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Monday, October 30th, 2006
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1:44 pm
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An update.
Just to prove that I'm still in...
um...
con
trol
Khan
Troll
Oui, Monsieur l'Abbé Fromage d'Ennui is paying a long delayed visit to his ethereal confrères.
God, the walls are closing in.
God, the air is getting thin.
Are you there God? It's me, Margaret.
Question: Is "I was channeling Judy Blume" a sufficient excuse to get out of work?
Even when I'm my own boss?
In a manner of speaking?
You know it's getting bad when I'm actually looking forward to Christmas.
The bells, all I hear are the bells!
current mood: pick a card
current music: my tummy hurts
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| Monday, July 10th, 2006
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10:47 am - pluit
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Raining buckets o' buckets right now. Can't see more than four blocks from my 10th floor window.
Doesn't help work get done. Thesis work I mean, but there is this, for what little it's worth:
Fog: A reply to Sandburg
The fog scrapes inward to tell me
of dry hills it caressed to dew
of lakes grown morbid and calm
with cold legs clenched tight at dawn.
The fog sloughs by and tells
of new skin it grows on snails
of a blanket made of welcome dull
cocooned on cocoons and wings.
The fog it passes on and on
me it asks me, where I am, and am
I there, and are there stars
in her thighs, son, are there suns?
But I cannot see for the fog.
current music: air conditioning, unnecessary
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| Sunday, July 9th, 2006
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8:39 am - bliss in 5 minute chunks
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One of my "best things ever" has not changed in quite a few years, so I thought I'd share. It's a piece of music, but it's not confined to "best music ever", but it must be included among "things", since listening to it engenders the same reaction as some paintings, foods, people, poems, rock formations, and ranks of angels also produce:
It is a Vivaldi violin concerto, and I know some out there, upon reading this, will groan/snicker/cough and quietly walk away at the sight of his name, but he is so much more than the Four Seasons. Or maybe I'm just a sucker for the Barock. Specifically, it is the Concerto in Bflat Major for Violin scordatura. Scordatura is an intentional mistuning of a string instrument, usually a half pitch higher, which, if nothing else, makes it louder, but also allows the soloist to play harmonies impossible if he were tuned to the rest of the orchestra. In this case, the G string is cranked up to a Bflat. What it creates is a haunting shadow of discordancy which, in the case of Vivaldi, you can't really put your finger on, because around 1700, he was hardly "allowed" to write truly discordant pieces.
Specifically, the "best thing ever" is the second movement, the Andante, 5 minutes of pummeling me senseless and sensitive in my soul's gut of beauty. The scordatura violin floats on a lusciously quiet bed of two full string orchestras, sometimes repeating the same three notes over and over until it sounds as if the instrument will snap in half, a technique that I've heard in no other Vivaldi and really is akin only to contemporary Philip Glass; but unlike in Glass, Vivaldi's wandering violin can always find the centre again, and settle back into the rich protective arms of the cellos.
I often listen to classical while doing work primarily, I admit, because it has no words to distract me and tempt me to sing along. But in the case of this piece, I drop my pen, the computer screen in front of me blurs, I have to set down my coffee lest I spill, and I sit still, unable even to lean, because every ounce of energy has been transferred, sometimes unwillingly, to my ears.
current mood:  prodigal
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| Saturday, May 13th, 2006
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3:14 pm - Lit review
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Read some interesting books lately. Feeling almost "with it" as far as contemporary literature goes. Took only two days to read Douglas Coupland jPod when I got my hands on an advanced reader's copy. Not a hard read when a good quarter of the book is in 48-point font, or covered with strings of random numbers or the digits of pi. It was all so painfully...clever. Still, I enjoyed it a lot, especially the Vancouver-bashing. I've never visited Vancouver, nor does it necessarily deserve bashing, but he was so terribly good at it. I was, frankly, envious of the characters in the book, even though he was ridiculing them to some extent. Some days I just want a job, a cubicle, a set time schedule and a paycheck. But then I realize their probably is something to the painful emptiness in these people's lives that so many contemporary authors want to depict.
Nearly finished reading Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age as well. It's actually from 1995, but feels new. Not really as good as Cryptonomicon. It has an utterly different feel from his other books. I'm trying to imagine what sort of audience he intended it for. He doesn't indulge in the extensive footnoting-in-the-text that becomes so tiresome and fascinating in the System of the World trilogy (which I gave up on halfway through the second book).
Also plowing through all the major stories of H.P. Lovecraft. I read them to my ladylove while she does dishes. It makes chores go faster when hearing about unspeakable tentacled things imposing horrificly wrong geometry on our perceptions of the universe. (And yes, I offer to do the dishes, but she likes to hear me read.)
Presently trapped in my carrel, trying to care about the 93rd distinction of Gratian's Decretum. Why, gods, why couldn't I have picked an intesting topic for my thesis?!
current mood:  thunkin
current music: Elton John - Empty Sky
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| Thursday, May 11th, 2006
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9:20 am - I drew a pig
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| Wednesday, April 26th, 2006
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5:00 pm - Efficaciter procrastino
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I'm trying to find an easy way to explain dactylic hexameters in my K'zoo paper. I'm talking about ways of translating medieval didactic poetry, and I want to address the (near) impossibility of converting Latin verse into English verse.
However, there were some attempts to "dignify" English with quantitative verse even though we don't really have a quantitative language. No less than Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote the following:
William, my teacher, my friend ! dear William and dear Dorothea !
Smooth out the folds of my letter, and place it on desk or on table ;
Place it on table or desk ; and your right hands loosely half-closing,
Gently sustain them in air, and extending the digit didactic,
Rest it a moment on each of the forks of the five-forkéd left hand,
Twice on the breadth of the thumb, and once on the tip of each finger ;
Read with a nod of the head in a humouring recitativo ;
And, as I live, you will see my hexameters hopping before you.
This is a galloping measure ; a hop, and a trot, and a gallop!
I am equal parts delighted and horrified. That last line will haunt me forever.
current mood: amused
current music: Soul Coughin - El Oso
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| Wednesday, March 29th, 2006
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4:08 pm - And I join the queue...Mmm...queueueyey
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*How does the world see me?
Rob Zombie - Superbeast (Seriously. This came up first. Fuckin rad.)
*Will I have a happy life?
Sugarcubes - Dream TV (Kinda works...)
*What do my friends really think of me?
Tom Waits - Paris Mood (Un de Fromage) (Cheesy. Fromagey)
*Do people secretly lust after me?
Maria Callas - "Je Veux Vivre Dans Ce Reve" from Gounod's "Romeo et Juliette" (apt, I suppose)
*How can I make myself happy?
Kate Bush - An Architect's Dream (when I was junior high I wanted to be an architect...creepy)
*What should I do with my life?
Badly Drawn Boy - Something to Talk About (nothing in particular, just anything momentous)
*Will I ever have children?
Bob Dylan - The Man in Me (This is just plain, outright disturbing)
*What is some good advice for me?
Dead Can Dance - How Fortunate the Man with None (Woohoo! Spend all my money--now!)
*How will I be remembered?
Johnny Cash - Don't Take Your Guns to Town (a fitting end for a pacifist)
*What is my signature dancing song?
Cyndi Lauper - Girls Just Wanna Have Fun (Again, I'm serious. This came up with one click.)
*What do I think my current theme song is?
ABBA - Money, Money, Money (Now my so-called musical "taste" is just getting too obvious. I hate you, Meme.)
*What does everyone else think my current theme song is?
They Might Be Giants - Sensurround (don't know what to make of this)
*What song will play at my funeral?
The Doors - Riders on the Storm (after chasing too many tornadoes)
*What type of men/women do I like?
Madonna - Sky Fits Heaven (um, eunuch angels?)
*What is my day going to be like?
Billie Holiday - Keeps on Rainin' (well, maybe this is tomorrow's forecast)
current mood: amused
current music: Blondie - Atomic Remix
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| Wednesday, March 22nd, 2006
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4:25 pm - More flogging and golfing
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I know my question the other day about destroying sports equipment (and I'm using "sport" in the broadest sense of the word) may have seemed a timewasting, one-off, but it actually is something that I do think about and has stayed with me for a long time.
When I was young I lived in an ugly puke-green house in-between a golf course and Yerkes Observatory, home of the largest telescope in the world. Large, but it can't see very far, since it's a century old, and in Wisconsin. Go figure.
The small patches of woods around my house and the golf course were inevitable treasure troves of lost golfballs. Old duffers don't have the energy to trapise into the woods to find their Titleist (pronounced Tit-Lee-Ist, according to the Venerable Beavis). My sister and I would collect them by the hundreds, sort them by quality and sell them by the dozen in old egg cartons to golfers showing up at the course. Often, I'm sure, we were selling back to them their own lost balls. Emasculating, no?
Some of the balls, though, were too damaged to ever see the face of 3-iron again, most probably caught by the golf courses iron legions of lawn-mowing doom. I would go deep down the hill of our long back yard, into the weeds my dad didn't feel like cutting, and dissect these already injured golfballs. Really, it was for the best. They don't feel pain any more. It took all my 7-year-old strength, and sometimes a carving knife stolen from the kitchen (hence my hiding in the shrubbery) to finish ripping off the rest of the outer skin of the golf ball not yet excoriated by the so-called "gardeners". Most golfballs have a heavy plastic outer skin about 1/8 inch thick, textured with an average of 336 dimples. This number has, to me, a far more evil significance than any 666. (On a side note, I stood in the middle of the entry court of the Louvre trying to count all the triangular panes of glass in I.M. Pei's infamous pyramid. I'm pretty sure there are nearly 700, and not 666 as its enemies claim.)
Beneath that layer is a good half-inch thickness of a rubber-band like material which is coiled in one long strand around the core. If the ball is quite mutilated, once you remove the skin, these intestines will automatically unfurl at a blinding (possibly literally) speed and attempt to leap from your hand. This is the source of the expression "Shuffle off the mortal coil." It originally was "shuffel offe the golfe-bal coyl" in the early days of professional golf in the 16th century. The golf ball can actually survive months without its skin, but once the coil is severed, it rapidly releases its admittedly tenuous life spirit.
I also believe this is the source of Yeats' "widening gyre." His editor demanded that he write about a falcon, as more readers would appreciate its obviously poetic symbolism, but surely the great bard had experience the aweful twisting and untwining of an expiring golf ball as it spins farther and farther in a widening arc around your head as you hold one end of the encircling band. But I will leave that question to the mini-Harold Blooms.
What truly matters is the vital heart of the creature, found no longer pulsing beneath the twisted viscera: a small, hollow ball with a course, striated surface etched with the tightened pattern of the rubber band. If you shake this ball, you will hear a sloshing, a slurping, a slithering of dark ichor at the core of the sport, unknown even to most of its cultists. This is where my dissection grew especially horrific. Despite my attempts at secrecy, my father knew all about my vile experimentation. He tried to warn me off this path to madness by telling me that the juices of the stilled heart were poison. Not that he expected me to drink them (or did he?), but he warned that they were poison merely to smell, to touch, dare I say, to see. This paternal verboten ist only served to goad me closer to unlocking the liquid archana of an ancient Scottish game. Surely it is no coincidence that golf found its nascence in the broad expanses south of Edinburgh, encircling the Templar chapel at Rosslyn, beneath which beats still some nameless heart of either eternal good or bottomless evil?
The knife slips only with great difficulty into the thick skin of the core--often I pricked my own flesh first, feeling no pain as I also saw myself as a mere coiled toy of the gods, beaten about, only to be mowed down and uncoiled at last by an uncaring lawncare deity--and a viscous jelly slides over my fingers, cold, foetid, yet not so much as I expected. There is a freshness, a sharp tang and sting, at the still centre of the real, lying disembowled in my small, quivering palm.
current mood:  en theos
current music: Spiritualized-Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space
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| Friday, March 17th, 2006
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11:17 am - The Rock Lobster still wins, claws down
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Just when the world has gotten you totally down, something like this happens.
I've got two words: Kiwa Hirsuta.
And in other geek news, I'm pumping mental ferrum for this afternoon's Latin Scrabble tournament. It's a damn shame that I drew a bye and won't play till next week. Bastard random selection. Ah well, I will still work hard at looming malevolently and latinately over the other players.
And in the eminent philosopher's words: "Watch out for that piranha/There goes a narwhale/Here comes a Bikini Whale."
Truth. Beauty. Dork Rock.
current mood:  Parsed man, totally parsed
current music: B-52s
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(comment on this)
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| Wednesday, March 15th, 2006
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1:28 pm
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Heh.
I usually correct typos in my posts, but I like "next doot" in the last one.
It reminds of a bunch of backup singers, like Lou Reed's, going "doot doot-doot doot-doot" and so on, while one is always thinking too hard about the "next doot" and thus misses it.
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1:24 pm - Sportive dismemberment
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Question for all y'alls who look at my entries:
Have any of you ever seen the inside of a golf ball, or tried to take one apart?
I've been haunted of late by memories from childhood of uncoiled golf ball hearts littering our backyard. We lived next doot to a golf course.
Or maybe I should broaden the scope. Have any of you intentionally dismantled a sports-related object so that it would no longer work.
(And yes, I got my worst grades in gym class.)
Odd question, but this is one of those all-too-common "Am I all alone here?" moments.
current mood:  pencilled
current music: Eduardo Panigua, Jardin de Al-Andalus
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| Monday, March 13th, 2006
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12:40 pm - Some thoughts in the rain about writing stories
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Thinking about stories, be they myth, legend, or the cobwebbing of facts we call history. So many things, places and, of course people, are fraught with stories, sometimes worn merely as a coat, sometimes forming the entire spine or Ygdrasil. Wondering where my stories are, where I could find them back in Wisconsin. Does the Midwest even have stories, does it have storytellers? I look back and what seems so omnipresent in my past is dirt, much clearer now in a city where I am so conscious of the lack of dirt. But that dirt is only dirt, good dirt for growing soy, corn and marijuana, but it’s not the soil of ages past, soft yet impenetrable foundation of countless storied generations.
Is it too much to ask for the hedge of my youth to be clung about with Arthur’s Vines, or for the many lakes in which I fearlessly swum to harbour unspeakable beasts of a time before time? Yes, but I still would like to walk through my town as if through a poem, hardly an epic but worth dwelling on/in, and say THAT house is where great things happened, dark deeds were wrought in THAT ditch by THAT pond, love unconquered burst, of all places, behind that crumbling cenotaph.
Maybe they did, but no one remembers, no one recalls, no one even mythologizes, for fear of stepping outside the bounds of normality, for fear of being called that most dreaded of names: “Interesting.” (It’s an insult where I come from—my father’s equivalent word was “Colorful”.)
Not sure where this is going, or what I’m looking for, but I suppose I’m making a demand of myself that, if I ever were to write again, at length, stories and poetry, that they be borne of my own soil, of mildewed Milwaukee attics, of Green Bays rather a ominous tinge of brown, of the new Lake Geneva, not the old (whose stories are legion and of whose myths I cannot partake), where ancient anglers whisper about fish 20 ft. long that eat drunken canoers who capsize late at night, dragged down by waters too cold to buoy their sotted flesh.
This hunting for stories should not always be like turning over large rocks—the unremarkably lichened granite replaced by crawling horrors, albeit tiny, who were never to see the light of day—for there needs to be some search, however desultory, for a verdant garden, no matter how overgrown, or to be more honest, a search for badly-paved small town streets, kids smoking up behind the gym, skeletons of elms dead 50 years (there I go again), of Al the mayor in his mesh cap, making the rounds of the town green (I never knew his last name).
Every day I read something more about the 12th or 13th century, about bishops and kings and my infamous archdeacons, and, for the most part, what survives concerns only the great, the beautiful, the horrible, the momentous. It makes my world seem so small, my deeds so insignificant. Maybe mine are, but the world which made me is not. I need to look anew, with my historian’s eye, at the small towns and schools of my childhood, wedged between glacial lakes, golf courses, and mile after mile of grain.
current mood: contemplative
current music: Cocteau Twins, Heaven or Las Vegas
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(10 comments | comment on this)
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| Thursday, March 9th, 2006
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12:39 pm - Synchronicities be damned
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Just had the enlightening and/or benighted experience of sitting through Prof. Silano's lecture on the birth of the medieval inquisition, processing it with half of my mind, while using the other half to read through a couple of Lovecraft's shorter, early stories. By the end of the hour, Silano's soothing Milanese lilt was wrapped inextricably together with nameless chthonic tentacles.
And on that note...back to my lentil and ratatouille salad.
Dag.
Woot.
current mood:  chthonic
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10:30 am - Good news
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Woohoo! Yet another half-valid excuse to avoid my thesis!
Prof. Akbari asked me this week to assist her with yet another of her ambitious SSHRC projects, this time an edition of Book 15 of Bartholomaeus Anglicus's De rerum proprietatibus. That's the section on world geography, including all sorts of wonderful monsters on the far side of Asia, and a long description of the topography of Paradise. Make's you wonder how ol' Bart could find this stuff out.
I'll be transcribing and collating several manuscripts, translating, maybe do some editing. In a word, my favorite kinds of procrastination. I wish nearly every day that I had found some wonderful text which I could have edited and discussed for my thesis, rather than this rambling, disjointed blather on ecclesiastical hierarchies.
Stoopid history.
Ignored for another day--The rain makes me happy. Flowers coming up everywhere, after only a day of warmth.
I need to find a new set of Mood pictures. The little Goth guy never quite looks like the selected mood. He certainly doesn't appear busy.
current mood:  busy
current music: Cowboy Bebop
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, March 7th, 2006
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12:26 pm - The Little Things--Suck
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You know how THEY always say that it's the little things that matter? Unfortunately, THEY are always referring to the happy, cute little things which you're supposed to stare at long enough to forget the lurking horror of mere existence.
THEY forget to mention that it's also the little things which will totally ruin your day. I just discovered that my brand-new ear plug headphones are broken. Something, some...cat, has chewed through the wire. I'm so angry right now that I can't possibly work, and must peruse Livejournal pages for several hours.
Yes, that's the only way to deal with righteous, nigh unlimited fury.
What makes me even angrier is that the cut in the wire is a bit clean for little kitty teeth, which suggests that it may in some way have been my fault, a concept so absurd that even its theoretical existence fills me with loathing so abysmally dark my eyesight has revoked the dominion of my brain and must wander aimlessly about my Robarts carrel, staring blankly at anything other than my thesis.
current mood:  angry
current music: nothing. freakin nothing
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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| Monday, March 6th, 2006
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5:35 pm - Wow, this made my evening
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<td align="center">You are Andie Walsh from Pretty in Pink
You are original and clever person. Although your family may not be able to buy you all the cool stuff you want, you are able to make cool stuff for yourself. Like a rocking 80’s prom dress.
Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com</td>
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10:45 am - Pick your favorite blasphemy
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a) God is my Livejournal
b) Livejournal is my God
c) Livejournal is a god
d) Livejournal is a heathen idol which must be destroyed
e) Livejournal is a heathen idol which I bought at a local nicknack shop and keep on my dashboard
f) Livejournal is a many-tentacled horror of the soul-swallowing darkness
current mood: extracted
current music: Chris Isaak, Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing
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| Sunday, March 5th, 2006
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7:23 pm
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Quote of the week:
Monkey 1: I hear Tom Wolfe is speaking at the Lincoln Center tonight.
Monkey 2: [gesturing dramatically]
Monkey 1: Well of course we're going to throw poo at him!
This comes from "Madagascar", an absolutely UNfunny film, which I mistakenly thought would be an adequate waste of a Saturday evening. Emily asked for something we didn't have to think about.
Nonetheless, these lines were worth the $3.50. We nearly choked to death with laughter.
Somebody would have to come scrape us off the floor and prevent the cats from eating our corpses.
It's even more priceless if you can picture Tom Wolfe looking the prig in his Capote-esque white suit.
current mood:  okay
current music: Oscar pre-show inanities
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(comment on this)
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| Saturday, March 4th, 2006
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3:12 pm - more time wasted...
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Wizard
40% Combativeness, 40% Sneakiness, 94% Intellect, 22% Spirituality | Brilliant! You are a Wizard!
Wizards are spells-casters who study powerful arcane magic. While Wizards tend to be pretty fragile, some of those spells can pack quite a punch. Unlike Clerics, Wizards aren’t as good at fixing people as they are at breaking them, so watch where you toss that fireball…
Your most distinctive trait is your intelligence. You're probably well learned and logical, if perhaps a bit fragile.
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My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: | You scored higher than 23% on Combativeness | | You scored higher than 51% on Sneakiness | | You scored higher than 94% on Intellect | | You scored higher than 17% on Spirituality |
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current mood: skittish
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(7 comments | comment on this)
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| Friday, March 3rd, 2006
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9:43 pm - Reflection
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Good lord, that poem from this morning blows a whole herd of the proverbial quadrupeds. I still like the first two lines, but it took a none too graceful swan dive after that. Have you ever seen swans trying to fly? You'll forget everything you heard about grace if you see those bloated feathery VW buses trying to gain lift. Keep em in the water, I say.
I'm not nearly as upset as my little mood feller would indicate.
current mood:  discontent
current music: Maria Callas
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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
ypocras's journal
porcine
![http://drawapig.desktopcreatures.com/gallery/large.asp?id=1070330&p=0&hof=1&q=personality+test][IMG]http://drawapig.desktopcreatures.com/gallery/2006/5/10/1070330.jpg[/IMG]](http://drawapig.desktopcreatures.com/gallery/large.asp?id=1070330&p=0&hof=1&q=personality+test][IMG]http://drawapig.desktopcreatures.com/gallery/2006/5/10/1070330.jpg[/IMG]){kind=link}