasional use of words like "q&Q&Q&Q&Q&Q&Q&Q&Q&". Weird rhythms in lines like "Canterbury or leverage it nothing, it's creepy or am I." -- I kind of like them, but the World at Large will certainly despise them, the only question is how much? I feel like the aspic in Dinner at Eight, which we finished last night -- "quivering with pride," but still bracing myself to be dropped unceremoniously on the kitchen floor in the knife fight scene. I think I need to regroup and seize upon a direction, any direction.
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November 4, 2002
don't want to / live inside it, must etc, sticky love / and animal obligation?
I've been writing for days! Whoo!
Found, in Economy of the Unlost, a word so unfamiliar I was sure it was a typo:
Pronunciation: "in-k&n-'si-n&-tE
Function: noun
Etymology: Latin inconcinnitas, from in- + concinnitas concinnity
Date: circa 1616
: lack of suitability or congruity : INELEGANCE
Also, a beautiful poem in Jacket:
in the caves today
the pistil of a calla lily may be speaking:
. . .THE ROOF IS FALLING
The caves are membranes breathing, huge
petals the sun breaks through
soft skin greenhouse.
Must I experience total
collapse of psychic hierarchy?
Will the caves stop being caves?
Leveling. Everything's leveling.
-- by Alice Notley (read the rest of it here)
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November 3, 2002
his scotches may be a bit naph but his plates are bona
I just love to read dispatches from my favorite queer superhero media theorist. Susannah writes:
Apparently a lot of the words have clearly Italian origins, but it also incorporates bits from rhyming slang, circus speak, Gypsy talk, and sailor cant. "Naff" (boring, tasteless) was in an Arab Strap song, and the title of that Morrissey album, "Bona Drag," is apparently Palare for "good clothes." Also the oft-cited phrase "so bona to vada your eek" was in the Morrissey song Picadilly Palare. (It means "How good to see your face." Eek was short for ecaf which is backwards slang for face.)
. . .
I find this whole writing business very difficult for me mentally. I may need to stop. I don't know how Aaron manages it. (I have four of Aaron's business cards, each one different, to give to the next four Internet folk I meet.)
Rhymed "can't," "cant", and "recant" today . . . one section is called "whores and olives" (but should it be the other way around, olives and whores?). Wishing I had dressed up for Halloween as the ghost of the English language crying out for vengeance.
Vigilant readers of other weblogs may have come to the conclusion that A.'s real name is either Ben, Corey, or Eric but that's not actually the case.
The Curvature of the Earth is Overwhelmed by Local Noise has some very nice excerpts of David Chess's novel-in-progress.
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November 2, 2002
getting and spending, laying waste
It's so obvious I don't need to mention it, but it's easier to write a 50,000 epic piece of crap than one good haiku. If I'm lucky I'll get a couple decent sonnets out of this. But so far I've rhymed "order" with "ordure" and one of the verses is about American Science & Surplus's "Grow-A-Date" dolls (I hope their claim of 600% growth in volume is a typo -- merely doubling in size should bring about an increase in volume of 700% . . . ) so you can draw your own conclusions about the quality of the work-in-progress.
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