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Yes, this post is part of the general Oulipo conspiracy. You should be part of it too. Oulipo, oulipo, oulipo.
On AIM the other day Jessamyn showed me her gang's 1000 Blank White Cards deck, The Seattle Electric Grimmeldeck -- there are some really clever ones in there, as there are a lot of clever people involved. There is a great deck online from Madison and here is the Boston deck appears to be out of order. There are a lot of links to other decks here, but if you know of any other decks out there that haven't been recognized, let me know and I will post a list. The map on the 1KBWC site hasn't been updated since at least June 1, 2002. Yes, I will scan more of our cards in (we have a pretty paltry stack right now, but we're just starting.)
Tonight we (Ben, Eric, Stewart and I) started one of our own out of a pile of defunct business cards, though we were only at it for 10 minutes. Then we played them (Eric drew this card, but managed to wiggle out of any actual rolling of frozen peas).
Out on the beach later on the four of us invented a game called Dos Hockey. First you need a Dos Pesos -- though any energetic dog < 5 lb. will do. Two people stand with their legs about three feet apart and the other two people try to chase Dos Pesos through the goalposts. Huzzah! Spiking the Dos in the end zone is not permitted.
This page of Steve McCaffrey's Carnival is a thing of beauty.
If you are at all interested in the pressing question:
you should, by all means, be my guest.
In order of title length:
• Shark 4
• XEclogue by Lisa Robertson (designed by Dean!)
• Short Haul Engine by Karen Solie
• The Captain Lands in Paradise by Sarah Manguso
• How Phenomena Appear to Unfold by Leslie Scalapino
• spaces in the light
said to be where one/
comes from by Stephen Ratcliffe
Shark contains some photographs of a new series of Nina Katchadourian's book stacks. Katchadourian visits a library, rearranges books so that their spines reveal a hidden narrative, and photographs them. There are some here and here and here.
In preparation for an interview with Christian Bök on Monday, I've been listening to these amazing sound works that he made. Bök won the Griffin this year, one of the biggest prizes in poetry ($40k!) for his book Eunoia -- an Oulipian exercise with an incredible number of constraints: each of the five chapters used only one vowel, AEIO & U in that order. 'Eunoia' means "beautiful thinking" and is the shortest word in the English language that contains all five vowels. In the end notes Bök writes:
Sadly, he was unable to find places for parallax, belvedere, gingivitis*, monochord and tumulus.
Among many other achievements in sound poetry and conceptual artwork (building books out of Rubik's cubes and Legos), Bök has created artificial languages for two TV shows: Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley's Amazon.
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* Whenever I see the word "gingivitis" I think of the time Barry White was a guest on David Letterman and Dave did his usual Top Ten countdown, which was "The Top Ten Unsexy Words that Barry White Can Make Sound Sexy" --Barry White read them -- and #1 was "gingivitis".
An impressive collection of pictures of Peace demonstrations from around the world, from Jakarta to Rekjavik.
By chance I was led to this Mirror Project picture of Derek and his cousin Sarah, and while they're quite sillycute, what really impressed me was the exhaustive exhibit of photographs on the walls behind them (also seen in this one), the home-as-family-museum.
Paging forwards and backwards from these, I found more great photos such as this one of Japanese stuffed animal fetuses in some kind of incubator and this lovely sulphur-lit ode to underground alienation.
Sympathy for the life of bacteria
• You have 0.001 times as much DNA as a eukaryotic cell.
• You live in a medium which has a viscosity about equal to asphalt.
• You have a wonderful "motor" for swimming. Unfortunately, your motor can only run in two directions and at one speed. In forward, you are propelled in one direction at 30 mph. In reverse your motor makes you turn flips or tumble. You can only do one or the other. You cannot stop.
• While you can "learn", you divide every twenty minutes and have to restart your education.
• You can have sex, with males possessing a sexual apparatus for transferring genetic information to receptive females. However, since you are both going 30 mph it is difficult to find each other. Furthermore, if you are male, nature gave you a severe problem. Everytime you mate with a female, she turns into a male. In bacteria, "maleness" is an infective venereal disease.
• Also, at fairly high frequencies, spontaneous mutations cause you to turn into a female.
• Eukaryotes have enslaved some of your "brethren" to use as energy generating mitochondria and chloroplasts. They are also using you as a tool in a massive effort to understand genetics. The method of recombinant DNA is designed to exploit you for their own good. There is no SPCA to protect you.
• The last laugh may be yours. You have spent three and a half billion years practicing chemical warfare. Humans thought that antibiotics would end infectious diseases, but the overuse of drugs has resulted in the selection of drug resistant bacteria. They didn't realize that this was only the first battle, and now the war is ready to begin.
• Humans think this is their era. A more truthful statement would be that we all live in the age of bacteria.
(via Alex Wright)
I am food! I am food! I am food!
I eat food! I eat food! I eat food!
My name never dies, never dies, never dies!
I was born first in the first of the worlds, earlier than the gods, in the belly of what has no death!
Whoever gives me away has helped me the most!
I, who am food, eat the eater of food!
I have overcome this world!
He who knows this shines like the sun.
Such are the laws of the mystery!
There is something irresistible about this fragment from the Taittiriya Upanishad. I know nothing about it (it is one of the epigraphs to Lewis Hyde's The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property), but I keep reading it over and over. The unexpected exclamation "I am food!" three times followed by the "I eat food!" three times -- the joyful kooky excess, the exclamation points, the gleeful good humor of this "I" -- and all this as a vehicle for conveying a Great Mystery, it's just so great! I am charmed. Would that all wisdom were delivered this way.
"The root of our English word 'mystery' is a Greek verb muein, which means to close the mouth," Hyde writes in the conclusion of the book,"Dictionaries tend to explain the connection by ponting out that the initiates to ancient mysteries were sworn to silence, but the root may also indicate, it seems to me, that what the initiate learns at a mystery cannot be talked about. It can be shown, it can be witnessed or revealed, it cannot be explained."
But then, if you flip back to the beginning, here comes this rambunctious "I", shouting and laughing like it's all a big joke, saying clear as day: I am food, I eat food, so are you. A clearer explanation you could not ask for. O wonderful indeed.
I've started a new weblog, Poems about War, where I will be posting poems from our most eloquent poets, speaking against war, for peace, for life, against death.
I finally got around to reading 20-30 of the poems on the Poets Against the War site, and as I had suspected, there are a lot of facile, uncooked poems there (and in my sampling, two or three that were downright awful and that should never never have been released from the confinement of their authors' hard drive. I'm being kind. Why be kind? It was more like 10, really. 12. Poets! We cannot afford to lose any more audience!) There were 8,000 poems submitted to the site within two weeks of Sam Hamill soliciting them (and there are 10,000 now). Two weeks doesn't seem long enough to write a proper poem. Several months seems about right. High standards did not have to go out the window with the master narrative. Democracy does not depend on embracing crumminess. And if everybody's talking, nobody's listening.
Fortunately for us, the world already has many, many good poems against war. Hit it Pablo:
Keeping Quiet
by Pablo Neruda (translated by Alastair Reid)
And now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.
For once on the face of the earth
let's not speak in any language,
let's stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.
It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines,
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.
Fisherman in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would not look at his hurt hands.
Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victory with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.
What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about,
I want no truck with death.
If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.
Now I'll count up to twelve,
and you keep quiet and I will go.
Artistic Sign Language: Signs of the Coming Bush Fall by Bernard Weiner
Sign is symbol, symbol is sign. Consider:
• Powell goes to the United Nations so that the missile attacks on Baghdad and Basra can begin -- and, in the lobby of that grand building, Picasso's "Guernica" painting, which depicts the horrific results of the Nazi bombing of that Spanish town, is covered over prior to Powell's arrival. No use embarrassing the U.S. by reminding folks of what's in store for Iraqi civilians.
• Ashcroft, in his police-state zeal, begins shredding the Constitution's Bill of Rights with its guarantees of due-process of law, and, early on, has the huge lobby statue of the Goddess of Justice draped and covered over because of its exposed breast. How appropriate to shroud Justice so that she can't see what's being done in her name.
• First Lady Laura Bush cancels a poetry workshop at the White House because she suspects that a number of America's high-profile poets, in the sacred grounds of that seat of power, will raise the issue of the coming war with Iraq.
Did you notice the thread that unites these events? In all three cases, symbolic shrouds are placed over art, so that nobody will notice the bad things that are being done in American citizens' names.
But art knows. Art sees beyond, often before the general public is aware of what's going on. (Often before the artists themselves are conscious of what they're revealing.) Art points us in new directions that make us think and question.
To those inclined more to rigid-order mentality, art is a virus that needs to be stamped out, or, at the least, tightly controlled. ("When I hear the word culture," said Nazi leader Goebbels, "I reach for my revolver.")
I'd like to plug a book here that I haven't read. It's Wintering by Kate Moses, and it is a novel about the last few months in the life of Sylvia Plath. I want to plug it because a) Kate was one of the best writers I worked with at Salon (you can look in the archives for more of her work and you can read an interview with Kate by another one of Salon's excellent writers, Laura Miller); b) I like Kate and c) I like Sylvia Plath. She also has a great web site (designed by my friends Mignon & Karen). Kate is doing a lot of touring all over the country, and the book is already being translated in to what? 5 languages? Congratulations, Kate.
By special request, Caterina's tea recommendations for Camellia sinensis aficionados & addicts, insomniacs and sensualists. Coffee is for stock brokers, tea is for poets! I only drink tea made from loose leaf tea, never tea bags, and use a strainer in my teapot, over which I pour boiling water. Most people let black tea steep only 3-4 minutes; I like my tea rich and dark, and so let it steep for 5-7. I generally drink it with 2% milk -- cream is too heavy for tea -- and always drink it from a china teacup, never a mug.
• Mariage Frères makes the best tea in the world; they do not, however, make the best web sites in the world -- browser crashes, insufficient selections, pop-up windows. And only the French part of the site is functioning. Best to go visit the shop on the Rue Bourg-Tibourg in the Marais in Paris, where linen-suited shopmen will get you whatever you like from ancient black tins. My favorites: Montagne D'Or, Eros, Bolero, Ruschka, Perles du Jasmin. The list goes on and on. The Perles du Jasmin are hand-rolled, and burst into beautiful spiders in your cup. This is ne plus ultra of tea, and what I mostly drink. I stock up when I can. You can get this tea in Vancouver (and Victoria) at the Bernstein & Gold in Yaletown when they have it in stock. It apparently takes Mariage Frères 6 months to fulfill an order and then they never send what has been ordered.
• Peet's Assam Golden Tip is an excellent morning tea. It is a full-bodied, extra-rich tea that goes well with milk, and with bickies. Peet's Assam Extra Fancy is almost twice as much and lacks the je ne sais quoi of the Golden Tip. I hadn't seen the Assam Mangalam Estate until today -- they don't have it in the stores as far as I know --but I'll have to try it and see if it is good.
• Golden Moon Rose Tea is wonderful, aromatic tea -- it smells just like roses -- and is excellent for daydreaming, thinking and writing poetry. Good afternoon tea, if you don't have anything pressing to do. Doesn't stand up very well to milk, so I like to drink this one with sugar. I buy this in bulk, since bulk tea on Golden Moon is such a good deal.
• Golden Moon Rasa Sinharaja Stronger, more caramel tea. Stands up well to milk, and is considered a "scholar's tea" -- good for novel writing, if you really want to sit down and start getting some brainwork done. Also good with sugar.
• Golden Moon White Tea White tea is lighter than regular black tea and doesn't do well with milk or sugar; it is a little like drinking a green tea, though not as earthy. This Golden Moon version has chrysanthemum in it, which is quite lovely aromatically. I find this tea very calming, so it is good for those days when you feel harried, or upset and want to sit still and breathe. I wanted to recommend Golden Moon's Shangri-La tea, but they don't seem to carry it anymore.
• Kousmichoff Russian Morning Tea is good for waking up to, and tends to be the one selected by those people who don't like "stinky" tea, i.e. those Lipton and Red Rose drinking guests of yours (It's OK, you can speak freely. We're all tea snobs here) but that you will also enjoy drinking. A good everyday, full-bodied tea without a lot of extra "tea experience". Robust enough for people who are used to drinking coffee.
• If you want more "tea experience", go for the Kousmichoff Anastasia Tea. I haven't been able to get my hands on this tea for a while -- I bought it at Meinhardt's in Vancouver, and they've yet to restock. But I was crazy for it while I had that one tin.
• Lindsay's Estate Decaffeinated Earl Grey. There are times when you know you must go to sleep but you also must drink tea. This is the only decaffeinated tea I've found that doesn't taste tepid and wrung-out. I'm not a big fan of herbal teas -- besides your standard peppermint and chamomile, which I get in bulk from some Swiss company -- I forget the name now, I always empty the boxes into glass jars when I get them. This tea is my personal Sleepy Time tea. Celestial Seasonings has never made much money off of me.
I could go on and on. There are more; I haven't even gotten into green tea yet (I quite like Republic of Tea's Moroccan Mint and your regular dime-store Genmai cha), but this should be enough get you started.
Poems Not Fit for the White House -- Look at the lineup: Robert Creeley, Jorie Graham, Galway Kinnell, Youseff Komanukaa, Stanley Kunitz, Ann Lauterbach, Mos Def, Sharon Olds, Robert Pinsky, Wallace Shawn, Anne Waldman, C.K. Williams... It's pretty incredible, like getting a whole year of 92nd Street Y all at once. Laura Bush's canceling of the poetry reading at the White House has done more to raise the profile of poetry than anything in recent memory -- or, more likely, the reactions against it. Foremost among them: Sam Hamill of Copper Canyon and his Poets Against the War Project.
Made a cheesecake. Worked on a site for Shamina. Read The Iceman by Haruki Murakami in last week's New Yorker. Watched both The Godfather and The Godfather 2. Had dinner with Danny. Finished another wall sculpture in anticipation of studio visit. Read The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property by Lewis Hyde, recommended by Paul (excellent). Had brunch at Milestones. Walked Dos Pesos. Bought another pallet of books from Powell's. Worked on Wail, Batten, Sport, Clip, Clasp, Sunder, Dwindle, Die, writing two sections I was satisfied with. Wondered who the hell the postman is, and how he is related to Hundred. Started designing my portfolio site in anticipation of my Landed Immigrancy status. Read Fun with Problems by Robert Stone. Wrote a list of things to do this coming week. Drank 5 pots of tea.
I must confess that I like GNE too.
The equivalent of the French esprit d'escalier.
-- Moshe. Idel, "Reification of Language in Jewish Mysticism." In, S.T. Katz, Editor, Mysticism and Language. New York, 1992.
I was overjoyed yesterday when the postal worker rang my doorbell -- ending a long string of never-attempting-delivery and just-leaving-claim-form which resulted in my having to go to the post office and wait in line for every package I received. I'd made two complaints to Canada Post that this was happening -- apparently they subcontract some of their delivery services and whichever subcontractor was responsible for my building wasn't doing his job. In any event, I was so happy to get my delivery and told Stewart the story and he said, "If you were a Superhero, your superpower would be Complaint!" which is not necessarily true, I prefer to think of it as the superpower of drawing-things-to-people's-attention, but it is true that I have gotten hotels to reduce their charges after discovering mildew in the bathroom, or non-functioning DSL, and once -- I still don't know how I did this -- I wrangled a seat in an overbooked flight in a section of the airplane I didn't even know existed, up a little spiral staircase on one of those gigantic Boeings. It wasn't business class, and it wasn't first class, it was Royal Class where there were only six leather loungers with personal video screens which were occupied by a Chinese businessman, and Italian countess, a sheikh, an actress and me. Occasionally a flight attendant would come around and offer us foie gras and champagne. I felt like I had entered a parallel universe in which an Agatha Christie novel was unfolding, certain that at any moment I would hear the screams of a passenger who'd found a body in an overhead bin.
I think I inherited this drawing-things-to-people's-attention tendency from my father who once engaged in a 15-year correspondence with The State of Maine, disputing some property tax or other, I forget the details. Endless letters of wearying detail -- "In reference to paragraph three, line four of my letter of May 17, 1986, reiterated in my letter of November 18th, 1989 paragraph two line two..." He comes from a long line of lawyers and judges, though he doesn't practice law himself. "What is this?" he would exclaim, exasperated, having received yet another letter. And, as he read, the solution would dawn on him like revelation, whereupon he'd declare: "I will write them a letter!" He eventually wore them down -- probably three generations of tax clerks -- by out-bureaucratizing them. He's the master.
As my mother always liked to say: "It never hurts to ask."
Creepy Valentines from yesteryear. (via travelers diagram)
I was over at Judith's site and followed her link to San Francisco Trees, and what should be on the front page, but the tree across the street from my house in San Francisco, which is on the way to Judith's house. How marvellous!
Unable to write this evening (perhaps because of writing so much yesterday), I have been idly looking at some famous fragmentary body parts , including some Archaic Torsos of Apollo: such as the ones here, here and here. This is the Miletus torso in the Louvre, which I think is the Rilke torso. And also having ganders at some of the Big Famous Statues Missing Body Parts such as the Winged Victory of Samothrace (here's a picture that includes the piece from the boat, from the Louvre web site); The Venus de Milo; And my all-time favorite, Fragmentary Head of a Queen in yellow jasper at the Metropolitan. (Juliet brought me a postcard with an even lovelier photograph back from New York, which is here somewhere). What am I doing looking at fragmentary body parts at 2 in the morning? It's not completely clear. Well, this guy has an explanation:
-- Jas Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer
I guess I was feeling dull and wanted some sublimity. Anne Carson says something different from our friend Jas. First she writes "Sublime quotes are their own reason for being," a sentiment, this weblog certainly shares. Then she quotes Longinus, from On the Sublime:
She then says:
Mr. Elsner, with his apartness and exclusion and subject-object, seems very outside. Carson and Longinus would be climbing right in to revel there, and Rilke having been climbed into by the Sublime, is the seen, the object-subject and is left on that terrifying verge of Being, Being between Self and Is.
Mycological Studies looks like the perfect book for me! A book of poems about mushrooms.
During that wander up and down Market Street in San Francisco I mentioned two or three weeks back, when I found The Letters of Wallace Stevens on a mailbox, I went into Books, Inc. and found on the poetry shelves My Life by Lyn Hejinian. Which I read in its entirety on the plane back to Canada. It went like this:
These uninflected, seemingly flat and paratactic sentences seemed wonderfully artless to me, a straightforward reporting of "the facts", ideas, observations as a child might speak them (or as I have found myself doing when speaking foreign languages badly). There were few question marks, and no exclamation points. There was a form of punctuation in the sentences heading each sequence, such as As for we who "love to be astonished", which were repeated intermittently in the texts that followed. I was quite rapt. It is a lovely book.
I have just finished reading The Cell (here are some of the poems) and I am about to start on The Cold of Poetry. Neither of these are in print, unfortunately, though I've read that A Border Comedy, which is, is excellent. I wonder if this print-on-demand technology will ever take off; it would be a boon for poetry.
they are together
they are talking
they are hugging
they are making everything they like.
--Alan, Toronto cab driver
Puppy Love at Harrumph (don't tell Dos Pesos). And even more puppy love.
- E.M. Cioran, History and Utopia
Our protagonist Young Törless, whose first name we never learn -- we learn no one's first name in The Confusions of Young Törless -- is at an Austrian boarding school at the turn-of-the-century, that he attends in the hopes of improving his prospects by associating with his 'betters'. He has made two friends, Beineberg the fascist mystic and Reiting the jovial sadist, who are, quite intentionally, practicing the deployment of power over other human beings. Initially Törless fears and admires them but simultaneously he feels a certain aversion towards them that he can't quite identify. He is in love with his mother, and hates to part from her. He visits a prostitute regularly, who "stinks of the barnyard" and whom he alternately desires and despises, but who he gets mixed up in his mind with his mother. Törless doesn't know what he thinks, what he wants, who he likes -- we're in a bildungsroman here -- but Beineberg and Reiting, with their unerring predator's instinct for the weakest member of a herd, singles out a boy named Basini to humiliate. They may or may not have caught him stealing. Törless, attracted and repelled by their careful plan of degradation and abuse, goes along, and finds himself up in the attic night after night watching and/or participating in the merciless rape, torture and humiliation of fragile Basini. It's a prophetic novel, a flinchless examination of the culture of discipline and masculinity leading up to The Great War, The Freikorps and eventually, The Third Reich.
Grab your Freud, your Kant, your Nietzsche, and your Klaus Theweleit. You'll be needing both Volume One and Volume Two of Male Fantasies for this look into a pretty fearsome place. Theweleit? Who's that? you ask. Theweleit wrote the two volume Male Fantasies which ain't no Best of Penthouse Forum. It's a study of the emotional bases of fascism, examining the cult of masculinity, the hatred of femininity and the discipline-to-destroy evinced by the proto-Third Reich Freikorps. He comes to the conclusion that the Nazis -- we're talking the regular folks, not the individual rulers -- weren't oblivious, in denial, reluctant or otherwise resistant to do what they did; Au contraire. They were doing exactly what they wanted to do, a conclusion that is simultaneously very so tell me something I didn't already know and utterly bone-chilling.
Come to think of it, while you're attempting to wrap your beleaguered brain around the battlecries our own President, you oughta grab your Theweleit and read closely too.
More on Young Törless later. I keep going like this, I'm going to run out of pixels. Read it. It's a fascinating book and Musil's first novel, written when he was 25. It's a stop-gap on my way to reading, you know, that Man Without Qualities thing, which I've been putting off and putting off as is not yet available in comic book format.
I suspect the Canadian Cabinet magazine deliveries are sent out last. But go have a look at their new web site! It has a number of their older articles online, as well as many things that are not in the magazine. This issue has Childhood as its theme. The last Pharmacopia-themed issue was excellent.
I am constantly driven nuts by the fact that I don't live in New York. I mean, I'd like to go to the The Way We Never Were: Nostagia and Modernity Conference too. But then again when I was living in New York I was driven nuts by that fact that there were so many goddamn things to do I never got any writing done. Did I promise myself I'd go back and visit at least three times a year? I did. Have I done that? I haven't.
Midnight sticker kids, taggers and samizdatniks The Propaganda Remix Project needs you. Repurposed Military Propaganda for printing out and postering your town. T-shirts also available.
From The Europeans by Murray Bail in the most recent issue of Brick:
My new favorite weblog, since Waggish appeared on my links page last week, is Giornale Nuovo, found in the comments from the last post. Misteraitch is from either Angle Land or Wales, and living in Scandi Hoovia in a Hotel with the lovely name of The Mañana.
I started linking to various entries therein, but this post was becoming like that map in Borges which is so detailed it occupies the same space as the land it represents. Giornale Nuovo is full of posts about sundry things I love -- Cabinets of Curiosities, Haruki Murakami, Illuminated Manuscripts, poetry... and is full of art and illustrations.
I grabbed the American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, the only book with a language map that I have, as far as I know (forgot to check Britannica), and I showed it to him. I can't find it anywhere online, but the map at the back of the book links related languages to each other and shows the languages from which they were derived. We were both lying on the floor at this point, which Dos Pesos takes as an invitation to climb all over you, and he did. I wonder how many phonemes dogs are capable of? They don't really have lips, or a nice wall of teeth at the front...
Today, I found this great Swedish site of Language Maps which covers what languages are spoken where. Not a relatedness map, however. Maybe someone knows where I can find one.
--------------
Word Rescued from Oblivion Dept.
detrusion
The action of thrusting down or away (lit. and fig.)
(first quotation from the OED) 1620 BP. HALL Hon. Mar. Clergie III. §6 Insolent detrusion of imperiall authority.
Yes! They gave Judith and me a test account for the OED. Be patient all you word geex, you will have your access soon. And if you haven't signed up at Eat More Words, please do so!
We launched a new site for The Game Neverending this weekend, which I designed, first site of mine to go live since my little MacPaint nostalgia piece (Man, I gotta get someone to go in there and remove those black background thingies. Throws the balance off). And I've got three more sites coming up; feels like 1999 around here. All the DHTML voodoo on both aforementioned sites is the voodoo that you, Eric Costello, do so well. Yay Eric!
(Also eavesdrop on Eric's wonderful children, who are listening to their new favorite song, Donna Summer's Hot Stuff and having the following conversation:)
(pause)
Phoebe: Maybe it's just coffee
(pause)
Jude: No, she says to give her the "hot stuff" tonight -- and Mom doesn't drink coffee at night.
Today we had brunch with Norma and David, Stewart's parents, who were in town to receive another award for their building, and to meet up with the guy who runs Hollyhock, an Esalen*-style workshop and retreat center where they conduct things like Aldous Huxley seminars and The Art of Didjeridu Playing. In spite of having lived for 8 years on the West Coast, I still don't go in for that kind of thing, preferring to organize my own chi, eschew macramé and maintain my customary demeanour, which has been described as unrelaxed.
Norma brought us the catalog anyway, which included a seminar that I just have to take, Mushrooms from the Forest to your Table taught by Andrew Weil and Paul Stamets. I have no idea who this Andrew Weil character is, but Paul Stamets! He's the author of The Mushroom Cultivator and Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms, as well as a bunch of other books I haven't read.
Close Readers** of Caterina.net will remember that I got really into mushrooms after finding a Calvatia gigantea on my lawn one morning, 20 inches across, which hadn't been there the night before. I was even a member of the Mycological Society of San Francisco for a while. One of my many plans for retirement (though first I'd have to get a job to retire from) includes finding a way to grow chanterelles and morels, which are well nigh impossible to cultivate; the reason they're so expensive is they have to be found growing wild. David said he's never understood why all these scientists are cloning sheep. What would he clone? Truffles.
. . . . . . . .
* Amazingly, they still have the site up that I designed in 1996 (based on an earlier design), though it didn't have the sidebar or that nasty scrolling banner thingy, just the calligraphy and the four images. I think this is the only design from my Organic days that is still extant -- tellingly, it belongs to a non-profit.
** Does anyone remember that really irritating part in Lolita where Nabokov, in a bid for Total Authorial Insufferability, writes something like, "The murdered man (close readers already know his name)..."? I remember the crumpling of my little bookwormed heart when I realized I didn't, in fact, know his name...
Thank you, Waggish, for the nifty links to the odd scores of Cornelius Cardew and the fascinating introduction to the Voynich manuscripts:
Voynich took the MS to the United States and started a campaign to have it deciphered. Now, almost 100 years later, the Voynich manuscript still stands as probably the most elusive puzzle in the world of cryptography. Not a single word of this 'Most Mysterious Manuscript', written probably in the second half of the 15th Century, can be understood.
Unfortunately, many of the image links go to a defunct Geocities site, so you can't see as much as you would like to. (Update: Verners emails to tell me the site is still up. The proprietor must have changed the file structure or something, which broke the links.)
The other fabulink was to Barry Guy's Scores. Both Guy's Scores and the Voynich magnuscripts have a family resemblance to some of Paul Laffoley's Occult Systems. (Here's some more Laffoley.) I first read about Laffoley in Nest Magazine, where they had a photo spread of his strange living quarters, the Boston Visionary Cell, where he's lived for 20-30 years. It's a 18x30 foot windowless utility room absolutely stuffed with artwork, old telephones, medical specimens, books...and where there was no bed, no couch. Laffoley is pictured sleeping with his head down on his desk, in what is apparently his customary fashion.
The End of the World at the Game Neverending prototype occured at 12:05 AM PST, and it was an amazing event. We were teary-eyed on both coasts, and there was a tremendous amount of feeling on the part of the players. "Wow," Ben said. "That was so real." It was a remarkable feeling. Look to the Light! Find the Bardo! Of course the Bardo has already been established at the Collective Detective GNE chat. And then, a second life In The Real Game.
Thanks to all the players, and to the Team. Thank you especially to Stewart and Eric, who kicked ass, and keep kicking ass again and again. It is a privilege to work with such great developers.
If you're seeing this, it means that the DNS has propagated for this site all the way to your home town! I am still working out the kinks, so be patient with me here.
It's been a very exciting night, the last night of the GNE (The Game Neverending), and we're all still awake. More on this after Caterina.net has been de-kinked! If you see any problems, let me know, and please include your platform and browser information. Thanks.