I'VE GOT A LOT OF WHIMSY IN MY PUNCH

September 20 , 2006. Music to read by: I don't know. I'll think of something later.

That's Mark's statement, if anyone was wondering.

So on my lunchbreaks and at other sundry times, I contemplate the world outside and far away. Working in a library is nothing if not relaxing (though it would be a far better library if I had COMPLETE CONTROL--oh wait, does that sound a little uptight?) but when I don't have things to research for teachers, or students to help ("say it after me: 'Check out, renew, return'"); but when I run out of things [I am permitted] to do, I do my own research.

For instance, did you know in Bali, they write sacred stuff (not yet established as to what the stuff is) on flower petals? Of course everyone has seen balinese praying, with a blossom folded between the hands.

And then there's Vikings--Viking romances, to be exact. And I quote:

"So I went down to the Underworld and saw King Snow, and for sixty goats and a pound of gold I bought the horn from him. A poison-cup the size of twelve casks had been prepared for his queen, and I had to drink this on behalf as well. Ever since then I've always been a bit troubled with heartburn."

And when the autumn makes itself apparent, start the fairy-fights: from Fairy Faith, the section on Scotland folklore:

"Lichens on rocks after there has been a frost get yellowish-red, and then when they thaw and the moisture spreads out from them the rocks are a bright red; and this bright red is said to be the blood of the faeries after one of their battles."

Cause that's what faeries do around about Halloween.

emendations, UPDATES

August 23 , 2006. Music to read by: REM, 'She just wants to be'

My Dad pointed out that It, of Stephen King's It, is a spider in fiction. (SPIDERS WOT I'VE KNOWN, May 18.)

And Mark points out that Beijing has tonnes of tunnels because Mao believed the future of his people was underground. (SPELUNK, May 23.)

I wrote a solicited :) review of Pirates of the Caribbean II for Strange Horizons.

And we're on our way back to China with our cat. Yes, you read it right. With Shreddie.

Here's a picture of Mum's new dog, Snowy, to round it out.

WAVES LUMINOUS AND LIMINAL

July 17, 2006. Music to read by: Neko Case, 'Maybe Sparrow'

I am back in the land of unrestricted internet access--that is, I can update my own site, sans proctor or proxy. And I can't stop gazing at the greenery. Daisies tall and pestiferous grow in luxury where the purple spears of fireweed do not; green stars of maple leaves spangle the blue sky when I look up, and the very columns of the trees in the forests here in Portland and on the coast thrum with the work of sap with their xylem and phloem veins. And the waves, the waves: thresholds, luminous and liminal, half-lives of green glass between the tropes ocean and land. I think I like surfing in Oregon a lot, all sandy and expansive. I think I'm hooked.

Regarding hooks, I went and saw Pirates of the Caribbean II: Dead Man's Chest, at the same pleasingly weird theatre where we saw Batman Begins...and pirates, I have to say, are still pretty darn cool even when they're franchised pirates. It's pretty hard to domesticate Depp. Alright, two quotes:

'At the siege of Carthagena, Le Golif saw an incoming canonball and raised his leg to let it pass. Unfortunately its ricochet took off one cheek of his buttocks, hence his nickname "borgnefesse"...'

-From THE MEMOIRS OF A BUCCANEER, Being a Wondrous and Unrepentant Account of the Prodigious Adventures and Amours of King Louis XIV's Loyal Servant, known for his singular wound as Borgnefesse,Captain of the Buccaneers.

I must also quote Hakluyt's thoughts on the island of Atlantis, being inflated and eloquent and wary of waves:

Plato in his Timaeus and in the dialogue called Critias, discourses of an incomparable great island then called Atlantis, being greater than all Africa and Asia, which lay westward from the Straits of Gibraltar, navigable round about: affirming, also, that the princes of Atlantis did as well enjoy the governance of all Africa and the most part of Europe as of Atlantis itself.

Moreover, this was not only thought of Plato, but by Marsilius Ficinus, an excellent Florentine philosopher, Crantor the Grecian, Proclus, also Philo the famous Jew (as appeareth in his book De Mundo, and in the Commentaries upon Plato), to be overflown, and swallowed up with water, by reason of a mighty earthquake and streaming down of the heavenly flood gates. The like thereof happened unto some part of Italy, when by the forcibleness of the sea, called Superum, it cut off Sicily from the continent of Calabria, as appeareth in Justin in the beginning of his fourth book. Also there chanced the like in Zeeland, a part of Flanders.

And also the cities of Pyrrha and Antissa, about Palus Meotis; and also the city Burys, in the Corinthian Gulf, commonly called Sinus Corinthiacus, have been swallowed up with the sea, and are not at this day to be discerned: by which accident America grew to be unknown, of long time, unto us of the later ages, and was lately discovered again by Americus Vespucius, in the year of our Lord 1497, which some say to have been first discovered by Christopher Columbus, a Genoese, Anno 1492.

The same calamity happened unto this isle of Atlantis six hundred and odd years before Plato’s time, which some of the people of the south-east parts of the world accounted as nine thousand years; for the manner then was to reckon the moon’s period of the Zodiac for a year, which is our usual month, depending a Luminari minore.

ROSEBUDS WHILE YE MAY

June 11, 2006. Music to read by: Hope Sandoval & the Warm Inventions, 'Butterfly Morning'

Sunday morning, drinking coffee made by Mark, in my sunroom. Outside a fountain of little white roses has bloomed and thrums with bees--goodness knows where they come from and where they go, and what they eat, in this rather bare development zone, but they are having a marvellous time in the roses, quite easily the lovliest sight I've seen since moving here (not having been west, yet), up to and including the Great Wall itsel'.

BTW, Henriette's Herbal Blog has lots of neat recipes for salves and dandelion syrup and such. I gather the she's Finnish; she has great English and, additionally, great online herbal references

IRK

May 25, 2006.

I would just love to find audiobooks read by women--or at least, by men with wonderfully interesting voices, such as Alan Rickman or Anthony Shakir. ...Lenny Henry, reading Anansi Boys, is amazing. Cate Blanchett reading Milton would be ever so much more refreshing than the dry male British announcer style. Or possibly Annie Lennox reading Beowulf?

WEIRD FOOD

May 24, 2006. Music to read by: Ani DiFranco, 'Deep dish'

Some weird but actually good meals we've had lately:

~ cherries and popcorn ~

~ steamed cabbage, fresh apricots and popcorn ~

~ green peas in the pod and raspberry jam on a spoon ~

~ thick honey on a spoon and thin slices of emental cheese ~

~ green granny smith apples and dark almond chocolate ~

~ homemade tomato soup and sesame butter on crackers ~

~ cheese bread and lychee fruit ~

What's the point? None, really. Roasted garlic and celery sticks anyone?

SPELUNK

May 23, 2006. Music to read by: JMJ & Flytronix, 'In too deep'

Every few weeks I dream about the underground--mattress and cloth warehouses with basements with back walls secreting dirty grey doors, which lead to ever deeper, shabbier basements. Is this videogame id or just id, wearing superego sunglasses? Matrixy ones. Anyways. Whilst waking I did a little brainstorming on cities with layers and came up with London, New York, Brussels, Paris, Shanghai and Mexico City. So conceiving, google found me Berlin, Bangkok, Portland and Guanajuato also.

Quote from 'London's Transport History: A Social History of London's public transport, 1829-2000 - Tunneling': "Subterranean London: As methods of tunneling improved, hundreds of miles of tunnels were dug underneath London for various purposes. For instance, the Post Office operates its own underground electric railway - 'Rail Mail' - to transport post from sorting offices to rail stations, and the deep tunnels at Clapham South were used to provide temporary accommodation for 236 Jamaican immigrants who arrived in Britain on The Windrush in 1948."

Photos of tunnels in Guanajuato, Mexico: pic 1 and pic 2

Photos of Portland tunnels (Oregon's former shanghai export...check out the pile of mouldering boots, taken from men to prevent their escape; and this random heap of chairs thrown down into the tunnels by lazy restaurateurs)

Photos of Bangkok Underground (the most amazing capture of artificial light I've seen)

Book on the urban under-workings of New York: Underneath New York

Book on underground New York: New York Underground: The Anatomy of a City

Photos from the book

Book on the art of the Paris catacombs: Paris Underground

Photos from the book

Article on Paris by Julia Solis, underworld activist: National Geographic Adventure: 'Paris's Urban Underground' and from it a quote: "The Paris underground, often referred to as the catacombs, has been luring curious visitors for centuries. The City of Lights is built atop a vast realm of darkness: enormous gypsum and limestone quarries that were mined beginning in the 12th century for the construction of Notre Dame, the Louvre, and other edifices. Burrowed haphazardly beneath the surface city, these quarries became increasingly unstable over time. When a street collapsed in 1774, Parisian authorities investigated the galleries and reinforced weak areas. As they did, the investigators marked the tunnel walls with the names of the corresponding ground-level streets. These two-century-old signs are still used for navigation" Read another rather ghoulish quote here.

Spaces of Uncertainty: A beautifully designed website with photos and techno-po-mo essays of the margins and interstitia of Berlin, Brussels and London

Dark Passage: A website concerning the darkling poesies of the abandoned and underground, with 'dioramas'--disturbing and revealing (caution, some stuff not PG; alternately, some stuff a tad gothically precious)

Laugh/shiver: check out, for example, The Wheelchair Graveyard

Just shiver: check out another example, Let Conversation Cease

Addendum: Beijing. Mark pointed out that Mao believed the future of his people to be underground.

Victoria, an abandoned space

MAINLY MUSIC

May 22, 2006. Music to read by: see below

Playlists of late:

Bunk (funk + punk + a little bathos and bounce = two hours of listening for my daily--well, maybe not quite--constitutional):

All Is One (Vocoder Mix) - Aaron Ackerson, India Club & Lounge
Une Annee Sans Lumiere - The Arcade Fire
The World's Gone Mad (Amended Edit) - Alex Kapranos, Barrington Levy, Del the Funky Homosapien & Handsome Boy Modeling School
No Phone - Cake
Where Boys Fear To Tread - Smashing Pumpkins
Go It Alone - Beck
Myxomatosis (Judge, Jury & Executioner) - Radiohead
Renegades of Funk - Rage Against the Machine
Carbon Monoxide - Cake
Silent All These Years - Tori Amos
Wake Up - Rage Against the Machine Rage Against the Machine Rock
Bodies - Smashing Pumpkins
The Gloaming (Softly Open Our Mouths In The Cold) - Radiohead
Something On - The Tragically Hip
Hell Yes - Beck Guero
Bullet With Butterfly Wings - Smashing Pumpkins
Arco Arena - Cake
Close to Me - The Cure
The Rockafeller Skank (Short Edit) - Fatboy Slim
The Way You Move (Radio Mix) - OutKast & Sleepy Brown
Black Tambourine - Beck
This Fire - Franz Ferdinand
Peter D Scollay/ Merran's Rant/ Da Kirk Stack - Fiddlers' Bid
Tales Of A Scorched Earth - Smashing Pumpkins
The View - Modest Mouse
Darts Of Pleasure - Franz Ferdinand
Fuel - Ani DiFranco
Tougher Than It Is - Cake
Muzzle - Smashing Pumpkins
Little Bird - Annie Lennox
Rain, Rain, Beautiful Rain - Ladysmith Black Mambazo

For Mark: Chambers for Lovers I: The Perilous Realm:

It's Only Time - The Magnetic Fields
Rebellion (Lies) - The Arcade Fire
Hold On, Hold On - Neko Case
Sorry Signs On Cash Machines - Mason Jennings
Digital Love - Daft Punk
Five String Serenade - Mazzy Star
This Year's Love - David Gray
Love You Madly - Cake
Escape - Enrique Inglesias
This Fire - Franz Ferdinand
New York City - Mason Jennings
Distant Sun - Crowded House
Naked As We Came - Iron & Wine
You - Radiohead
The Old Apartment - Barenaked Ladies
Where Do I Begin - The Chemical Brothers
You Are My Sister - Antony & The Johnsons & Boy George
Central Reservation (Original Version) - Beth Orton
The Way You Move (Radio Mix) - OutKast & Sleepy Brown

For Mark: Chambers for Lovers II: To Sail Beyond the Sunset (And the Baths of All the Western Stars):

Grey - Ani DiFranco
Dragonflys - Devendra Banhart
Firefly Refrain - Espers
Sail Away - David Gray
Ocean Breathes Salty - Modest Mouse
Walk On The Ocean - Toad The Wet Sprocket
Cast Anchor - Hanne Hukkelberg
Constellations - Jack Johnson
The Sound of Settling - Death Cab For Cutie
Ocean - Pearl Jam
Here Comes The Sun - The Beatles
I Will Not Take These Things For Granted - Toad The Wet Sprocket
Nightswimming - REM
Hoppípolla - Sigur Rós
Sunshine - G. Love
The Book of Love - The Magnetic Fields

Canticles and Broken Strings (title from a lovely poem by Brianna; mainly songs involving cello, fiddle, bass, or mandolin, with occasional just guitar cheats):

Cello Suite No. 5 in C Minor, Prélude - Jian Wang
Cello Song - Nick Drake
We Will Become Silhouettes - The Postal Service
Neighborhood #4 (7 Kettles) - The Arcade Fire
Monsters - Band of Horses
Love of the Loveless - Eels
Guitar Flute And String - Moby
My Fair, My Dark - Ida
Bird Girl - Antony & The Johnsons
Death Announcements and Funerals - Hilmar Orn Hilmarsson & Sigur Ros
Muzzle Of Bees - Wilco
Crown Of Love - The Arcade Fire
Hurricane Waters - Citizen Cope
It's Not Up To You - Björk
Staralfur - Sigur Rós
Things Behind The Sun - Nick Drake
Inner Meet Me - The Beta Band
Inaniel - Devendra Banhart
We Have A Map Of The Piano - Múm
Five String Serenade - Mazzy Star
Into The West - Annie Lennox
Nighswimming - REM

And, in the strings vein, very educational but rather expensive, a 'Fiddle Rock' playlist from iTunes:

Monkeybats - Mark Wood These Are a Few of My Favorite Things
10538 Overture - Electric Light Orchestra Afterglow
Orange Blossom Special (Album Version) - Doug Kershaw Spanish Moss
H.C.Q. Strut - Django Reinhardt & Stéphane Grappelli Souvenirs
Crazy Rhythm - Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson & Stuff Smith Stuff Smith, Dizzy Gillespie, & Oscar Peterson
Sweet Georgia Brown - Stéphane Grappelli & Yehudi Menuhin The Very Best of Grappelli & Menuhin
Crown of Love - Arcade Fire Funeral
Explosive - Bond Explosive - The Best of Bond (Bonus Track)
Baba O'Riley - The Who Who's Next (Remastered)
Cause=Time - Broken Social Scene You Forgot It in People
Hot Sonatas - Joe Venuti & Earl Hines Hot Sonatas (Remastered)
Fiddle Tune - John Hartford Live from Mountain Stage: John Hartford
White Room - Vassar Clements Full Circle
The Devil Went Down to Georgia - Charlie Daniels Charlie Daniels: Super Hits
Yellow Rose of Texas - Five Buck Fiddle Five BuckFiddle
Fisher's Hornpipe - Alison Krauss, Mark O'Connor & Yo-Yo Ma Appalachian Journey
Revolution - Ashley MacIsaac Pride
Cartoon Song - Laurie Anderson Talk Normal: The Laurie Anderson Anthology (Remastered)
GATman and Robbin - 50 Cent & Eminem The Massacre (Special Edition)
Bittersweet Symphony - The Verve Urban Hymns
Canon - ZOX Take Me Home
Everywhere - Yellowcard Punk Goes Pop
Bringing It Back - Kansas Kansas
Higher Ground - Regina Carter Motor City Moments
Beautiful Queen (Live) - Robyn Hitchcock Storefront Hitchcock: Music from the Jonathan Demme Picture
Hurricane - Bob Dylan Desire
Vivaldi Rocks - Mark Wood These Are a Few of My Favorite Things
Nika Tika - Lenny Solomon, Bill Bridges, Sasha Luminsky Trio Norte
Everydance - Curved Air Second Album
Mr. McT - John Blake Adventures of the Heart
Mr Rhythm Man - The Cats And The Fiddle We Cats Will Sing for You 1939-1940 Volume 1
The South's Gonna Do It Again - The Charlie Daniels Band The Dukes of Hazzard (Music from the Motion Picture)
My Honey's Lovin' Arms - Joe Venuti Joe Venuti & Zoot Sims (Remastered)
Gate's On the Heat - Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown Gate's On the Heat
Calypso - Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson & Stuff Smith Stuff Smith, Dizzy Gillespie, & Oscar Peterson
Midnight Train - The Mad Violinist Just a Taste
Aye? - Martyn Bennett Bothy Culture
Fiddle Diddle - Lionel Hampton All Star Sessions, Volume 1: Open House
Fiddle Funk - John Blake Rhythm & BLU
Mr. Bojangles - Vassar Clements Full Circle
Dill Pickle Rag - Buddy Spicher & Vassar Clements Runaway Fiddle
American Baby - Dave Matthews Band Stand Up (Bonus Video Version)
Winds of Change - Eric Burdon & The Animals The Best of Eric Burdon and The Animals
The Squid - ZOX Take Me Home
Bombay Calling - David Laflamme Band Beyond Dreams
Don't Git Sassy - Regina Carter Motor City Moments
Willie the Pimp - Frank Zappa & Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band Hot Rats (Remastered)
I've Just Seen a Face - Vassar Clements Full Circle
Lil' Jack Slade - Dixie Chicks Home
Forgiven, Not Forgotten - The Corrs The Corrs Unplugged
Yassassin (Turkish for "Long Live") - David Bowie Lodger
C**k of the North - The Clumsy Lovers Smart Kid (Bonus Track Version)
Vivaldi - Curved Air Air Conditioning
Fandango Nights - Willie & Lobo Fandango Nights
Louisiana Man - Doug Kershaw The Best of Doug Kershaw
Raconteur Troubadour - Gentle Giant Octopus
Night Flyer - John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers USA Union
In Old England Town (Boogie #2) - Electric Light Orchestra Electric Light Orchestra II
Hand Jig - Dixie Dregs Free Fall
Banjo and Fiddle - Nigel Kennedy Classic Kennedy
Ten Fifty Two - Lara St. John re: Bach
Afternoon in Paris - Stéphane Grappelli & Diverse Instrumental Solisten Afternoon in Paris
Rasputin's Runnin' - Gwen Laster I HEAR YOU SMILING
Mini Skirt - Kronos Quartet Nuevo
Big Pig Jig - The Good Brothers One True Thing
Amen - The Clumsy Lovers After the Flood
Part Time Poppa - Po' Girl Vagabond Lullabies
Joik - Martyn Bennett Bothy Culture
Venus in Furs - The Velvet Underground & Nico Peel Slowly and See (Box Set)
Fiddle Bop - Hardrock Gunter & The Rhythm Rockers & Sonny Durham Gonna Rock 'N' Roll Gonna Dance All Night
Death Camp - John Cale and Ice Nine Nico
Bringing It Back - Kansas The Ultimate Kansas
Dance with You - Willie & Lobo Gypsy Boogaloo
Fire Dance - Bowfire Bowfire
Wedding Song - Zubot & Dawson Six Strings North of the Border, Vol. 2

DICKENS DIDACTIC: OR, THE LONG QUOTE POST

May 20, 2006. Music to read by: Beatles, 'Two of us'

So I'm reading Bleak House--fancy me reading a Dickens' novel, a real break from my usual indulgence in fantastical stuff...but the start captured me, all about mud everywhere and fog everywhere.

Its edgy satire is great (but not the loving angel of the house protagonist...perfect women from a wordy writing divorced (well, separated) Victorian man is a bit much...though she is not, I will grant, gorgeous as well...and his parody of the very much irritatingly alive-and-well-type, the rich, complacent, clued-out patriarch, is great), as well the sheer richness of people and places, rather LM Montgomery, parochial persons and descriptive of country scenery, but more masculine, done in lists of features, not painted onto the page--and one of the characters, a young man, becomes caught up in hopes for resolution of a legal suit that seems irresolvable and has ruined generations before him financially and emotionally. But he ignores good people's advice, to simply live his life, and instead, he ruins it. Hope deferred makes heart grow sick.

And what do you know, Dickens taught me something. I've been completely focused on exterminating as much of our student debt as possible; reading about this guy makes me want not to throw out the present for the future. What does Coupland call it? 'Now Denial' ('to tell oneself that the only time worth living is in the past and that the only time that may ever be interesting again is in the future,' or, the conviction that only the past was worthwhile and only the future will bring what's missing from the present.) That's what I've been up to, though heaven, or maybe purgatory, knows there's little else to think on here, but. But. How one feels about the present is serious human business--the crux of contentment or despair. Or perhaps, if not crux, then the paradox.

...

CS Lewis writes about joy and its deferral past and future:

In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, . . . I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you - the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both . . . Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth's expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things - the beauty, the memory of our own past - are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited . . . . Here, then, is the desire, still wandering and uncertain of its object and still largely unable to see that object in the direction where it really lies . . . Heaven is, by definition, outside our experience, but all intelligible descriptions must be of things within our experience (from The Weight of Glory).

Which is frightening, and also very incisive, I think. Lewis treads a fine line between heart-breaking accuracy and invasive second-guessing but, providing one keeps an open mind (conversely, a not-Pullman sort of mind), sometimes he is right.

And Lewis is another person who takes his lessons--on joy--from books (Squirrel Nutkin no less):

It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what? . . . Before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased. It had taken only a moment of time; and in a certain sense everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison. The second glimpse came through Squirrel Nutkin; through it only, though I loved all the Beatrix Potter books . . . it administered the shock, it was a trouble. It troubled me with what I can only describe as the Idea of Autumn. It sounds fantastic to say that one can be enamored of a season, but that is something like what happened; and as before, the experience was one of intense desire. And one went back to the book, not to gratify the desire (that was impossible - how can one possess Autumn?) but to reawake it. And in this experience also there was the same surprise and the same sense of incalculable importance. It was something quite different from ordinary life and even from ordinary pleasure; something, as they would now say, 'in another dimension' . . . [it was] an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy . . . anyone who has experienced it will want it again . . . I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world (from Surprised by Joy).

Here's to the pedagogical power of books. Carpe diem people.

SPIDERS WOT I'VE KNOWN

May 18, 2006. Music to read by: Wilco, 'Spiders (Kidsmoke)'

A list of spiders in fiction:

Kamajii ~ Spirited Away by Miyazaki: the cartoon with the mustached, kettle-spout-drinking, welder-glasses-wearing furnace man

Ungoliant ~ Silmarillion by Tolkien: far more terrifying than Shelob, she drained the twin lights of the world which were trees

Shelob ~ Lord of the Rings by Tolkien

spiders, lots ~ The Hobbit by Tolkien: Attercop, Lazy Lob, Crazy Cob and Old Tomnoddy

Aragog ~ Harry Potter by you all know who: a giant Acromantula beloved of Hagrid

the Weaver(s) ~ novels by China Mieville; quote from below resurrected from a previous post, about the all-id spider-beings with human hands, really the coolest monsters ever!:

For a terrible breath I glimpsed the reality through which the dancing mad god was treading. ... I saw, or thought I saw, or convinced myself I saw a vastness that dwarfed any desert sky. A yawning gap of Leviathan proportions. I whined and heard others whine around me. Spread across the emptiness, streaming away from us with cavernous perspective in all directions and dimensions, encompassing lifetimes and hugenesses with each intricate knot of metaphysical substance, was a web.

Its substance was known to me.

The crawling infinity of colours, the chaos of textures that went into each strand of that eternally complex tapestry...each one resonated under the step of the dancing mad god, vibrating and sending little echoes of bravery, or hunger, or architecture, or argument, or cabbage or murder or concrete across the aether. The weft of starlings' motivations connected to the thick, sticky string of a young thief's laugh. The fibres stretched taught and glued themselves solidly to a third line, its silk made from the angles of seven flying buttresses to a cathedral roof. The plait disappeared into the enormity of possible spaces." From Perdido Street Station.

Spiderman and Venom

Mister Anansi ~ Anansi Boys by Gaiman

Charlotte ~ Charlotte's Web by EB White: my Mum read this book to us as kids and we sobbed, Mum included, through it's entire conclusion...still not a fave, though for different reasons now

spiders, lots ~ The Valley of the Spiders by HG Wells; quote: 'thick and fast as thistledown on waste land on a windy day in July, the cobweb masses were coming on.'

Addendum: It ~ eponymous, by Stephen King.

WHO YOU REALLY ARE: Quiz time

May 9, 2006. Music to read by: The Decemberists, 'Bridges and balloons'

Which Endless are you?

Which Hogwarts House are you?

Are you addicted to the internet? (I'm under the wire. But I got the Mountain Dew reference...)

My cousin Vicki and her husband Jeremy have had triplets: Oliver, Rosemarie and Alexander. Their website is full of amazing, amazing, astonishing pictures of bright-eyed little wonders. They are looking plumper and more thoughtfully scheming all the time.

And finally: The Saga of Fred the Unlucky Black Cat via Neil Gaiman's blog.

LETTERS

May 8, 2006. Music to read by: G Love, 'Sunshine'

I have a smile firmly ensconced on my face from a few letters from people. Here they are because they say cool things.

Summer (from the glorious city Portland OR) says, '...i had to tell you that, since your blog is so interesting and you're into all sorts of info, you should look into string theory, and how cool it is that it actually correlates to so many of the old stories and even some new (like gaiman's) which describe Creation as being done through song, or word.  in brief, you may know anyway, but in case you don't, bottom line of string theory's implications regarding the creation/beginning of the universe is that ALL that IS is at it's basic smallest level in the shape of a string, whether looped or unlooped.  and the best part about this, which you'll love, is that this means that everything is what it is because of the vibration it makes:  different string/vibration, different essence. so to me this means creation is a symphony of all that exists...one which is still being played.  any stories pop to mind? how about tolkien's silmarillion and his creation story?  i love the mental picture in my head: a Great, invisible God is holding a conductor's baton that is the size of several Milky Ways, waving about all the stars... how beautiful is THAT for a scientific theory?? i bet you know all that. but i just wanted to make sure.'

Which indeed I love thinking about too: it's realllly cool, how stories make intelligible maths and gyroscopes and astrolabes and orreries and particle accelerators. And Summer, thank you! :) What would I do without string theory. Nothing, that's what.

Moira (from Singapore) says: 'I stumbled upon your blog by following a link at the Endicott Studio and just decided to drop you a line to tell you how much I enjoy it! This is definitely going to be a frequent stop for me whenever I traverse the net. I write fantasy stories too and at the risk of sounding like some desperate
wannabe, you write just the way I wish I could. I loved your entry on the first day of spring. I love the fall of light too, through filigree leaves, upon river and sea and the numinous gleam of twilight. When I was young I would stand and stare at light falling and wrote furiously to express what I saw and felt, always falling short. Now, older, I haven't done that for a while, but somehow your entry reminded me to to that, to pay attention to the light, the wild grasses and plants, to listen, smell, remember and write.'

Which makes shameless self-promotion all worthwhile for such lovely letters.

And finally, from Brenda whom I miss (in Victoria ), a valuable missive: 'i love your blog and i love you and i hate math. b'

Which is so awesome of her what with her wee brilliantine child dancing about making loquacious and insightful comments. Who could possibly compete?

ONCE MORE UNTO A BREACH OF MANNERS

May 8, 2006. Music to read by: Rage Against Machine 'Wake up'

Sigh. Just when I thought it was safe to do an entry about, you know, Buffy or something (maybe Alias), I found this Scientific American blog entry, "ID Rigs Its Own Trial" which is, as usual, tiresomely rather hostile and also, of course, profoundly Establishment. Writes John Rennie, SciAm Editor in chief:

The panel is presented as an opportunity to finally, finally confront the ID community with the serious questions that have hovered over the subject--for the advocates to confront their critics head-on and prove their case that ID is scientifically respectable. But this is a fiction. ID was literally given its day in court in Kitzmiller v. Dover, and it lost. The tough questions were asked there--as they were in other places at other times. Behe took the stand, testifying for the inclusion of ID in the curriculum, and he was confident that he had nailed all the objections (that is, until the verdict came in). In short, all these A-list ID speakers have had the chance to make their case before and they've failed. My expectation is that they will therefore either continue to peddle the same unconvincing nonsense.

To which I can only reply, predictably, quibblingly, profoundly unauthoritatively and AH-gain, something like this: that I would be pleased to know: why are his criticisms of the ID situation based on personal and political considerations (such as implied defamation of Flew and the previous publications of an institute--garnered from a database built by a plurality of non-authoritative sources--whose acronym he finds very funny) while his preference of evolution is by implication based on the defences of 'materialism' and 'empiricism'?...

p.s.: A lot of responses to the comment were kind of along the lines of 'I hate you you ____ [fill in blank with leftist pejorative] you have no right commenting on Scientific American' which really proves my point, however inadvertently.

ORDANARIIS CONFESSIONIS

May 4, 2006. Music to read by: Clap your hands, 'Let the cool goddess rust away'

Inspired by a list on a cool newly discovered blog, Blue Wyvern Tea. Lots of stuff on gaming, digital art, online comics, and fantastic fiction (check out her post Abandoned Places, a thing I like very much myself).

A list of habits. (Originally I was going to do five but I think I shall spare us all and list three.) Reading them I more than suspect I'm quite boring.

1) I wake up to check my emails and blogs. This is why I rise in the morning. I check in the following order: my Gmail; Mark's Gmail. Then blogs. Then back to my secondary email accounts. Sometimes I read free New Scientist articles or Google's How To stuff.

2) I drink bottles of Perrier sparkling water every day--it's better than our bottled water.

3) When possessed by deep feeling I reorganize my bookshelves. I put Wendell Berry next to Nick Hornby for a while, then change him over to CS Lewis. I realign the fuzzy spines of my Narnia and Lord of the Rings (including the Silmarillion and the Hobbit) books. I put my language books in chronolingual order: Latin, Old Norse, Old English, Medieval Latin, Middle English, Welsh, Quenyan (I'm a nerd, nerd nerd). (I can't read all those but I have neat dual texts...) I shift Diana Gabaldon's books to match either the trade-sized books or the mass markets. Always I debate whether Wolves in the Walls and Where the Wild Things Are belong with my Sandmans and Alan Moore books and Bone--or with my Brambley Hedges. And what about The Bear's Famous Invasion of Sicily? What about bloody Egil?

Finally, Northvegr: a great resource for germanic languages, texts and stories. They are a proponent of 'Heithni' (see link for a heithni's blog).

THE STONE AND THE ELDERBERRY BUSH

April 30, 2006. Music to read by: Postal Service, 'Such great heights'

A story. By me! (I wrote it four years ago and got it published this month.)

OF Starlings and stars: THE MEANING OF EVERYTHING

April 28, 2006. Music to read by: the birds

Yahoo News finally comes through with a neat news article on a scientist teaching birdsong grammar to starlings. They get it, apparently:

'Starlings learned to differentiate between a regular birdsong "sentence" and one containing a clause or another sentence of warbling...Gentner trained the birds using three buttons hanging from the wall. When the bird pecked the button it would play different versions of bird songs that Gentner generated, some with inserted clauses and some without. If the song followed a certain pattern, birds were supposed to hit the button again with their beaks; if it followed a different pattern they were supposed to do nothing. If the birds recognized the correct pattern, they were rewarded with food.'

The article has a sort of diminishing tone to it, though, which irritates me: how does this guy know it wasn't he who finally tuned in to the birds?

In other cool news, black holes spew symmetrical jets of gas which might prevent new stars from forming. Like whirlpools, some black holes spin. So I still wonder if they're bad or good for the health of the galaxy: do they stabalize or destabalize? Here's a movie of what people think it looks like.

TAKE ACTION

April 25, 2006.

Follow the link and send a letter to Congress about the 'Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act'. Canadians can too.

ODDS

April 24, 2006. Music to read by: Hilmar Orn Hilmarsson & Sigur Ros, 'Schiller In China'

Fisher Funeral Home of Fisher Branch, Manitoba advertises my blog. I don't know why. But I like it. So if you die in Manitoba please use them. (Even if it is just an automatic sponsor ad).

I am a tutor and my Korean student James has this to say about Dave McKean's and Neil Gaiman's Wolves in the Walls: 'It's about the girl who knows there are wolves in the walls. It was very funny story because Lucy's family said very interresting things. for example they thought very fantastic [by which he means magical] things!! The picture was so beautiful, however a little strange.' This concludes my Guest Review. He will soon be posting his own website under my tutelage.

May I just say again how brilliant 'Death Announcements and Funerals', the last song on the Sigur Ros/Hilmarsson Angels of the Universe (Englar alheimsins) album is? Really, really brilliant.

Make a bow and arrows.

One last thing. In the grime and grit of Jinshitan Resort (see the April 12 post, "'The Wild' of Jinshitan"), that is, the scurrilous and dumpy wee town Magitan, where we go to buy cheap beer and cheaper Christmas lights (really, really cheap: they last for about three days. This is because the bulbs, fed by copper filaments copulating without protection with the wall socket, burn hot enough to blister), has black market, bootlegged, pirated, ripped off, stolen copies of a little film called Mirrormask. An admirable little film, perhaps even getting to be a medium sized film, but still, given its playtime in legit theatres (smallish), it's astonishing that it made it all the way to the crumbly, sloshy edges of northern China.

As my sis Rebecca says, 'as a child i can remember hearing of the 'black market' and imagined a secret door which led to ceilingless chambers, dingy and black with soot where you could buy all things immoral.' And she is basically so right. Secret doors in back hallways, the clink of flower-and-Mao-stamped RMB and irradiated pink hotdogs ('nyo ro'? 'jyo ro'? Fried and condensed minnows? I don't know) shrink wrapped and sold as snacks while you browse.

I didn't buy it. But a friend did.

SPIDERS AND LIMES...

April 23, 2006. Music to read by: Neko Case, 'Deep red bells'

...Say the bells of St. Fines (I know, illegal rhyme, and, I think, no bells there). My BOOK REVIEW: 'An Ontological Reader Extemporizes Upon Limes and Spiders Within the Existens of Gaiman's Latest Soufflé.'

CHERNOBYL

April 22, 2006. Music to read by: Doors, 'The End' (is that too insensitive?)

Check out this site even though I can't from China because they hate the BCC. Sample, from the illuminating Iain:

(I added the text.)

From CS Lewis, Silver Chair:

April 21, 2006. Music to read by: David Grey, 'Silver lining'

"She had already said to herself about five times, 'I must go to bed', when she was startled by a tap on the window.

She got up, pulled the curtain, and at first saw nothing but darkness. Then she jumped and started backwards, for something very large had dashed itself against the window, giving a sharp tap on the glass as it did so. A very unpleasant idea came into her head--'Suppose they have giant moths in this country! Ugh!' But then the thing came back, and this time she was almost sure she saw a beak, and that the beak had made the tapping noise. 'It's some huge bird,' thought Jill. 'Could it be an eagle?' She didn't very much want a visit even from an eagle, but she opened the window and looked out. Instantly, with a great whirring noise, the creature alighted on the window-sill and stood there filling up the whole window, so that Jill had to step back and make room for it. It was the Owl."

WINDOWS

April 20, 2006. Music to read by: Barenaked Ladies, 'When I fall'

I always thought I liked windows. I always loved the idea of filtered light, and of thresholds, and the deceptive clarity of dividing panes slotted between the viewer and the viewed.

Here windows have come to mean my computer, more than anything. The internet screen is, in Explorer anyways, actually called a Window.

My computer is my ocular prosthetic. It's where I write, read comics, poetry, dictionaries, articles and fiction, pretend to order books and clothes, play stupid games like Hearts and Tetris, organize and view our photos, gaze at live webcams, talk online with family and friends, email family and friends, IM chat with family and friends, read news, maintain publishing efforts, conduct all manner of writing and business research, do business itself such as banking (ugh), write my blog, view the earth from satellite, acquire and listen to music, and google any insane thing I want, to staunch the cravings for, say, the sight of New Zealand, or the standing stones of Scotland, or wild violets, or a better understanding of the ionic conductivity of mud. I look at the world through my little, silver, clear-screened computer, and the world looks at me. Sometimes a mirror and sometimes a pane of glass.

Tap tap.

The real windows here are mud-spattered from rain mixed with Gobi desert dust. We had such a thunder storm the other night that the lightning flashed in colours overhead--red, yellow, blue, like a prism. The thunder came immediately afterwards, resounding in numinous bass echoes. And speaking of prisms, the moonlight was bright enough one night to show in my prism hanging in the bedroom window--really deep, rich colours, surprisingly. I guess the dark air around it makes a murky mix.

And on most nights, whatever the weather, the wind tears across the bleached brick and weed courtyard behind us and buffets our bedroom window, and whistles through the little round screw hole left in the frame by 'tradesmen'. The wind is a good sound, really. It suggests life and movement and distances swept clean. Though it frequently keeps me up listening and watching the brassy mercury shift of moonlight over us.

Here's a livecam of the west coast in all its sodden, grey, stormy glory.

And here's an article on Google's policies and representation in China...'The Internet: abridged.' Bowdlerized, castrated and, to fit with my windows metaphor, blinded. Or at least, major blindspots.

Yeah, windows.

GOOD AND PRETTY GOOD

April 15, 2006. Music to read by: Band of Horses, 'The first song'

You know those old, heavy, brightly painted seesaws which used to populate playgrounds? Along with chin-up bars, metal merry go rounds, and chain link tire swings, back when toys were toys and kids were kids--and bloody playground wounds were frequent? You know how you could balance in the middle of the seesaw, swaying back and forth, keeping each end from touching the ground? Back and forth, back forth. That's my life right now: no idea where we'll be next year.

Last year, wandering the backside of Victoria, I climbed over a grassy hill of oak trees and granite, and discovered probably the last old fashioned playground. It was like finding the lost valley of the dinosaurs. There was a metal merry go round painted in primary colour quadrants, with handles radiating from the centre to cling to, and a deck of chevron-embossed steel. I spent the evening on it, dizzy from the 360 degree revolutions of slanted twilight and the yellow taste of broom and gorse pollen in my mouth. I didn't know what was going to happen then either but I sure appreciated the incarnate metaphor. I could do with a real seesaw now. I'd stand in the middle and balance back and forth, watching the horizon go up and down.

But enough of that. I have pretty good news, my first piece of fiction's being published by an online magazine. They paid for it too, and with the money I shall go buy one half of a c.d. It'll be a special half, though. I shall shamelessly post the link when it goes live, also my review.

And the really good news is the discovery of two very creative people's blogs, my sister Rebecca and her husband Dustin! Really cool photos, movies and bits of writing. And Mark is working on one too.

'THE WILD' (OF JINSHITAN)

April 12, 2006. Music to read by: The Killers, 'All these things that I've done'

FROM THE GERMAN

April 5, 2006. Music to read by: Radiohead, 'Sail to the moon (Brush the cobwebs of the sky)'

Corona -- die Glimmentladung to die down -- verglimmen to glint -- glimmen (glomm,geglommen) glow discharge -- to glow -- die Glimmentladung to smoulder.

MEOW, SQUAWK, WOOF

April 5, 2006. Music to read by: Mazzy Star, 'Look on down from the bridge'

At this moment I am listening to Mazzy Star's slow-mo Emo organ and electric guitar music, watching a superlatively good livecam of a bald eagle nesting on Hornby Island. The nest is made of pine branches. It is dappled with sunlight. The eagle's feathers are prismatic brown in the light, and rough white on her head. Every once in a while the eagle looks at the camera and makes that funny, piping eagle call, so that Mazzy Star's mumbles, 'my stars...let them shine,' are nicely punctuated with treble squeaks. And every once in a while the eagle moves so she's facing the opposite direction.

My illuminating friend Iain says eagle actually called 'sweaks and swaks.' Along these lines I found a cool language site that compares the transcription of animal languages in different languages. For instance, in English, dogs go 'woof woof.' In Algerian Arabic, they go 'haw haw.' Icelandic: 'voff.' Indonesian: 'gonggong.' And Slovene: 'hov-hov.' I always knew there was a reason why Snowy went 'woof' in the translated balloons, and 'woah woah' in the French illustrations.

The bee sounds are kind of neat too, for their homogeneity. Lots of bzzing. Though Hebrew is 'zum zum zum' and Swedish 'sur sur.' There are two main forms for the sound, essentially 'bzzz' and 'zum,' and that makes me wonder: do these forms express two different noises bees make--hovering and zooming by, perhaps--or do they express some darker purpose? Are the zums the sound of bees heavy, laden down with the souls of the dead?

WOULDN'T YOU KNOW, A BIT MORE AMAZING NEWS, AND IT'S SUNNY OUT

March 30, 2006. Music to read by: Beck, 'Hell Yes'

First piece, I just discovered the coolest function in Microsoft Word while writing a story about Odin. Open a document, hit the 'Windows button' (it's the one with a little flag divided into four squares) and 's' at the same time: and you get a reading of your writing in a thrillingly cold, grey, crawling, werewolf sort of voice. A coolly ironic, dispassionate voice. A voice that takes everything seriously and nothing all at once.

It even has inflection for questions, commas, and colons. Its rendition of curses and expletives is high effective. Try it yourself: copy 'You absolute boff mucking goat liver pus bag of Fenrir's filth' into Word and listen up. That's 'Windows button+s.' On a more mature note though, it's very helpful for editing purposes.

I discovered it by accident and for a micro-moment, thought it was Odin speaking to me from my keyboard. Or possibly Agent Smith.

The second piece of good news is that my first paid bit of writing has been accepted by Strange Horizons! Huzzah!

TODAY'S AMAZING NEWS

March 29, 2006. Music to read by: High Dials, 'Holyground'

And song comes from our illuminating friend Iain. Thank you Iain.

Bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) have fished with people at Laguna, off the coast of Brazil, since 1847 (Pryor et al. 1990). During this time dolphins developed a culture of driving fish into fishers' nets, signaling to fishers, and feeding on stunned fish. This behaviour is cultural because it is learned socially (young imitate or are taught by their mothers), persistent (at Laguna for at least three dolphin generations), and not found in all dolphin populations. The culture of fishers includes an ability to interpret distinctive rolls performed by dolphins, which tell the fishers how many fish the dolphins are herding and where to cast their nets.

Carrion crows in Sendai, Japan, harvest English walnuts each autumn and carefully place them in front of cars stopped at traffic signals. When the cars move, the nuts are crushed, and the birds fly down to eat the nutritious nutmeat (Nihei and Higuchi 2001). This behavior is spreading slowly from the place it was first observed 20 years ago, which is consistent with social learning. In accordance with cultural evolution, other populations of carrion crows do not use cars to crack nuts, but they do drop nuts to crack them. When and where did crows learn to use automobiles as nutcrackers?

Go here to listen to sonograms of crow language.

And then, go here to watch a sperm whale cruise by an oil drill. Moving like a behemoth god through the deeps.

FIERY TORNADOES

March 23, 2006. Music to read by: Cake, 'Carbon Monoxide'

Someday I'd like to wake up and read something on the Internet that's truly staggering and exciting and wonderful and strange. For instance, 'Planet of Elves Seeks Communication With Us,' or 'Breakthrough in String Theory Leads Scientists to Eliminate World Pollution By Reknitting Spacetime!' or even 'New Evidence Indicates Eating Organic Food Makes Human Beings Smarter and Kinder.' But every day it's the same old mulch: 'Spoiled Dyed Blonde Heiress Cashes in on Further Humiliating and Nepostistic Benefits,' 'Bush Bush Bush,' and 'Scientists Now Realize that Synthetic Green and Blue Food Dye's as Bad as Red' (duh). Or worse and sadder.

Alice said of her subterranean world that it was curiouser and curiouser. I guess I'd settle for a few epiphanies to do with how curious the world already is. 'Storytelling: Confirmed Essential to the Human Condition.' 'Chlorophyll Found to be the Substrate of Light-to-Sap Alchemy!' Diatoms Look Like Jewels.' 'Tornadoes of Fire at Burning Man.' 'Lightning Strikes Sand and Makes Twisting Glass Called Fulgarite.'

Check out the staggering videos of cells healing, and other gorgeous slides and stills at Cytographics.

A SCHOLASTIC CONUNDRUM

March 22, 2006. Music to read by: Gord Downie, 'Chancellor'

Dear Averrhoës, A.K.A. Ibn Rushd, twelfth century philosopher,

In 'Incoherence of the Incoherence' (how could I thus fail to expect an answer), you implemented a paradox of omnipotence which sticks with me: can God create a rock big enough that He, being omnipotent, would fail to lift? This is a useful question in so many forms. For one thing, it's fuelled endless discussion for centuries, still inspiring thousands of internet intellectuals to create rings and forums and things to solve the problem. And it's begged all sorts of other questions to do with barbers shaving themselves, and Schroedinger's cat, and angels dancing on the heads of pins. It keeps people busy.

But here's a really important question.

Could Superman hurt himself with his bare hands? He's strong enough to withstand anything (except kryptonite); and he's stronger than anything else (except when he's weak around kryptonite). So if he's stronger than anything, is he strong enough to overcome his strength (when he's not around kryptonite)? Just wondering. If he was hypnotised or something. Been watching a lot of Smallville.

Sincerely,

me.

MORE WORDS TO LIVE VICARIOUSLY BY

March 21, 2006. Music to read by: Mason Jennings, 'Living in the Moment'

Currently enjoying a re-reading of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series tremendously, not the least because the first time I read them I was conducting interviews simultaneously with reading at a scurrilous not to be named telephone survey agency. I knew the answers people gave well enough to follow the gist of the novels at the same time. It's amazing how much you can get done at the same time with the proper motivation: let's see, listen to the sixth-hundredth bored guy stammer out his opinion of Alberta utility services, or, half-listen and read about graphic surgical feats and vivid romantic encounters. I've learned a tremendous amount about treating parasites of all sorts with rum and a sterilized knife, and the aphrodisiac effects of a proper scotch whisky from the novels, and I'm duly grateful. This time round I'm the more riveted for giving the books my full attention. Long live any writer who can spin such a catchy web.

WORDS TO LIVE VICARIOUSLY BY

March 20, 2006. Music to read by: Beck, 'E-Pro'

"I believe fiction is a virtue because making a virtue of necessity is a great way to justify addiction." -me.

IN THE WEST BEHIND THE HILLS

March 20, 2006; First Day of Spring. Music to read by: Ani DiFranco, 'Grey'

I have forgotten the name of spring. I try to conjure up the snowdrops, green flames of leaves, early tissues of cherry blossom and forsythia, movement of fresh ferns bunching out from granite, pussywillows in the red haze of swamp growth, the ozone and clay smell of rain and mud. I remember the movement of green small frogs in amongst fallen birch branches, gleeful in their algae--but not their shapes. I remember the colours of coastal scrub--willow yellow, bramble red, orange and green switches in vertical, rainbowed curtains, but not the colour of the light. I forget what else. With no external recourse I googleimage 'spring' in order to remember what I'm missing, and come up with hands full of sifting kitsch. Ezra Pound wrote, "The blossoms of the apricot / blow from the east to the west, / And I have tried to keep them from falling." I like that although it's from a poem brimming with pseudo-Eastern romanticised quaintness about Confucius which is incorrect both in its fantastical western nimbusifying (fatefully close to that common term 'nimrodified' I know) and its historical to current ideological fallout. Far more accurate, for here, the old quote of quotes--and I feel lucky for it--In a Station of the Metro: "The apparition of these faces in a crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough. " The good thing about all this googling is that I found a really wonderful series of New Zealand photos, and enchanting, nearly synesthesic pottery made somewhere in Wisconsin. Synesthesia is not one of the internet's strengths though the ghost of the back of my nose in my brain remembered the smell of wild roses when I found their picture, and I remembered the name of camas lilies by searching 'edible first nations lily bulb.'

DESIRE, YOUR NAME IS FRAILTY

March 12, 2006. Music to read by: Wolf Parade, 'Same Ghost Every Night'

Reading Still She Haunts Me: A Novel of Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell, by Katie Roiphe. It's a fictionalised view of authorial alchemy subverted desire turned fiction: i.e., a pedophile writes a child's novel. It's beautiful prose but pretty disturbing subject matter; only a postmodern could have written it: with the temerity and Freudian realism which belong to modern novels, and the warping, bubble-universe relativity which is the postmodern tendency. The axiom which preserves her premise is Ann Carson's precept of desire: "Conjoined they are held apart. The third component plays a paradoxical role for it both connects and separates…The difference between what is and what could be is visible." So writes Roiphe, "To be stuck in a state of almost having. To remain in motion, going toward her and she toward him, though they are never going to reach each other. They are like Zeno's famous paradox..." Which is the stupidest smart idea ever. Those Victoria children's writers. Those postmodern writers. But her writing about light and leaves and so on is beautifully painterly. Here's my review of it.

PLEASE TEACH BOOK?

March 6, 2006. Music to read by: Sigur Ros, 'Glosoli'

Just finished reading The Giver for the first time. I skipped that class in school, I guess. (Maybe we read 1984 instead, equally didactic but more conceptually sound.) It's all about a community which has relinquished all feeling in exchange for perfect control. No old people, no colicky babies, no colours, no weather or seasons, no angst over what to be when one grows up--it's all guided by rules and enforced by Elders: euthanasia and sensory deprivation transformed into the expungal of all personal or social responsibility And I was struck by how difficult it will be to tutor my Chinese students about it. For one thing, colour, taste, choice: these things, while universal, have different connotations for a typical resident of Kaifaqu than Lois Lowry may have been thinking of. If you have never tasted organic watermelon at the height of its ripeness, fresh picked and chilled, how do you know it's better than pale candied strawberries? If you have never tasted fresh wild salmon, how can you know it's better than boiled hotdogs? If you have been told by your father all your life that you will be a business man or a doctor, what is choice without the frame of family honour and shame? And if you have seen only a landscape littered with kabob sticks and milk cartons, and plastic bags of all shapes, colours, sizes and functions, intermingled with weeds and poorly built marble edifices, how do you equate the outdoors with possibilities of microscopic ferns and mosses wrapped around a landscape of twisting, autumnal giant leaf maple trees, mingling green and gold, exuding fresh, moist oxygen with the every blink of stomata? This is not to say that great beauty and noble choice don't abound here, too; and lots of kids feel the same way in every country--what has this book got to do with me--what is even going on in it--why I am here instead of playing video games--can't I have Doritos instead of sushi, an Xbox instead of surfing--but there is a pronounced tone of implacable conviction in the writing of most of students at this school. If you have all been taught that all Chinese are peaceful and gentle and eloquent, and all Japanese are cruel and warlike and stupid, how are you to know you've been brainwashed? If handicapped people are legally forbidden from all public parks, except for Shanghai as of two years ago, does disposal of the inconvenient among us seem so bad?

So today I was explaining to my student the way the Giver gives memories to the Receiver: it's a kind of psychic magic, or subconscious metaphysics--in terms of empathy, or Harry Potter, or story-telling, in the simplest of words. He huffs, and, smiling irritably, demands in broken English, 'please teach book, teacher.' Um. Yeah.

ARS GRAMMATICA

February 20, 2006. Music to read by: Ani DiFranco, 'Don't Nobody Know?'

Chigaco Style has an FAQ where you can e-mail ponderings on all things stylistic and punctuated--very cool, yes? I've found it handy on occasion. Grammar. Hm.

 My favourite considerations of grammary (which once meant 'magic') as a larger topic are the ridiculous names given to parts of eloquence, found in books called things like 'Ars Grammatica' and 'Institutio Oratoria'--tropes, for instance: 'there are thirteen tropes: 1. metaphora, 2. catachresis, 3. metalepsis, 4. metonymia, 5. antonomasia, 6. epitheton, 7. synecdoche, 8. onomatopoeia, 9. periphrasis, 10. hyperbaton, 11. hyperbole, 12. allegoria, 13. homoeosis.' And there are, for metaphors, four modes of transformation, fusing the inanimate to the inanimate, the animate to the inanimate, from the inanimate to the animate, and of course, animate to animate... How this is decided upon is in itself a ridiculous and a monolithic creative act. Dame Murdoch excuses this: 'All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple.' Which relieves a lot of my anxiety over many of my hobbies! 

Personally I think that, like quantum particles, the which become fuzzy in one attribute the more closely one measures a mutually exclusive attribute, words--and punctuation--yield both further obscurity and broader possibilities of meaning the more closely one attempts to define them, precisely because of the zenotic gap between signified and signifier, trope and object, vision and representation. Just a thought; lots of people have said it better than I.

But Heidegger says, 'world as environing world is due to the specific worldhood of space. It is incumbent on us to see this worldhood of space, to see primary spatiality, and to understand...only then are we in the position to avoid a course which is always and above all adopted, even by Kant, for the definition of spirit and spiritual being. This course always involves defining spirit negatively against res existans, conceiving spirit as non-space...we associate space primarily with corporeality and so move in constant fear of materializing the spirit.'

By which I take him to mean (if one can 'take' 'him' 'to mean')--one can't really get too detailed or technical or hypothetical, so long as one remains categorically inclusive. Don't be afraid of materializing the spirit: you won't, or if you do, maybe it always was, or is still other things too--infinite exactitudes in infinite approximations? I think that's what he's saying. So one's in good company, if one likes Murdoch and Heidegger and very old Latins. 'Rhetoric' was an Art a while ago, though it's fallen on hard times--but there you go, all meanings change.

TRANS-NEPTUNIAN OBJECTS?

February 18, 2006. Music to read by: Franz Ferdinand 'This Fire'

I suspect Dante's head might explode if ever he found out that the planet UB 313 is being considered for admittance to the planet club; a tenth planet would so upset the cubed symmetry of medieval devotional astronomy.

Anyways, I read a great article about an early Arcade Fire gig, and I quote:

[T]he chaotic, fervent night had all the trappings of a public burning, wherein the Arcade Fire were the fierce, indignant victims, railing out against the injustice of their sentence as the crowd tossed whatever would burn into the conflagration. Any rock show worth its weight should leaven the audience’s enthusiasm with a bit of confusion and old-school terror, and the band dealt each out in spades by flinging themselves around, tripping over their equipment, and, occasionally, wrestling. Nobody knew, from moment to moment, what was coming next. To improve on the excellence of the show, the band would have to have given away free pies.

And I can feel the wonderful absurdity of this when I listen to 'Un Annee Sans Lumiere,' 'Wake Up' and 'Rebellion (Lies),' and 'Neighborhood #4 (7 Kettles)'...Check out their entrancing site.

Finally, a good article about Grainy Space--string theory and quantum loop gravity theory--clearly written and reassuringly really really simple. It talks about those poetic ideas 'spin networks' and 'spin foam,' and then concludes, 'Most perplexing of all, spin nets and spin foam cannot be thought of as existing in space and time. They reside on a more fundamental level, as a deep structure that underlies and gives rise to space-time...The universe, in this view, is conjured up from pure mathematics.' Math's never sounded so transcendent.

ANOTHER LIST

February 11, 2006. Music to read by: Hilmar etc., 'Memory'

From NG's blog, Jan. 1, 2006:

'...[I read] Garry Kilworth's not-yet-published Attica, a fantasy quest (sort of) set in an attic. Or perhaps in all attics. It's an excellent book, good and original and, in all the best ways, strange. It kept transporting me back to the attic of the house I lived in as a boy, in which we would find peculiar things left by the house's former owners, cardboard boxes filled with large glass bulbs, like light-bulbs, each containing several tablespoons of dusty liquid mercury, or round bricks of glittering white marble, and suchlike forgotten magical objects...'

Which is the sort of thing that when people say it, I get all wistful, because I always wanted such an attic, but never had one.

We did, growing up, have a crawlspace. It was: full of large spiders, pipes, and ancient appliances which smelled bad. There was often a puddle of water in the back left-hand corner of the crawlspace, from the hosepipe being left on too long, and I think a large frog lived close by, because at night under the floor of my bedroom I could hear long, magnificent croaks from it.

I checked on the crawlspace every few years on the hopes that I had missed something exciting the last time, yanking open the plywood door, overgrown with couch-grass, and poking my head in, armed with a flashlight whose batteries were invariably just dying. I never saw anything though, except more spider webs.

There was also a warehouse next door where my Grandad stored things like expanding foam and orchard fertilizer, massive bags of it, with little white beads spilling out the corners all the time, and moldering piles of lumber, piping, and winter tires. We roller skated there a lot, coming to frequent grief on the on the cement floor.

And there was the abandoned barn, for a long time, in the pasture, tilting sideways, surrounded by fallen barbed wire and lush grass which shone living green in the evening elf-light. Compacted, rotten hay inside made for a wonderful landing from the upper floor.

Also an old, raised tack shed with: a rusted pommel, a rotten bridle, and several sorts of highly tetanusy nails in coffee tins. We used its underside for the burial of numerous dead mice, ranging from whole ones poisoned by orchard pesticides, to merely the frontal skull and nose, with whiskers, of cat-devoured specimens. We had one cat who would eat everything but the livers, too, but we didn't bury these, leaving us with a vague sense of waste, for these lone organs: oughtn't they go to a donor bank?

And there was my Granny's basement, full of carefully stored artifacts from the sixties: a peach-pink crinoline dress with frills, which Granny had worn as a bridesmaid (she no longer had her own wedding dress, probably left it in England). A vinyl, opening and closing Barbie van with groovy patterns on the side, shag carpet in the back, and place where Skipper could sit, behind the steering wheel. Rows of canning jars, those classic objects of desire of aunts and grandmothers everywhere. A game of Mastermind, with a picture of a mob boss and his Asian secretary on the cover, with all pieces (no one except Dad would play with me). An electric typewriter. A pellet-burning stove which they used in the winter, with an interior cavern fed by carefully dispensed sawdust pellets. It looked a lot like Smaug's lair inside, with heaps of ash and miniature, glowing embers.

There was the moveable wardrobe as well, but it was quite narrow, and we used it to make a swing, inside, on the dowel, that moved upwards and downwards by means of a pulley. We wore a large red and white bike helmet for its operation, and gardening gloves.

And in Kamloops (actually 'Barnhartvale') we bought a house which an old man had left his huge rock collection in. He'd collected, cut and polished hundreds of quartzes and liver-spotted skipping stones and then left them to collect dust in plastic bags. It was overwhelming; maybe that's why he left them. Also he left stacks of 1950s magazines, not Playboy, but nearly as weird.

And that was about it, though the architecture of these places expanded marvelously in sleep, to much more disturbing and extensive dimensions. But no test tubes of mercury, or magic books. So I have made a:

list of oddities I should have liked to, or would like someone to find:

a basket of dried shelf-fungus of the kind that grows on dead or dying trees

a rocking horse with one eye poked out, the other one a red paste-gem

several silk and paisley scarves and shawls which smell faintly of patchouli

smelling salts (because I always wondered what they were as a kid)

several mouse-chewed Everyman's copies of Rudyard Kipling's lesser works, in red leather

Disney's Uncle Scrooge comic book series, and an Illustrated Classic of 'Tale of Two Cities'

hot-curlers of the kind my sisters and I loved in the eighties, made of coiled springs encased in rubber, sans dispenser, mixed in with a lot of Lego and Meccano pieces

several seagull quills cut for nibs, and a large bottle of India ink with a dried crust of ink around the cork to ensure spillage upon opening

a fossil or two

a wooden puzzle with 'Ozymandius' painted on it, to be read upon assemblage

Hungry Hungry Hippo

bangles and jelly bracelets and a griffin ring, as well as costume jewelry, in a wooden box

large lengths of black cloth

brown snail shells, hundreds of them, in a pottery jug

a human torso with coloured, removable organs

a model of a bat

a black widow spider preserved in a clear resin paperweight

two dozen argyle socks with holes in them

a pillbox of baby teeth

the collected encylopaedic excerpts of great writings from Homer to Cheever bound in marbled Art Nouveau covers (I already have this), extremely dusty (they are)

a small round mirror with a beard hanging off the bottom of it

acrylic balls of yarn of several shades, tangled in a gunny sack

oil paints

a nearly complete set of socket wrenches

slingshot, inner tube and rope ladder (Mark's contributions)

toasting mesh for over the fire

a glass replica of a goats' eye

marble collection in an aquarium

magnifying glass

stethoscope (perfect for listening for echoes in the walls)

50,000 paperclips

silk violet corsage

rapier

playing cards with thinly-clad Victorian faeries on the back

Mayan incense cones

a home-made rock collection of the magnitude referred to above

galoshes with something in the toes

lengths of hosepipe but no nozzles

Xeroxed book of mushroom identification in German

roll of fishnet

box kite made of oiled silk

cat-gut snow shoes

an industrial magnet on a rope and a Commodore 64 (Mark again)

cross country skis and gaiters

a trap door

Of course the best thing about being a kid is the stuff you make (up), invention, fabrication, the stuff of nightmares and day dreams.That, I expect, takes care of itself.