Our favorite verbose and eccentric blogger Jamie King is back online, having been to Neder-Neder Land after giving a lecture as a member of the International Necronautical Society an organization of which I was not aware and which I find fascinating, especially since the science fiction book that I am writing has a lot of people pushing up against the frontiers of death.

The Lands of Death, of course, are The Lands of Poets, for only fools, poets and the fatally curious seem to venture there: Orpheus in the Underworld, soothing the damned with his lyre, Dante communing with Virgil through Death's three manifestations, Faust making deals with that agent of death, The Devil...

Jim, (appearing also here) my friend who now lives in Mexico City, Death's Heartland (where for weeks leading up to The Day of the Dead vampires and devils can be seen running through the streets, and people decorate their cars with skulls) Jim, at Vassar, tried to build an Isolation Tank with his roommates in their apartment which was also known as The House of Id. I was afraid of this place, a real Center for Disease Control Research Area. It was the most repulsively unclean place you could imagine: mold growing on plates in the sink, spilled bongwater and beer giving the carpet a sponge-like consistency, a really hideous Iguana full of ill-will roving about casting the Evil Eye -- as well as lizard turds -- upon everyone and everything. Jim's roommate, let's call him Lester, was a prodigious serial seducer. He seduced more women in college than anyone would ever have believed, being kind of an unassuming computer programmer kind of guy with very average looks. His secret was, I guess, charm, but mostly that he never told a soul. Never bragged, never raised an eyebrow, never brought it up in casual conversation, never said a word. Kissing but no telling. No one knows to this day what a Don Juan Lester was in the early 90s at Vassar, not the women he seduced not his CS classmates, only his roommates, and their confidantes, such as me.

Then there was this other guy at Vassar, known locally as the Master of Time Management. Said Master was dating no less than four women at the same time, and managed somehow, to keep each one believing that she was his girlfriend. Was always there when she called, was attentive, and doting and present-giving. He must have slept in shifts -- or not at all. Kept a cheat sheet with their names and vitals in his wallet, amongst all the jimmy hats. Valentine's Day must have been a great exercise in quantum physics for the poor guy, required to subdivide into four separate entities in four separate campus locations. He eventually failed out of school as I remember. He couldn't do all this _and_ go to classes too. I think also there was some kind of cataclysm when they all found out. It was ugly: I'm picturing tar, feathers, pillories, four horses for drawing and quartering ridden by the Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse. I saw him on a bus in San Francisco a few years later. He still looked bludgeoned and completely dazed. There was a dent in his head like the concavity most often seen on the inside of catcher's mitts. Some people never recover from the follies of their youths, unlike certain world leaders we have had the displeasure of accidentally ushering into presidential quarters by means of poor interface design, overzealous chad punching and the generous assistance of Third Party Spoilers.

Now where was I going with this? This was not meant to turn into Rakes I have Known. Oh, the Isolation Tank. I will have to get back to this story later today, when I have more time. Right now I have to design some Web Things.

P.S. Forget what your teachers tell you. Tangents are not incidental byways on the highway of life. Tangents are the very black bitumen of life. They are its ruby-throated holler. They are the snow whitely falling.
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OK. First person to email me their street address gets this envelope full of stickers I collected at a 1998 skateboard convention in San Diego.

UPDATE: OK, I'm out of stickers. Scott Raymond was our lucky winner. :-)
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Happiness is a kind of genius.
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EPHEMERALIZATION Doing more with less. R. Buckminster Fuller coined this word to describe how science and technology allow the earth to sustain an ever-growing population with fewer resources. To me, this sounds like it should be defined, "Making things that don't last."
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A beautiful work by Eva Ekeblad, of Göteborg Sweden. She finds a weed a day, scans it in, and looks it up. If you look at the building where she lives, it seems to rise in the midst of a corrupted, industrialized and natureless place, but the list reveals a poetry invisible to all but the closest seers: Mouse-ear Chickweed, Fat Hen, Ladysthumb, Shepherd's purse, Toad Rush, Soft Rush and Thin hen and Nipplewort. An Ode to Seeing.
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From the morning's email:

"There is, it seems to me, something that is just fundamentally not right in my sitting here, with all my various gifts and whatnot (I might not be the cat's meow, but, relatively speaking, I am blessed), marking up some asinine document the sole purpose of which will be to enrich some individual or individuals who I care not one piss about when out in the World-at-large there is so much to be done. If all I were to do was to create some little thing which made people smile or say Ah! that might be enough, but even then I'm not sure. We -- you, me, all of us who are similarly blessed -- have an obligation to do more than just be quietly pleased with our blessedness. I was put to thinking about this, not for the first time I should say, by the horror and tragedy of the earthquake in India."

Resoundingly, resoundingly true.
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Next interesting thinker to investigate Karel Teige Czech artist / thinker / editor / typographer / architectural-theorist. In the Amazon review of the latest book about him there is this passage: "Teige firmly believed in an ars una, free of the artificial separation of one branch of the arts from the other" an idea I mull over continually, more recently after Pamela Lee's lecture on the idea of Wagner's Gesamptkunstwerk and The Exploding Plastic Inevitable at Stanford late last year. (Interesting stuff about Warhol and The Velvet Underground films are on this excellent site. This is what I love about the web. Sites like that one. Labors of love.)
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Alas, ending tomorrow, the Tom Friedman show at Yerba Buena. Saw it today with Alexandra and Mark and Sasha and Tim. Marvelled over the minuteness and OCD tendencies of the work. I'd read about this work many times before: the miniscule self-portrait carved out of aspirin, the sculpture constructed of moistened and dried spaghetti, hair arranged in a perfect spiral on a bar of soap, a gel cap filled with tiny balls made of Play-Doh, the "cursed space" -- a space seven inches above a pedestal that was cursed by a witch, and the piece of paper that was stared at for 1000 hours. Sasha said that kids should really see this exhibit so that they know they can make art out of pencil shavings, soap, toilet paper and detergent. If you're not doing anything on Sunday the 28th, go down there. The security guard there was even enjoying the work -- he came over to us as we were admiring a cereal box, and cracked a joke. Positive reviews from museum guards = must see exhibits. Another review of Friedman's work is here.
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A cat dies in another country and I am sad. Pootjes, pronounced like "Porches" or "Potches" means "little paws" in Dutch (thanks henk!) Gilberthe and I teased Pootjes about his "snout" -- and Gilberthe and I laughed when we discovered that "snout" ("snoot"?) is the same, or almost-the-same in Dutch and in English. Poor Pootjes, and big hugs to sad Rolf and Roemer!
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Moonies have attempted to recruit me at least five times. Do I look really gullible or something?
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Bookmarking your Brain Lying awake this morning, events remote from one another in both time and place were coursing through my head, things I didn't remember I remembered, and things I'd not deliberately remembered, but were there nonetheless. I've tried in the past to bookmark my brain, and try to remember things as I am experiencing them: this I must remember, this I must remember. But it doesn't work. The only way is to take pictures or write it down. Do a mental screengrab. Memory is eel-slippery and doesn't care a whit what's important to you, only what's important to it.
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More Stichomancy*:

Today's passage is from the recently reissued Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz., p. 79:

"Tut, tut, as everyone knows, mankind needs myths -- it chooses this one or that one from among its numerous authors (but who can ever explore or shed light on thejcourse that such a choice has taken?), whereupon it proceeds to elevate him above all others, to memorize his works, to discover in him its own mysteries, to subordinate its emotions to him -- but if we were to elevate, with the same doggedness, some other artist, then he would become our Homer. Can't you see then, how many varied and often other than aesthetic elements (a list of which I could tediously extend ad infinitum make up the greatness of the artist and his work? And you want to enclose this muddled, complicated, and difficult communion with art in the naive phrase: "the poet sings with inspiration, the listener lends his ear in admiration"?

* Stichomancy is the practice of seeking metaphysical insight into the world by reading a random passage from a book. An important type of Stichomancy is Bibliomancy, which restricts itself to holy books.
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Losing my mind a little? No sleep and really really tight deadlines are rendering me slightly mad. I am sitting here giggling to myself. Snickering. Chortling. Tittering. I noticed myself giggling and wondered what I was giggling about and couldn't really find anything worth giggling about in my immediate vicinity. So I can only conclude that I am going slightly mad. Or something really really funny is hidden nearby, available only to my giggling self. I am of two minds about it and yet I am quite beside myself. Is this some kind of bifurcation of the personality that leads inexorably to schizophrenia? At least I know I'll be one of those laughing crazy people as opposed to the angry crazy people. That's a relief. Phew!!
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This morning my friend in New York said "Startups are now enddowns!"
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Andy, creator and editor of Lines and Splines has built a font out of the handwritten notes that Monica Lewinsky sent to Bill, called, of course, Monica. For people who like a little subversive history hidden between the lines of their mash notes. Also, unfortunately, for lovers with PCs only. Mash note writers with Macs must roll their own. Cigars, that is. (Sorry. I couldn't resist.) Update: Yes, Virginia, there is a Mac version. Woohoo!
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Like she said. Read it. Now.
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This weekend I finished an illustration and design for an event at my friend Marc's synagogue, a kind of "Yentevent ." I used to do three traditional illustrations a week for Salon, and I really really miss it. So, I am trying to get back into it and am always looking for illustration work. Eventually, I'll put my portfolio back online.
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David Crawford's Substitute in which he traces the changes in his life in terms of Employers, Girlfriends, Hometowns, Schools and (Step)fathers. Backwards navigate to his light of speed site to check out his other work.
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I slept so well I feel reborn. Now: more crazy work!
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The woman-hating -- of beleaguered women in economically undeveloped countries -- has already begun. A dark augury of things to come.
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Exhuastion! Wow. Here's an untenable schedule: to bed at one and up at four! I meant to get up a five, but I set my alarm clock wrong. Don't try this at home, kids, you might hurt yourselves. I woke up before the birds and designed a lot of things. Had a conference call. And still have to design more web things. Design. More. Webthings. Design. Things. I feel as if I might design something dangerous, recklessly designing on this little sleep. Like, something with really sharp, unfinished corners that could trip over. One should also not blog when one is unable to construct coherent.
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Mystery still abounds Department: The Looking-Glass War "There is nothing very strange about the fact that ordinary mirrors reverse left and right, is there? "Left" and "right" are labels for the two horizontal directions parallel to the mirror. The two vertical directions parallel to the mirror are "up" and "down." But the optics and geometry of reflection are precisely the same for all dimensions parallel to the mirror. So why does a mirror treat the horizontal and vertical axes differently? Why does it reverse left and right but not up and down?" You can also buy a True Mirror and see what you really look like to your friends and loved ones. Peculiar, no doubt.
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A new profile of Chris Ware in The Chicago Sun-Times: Is Ware the smartest cartoonist in town? (via email from Steve Rhodes)
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Updates to Books page:

Digital Mantras
by Steven R. Holzman
I don't know how I acquired this item, but it was in a stack of books earmarked for donation to Goodwill that was in the back of my car, and at one point, stuck waiting for someone at his office, I grabbed it out of the pile and started reading it. Written around '93-'94, it traces the development of "generative grammars" through various disciplines such as linguistics, painting, and music, up through "VR" and the use of computers in the construction of art. The latter chapters have that breathless and awestruck tone that characterized so much prognosticatory technological writing of the day, but the book can be quite illuminating to see how these structures inform, and have informed various schools of thought vis-a-vis language and art. It's a multi-disciplinary survey along the lines of Godel, Escher, Bach, with some interstitial musings on Himalayan spirituality thrown in. All in all, it's an excellent and articulate primer on some basic ideas of systems and their place in history and in our time.

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New Phillipine Leader Calls for Unity During Transition. I find it utterly amazing that the "paper of record," the New York Times, doesn't know how to spell "PHILIPPINES." Copy editing there has been abysmal in the past several years, shoddy, shoddy. The New York Times has been slipping in all kinds of other ways: it has failed to build a credible reputation for technology reportage (though I'm admittedly basing this on 1996 evidence) -- the New Yorker is also notably weak in this area. Its grasp of contemporary culture is weak, often laughable, and it seems a queer mishmash of patrician articles about weddings and tony shoe shops and, well, bona fide news with a middle-of-the-road to knee-jerk liberal bent. It is manifesting the same kind of unabashedly consumerist vs. socially liberal schizophrenia of the "Bobos" -- "Bourgeois Bohemians" -- that comprise its readership. It makes for very weird abutments and juxtapositions. Though I find reading the Times to be a juttering experience [ Copy Dept. wd. that be "juddering"??] , as if it were the bastard child of Town and Country and The Nation, I still read it, because it is still 10X smarter than any other paper I know. (A reader wrote and said that the average income of NY Times readers is $92,000.)

But, weirdly, journalism always seems to be in decline. How can that be? It's impossible. Unless we were starting from some truly vertiginously good papers 200 years ago.
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The new DeLillo novel is out: 'The Body Artist': A Marriage Replayed Inside a Widow's Mind.
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Tell me this: if you were a landlady, and you knew that your bedroom was right above your tenant's bedroom, and you knew that you were an early riser whereas she had a predilection for the night, if you were a very nice person and on good terms with said tenant, would you nonetheless move your furniture at seven in the morning? We're not talking footstools here. We're talking armoires, horsehair couches, pianos, grandfather clocks, highboys, sideboards, credenzas and canopy beds with half a dozen slats keeping the enormous, sheep-stuffed mattresses up, and, dismantled, clattering to the floor like fallen eaves. We're talking things so heavy one couldn't possibly lift them even with help -- say, if one's brother-in-law were Paul Bunyan and the Seven Chinese Brothers lived next door. One could only drag them -- sonorously, gratingly, wake-the-deadingly -- across the floor. Would you? Would you wear concrete footwear while doing so and require that your traditionally slipper-shod partner do the same? and subsequently haul out the vacuum cleaner, a vacuum cleaner that sounds like a phalanx of braying mules, that violates EPA strictures for aircraft and sonic booms? Would you or wouldn't you? Be honest.
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When I was in second grade there was a kid in my class named Scott who lived down the street from me. He had dark hair and pale skin and freckles, freckles everywhere, cute, very cute, and really well dressed: his jeans were always clean, maybe even ironed. But he would never look you in the eye. He was always staring down at the ground with his shoulders hunched over in a posture of absolute despair. He suffered the ultimate humiliation -- which was not to have no friends, or to be alone, or to sit quietly at the edges of things, or to be picked last for the kickball team -- the ultimate humilation was to have the teachers talking about you with one another, and talking about you to the other kids, and telling the other kids to play with you, even if they didn't want to.

I remember the playground, and all the screaming that happened there. There was a lot of running, chasing mostly, and taunting and teasing. And I was in the thick of it, and had this little gang of girls that I hung out with, me and Nicki and Vicki, Nicki, Vicki and Tricky our teacher called us. We were the first girls picked for the kickball team, even picked before some of the boys. We were the popular girls, and chased and kissed this boy named Glenn, and this boy named Robert and this boy named Steven. We were the queens of second grade, and always sat together in the last benchlike row of the Purple Plum school bus -- there was a purple plum cut out of construction paper and pasted in the window. We said what we wanted to say, we picked our friends and not the other way around. At least this is how I remember it. How I want to remember it. But memory is a shifty, editable thing.

Yesterday an image leapt into my mind, a memory as clear as if the sun were shining down and I was standing in the sand of the playground at The Kiel School. It was sunny and I was standing alone, listening to the children yelling and running and feeling as if I were hearing it from very far away, even though it was happening all around me. And what I was doing was watching Scott swinging and swinging on the swing in the playground, staring at the ground, not looking up, listlessly swinging, swinging without oomph or enthusiasm or vigor, just allowing the swing to swing him in those useless parabolas that happen when the swinger doesn't care to go up and down and back and forth. Sad, unpretty swinging.

I was staring at him, and what I was feeling was despair, absolute despair. I was looking at Scott and I was apart from everything, and I knew that despair was dogging me, was always, everywhere, right behind me, and I had a kind of existential shift, like my first existential experience when I realized I was alive, was me. I don't know how to describe what happened in this strange, vivid memory, but I will try: I was Scott. Or rather, we were part of this thing more powerful than us, completely indifferent to us, something dark and irrefutable. It was like horror, but an awareness that horror was permanent. And that was the memory. I don't remember ever thinking about him again; maybe he wasn't in my class the following year.

Third grade was awful. I remember that now, now that I think about it. I never think about third grade, only second. Third grade, if I don't whitewash my memories and I let the original feelings wash over me all over again, third grade was a year of silence-in-noise, and loneliness-within-crowds, and darkness-in-sunshine. It was me then, not him. I was hovering on the edge of the playground. I was swinging in parabolas on the swingset. Getting chased by a Doberman on my walk up the hill from the bus stop, running, crying. The teachers talked about me. I hope they didn't tell the other kids to play with me: I shudder to think of that awful playground malice disguised as playground charity. Eight year olds are so mean. Eventually, my parents were called in. I was made to talk to a guidance counsellor. God, it was awful.

So now, here, I wish I hadn't remembered that, I really do. Everything was going swimmingly, and then this. Is it better to believe yourself invulnerable and strong and happy, even if it's a lie? To say, I'm OK, I'm fine, to tell this to other people, to tell this to yourself? Or is it better to be totally honest with yourself, and say, I'm not OK and let that fear back inside you? I've done this all my life, since then. I forget, I remember. I forget, I remember. I try to forget, I try to remember...

Somewhere existential experience #3 happened, and I became the adult I am now. I feel tender towards the little boy on the swing, and tender towards the little girl watching him, and I am the teacher, prodding them: go play, go play.
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I thought I was over this. I really want to smoke. Like, really. I'm going to cry.
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Boys and Girls. Go now and subscribe to Cabinet Magazine which I just picked up today at Tower Records on Market. A "quarterly magazine of art and culture" which has articles on Helene Smith, a woman who would go into trances and speak Martian and Ancient Hindu, the current state of Esperanto, the experiments of Swedish artist Öyvind Fahlström whose "monster languages" include hybrid bird-human languages and "whammo" -- a language made up of onomatopoeic words from comic books, and a piece by the guy who made up a post-Klingon alien language for TV. There are also articles about bingo in Sweden ( 'Bingo is "Bingo" in Swedish') and nosepicking, as practised in suburbia. Some of the online art experiments there are, well, not bad. Haven't had a chance to look at them all.

Funky, odd and fascinating stuff. And on their website is this oddity: U.S. Defense Soliciting Proposals for Human Exoskeletons Yes, your tax dollars hard at work developing what will probably end up looking like Giger-inspired Hollywood costumes. I want to see the proposals. How sci-fi!
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It's noon and I've already done 6 hours of work! Crazy. It's kind of fun to do a little pushel pixing after all that time working with words. I'm going to take a little time off the screen and do a traditional illustration for a benefit at a friend's synagogue. Then back for more.
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"...the people that ask the questions and the people that give you the answers are often the same people, just on different days." (via Ruthie's Double)
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Scotch. My father drinks scotch, but I've never liked the stuff -- maybe because I've never had anything but J and B? l was introduced to the real thing last night: this fifteen-year-old Glenmorangie stuff. Not enough o's in smooth to describe it. Makes your insides feel like hot silk. Now *that's* the way to drink.

Saw Kikujiro no natsu (1999) too. About a kid looking for his mother, and the no-good gambler who's supposed to take him to find her. Slapstick comedy, schmaltz, hilarity and sad bittersweetness. I really liked it. Apparently unlike Takeshi Kitano's other films, which I'm not familiar with.
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From Sunday's list, I accomplished 1,2,4,7,8, and sort of 9, since I saw Heather, but not for lunch, and talked on the phone to Alexandra, and made a plan. And today's list (I love making lists) I was amazed at how interesting I found Brian Eno's lists of things that he did and bought.. You really don't have to read this, it's for me:

1. Vacuum under the bed while I still have my sister's deluxe vacuum cleaner
2. Go to Southern Exposure and get art
3. Buy Cisco if it's still in the 30s.
4. Call Camille in NYC
5. Write back to the Endangered Language folks
6. Answer all the email that piled up yesterday.
7. Buy more (different kinds of) glass
8. Buy a couple drill attachments, (circular hollow kind)
9. Go to studio and bring glass paint
10. Go to the SMAC thing.
11. Reread my sister's bit about her marriage and what she believes about relationships.

So I got my fellowship application in today! Yay! and I got my sister's vacuum cleaner, and some glass, Yay! and went to my studio and cleaned it! Yay! But just when I thought I was going to be utterly free to pursue art things, my friend calls from New York and offers me Work I Can't Refuse. Um, Yay!
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Damn damn damn. My SF novel is nowhere near where it needs to be. I leaf miserably through the pages. I recoil from it. Am I too hard on myself? This is what I am told. One last awful night and this latest effort will be done. Over.

Tomorrow I am going to:

1. Mail my fellowship application. Out! Out! (Damn spot. Geez I'm sick of being holed up and alone. I love the hours (anytime), love the commute (none), but novel-writing is lonely work. After spending two months alone with myself, I'm sick of me.)
2. Sunlight. This vampiric phase has got to end. I'm pale and suffering from a Vitamin D deficiency and Seasonal Affective Disorder. (SAD). I hope it doesn't rain!
3. Pick up the art I bought at Southern Exposure all those weeks ago, and get an application from them. (Can we just stop to notice how many damned applications an art career requires?)
4. Borrow my sister's vacuum cleaner so I can clean my studio which has been suffering from terrible neglect.
5. Return all the phone calls I've not returned. Sheesh. Gotta get out of this cocoon!
6. Visit Tap Plastics to get some lucite.
7. Buy some glass (these last two items required for my next planned art efforts)
8. Go to the gym.
9. Maybe meet up with Serena or Heather or Thilde or Alexandra for lunch if they're available. All these wonderful friends working at home, and within blocks of my house. Now that I'm not a hermit anymore, I am in desperate need of an infusion of conversation.

Yesterday we were discussing how Southerners are so much wittier than Northerners. Why is that? An oral tradition still alive and well?

When I was working at a dive shop in Mountain Home, Arkansas -- I know , long story -- these two wonderful guys in their 60s, and this other younger guy, who'd had polio as a kid, would come in and bring me fried chicken for lunch. You can never be sure about these things, but I think they had a little crush on me. Their names were McSafety, Injun Joe and Kevin, and Kevin had a dog, Zing ("Zing. You know, the sound a bullet makes when it goes off a rock.") They'd pull up, all three on the bench seat of Kevin's new royal blue truck, come in and sit down to chat. McSafety'd talk about Injun Joe like he wasn't there. "Miss Trina," indicating with his elbow, "Injun Joe's part Injun. He used to drink and was real mean, but he stopped now and is as nice as pancakes." Munching on the fried chicken. Every day McSafety had some comment about it: "Mm Mm. That chicken is tender as a mother-in-law's kiss". Or the next day: "Mm Mm. The colonel'd run 25 miles to put his name on that chicken." Or: "Mm Mm. "Those fried chickens better run when they see me coming." Patting his belly. "That there is a fried chicken graveyard."

Sometimes McSafety, Injun Joe and Kevin would run out of money. Or maybe their wives were keeping it away from them, I don't know. It was difficult to ascertain what they did for a living. They liked to fish. They needed to fill their air tanks so they could spearfish for walleye pike, so I'd say that they could have some compressed air in exchange for some music. Kevin'd go out to his truck and grab his banjo, and Injun Joe would play the jug, and McSafety'd warble along. Kevin was really good, but Injun Joe was awful and McSafety's singing was a horrible ear-splitting racket. Nonetheless McSafety'd try to get me to dance with him. "Mm Mm." he'd say, "Miss Trina, That there music is so soft and sweet, it's belt-buckle polishing music. Don't tell me that doesn't make you want to dance real close and polish your belt buckle?"
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I cannot see caterina.net. But apparently other people can. It's strange, posting things and then not being able to see if they're there. Like trying to look at the back of your own head. Or like trying to look at the back of your own head just after you've gotten a new haircut and can feel that something is different back there, and completely failing to do so. I've been trying again and again to look at this site, like an anxious lover checking his email (control-M, control-M) for word from his beloved. If you can see this, you're Argus-eyed where I am blind. (Metaphors galore)

I wish there were evidence of all the visits here. That caterina.net would be a little dogeared when I eventually got to see it again, with coffee spills and fingerprints. Used, a little. Online guestbooks are not quite the same thing. When I was at Vassar, the library books had those little cards that you wrote your name on to check out the book. I noticed one day as I was checking out some books that this one guy had checked out all the same books. A couple weeks later sitting in a carrel, I noticed his handwriting, wide and loopy, on some other library cards. Then I looked at some other books I'd checked out in the past, and he had taken them out too. Odd. Then I didn't think about him again.

A year later we were introduced by a professor who thought we might have a lot in common. We liked the same books. We had similar coloring and features. We even dressed the same. So, we ended up dating for a while. Not too long after that I noticed that one of the Italian Lit professors had also taken out all of the same books as I had. Obscure poetry, belles lettres and arcana. I took his class on the Inferno. What a brilliant guy he turned out to be.

My junior year they converted the whole library to this computerized barcode system, and threw all the cards away.
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I've been entering common sense information such as "books are full of words" and "fruit is usually sweet" at Open Mind, an artificial intelligence project to teach computers things that we know that we never think about. It's an interesting project. If you enter in the word "dog" in the search box for example, you get back all the data that has been entered, such as "a dog is a mammal" and "dogs cannot fly". There are thousands of results for "dog" alone. (via ruthie's double)
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I am thrilled to note that subterranean notes is back on line!!
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I love the night because it is dark. I love the night because it is silent. I love the night because there is the rustle of sleeping going on all around me, and people dreaming and their dreams seeping out into the world. I like to think that when people sleep they are all connected to one another, together in the dream place. I love it when people sleep near me because it means they trust me and feel safe. I love the night because it is soft, because dreams happen there, because darkness drenches everything in mystery.
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I love this story. I have read it ten times. Stewart and I just sat in different countries reading it together. He grew up like that. I didn't. There were no leaves in my hair. I had a Nixon button pinned to my smocked dress, and I always had clean fingernails and went to church. Please read it: Flower Children by Maxine Swann.
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Two Planetary Systems leave Astronomers Stunned. Planets of a variety never seen before. "In one of the systems, a Sun-like star is accompanied by a massive planet and an even larger object 17 times as massive as Jupiter. If this whopper is a planet, it is the largest ever detected, defying current theory. Scientists suspect that it could be a dim failed star or a type of astronomical object that has never been observed before." I am filled with childlike wonder whenever these discoveries occur. The world is still full of surprises.

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Women under 5'4". Short women. Very short women. Women that are not very ****. Vertically challenged women. Women of non-amazonian proportions. Petite women. Abridged women. Non-gangly persons of the female persuasion. Women wearing sizes 0, 2, 4 or 6 and who are usually found in the Jr. and Misses sections of department stores. Women of stature, but not the stature associated with height. Persons who sleep comfortably in airplanes. OK? I was called "Half-pint" as a kid. I was called "Little Bit." I was called "Navel-gazer" and not because I was particularly contemplative, but because that was what was at eye-level most of the time. We are not big here! We are small! Small and proud! Damnit! We don't look it, but we're tough! Really! Wanna armwrestle?

There. That should take care of all those search engine search results for "very **** women". We are not ****! Go away!
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My days and nights have become almost completely inverted. I've been writing since eleven p.m. and it's now 5 in the morning. I'm getting sleepy, but I promised myself I'd finish this section. It's going pretty well. I'm happy to discover that my original draft was actually pretty good. An enormous amount of crap, and I've tossed more than half of it, but the parts that are good, are, well, pretty good!

This is going to be a very. long. novel. *sigh*
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"I did not know how good a man I was till then. I remember the drawn faces, the dejected figures of my two men, and I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more -- the feeling that I could last forever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort -- to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small and expires -- and expires, too soon, too soon -- before life itself." -- Joseph Conrad (via email from Jeff Miller)

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Dunne-Raby thinking about things. What cell phones will be like in the future, a distributed mobile network. Auras of radio waves. Look at these especially nifty sketches.
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Headphones in Infinite Loop Emily was telling me that research done with trauma victims showed that their brains went into a recursive loop and got stuck there, causing their suffering to persist, and that rapid eye movement, such as occurs within a visually stimulating environment with variation in depth of field, breaks people out of these loops -- and therefore I must get out of my house, away from my computer and headphones and take a walk. But "I'll come running" on Eno's 1975 album of perfect genius Another Green World is all about staying indoors:

I'll find a place somewhere in the corner
I'm gonna waste the rest of my days
Just watching patiently from the window
Just waiting, seasons change, some day, oh oh,
My dreams will pull you through that garden gate

Over and over. There is apparently a version of this song with salacious lyrics by Eno and the Winkies. If anyone has it, please let me know!
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"I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. they are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest." From The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham.

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Hello, world.
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I have this feverish, restless case of Monkey Mind! Brain jumping all over the place. I'm trying very very hard to concentrate and write my science fiction novel. Very hard. Because I have to have another draft of it out by the 15th. For this Fellowship. But my damn Monkey Mind! Aagh!

I am also having dinner at my house for a lot of people. Somehow, I will squeeze them all into this tiny place. I will have them wear girdles and hold their breaths. I will serve them skinny food: asparagus, spaghetti, breadsticks. Otherwise they won't fit!
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Be contumacious. Discovered today on She's Migh-tay Migh-tay. "I like Catarina because she reminds me of a quirky girlfriend I had in highschool named Heather. People thought Heather was weird and pretentious, but she was actually just genuinely surprised when the guy next to her in Driver's Ed didn't know what contumacious meant. So, in honor of the girls who don't dumb themselves down for public consumption, I present these Catarina moments. ..."

I have no idea what "contumacious" means either. (Reaches for dictionary...)

Girls, ladies, women, dames, broads, chicks and wymmyn: Never ever dumb yourself down. Smart yourself up. Once I won this National Merit Scholar award for getting high SAT scores, and they were posted in the hall of my school. This guy named Bobby came up to me, and said, "Gee, Trina (which is what I was called then) I didn't know that you were smart. I always thought you were just some dumb, pretty girl." Bonehead. Which made me feel pretty smart for never hanging out with him because, obviously, he was dumb as a box of rocks. His girlfriend? Oy. Let's not go there. If you can't say something nice. Another thing: always assume people are smarter than they are. Even if you're wrong, when they intereact with you they'll become smarter than they are because you treated them that way.

Dictionary says: con·tu·ma·cious : stubbornly disobedient : REBELLIOUS. Be contumacious. Kick Bobby's ass at the spelling bee, the SATs, the shotput. Like Courtney Love said (long before her plastic surgery) : don't date the football star, BE the football star. Go Hillary!
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Maybe I'm slow in realizing this, but EDGE. org has redesigned. I don't remember if the search function was there before. Well it's there now! Yay!
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Wow! Blogger is really fast today!
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One summer I went with my boyfriend up to his family's house on Mount Desert Island in Maine. His father had just died of cancer a month before and he was barely able to talk. Everything was ghastly to him and he kept waking up in the middle of the night with the world caving in on him and he was angry at me a lot of the time. I didn't know what to do. We hiked, and ate lobster and read, but things were pretty bad. He couldn't cry. We were just circling one another. He had a friend who we drove to see, who lived on the end of a dirt road somewhere near Blue Hill. Adam and his girlfriend Nicole and a cat named Sabbath lived on this small plot of land right near some swampy water, where the mosquitos were like nothing I'd ever seen before, large bloodsucking things like flying hairpins. Adam was beautiful, with wavy blonde hair and eyes like saucers, but I already knew that because he had broken my friend's heart when they were in high school. Nicole was pretty and brown-eyed and shy.

They'd built this little one room house on a platform using a plan they'd found in some book on homesteading, though the roof wasn't finished yet, they were waiting to find more wood, since the wood from the lumberyard was from the wrong kind of trees. They described the composting toilet that they were going to buy with the money Nicole made from her job at the cafe in Blue Hill. They had a few packets of Burpee seeds, and plans for a garden, but hadn't gotten started yet. They had the Tao Te Ching and a little tape player with Leon Russell singing Stranger in a Strange Land. They were going to live a life, finally, that was sacred and not profane. They were going to be free. Adam was aglow with plans, his blue eyes lit up like flashlights.

We sat and listened while Adam explained that the guy who had written the homesteading book had lived to be a hundred eating nothing but things that he'd grown himself but had killed himself when he turned 100 because he thought that he'd lived long enough. Nicole was cooking beans on a Whisper Lite. He showed us some yoga asanas and gave us some tea made from wildflowers. Then dusk came, and the sun started purpling down and the mosquitos dove from the sky in search of blood and we had to get out of there.

They waved goodbye and as we drove away it was clear to us that it was a pie in the sky. Nicole was probably, in a month or two, going to buy a flea collar for Sabbath and take a bath and catch a bus from Bar Harbor to Portland and from Portland to New York, back to the Lower East side where she'd met Adam in a health food store, or maybe back home to her parent's house upstate. It was inevitable that more possibility, more idealism, more dreams would soon vanish from this earth. It made me really sad because everything that year was tainted with loss and darkness and failure and people growing older, sadder, wiser. We were all around 22, and had so little time left to be foolish, or at least foolish and forgiven for it.

A year later I saw Adam walking up Fifth Avenue, walking not on the sidewalk, but right next to the traffic amidst the taxicabs and bicycle messengers. He didn't see me. His eyes were shut, and he was oblivious to everything, head thrown back, singing.
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Sleepy, as I sometimes am, from drinking coffee.

The day before yesterday Paul wrote about emotional and memorial "operating Costs" which sent my mind tumbling recklessly into all kinds of directions:

What would emotional entropy and recycling actually be? Could emotional recycling be: Loving people exactly the same way, all the time, a kind of emotional habit, or conservation of energy? Or, in the sense of resisting emotional entropy: putting self back together after one falls apart? Or, in the sense of learning from one's mistakes, re-using emotional "waste"?

Mary McCarthy in Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood said that to stop feeling guilty or bad about something evil that she’d done or that had happened to her, she thought about it over and over, replayed every painful and regrettable moment until eventually it wasn’t painful anymore. To speed up the process of acceptance.

Which calls to mind James Merrill (in his autobiography of his psychoanalytic process A Different Person) who said to his psychiatrist, disdainfully, "Well what have you given me that I wouldn’t have solved myself, given time?" and his shrink said, "Yes, what we do is very much like time, except faster."

There is a great cost to forgetting (mental entropy?), and also a great cost to not forgetting. Forgetting always seems to get short shrift, when, as Jonathan Lethem said, forgetting is also privileging certain information over other information and is the only way to stay sane, Borges’ Funes the Memorious being an example of the nightmares arising from total remembrance.

What are the opportunity costs of emotions?
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Things are really plummy here up on the bridge of the Caterina Enterprise -- the sun is slanting down like I'm a flower it's trying to grow, I got a whole lot of onerous crapola done this morning, I have a fresh new bar of soap and I finished another fellowship application (two down, three to go!) -- so, plummy plum plum except for the fact that the following keeps on keeping on through my beleaguered brain:

Sunday Monday Happy Days. Tuesday Wednesday Happy Days. Thursday Friday Happy Days. Saturday What a day. (something) all week with you!

And so on. You know that "something"? I don't know what that word is. I never knew what that word was. It's adding insult to annoyance to have that "something" in there too. By George. Must distract! Here:The Magnificent Melting Object and Ruthie's Double are my new favorite weblogs, both via Syntheticzero.
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Well, Blogger users, we've been enjoying a free Blogger for a while now, and the service has worked with barely a hitch til recently what with all the new users. Money is tight over at Pyra, as money is tight all over the place. I'm giving them $48.00 -- the total currently in my PayPal account, and will be happy to subscribe to Blogger Pro when it launches. Maybe you can help out too?
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I used to know a guy who was completely nuts. He was in my philosophy class in college, and one day -- out of rebellion, or a fatal curiosity, or just because he was sick of being doped up and subdued and not truly himself -- he decided to stop taking his medication.

The first indication that things were going awry was when, in the middle of a section on, like, Aristotle, he stood up in class one day and delivered a 10 minute Nietzsche rant. Genius or bullshit? Lots of people did things like this in college, but there was something slightly unhinged about his delivery. And there is something about crazy people and Nietzsche, I tell you. I've been around several people who were somewhat if not completely unglued, and Nietzsche was never far from their minds, Thus Spake Zarathustra never far from their pockets. He's quoted on more suicide notes than anyone else, more than Mark Twain, at least, Alexander Pope or Woody Allen.

So this crazy guy. At one point I was reading in the library and he came up to me and saw that I was reading, I don't know, Lautreamont. He said, Wonderful! Wonderful! Patatipatata! and recited an entire poem by Baudelaire, in French, and then translated it, presumably on the fly, into English. A feat that impressed me to no end. Did I mention that this guy was very attractive? That, before he stopped taking his medication he was the object of more than a few schoolyard crushes, including one of mine? That there was something brilliant and sexy and risky about this guy that fascinated and repelled and charmed people? He was, he was, he did. Yes. What a terrifically sexy guy, part Robert Downey, Jr. part Artaud, part Robert Redford (he was blonde and looked like a surfer, skinny and sinewy.) Yum.

Then he started taking enormous amounts of acid. Schizophrenics love acid, apparently, according to my friend Jim, and that's why this guy supposedly was. It was at that point that he crossed the rubicon between quirky, sexy and eccentric to stark raving and dangerously mad. He painted black circles around his eyes, and I don't mean kohl stick eyeliner, I mean black circles filling his entire eye socket like I imagine death looked like in those medieval mystery plays. Nosferatu, he looked like. Satan. And screaming about Nietzsche to anyone who would listen. Sticking his head out of his window in the middle of the night and screaming.

He stopped coming to class altogether, and could occasionally be seen in the distance, wearing a cape and declaiming to rocks and bushes, like King Lear, or a fool in one of those Shakespeare pastorals. The last time I saw him he was on his hands and knees in the Quad, biting the trunk of a tree, lifting up his head with a mouth full of bark and howling. My friend Jim mentioned this to our philosophy professor, who mentioned it to the health department and soon uniformed medical technicians came and took him away somewhere, never to be seen again. He is probably still in some institution somewhere, or some halfway house, drugged and dimmed.

Sometimes I see flashes of madness in other people. It is seductive and terrible. Little bits of manageable madness can be OK, can be beautiful, can be brilliant. Little bits.
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I forgot the best part in my French Unordered List: Jouke told me that "patatipatata" is French for "yadda yadda yadda".
LINK | 2:24 AM |
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Wonderful nonsensical thing, Bulbous Bouffant (4.5 megs). (via synthetic zero)
LINK | 9:33 PM |
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Domesticity Reigns here at caterina.net headquarters. This is the third batch of potato-leek soup that I've made recently, as well as the 2nd batch of tapenade. I think that this latest housekeeping bout was inspired by my recent stay at Le Moulin du Merle and those happy hours sitting in the kitchen talking with Gilberthe peeling beets and chopping potatoes from their garden. And Evan's delicious chili. And also because while I was away, my landlady came in to install an electrical outlet, and while she was here, defrosted my fridge and discovered boll weevils in some flour. When I got back from France, they were everywhere. I had to clean out the fridge and the pantry, which made me think, for the first time in a long time, about food.

Cooking, cleaning, thinking, taking baths, going for walks are things I hardly have time for anymore, or don't remember to do. Funny how these things used to be the stuff of life, but have been replaced by driving on freeways, conference calls, showers, chinese food delivery and answering email. Like we want as little contact with our lives as possible.

I remember reading something by Rem Koolhaas where he said people obviously very much wanted to live in identical boxes in large impersonal apartment complexes, not knowing their neighbors or grocers or delivery people since that's the way most of them lived. I found this to be an utterly shocking statement, as it was no doubt intended to be, and directly contradicting my own needs and desires. But on further reflection realized that probably Koolhaas was right, only because it is easier to accept what is given you than to try to change it. Particularly large and intransigent things such as buildings.
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Art Garfunkel has just about every book he's ever read since 1968 listed online in his library index. There are nearly 1000 books here. I am very fond of Art Garfunkel, a sentimental childhood fondness, while we're listing sentimental childhood fondnesses. A gentle man with a voice like a bell. (via vacuum)
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The Letter People. From kindergarten. I thought I was imagining them, but last night at Judith's new year's party, Sandy said she remembered them too. But there aren't any sound files anywhere for all the songs. If anyone has them, let me know!. I've been looking for them for years. They're so groovy and fun and wonderful.
LINK | 3:53 AM |
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