From Julian Barnes' introduction to Alphonse Daudet in the Land of Pain:

At the nursing home where I worked when I was fifteen there was one woman who looked too young to be there. She looked as if she were, say, 67. She couldn't get out of her bed, something wrong with her muscles, and I had to spoon feed her. "You're too young to be here," I said. "Honey, I'm 90 years old," she said. I almost dropped her Salisbury Steak. I insisted she tell me her beauty secrets.

"Every day you have to put lotion on your skin."

"That's it?"

"That's it."

"What kind?"

"Doesn't matter," she said. "During the war I put Crisco on my face every day."
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Mao, a fascinating card game described by Tom on A Rule Against Rules. I'd never heard of it before:

Dos Pesos, sly devil, gets me to postpone his neutering appointment tomorrow morning by throwing up all day today!
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The other day as I was driving my car I thought to myself, "If I could have any painting in the world, what painting would it be?" and I thought, "Of course! The Mona Lisa!" Because it is the cynosure of the painted world. Because everyone knows it. Because it is the most reproduced painting in the solar system. Walter Benjamin was wrong about the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Reproduction, and a thing's subsequent propagation into general consciousness, makes the original more valuable, rather than less. Not only monetarily, but also culturally. With the printed word, while there is some value to the original manuscript, the "cultural value" increases as it is more widely disseminated.

Today I read a poem I really loved, Gravity and Levity by Bin Ramke, which is printed in issue #35 of Conjunctions, and as I was reading it, I became a little depressed at how few people actually were going to read it. I mean, you haven't read it, have you? Didn't think so. And I thought that there is something qualitatively different about reading, say, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. You know that people have read it before you -- not just people, the public -- and that people will read it after you. Or even something like Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. In reading those poems you were part of a poem-reading society, a people, a nation! whereas reading Gravity and Levity today felt wee, insignificant, solitary and vaguely masturbatory. You know, arch. Self-indulgent. I wanted everyone else to have read it. I wanted to belong to one of those cultures that awaits the next, say, Seamus Heaney collection. (Apparently in Ireland, the police let Heaney off for speeding because they recognize him!) I love poems, I adore poems but they seem to have become the dessert and not the bread of life, and that makes me glum.

Do you read poems? Do you buy poetry books? I buy about a dozen books of poems a year, I'd say. I read all the ones in the New Yorker, and like about a fourth.I want to take a short survey here: How often do you read poems? and Have you bought any poetry books this year?
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Somebody sprayed -- sprayed!!-- motor oil all over my car, and about five other cars that were parked in the alley near my house. It had to be deliberate! It was only on the front end of five cars. Of course, rubbing it off with a towel only smeared it into a Vaseline-like transparency; driving around, the world looked like a dim memory. I drove slowly to the nearest gas station and used their squeegee for a really long time until I could see, then drove it through the car wash. Car washes haven't lost their charm! I still love driving through car washes. I hadn't done it in years -- the San Francisco car washes require you to exit your vehicle. No fun at all.
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My fluctuating intelligence is at a low ebb right now, and though I seem to be carrying off a reasonable facsimile of the chit-chat required for daily call-and-response interactions with salespeople, desk clerks and telephone solicitors, I'm barely able to experience my own sentience. My knuckles have been drooping floorward, my hairline has been creeping down to my eyebrows, and I've been noticing comfy perches up in branches. Ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny in reverse. Next stop, tadpole.
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A papyrus of the poems of Posidippus were found wrapped with a mummy. The article describes how the discovery sheds new light on an historical aspect of Greek literature:

I'm having a really hard time not opening my nephew's Christmas present. I think I have to get my own pontiki. And a pootiki too.
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Last night we all sat around Rachel's kitchen table eating chili and lasagne and drinking wine and tea and doing two of my favorite things: talking and laughing. We discussed Toni's novel, which is so far really promising and Rachel's poems. I hadn't read Rachel's until the meeting, and read through them all when I got home. I'm really excited for when her new book comes out, and you should be too since the poems we read last night are going to be in it and they were excellent. We have to wait for it until the spring though (her MS is due in March). Until then, you can read her last book of poetry Giving My Body to Science.

PS: Looking up that book, Amazon just appended a list entitled "Customers who wear clothes also shop for" followed by a short list:
* Clean Underwear from Amazon's Gap Store
* Cashmere Sweaters from Amazon's Lands' End Store
etc.

and customers who don't wear clothes shop for...? It's unusual for large companies to be aware of the distinction between the shopping needs of nudists and non-nudists.
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Subject line from today's email:

Truth in advertising? Or are they targeting men with modest expectations?
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Cuentas claras, amistades largas my friend Jim used to say whenever he insisted on paying me back for something I'd forgotten about. Clear accounts, long friendships. How true. This afternoon we had the unpleasant task of confronting this guy in our art collective who could not account for $2,500 missing dollars from the group's bank account, which was in his name.
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Deer Esther:

Thanck yu n Klaus 4 feeding me all that chiken! I haf only kible heer n can yu beleve!! Cat n Stew didnt bring me bak n e presints -- it was lik they didnt evn car. I m tiping this leter all by myself. Next week I m going to get fixt! I dont know what fixt is but I am eksited.

Win evir I think aboot that beegle, I get mad! But win ever I think aboot yu n Klaus I get hapi.

Lov Dos.

Where the Rubber Meets the Road. While I was in Amsterdam, my eczema, responding to the dry heat, dust and wool, broke out all over my face and neck and arms. It is hideous, and it is miserable. I remember reading a survey of AIDS patients rating their various ailments in terms of the suffering it caused them, and their skin ailments were consistently rated the worst, above digestive disorders, dementia and even blindness. "If I could just stop this itching, I'd gladly go blind!" one fellow said. This didn't surprise me. Nabokov, suffering from Psoriasis, wrote to his wife Véra in 1936 that his psoriasis drove him to the edge of suicide.

Your skin is also what you rub up against the world with, the place where the rubber meets the road. I was trying not to feel leprous. I did anyway.

It's gone now. May the Ointment Gods be praised!
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From Testaments Betrayed by Milan Kundera:

The Department of Homeland Security may make this world possible.

We've arrived and are staying in little hotel on Leliegracht which is well-located, but too expensive. We ran into Kris last night at dinner, such a nice surprise! and Dos Pesos has already sent us a couple of postcards telling us about how much fun he is having without us.
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We're off to Amsterdam, where we will be seeing our favorite Amsterdam resident Rogerio, and Kris and Fred and hopefully Paul and Jouke. And, of course, attending Doors.
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Today Derek alerts me to the existence of the Fombum who sits atop a flower atop scaly pillars atop a mashed-potato lake and permits genuflecting on a lower branch:

Tonight Stewart and I stopped by Pulp Fiction on Main Street on the way back from Klaus and Esther's (who are taking care of Dos Pesos while we're in Amsterdam, lucky dog!) and I found Woodstock Handmade Housesto add to my collection of books on vernacular architecture. Looking around the web for more vernacular architecture and I found:

• Earthships, which use the rammed-earth-in-tire technology I originally saw used by Sam Mockbee and students at the Rural Studio
• Shelter, published by a small press in Bolinas, CA, is apparently the must-have of vernacular architecture books.
• And the upcoming sequel to Shelter, Homework, which has some great links, including a story about a guy who built a house in the Transvaal in Africa entirely by hand, and entirely unclothed.
• The Hippodome in Arizona.
• A page of links on the Homestead.org site, mostly about how to build your own.

NY Times Book Review trend: praise for writers that eschew pop cultural references (Also, should "pop-cultural" be hyphenated while "pop culture" is not? Not sure how that works.)

I've noticed this elsewhere. Everyone seems to hate it these days. And here is David Foster Wallace in an interview talking about realist authors uneasily sort of not making pop culture references:

And now, an offshoot of Game Neverending fanzine Ludus Perpetuus arrives, Paper Lane.
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Dream House by Gregory Crewdson. I've always like Crewdson's superreal supersaturated suburbia photographs.
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From Brenda Shaughnessy's Interior with Sudden Joy, (which has one of my favorite Dorothea Tanning paintings on the cover, also named "Interior with Sudden Joy") Reading her poems is like finding a lost piece of myself. Here is this poem:

If you're coming here for the poems, you can skip this

Of course I'm aware that posting your political opinions to your weblog -- especially a weblog with a comments feature -- is liable to net you a lot of grief. But that's OK. It doesn't bother me when the things I post get other people incensed. I've come to be pretty thick-skinned where the Caterina.net comments fields are concerned. It would be easier to just keep quiet, I guess, or have no comments at all. But that would be so much less engaging, and I've learned so much from so many of your posts, I have changed and amended my opinions -- it's great. I love the comments.

Other people's opinions are as valid as mine -- I make no claim to having any more idea of what "the truth" is than anyone else. I have opinions. I get pissed. I rant. I am not always the best of all possible Caterinas. But since this is Caterina.net, not Carl.net or Joe.net or Lisa.net; this is where you get my viewpoint. Preaching to the choir is a futile exercise, so disagreement is generally good. There always will be a few people who are disrespectful, rude, hostile or just plain assholes in the comments. I don't bother responding to those. (I also don't always respond if I think I have nothing to add (or am too busy)).

So I really really appreciate it when people like Brian, in the comment field below, has the guts to say they totally disagree with what I'm saying, but then add, "Please don't let my pithy reply deter you from responding. I'd really like somebody to help me change my mind on these issues if I am misunderstanding the situation." That is really great.

Here is what I think about the "War on Terrorism":

I am afraid of any justification for national militarization. I am even against people with guns anywhere in public. Even the police. (Think Britain.)(Call me a peacenik, I don't care.) When I was walking around Lebanon and Syria in 1999, there were soldiers with machine guns all over the place. Freaked me right out. (We got lost in the Hezbollah part of Beirut, and that freaked me right out too, but that's another story.) When I was in the St. Louis airport in February this year there were soldiers with machine guns all over the place. First time I'd ever seen a machine gun in the United States. Boded ill for us. Very ill. To fully protect ourselves from terrorism would turn the U.S. into a prison state.

The "War on Terrorism" is justifying outrageous defense spending. The 2003 proposed Defense budget is $379 billion, which would roughly match the combined spending of the 15 next biggest miliary powers, as a defense analyst noted in the Senate. How does Bush justify this spending? How does he convince the American people that we need a big arms buildup? By spreading fear.

I am against fear-mongering. These random alerts from the FBI especially rile me. Terrorists can strike at any time, in any place. That is the nature of terrorism. This is news? I really did agree with those parts of Bowling for Columbine where Michael Moore pinned responsibility for our current Culture of Fear on the media. It's possible that I'm not scared because I don't have a TV and am so not subjected to the daily reminders that I should be scared coming from the "war-mobilizing and patrioteering mechanism" as Richard Falk calls it in The Nation. I read the news online, in the newspapers and in magazines. The threat of terrorism seems possible, but remote. I may blow up next week, but I don't plan on living in fear.

I am against war-mongering. Initially I was against the actions taken in Afghanistan against Al Qaeda and the Taliban regime by the U.S. Government, fearing for the civilian Afghans, but the Taliban was vanquished soon enough to seem that the Bush Administration had taken the appropriate action. Yay team. But since then -- and this what I am mostly against -- is the Bush Administration extending their definition of what constitutes "terrorism" to include any nation possessing weapons of mass destruction that might fall into terrorist hands, i.e. Iraq. Are we defending ourselves against a direct military threat from Iraq? No. This is war-mongering. Iraq is probably harboring weapons of mass destruction, but does that give the U.S. the right to deploy against Iraq weapons of mass destruction? The logic behind this boggles the mind. And doesn't it seem like Bush is trying to settle his father's scores? All the same people are making the decisions.

I am incensed that the "War on Terrorism" is diverting attention from domestic issues. Health care, education, social security, the environment, human rights, corporate corruption, rampant consumerism, the 3000 ads the average person sees before s/he gets to work in the morning -- the list of the issues that are being ignored goes on and on. This galls me. I'd even be happy to talk about tax cuts! Let's cut taxes! Erm...

I am against unilateralism From the outset, the Bush Administration deliberately repudiated several important multilateral and multinational treaties, including Kyoto (global warming), the ABM treaty (against militarizing outer space) and the Biological Weapons treaty (prohibiting the development of such weapons) in a general all-out Fuck You to the rest of the world, absolving themselves of any responsibility to other nations. Their selective adherence to The Geneva Convention (for human rights) in the case of the Taliban and Al Qaeda detainees in Guantanamo Bay was another flaunting of global concern or cooperation. I think this is deplorable. What was that thing Bush said about his willingness to bomb China within a few months of taking office? Egads. Diplomatic nightmare! Proceeding to declare war on Iraq against the decree of the UN Security Council will be another boot in the face of the world, demonstrating that the U.S. has no respect for human solidarity and has a willingness -- an intention -- to subjugate all nations. I will swear again here. Fucking Oath.

Brian: I am not against airport screenings. Like Stewart says, "If the choice is between gittin' blowed up by terrerists or having to take your shoes off before boarding the plane, we will all, of course, remove our shoes." I actually don't mind them paying for extra chemical detection equipment and better scanners, shelling our more tax dollars for better trained security personnel. But people are constantly complaining that their tweezers are being confiscated. This is a joke. Have you ever noticed how many metal pieces are in the airplane tray table? Have you ever seen someone garotte someone with a belt in a movie? Why have all those dull butter knives been replaced with plastic knives? You should see what I can do with your throat using the fork. I could use my jewelry to off you if I wanted. The fact is: You can't stop someone who is willing to die and take everyone with them. Plain and simple. But all this searching causes humilation. The feeling of invasion. The constant presumption of threat. How much of this is necessary? I think there is more likelihood since Sept. 11th that passengers will jump up and stop hijackers. People are saying, "Things are so uncertain now." That is absurd. If September 11th proved anything, it proved that things were uncertain before.

The Homeland Security Bill: Here is where shit gets really scary. Orrin Hatch has proposed an amendment to this bill that states that a warrant is no longer required to access electronic communication, i.e. email. If that doesn't scare you, you have forgotten what liberty is. Time to read 1984 again.

OK, I could say a lot more about everything, but I need to sleep a little. I think this is my longest post ever, and I didn't even get through half of my opinions. I will read all the comments you have, and will likely learn things, but I probably won't respond to them. Sorry! I can only talk so much, and this was itself a response to a comment from yesterday's post. I want to read some poems now...
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I was raised by two very serious Republicans, we're talking Goldwater, Nixon, and Reagan Republicans, and they're still serious Republicans. I even registered as a Republican for a year when I became eligible to vote at 18. I am not, however, a Republican. And I am not happy about yesterday's election results, and what a presidentially controlled Congress is now capable of doing. I am horrified by what Bush is doing to the environment, I am appalled at the entire sabre-rattling Iraq escapade, I am repelled by the "War on Terrorism", the periodic -- and extremely vague -- FBI warnings of "increased threat", his undermining of women's rights, his stance on guns, the ENRON catastrophe which was conveniently buried under war rhetoric -- there are dozens of things the Bush administration has done that appal me. Ugh.
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And another thing of beauty we should all look at together. More celestial atlases are available on this site. (via calamondin)
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Ludus Perpetuus, a Game Neverending fanzine has just launched! GNE players, add your player description, contribute articles, and read an exclusive interview with Inspoetica, the perpetual #1 player.
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The Importance of Grandma

Asa nisi masa.
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Let us all look at this beautiful thing together.
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I had completely forgotten I'd started a novel for National Novel Writing Month last year. I just found it today, and really like it in all its unedited stream-of-consciousness oddness. It has that fresh untweaked feeling. I think I'll keep writing more of it:

We just got back from seeing Bowling for Columbine and I was surprised by the Canadian gun statistics. I didn't agree with Michael Moore's conclusion which seemed to be that the media in the United States is responsible for inculcating Americans with fear, and this fear is driving them to buy guns and kill each other. This is not to say that the media doesn't do that -- I think it does -- it just seems that gun control seems to be the major difference between Canada and the United States. That and a better social support system. Stewart also said that Michael Moore can be really sensationalistic, and while that is probably true, it's also the reason why his movie is being shown coast to coast (and all over Canada) while hundreds of far more earnest, deserving and intellectually sound anti-gun documentaries are languishing in the vaults, unseen by the millions.

Here is some interesting info I just read about Canadian gun control.
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Dog bride.
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Fascinated by the Elegant Gothic Lolita business found on Morbid Outlook magazine (what a great name!), I've been surfing all over the place, especially Luscious Dilettante -- look at this Goth cutie -- and learning terms like "Execugoth" -- Execugoth! The world is indeed a wonderful place. Luscious D. also has an excellent links page. What I've learned so far: The Elegant Gothic Lolita look was given its icon in the form of Mana, who is a man, and is in the band Malice Mizer, prounounced Marisu Mizeru. There is a magazine for this, the Gothic and Lolita Bible, and some of them have been scanned in here. I'm sure the craze is probably over by now, since trends in Japan change with wind direction. They also stopped closing the main square in Tokyo from traffic and turning it into a pedestrian walkway on Sundays-- some people attribute the whole fashion explosion to this Sunday stroll.

Now I really want -- need! -- a black parasol with a ruffled edge -- here's one with beaded trim in velvet. And of course your best friend will want to get in on the action.
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