People make wonderful, wonderful things. Such as this needlepoint of the Photoshop tool bar. Be patient, it may take a long time to load, but it's worth the wait. It's a beautiful, uncanny thing. (via cheesedip.com)
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One of the best things -- I mean -- the very best thing I toted back with me from San Francisco was Serial # 200201 of Circular Breathing, a personal breathing recorder built by my dear friend Scott, a work of seductive electronic art. It's amazingly sensitive, and can record even quiet, inaudible breathings. I was worried they were going to confiscate it at airport security, but they didn't even slow down the x-ray's conveyor belt to have a longer look. I carried it on my lap all the way home so it wouldn't get bumped.

Art! It makes me so happy.
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Possible wackiness. I am both moving this domain to another name server and switching over to Movable Type. The archives, in particular, may be wonky.
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Playing Six Degrees: anyone know Whit Alexander and Richard Tait from Cranium? If so, write me at caterina (at) caterina (dot) net. Thanks!
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I read the papers every day, disgusted by Bush and his administration, repulsed, helpless, signing petitions, sending emails to congresspeople, feeling utterly powerless to do anything. Even readers of Time Magazine, when polled, say that the U.S. -- *not* Iraq or North Korea -- poses the greatest threat to world peace. Time Magazine. Today someone posted this poem to a list I'm on, and it resonated, and stung:

The latest issue of Numb is now out, and it includes the interview I mentioned I was working on several months back, which was with Moses Znaimer, Canadian TV mogul, and founder of Citytv, the Bravo! channel, MuchMusic and 20-some other TV channels. The article is titled Let 6 billion flowers bloom -- referring to Znaimer's idea of everyone having "their own" TV station. Riad did a particularly beautiful cover for this issue, pictured here, and I am very pleased with the illustration for the article, which was a collaboration between Riad and me. Numb is available from the web site, and, if you are in Canada, at Chapters and Indigo. If you see the magazine on the shelves, please do Riad a favor, and put them at the front of the rack -- the big distributors pay to have their magazines put at the front, to maintain the hegemony of the mainstream press.

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Excellent illustration by Jeff Crosby in the Village Voice, based on Where The Wild Things Are, for an article on a repulsive organization known as "The Military Order of the Carabao" which meets annually to wallow and celebrate the conquest of the Philippines and declare that "war is heaven and peace is hell".
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Langpo Alart (yes, deliberate typo). Language poet Ron Silliman, editor of the well-known anthology In the American Tree, has an excellent weblog:

Other poetry weblogs I've been reading lately include Jonathan Mayhew's, and Ululate by Nada Gordon and Wine Poetics by Eileen Tabios, who is also pinay.
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Raisins from the Universe: Yesterday, after a lovely breakfast of French Toast and conversation, I was wandering aimlessly around in Cole Valley sunk in one of those inexplicable and uncaused miseries that occasionally descends like a flock of rooks. There were sunshine and babies and dogs all around, which served to irritate more than charm. I took the N-Judah through the hill to Duboce and walked down to Market, where I was again wandering miserably among babies and dogs, albeit in a gayer context, when I got a Sign from the Universe: a very thick book was sitting atop one of those boxes that house Free Weeklies on the corner of Market and Noe, and I went and picked it up. It was The Letters of Wallace Stevens. I opened it up: "...one comes upon the most excellent raisins everywhere."
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The wedding was lovely. Congratulations Serena and Rob! One of the very best ceremonies I've ever heard, written by the betrothed.

We were going to go see the Spike Jonze/Charlie Kauffman movie tonight -- I can't ever remember the name of it for some reason -- but instead I think we're going to go see Intersection for the Arts on Valencia to see the Dave Eggers interviewing Denis Johnson thing. I so admire Jesus' Son.
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Stephen Ratcliffe links for later reading (discovered his work in the current issue of Aufgabe):

• Stephen Ratcliffe on Robert Duncan
• His home page at Mills College
• from Sculpture in Chain's Documentary issue
• from Conversations on Vert:poetics
• Cloud/Ridge on ARC
• from Portraits and Repetitions on Vert:poetics and poems
• from Real on Vert:prose
• Portraits and Repetitions on Conjunctions
• from The Calculus of Color

Big day of walking, buying books. Lunch with Scott, coffee with Eeka, then Eric and I wandered into Harrington's on 17th street where he wanted to buy some taxidermy for his man-cave, but none of the mounted deer heads were for sale. The degree of inauthenticity involved in buying them at Paxton Gate was discussed as not manly enough (proper acquisition entails hunting your hunting trophies yourself, or buying them at a thrift store, but it's very unmancave to buy hunting trophies at a foofy yuppie shop.) While in Harrington's Andrew, owner of Adobe Books came in and we walked up into the grand cathedral-like 2nd floor and Andrew gave us the entire history of the Harrington's building. Then we went back to Eric's studio where he changed from his grease monkey getup into a suit and tie and we took the Bart down to SFMOMA for Scott's opening. If any of you are in San Francisco, and have a chance to get down to SFMOMA in the next few days, definitely stop by and see his show. It's in the Schwab room just off the lobby. The thing I love about Scott's work is its total transparency and immediacy -- no convoluted artist's statement, no explanation. That's not to say the work is not theoretical or profound -- it is -- but it's simultaneously simple and elegant. Children love it. And it's fun!

It was lovely running into Mike, who I hadn't seen since the wedding, and Marisa, who is now working at SF Camerawork and the other Scott, and Alana, and Amanda, and then meeting another half dozen new people. I miss San Francisco.
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Rag·na·rok
Pronunciation: 'rag-n&-"räk, -r&k
Function: noun
Etymology: Old Norse Ragnarok, literally, fate of the gods, from ragna, genitive plural of regin gods + rok fate, course (later rendered as Ragnarøkkr, literally, twilight of the gods)
: the final destruction of the world in the conflict between the Aesir and the powers of Hel led by Loki -- called also Twilight of the Gods
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If you don't have a word for it and they do, steal. (via Open Brackets)

Of course, it's entertaining for us plebes, but Steve feels this site is etymologically unsound, and gives it a sound thrashing on languagehat today, also pointing to a better list. So there you go!
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It's only been two weeks since the last time I was there, but I'm off to San Francisco again, this time for the wedding of my dear friends Serena and Rob.

I love seeing everybody back home -- I still think of San Francisco as home -- but I'd really love to stay in one place for a two months at a stretch. I finally got the momentum going on the novel again after Christmas and all, and then once again I am displaced.
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Another interesting bit from Pharmako Dynamis:

(Apologies to all the Nahuatl readers out there; I couldn't manage all the accents in the transcription of the words.)
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More reference work geekery, of course. I was excited to see, on my Amazon recommendations The Dante Encyclopedia. But $185? It's like they're forcing me to steal.
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Our non-profit word consortium, Eat More Words, has gotten under way, and is now accepting memberships. Please visit the site for more information!
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Hachadura, VII

I heard Bringhurst on the CBC reading from his translations of Haida myth and folktales The Raven Steals the Light in a deep, impressive voice, what a guy I used to know called a "base barreltone". I found these poems, and the three volumes of his Haida translations at Hermit Books on Broadway. I didn't buy them, because they were expensive, but when I was still thinking about them a day later, I went back to get them.

The poet and linguist and anthropologist Robert Bringhurst is the same Robert Bringhurst who wrote the marvellous and poetic Elements of Typographic Style (where he wrote that type should aspire to "a statuesque transparency"). In the introduction to the book where this poem appears, The Beauty of the Weapons, Robert Bringhurst writes:

So far -- I have not read but bits of the book -- I particularly admire the section called The Old in Their Knowing, which Bringhurst introduces thusly:

As I was gnashing my teeth this evening at the recrudescence of The Neighbor Who Sings One Pearl Jam Song Badly, I suddenly recalled a certain dorm room in boarding school where I had The Neighbor Who Sings One Leonard Cohen Song Badly, and decided if I had to choose between the two, the latter was preferable.

A couple years ago, my friend Paul was invited by his housemates to find another place to live. When I asked him what had happened he explained that when he moved in he had a job, no guitar and didn't like Bob Dylan.
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My lost novel has been found! However, I'm already much happier with the new one. What I'm really happy about is retrieving the five pages of words culled from Cormac McCarthy novels, lost with them, that I actually looked up and knew I'd never look up again. Unless I could access the OED online.

Logophiles! Independent scholars! Students of language and literature! Have you signed up at Eat More Words yet?
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I've been trying to figure out where I'd read this for years and here it is, on wood s lot:

Lamed Vuv. Also, does anyone know the name of the people in Jewish mythology who suffer for other people's sins?
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I am pleased to see that William Gibson has taken to his weblog like Dos Pesos' spare fur has taken to my black clothing. He hasn't missed a day all week!

After that great dollop of weekend writing, it appears that I am too tightly wound to sleep at all. Possibly Monday-related anxiety and being back on the clock. As much as I remind myself the workweek is a construct, heebeejeebees nevertheless descend around 10 P.M. Sunday night, and cling fiercely til Friday, 3 P.M.
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Exceptional three days of writing. Absolutely painless. Couldn't be happier.
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Up in Tofino, while we were running, at night, in the rain, on Chesterman Beach, Mark said "Let's take a photograph" and we all stood still for a long moment and photographed it onto the emulsion of our minds, following Mark's instructions: "not what it looks like, but how it feels."
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Prepare for possible DNS weirdness. I'm in the process of transferring caterina.net to a different domain registrar, and a different ISP. I will be So Very Happy when I can free myself from the clutches of Verisign. Verisign has been despicable during the past two months during which I've had to send two faxes and spend hours on the phone with them. I had had this same experience three or four years ago the last time they stymied me, and was loath to start the process again. It seemed their incompetence was deliberate, because so long as I had no access to the email address in their files, they were assured that I could not transfer my domain to another registrar.
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Freud had an excellent bookplate.
I have also just discovered bookplate heaven.
And Portage also has some bookplate links today.
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Ha!

The post about grading student papers on Baraita reminds me of a professor I had in college, for a year-long Shakespeare course, who was famous for having failed every single student in one of his classes. He was completely remorseless. You should have seen his paper comments! He held nothing back, spared no one's feelings. I wish I'd kept them. I think I burned them.

He was, as you might suspect, a genius, admired by students with the fortitude to keep their opinion of him from plummeting along with their G.P.A.s. I almost got kicked out of school for having received an F on my midterm paper.

I finally squoze an A out of the man, and that was some serious, olympian squeezing. I rewrote every single paper I handed in, sometimes twice. It was the hardest grade I'd ever earned, and the proudest. And I remember everything I learned in that class, everything.

The idea of "customer-oriented" classrooms is terrible. There is nothing like some salutary, un-asked-for ass-kicking to make you do some work.
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I am changing the Caterina.net copyright to a Creative Commons License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
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I've long been annoyed by the insane price schedule of the online Oxford English Dictionary. It costs $550 a year for individual use, but institutions only have to pay $795 for up to 2,499 users (at a cost of $0.32 per user/per year). Does anyone know of an institution I can join that would give me access to the Online OED?
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Tried and failed to find a favorite New Yorker cartoon in which a drowning man is screaming Au secours! Au secours! Aide-moi!! and a man standing on the shore says to another What a pretentious guy.
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I am a devotee of the leaf and not the bean (though the Butterfields gave us an espresso machine for Christmas, and we've been having lattés 3-4 times a day ever since).

Ghazal Alert:

New Peeve Alert: when speaking with me, please avoid using grammatically incorrect, awkward or cutesie phrases such as My bad, Thank you much or Play nice. Feel free, however, to find novel or surprising ways to say mundane things, such as Do you want a diet seven or a diet doctor?

Thank you very much. End of New Peeve Alert.
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I found this sentence in Pharmako/Dynamis, which I'd found, in turn, through an article in the last issue of Cabinet magazine. I looked all over the web for an example of this alphabet contruction by Aleph turnings, but was unable to find anything besides articles such as this; nothing about the Aleph's shadow letters.

I have a feeling that Golan might be able to help me find this, what with his interest in invented alphabets and visual languages.
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