geegaw.com

all corke

Apropos of the glass delusion, Paul quotes Andrew Solomon:

Burton describes a winning sequence of melancholy delusions--a man who thought he was a shellfish, some who believe that "they are all glasses, and therefore will suffer no man to come neere them; that they are all corke, as light as feathers, others are heavy as lead, som are afraid their heads will fall off their shoulders, that they have frogs in their bellies, &c. Another dares not goe over a bridge, come neere a poole, rock, steep hill, lye in a chamber where crosse beames are, for feare he be tempted to hang, drowne, or praecipitate himselfe."

Well, that last delusion doesn't seem that unreasonable to me, but okay. . . .

These delusions were characteristic of melancholy at the time, and accounts of them abound in the medical and common literature. The Dutch writer Caspar Barlaeus at various stages of his life believed himself to be made of glass and to be made of straw, which might at any moment catch fire. Cervantes wrote a novel, The Glass Licentiate, about a man who believed himself to be made of glass.

Indeed such a misapprehension was so common that it is referred to by some doctors of the time simply as "the glass delusion." It occurs as a phenomenon in the popular literature of every Western country at about this time. A number of Dutchmen were persuaded that they had glass buttocks and were at great pains to avoid sitting down lest they break; one insisted that he could travel only when packed in a box with straw. Ludovicus a Casanova wrote a long description of a baker who believed himself to be made of butter and was terrified of melting, who insisted on being always completely naked and covered with leaves to keep him cool.

That last delusion seemed more plausible once I'd found these commercial animal figurines from butter and "Butter," an art exhibit in Chicago that includes several butter scupltures, and about which Fred Camper wrote:

The ease with which these artists can acquire and lavishly goop on butter in this show reflects the material excess of America at the end of the millenium. In the famous cream-separation scene of the 1929 Soviet film "The General Line" Eisenstein valorizes the mechanization of butter making, celebrating a process that made food production and distribution more efficient. But for us, butter is there for the taking.

And glass too.

like beauty spots marking a still perfect cheek

Been reading from the world's super awesome bestest treasury of antiwar poetry poetry of witness.

And salted was my food, and my repose,
Salted and sobered, too. . .

-- from The Owl, by Edward Thomas -- Welsh writer killed in WWI

Things are going so well, but then there's this feeling of impeding blood and conscience and war crime and betrayal. I had not considered myself a pacifist, was just worried that the government was rushing into things, but the more revelations unfold -- I mean, I don't get it: they had thousands of al-Qaida operatives and they let them go? In the meantime, here's me and the rest of the citizenry walking around wearing motley. . . .

. . .

Stumbled across what just may be one of the most beautiful Movable Type journals ever. I can't keep myself from reloading it over and over to watch the tinted woodcut in the upper right hand corner change. It's so compelling that it's almost, but not quite, shaken my loyalty to the lovely eudamonist.com with its paradoxical accessibility statement and compulsively detailed biography of a nonexistent Edwardian essayist.

Those Georgia blogs. Can you blame me for wanting to have one?

forest of red

Rec'vd spam entitled: "Geegaw Diplomas No One is Turned Down 4971983"

Work is going happily. I got a raise and 5000 nodes onscreen!

the charge of the tardigrade brigade

To anyone curious about the microscopic creatures marching across last week's provisional site design and along the bottom of the re-expanded diablog, here's a nice comprehensive Metafilter thread about them (thanks Capodistria & Toadex).

Made some soy hot cocoa using half the sugar, and half again as much of the Dutch process cocoa, so it was luxuriously dark and bitter. Caved in and bought the new William Gibson book, hurrah!

Though I don't agree with this, I find it stirring:

What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
A connivance with official lies . . .

-- Czeslaw Milosz, "Dedication."

pro-war poets

How could I forget? Alfred Lord Tennyson actually liked war, Kipling at least honored soldiers (his son was killed in WWI), and Hardy wrote a poem about how life goes on despite it: ("War's annals will cloud into night / Ere their story die.")

about being About the War

I'm helping maintain and update poetsagainstthewar.org -- in particular, I'm doing their news page -- so if any poetry-and-war tidbits float past you, I'd love it if you could push them my way or post them to the diablog or somesuch.

Here's a war poem I like:

Ultima Ratio Reagan*

The reason we do not learn from history is
Because we are not the people who learned last time.

Because we are not the same people as them
That fed our sons and honor to Vietnam**
And dropped the burning money on their trees,

We know that we know better than they knew,
And history will not blame us if once again
The light at the end of the tunnel is the train.

-- Howard Nemerov.

---

^* ultima ratio regum is Latin for "the final argument of kings," i.e. war
^** Although, in this particular instance, we are.

And Caterina has a new, auxiliary weblog, Poems About War: "not 'Poems Against War' because the issue is a complex one, and I wanted to be able to examine the issue from as many angles as possible, using poetry as a springboard," she writes. Honestly, though, I'm hard-pressed to think of a single pro-war poem that's much good. The machinery of war tends to favor politicians, not poets. But I'm curious to see what comes out of this.

Greg Nickels and Dimes

After not reading much for weeks, I finished a book! -- an extraordinarily engaging one, since I finished it within 48 hours of its arrival at Chez Gaw -- Selling Ben Cheever. It was a present from A., who's all too aware of my penchant for daydreaming about a career in the service industry, and it did succeed in disillusioning me, though not for the reasons he maybe expected or hoped.

Basically: wealthy, upper-class, 50-year-old Ben Cheever feels like a failure as a writer and overshadowed by the successful writers who surround him (he's John Cheever's son, Janet Maslin's husband). He doesn't need to work for a living, so he dabbles in these service jobs instead, and learns a couple things:

(a) there's something about the camaraderie of these places, or the sense of purpose that work gives him, that keeps him coming back for more, no matter how terribly he gets treated by management, and

(b) economically, almost none of these jobs are worthwhile -- that is, even the ones that are supposedly high-salary, like car salesman for GM, wind up paying near-minimum wage; and many of the firms that purport to be hiring are actually scams that take your training money and leave them up the creek.

The book's garnered mixed reviews, but if you're a spoiled dilettante like me, you'll probably love it.

. . .

Sugar doesn't do it for me anymore. That is, I used to sit down with a book and a specialty President's Day triple cotton-candy-and-marshmallow-syrup flavored mocha from Starbucks, and the first sip would send this warm, limpid feeling coursing through all my veins. But lately it just makes me feel vaguely ill. I could really use some more of that herbal chai they serve at Teahouse Kuan Yin. In the interim I need to resort to other varieties of cheap saccharine experience, like Josh Rouse albums and taped episodes of Six Feet Under.

10 Reasons Not To Buy a Vespa Scooter!

 
 

See, I'm really tired of waiting for buses in the rain for half an hour at a time, but I hate cars and driving, so I was dreaming of getting a sleek little early-midlife-crisis Geegawmobile, and in three or four years' time I'd probably get really good at scooting around in the rain. But no! This is not practical! For the following reasons:

• Owning one will not make me pretty like the chicks in the fotos!
• Seattle's hills demand enough horsepower that I'd need to study for a motorcycle license!
• Grease stains, dead bug stains -- eww! Not to mention safety goggles and helmet!
• Dangerous to ride on the freeways and impossible to get anywhere cool (my office, the mountains, the beach) otherwise!
• Dangerous in general!
• They get stolen all the freaking time!
• $$$ -- especially if you get really into it and start demanding all the cute accessories, because they really are pretty darned cute!
• Can't actually wear a skirt (I think? -- none of the people in various scooter club photos wear them)!
• Misogynistic culture of enthusiasts (e.g. a passenger is called a "bitch," and thus one of the women's scooter clubs has the slogan "Stop being a bitch and ride."). I find that alienating. . . .
• According to Umberto Eco, it's not the Vespa itself I want, but the freedom and mobility it represents! -- "Thus the Vespa came to be linked in my eyes with transgression, sin, and even temptation - not the temptation to possess the object, but the subtle seduction of faraway places where the Vespa was the only means of transport. And it entered into my imagination not as an object of desire, but as a symbol of an unfulfilled desire." !

gingerbread testament

Hey anyone who reads this site -- thanks for putting up with three days of divers hideous color schemes while this site's new design stabilized. This site was simmering, simmering, simmering . . . the engravers of Webster's New International Dictionary of the English Language, 1911 brought it to a boil (plus Bhikku's diatoms, plus a big twinkly spunkflake).

Mitsu sends a recommendation of the Virtual March on Washington. I should sign up for this, I really should. . . .

Eat Your Words: the Edible Book Festival is accepting proposals till March 15th (thanks moonmilk). Of last year's creations my favorite is the book cut out of seaweed by Masaaki Tatsumi.

Reading through silva rhetoricae (the forest of rhetoric) is like being in some alternate universe. "Male collocutum" means "cacosyntheton." The words are more interesting because they sound cool than because I have even the faintest clue of what they might actually be referring to. Like if words were food, the names of rhetorical strategies are like those inedible, lacy constructions that garnish your dishes in fancy fusion restaurants -- whether vegetable or mineral, no one can tell. Thanks Toadex (I think.)

To whoever sent me the 404 link -- I'm sure the page was really cool three days ago when I actually received your message, and I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to catch up on my email till today. Can you tell me what it was about?

puce abuse

Hey. I'm sorry if your eyes are watering and you can't read this. I'm halfway through redesigning (new theme: "maximum CSS damage") and I hope to be, well, at least slightly easier on the eyes by the end of the weekend.

In the interim -- well, your feedback is welcome, as always, of course . . . .

snapshot of work

In case you're curious what I've been so busy doing. Here's a picture of 5000 nodes distributed randomly over a 10 x 10 square. There's a set of 5000 lines (not yet drawn) connecting each of those nodes to the very first node in the square. In the next fraction of a second, the program (written in 1993, by some guy I'm going to go visit tomorrow) is going to try to rearrange all these nodes into a long, straight line and then zoom out till the line fits onscreen, and then it's going to crash. I have been trying to figure out how it works and how to make it work.

find mike wallace

The dude in the photo above has been missing since Feb. 4th and was last seen in Menlo Park, CA . . . I've never met him myself. If you've seen him, get thee to http://www.findmikewallace.com/. . .

10 Ways Your Blog Can Change Your Life

Been too busy to feel motivated to write in my blog, and then there was some navelgazing done on Fireland and then FTrain, and then my proximate motivation for posting this was Sir Wag-a-Lot's entry about how the bloggers will inherit the earth while those stuffy academics will end up relegated to this stuffy little virtual reality box we call the blogverse -- anyway, here's some notes I jotted a little while ago to inspire myself, mostly based on how I've been affected by reading other people's blogs. It should probably be called "10 Things You Can Do In Hopes That Your Life Will Change," but instead I called it

10 Ways Your Blog Can Change Your Life, or vice versa

1) Blog your troubles and boost your immune system. (cf. James Pennebaker's research that suggests that writing about stressful events is good for you). Plus things that you may find hard to talk about, like sex, often draw the most hits.

2) Blog your interests, and in doing so, develop them further -- whether they be political, literary, artistic/creative, etc., you can always put in a little extra effort to make them really stand out -- I'm thinking of eeksy peeksy's "augury doggerel," or Witold Riedel's drawings. It's the web, so post your photos, mp3s, little movies, whatever.

3) Blog as if you were the person you wish you were. Pretend you're someone else, someone more interesting. On the web, who's to know the difference? A pseudonym in particular can provide the liberation to let you act in ways you wouldn't dare in real life. When people meet you in person, they mentally shelve you into a certain compartment and you're stuck there. If people pigeonhole you on the web, just redesign.

4) Talk to strangers. Your site doesn't have to be addressed just to the people you already know in real life. Link to strangers if you think they're cool and start up a dialogue. They might turn out to be living right down the block, or even better, halfway around the world.

5) Write every day. It's not just that getting into that habit of daily writing can improve your fluency -- it's that having a blog affords you a chance to play around with words and syntax in a way you might not have a chance to at work, or in letters home.

6) Push the envelope of your tech skills. Programming for the web is a great, instant-gratification way to get more computer-savvy, and since it's your own site, no one else cares if you break something. Non-techies can start by hand-editing your HTML to incorporate the cool CSS border or funky font you found in someone else's source code. From that to Javascript hacking to writing your own CGI scripts is just a matter of time.

7) Find your true love ( . . . or, if you have one, let them see a different side of you). Couples who met via weblogs abound. I don't want to be a gossip so I won't list them.

8) Get fired from your crap job (by posting about how much you hate work) and then get a cool new job (by writing about how much you need one, what your skills are, etc.) Your blog can also function as a portfolio: c.f. items 2 and 6 in this list. You know how they say the only people who read weblogs are other webloggers, and that the blogging community is homogenous -- well, this can come in handy during networking. I think.

9) Keep your friends caught up on how you're doing. Sometimes folks are too busy to pick up the phone and call, but it's easy for them to spare a couple minutes, several times a week, to read your site. And if they miss a month, that's what archives are for. (I'm guilty of this too. I almost never call anyone.)

10) Help other people. I don't just mean furthering political causes -- though that's important too -- but also casual mentions of your daily life can help your readers find new books they like, figure out what to see when they're visiting your city, get hooked up with a new opportunity to volunteer, etc.

Now to practice what I preach, on the other hand . . . ulp.

myriad myriads of lives

What's the biggest number you deal with in general day-to-day life? I use PCs with P4 chips at work, so most big numbers I use at work are about 32 bits long, and these are mostly pointers. They tend to be on the order of 2³¹ - 1 = 2,147,483,647: this is the largest signed integer you can represent on a 32-bit platform. But it's only 13 digits long, so the biggest number I deal with in everyday life is definitely my (16-digit) Visa card number, when I type it in to buy stuff online. (This'll change once we all upgrade to the new Itanium processors, I'll probably be seeing more of numbers like 2⁶³ - 1 = 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 (I think), which is going to be a real pain in the ass to jot down in my notebook. . . .)

A short list of "classical" numbers. Apparently the biggest number you could express in Greek notation was "a myriad myriads" (10⁴ x 10⁴), and Archimedes was able to wrangle this system into expressing up to 10^{80,000,000,000,000,000} by some process I don't fully understand.

reversible

I think this is what the deal is with Reversible.org: each page saves a list of all the sites that have ever referred to it. Thus:

• I like GNE (links to a list of other bloggers who also like GNE)
• I like the quotidian (I made this URL up; let's see what reversible.org generates after I click through this link.)

asses of evil

The protest was huge and mellow and fun. The cops rode pretty horses, and even our retired neighbors went. I got sick during the rally and went home early instead of doing the march, but I'm feeling much better now. On the bright side Jim took photos and I wouldn't be surprised to see some on Jessamyn's site either.

Ebert writes: The animated version of "Animal Farm" (1948) was paid for by a CIA front, and twisted Orwell's fable about totalitarianism both East and West into a simplistic anti-communist cartoon. And, oh my god, this article claims:

The agency also changed the ending of the movie version of "1984," disregarding Orwell's specific instructions that the story not be altered. In the book, the protagonist, Winston Smith, is entirely defeated by the nightmarish totalitarian regime. In the very last line, Orwell writes of Winston, "He loved Big Brother." In the movie, Winston and his lover, Julia, are gunned down after Winston defiantly shouts: "Down with Big Brother!"

And Toadex writes: There is so much lying and glossing-over going on in the news these days, it is obscene. It has been, I said, the most obscene abuse of public reason to which ever have I borne witness.

Yes . . . & weeping, sleepless, in all them time . . . hats with ears! Hats with ears!

Hats with ears: you can knit your own according to the kitty62 hat pattern (via Allura) and I also saw some in the window of Damsel Collective in Belltown.

Finally, Laura likes this Chuck Palahniuk quote she read on Jessamyn's site:

What good is intellect if it leaves us immobile and frozen in indecision? At some point, despite all the other options, you have to commit yourself to a path. Being flexible is fine, it's maybe the greatest talent you can have, but in order to define yourself, you need to pursue your passion. There will always be good reasons not to do something, or to do something else, the world is full of women more beautiful than your wife, you can never choose the best car, there's always a cheaper air fare. What's most important is that you choose and get on with your life.

Which can be true. Though I think I tend to choose too quickly, shooting from the hip. Something good might be coming up on the horizon and to me it looks like candy.

lotsa lotsa matzoh balls

Feb 15 -- anti-war marches in cities across the country, including Seattle. Be there or be a hawk. . . .

(I've been pretty busy lately -- here's my backlog of cool links that could wait no longer to be posted.)

I have to read this!!!: Parasite Pig, the 1995 sequel to Interstellar Pig. (Discovered by Paul.)

Crocheted skulls: you can either buy one or follow the DIY instructions. Very frail and creepy, these. (Thanks, Estee)

Uplink - a game where you play a hacker engaging in corporate espionage. Apparently this is getting pretty darn popular, though I hadn't heard of it before . . . personally, though, I don't think I'd play this unless I stopped working in the computer industry. I get enough hacking from my day-to-day "dammit, the lab manager is on vacation and I need to get such-and-such a system back up and running by the end of the day."

"Data suggests that the price of a year at Harvard is roughly the same as the amount it costs to keep a person incarcerated for a year." Ha! (Spotted by Barb, and you should check out her wife Jan's site if you haven't already.)

Carved pencils - very psychedelic, thanks Toadex.

And apparently, "Computer programmer Jim Flanagan just may be Yahoo?s worst nightmare." Way to go Jim! (Warning: popups)

treading water

Should have known it would come in handy:
by slow prudence to make mild
a savage people, and thro' soft degrees
subdue them

on clothing

I'm feeling so anti-needless-consumerism right now but it doesn't stop me from coveting this pirate dress and this vintage wool suit.

Read the first chapter of the new William Gibson novel, on Jessamyn's recommendation, and the first thing that struck me was the implausibility of the so-cool-she-hunts-cool-for-a-living main character's outfit -- described as a black, "well-shrunken" little boy's Fruit of the Loom t-shirt, a grey little boy's prep school sweater, and "oversized" black Levi's 501 jeans. Sure, it may sound hot on first read, but try and actually visualize it: even Cameron Diaz would look laughable in that outfit. 501s are slim-fitting and made out of a very stiff denim, so oversized 501s won't look properly baggy -- they'll just stand about an inch away from your waist and hips of their own accord, balloon like sausages around the thighs, and taper down around the calves to what would be a reasonable width for flared jeans. If you are skinny, like Gibson's protagonist surely is, then a little boy's tee that's small enough to flatter the chest will have sleeves that flare out, parallel to the floor, and a collar so tight around the neck that it could leave a visible indentation. The sweater will have similar problems, not to mention how it'll disappear into the gap between your body and the oversized 501s.

What I think Gibson imagined his character as wearing, but lacked the, well, shopping experience to describe, was a tank top or an A-shirt and pants that fit around the waist but had baggy legs.

ethical culture

Learned this morning of the birth of a tiny bundle of Courage. Stunned and happy. Many felicitations.

Recv'd spam titled "Fauvism: Raoul DUFY." Funny coincidence, I read my first Flauberts yesterday evening -- the parrot story, and "The Legend of Saint Julian":

In the foliage an immense jackdaw sat looking at Julian, and here and there among the branches glowed countless lights as if all the stars in the firmament had rained down into the forest. They were the eyes of animals, wild cats, squirrels, owls, parrots, monkeys.

This is amazing. Is there a forest on earth where squirrels and monkeys coexist? I want a painting of this, which I imagine to be painted by some sort of Fauvist Van Gogh; half Disney's Snow White, half Philip Larkin dreaming of native girls who bring breadfruit. That horror of the boyhood dream of the tropics that ends in death.

(Update: Dirk mentions Rousseau -- yes, it's he, not Gauguin, whom I had in mind but whose name I could not recall. Also, a simple Google search revealed that apparently squirrels and monkeys live quite happily together in the jungle! Who'da thunk it.)

Bovary will be next, after I finish with this Sebald book. Right.

Things I will miss about Seattle if I ever leave it: its white overcast skies, its verdure, the clear and flavorless water that flows from its faucets.

anti-gewgaw

Lisa found me an excellent t-shirt during her tour of Asia:

. . . and if it weren't too self-reflexive I'd adopt that as this site's slogan: "Geegaw: the anti-Gewgaw."

I suppose that I don't write about poetry very much and yet I'm often hurt whenever I find that this site isn't considered a poetry blog; I suppose the solution is really to be less half-assed about it instead of being jealous of Josh Blog for showing up in Ron Silliman's list of 37 poetry blogs, even though, for cripes's sake, he hardly writes about poetry either . . . well, may as well try to get back into the whole literary thing, and who knows, some work of noble note may yet be done. . . .

Gwen sent me a link to these weird little crocheted mice and Toadex shared a little New Yorker blurb about Mitnick learning to surf the web -- kind of a Rip Van Winkle thing -- and ha! the White House cancels their poetry symposium due to fear of Poets Against the War (who BTW have yet to reply to my offer of volunteer help, which I extended after learning that Jessamyn was doing it, but I hope that means they're doing ok ).

Also, Laura got me these tasty Placebo mints. The tin is very cute. When I'm out of mints I'll refill it with the Ginger Altoids that Y. got at the 7-11.

I finished the 1999 Year's Best Sci-Fi anthology in record time, mostly because I'd already read a lot of its stories in other Dozois anthologies. Aside from that, what have I been busy doing? . . . . tidying up the house . . . gorging on Cambozola. . . .

mr. eglantine is unfulfilled

Mr. Eglantine, the celebrated perruquier and perfumer of Bond Street whose soaps, razors, and patent ventilating scalps are known throughout Europe . . . [was] a very fat man, who required much art to make his figure at all decent. He wore a brown frock-coat and frogs, and attempted by all sorts of contrivances to hide his obesity. . . .

-- William Makepeace Thackeray, from Men's Wives; spotted by Judith, & thanks

And in an unsurprising coincidence, here's something I could have written myself, if my writing style at all resembled the style of what follows:

Lesson: respect and intellectual engagement make me feel terrific, whereas numb uninterest and being treated as a disposable impediment in someone else?s factory make me feel weary and dispirited. So, how shall I maximize the extent to which I operate in a sphere that offers me the former and minimizes the latter?

-- AKMA (a fellow GNE player apparently), via The Cruising Politician

I'd like respect and intellectual engagement, but it may be more important just to work with more kindred spirits (emotional/non-intellectual engagement).

accessibility

It looks awful, doesn't it? I've been guilt-tripped by Dive Into Accessbility into making this site accessible. Hrm. I'll try to find a way I can redesign.

zeitgeist and the seafarer

Friends and readers, lately I've been dragging my winter body around, subsisting on a diet of half-eaten lunches, potato chips, dark chocolate, and science fiction anthologies. At least there's Buffy tonight. . . .

Attempts at flâneurisme having failed, will try a different tack. Ask me more in person.

Taking advantage of Jim's negligence in applying for a Creative Commons license, I've installed a stolen copy of the Everything Burns Zeitgeist script on this server. Thanks to Selva for help in procuring, guinea-pig-ing, troubleshooting, and installing the script, which displays in a pretty format what a site's most common search engine hits are. You can read the results here.

In another impressive feat of dedication, Toadex has transcribed The Seafarer, an anonymous Olde English epic (there's also a translation by Ezra Pound). In its original form it's completely unreadable -- I don't even know how to pronounce any of the phonemes, so I can't even imagine how it would sound. But I love that old-fashioned alliteration, at least as it manifests itself in the translation:

Neareth nightshade, snoweth from north,
Frost froze the land, hail fell on earth then
Corn of the coldest.

. . .

RE the current diablog: Modulor is amusing, and I wonder if it prefigured Skeletor, Megator, Dragstor, Predator, Lex Luthor, and other plasticine -or-suffixed villains? As for the Greek ideal being 7 1/2 heads, it was tempting to read some other unit in place of the word "head." Whee!

see you walking around, like a boy about town

flâneur, n. My career goal du jour.

After spending the weekend watching too many episodes of a certain offensive British comedy show, I started to get curious about Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man drawing: how many men actually fit that perfect, circular standard? And since modern-day man is so much taller and beefier, have his relative proportions changed at all? Luckily for A., before I could pinion him to the wall with the tape measure, I found an online lab notebook performing the experiment I had in mind: the kids measured some random guy and determined whether or not he fit Vitruvius's proportional edicts.