January 31, 2003
matthew bliss
Thanks to 20things.org, I am the happy owner of an original artwork by Matthew Bliss:
Drifting, stunned, she cradled the box, staring through the rectangle of glass at an arrangement of brown old maps and tarnished mirror. The seas of the cartographers had been cut away, exposing the flaking mirrors, landmasses afloat on dirty silver. . . .
-- William Gibson, from Count Zero
I join your risk my
I join your risk my dear Friend & go with youReminder to read more about: The glass delusion; the sludge delusion.
Rec'vd excellent summary on rhinocerotes from Jessamyn, will upload when have more time.
Why, there's no remedy. 'Tis the curse of service:
- Iago
Preferment goes by letter and affection,
And not by old gradation, where each second
Stood heir to the first.
January 30, 2003
dogfish and memory
Happy birthday Judith.A confession. I liked the blogverse better in 1999, when so few of us even wrote about books at all, we had to band together in our own ontogroup. These days I'm just inundated and intimidated by these long lists of excellent hard-core poetry blogs I'll never have time to read, half of them are full-time academics and they all blog with their real names and . . . gah! To preserve the pleasure in things I shall continue to pretend that the vast majority of these sites do not exist -- I wouldn't want to I risk losing the creature.
Digital camera arrived! Whoopee!! Time to try the baked-paper-and-foil recipe (thanks!) and picture-ify it. Time to give the paperwhites (all blasted, all wasted) a decent burial. Time to roll up the old sleeves and prepare the Champ-O-Rado.
I just finished memorizing my second poem of the 21st century, which took me about a week. It was Tennyson's Ulysses if you hadn't already guessed from the site's new slogan. They say memory improves with practice and I've just been too impressed with J.D.'s sleight-of-hand talent of producing chains of colorful verses out of nowhere (prestirecitation?). I would've liked to start with Ashbery, but old poems are so much easier to memorize -- regular meter acts as a kind of checksum, as do (to a lesser extent) rhyme and meaning.
p.s. Thanks for your support of the diablog. I'm glad you guys like it. So do I. :)
If hands could free you, heart
Two poems by Philip Larkin and a lyric by Ian Curtis:
To put one brick upon another,
Add a third and then a forth,
Leaves no time to wonder whether
What you do has any worth.
But to sit with bricks around you
While the winds of heaven bawl
Weighing what you should or can do
Leaves no doubt of it at all.
. . .
If hands could free you, heart,
Where would you fly?
Far, beyond every part
Of earth this running sky
Makes desolate? Would you cross
City and hill and sea,
If hands could set you free?
I would not lift the latch;
For I could run
Through fields, pit-valleys, catch
All beauty under the sun--
Still end in loss:
I should find no bent arm, no bed
To rest my head.
. . .
Got to find my destiny before it slides away
January 28, 2003
petit vache
Dichotomic, defensive, yet ineffably right-seeming, An Introvert's Lexicon installed in me that sense of introverted superiority which its author seems to be trying to cultivate! But only briefly. (Thanks to an email from Waggish.)Twigmuntus, Cowbelliantus, Perchnosius: the story of a simple lad who confounds a group of scholars by pretending to know Latin.
The stalks of the paperwhite on my desk have fallen over and are lying limply across my desk. Those long green shoots seem to be trying to arrange themselves fetchingly, the way I remember once having tried to impress a guy with how neatly I could curl up in a narrow window ledge.
I wish I could help them. I want them to leap robustly upward, the way I remember once having tried to impress a guy with how neatly I could climb halfway out a third-story window and, gripping the ledge above with one hand, deface the outer walls of the building with a piece of chalk held in the other.
January 27, 2003
purity of essence
The US intends to shatter Iraq "physically, emotionally and psychologically" by raining down on its people as many as 800 cruise missiles in two days.Well, but you can't expect to wield supreme executive power just 'cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!
thanks jim
p.s. You know, can I just cut the fucking ironic humor and ask a simple question? Why do you hate us so much? Seriously.
January 26, 2003
My brother scanned in the
My brother scanned in the entirety of our family's photo collection
January 25, 2003
from Sweet Thursday
Dissolved some sugar under my tongue today. Poisons the only cures.Or elbow grease.
"I bet I could fix rich dames up," said Mack. "At least for a while."
"How would you go about it?"
"Well, sir, first I'd hire me a deaf-and-dumb assistant. His job just to set and listen and look worried. Then I'd get me a bottle of Epsom salts and I'd put in a pretty little screw-cap thing and I'd call it Moondust. I'd charge about thirty dollars a teaspoonful, and you got to come to my office to get it. Then I'd invent me a machine you strap the dame in. It's all chrome and it lights colored lights every minute or so. It costs the dame twelve dollars a half-hour and it puts her through the motions she'd do over a scrub board."
-- Steinbeck, from Sweet Thursday. (Thanks Bhikku for helping me find the exact citation.)
January 24, 2003
rhinos and flatulence
Since I heard of Google Answers a few days ago, I've only come across one question that I'd pay to read the answer to: Is there a link between rhinocerotes and mental illness? And if not, why does Tom O'Bedlam call himself "Tom Rynosseross" in one of the verses? -- Is it just so he can rhyme "cross" and "rhinoceros"?I guess that was three questions. . . .
And it's not that these are the questions that plague me; it's that I know Google lacks the answers for what I really want to know.
Bits and pieces of my entry yesterday have gone missing. I was complaining that I've been petitioning Rosebaby for a Cardinal Fish tee for almost a year now, yet apparently all that was required was for just one diablogger to suggest it. Also I wanted to thank Mr. Psychic Pants for his Champ-O-Rado.
Breaking Wind: Legendary Farts. A small collection of folktales about flatulence from around the world.
January 22, 2003
waggish
A recent Waggish is about a Latin multidimensional palindrome (you can read it backwards, forwards, upwards, and downwards) and how the Austrian composer Webern and the Brazilian writer Osman Lins based entire works on it. The weirdest thing about it is that, if you remove an Alpha and an Omega from the letters, you apparently get "paternoster." It's GOD code! The palindrome itself? "Klaatu Barada Nikto." Just kidding. You'll have to read the entry on your own. Fa la la.
moles & toads
Toadex writes: "I believe I have just received latin spam! Subject: 'favorque panem dagmar_chili sign up.'" He's apparently also rec'vd spam from a certain "Greenawalt Felkins."From Information about Moles:
The snouts of all moles and desmans are tipped with a unique battery (numbering several thousand) of touch-sensative structures, known as Eimer's Organs. Under a microscope, they are reminiscent of cobbled streets. Each one sits on top of lots of nerve endings. . . . The star-nosed mole (Condylura cristata) (see picture) has a uniquely divided nose. The end is a Medusa-like rosette of 22 naked, fleshy tentacles. Each of these are covered with the aforementioned Eimer's organs.
January 21, 2003
blah
Coolest of the anartifacts is the trichobezoar, or human hairball. (Thanks L.)January 19, 2003
sendmail
Email on the new (PII-400) server works now. It turns out the default configuration of sendmail was to listen only on loopback by default(!).If you guys are still seeing the random timeouts, missing pieces of images, etc. let me know -- but I think those were all due to the failing hard drive on the old (Pentium MMX) server, which was rife with bad sectors. Here's my little rant after it took me almost 12 hours to get my new server set up. RedHat has a long way to go before they even come close to the usability of Windows, which is pretty sad considering Windows.
more swag
Aside from a little fatigue I feel pretty healthy today.As the Bard once spake, random stuff is the bomb. Did I mention that it turns out Caterina is good friends with the publisher of ReadyMade? So I receiv'd RM#4 in the mail from Vancouver, hurrah, and thanks Caterina. Then Selva did gift me with a little furry baby tamago Sushi Seal, and Nari gave me a bath bomb from Lush, from their trip up to Vancouver last weekend. And Jim and Patti hand-delivered a beautiful sheet of purple paper (handmade and hand-dyed right here in the good U.S. of A.).
I only wish I could photograph all this stuff for you so you could see it. And I've got some Champ-O-Rado brand champorado from Lia that I've been forcing myself to save till next month, when my digital camera arrives. . . .
Gwen pointed out that there's a new issue of Knitty out, thank god! I've been scared to knit any more of my sweater because I don't know how to do finishing, but there's articles on blocking and on cannibalizing old sweaters for yarn (scroll down)! *wave to L.*. The article on felting would've been really useful while I was making my felted eared hat.
January 18, 2003
mr. bungle
Finally migrated geegaw.com to a new server . . . things should be a little faster, but email is broken right now... .. ..
but at the same time i wish
-- Archy, from the lesson of the moth
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself
.. .. ..
Hurrah for Cardinal Fish! Leading by example!
"No Children" is a fine song, but the depressing lyrics seem to get stuck in my head, and they're even more embarassing than being caught singing something like, say, "I'd like to beat you black and blue / for all the desperate things you made me do," under my breath, which has, in fact, happened. . . .
.. .. ..
Provocative article about Gender Swapping in Cyberspace. It lists several motives for why men pose as women and vice versa, a bunch of interesting anecdotes, and an uncannily accurate set of tough questions designed to tell "real" women from men posing as women -- I'm curious how many men can fill in the blanks, e.g. --
The rest of the site is pretty amazing as well. I could spend all day reading through it.
.. ... ..
Apropos of cyberspace, Jim has composed a psalm for Game Neverending, beginning "GOD is my algorithm; I shall not want."
January 17, 2003
the good day
I can't in this way or that despite another waylook down the path that's yellow or fatherly,
sum it up. Well great, if it goes down, possibly
wearing a coat, any old thing will so, even beans.
Yup, that direction. Emerson on my mind . . .
What goes side by side,
I'm trying to figure out. Go hide, friend.
Who am for instance. That's worth rent checks.
-- from a poem by Jonathan Delcourt
.. .. ..
A Korean-centric day, had lunch with Selva at a new Korean restaurant and was introduced to the savory multiplicious perfection that is Korean food. We both ordered bi bim baps (rice bowl with spinach, fried egg, thinly sliced beef, carrots, and soybeans -- an invention of genius) and the waitress brought in literally almost a dozen little side dishes - garlic shoots, broccoli, fermented black beans, buckwheat cakes, little seaweed and crab omelettes, fried tofu, a spidery dark fried spinach-like vegetable, julienned cuttlefish in chili, kim chi of course, . . . . memory fails me, but it was just amazingly tasty. Selva ate much less than half of the appetizers and I just wolfed all the rest down. I think I ate as much at that meal as I usually do during an entire day. What a blast.
And then we decided to dissolve our mutual sugar-avoidance pact. Good riddance!
And tonight A. suggested we rent Notorious C.H.O. on DVD since I'm always talking about how much I want to see it, so I cuddled up with him on the sofa and we watched it (link forthcoming - but we plan to rewatch the whole thing to listen to her mom's side-splitting commentary) and then I beat Apache into submission (turns out it was the conf.d/ssl.conf file that was messing with my ability to create name-based vhosts, not httpd.conf after all, but thanks Jim for the CVS link that helped me figure that out). Yeah, and L. called my cell phone, and A. and I foraged for tons of stuff at the 25% off sale at Tower Records, and I boiled cabbage and baked squash for the first time, and we ate these almond tartlets, two each. . . . Mmm. Right. A good day.
January 16, 2003
living on fish
Oh, help! Anyone know where I can get a pristine, unedited copy of the default http.conf from Apache 2.0.40? Stupid Red Hat won't let me uninstall and reinstall the package due to phantom "dependencies.".. .. ..
There are no limits to Jeeves's brain power. He virtually lives on fish. --Bertie Wooster
Spent the morning waiting at the doctor's office, the new consensus being that what kept me up last night was just a resurgence of last Friday's ailment, improperly treated. And now just working on keeping my spirits up.
Coming up on the end of the work week and I find I've managed to avoid the bus entirely all week. Oh I get by with a little help from my friends. And I wouldn't, without it. Thanks.
Very well, the distracted mind is a patient animal waiting for dark to jump the fence like the hitchhiker we would have picked up, but we are a house. --Christine Hume, from "Highway Address," in her collection Musca Domestica
And also: from Various Readings of an Illegible Postcard by Christine Hume:
Horny or Harm seems an ordinary home.
Or Having seen the orchard and hives,
I'm satisfied I've picked the dark pocket
pink or satisfied, pickled larks protect the jinx.
You know I'm trouble with Dixie cups, croquet
and wicker or humble with desire for (cough)
the wicked. Ago? A queer little dog grazing
or gazing lives in my room or ivys my nouns.
Which (confidential to J.D.) I wonder if that's what you meant when you said you were trying to take a sentence, like "the teacup is white," and intercept the vector at the midpoint, and break it.
Confidential to all of you (and you know I'm using the C-word ironically). If you live in the Seattle area or hereabouts and you feel like sitting around talking about poetry of an evening, drop me a line.
split end
Here's a list of things that have been clinically proven to improve the immune system:
image resizing in diablog
Edited Movable Type to set a suggested width for any images posted to the diablog. This is bypassable but I'd rather you guys not bypass it, since wide images seem to wreak havoc on some readers' browsers - thanks. Changes to Util.pm line 320 or so
unless ($blog->allow_comment_html) {
if ($blog->allow_comment_html) {
} else {
January 15, 2003
part-time job share resources
Bookmarking for my own benefit as much as yours - I've heard good things about WorkOptions.com, which sells customizable proposals you can hand to your boss to request a variety of flexible working arrangements (part-time, job share, etc.).Will come in handy when I shift to a 20 hr-week schedule in order to write my Great American Novel / genetically engineer my Great American Octopus / do whatever it is that I want to do with my life that I haven't yet figured out.
January 14, 2003
Tallahassee
A. came back from Vancouver with lots of loot, including Tallahassee, the new album by the Mountain Goats on 4AD. The stand-out track is definitely "See America Right", declamatory rockin'-out in a style that reminds me of Dylan and A. of Possum Dixon: I've played it about a dozen times tonight (luckily it's just under two minutes long). Here's a nice small 1.7MB empeethree of it, plus the lyrics See America RightI was driving up from Tampa
when the radiator burst.
I was three sheets to the wind,
a civilian song at first,
And then there was the cop,
and then the children standing on the corner. . . .
Your love is like a cyclone in a swamp
and the weather's getting warmer.
I was getting out of jail
headed to the Greyhound.
You said you'd hop on one yourself
and meet me on the way down.
I was shaking way too hard to think
dead on my feet, about to drop,
when I got the case of vodka from my car
and walked the two miles to the bus stop.
Got on the bus half-drunk again,
the driver glared at me.
Met up with you in Inglis,
thumbed a ride to Cedar Key.
If we never make it back to California
I want you to know I love you --
but my love is like a dark cloud full of rain
it's always right there up above you.
January 13, 2003
mouissemusque intelektualove
Recv'd spam titled "mouissemusque intelektualove" and containing in the body the following: <ozenenim><inspiratque>From Keats's letters:
Talking of Pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my Mouth a Nectarine -- good god how fine -- It went down soft pulpy, slushy, oozy -- all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large beatified Strawberry.
- Letter to C. W. Dilke, 22 September 1819
January 12, 2003
Causa Belli
The Unseen Gulf War by Peter Turnley. Images of carnage from the 1991 war against Iraq. Via wood s lot.
Causa Belli
They read good books, and quote, but never learn
a language other than the scream of rocket-burn.
Our straighter talk is drowned but ironclad:
Elections, money, empire, oil and Dad.
January 11, 2003
GNE Pioneer Accounts
If you've played the alpha version of Game Neverending at all in the four months since it launched, and if your in-game experience approached even the tiniest smidgen of fun:(Disclaimer: This entry was written purely out of self-interest, of course, since I'd like the Big Game to come out as quickly as possible, and to be as richly featured as possible too.)
Mulliner's Buck-U-Uppo
Well, though my body may have temporarily succumbed to yet another microscopic invasion, I'm going to keep my chin up and keep on searching for that elusive elixir of good health, otherwise known as Mulliner's Buck-U-Uppo, whose effects were first documented by P. G. Wodehouse:He felt most amazingly fit. Undoubtedly, in asserting that this tonic of his acted forcefully upon the red corpuscles, his Uncle Wilfred had been right. Until that moment Augustine had never supposed that he had any red corpuscles, but now, as he sat waiting for Mrs. Wardle to bring him his fried egg, he could feel them dancing about all over him. They seemed to be forming rowdy parties and sliding down his spine. His eyes sparkled, and from sheer joy of living he sang a few bars from the hymn for those of riper years at sea.
Also I'm starting to wonder if this elixir, in our universe, may go by the name of "remembered wellness," aka idolatrous meditation and mystic gnosticism?
January 10, 2003
from From Combaria, by Theodore Pelton
Toadex writes:
from From Combaria
We've come to expect the rationales given by governments in defense of
their various projects to be lies. This is especially true of
militaristic governments, who do not wish to overtly disclose their
policies. A militaristic state leader, questioned about his government's
policies of war and aggression, commonly answers using the words
"enemy," "danger," "security," and "need." The answers are accepted by
the citizenry of the militaristic country, who assume that the state
leader has some privileged information for the lack of which he would
not make such astonishing proposals. The popularity of the state leader
then, commonly, increases: the people wish to show solidarity with their
leader against the supposed threat. The leader, then, with a stronger
base of national confidence, can withhold all specifics of a situation
and introduce new information which, in fact, he has invented. The less
he tells the citizenry, the more popular he becomes. Facts destroy the
characterization "enemy" on which the leader so strongly relies.
Such is the situation in Combaria. A dissenter here is rarely listened
to, for the stakes have escalated from country versus country to
homeland versus enemy to good versus evil.
-- from a short story by Theodore Pelton, 2000
January 9, 2003
lip balm recipes
Plato and the Bees. When Plato was an infant, some bees settled on his lips when he was asleep, indicating that he would become famous for his honeyed words. The same is said of Sophocles, Pindar, St. Ambrose, St. Chrysostom, and others. -- Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & FableSo I just bet one could attain literary fame with one of these recipes:
Ginger lip balm. Melt 2 tablespoons grated beeswax (look for beeswax near the candles at health-food and craft stores) with 1 tablespoon canola oil in a small saucepan over low heat. Grate 1 teaspoon of fresh ginger, then squeeze the juice through a piece of cheesecloth (or a piece of clean old T-shirt) into the saucepan. Mix, pour into a small tin, and let harden. -- from RealSimple
Lime balm. Buy a small tub of pure shea butter (available at health-food stores) and mix in a few drops of your favorite essential oil (try lime oil for a fresh citrus scent). -- this recipe is for cuticle cream, but I don't see why it wouldn't be a nice lip balm too.
Adventures in lipbalm from notmartha: I like the idea of mixing in a little sliver of lipstick to tint the balm.
A dozen lip balm recipes, mostly beeswax-based plus either coconut oil or cocoa butter.
January 8, 2003
post-mortem photography
The above photo is from Sleeping Beauty II: Grief, Bereavement in Memorial Photography American and European Traditions.
And from an article on Victorian post-mortem photographs and the people who collect them:
Death masks and post-mortem portraits were reserved for the wealthy until, in the 19th century, the invention of photography offered something the common man and woman had never had before: a lasting image of a parent or child who had passed.
Collection of post-mortem photographs, largely of children who appear to be sleeping. A lot of these are group photos, with the family of the deceased surrounding the coffin.
Tin-type photo of a young girl. She has been dressed in day clothes and propped up in a chair, but her eyes betray the illusion.
January 7, 2003
css
Thanks for your feedback on the CSS, I hope everyone can read the site now. The problem was that I was specifying sizes in pt, when I should've used px. Here's the new styles:PC users (for IE or Mozilla users, this is equiv. to the old CSS):
Mac and Linux users:
bibelots
Sharp-eyed Josh notes:The Word of the Day for December 12 is:
bibelot BEE-buh-loh (noun)
: a small household ornament or decorative object
: trinket
Did you know?
Can you think of a six-letter synonym of "bibelot" that
starts with the letter "g"?
. . . the answer, of course, being "gewgaw." Hee.
January 6, 2003
the shape of poetry
Essay about the boundary between formal/free verse and chaos theory/emergent phenomena: The Shape of Poetry. I am at once enraged and intrigued by the the author's arguments (for example, he equates the rules that govern the flocking of swallows with the rules of formal poetry -- as if free verse, lacking explicit rules, were free from aesthetic constraints as well).. . . the way a mass of bubbling chaotic thoughts and scattered phrases turns into a sonnet or villanelle is very similar to the seemingly magical transformation that occurs in heated silicon oil . . . self-organiz[ing] holistically . . . [into] a beautiful pattern of hexagonal convection cells, packed together like the beeswax cells of a honeycomb.
He notes: the Divine Comedy is fractal (has self-similarity) because it has three big sections and is written in tercets. His conclusion: that formal verse is ultimately superior because it's the truer mimic of nature's intricacy. Forgetting that what makes a dewdrop beautiful (perfect unbroken regularity) or a fjord (unharnessed roughness) can make a poem hideous.
(The baby pandas diablog entry is brilliant! Thanks!)
January 5, 2003
readymade hat
When I went down to Kinko's last night it was closed, so I ended up browsing through Readymade #5 in the record store, decided on impulse to make the "sweater beanie" project, rummaged around in the garage and found an old holey sweater, felted it in the washing machine, went to sleep sniffling with dust allergies, woke up fine, cut up a hat-shaped piece out of the sweater, sewed it all up by hand, designed a pair of ears, attached them, and "wallah"!
Thanks to Selva for taking the photos. (It's Selva's totoro, too.) Details on the hat pattern:
The ears are an obtuse triangle of felt, folded in half for extra thickness, with a smaller similar triangle of contrast color sewn in, then attached to the hat such that the bottom edge forms a semicircle on the surface of the hat. (But they were just for fun -- I'm removing them for everyday wear.)
To do the felting, I washed my sweater in hot water twice, each time doubling the part of the cycle where you agitate with the washer full of hot soapy water. It was a chunky sweater to start with, so the resulting material was quite heavy (about 1/4" thick).
The hat I made is a modification of the "Aspen" pattern, whose shape was essentially two long semicircles stuck together; mine is more like four semicircles stuck together and the seams meeting in a little cross on top.
I did run into some problems with the magazine's instructions:
(1) Felting. They use a term, "swelting," to describe some process they've invented that involves felting in the spin cycle, but don't explain it. (The article says "You'll be surprised how much swelting your average dryer can do," but it's washers, not dryers, that have a spin cycle.) No suggestions on how long to swelt, or at what temperature.
(2) Patterns. The patterns are scaled down, and they don't specify by what factor you need to enlarge them, though one of the patterns does give height and width dimensions (the other only gives height measurements).
Aside from that, the article rocked. I plan to pick up all the back issues of this mag that I can get my hands on.
January 4, 2003
modifications I made to MT
Fed up with how Movable Type date formats always have leading zeroes or spaces, breaking my old permalinks, I fixed my copy. Change description follows: I made the following changes to MT v2.51: file mt/lib/MT/Util.pm in the vicinity of line 75:
($f{e} = $f{d}) =~ s!^0! !;
($f{e} = $f{d}) =~ s!^0!!; # %e: day of the month, no padding
($f{n} = $f{m}) =~ s!^0!!; # %n: the month, no padding
The %e format specifier now has no leading spaces. I added a new format specifier, %n, which prints out the numerical month without leading spaces or zeroes.
the Thai Ministry of Health
Via Nari: Thailand introduces government-sponsored classes in "bosom-firming dance" to help Thai women whose reliance on ill-fitting foreign bras "could be leading to deformities." The photo accompanying the BBC article appears to show a largely male aerobics class practicing in Bangkok with the caption "Thailand's health ministry says exercises can help." Help what?And, c'mon, bras cause "deformities"? I tried to find the studies in question, but ended up only at some Thai bodywork center that offers certifications in Breast Massage (scroll) -- not the fun kind, the icky "lymph drainage" kind. Their class description is scarily reminiscent of Mitsu's entry positing a link between bras and breast cancer, about which I am still skeptical.
geegaw vs. gewgaw
The gewgaw-related entries in the diablog are neat: thanks! ("Brummagem" may be a trifle derogatory but it's too cool a word to turn up my nose at.) By the way, our sister site gewgaw.com has been under construction for the four years I've been keeping tabs on it, and gone through at least one change of ownership. "Geegaw" may be merely a variant spelling, less frequently used in the language as a whole, but thanks to the good people who've linked to this site, on the web it prevails!
in | Permalink
January 3, 2003
baked paper
Clear and warm weather today. Stopped by Confounded Books in Belltown hoping to find a new issue of PekoPeko (no dice) and there was this old-fashioned three-tiered pie rack sitting on the counter, and resting in each of the glass pie plates was a bright blue rectangle wrapped in lattice strips of baked pie crust. The owner told me it was a zine called "Pie." Obviously I had to get it.On the bus home I broke open the crust to find that the baking process had soaked the outer pages of the zine in oil, turning standard Kinko's pale blue paper into translucent sapphire. And I was sitting in that open part in the back where everyone faces each other, so I'm sure the other passengers were all "Get a load of the crazy lady dusting the flour off the cover of her greasy pamphlet. Eww, is she actually peeling the thing open with her fingernails in order to read it?" -- but the thing was weirdly beautiful, and reminds me of Judith's lapidary waxed book sculptures -- purty. I think my next project may be a foray into baked paper art. Either laminated or in baggies.
January 2, 2003
paperwhites
The paperwhites on my desk started to bloom on New Year's Eve, and today their profuse clusters are filling my room with a heavy, sweet, chemical smell, like melting plastic.Yesterday I washed out my Chia pet planter and left it to dry.
Hibernating Sir, Today is the Day
Sir, the fates eat fate. Day masons eat mortar. Day springs up, sir. Day hears the cloudless cry. And organs riddle seas drunk. Today, surgeons can remove spacelight. Transistor TVs leave music in place, and the music eats diamonds alive. Sir, transmit the whiteout. Wait for white to unfocus you, but don't wait. Can you feel the animal breath watching? Its slow teeth watching, sir. Hunters can toy with the safety of thick hands. Stones warm their pockets now. We eat stones so that our voices can touch it. Sir, a voice can change color. It can dig you out, and carpenters can springload today. Up, sir, a chimney blew away. Today we rise out of our mirrors. We roll comets off the telepath. Stars have eaten their own good. The surveyor knew, sir. He knew several weathers may be stitched to the center. Outside hangdogs you. Today we have struck night; we have you cold.
- by Christine Hume, from AGNI 55 via Harper's. I am researching her first book.
batalis and the man I sing
Toadex reports that he's borrowed a copy of Gawin Douglas's Scottish translation of the Aeneid, which begins:
The batalis and the man I wil discrive
Fra Troyis boundis first that fugitive
By fait to Ytail come and cost Lavyne,
Our land and sey katchit with mekil pyne
By fors of goddis abufe, from every steid,
Of cruell Juno throu ald remembrit fede.
It's past midnight now, and gusting sleet . . . tiny pieces of ice sliding down the windows. . . .
January 1, 2003
happy new year
The Space Needle exploded last night like Quagmire exploding cash at a strip club. You know, I used to think beaujolais nouveau was French for "New Year."I've been using this one thick Mead notebook for scrap paper since I moved to Seattle. It contains phone numbers of prospective landlords, auto dealerships, Latin declensions, drawings of feminine silhouette mud flap ornaments, an outline of an autobiography, and the story of Raspberry the Bad-Ass Bear.
(What's in your notebooks?)
Redesigned, according to feng shui principles . . . new front page inspired by Dahlia Digital, Caterina, and Lemonyellow.
Resolutions for the month of January:
After that: