Jasminembla's Fantasy Blog

IN XANADU (STILL)

February 8, 2006. Music to read by: Bedlam, 'Harvest Moon'

Well, dreaming in Thailand is all very well, but I do miss the internet, and the blogs that go with it. For instance, my friend Megan has a lovely new blog, and I haven't been able to scrutinize it at all, yet. It's replaced Wonderblossom's, which I feel sad about, but at least I can access it in China, unlike any blog on Blogger, or for that matter, this one. Why? Because in China, monitors sneak through the system like those machines in the Matrix and shut down any wee pinholes in their electric iron curtain. I set up three different blog hosts in one day and after an hour or so, each one ceased to function. So being here in Thailand is a relief, that way, and when I go home, I've resigned myself to using the redoubtable Dave Barbour, cousin in law, to update furtive zipped files from another sort of Xanadu.

I've made no attempt to learn Thai at all, I'm ashamed to say, except hello and thank you and very good (sawadi ka, kap kum ka, or something, and aroy ma! which apparently also can apply to women, hm). Instead I've frittered my days on beaches, reading, and in soft northern mountains, reading, until I rather feel that like that victim of dream-dust in the first Sandman collection (John Constantine's ex-girlfriend), I shall be stuck lounging on pillows forever, sifting through and mainlining irresistible, addictive Story. Oh well.

Pai, where we are, is nice, a bit like Nelson moved to a jungle version of the Okanagan valley, with dry heat in the day, crickets in the night and birds in the mornings. It's easy to be here, in our little German resort, with neat clipped lawn, and perfect low palms, and a large pond with sedge at the edges and a fountain for circulation, and indoors, very nice sheets on the bed. Everywhere here, as in Chiang Mai, you can smell Buddhist incense, and hear the evensongs of monks, a sonorous chant, and the exalting minor scales of Islam. There's a sleek, mostly black, medium-sized dog called Linda who sleeps on our porch every night. So I feel really lucky to be here, reading, and working out plans of action with Mark, and feeling at peace after a long time of not.

And very excitingly, I must add that my cousin Asheya and her housband Eric have had a baby, Elias. Picture on left!

EMAIL ME (comment)	JASMINEMBLA'S WEBLOG	REVIEW: STEPHEN KING'S HEARTS IN ATLANTIS REVIEW: PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN II: DEAD MAN'S CHEST STORY: The Stone and the Elderberry Bush BOOK REVIEW: An Ontological Reader Extemporizes Upon Limes and Spiders Within the Existens of Gaiman's Latest Soufflé BOOK REVIEW: STILL SHE HAUNTS ME MUSIC REVIEW: NORSE TRIAD MUSIC REVIEW: FIDDLER'S BID MUSIC REVIEW: VIND REVIEW: WATCHMEN REVIEW: THE COMICAL TRAGEDY OR TRAGICAL COMEDY OF MR PUNCH, GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: THE COMICAL TRAGEDY OR TRAGICAL COMEDY OF MR PUNCH, RADIO PLAY REVIEW: THE YEAR'S BEST SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY FOR TEENS RESEARCHING the WORKS of NEIL GAIMAN SPACES OF UNCERTAINTY DARK PASSAGE THE PARTICLE TAROT VIOLET MIRANDA: GIRL PIRATE POSY SIMMONDS: TAMARA DREW POSTSECRET MIRRORMASK BJORK'S QUICKTIME GALLERY DERELICT LONDON FORGOTTEN NEW YORK NORTHVEGR MOON MAP GOOGLE SCHOLAR OLD FONTS AUGUSTINE'S CONFESSIONS IN E-TEXT TRASLATION EAGLE WEBCAM WEST COAST WEBCAM OREGON WEBCAM ANTARCTICA WEBCAM PATAGONIA WEBCAM LOCH NESS WEBCAM MARK'S SPACE REBECCA'S SPACE DUSTIN'S SPACE DUSTIN'S FORUM Henriette's Herbal Blog SINEFORMA WEBLOG ARCHAEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA THE LAST MORPHEUS: A COMMENTARY NEIL GAIMAN'S WEBLOB MAKING LIGHT WEBLOG SURE FIRE (THOUGHTS AND TRAVELS) WEBLOG VIVIDPIECES WEBLOG SLAUGHTERHOUSE WEBLOG JONATHAN STRANGE.com A HEATHEN'S DAY Blue Wyvern Tea
	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?
"Regardless of where your research takes you, there are always new things to discover about subterranean Paris," says Ingmar Arnold, a Berlin-based underground historian. "Wherever you walk, you can never be sure you're not passing across something mysterious—behind every corner there could be a great secret" (from Paris's Urban Underground').	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
'When Charles Dickens was a small boy, perhaps eight or nine years old, he got lost in the City, the teeming financial and commercial center of the great metropolis of London. A friend of the family had taken him to look at the outside of St. Giles's Church with the hope of quenching a fantastical notion that had taken hold of him: young Dickens was convinced that on Sundays, the beggars of London, having cast off their weekday pretenses to blindness, lameness and other physical maladies, and freshly attired in their holiday best, were to be seen marching into the temple of their patron saint, where they would then partake of divine service. St. Giles's was viewed "with sentiments of satisfaction" and, one infers, edification all around, but shortly afterwards, on the Strand (a well-known street in London), Dickens somehow became separated from his companion. At first, he was horrified; but he soon rallied and determined to set off to seek his fortune. "Thus I wandered about the City, like a child in a dream," he reminisced in "Gone Astray," an elegiac essay written more than thirty years later, "staring at the British merchants, and inspired by a mighty faith in the marvellousness of everything."' (from 'Life of the Author').	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.
NEW GHIBLI MOVIE, TALES FROM EARTHSEA!	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.
A VISION OF SATISFACTION 'BRIDGES AND BALLOONS' LYRICS	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.
THE BELLS OF ST. CLEMENS	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."
GOOGLE IN CHINA: THE BIG DISCONNECT COX BAY WEBCAM	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.
Rebecca Dustin Mark	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.
TINTIN: OFFICIAL SITE ANIMAL language IN HUMAN LANGUAGES	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!
COLLECTIVE ANIMAL NOUNS MORE COLLECTIVE ANIMAL NOUNS AND ONE MORE COLLECTIVE NOUN SITE	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.
CYTOGRAPHICS: PICTURES OF CELLS	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.
OPEN LETTERS TO PEOPLE OR ENTITIES WHO ARE UNLIKELY TO RESPOND	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.
EPHRAIM POTTERY	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.
QUINTILLIAN 'TRANSFER OF INFORMATION' AND 'RHETORICAL FIGURATION:' LIMITS OF SPEECH COMMUNICATION	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.
NOT ENOUGH PROTECTION FROM THE SONG	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.
"All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple." Iris Murdoch.	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.
WONDERBLOSSOM ANGELS OF THE UNIVERSE SOUNDTRACK RACHAEL'S MUSIC FOR EGON SCHIELE POSY SIMMONDS: TAMARA DREW	I TAKE IT BACK... February 10, 2006. Hilmar Orn Hilmarsson and Sigur Ros in Angels of the Universe, 'Colours' Wonderblossom's still around, and looking good. Please note a very atmospheric soundtrack, by Hilmar Orn Hilmarsson and Sigur Ros: Angels of the Universe. It's a strings equivalent to the Rachel's Music for Egon Sciele. A description could easily get lost in abstract words, so listen to a sample. I imagine a gale in autumn, and a skinny old man sitting on a bench in it, letting his hat blow away, while two tall, thin creatures barter his memories back and forth behind him. Not easy listening, but worth it. (Alright, must add some abstract adjectives.) 'Bium Bium Bambalo' is wonderfully, ponderously elegiac, and the last track, 'Death announcements and Funerals' is thunderously bright with electric guitar and organ. Apparently they play it as an intro on Icelandic radio (in Iceland). And a new to me online graphic novel: POSY SIMMONDS: TAMARA DREW.
MEGAN'S WEBLOG (Elias)	IN XANADU (STILL) February 8, 2006. Music to read by: Bedlam, 'Harvest Moon' Well, dreaming in Thailand is all very well, but I do miss the internet, and the blogs that go with it. For instance, my friend Megan has a lovely new blog, and I haven't been able to scrutinize it at all, yet. It's replaced Wonderblossom's, which I feel sad about, but at least I can access it in China, unlike any blog on Blogger, or for that matter, this one. Why? Because in China, monitors sneak through the system like those machines in the Matrix and shut down any wee pinholes in their electric iron curtain. I set up three different blog hosts in one day and after an hour or so, each one ceased to function. So being here in Thailand is a relief, that way, and when I go home, I've resigned myself to using the redoubtable Dave Barbour, cousin in law, to update furtive zipped files from another sort of Xanadu. I've made no attempt to learn Thai at all, I'm ashamed to say, except hello and thank you and very good (sawadi ka, kap kum ka, or something, and aroy ma! which apparently also can apply to women, hm). Instead I've frittered my days on beaches, reading, and in soft northern mountains, reading, until I rather feel that like that victim of dream-dust in the first Sandman collection (John Constantine's ex-girlfriend), I shall be stuck lounging on pillows forever, sifting through and mainlining irresistible, addictive Story. Oh well. Pai, where we are, is nice, a bit like Nelson moved to a jungle version of the Okanagan valley, with dry heat in the day, crickets in the night and birds in the mornings. It's easy to be here, in our little German resort, with neat clipped lawn, and perfect low palms, and a large pond with sedge at the edges and a fountain for circulation, and indoors, very nice sheets on the bed. Everywhere here, as in Chiang Mai, you can smell Buddhist incense, and hear the evensongs of monks, a sonorous chant, and the exalting minor scales of Islam. There's a sleek, mostly black, medium-sized dog called Linda who sleeps on our porch every night. So I feel really lucky to be here, reading, and working out plans of action with Mark, and feeling at peace after a long time of not. And very excitingly, I must add that my cousin Asheya and her housband Eric have had a baby, Elias. Picture on left!
MEMORANDUM OPINION OF JUDGE JONES	ID, OR: WHAT IS THERE TO FEAR BUT FEAR? December 22, 2005. Music to read by: Bob Geldof and the Vegetarians of Love, 'Great Song of Indifference' ~ That which is impossible and probable is better than that which is possible and improbable. (you know who) I just love how one man, formed by a generation of top-down pragmatic capitalism and one-way logic, can rule that an idea does not exist within certain arenas. The Pennsylvania case on introducing Intelligent Design as an alternative to Darwinian evolution becomes a national precedent on which to reject all other "non-science" alternatives to evolution. Not only rejecting it as teachable, Judge Jones rules it as unviable. "Intelligent Design is not science," he declares. Wow, so tell me, one man with one perspective and one set of experiences, as well as one definition for that discipline which is to investigate possibilities, not defend theories: tell me what science is (is it an artificially constructed set of parameters like law?), and truth, and what I might be legally permitted to consider within a classroom. Not only does he indicate that science is defined by his ruling as state-sanctioned possibilities (and ID as an "untestable alternative hypothesis" which is ever so much more ineffable than Punctuated Equilibrium) but on a basic Gobless America sort of level, he rules illegal the representation of the questions and inquiries of a large bit of the population of the United States. "To preserve the Establishment clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution ... we will enter an order permanently enjoining Defendants from maintaining the ID Policy in any school within the Dover Area School District, from requiring teachers to denigrate or disparage the scientific theory of evolution, and from requiring teachers to refer to a religious, alternative theory known as ID ... " We the People? What about We the Clever Utilitarians Bent On Granting the Proles a Rigid Arena of Reason, an Exclusive Definition of Science, and a Narrow Window from Which to Peer at the Inexplicable Universe? As one woman, and a marginalised ex-pat Canadian with no money, power, or proper respect for the legalities of speculation, formed by a spotty flirtation with many ideas and master of none, I can only say I wish I had been offered a real chance to think in high school. I wish the low-functioning science teachers I had had had the balls to take frog dissection and laser physics to another level, a higher level of thinking and reasoning, instead of asking (literally) "why do I want to know that?" Not all kids are stupid and incapable of reaching for meaning. Just brain-washed ones. With no alternatives. Quote from Judge Jones: "Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court." I can only ask why then he would write a 139 page memorandum on why ID is not science and why the "banal" people who promoted it negate its total usefulness within the arena of education. And why, in a world of limited access to infinite facts, he should claim empirical authority regarding origins. Is this objective cosmogony or suppression of human investigation? Yes, I mark this as a product. Not a precept, but a product. He'd like us to know, by this statement, that we have a reasonable binary: concur with his decision or mark his decision as an activist one, which, within the artificially defined arena of law, is a logical impossibility since the Court is, by (designated) definition, non-activist--leaving us to conclude that we are illogical to disagree with his ruling. Yet I have this sneaking feeling that he ignores the limitations of his own being, and therefore his interpretations of law. Religion is not, even though the board members of Dover Area District were, the only threat to freedom of mind. Let it and science and all limited paradigms be rather many "places to stand and look and act, vantage points from which to view the world" (Neil Gaiman). Quote from Michael Ruse, a philosopher of science at Florida State University, on the case: "We thought we had put a stake through the heart of creation science 25 years ago and it evolved and here we are again." Was that circa 1984 then? Some theories just won't go away, even when full of holes... A plaintiff after the trial. My bellyfeel? Big Brother says ID verges on crimethink; blackwhite speak is doublethink but legal. Somebody tell me what science is, before the Venetian Senate freezes my salary and the ruling ideological body of the day Inquisitions me. Whatever happened to possibility?
	SOMEBODY HELP ME December 21, 2005. Music to read by: Molly's Revenge, 'Brewer's Lament' Happy Solstice, and to the return of "Godes condelle, // glaedum gimme... aethelast tungla // ofer ythmere / estan lixan, // faeder fyrngeweorc / fraetwum blican, // torht tacen Godes," or in newer words, 'God's candle, glad gem, fairest star, over sea-waves in the east waxing, Father's forework, fretwork dazzling, God's lucent token.' Now a small request: can someone recommend a better news web page than the Yahoo blurbs, which today (and everyday) run along banal grooves such as "Kerry calls Bush spying defence 'lame'," "Wife of Joel Osteen asked to leave plane," and "Spears sues over 'goofy behaviour' sex tape report." Not one headline about other places in the world (except, eternally, Iraq , about which I learn " U.S. soldiers dig up weapons cache in Iraq ," and that Bush thinks the war is going well). I need not break down how silly all this is--imho Yahoo is an embarrassment to good web design as well as good news, though I am consummately unqualified to say so. So--BBC, CBC, The Onion?? Recommends welcome.
TRAVERSAL ANIMATION OF AN ORB WEB BEING BUILT	ANANSI BOYS December 20, 2005. Music to read by: Chemical Brothers, 'Where do I begin?' ~ “His lime sat, like a small green Buddha, on the countertop.” ~ Right. I want to have a word about Anansi Boys, which will be a bit hard since so much has been said already, and it's a Best Seller, and all that. I guess I can only add that there is less root-and-bone-felt rumble of thunder in it, as is sometimes usual in Gaiman's novels. Instead, there's more of an extremely strong--you might almost say pungent--sense of human perspective, id est (sic), the ridiculous, via the main character, Fat Charlie. And there is also a lime which gets passed around, a lime which I imagine to be one of those large, gently shining citrus oil bombs available only in the South Pacific or extremely expensive fusion restaurants. A really beautiful lime. I could be wrong. It could be quite an average lime. The thing I like best about the book is the way it's hung together. I expect that Neil Gaiman did a lot of work to get the structure of the book right; it's not a terribly long book, and, therefore, its overall narrative effect will be potent; also there is the whole concern about making a story about webs and weaving stories a well-woven one. 'It begins, as most things begin, with a song,' begins the book. We're in for a bookended oral tale, brackets within brackets, spirals within spirals, like Ovid's Metamorphoses, or Canterbury Tales, or A Thousand and One Nights. An anecdotal sort of read. Which, by the way, is the main trick of oral narrative: tellings embedded within tellings, connected by circular returns to the central matter, the better to remind the listeners of what's going on. It goes on, 'In the beginning, after all, were the words, and they came with a tune. That was how the world was made, how the void was divided, how the lands and the stars and the dreams and the little gods and the animals, how all of them came into the world.' The book throughout is punctuated by such earthy cosmogonical reflections, as well as spacious, colloquial trickster narratives, mostly bloody but funny, and Fat Charlie's epiphanies, dreams, visions. These are mythic and yet lucid, because Gaiman is, thankfully, very good at writing the mysteries. While Gaiman manages to maintain his encounters with the gods, the numinous is much more internalized or on the margins than in other books. The human element is more important. 'Stories are webs, interconnected strand to strand, and you follow each story to the centre, because the centre is the end. Each person is a strand of the story.' Chapter One is entitled, 'Chapter One - Which is Mostly About Names and Family Relationships.' Two, 'Chapter Two - Which is Mostly About Things that Happen After Funerals.' And so it continues, refulgently verbose, fantastical events unmistakeably lynch-pinned by the human: the plot of the novel is driven by vignettes shifting from character to character. And Fat Charlie is the centre of this tale, not the Singer. Knock-kneed, smelling of sweat during mortal moments, I suspect, and charmingly humble, he manages to bumble his way around the worlds his father left him heir to; and as all inept heirs do, he has his moments of humiliation and exaltation along the way--'Light thought Fat Charlie. He sang aloud, and all the lightning bugs, and the fireflies of that place, clustered around him, flickering off and on with their cold green luminescence.' I liked Fat Charlie enormously, because he is imperfect, decent, and sympathetic, and has the sort of thoughts that most of us might think in uncomfortable moments; I imagine that a good deal of empathy went into his materialisation. His sheer embarrassment over his father's splashy, unconventional and sometimes downright not-good behaviour is a nice example of Gaiman's light-but-heavy explorations of family and history: what lines from the past, however confused by time and the comings-to of grief, still form my possible world? What choices did my parents make which may or may not shape my chances and choices? What dark secrets have they withheld? The usual. The things we all need to ask. Charlie is forced to ask himself why he is so damn weird, and to follow the crooked trail of happenstance, history and the choices of fathers down to its psychedelic dregs. The cocktail of a result is magic--plus a few footnotes here and there, three or four self-enclosed stories, as well as two not-too-romantic romantic subplots, and indecently funny indirect discourse on the part of heroes, spindly mother-in-laws, love interests, crones, and leading psychos. The result is a good yarn. Spider webs come in many forms--cob webs, silk sheet tunnels, diving bells, and orb webs. See here for an animated illustration of how the garden spider builds an orb web. Spiralling outwards and then inwards, the spider works first a non-sticky spiral of silk, which it then follows back to the centre of the web, replacing it with sticky silk, the kind that traps other insects--seemingly innocuous and deadly grave at the same time. Kind of like this story, which varies surprisingly nimbly between a droll British tone and a mild Caribbean one, between the uncomfortable thoughts of a humble man and the odious reflections of a genial psychotic. It sucks you in, and you don't know it until voila, there's 'blood in the souffle,' and you're two thirds done the book. The rest is as easy a song. How's that for a scramble of metaphors? So the whacked, wicked narration veers from spoke of spiral to radial, moments of myth to bathos, in a series of feathery postmodern interpretations of slapstick comedy in the self-aware tradition of Wodehouse or, much more familiarly to me at least, the hallucinatory Loony Tunes. This web of a novel works a bit like the human mind itself--synaptic traversal of energy along a neural net or, more arcanely but just as coolly, along a spin network--all lightning (ah, there's a common visual trope, at least) and spark and boom, like a tropical storm. The souffle stands: replete with, well, a very humanized narratological existentialism whisked up with a very light and yet transcendent touch. Neil Gaiman, as usual, does some things differently in this book--tone, voice and structure, for example, as well as laugh-out-loud characterizations. He does a few things the same. He is, for instance, very good at writing proper, coherent finales, which are also just a bit scary, since gods are, even when they're being foolish. And the ending is juuussst riiight. 'The important thing about songs is that they're just like stories. They don't mean a damn unless there's people listenin' to them.' We're listening, Neil, as you well know. And our fedoras are all tipped your way.
	CHUSING MADNESS Decemeber 19, 2005. Music to read by: David Grey 'Say Hello, Wave Goodbye' I'm back. After a three month contract teaching kids how not to hit each other, I now have time again for writing. First order of business, is to state that Brenda, Brianna, Jess and Megan (in alphabetical order) are the loveliest friends, who have given me the best recovery from sub-zero temperatures and depressingly un-endowed classrooms possible: the new book by Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys. Thank you, friends. Also for the mix c.d.s and card, Brianna, the pictures from Madeleine, Brenda, and the writing all of you. I have duly kissed each thing and put it on my wall or my bookshelf or music player, and am savouring them very much indeed. I hope that each of you is getting, individually, into as much trouble as we got in together, but not too much, for, as they say, run as mad as you chuse, but do not faint.
	NATURA AND THANATOS November 5, 2005. Music to read by: Beatles, 'Across the Universe' Sitting in a taxi in front of DVD blackmarket, awaiting the emergence of better shoppers than I. Mark has, apparently, found a copy of 'The Naked Chef' Christmas special. Lucky him. But what I really want to talk about is the idea of Natura, the goddess Nature. Having dipped into CS Lewis' Discarded Image on the ching-way (train) to work, the chapter 'The Seminal Period' (yes, has ever there been a chapter of more loaded memes?), he writes that the early Greek philosophers conceived the term as a way to address 'the All' when discussing reality. That is, nature was a term constructed, and therefore artificially defined, to absolutely, regardless of perception, Encompass. This is pretty cool because of two things: they were talking about a limit without limit: omni-omni, you might say; and because there can be no meaningful way to apprehend this. That is, as Lewis points out, Nature was meaningless as All because the mind cannot encounter (name, perceive, or synthesize) everything--and so it becomes nothing. The inversion of All into a Vacuum is kinda like the anti-Platonic ideal. And the only access we have to conceptualising Everything (although I'm not sure it's good for us, a bit like eating candy made of high glucose corn syrup), is by the inexactitudes of limits themselves--on that threshold between name and thing, is our only sidereal, paper-thin glance at God.
CROWS' LANGUAGE E-TEXT VERSION OF THE BOOK OF THE DEAD ANOTHER VERSION INTERVIEW WITH HARUKI MURAKAMI ON WWII AND BEING ALONE LIVE CAM OF FIELD BY LOCH NESS	I WENT OUT WALKING October 3, 2005. Music to read by: U2 and Johnny Cash, 'The Wanderer' A small bit of China. A summary of exeriences so far. Today Mark and I went walking. We walked south and east along the coast where we live, through the tourist beach and beyond. It was a direfully windy day with a grey sky and flat ocean (go figure), and the air was sharp with chill and the smell of metal from welding and salt. The beach where we live is called Golden Pebble Beach , but it is, in actuality, a rusty red, like the colour of the sun shining through the smoke of forest fires or one of those seemingly immobile offshore fogs which haunt the air here in late summertime. It is the heartland of the Jinshitan Tourist Resort. Jinshitan Tourist Resort is at all times lit up by copious firework displays intended to scare away evil spirits; by the refulgent resound of shell explosions from military practice at the local high school; and by blooms of molten welding arcs in a hundred different empty hotels. Jinshitan Tourist Resort is lit up by little else. These hotels will stay empty for most the year, until the summer months, when the lucky ones are temporarily animated by hot-and-noisy crowds of tourists. There is a word for 'hot-and-noisy' in Chinese: 'renao,' and that means, essentially, 'having a damn good time.' In Jinshitan, this time comes but once a year, if at all. Tourism is China ’s purgatory: the nexus of all its past and future issues, and the crucible of its fantasies. The Jinshitan area in general, and Golden Pebble Beach in particular, is like the wetdream of a socially ambitious yet woefully undeveloped adolescent Kubla Kahn. In soil depleted and air corrosive, many buildings stand empty forever, half-completed and filled with nothing but stale air and the unusable detritus of shoddy construction. Wonderland-esque cement statues abound: a bulbously endowed woman in a bikini, green-skinned, welcomes tourists with a wave and a smiling volleyball-shaped head. Hansel and Gretel fade and rot into flaking paint as their internal rebar reinforcement crops up through their eroding skin. Quays and dancing floors collect guano, dead leaves, and abandoned plastic bags of every hue, weight, and function. An ironically Coleridgean, psychedelicised vision of Western bliss. In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn a stately pleasure dome decree…with giant cement statues and blue-yellow streams of water running down to a salty sea. Main attractions in the Jinshitan Tourist Resort include a half-built cement castle theme park replete with crenulated walls and a yellow roller coaster which looks uncannily like those metal-and-bead contraptions children play with in dentists’ offices; numerous abandoned hotels; herds and harrases of small, muscular horses done up in pseudo-Mongolian red and yellow tassels and bells for riding; rotting tiki huts and umbrellas for shelter from the sun and foci for karaoke; and a number of kilometres of ‘seafood’ restaurants, some large, some small, all, without exception, piping overlapping, out-of-doors, come-hither Kenny G covers of Peter, Paul and Mary ballads: except when they're playing overlapping, out-of-doors, come-hither covers of the Titanic movie theme song. Obviously, then, the real sights are the people. When you say 'neehao' ('hello'), to the locals as you walks by, they look at you stunned for a moment, then break into grins and shout 'neehao!' in loud accord. It is the same when they zoom by in three-wheeled popcorn-maker-like trucks and trikes, people spilling in multitudes off the conveyance, laughing backwards at you, 'neehaos' Dopplerising derisively. Most locals, though, are very proud of knowing the English 'hello,' which they manage always to frame as a shy question—'hell-oh?' or, if money is involved, a demanding statement—'hel-LO!' 'Come here! Check out my taxi/souvenirs/beverages/candied squid on a stick. I know you want to!' Everyone here works very hard. Here, fishing is huge, the aquaculture consisting in hundreds of small wooden rowboats equipped with removable outboard motors which are carted home every night balanced on the backs of motorbikes; consisting in dark-tanned fishers going down to harbour at approximately three-thirty in the morning; consisting in ad hoc piles of rotting seafood for sale in various locales; and consisting, delightfully, in numerous glass floats stacked everywhere; in cobwebby nets in need of constant tatting; and in more magpies floating about than could possibly fit into one rhyme. Besides the fishermen there are the women, who wear bright pink or yellow or red or blue or floral headscarves tied under their chins, and either drive small gassy trikes for hire, or wield large, branchy brooms which look like the sort of cleaning implement favoured by the old woman in her basket, sweeping cobwebs from the sky, but they ride about on bikes sweeping the gutters. These women also wear variously coloured gumboots, and are very tan. Accompanying them are deeply tanned men in dark suits and black chequered fedoras, who handle Business. They’re rather dashing and know it, and they wave, shout and wink at us as they tinkle by behind their stubby, cloppy, impatient horses; or cherish cheap, large green bottle of 2.5% beer out on their take-a-tour boats; or drive around on their motor bikes with an interminable ciggy hanging from their teeth. There are also a prolific number of bicycles. The oldest, rustiest ones are ridden by fishermen, and they come and go announced by the loud squeak-squeak of never-been-nor-to-be-oiled chain which sound something like Edward Scissorhands fretting; or they are ridden, much too large, by children who can’t reach the ground while sitting on the seat, or, conversely, can’t sit on the seat while pedalling. Just such a bevy of children and bikes flew and rattle by us today; two of the boys were barefoot on one foot each, having shared between them a pair of canvas shoes. Finally we walk far enough to emerge from the sun-and-wind-bleached tourist hell of crowded, staring buses and sleek black Audis full of white wedding-dress-clad National Day brides clutching tropical bouquets, and follow a narrow cement and clay ‘road’ along the coast, through a real village which is perched between the sea cliffs and foothills. In such villages, free of Kenny G and oh so fun giant ants and crabs and bulls and witches made of that pale, crumbling cement, things are kept a bit more real. For one thing, there is a wonderful smell of wood smoke—not the rotty stench of burning garbage, but clean smoke from chimneys over which tea is made. Normal people's houses are usual tile-topped or flat roofed, with tonnes of ragweed and sunflowers growing around them, and lobster traps hanging around, and quite a bit of carefully stacked junk. There are lush garden-fields full of squash vines, glossy cows, dirty white goats, and twining, bright blue morning glories. There are fields full of corn stocks—dried stalks stacked in pyramids, tassels nodding in the wind. Magpies fly over the cut fields in huge numbers, their black and white wings and long tails making ying and yang patterns against the grey sky and red earth and green trees. There are stunted groves of oak and some sort of bay tree growing against the foothills, with red Virginia creeper vines hanging from them. Ancestral grave memorials gleam white between groves of pine, waiting for Ching Ming to be revivified by incense ash and daffodils and prayer. And along the roadsides grow purple autumn asters, and yellow ones, and clouds of gone-to-seed weeds. Walking through the village, many people laugh at us for taking pictures—of a small kitten in amongst wilting, wind-bitten purple mums (half its tail is lost, but it’s silky and plump, amazingly); of white gumboots kicked off in front of a white cement house with green wooden door and windows and a graceful red script written on the wall; of a corn-husk-piled cart pulled by two glossy mules; of a small girl running barefoot across rooftops while her father stacks yellow corncobs to dry on one roof, and rakes the husks into bales on another. A small child and a mother wave at us from a window and a young man on a motorbike gives us the thumbs up when we laugh at the amount of beer strapped onto the back. Plumy chickens squawk at us and dogs shrug. We followed the road to its end: a lonely, abandoned drydock and fish plant on the top of some cliffs, all rust and shell debris and quietude. The tide is high and sluggish; the wind moves light and dry in its convection currents; the omnipresent magpies hover in it overhead. There is the silence of whispering weeds. We turn back, and go home. I’m sort of glad we didn’t go any further, towards the cities of Kaifaqu and then Dalian, because I like the idea that, if we twist and turn enough, and follow dirt paths up into the hills and down through small gullies, and along green fields of lettuce and dry fields of corn, we might avoid any further encounter with cooling stacks and buses and Kenny G and the nightmare capitalism. Yet that’s quite unfair, I’m sure. I am in China ...am I ever...but big deal: so are 1,306,313,812 other people (according to the CIA factbook, anyways). Eventually I’m going to have to wake up to that. Won’t we all. So Tolkien wrote: The Road goes ever on and on Down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, And I must follow, if I can, Pursuing it with eager feet, Until it joins some larger way Where many paths and errands meet. And whither then? I cannot say. Which—despite the seeming irrelevancy of a mid-previous-century fantastical writer who used Indo-European paradigms turgid with romantic adverbs such as hither and hence, thither and thence, whither and whence to the Sino-Tibetan paradigm ('hel-loh?'), and despite the fact that most of the other 1,306,313,812 people here probably haven’t heard of Tolkien, and despite the fact that I, and the little club-tailed cat, and the two boys with complementarily bare/shod feet, and an entire tiding of magpies, are only one small bit of an entirely lost, ephemeral and unique China—is quite true.
	TO BE AN EXPAT October 2 , 2005. Music to read by: Thievery Corporation, 'Shadows of Ourselves' Yesterday and today Mark and I have taken taking it easy to new levels--large green bottles of cheap local Keller beer, at 2.5%, and cheap DVDs=hours and hours of 'Lost' and 'Six Feet Under' in the comfort of our living room, aka, Plato's Cave, in which shadows of the real world dance across our walls. Taxis' horns, the rumble of one-cylinder, three-wheeled trucks (which always, for these traits, remind my id of war amputees in spite of my politically correct superego). The creep or glow of of sun emerging from mist, sharp yellow on cold days and cherry red through the mist on warm ones. The dentist-light quality streetlight at night, or the blue glimmer of that little reading light from Iain on one of his MEC trips. (It's very useful for not running flat into doors at night, and quick fix reads when the brain wakes itself up with too much thinking.) If all this sounds pathetic it's only because no one realises cheap DVDs and long black pleather couches (black and pleather like Trinity's superhero pantsuit) are the epitome of expatry. As Plato says, "The eye intercepts the light of the t.v. to see the good forms of Tintin and Billy and Claire and Miyazaki's dead children dancing in clouds of fireflies."
	GIANT KITSCH, KUMQUANTS, FLOWER COINS September 2 , 2005. Music to read by: Beatles, 'The Long and Winding Road' In China. What can I say? It's clean here in Jinshitan compared to most places; the beer is about 2.5% and when one says 'Neehao,' to the locals as one walks by, they look at one stunned for a moment, then break into grins and shout 'neehao!' in loud accord as they zoom by in three-wheeled popcorn-makers/trucks/trikes. Here fishing is huge, aquaculture consisting in hundreds of small wooden rowboats equipped with removable outboard motors which are carted home every night balanced on the backs of motorbikes; consisting in dark-tanned fishers going down to harbour at approximately three-thirty in the morning; consisting in ad hoc piles of rotting seafood for sale in various locales; and consisting, delightfully, in numerous glass floats stacked everywhere, and cobwebby nets in need of constant tatting, and in more magpies floating about than could possibly fit into one rhyme. Here's a picture Mark took of the fishing boats being hauled in by a tug at the end of the day: Walking away from the stucco-clad dream-hotels lining the beach, there are lush garden-fields full of corn, squash vines, glossy cows, and twining bright blue morning glories. Normal people's houses are usual tile-topped or flat roofed, with tonnes of sunflowers growing around them, and lobster traps hanging around, and quite a bit of garbage, but the garbage is tucked neatly off into ditches, where it is burnt. Most women wear very bright, huge head-kerchiefs tied under their chins, and gumboots. Most men drive around on their motor bikes or bicycles with a just-lit ciggy hanging from their teeth. Every one works very hard, I think. Dalian, the big city about forty minutes away, is, as far as I can tell so far, a cement festival of giant kitsch--soccer balls, women, rocket ships, birds, 'castles,' sea molluscs...sky's the limit. Haven't explored it much yet. Most of the coins here have flowers on them which look like but probably are not nasturtiums, peonies, lilies and asters, or Mao, or both. And kumquats are in season. As well as giant watermelons. So I sit in my apartment listening to classic Beatles stuff, 'Let it be' and 'Across the universe' (reminding me of Dave Campbell's karaoke night!), 'Here comes the sun.' Last night the week's humid yellow mist gave way to white mare's tails against blue sky and a proper high wind. So I walked around in the dusk feeling convalescent from my first Chinese cold and listened to the crickets and told myself this is home for a while. And for the first time in ten days I almost believed myself. The wind continues to blow, from the north-east, bringing a faint sheen of yellow Gobi sand, and I believe myself a little more.
	HOW SWEET IS YOUR RUBARB? July 23, 2005. Music to read by: Barenaked Ladies, 'Lovers in a dangerous time' (it can't be helped) SPOILERS! Read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and didn't quite cry, but wrote long thoughtful entry in my hardcopy journal afterwards about bravery and all that, very indulgent. I thought the book was great...and I guessed right about who the Half-Blood Prince is! My next theory: the scar is a horcrux. The Guardian had an in-the-style-of writing contest for the moment of Dumbledore's death. I liked: CHAUCER: THE POPPYNGE OF THE CLOGGES HELEN FIELDING: HERMIONE GRANGER'S DIARY HP LOVECRAFT LEMONY SNICKET ENID BLYTON (really funny) In Portland again, and the dry city wind smells of small diesel and patchouli and water and trees, and tomato vines and dust. It wavers in heat or in haze, depending on the time of year. Cottonwood trees, green-under-water maples, roses wide and heavy-sweet, rolling decorative cherries a-sticking the sidewalk, and the bridges full of liquid mercury traffic. I think I shall get the rest of the Sandman series for that little plane ride to the other side of the Pacific. Well, every person needs a few vade mecums...or a lot. My own attempts...email me, dear reader(s), if you have something I could post! Jane Austen--'Ginny and Hermione elected to take their tea with a view over the pond. They deliberated for the better part of the afternoon over connexions of the heart which a fine sensibility might discern within their circle of acquaintance. They thought they should certainly chuse, if given the chance, the two universally acknowledged finest young bachelors of the year'. Charles Dickens--'It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. Harry was happier than ever. Harry was sadder than ever. The world was going to pieces. The world was become all new. Wizardry was certainly the finest ever in history. Wizardry was all but dead'. Hardy Boys--'Ron and Fred wrestled goodnaturedly in the kitchen until Mrs. Weasley scolded them and sent them out of doors with a cookie [yes, cookie] in each hand. "Well, bro" said Fred, "what do say we call the gang and have a shin-dig tonight?" Ron grinned and feinted to the left, grabbing for one of Fred's cookies. "I'm in. We oughta give Neville a call, he's a real regular guy."' Enid Blyton--'Ginny, Harry, Hermione and Ron packed a large picnic basket with a toothsome array of ripe tomatoes, cold tongue and cress sandwiches, a bottle each of ginger beer, and some chocolate. They set out early for a long day's tramp through the woods. It was lovely and sunny out, and the girls skipped ahead while the boys trudged along with the packs. "Oh, I say," said Ginny. "It's noon now, what about a spot of lunch?" "Rather," said Ron. Hermione unpacked the basket and spread out the feast. "Oh bother," said Harry. "We've forgotten the tea." Triumphantly Ginny produced a flask from his rucksack. "No, silly, why do you think your pack was so heavy?" Harry grinned at her and they quickly dove into the food, making plans to look for a small cave the twins had mentioned the year before.' And of course Tolkien--'Harry and Ginny waited on the shore of the wide lake in the twilight, watching the sun sink down to the west behind looming dark hills. A silver light glimmered over all, and a light wind brushed their faces, bringing the scent of a dark line of fir down low to the water. Stars gleamed in the gloom overhead. The susurrus of wind through the marsh grasses seemed nearly to speak. The watches through the night would be long.' And so on.
NEIL GAIMAN's INTERVIEW OF GORILLAZ INTERVIEW OF CHINA MIEVILLE BY BELIEVER	oh, and... July 5, 2005. Music to read by: Gorillaz, 'November has come' Any one who might wish to watch a good movie this coming Haligmonath, aka Haerfastmonath, aka September (or in Winterfall or even Bloodmonth), should hit this link for a Windows or Quicktime preview of Mirrormask, that a strong interest might be indicated: "Spread the word. Spread the link. (If lots of people watch the trailer then Sony Pictures will know that lots of people want to see it.)" says Neil Gaiman. Check out FORGOTTEN NEW YORK for exhaustive photo tours of derelict and lost streets and customs. Pretty cool series on walking the Brooklyn-Queens borderline. Here's a pic of Dead Man's Curve: The subways section is also pretty cool, especially here. I wanted to read on this, and say the words to myself, so: Days of the week from Roman and Germanic gods: Sunday, Moonday, Tiu'sday, Woden'sday, Donar'sday (Thor'sday), Freya'sday, and Saturn'sday. In Old English, Sunnandæg, Monandæg, Tiwesdæg, Wodnesdæg, Þunresdæg, Frigedæg, Sæterndæg. In Latin, Solis, Lunae, Martis, Tiu, Mercurii, Jovis, Donar, Veneris, Saturni. Interesting that they're in the genitive, but without -day. Months in Old English: The Old English calendar had twelve months and the year started with the winter solstice. This festival was known as Geola from which we get the modern word Yule. The summer solstice was known as Liþa whose meaning is unclear. Æfterra Geola, After Yule Solmonað, Sunmonth or Miremonth (makes more sense to be mire, I’d say) Hreþmonað: named after the divinity Hrepe (‘glory goddess’) Eastermonað: named after the divinity Eostre Ðrimilcemonað, Thricemilkmonth: cow milking month; cows were milked three times daily at this time of year Ærra Liþa, Before Liþa (from ‘lithian,’ to travel) Æfterra Liþa, After Liþa Weodmonað, Weedmonth or Mildmonth: this could be a reference to the growth of vegetation Haligmonað, Holymonth: probably a reference to harvest Winterfylleð, Winterfall: the first full moon of winter Blotmonað, Bloodmonth: sacrifice month, when animals who could not survive the winter would be slaughtered Ærra Geola, Before Yule
PORTLAND BRIDGES	BRIDGES AND WINGS July 5, 2005. Music to read by: Mum and Bjork, 'All is full of love' Portland is, as Douglas Coupland wrote, a city of bridges the colours of clouds. I’ve managed to find three of the ten Sandman graphic novels used, for $12.95, no tax as opposed to $32.95 plus 14%, as well as Charles Vess’ illustrated Stardust and Yoshitaka Amano’s illustrated Dream Hunters: I love Powells and crave it. And I've also managed to spend some much-needed time with my parents, sis and her husband before flying across the Pacific, to China. Last night we watched the July 4th fireworks all across the city from a high hill in the Forest Park. In the hazy ten o’clock air, we could see hundreds of multi-coloured fires blooming across the larger metropolis, sudden clouds and arcs of red, or blinding corkscrew sparkles, or green-to-periwinkle blue, a swampfire garden. The booms of massive and screeches of little fireworks traveled across the city to us and broke slowly on our hill, and the air was full of sulphur, and of little bats and medium sized bats mollocking and tippling over our heads. I once had a really vivid dream in which I was running through a pitch-dark jungle of trees made of multi-coloured, beaded fire, the bark translucent, the fibres and branches and sap moving and glowing brightly red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet. This was like that. Walking back we could see the stars, low and milk-bright. Movies. Saw Spirited Away by Hayao Miyazaki, the same creator as Princess Mononoke. It was bizarre and delightful: spirits of radishes and rivers and everything else come to be refreshed at an expensive bathhouse disguised as an abandoned amusement park. A bit of Pinocchio, a bit of Wonderland, a bit of Mombie or Baba Yaga, and a bit of Shintoism makes this movie a great trippy trip. The only thing I couldn’t stand was the whiny little girl protagonist shrieking and eeking. Why can’t more little girl protagonists have uniquely calm, dignified voices? But that got better as the movie went on. My absolutely favourite part of all is Kamajii, the furnace man, welder-like, bald and mop-moustached, many-legged, gruff, and drinking tea directly from the kettle. The fluid dragon character is beautiful too. Saw Batman Begins at a comfortable old theatre with garishly coloured plaster medallions on the ceiling, and squeaky, rocking seats, and dirty velvet curtains, tended by two silent, pointy-chinned, blond boys who were certainly either unseelie or Lost. One of them had a fluffy, ash-silver goatee. The other sat with his thin legs curled up under him, behind the snack bar. I liked the movie better than any of the others except Tim Burton’s, which, I have to admit, was not exactly canonical. The fighting was pretty good, the story never bored me, and while themes of justice, fear and insanity were a little heavy handed, they were structurally sound, even a little bit scary, sometimes. The Scarecrow was pretty cool: a neat explanation of his abilities as a gunny-sacked, fly-buzzing Beelzebub apparition, and a (predictably) short reign of terror with a horseman of the apocalypse on a fire-breathing horse in mad Gotham, an effective melding of Chicago and New York. And Winged Migration. I have never seen anything like it. Watched birds fly as if I was suspended beside them, their wings perfect, waxy-feathered arches designed to fold like scissors for diving, or scoop high the Atlantic storms. African pelicans on the sand-dune beach, their gullets flapping in the wind. Strangely black and white be-feathered birds marching about in paired unison, their long necks pointing straight to the sky, then down to the ground, a complex dance. Penguins hopping through the water like a flock of dolphins, moving myriad and clownish and fast. Clouds of birds moving in white lines across the world so high the curvature of earth fills the screen. Birds preying on one another, or caught in cages. Two emperor penguins reaching their faces to the sky, crying in mourning for their hatchling eaten by an albatross. The music was lovely and strange too.
MUM MUM VIDEO ONLINE METAPHROG, MUM AND HEY: DREAMS NEVER DIE SAMPLE IMAGE FROM DREAMS NEVER DIE	THE INEXORABLE FANTASTICAL FICTION READING LIST July 5, 2005. Music to read by: Mum, 'The land between solar systems' I made a list for my friend Brianna so I thought I'd post it. Lord of the Rings; Tales From A Perilous Realm, JRR Tolkien Perdido Street Station; The Scar, China Mieville A Man Called Thursday; Club of Queer Trades, GK Chesterton The Chronicles of Narnia; The Space Trilogy; Till We Have Faces, CS Lewis Ombria in Shadow; The Tower at Stony Wood, Patricia McKillip The Last Light of the Sun; The Fionaver Tapestry, Guy Gavriel Kay Harry Potter 1-6, JK Rowling “On Faerie Stories,” essay by JRR Tolkien Beowulf, Michael Alexander’s translation Sir Orfeo, JRR Tolkien’s translation Paradise Lost, John Milton Comedia, Dante Alighieri Rose Daughter; Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast, Robin McKinley The Elder Edda, Caroline Larrington’s translation The Watchmen, Alan Moore The Sandman series; American Gods; The Comical Tragedy or Tragical Comedy of Mr. Punch; Stardust, Neil Gaiman Moby Dick, Herman Melville Windup Bird Chronicles; Sputnik Sweetheart, Haruki Murakami Strange Pilgrims: Twelve Stories, Gabriel Garcia Marquez Earthsea quadrology, Ursula Le Guin Wrinkle in Time quadrology; A Severed Wasp, Madeleine L’Engle The King of Elfland’s Daughter, Lord Dunsany Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame Dune (only the first one), Frank Herbert Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Jules Verne The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury Chocolat; Blackberry Wine, Joanne Harrison Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke The Dark Tower series, Stephen King Lilith, George MacDonald Moonwise, Greer Gilman The Oz books, L Frank Baum The Bacchae, Euripides A Song of Ice and Fire series, George RR Martin Kabuki series, David Mack Possession; Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, AS Byatt Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl The Moomintroll series, Tove Jansson Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe The Time Machine, HG Wells
CHINA MIEVILLE HOMEPAGE	PALIMPSESTIAL LIGHTS. June 14, 2005. Still living on my internetless island, with a quick visit to the dazzling city Ganges. The library has wireless. Music to read by: Arcade Fire, 'Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)' Read China Mieville's books Perdido Street Station and The Scar. I kept expecting the main characters to die and I wonder why his extensively described world is not penalised while Tolkien's is, but the books are fabulous, admirably bizarre, story. 'Metamorphosis' does half the job describing the forces ratiocentrified in his novel: rampant, florid, punctuated evolution like half-melted candle wax is better. Mieville seems like the kind of guy who would listen to Rage Against the Machine when feeling mellow, introspective, retrospective, who has no tattoos because that would be ascribing to a one trope, who never puts milk in his tea. He uses words like ontological, thaumaturgical, daedal, palimpsest, etiolated and puissant with easy regularity. One of my favourite phrase in the book is, "I fucking despair, Derkhan!" He is a poet. He writes long italicised descriptions of natural phenomena and landscapes with an Old Testament fear and grace to which only Annie Dillard, in my experience, comes close, but better, infused with thaumaturgons--enchanted particles--and paranoia, with Hensen-like analogue machines and Poe-ish psychos and Mervyn Peake-y monsters. Sample: "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. Sample: "At the edges of the world the salt water is cold enough to burn. Huge slabs of frozen sea mimic the land, and break and crash and reform, crisscrossed with tunnels, the homes of frost-crabs, philosophers with shells of living ice. In the southern shallows there are forests of pipe-worms and kelp and predatory corals. Sunfish move with idiot grace. Trilobites make nests in bones and dissolving iron." From The Scar. It's truly irritating (I wanted to write that) and wonderful how he uses string theory for marvelous visions, and how the 'dancing mad god' (a giant transdimensional spider with two human hands and a subconscious poetic aesthetic for brains) makes the web thrum. I wonder about the story-weaving aspect of Anansi Boys and if it will relate. I wonder how many other authors believe, a little bit or a lot or somewhere in between, in string theory as a--puissant--metaphor/metonymy. Mieville somehow manages to be very English with his chorus of and-built clauses, and yet also vaguely Middle Eastern, with his fervent multi-sensory barrage. His post-modern architecture is everywhere, in the Perdido Street Station and the sea-faring city Armada, and exotic surprises come up at perfect moments. Beaches made entirely of rusted, ancient machineries, the sand made of cogs and springs and their deconstructed, rotting, microbits. Boats filled with earth and planted with luxuriating ivy, and date-palms, and honeysuckle, and pansies. Side street of cobble, with cob-webby age-runnelled glass windows admitting strange slants of light, and dust, and furtive sparrows. Badgers named Sincerity, and energies named torque and possibility-mines and crisis-engines, a communicatrix clairvoyant, with wind-up head-gear to amplify brain-waves. It goes on. The really amazing thing is how Mieville manages to make a story, and a very gripping one, of all these blood-offerings and poesies. Music to read by: Arcade Fire, 'Une annee sans lumiere' Last night we walked up towards the lake to go rowing. The walk diverged onto a new route, the kind which takes several hours, and involves exploration stretching into the dusk, and requires a steep climb up a cliff covered in shale and deep sphagnum moss. The best kind of diversion, which almost gets one into trouble for going too far, too late, for turning one more corner around one more path. We found a lee of green banks, under steep cliffs, the largest a grassy glen by the water, thick with clumps of fern and hung over by white elm trees. The deer had systematically snipped the fiddleheads off many of the ferns. There was a small uncovering of an old shell midden between the bank and the narrow shore. Trees hang over the water, arbutus, pine, elm, all small and delicately green. Finally, in the 9:30 dusk, we went rowing on the pond. A sliver moon to the south-west, and jagging silhouette of tall, never-cut pine trees bowling the lake. Cow-lilies cabbagy and reeds whishy. Best of all, bats. Lots and lots of bats, chirruping and swooping over the water and through the trees, around our rowboat, over our heads, totally random-yet-choreographed hyperboles and ellipses. Invisible frogs stertorous and symphonic sang in waves around the edges of the pond, and all was hypnotic, ourselves alien but at centre, until it felt like an aural-visual massage, the bats flying and turning and flittering and filliping to frog music, and the energy of it like sitting in a solar wind, feeling both the overall roar of its edges, and the microscopic ping of each particle on one's skin. Music to read by: Arcade Fire 'Rebellion (Lies)' Re-read Generation X by Douglas Coupland last night. It is still every bit the manifesto for me that Marx's must've been for the Bolsheviks, and the marginal vocabulary still makes me laugh--McJob: 'a low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one.' Or Terminal Wanderlust: 'A condition common to people of transient middle-class upbringings. Unable to feel rooted in any one environment, they move continually in the hopes of community in the next location.' Or Black Holes: 'An X generation subgroup best known for their possession of almost entirely black wardrobes.' Or 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.' Coupland still has the pathos and pathetical situation of X genners pegged. Now more than ever there is little affordable housing, and no hope (in Canada anyways) of contributing less than 50% of one's income to taxes, and although the job market will open up, we'll be paying CPP and pension support one way or the other for a career-long length of time. He also gets straight to the heart of victimhood, cynicism, inertia and 'Knee-jerk irony' which characterizes--dare I say--us. And his ending is still, about ten years later, the most consummately satisfying yet post-modern ending I've read. (The worst post-modern ending I've ever seen attempted was the conclusion to that depressed and spurious movie 'Dr. T and His Women'). And although I was born in the late seventies, not the late fifties-early sixties as the publisher's flap delineates, the book is still a salient, cautionary, biting shot in the dark, much as Catcher in the Rye was for some (for me, it was an interesting spectacle only, nothing more than an inversion of the Frank and Joe Hardy culture I'd read in as a kid). But actually, it's more Franny and Zooey--a vastly superior crisis novel and Salinger's best, I think. It certainly kicks the horseshit out of Boom, Bust and Echo. I wonder who will write the novel for the next installation of generational angst and anomie.
	A LITTLE CABIN BY a pea-green SEA. June 6, 2005. Music to read by: Arcade Fire, 'Wake Up' We are on the island (nested islands, actually, since it's off Vancouver Island, islands within islands). Yesterday we went walking where there was no path. We climbed a ridge and found a green, tussocky path of moss, quite distinct, leading along the spine of the hill, one side a cliff down the ocean, the other a tapestry of yellow-leaved arbutus and sticky fir. The path is too bumpy to have been made by humans, to distinct to have been naturally formed, perhaps. My only, and scientific postulation is, therefore, that it was made by some relatives of the Sidh, who like green, hillocky mounds and paths, I hear. My theory is that such beings exist everywhere, though best known in Europe, where they have been captured, a bit, with paper and words and ink. They don't really like it, and generally resent the Euro-centric conception of fey which has grown out of those early maniacal Victorian collectors. And what they think of Mallory and Spenser I shouldn't like to think. So I wrote a bit of something about this, here: Apple orchards in the new world You dream of apple orchards glistening with a little stardust, glowing, ruddy, colonnades of wide-branching warmth beyond Channel’s chill mists, the warmth of the summer country, long lost then emerging from fog, wan and grey to green, then gold, while strange things tumble within the breakers: they watch and we cross. But I say the magic is here, too, in the New World , wider, longer than ever the Old. Old is here too—I know, for I have blown glass-clear a thousand times from salt-spray, from milk-stars. Wild solitude goes well with oak, lupin, crash of surf, bite of last autumn’s apples rising from hills. I have never forgotten my freedom; the taste of magic is strong in my mouth, like a word of power made light in the lucent sphere. The same stars evanesce above the watching wind, same sun reaches through air, wrapping the record of weather into redwood, arbutus, eucalyptus, pine; reminding the world’s reader of other slants of falling light and mist, worlds held in hidden gardens, elsewhere of everywhere. We send your dreams westward, yes, ever west. Which is, I hope, not so much longaevi cultural appropriation as a mummery of available imagining, a small misdirection such as they might themselves prefer.
SOUSAPHONE THE PARTICLE TAROT	THE 'SATIABLE CURIOSITY OF LUCY June 1, 2005. Music to read by: Eels, 'Beloved Monster' Today I bought the last copy of the on-sale Wolves in the Walls at Chapters, which was a very good thing since I’m moving to that ferry-less (but not faery-less) Gulf Island at the end of the week and really wanted it now. So for $5.99 plus tax (apparently Neil Gaiman STILL PROFITS FROM THIS though I wonder if he’s also being gracious) I proudly possess a book I shall read to my as yet stochastic children as well as students of all ages. I’ll make my stochastic Latin students translate it into Latin, and I suspect it might even mostly work for Old English (Thas Wulfas Weallum?). I started and finished it on a bus ride home. I thought about reading it to the old lady sitting beside me but I didn’t really want to share first time round. I think this is one of Dave McKean’s more readily intelligible collage sequences—not that complex is bad, but sometimes it’s just nice to read something in which a jammy mouth is just a jammy mouth. The art alternates between a sort of pseudo-photographic pre-Raphaelite warmth, and distinctly rampaging, frenetic line drawings lit up by spotlights of primary green or yellow or red. In the reverse of the reality/unreality technique used in their Punch and Judy collaboration, McKean uses the line drawings for the wolves and the photographic pieces for the family. The wolves look a bit like Wile E. Coyote, for whom I’ve always had a soft spot. My very favourite image is of the family standing at the foot of the garden below their house at night; the house windows glow green, and a lollopy-tongued wolf stands in silhouette, howling at vaporous white night clouds which move in strange, smoky spirals. The clouds are a bit like Van Gogh's Starry Night or incense smoke gone stratospheric. The writing is the very best sort of English children’s writing. It has sentient animals, it entertains slightly macabre suspicions, it has that ‘UNDERSTATEY THING’ happening, and it is tremendously well-paced. It is wry and witty and slapsticky in a good mixture. The protagonist Lucy is charming, and like Lucy from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, she is clear-sighted, and she is not believed. (There’s maybe even a bit of intertext with the idea of magical interiors…although that may be pushing my current fascination with dreaming houses and unreal rooms.) Neil Gaiman always seems to know when to include wonderful silliness: ‘Some of the wolves had put on the family’s nicest clothes, and they had made big holes in the back of them, for their tails,' and when to just say, THE WOLVES CAME OUT OF THE WALLS! One of the things Neil Gaiman does best in this book, I think, is repetition. The Arctic circle with nothing but polar bears and seals for hundreds of miles, Sahara desert with nothing but camels and desert foxes for thousands of miles, outer space with nothing but FOOZLES and squossucks for billions of miles--his style is outlandish enough to please kids, but it's also clever, and must make kids feel clever, too (if I'm anything to go by). I also particularly like his use of present participles, '-ing' words—they create immediacy, chaotic instability, and a pleasing rhymish quality. The book is meant to be read aloud, I suspect, and someday when my Visa is less debilitated, I think I’ll get it from iTunes. You can listen to a clip on iTunes of Neil Gaiman reading an excerpt which includes words like ‘clawing and gnawing, nibbling and squabbling,’ and ‘poppet.’ You can also see a sample inside the cover at AMAZON. McKean’s visual wit moves chiasmic (and chimeric) with Gaiman’s, and I laughed loudly at the very last page (which I won’t spoil here) so that the old lady beside me on the bus gave me a pitying sort of look that said, 'Already going senile, poor dear.' Perhaps it made both our days. I’ve always wanted to know what a sousaphone is, and now I do. I’ve also always wanted to convince someone that jam yesterday and jam tomorrow is never as good as jam today, and I think the wolves—ousted like the weasels from Toad Hall—would probably agree. *** Also, check out the PARTICLE TAROT link for an ensorceling of the Tarot by Dave McKean. It is brilliant. I particularly like the moon, devil, time, female pope and death, and I thought the magician was disturbingly insightful.
	ME LOVERLY SISTER AND HER HUSBAND May 31, 2005. Music to read by: Nick Drake, 'Pink Moon' (their aisle song) My lovely sister Rebecca and her awesome husband Dustin, May 27, just married. Calls for the best sort of epithalamious sentiment, blackberry wine, and such.
THAT SUMMONER GEEKS VIDEO 'STORIES WE SEE TOO OFTEN'	WHERE'S THE MOUNTAIN DEW? May 24, 2005. Music to read by: the entire Lord of the Rings Soundtrack, extended version, on shuffle and repeat This is just an indulgent little post to remind person(s) of that irritating yet therefore wonderful short film, 'Summoner Geeks.' Watch it (again). Love it. Quote it in theatres just as the room goes silent in the aftermath of some titillating preview to "House of Wax," or dazzling rhetoric on Why It Is Wrong To Steal From Hollywood (although who would want to steal Mirrormask from Dave McKean and Neil Gaiman? That'd just be rude.). Also to proffer the world a link to a great list of Stories We See Too Often, put together by the editors of Strange Horizons.com. It encompasses all my least favourite ploys. It is replete and witty. E.G.: Weird things happen, but it turns out they're not real. Subheading: In the end, it turns out it was all a dream. Subheading: In the end, it turns out it was all in virtual reality. Subheading: In the end, it turns out the protagonist is insane. Subheading: In the end, it turns out the protagonist is writing a novel and the events we've seen are part of the novel. E.G.: The future is soulless. Subheading: In the future, all learning is electronic, until kid is exposed to ancient wisdom in the form of a book. Subheading: In the future, everything is electronic, until kid is exposed to ancient wisdom in the form of a wise old person who's lived a non-electronic life. E.G.: A party of D&D characters (usually including a fighter, a magic-user, and a thief, one of whom is an elf and one a dwarf) enters a dungeon (or the wilderness, or a town, or a tavern) and fights monsters (usually including orcs). Sub-heading: A group of real-world humans who like roleplaying find themselves transported to D&D world. Et cetera (ad hilarium). Violet Miranda: Girl Pirate, a black and white Eisner-cum-Art Nouveau online graphic novel is also really cool, though not yet complete. And from Neil Gaiman's website, a link to Post a secret. Read homemade postcards with anonymous confessions on them, like "Everyone who knew me before 9/11 thinks I'm dead."
THE GRANDILOQUENT DICTIONARY SEATTLE TIMES: UNEARTHING TSE-WHIT-ZEN	OF GYROMANCY AND GRAPTOMANCY May 23, 2005. Music to read by: Tori Amos, 'Wednesday' First, check out UNEARTHING TSE-WHIT-ZEN at the Seattle Times website. There is an amazing documentary on a huge native site on the Olympic Peninsula; see especially the voice-over slide show. Am presently in the midst of packing our life, all by myself, into boxes and bags and recycling bins, and garbage bins, and all manner of unusual and desperate containers. I am going to a ferry-less (but probably not faery-less) Gulf Island, where my hard working Mark is already doctoring lambs, chopping wood, bucking trees, and building fences. For which I am lonely but prodigiously proud of him. And then we are going to China. Moving is much more than packing. It is a deconstruction of everything you thought you knew about your environment. And even though I'm ready--more than ready--to leave the exorbitant food, petrol, housing and taxes which is Canada at large and Victoria in particular, I still find myself at a loss. They say that when you get lost in the woods, or I suppose the mountains, or even in those tall, odd coloured rock pillars in Utah, the reason you do so is because for a while you run off an assumed mental picture of your surroundings. You assume they're familiar, until at last the concept map in your head drastically, screamingly mismatches the one around you. You believe yourself to be on the path or just below such and such a ridge, and then--a sweaty, algae filled, valley-blocking post-forest fire swamp rises up, and the mental map gets blown to bits. Stephen King's The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, baby. To a less lethal extent, so moving. I still have dreams of packing up my parents' house from two years ago. Our long, white was-once-a-row-of-apple-pickers's-cabins house, with lilacs and yellow roses by it, and a row of apple trees down the old wood fence, and an unfailingly prolific apricot tree at the back of it, and green and purple gooseberry bushes lost in the long grasses, rediscovered every summer, and a large rotty elm which we climbed to the swaying top of and jumped off its lower branches from, through whose branches I first noticed the way stars are caught in branch-nets, "Stars caught in my branches" as that silly, grandiloquescent but sometimes useful Swinburne writes. Or Hopkins, Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare... (I've removed all the Victorian exclamation marks. Abeles are white poplars). And I'm sure Tolkien's made the same observation somewhere. And there were sheep on the hillside, blackbirds in the slough, sandpipers in the road and morning doves in the orchard. Coyotes and the occasional owl or black bear from up in the range hills and behind them, the low mountains which just sort of go, all the way to the Alberta border. In my dreams of packing up that first house, I discover small metaphorical junks and junkets of years-lost treasures, small Fisher-Price toy men, and old, battered books, and a long, gleaming Zorro sort of sword which I never had and always wanted. I discover small hatches in the ceiling leading to rains of the brightly coloured beads my sisters and I always favoured, or to dusty little attic spaces with small bats whisking over my hair. I go out into the yard and prick my thumb on a wild rose bush which isn't there anymore, swing on a handful of willow branches from a tree we planted just by throwing a willow wand over the fence, like prophets. I go under the house in my dream and instead of an earwiggy damp crawlspace I find an old, curvaceous, robin's-egg-blue fridge with one of those sparkling, slanted chrome brandnames emblazoned over the handle, rusting into shadows, and brass water spigots, and that little bike upon which I'd ridden right into the ditch across the road, face first, and come up coated in black orchard mud. I remember a little boy called Mattie giving me half a piece of cinnamon gum after that, to assuage my muddy humiliation. And I remember that it worked. In my dreams I go into the kitchen and polish the red brick chimney till it shines with a peculiar warm gloss, and I stick my head under the sink and tell the wild morning glories to go nuts, and they do, growing and bursting and curling out of the cupboards and around the sink faucet, and along the kitchen window. I pull up the loose corner of old green carpet in my old bedroom, where I had climbed the bookshelves playing Questor (wrapped in a toga-sheet and carrying a Venetian blind adjustor wand for a sword), and where I hid under my bed playing Frank and Joe Hardy waiting for clues and perps, and where I played Nancy Drew, aging notes written in self-devised code to myself with tea bags in water, and with lighter-singes on the edges, and I discover a whole raft of parchment-like notes from my childhood, half-finished stories about Spock and Questing women climbing through infinite hills, and childish lists of my friends and enemies, and acrostic poems written for my hamsters. ~A bridge over an old rail line which ran from Finsbury Park via Stroud Green and Crouch End to Highgate, with a branch from Highgate via Cranley Gardens and Muswell Hill to Alexandra Palace. Now Parkland Walk. Now, in waking life, I make impossible stacks of books to be taken with us to China. I hesitate, JRR Tolkien's Complete Letters in hand, over the Maybe and the For Sure pile. My books are particularly hard to let go, to tuck away in boxes for years, perhaps. The Space Trilogy, the Earthsea series, American Gods, the Chronicles of Narnia, Puck of Pook's Hill, The Romance of Orthodoxy, Possession, Fionavar Tapestry, Jane Austen, four different copies of Gawain and the Green Knight/Sir Orfeo/The Pearl (there's a solid reason I bought each one!), my omnibi of Shakespeare, and Milton, and Hopkins, and Victorian poetry, and Romantic Poetry, and that tattered Albatross Book of Verse which was my touchstone in high school ("Dark Angel," "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"...), Leonard Cohen's dirty beauty, Neverwhere and Stardust and the Theogony and Bacchae and the Cloud of Unknowing and the Pensees... How can I leave these behind? The short answer is, I won't, maybe. I think that's what this entry was all about, actually. Convincing myself that I will not leave any of my best books behind, even if I will my strange cedars and stormy nights with the wind blowing under the sills of all the windows, and smoky rooftops, and rain-bright rooftops and shining trees. And our few but very valued friends. In the mean, I console myself with Guilty Pleasures. I somehow find myself unmoved by the scrappy gods you make me hot but I'm still gonna shoot, cut, impale and behead you persona, which may be unfair since Laurel K. Hamilton probably did it firstish. A classic, so I'm glad I read it. I hear her subsequent stuff gets more lurid, though of the writing itself I've had no word.
Ginny Weasley and the Curse of the Firstborn Lee Jordan: Tour Guide After the End Where the Light Is Magic Within, Magic Without The Letters of Summer Decoding of the Heart To Sever the Lining of a Cloud	THIS IS ME? May 12, 2005. Music to read by: Dinosaur Jr, 'Seemed like the thing to do' When I got a blue airmail letter from Oxford, I read it. I shut the cat in the closet by mistake. I did the dishes badly, and let the cat out. Now I know which college wants me, Lady Margaret Hall. I'd love to join the callow line of wide-eyed woman scholars who've gone before me, and shall follow. Here's one just above, an early LMH attendee. She looks comfortable enough, no? Maybe a bit cold. But doing her own thing. (She looks like Persephone ought to look.) A daisy-gone-alley. At this juncture I am very sorry, but I must cave to my fascination with Harry Potter fanfiction. This is a breast-baring post, and I shall full front. So on the side you'll see some links to my favourites. Some are legendary, some will be, some are just fun. In defense of fanfiction, I'd like to suggest it's been going on ever so long--Dante loved Virgil, Shelley told his own worlding of bound Prometheus in 'Prometheus Unbound,' replete with an OC love interest (that's Out of Canon, and the love interest, Asia), Milton's retellings of myth and Bible. There's something powerful about the HP fanfic phenomenon. So many people telling, retelling, elaborating upon, adding, delving into, reinventing, transforming a pantheon of characters into a thousand cycles, much as Robin Hood was reinvented for each era, social justice requirement, sensibility, or Woden et al, or the Greek myths so very culled and milled by Elizabethans, neoclassicalists, Romantics, yet full still of power and intrigue. And best example, perhaps, the Arthurian tales, cycles and spinoffs. Malory: the first novel length fanfic? Some people scorn fanfiction as redundant, derivative, or even craven. But when a fic's well done, there's something unique and yet accessible there. In oral cultures, there's almost always a huge respect for retelling tales well; in written cultures where performance is still key to accessing narrative, there's a huge admiration for the teller's ability to make meaningful changes to a stock set of events and characters. A new spin on an old world. Since there is almost no way to avoid putting something of oneself into creative writing, world making, subcreation, whatever one calls it, I think sometimes--not always, and not permanently--there's room for playing with a pre-existing world, and people's knowledge of its key characters and internal rules. Tolkien writes that "the incarnate mind, the tongue, and the tale are in our world coeval." And since most postmoderns would argue that there can be no fact that does not contain some fiction (try telling a friend an exact account of some anecdotal encounter sometime and see if you can retrieve everything you filtered within the experience, and convey it in full exactitude; it doesn't work, especially in compelling storytelling), I'd argue that the opposite is true: fiction cannot help but convey something that is true (what that truth is will vary from writer to writer, I suppose). Good storytelling will out. Even in fanfiction. If the mind and the tale really are coeval you just can't feel too bad about it--there's an elemental, poeic force at work whose source may be one's mind (cogito ergo sum?), or maybe something else. Tolkien points out that in Old English "spell means both a story told, and a formula of power over living men [and women]" (brackets mine). As someone writes in a long and interesting essay (apology?) about fanfiction: The puppets themselves are timeless, and wear these burdens so lightly that they might well have been clothed by the Emperor's own tailors, oblivious to the passage of these censorious centuries. In the purest of executions no one deliberately attempts to be outrageous, or at least not any more outrageous than could be accomplished by judiciously painting one's hair pink. Horrified whispers and flutters in the hencoop are not required by the management. An excellent rule of thumb. See here for the full essay, a long, interesting exposition on Regency novels, feminism, and Snape... So I guess we enter JKR's world and write because it is a reality we find fascinating, and then we go and "subcreate" our own stories. No worse a hobby than drinking, no better than it should be. Dreaming the same dream together--the usual community of reader's and writers is extra powerful because of it. Like Punch and Judy professors, we wear collectively known characters and see what manifests. One of the major attractions for me is the insight one gains into human psychology--of the characters, the writers, and how far one can push both effectively. HP fanfic's become folk tradition? Sort of. Not the be and end all, but a nice parallel world to the literary one.
'silence swimming in a pool of dreams beneath its depths the forgotten streams' -Tea Party	MORE FORGOTTON STREAMS May 9, 2005. Music to read by: Tea Party, 'The Bazaar' The spirits white as lightening Would on my travels guide me The stars would shake and the moon would quake Whenever they espied me. With a host of furious fancies, Whereof I am commander, With a burning spear and a horse of air To the wilderness I wander. Yesterday I broke our second to last wine glass. I actually don’t really care because I firmly believe wine is more sensibly drunk from mugs, or better yet the bottle, as we did with some friends by the river in Sooke, in a sun-dim evening by the brown, sluicing river water. The pothole river, as it’s called, wends downs from the inner island, and the air is warm and pine-resin-, cottonwood-sap-sweet like the Okanagan. Swallows, river stones (rounded silver skipping disks, or sand made of smaller disks so flat-thin flaked they float), a bedrock channel smooth-carved into undulating river water shapes. Cold water wading, a perfect early mountain ash. Green soaking the air, the light, our eyes. When I broke our second to last wine glass yesterday, I swore, and then I cleaned it up, and then I tossed our last wine glass into the garbage too: preventative waste. Pernicious anoetic barycentrism, damnit! The verses above are the madness of Tom O' Bedlam, herald of the wild hunt. Edgar tries to be him, but his verse is quoted, and runs out at the end, a funny moment of many in 'Lear.' Mere madness, I hear, requires a conviction that you’re both original and true: the moment madness knows itself, some of its madness is lost, to coin Lewis’ paradigm and Chesterton’s truth. Poor Edgar. Maybe mania is as close as one can get to entheosm, while still being able to appreciate the otherness of it. ...Therefore I question whether Bacchus’ Maenads really were having so much the time of their life, if really mad and therefore excused. If not, then they're not very subversive, Maenads, truly mad and they don't know it—and all that raw manflesh, so far as they know, is just more roasted rack of lamb and homous. Sparagmos and omophagia fool’s gold transmuted to home and hearth and sweeping broken glass with thyrsus? And then there's Persephone and her pomegranate seeds. Small, sour, woody mostly, watery some—why on or under earth did she eat of them? Perhaps, as with many people contemplating eating some silly thing, she was bored, and as we know, nothing is quite to be so avoided as that. Jewish tradition says that the human body includes 613 nerves and pomegranate fruit 613 seeds as Torah includes 613 commandments--a weighty magic, barycentric, even. To eat the pome, and fall into the spell of darkness, furious fancies. Ash tree seeds key to faerie, pome’s to underworld; eat it, and you’re by the darker river ever. Do the Maenads wake up? And still I'd think wine would be better drunk from bottles. Especially if you’re the bride of ecstasy. Like Goldsworthy, at the river I made maple leaf rafts with silver penny river rocks on them, and yellow flare dandelion heads at foot of cottonwood leaves, Dufflepuds’ mimesis, you might say, and floated them down the wide eddies, the small standing waves.
DERELICT LONDON: RIVERS SUBTERRANEAN RIVERS of LONDON DERELICT LONDON: UNDERGROUND DERELICT LONDON: ST. PANCREAS VIRTUAL TOUR of ST. PANCRAS (from NG's site)	UNDERGROUND, or, THE DEATH of RATUS RATUS April 26, 2005. Music to read by: Hilmar Orn Hilmarsson and Sigur Ros in Angels of the Universe, 'Journey to the Underworld' Just re-read the Eka Dasa Rudra based Ombria in Shadow by Patricia McKillip. While all her books have their attractions, this one is particularly 'chanting. In a city old as time, full of time, rotten with time, a waxling girl, a mild-fierce courtesan, and a half-fey bastard prince find themselves lost between the webs and machinations of two ancient creatures--a she-spider and a possibly amoral sorceress. Above the city in the palace, a riddled, addled hive of secret passageways and forgotten chambers, in the city, a place rife with pirates and drunkards, and below the city, in a cavernous, forgotten part of the city's past, a black river, abandoned houses full of seed pearl dresses, burned out candelabra, ghosts and paintings. The setting is truly marvelous evokes much with a few words--caw of crows, smell of briny harbour air, of horse-piss, dust, violets, charcoal, white rose, ash, wax... This brought on a desire to list books with evocative undergrounds: Time Machine by HG Wells--the Morlocks, which I picture much more like this or this or maybe these more than the actual movies Coleridge--where the sacred river ran, through caves measureless to man, down to a sunless sea comics 'Return to Xanadu,' Parts I&II, by Don Rosa (Disney's Uncle Scrooge #261 and #262)--a weirdio, formative trip Tom Sawyer by 'Mark Twain'--empty caves Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman--classic yet innovative gothic Tube romance Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll--curioser and curioser Windup Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami--much of the action takes place in empty wells The Secret World of Og by Pierre Berton--an entirely green underworld of mushrooms and critters who speak Og: 'Og-og, og og og, og.' Inspired by the Irish land, Tir Nan Og, or Nehemiah 9.22, 'Moreover thou gavest them kingdoms and nations, and didst divide them into corners: so they possessed the land of Sihon, and the land of the king of Heshbon, and the land of Og king of Bashan'? Dante's 'Purgatorio'--worser and worser Chapter 3, Season of Mists by Neil Gaiman--in which all of Dante's work is quite undone for a while Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIHM by Robert C. O'Brien--the rosebush Hades and Persephone--beware pomegranate seeds Sabriel by Garth Nix--necromantic rushing rivers, ringing bells, impending doom Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne--classically cool detailed speculation with lots of volcanic vents and dizzying depths Perelandra by CS Lewis--Ransom dragged underwater to seacave, makes his way up through vents and tunnels filled with dimly fire-flickering creatures and giant persons Watership Down by Richard Adams--the beautiful burrow of sacrificial rabbits, vaults made of bone and wire Silver Chair by CS Lewis--many fall down, and few return to the sunlit lands; and then there's Bism at the bottom of the world: 'A strong heat smote up into their faces, mixed with a smell which was quite unlike any they had ever smelled. It was rich, sharp, exciting, and it made you sneeze.' Promises Golg, 'There I'll pick you bunches of rubies you can eat and squeeze you a cup of diamond juice' A new piece of monomorphemic haiku in response to all these memories: Undergrounders ground undergrounding underground, grounding under's ground. And finally a song Neil Gaiman wrote for Folk Underground (copyright 2002): 'There are folk underground and they don’t do a lot but they listen to us in the sun...'
	AN EMPEROR PENGUIN SNEEZES April 21, 2005. Music to read by: just itself I just found the best link ever: 'Sounds of Antarctica.' Hear seals yawn and penguins sneeze. Best are the underwater seal trills and calls, with the sound of ice crackling in the background. Selkie song and haunting. What a remarkable privilege to eavesdrop on the impossible.
	FEEDING FIRE April 21, 2005. Music to read by: Bjork, 'An echo, a stain' “Don’t say no to me—you can’t say no to me.” –Bjork There is forever something childish about writing. Childish, not just childlike. Something which says to itself that the chimes and sparkles, smoke, mist, mirrors, harps, dungeons, swords, elf-light and words wild or wise or silly—that the desert shimmer, staff of snaking wood, darkness and corridors, roses and blood and kisses, scent of frankincense and myrrh, rumble of djinn’s laugh, clink of gems, flickering candle, shifting shadow, back-door, back-window, sad old brick and weed-enprovinced parking lot, all, all of it, all the words will say yes to you—or you say it will say yes to itself, and hisss, into life, ignited, imagination. Dreams like magnesium exposed to the mouth-moist breath of thought. Lisa Snelling's blog is particularly cool right now, lots of pics of her fantastical sculptures.
	MERRILY, MERRILY, MERRILY MERRILY April 20, 2005. Music to read by: Bjork, 'Sun in my mouth' …in dreama dream, þær hi dryhtne to giefe worda ond weorca wynsumne stenc… …unto joy of joys, there they to gift the Lord of words and works winsome scent… (From the Old English poem ‘The Phoenix’) So I was murmuring over ‘dreama dream’ and the Lord Dream in my head, as I walked through the warmth of pollen-dusk the other eve, and I thought, What if we wrote haiku using just that word? (There is no why.) This is the result: Monomorphemic haiku (TM Jasmine). Ahem: Dreamers dreaming dreamed Dream’s dreams; Dream’s dreams dreamily Dream dreaming dreamers. Of course this unique poetic form can be applied to nearly any word, provided one be willing to play fast-loose with lexical English. (Hey, that’s how language evolves.) Sexists sexistly Sexualize sexs’ sex, Sexing sexist sex. And my favourite: Monomaniacs Monomaniacally Monomanticise. Of scent, ‘wynsumne stenc’ (the unfortunate OE root for ‘stench’) the following gmail converse with my friend the irrefutable Megan: ‘Hey Jas, I just read your blog and you mention Tranquille. My grandmother was in Tranquille when she had TB…who was being courted by my grandfather (in Alaska during WWII) at the time. Weird hey?' To which: 'Hey Megan! Glad you liked the Tranquille episode… Does your grandmother have any stories about her time in Tranquille?' And then: 'Unfortunately, I never got to meet either of them. I only have stories about my grandmother from my mom and she only has stories of her father from the rest of her...relatives. There is no accounting for family or the relative veracity of their stories.' To which: 'Too true! My grandmother had raven black, golden blonde, and fire red hair in her youth according to varying accounts at slightly varying times...Also my gramma Alice , when praying in her closet, once got a mole that smelled like sweet incense and lasted for days.' And thus: 'A scented mole? That is too strange and wonderful for words.' Indeed.
TETRA-GRAMMATON TRANQUILLE PICS	OH, INVERTED WORLD April 18, 2005. Music to read by: The Shins, 'Caring is Creepy' 'The Shins' is such a stupid name (not that I'm in any position to say so), but their lyrics are pretty great. Michael Zulli’s ‘Last Morpheus’ is at about $3800 dollars now. His journal hath of late been wonderful reading—the punctuation is very off (no matter), but his thoughts on painting: the joy and terror of it, are very interesting. Been watching ‘Six Feet Under: Season One’ over the weekend. Some of it is convulsive, some ho hum. The best part of it is watching young twenty-thirty somethings think about death in life, much the contrast to ‘Friends’ and all that shite. The actors’ faces are great. Strange and unique. Brenda’s psycho brother Billy (a rather Frida Jeremy Sisto) is puckishly charming, as is the luscious Claire, Delerium poster-child, still in highschool in season one, with a predilection for sad boys and soft drugs. Pretty much all the characters are morbidly sensitive in unique ways, and the confluence of odd deaths—the episode tags—and ongoing lightly gothic melodrama is addictive. Putting aside my deep conviction that the dead body is a husk which is best cremated and scattered with respect and hope of resurrection, rather than pumped full of chemicals and buried in old-growth caskets which would pay a year at college, this show does well unvarnishing the a-morbid varnish we traditionally gloss and glaze over mortality. I’ve also been reading—slogging through—reading—All Hallows Eve by Charles Williams. His diction is convoluted but his storytelling is worth every double-take. The book follows the secret rise and fall of an apocalyptic antichrist who uses Jewish magic and the unmaking of words to access power. The premise of this sound-power is the tetragrammaton. A word of power, the personal name of God, the four Hebrew letter YHWH. Much like CS Lewis’ ‘Deplorable Word’ (I remember the whole book when I write that and feel a home-sick craving to read it again, and so I shall) in The Magician’s Nephew, the word has been much debated and feared. It has been interpreted as the causative, imperfect form of the verb ‘to be, become’—thus ‘He will ongoingly cause to become.’ It’s also been interpreted as a conglomeration of the root YWH with the derivatives ‘He was,’ ‘He is’ and ‘He will be.’ The name is thus eternal and generative. Urd, Verdandi, Skuld. Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva. Chaos, Kronos, Zeus. Father, Son and Spirit. Yes, a bit of a pattern. Because the Hebrew alphabet does not include vowels, speculation continues. In the Wikipedia table of YHWH transcribed to other languages, the name remains rather the same, which is bizarre considering that most sounds in Indo-European are not held in common with analytic languages such as ‘Chinese.’ The coolest thing about this use of YHWH in the book is that is connects to the genesis of the world (“And God said…”), and the Word made flesh, Christ. Thus William’s antichrist is the unmaking of creation and salvation by his deconstruction of sound: Chaucer's flatulence. String theory lends a nice visual metaphor—strings of energy, perhaps light, compose all; geodesic resonation is the expression of gravity transmitted upon the string network; and via the phenomenon of sonoluminescence, we know that sound transmutes to light when held in a contained sphere. Words made flesh, voila. Those Inklings. Anyways, the book is an interesting imagining of London as the empty-not-at-all city of the dead, damned and redeemed towards the remade body. Transfiguration. Robin McKinley made a comment about the book as an early example of urban fantasy—I’d say Augustine’s City of God is earlier, and more relevant than De Lintean urbanity, but the stirring, Wellsian Underground (the sort of place where a tattoo of a complete map of the underground might come in useful), the odd slants of light, the mutable, organic rubble of it is, indeed, a fine example of Place, less gorgeous than the Eka Dasa Rudran Ombria in Shadow, but still very, well, haunting. The most haunting place I've been to, maybe, is Tranquille (aka Pediva City, aka Serenity Lake), just north of Kamloops. It is a ghost town, a former sanatorium then 'mentally handicapped people's home' where the government performed (you guessed it) teaching and 'research.' The TB patients had a newspaper, 'The Tranquillean' for eighteen years. I'd love to read it. Driving through there was like moving through resistant water: heat shimmering from roads covered in disuse--shale, tumbleweed, crow's droppings. Old clapboard, old lilac trees and drifting cottonwoods. Emptiness crowds itself into houses, tunnels, dorms and shacks. 'Ghoststudies.com' has some fascinating pics, as well as accompanying ...patter. The approach: It's not on Google maps, nor Mapquest--in fact, Kamloops wasn't even on Google maps, until I googled it into being. Tranquille sits a massive collection of buildings cracking in the heat and cold, abandoned edifices, wind whispering the past around corners, over chimneys, between walls, under doors, through windows. The hospital:
'ATOMS of SPACE and TIME:' SPIN NETWORKS and SPIN FOAM (SciAm article) AN INTERNET SPIN NETWORK 'THE ARCHITECTURE of LIFE:' GEODESIC TENSEGRITY	WEBS and DAEDALS April 12, 2005. Music to read by: Tori Amos, 'Beekeeper' Lately stumbled upon the idea of spin networks and spin foam as a quantum expression of gravity using string theory. You see, there are lots and lots and lots of little loops made of--something--which intersect in geometrical ways, and along the nodes of intersection Space and Matter are made, maybe via Gravity, they aren't sure. This intersection is the spin network. Along the loops, Space and Matter--if there is any difference--are made manifest by adding the dimension Time, so that lines become planes and nodes become lines. This dimensional coruscation is the spin foam. By the foaming of the network, Time is made manifest. And by the networking of foam--i.e. Time's passage--Spacetime is made manifest: a virtuous circle, brought "into a mountain of affection th'one with th'other." So that in the end, we are where we began: the cosmological constant is still a geodesic necessity. Hopkins was right: inscape and instress, the innate ontology and unique expressive energy of every thing held into being along unique coordinates, an intercatenated narrative of energy made visible by observation, like sunlight caught in spider webs. * The last few days I've also been exploring graphic novels--how to, what's beautiful, all that. To put the imagined scenes to an artist's hand and couple their imaginings of one's imaginings with beautiful words and strange stories. It's quite interesting to read some of the GN scripts I've found--maybe 70% of the writing is direction to the artist. Of the total text, eighteen pages or so, only 2500 words are actually dialogue and exposition. So in some ways it's a very disciplined kind of writing. Spare. Also very interesting is the arrangement of sequential frames. At best, the frames help tell the story by expressing passage of time, perspective of characters, immediacy to or emotional reaction of the reader, even a reflection of the story's tone--confusion, ecstasy, anger, epiphany. Whew. I think there's more a place for numinous-driven wiring and art than there has been for a long time, which, of course, makes my inner CS Lewis happy. We are hungry for miracle, just as much as they ever were in medieval times, couched in crystals and regressive dream therapy, comic book movie adaptations and fantasy paintings, speculative astrophysics and poems about darkling sibyl's leaves--all worthy of contemplation, and a way of importing wonder. I guess fantastical story is just barely one removed from hagiography and relics. * Michael Zulli's commentary on his Last Morpheus is nearly done and that makes me sad. Check it out and wish along with me you had thousands to the good instead of bad with which to bid for it. In memoriam of Dream--a la The Wake--Shelley: 'Some say that gleams of a remoter world Visit the soul in sleep, that death is slumber, And that its shapes the busy thought outnumber Of those who wake and live. I look on high; Has some unknown omnipotence unfurled The veil of life and death? Or do I lie In dream...' ('Mont Blanc').
CLIPS AND STILLS from POPE JOHN PAUL II's FUNERAL DOCUMENTARY: THREE WORLDS of BALI	MILKY WAY CLUSTERS April 10, 2005. Music to read by: Cake, 'Shadow Stabbing' Watched: ‘Iris.’ I liked it alright. Sir Richard Eyre, who co-wrote the screenplay, says about it: "The film is not a biography, nor is it fiction, but occupies a poetic territory between the two." Very useful, that, for justifying my author series. Kate Winslet is most charming in it; the interchange between past and present was conceptually sound, but rather depressing in practice. A woman who loves words, lives in two worlds, and loses all of it, mind swallowed by an Echthroi night. Realised: Fuel is now 102.9. Like Proles transfixed by the engineered surges of the Lottery, we watch, and wonder, and keep on driving—voluntary non-reflexive yes-men all. Another Canadian kilometrestone. Discovered: Papal found poetry. “Kings and queens, presidents and prime ministers, sheiks and sultans, dukes and despots—squeezed side by side in alphabetical order” (Luca Bruno, Assoc. Press). Welsh Cistercian monks watch by satellite. Though I cannot, not being Catholic, those that are can post prayers for the pope at Rosary.com... Read: “An Open Letter to the Radioactive Spider that Never Bit Me.” For all the people awaiting vivification via either superhero abilities or, arachpopos, Neil Gaiman’s new novel, whichever might come first (and you'd better get going on the radioactive spider thing as the other spider thing is happening September 20). Found: another painting process commentary like unto 'The Last Morpheus' by Michael Zulli--Charles Vess on ‘Companions to the Moon.’ Oggled: the lights of the world, spinfoam and spindrift cinder-speckles...and I was always so overwhelmed by Coruscant, and the Borg Earth, and the Matrix Machine City, and city, and city. Also, from an Antarctica webcam, virtual dreams tending to be. And thought about: “In one interpretation of string theory, called braneworld, those extra dimensions are large, perhaps even infinite, and our universe is just a 3D membrane drifting in a higher-dimensional space.” Which perhaps illuminates our obsession with Shakespeare, or himself with metaphysic extemporare-- And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow. "Wayang is a Javanese word meaning "shadow" or "ghost" and is a theatrical performance of living actors (wayang orang), three dimensional puppets (wayang golek) or shadow images projected before a backlit screen (wayang kulit)."
BBC: CLUB of QUEER TRADES PROMETHEUS UNBOUND	REST OF BONES, SOUL'S DELIVERY April 5, 2005. Music to read by: Eels, 'Love of the Loveless' Listening to: the BBC rendition of Chesterton's Club of Queer Trades. Almost as as good as the book, though slightly, unfortunately, less odd. A series with playbacks that one can listen to all this week. "ASIA: The rocks are cloven, and through the purple night / I see cars drawn by rainbow-wingèd steeds / Which trample the dim winds; in each there stands / A wild-eyed charioteer urging their flight. / Some look behind, as fiends pursued them there, / And yet I see no shapes but the keen stars; / Others, with burning eyes, lean forth, and drink / With eager lips the wind of their own speed, / As if the thing they loved fled on before, / And now, even now, they clasped it. Their bright locks / Stream like a comet's flashing hair; they all / Sweep onward. DEMOGORGON: These are the immortal Hours, / Of whom thou didst demand. / One waits for thee" (Prometheus Unbound, Act II, l. 130 &c.). Watched: 'The Hours.' Personally I think Nicole Kidman looks far better with that prosthetic nose--but then I have always liked unusual noses and hated pert foxy ones. Weepy mental illness wasn't terribly interesting, but Kidman's acting was truly riveting, also Meryl Streep's. Admittedly this has little to do with fantasy, except the association with the Furies, but more to do with my author series, as an example of ficto-biographical retelling. I'm glad to give the swelling piano/violin soundtrack a miss in my medium. Yesterday Mark and I discovered the Chinese Cemetery, an unexpected green wildness on the water. Before, the Olympic Mountains, behind it, a special Canadian sort of racism, inclusive segregation.
RIVERS and TIDES SOUNDTRACK TERRI WINDLING'S BIOGRAPHY of JM BARRIE JM BARRIE RESOURCE SITE	THREE MOVIES WORTH SEEING April 3, 2005. Music to read by: Sigur Ros, 'Staralfur' Or should I say films? Best watched in sequence, at recline, with large mugfulls of cassis and soda water. 'RIVERS AND TIDES: ANDY GOLDSWORTHY WORKING WITH TIME' I thought this would be a sort of panoramic dream-flight, akin to Bjork’s 'Joga' music video, perhaps. Instead, it is a charmingly Commonwealth (read, awkward and unadorned) representation of Goldsworthy playing with large and small bits of the outdoors. Often one sees his works shown over a year, brightening, darkening, decaying. A rock hive beached, submerged, emerged. Goldsworthy tries to explain his work, his ethos regarding time, death, nature, eternity, the camera resting on his round, weathered-youthful face for long periods of rapt—or something—silence. His gentle bullshit is sometimes inadequate, but charming, and I understood someone reaching for the essence of things—E=MC2, inscape and instress, fractal manifestations of spirit, the alchemy of energy, Dr Emoto and the eternal child seeking to modify and move into the centre of her/his environment. He throws crushed rock into streams, snow into air, watching the curling movement of medium and particle. At the start of the movie, I thought his works were merely kind of neat. By the end, I’d fallen to the slow ensorceling of his work. It draws me into the landscape, even through the glassy eye of the telly, dilating the horizon to include wind and time, and revealing small and fragile details. The soundtrack is good also. 'MAD MAX: BEYOND THUNDERDOME' Does it get better than desertous post-apocalyptic anarchy involving childlike anthropological pseudo-myth, Tina Turner as Aunty Entity in silvery chainmail, subterranean pigs, and hard rocking neo-barbarians wearing mannequin heads? Spooky, roaring, wide-eyed, schlock. Way way better than 'Waterworld,' way way stronger than 'Final Fantasy,' and way way cooler than 'Tank Girl.' Though I wouldn’t pass up those ones either--'we’re all of us part of the tellin...' Apropos apocalypse, a new 'War of the Worlds' is emerging in June. I dinna ken how it’ll compare to the old version, nor other classics such as 'When Worlds Collide' or the early Vancouver-era darkling 'X-Files.' 'FINDING NEVERLAND' Of course any movie with Johnny Depp is likely to be strange, and therefore good in some respect. I loved the premise, the Shakespeare in Love-esque process of creation ex vitae. The trick is well played, drawing his writing and his life together in an intriguing, delightful and sad sort of way, so that one plot illuminates the other. Loneliness, belonging, child- and adulthood, imagination, death. The movie flickers between fantastical scenarios of imagination and the real-life play acting of Barrie and the Llewelyn Davies children, the which were charming, but somehow, I felt, less satisfying than they might have been. The imagination sets felt like Hook’s more plasticy bits, when I wished them to feel more like Hoffman’s 'Midsummer Night’s Dream.' One scene was quite perfect, where the four boys bounce along their beds and float out the window. A very powerful image, founded on the flying dream motif--easeful, perfect floating freedom, air transformed into a new medium of exploration. I also liked Knee and Magee’s (!) sanguine interpretation of Barrie’s relationship with the Llewelyn Davies family. Though the boy Peter grew to be an embittered alcoholic and Barrie excluded him from his will, I like to think that in the interim, the interstice between cause and effect, real history and the biographical dirt people dig for, there might have been real affection, good intention. See Terri Windling’s wonderful biography for a balanced and fascinating essay on Barrie’s life and his works on Peter Pan. In any case, the film is an effective fiction, and Depp carries off scenes which other actors never could—childlike, wistful, capricious, quirky and wise, both Pan and Hook. The moment where Barrie (Depp) realises that Michael has changed from boy to man is delivered with a perfect fey gravity. That Barrie conceived of new theatre effects such a flying on stage, that adults at the first showing of Peter Pan clapped so loudly that the actress playing Pan was overwhelmed, and that Barrie seemed so terrified himself of the clock-ticking crocodile, a monster-perfect picture of time—makes the film experience a meaningful fictive biography. I think Barrie might have approved.
	LONELY UNTO THE LONE March 31, 2005. Music to read by: Tan Dun, 'Desert Capriccio' If there were such thing as snot donation clinics, I should save the world. As it is, I spend the world in unending tissue, wishing my nose would stop dripping, and worrying about dehydration.
	FAERY: A SERMON March 19, 2005. Music to read by: Crowded House, 'World where you live' Blaise Pascal: “We do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves and in our being; we desire to live an imaginary life in the mind of others, and for this purpose we endeavour to shine. We labour unceasingly to adorn and preserve this imaginary existence and neglect the real.” A perfectly good definition of an artist/writer: magenpies and rooks, eye caught by a shiny thought, a blooming trope, a smoking sparkler dart of story, with which we hopefully adorn the nesty mind. And yet there is no connection to story without paying some attention to Life…the ubiquitous and endless ‘desert of the real’ is the very scope of magic, the opening out of mind onto wilderness. Mountains of shadow, vasty plains of dream. Where does it begin? How is it felt? Is it the tendril of mist, chime of sound, mirk (sic) of twilight, which creeps across the periphery of one’s inner vision, infilling the senses until all is changed, slowly, a sea change, until a-sudden darkling skies overset a clockwork world in favour of a wandering one, cosmos torn by the windy branches of a strange and crackling tree? Or is it in the gob-smack rushing overtake of disastrous, gleaming dragons dropping blood upon your tongue, that the language of all things be made known to you, a searing wonder which yields horror, that you hear all things, and all things tell you your doom—birds, trees, stars, dogs, crows—until you are mad, berserker crazy with the clanging, gonging strangeness of the it? Or is it the envelope which comes from somewhere called the Ministry of Stories, with an unexpected bill for thirty-seven dollars and one cowrie shell, the winking cat on Christmas Eve, the pulsating motor-car…the squiffy shift of telephone lines to whirring messengers, the scrabble of oddly sharp-toothed seagulls on the roof, waiting hungrily for the setting out of jack-o-lanterns, their yearly soul-food…the shuffling migration of abandoned couches from curbs all across the city—by-product of students every April—to Couchapolooza, where all dead-beat couches rock out to Potato Jackson and croon along with Sarah MacSitcom, before going on to the land of the stinky dead? Or is it the scum floating on the surface of the story pot, that great cast-iron soup of rebirth which Tolkien and Gaiman—‘or maybe Terry Pratchet’—refer to, where green and orange and swirling black and shimmering-soap-clear bubbles percolate and surface, and become two-way permeable bubble-universes holding all manner of weird and wild and wonderful tales? John Tolkien: "It is precisely the colouring, the atmosphere, the unclassifiable individual details of a story, and above all the general purport that informs with life the undissected bones of the plot, that really counts. … In Dasent’s words I would say: ‘We must be satisfied with the soup that is set before us, and not desire to see the bones of the ox out of which it has been boiled.’ ... By ‘the soup’ I mean the story as it is served up by its author or teller, and by ‘the bones’ its sources or material—even when (by rare luck) those can be with certainty discovered" (On Fairy-Stories). Neil Gaiman: "Art (and you can pick what you want for any value of art here, be it music or fantasy fiction or whatever) is like a big bubbling bowl of stew. When you're starting out, you ladle out some of the stew. As you go on, and you make more art, you start putting things back into the stew, for the next round of people to ladle out. Art (except, perhaps for some outsider art, and I'm not really convinced about that) is a dialogue (or, perhaps, a conversation) not something that happens in a vacuum" ("Art as stew," November 24, 2004).
ANNE CARSON AS BYATT on POSSESSION GM HOPKINS EXILED ZENO'S PARADOX	PATTER PAEAN March 16, 2005. Music to read by: Nick Drake, 'Fruit Tree' “The writers and readers share what the critics and scholars cannot discover.” ~AS Byatt Today I actually crowed. You see, I’d run out of coffee—a sad awakening. 97 cents in my piggy bank (yeah, I have a literal pig bank, it’s made of clay and painted brown, and its ears are broken off it), and the local’s delicious coffee is $1.25. Being the resourceful lost child that I am, I immediately hit upon looking under the couch cushions, a useful if rather dusty/crumby practice which has never failed me yet. And there, glinting right in the middle of the couch-bed, were two extremely shiny quarters. It was a very Peter Pan moment. So I chuntered down to the House, braving along the way storms of cherry blossom petals, and rains of sepals and dusty yellow filaments, and wild gusts of wind through strange cedars, and intermittent, pattering face-splashes of rain, and I had my coffee. Thus fortified, I turned to Eros: The Bittersweet, by Anne Carson (lent me by the same irrefutable friend who introduced me to Kim Harrison). I am not a Greek scholar (merely a sporadic enthusiast), nor much for absent desire (in general), but the language in it is elegant and sure: “For, where eros is lack, its activation calls for three structural components—lover, beloved and that which comes between them. They are three points of transformation on a circuit of possible relationships, electrified by desire so that they touch not touching. Conjoined they are held apart. The third component plays a paradoxical role for it both connects and separates…When the circuit-points connect, perception leaps. And something becomes visible… The difference between what is and what could be is visible… Desire moves. Eros is a verb” (pp 16-17). And then I thought of sehnsucht, desire which moves imagination—the imagination of an artist, and also of the beholder of their art. And really, I almost think you could substitute sehnsucht for eros, reader and writer for lover and beloved, and the reader-writer intertext/gap for the third element, so that ‘they are three points of transformation on a circuit of possible relationships, electrified by sehnsucht, and so perception leaps’ …and so writer’s world sparks in the reader’s, and conceiving minds meet. To see if this is true, I have been trying to write a series of tales about writers writing (right now, unloved Hopkins). To be simultaneously reader and writer. To enter and not enter their world, to create a world of my own, and yet not my own. “Space is power,” Carson says. Across its gulf the writer imagines her/his readers while she/he is writing, and the readers imagine the writer while they are reading—though neither fully knows the other. “Conjoined they are held apart.” If our imaginative constructs (composed within the space between truth and lie) are important vantage points of perspective for experiencing literature, then that connection over distance (all kinds of distances, non-relationship, time, and certainly of literal personality or agenda or beliefs) both reveals and protects our true natures. It is a ‘Zenotic’ lacuna within which both truth and lie cohabit. The quantum sparks are, I think, imagination kinetic. Also fiction itself. My stories about writers are mere fictions in praise of writers, and about the reader/writer cohabiting within my own imagination. Strange things happen in the stories because I cannot resist the fantastical—centaurs write letters, visions walk, metamorphoses, of course. In a sense, it’s rather an intimate thing for other people to read what comes from one's head; it requires bravery and cunning (skill) all at once. The energy there fascinates me. So shall I in turn reveal my mind about the writer? To enter and not enter their world, to create a world of my own, and yet not my own. Dangerous, humbling—not sure it’s working. But interesting.