July 5, 2008
#95. Sigur Ros
#94. The wind and rain
And the smell of ozone. And the two strange cedar trees outside our windows.
#93. My longboard
I think it's Thor.
Friendship is Glass: Or, 100 Favourite Things
July 4, 2008
Mark's class of 15-year-old exchange students (mainly from Japan and one from Thailand, with some Germans and Mexicans in the fall) are doing a poetry unit right now. And they're working on metaphors: "Love is fire." "Music is electricity." "Bastketball is flying." "Friendship is glass."
This last one actually struck me as really apt. I've often wondered about that common media motif of the chosen family: urban constructions or agglomerations of people who might drive you bananas but will always be there when the chips are down, and around a lot the rest of the time too. Around for the good, the bad, the banal. Quotidian profundity. Narratopoeic community. Buffy, Friends, Reality Bytes, Harry Potter.
Not just in the media. People write about it in their own lives and it seems like a powerful thing. But I have to wonder, how well do these groups really work? Are these people sometimes brutal? I would think so. And if the people involved in the conflict fight each other, and forgive each other, and this becomes ongoing, isn't that just a kind of 'codependency' --that shop-worn but ever-adequate word--a substitute phenomenon for the real thing (co-dependency is to friendship as aspartame is to sugar)? And isn't that just kind like of most biological families anyways?
Of course the answers to such questions are as diverse as the real life examples. But. I remain quite sure that friendship, with all its attendant voluntary or chosen associations or interactions or obligations or intertwinings, and whatever its roles, faces, manners, modes or mediums, is glass. Not a bad thing, glass, but fragile.
I spent this morning searching the web for old high school friends. I do this once in a while when Mark is busy elsewhere--it's like smoking Indonesian cigarettes when drunk on tequila or chewing one's finger nails all in one go--and I am alone and feeling retrospective.
And I must confess I have not remained in contact with any of them, not a one. My choice, and most of the time I'm really glad. I was mostly unhappy in high school, which may very well be a prerequisite for being happy later on in life; and Kelowna was and is a pretty damn wee place. I am reclusive and intolerant of any hint of rudeness. I hate rudeness. And people always are, eventually.
But. Bianca. Mikie. Chris. Sean. Gabe. Steve. Blue-Doc-Marten-boot-girl whose name I cannot even recall. Oh, Julia. That was it. We spent so much time together and I couldn't even remember her name. Yolanda. Shannon. Gone. Not a googleable trace remains of most of them.
So all I have from my high school tribes eleven years later are a smattering of images, moments. CS Lewis and cigarettes. Shaved head and dark eyes. Long lashes over freckles in a dark car filled with the musical strains of Dinosaur Junior. Confessions in the park, sun overhead, dandelions slowly and luxuriously shredded in hand. Standing on the side of the highway to Penticton at midnight, splitting my sides with laughter watching a spirited rendition of ABBA's 'Dancing Queen' with choreography, with the Lake nacreous and echoing and vast at the foot of the cliff below us. 'Moshing' at 'gigs'. Climbing the roof of the Orchard Park Mall at night. Eating cherries in the orchards and swimming in sluggy ponds. More cigarettes and more Dinosaur Junior, and Radiohead, and Smashing Pumpkins. Driving along rolling country roads in a broke-down pale pink two-door coupe at dusk, listening to the tosk-tosk-tosk-tosk-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-tosk-tosk-tosk-tosk-t-t-t-t-t-t -t-t of the giant orchard sprinklers, the smell of stone and water and mint-in-the-ditches wafting along the dark air. The hopeless longing for secret dalliances which never were, or could be, nor shall be world without end until kingdom come. Value Village ensembles and making awesome hemp jewelry. Hitchiking. Staying overnight in a friend's camper trailer and burning so much incense we could taste it in our charred nostrils all the next day. Going underage to the alternative club down town at nine at night, too bored to wait any longer, and staying for all of ten minutes, mightily unimpressed with the mundaneity of the clubbers. Intentionally chewing the sleeves of my thermal shirt to make it grunge. Outlining my lips and eyes with kohl and filling my lips in with dark, pouty, Scully-like red. Leonard Cohen and Poe and my ubiquitous Albatross Book of Verse from which I would console my melancholy frequently. Notebooks full to the brim with poetry, some of it good, most bad. Walking everywhere, from Winfield to the Mission, Black Mountain to the Lake, in my boots. Shortcuts through apple orchards, Spartans and Macintoshes bouncing off my head, or mashing underfoot and rising up in a vapour of cidery rot. Singing along to 'Unbreak My Heart' for the umpteen-millionth time at three in the morning at Denny's. Magnificently crashing my parent's great rust-red boat of a station wagon--it was a magnificent vehicle--downtown whilst skipping school to buy the newly released Frogstomp album, 'Silverchair'...
But mostly, being lonely. Lonely, lonely, loneliness. Even with my grade ten nerd tribe. Even with my grade eleven alternative tribe. Even with my latter-day grade twelve orchard-dwelling tribe. Even with my Mennonite Brethren alternative mo-fo tribe whose oddly insular ways still exasperate me at times in memory. Lonely. An excerpt from a letter written a long time ago: "I woke up, and upon me came a moment of utter clarity wherein I realized that no matter how much kicking and screaming and dreaming I did, I was utterly, truly alone. And like some half-crazy medieval female ecstatic mystic, I saw in my head a picture of a white horse suspended in a white universe, made of stone, with wings, and it was the void, or not-movingness, and I was riding it, stuck in a dimensionless limbo with neither time nor eternity."
Such pomposity, such melifluous verbosity!
Things are better now, being, y'know, grown up, with my darling, witty and insightful surf-warrior Mark and our noodle cats, living by the sea and doing things I like, mostly, and no longer smoking cigarettes till vomitous long into the night at Denny's Restaurant.
But I still wonder sometimes--what happened? And how are these people now? And did they find a way to be comfortable in their own skins? And did they ever stop hitting the bottle so hard? (Though I'm no judge there.) And how do they look, and what would they think of me now? And what would I think of them?
I imagine futures for them, stories and narratives and likelihoods. But I'll probably never know and that's okay. Cause friendship is glass and it breaks, and the shards remain, buried in the midden for a very long time.
This long, hopefully uncharacteristic post about emotions and feelings and memories and dynamics and people and the past doesn't represent the totality of my high school experiences, nor their small to medium place in the larger scheme of my life. Nor the reality of the people I once spent so much time with. Just my remembering mood. One version of a collusion of memories that I don't know that I'll ever encompass. Fragments swimming in a vague stew of brain juice, really.
Of course no representation of reality can ever be more than a fragment of fragments. I suppose that's why metaphors work: friendship is glass, glass is liquid, liquid yet frozen, frozen yet moving, but invisibly so. It is clear but refracts light. It's ice from heat and fusion from fragments, "paradoxical [by] nature, translucent as water, heavy as stone, invisible as air, solid as earth. Blown with human breath in a furnace of fire." (AS Byatt, 'The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye'). It is what it is, dasein, dasein. I move through a world as a space of possibilities.
And although I find the thought of chosen families and tribes of friends very cool, even now, I don't know it would really, really work. For one thing, a lot of our very loved friends would probably detest each other. You know who you are, dear friends. :) Anyways.
I am now going to embark upon a list of my top 100 favourite things, much like the list on my husband's blog but rather less to do with surfing. And also, more than one per post.
#100. Fruit of the Loom white cotton underwear
Lots of it so one doesn't have to do laundry too often. Nothing more comfortable.
#99. My boots
When I bought them I didn't realize their history. But I still love them and wear them wherever I can, out for oyster shooters, comic book shopping, the Eucharist... They look real purty with skirts.
#98. Clean sheets
That's all.
#97. Joann Sfar's stars
They're shaped like boxes.
# 96. Elena Filatova
Motor bike trips with a camera and a geiger counter through the Chernobyl area and Belorusse. Her trip to Pripyat.
Zombies, Pirates, Werewolves, Vampires
June 3, 2008
I can't believe it's been almost a month since I published a blentry. (Yes, 'blentry': I do my best to be a raging nerd, exhausting though it be.) Well, now I'm down to working four days a week, which is ideal. More time, for example, to pursue my new penchant for non-fiction.
Yes, non-fiction if you can believe it. I've read two non-fiction books in the last two weeks and loved them. Who knew. I was really proud of myself, too, until I was bragging to my friend Nancee, enumerating my non-fiction conquests: I've read a book about pirates. And a book about zombis. And she starting laughing, in the nicest way, and I realised that as far as non-fiction books go, it's about as fantastical as you can get... Then we went and watched the new Indiana Jones movie, and it was loud but a great deal of fun.
So the non-fiction book about pirates was The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down, by Colin Woodard. Colin Woodard does a fabulous job of reading over innumerable court proceedings and colonial type letters to construct a factual and fascinating narrative of the roots, growth and Golden Age of piracy in the Bahamas. Blackbeard was my favourite person(a). He had a huge curly black beard which he braided and tied with little bright coloured ribbons; and when he about to board some panty-waist navy frigate, he tied fuses into his beard, and lit them, so as to terrify his opponents with a halo of smoke and fire. All these pirates came to an early end, some in hurricanes, and some, like Blackbeard, surrounded by stabbing, shooting bands of privateers. I learned that all oceanic stealers can be called buccaneers; but only pirates--and not privateers--pursued their own anarchical democracy--or was a democratic anarchy? Anysearoad, here's Woodard's pirate research weblog. Arr. The book is completely readable. I recommend it.
The other non fiction book I read was The Serpent and the Rainbow: A Harvard Scientist's Astonishing Journey into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombis, and Magic, by Wade Davis. Now, Wade Davis is practically a local; he hails from Cascadia and according to the back of his book hangs in Van'. And like many a Cascadian, he seems to have a great deal of respect for psychotropic plants. I happen to not be one of them, unless that plant has interacted with yeast, but he is a Tintin figure extraordinaire. Also it's cool that his first name is actually Edmund (always my favourite human character from the Chronicles of Narnia). Anyways, his account is quite respectful and descriptive, although a touch melifluous at times. He accomplished something tangible and amazing in his investigation and analysis of the secret voudoun societies of Haiti; and I really liked his history lesson on the Maroons as well as traditional uses of poison in West Africa. In vodoun belief the human being is comprised of several disparate parts, some spiritual and some physical; deprive a person of any one of them, and you have a zombi. My favourite composite part of the whole human is the z'etoile: a bit of one's soul in a calabash that is also a star in the sky, which holds "all the many ordered events for the next life of the soul". Also Davis uses the word 'natter' a lot which I find appealing and funny.
All this zombi stuff was inspired in part by my reading Already Dead, by Charlie Huston. The book is about zombis. And vampires. And if you thought these creatures weren't awready noir, read Huston's novel and deal widdit. Thanks Sarah, for the recommends!
Finally, I've just embarked upon another fictional read (is my non-fiction streak already over??? Mon dieu, I shall have to pull out my half-read copy of The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, by WY Evans-Wentz, which is non-fiction insofar as it researches those who really believe in faeries--possibly including the author) called Lonely Werewolf Girl, by Martin Millar. Now, Millar also wrote The Good Fairies of New York, which I have wanted to read semi-badly for a while now, along with anything new by Diana Gabaldon which might include erotic marital sex and eighteenth century forensics (this rules out her Lord John series, I'm sad to say). Anyways, so far it's funny, and human, and delightful, and I'm verily impressed by his reinvention of werewolf myth (he throws in Sumeria, and like those persons who rhyme sycorax and parallax I generally love anyone who throws Sumeria and/or Babylon into their writing). It is gently witty in the post-post-modern vein of 'How I met Your Mother', and Millar treats his fantasy with a lightness which is amusing whilst still convincing.
In keeping with recent tradition, I shall now post another Youtube video, this one, "Babylon" by the Tea Party. I have to say I still really like them, even in this cynical ironic indie folk hipster rock era (yes, I'm looking at you Mark)--crunchy, exotic, dreamlike--in other words, drama drama drama (Queen, Antony and the Johnsons, Decemberists, Iron Maiden, love you long time).
And because I am put in mind of Reznor by Tea Party, his song Hurt, covered by Cash. For Dave Campbell.
May 8, 2008
So after encountering a mention of Nochoy Dozor on Sarah Deming's weblog, I happened to see the books at my local. I bought and read all three and they're pretty cool. Russian vampire novels: need I say more? Night Watch, Day Watch, Twilight Watch, and, apparently coming to the English speaking only readers this July, Final Watch. OOh.
Not that I've been to Russia, but the novels do seem to catch the flavour of Moscow quite nicely. And the author, Sergey Lukianenko, must be added to my mythy-puissant list for his night watch world. So it goes:
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Jim Hensen--muppets
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Neil Gaiman--the Endless
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JRR Tolkien
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China Mieville--anarchaical metamorphical phantasmorgraphy
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JK Rowling--everyone wants to inhabit her world
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Susanna Clarke--for her unmitigated mastery of manner
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Catherynne M. Valente--for her Orphan's Tales series which fuses found metamorphosis with entirely strane and new stuff
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that slew of dudes and dudines (still moiling that one around to see if I like it) who invented Doctor Who
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George Lucas--you know it
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TS Eliot--'The Waste Land'
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HP Lovecraft
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Battlestar Galactica--re-invention of Greek myth
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Sergey Lukianenko--an amusingly politicized vision of good and evil, a reworking of weres, vamps, and sorcerers within a 'Star Wars the new Force theory-esque' hierarchical system of power--think exothermal versus endothermal power--and the twilight zone behind our shadowlands...he materialises the spirit jest fine.
I really want to see the movie...any film with imdb Plot Keywords: Witchcraft | Blood Splatter | Attempted Murder | Tiger | Stabbed In The Chest must be worth a look even if it's just the key words that are a bit silly.
Finally, via Neil Gaiman's blog, a super new weblog, English Russia--"a daily entertainment blog devoted to the events happening in Russian speaking countries, such as Russia (Russian Federation), Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Kazakhstan, etc. Everyday something interesting happens in the countries occupying 1/6 of the populated world."
My favourite entries are the ones with the "abandoned" tag. A sample:
Its shores on the west are washed by the waters of the North Pacific May 3, 2008 Rivers are roads which move, and which carry us whither we desire to go. -Blaise Pascal So we've been obsessed with swimming the Sooke River in our wetsuits. It's bloody zero degrees cold and just a tad rocky but all the rocks are smoothed by long centuries of thick-veined spring runoff coursing along a channel perhaps 20-30 feet deep in places, although only ten or so feet wide. (Note my undeniably muttly usage of Standard measurements in a Metric country. It's terribly hard to think only in one mode or the other. For example, I think of myself in lbs but the temperature in degrees Celsius. Is this a result of being part of a generation that saw the transition from Standard to Metric, or of having done five random out of twelve years of schooling "at home"--read: reading prolifically all year and ignoring my maths till June--?) The rock formations along the river bed are lovely, bubbly and smooth in some places, smooth and undulating in others, lined along both sides by tall avenues of spruce and fir. Occasionally loons fly overhead, tremoloing or wailing down the High Street created by the river's channel of trees. What might they see with their quantum eyes? At one particular wee waterfall there's a kind of back eddy which allows one to swim out into the fervour of the prevailing current, shoot along a while and then loop back around and float upstream to the falls again. In another place the river banks rise into canyons topped with madrones/arbutus trees and sword ferns--but because the bed is so deep the current simply meanders along. Here's a spangling waterfall in the canyon: The water is clear and clean except at the waterfalls, where it's green as, say, absinthe being prepared the proper way, and gorgeously bubbly: ( Here're a couple of Mark and meself. Note the smoothened rocks. A quote from "Notes on the Physical Geography of Vancouver Island" by C. Forbes, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, Vol. 34, 1864: Vancouver Island, first made known to us by Cook, is situated on the coast of north-western America, between the latitudes of 48 degrees 20 feet and 51 degrees N.; and the longitudes of 123 degrees W. It is sepparated on the south from Washington territory by the Strait of Fuca, and on the east from British Columbia by the Straits of Georgia, and by Johnstone Strait. Its shores on the west are washed by the waters of the North Pacific. Essentially a mountain ridge, its buttress-like walls descend for the most part abruptly to the shore, fringed, however, in many places, more especially on its south-eastern and eastern sides, by the undulating country, thickly wooded in general, but here and there containing patches of open grass-land. The island is of an elongated oblong form, nearly 300 miles in length, by from 30 to 50 in average breadth, attaining, at Mount Arrowsmith, an elevation of 5900 feet. Its outline is boldly picturesque; its shores are characterised by abrupt cliffs, rocky promontories, sheltered coves, pebbly beaches, and fine harbours. The whole western side presents a gloomy, frowning aspect. Numerous areas of the sea, fjord-like in character, penetrate between the walls of metamorphic and trappean rock... China Beach I think I'm addicted to geophysographies. It's odd and melancholy and thrilling to hear my home described in such distant, wrong-end-of-the-telescope terms...like something from the Odyssey, or Voyage of the Dawn Treader. (Did CS Lewis research his book by reading such reports?)* "Its shores on the west are washed by the waters of the North Pacific"--like that Decemberists song "Island" part one, "Come & See" that I have quoted on the side column: I really love anyone, anyone, who rhymes parallax and sycorax. Here's the Decemberists site, where you can hear a produced version of the song. Oh, one final thing: scientists have done a video autopsy of one of those giant squid. Poor squids. I can hear them booming from the deep even now, "Don't get mad: get even! Leviathans of the abyssopelagic benthos unite!" And what about that Hadal zone? But still. It's pretty fascinating:
April 23, 2008 So I came across a poem in Medieval English Lyrics: A Critical Anthology, edited with an introduction and notes by R. T. Davies about the man in the moon, circa later 13th century to earlier 14th century, written in the alliterative tradition of Gawain and the Green Knight. It goes:
On his bot-forke his burthen he bereth. It is muche wonder that he ne down slit-- For doute leste he falle he shoddreth and shereth. When the forst freseth muche chele he bid. The thornes beth kene, his hattren to-tereth. Nis no wiht in the world that wot when he sit... Which means, to wit: THE MAN IN THE MOON STANDS AND STRIDES; HE BEARS HIS BURDEN ON HIS FORKED STICK. IT IS A GREAT WONDER THAT HE DOESN'T SLIP DOWN--FOR FEAR OF FALLING HE TREMBLES AND VEERS. WHEN THE FROST FREEZES HE ENDURES MUCH COLD. THE THORNS ARE KEEN, HIS CLOTHES TEAR TO PIECES. THERE IS NO PERSON WHO KNOWS WHERE HE SITS DOWN...
And one more from the omnibus, featuring the same waxy-wavy haired man: I still find the Kincaid illustrations fantastically grotesque: the people's features are so knobbly: very English indeed. Reading the Omnibus even now triggers the smells of my granny's house--wool and mutton; and the sounds--the tick tock of a grandmother clock, the crackle of the fire; and the colours--the uniquely plum and claret shag carpet, the green and mustard kitchen. This is the same house about which I had recurring underworld dreams for years. It was a perfectly normal basement. Except when it wasn't. Anyways, I then I went to google and watched George Melies' most soothing and surreal 1902 Le voyage dans la Lune; I'm so very glad this film wasn't melted down to make boot heels like so much of his stuff was... Here it is: In addition, his hilarious Eclipse: More moon lore: Moon Lore, by Rev. Timothy Harley, 1885 Tolkien's poem, very fun to read out loud: The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon. And finally, the valkyriean Feist's words on the matter: The robins are mustering in the chestynutter trees April 20, 2008 Another small happy note, a kind mention from Endicott Redux for the spring edition of Goblin Fruit--and 'Seeds'! Also I got tired of orange and purple, so for a while we're going with black and purple and mint green. April 16, 2008 A small happy announcement, I sold some poems in a series called 'Seeds' to Goblin Fruit (mine's the final title listed on the table of contents). It's up now and will at some point also be read by myself and a number of others including Catherynne Valente whose lovely Orphan's Tales books I happened to be reading when I got the news. She reads Greek which is fortunate since I don't know how, and yet the poem includes some. (Maybe I should write a poem in Old English and then I'd be able to read it myself...although it would probably have a vocabulary limited to things to do with seafaring, honey, mare's milk, last battles and bone cages. Actually that sounds kind of cool. Hm.) Anyways, Valente's books are written like the 1001 Arabian nights, frames within frames, and are obsessed with strange metamorphoses. And, they are incredibly readable. Which is neat because not all extended, braided, mythypuissant* narratives are. As a preface to 'Seeds', should anyone follow the link: They are a collection of monologues on the incident of Persephone's abduction. A few minor details accompanying the version of story of Persephone and Hades which I've read, which I think might fill in where the characters are coming from: after Persephone was abducted, Hecate (goddess of childbearing, the moon, crossroads, owls, etc, and one of the few Titans not killed or squashed under a volcano after Zeus' revolution) suggested that Demeter, who was tearing the world apart looking for Persephone, ask Helios, the sun god, about it. He'd seen the incident, but didn't say anything to Demeter until she asked. Zeus, father of Persephone and also incidentally brother of Demeter and Hades, sends his son Hermes, psychopomp and sometime rapist, to extricate Persephone from Hell. But because she's eaten pomegranate seeds (of all things to be undone by), both he and Demeter fail. In the monologues I think the characters are still trying to work out what happened. Most of them are perhaps a bit selfish. ð *mythy-puissant is my slightly ridiculous euphemism for 'mythopoeic', which I overuse. Apropos, let's add to the M.P. list: Jim Hensen--muppets Neil Gaiman--the Endless JRR Tolkien China Mieville--anarchaical metamorphical phantasmorgraphy JK Rowling--everyone wants to inhabit her world Susanna Clarke--for her unmitigated mastery of manner Catherynne M. Valente--for her Orphan's Tales series which fuses found metamorphosis with entirely strane and new stuff that slew of dudes and dudines (still moiling that one around to see if I like it) who invented Doctor Who George Lucas--you know it TS Eliot--'The Waste Land' HP Lovecraft Battlestar Galactica--more re-invention I guess? Warren-Ellis-likes-to-swear (ee-i, ee-i, oh) April 10, 2008 Been trying to cultivate a taste for Warren Ellis' work. It is a strange juxtaposition, reading his webcomic FreakAngels for example, while working as a nanny for innocent young children (well, sometimes not that innocent, when they're plotting to take down that large ficus for months and then do it the minute they learn to crawl...). One reads something like, "Oh, just use the big steam gun and pepper whothefuckever it is from above, Con..." and then one goes to sing "Old MacDonald had a farm" when the wee ones wake up from their naps. The juxtaposition makes one's mind wander to wondering what old man MacDonald was really doing on that farm (I'm from BC after all) and it also makes Ellis' ever so devout pursuit of crooked little veins seem rather silly. Still, he is a master of elegant (brief yet vivid) exposition and although I don't love psychos for, apparently, psychos' sake, his stuff's effective. Theodora Goss' thoughts on the matter: "Without some sort of ugliness, stories have no edge. Perhaps that's what I miss in so much fantasy nowadays. Either the beauty or the ugliness is missing. You have to have both – the fairy godmother and the stepsisters who chop off their toes."). I certainly can't blame the salty son of a curmudgeon for enjoying his fuck-bombs and his shite-goddams... Oh, and I have my new computer! It's pretty brill. Computerless March 15, 2008 As the title says. Am awaiting, for two weeks hence, a sparky new desktop with a good screen for viewing certain sci fi shows not widely available in North America... Until then, blogging is intermittent. Sigh. Joss Whedon web comic February 24, 2008 Free on Dark Horse's myspace. Kinda shiny, n'est-ce pas? French kiss for hire
February 15, 2008 Orlo says: Habby Balantineth Thday.
Say no to junk mail
February 11, 2008
February 1, 2008
Some items:
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It's called freedom. Today is an earmark in my life as I have just paid off my federal student loan in full. This is cause for celebration and so Mark has been commissioned in the identification and purchasing of fantastic syrups and liquors and other mixed drink accoutrements for the evening, whilst I blog and pretend to cook an organic whole chicken and marinated mushrumps. We'll be toasting to a life less ordinary tonight...though I've jumpstarted the occasion with a small glass of champagne on my own. Is there anything more soothing and yet titillating than drinking alone, quite alone?
[Update: So Mark bought this amazing award winning creme de cassis that is terribly delicious. And some good champagne. I love the contrast between the tizz of good champagne and the oily swirl of blackcurrant. Obefreakinyum.]
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Oh, Doctor Who. Also of note--a couple new weblogs on the blogroll: Do the Math, the weblog of a New York dwelling jazz musician who loves Doctor Who and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Via Spiral Staircase. Very cool post-essay-thing by him here, in which he states:
A rubber suit will always, no matter how well done, look like a rubber suit. Therefore, the imagination of the viewer is required to complete the circuit, just like in cartoons, comics, or even a child playing with dolls or toy cars.
Word. Sounds like this dude's been reading Anne Carson on Eros. And apropos Eros...
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Torchwood. If you like multi-gendered sci-fi, give it a go. Not saying it's brilliant, cause it's not; as NG says:
...yesterday I composed an entire thing in my head I didn't write down about Why The People in Torchwood Season One Are All Too Stupid To Live -- including the astonishingly puzzling incident where someone in 1941 has written something down on paper with black ink (a medium that will last legibly for centuries if kept out of the sun), and, unaccountably worried that ink on paper will fade and become unreadable in time, first she takes a prototype Polaroid photo of it, and then writes some of it in blood and puts it in a coffee can in a damp cellar, because these media will still be readable seventy years later. Why she didn't make a model of it out of chocolate as well, I will never know.)
Which made me laugh. Because it's pretty bloody true. And yet I really like Gwen Cooper and her green Converse sneakers. And all the kissing in a sci fi show, which seldom happens in sci fi shows, is somehow tremendously satisfying.
Whilst living in China I had tonnes of dreams involving men on men... No idea what it means...I found it neither erotic nor repugnant. What does it mean? What does it mean?
...Have I mentioned Neil Gaiman's weblog has been better lately? He's even got a link on how to make one's own oak gall ink.
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Edinburgh.
Next blog, an Edinburgh writing man who likes to write: Freedom from the Mundane. Apropos Edinburgh, a fantastic panoramic shot I've been contemplating: it includes all that Georgian loveliness and Arthur's Seat. This wee image doesn't do it justice so be sure to click on it to see it in full.
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Baking bread. Via Crabapple Herbs, an intriguing new/old way to bake bread, which involves letting time do the work. Supposed to produce a crunchy crust and flavourful, moist crumb. Must give it a go.
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Octopussy. (Sorry, it had to be done. Anyways, who doesn't want their own circus and floating island??) I love cephalopods. And corvidae. And a few other things that lots of other people love too but it's okay, because they're so damn cool. Here's an extremely relaxing video of an octopus casing the joint and snacking on crabs. And here, women + octopi. Via Blue Wyvern Tea. And didja hear about the giant squid invasion of San Francisco Bay? Truly bizarre.
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Eloquent stick figures. XKCD: A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language. And I quote:
Excuse me, but real programmers use butterflies.
They open their hands and let the delicate wings flap once.
The disturbance ripples once, changing the flow of the eddy currents in the upper atmospere.
Which act as lenses that deflect incoming cosmic rays, focussing them to strike the drive platter and flip the desired bit...
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Breathing. Before paying off my federal debt and then going on a celebratory bikeride in the wind and sun I went down to MokSana studio for a great yoga class. And in that class it just felt so bloody good to breathe properly. Often under stress I withold breath from myself.
I often dream that the ocean is rising up, welling up over the cliffs on Dallas Road and flooding Victoria. It's quite a soothing dream. So check it: Ujjayi Pranayama or Ocean Breath.
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Comics + Buddha = Enlightenment. Reading Osamu Tezukama's multi-volume comic on the life of Buddha. So far, extremely good. Good old Bookslut characterizes it as both ridiculous and sublime. I concur. Is there any other Way?
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Mia. Too cool.
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Nightmares on Wax. The best of both worlds. Both worlds being jazz and electronica.
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I believe him, I know it’s my only chance to – my only chance, I believe all I’m told, I’ve disbelieved only too much in my long life, now I swallow everything, greedily. What I need now is stories, it took me a long time to know that, and I’m not sure of it.
–Molloy, Part I, Samuel Becket.