Well. That was fun.
And one day, if you’re very lucky, I’ll tell you all about it.
“Very exciting—as a luggage problem.”
The folks have just set out on their first trip to points subcontinental, and my mother—whose photos I’ve mentioned a time or two before—had a bit of a packing dilemma:
Been to India? Please take a moment if you’re so inclined and drop some advice on their itinerary. Thanks. (Me? Jealous? Never.)
As clever as clever!
This particular backwater of the Islets of Bloggerhans almost missed celebrating its sixth birthday today. —Gifts of candy or iron are suggested.
I don’t think Pitchfork would like it.
Another meme!
Create an Album Cover
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first article title on the page is the name of your band. - http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album. - http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
Post the results, it should go without saying. [via]
They’d enjoy eating,
take pleasure in clothes,
be happy with their houses,
devoted to their customs.
Cords to knot for the commonplace book. —In a comment to the Infamous Brad Hicks’ endlessly provoking post on the city-burners who (may or may not have) brought about the end of the Bronze Age in 27 tumultuous years, 
perlmonger says:
But barring some so-far unforseen archaeological find, we are unlikely to find out what their actual motivation was, because one thing that the city burners seem to have gone way out of their way to do was to completely destroy the technology of written language everywhere they won battles.
Fredy Perlman would have said that that was because writing in the bronze age civilisations was devised and used as a mechanism of oppression; something that was there basically to define and record the ownership and value of grain and slaves (and the glory of the kings and priesthood) would necessarily be seen, by slaves with an oral history of the time before they were enslaved, as something to destroy.
No way of knowing for sure, of course, but it makes sense to me at least…
Which reminded me of this, from Delany:
Norema suspected Venn was perfectly crazy.
Nevertheless, Norema was sent, with the daughters and sons of most of the other families in the harbor village—some thirty-five in all—to be with Venn every morning. Some of the young men and women of the village when they’d been children had built a shelter, under Venn’s instruction, with ingenious traps in its roof so you could climb up on top and look down from the hill across the huts to the harbor, and Norema and the children who sat with Venn under the thatched awning every morning made a cage for small animals they caught; and they learned the marks Venn could make on pieces of dried vegetable fiber (that you could unroll from the reeds that grew in the swamps across the hill): some marks were for animals, some for fish, some for numbers, and some for ideas; and some were for words (Norema’s own contribution to the system, with which Venn was appropriately impressed)—there was a great spate of secret-message sending that autumn. Marks in red clay meant one thing. The same mark in black charcoal meant something else. You could use Venn’s system, or make up a new one with your friends. They nearly used up all the reeds, and Venn made them plant many more and go hunting for seedlings to be carefully nursed in especially nice mud. The whole enterprise came to a stop when someone got the idea of assigning special marks for everyone’s name, so you could tell at a glance (rather than having to figure it out from what it was about) just whom the message came from. Venn apparently intercepted one of these; someone apparently deciphered it for her.
“We must stop this,” she told them, holding her walking stick tight with both hands up near the head, while an autumn rain fell from the edge of the thatch to make a curtain at her back, fraying the great oak tree, sheeting the broken slope that rose beside it, dulling the foot path that cut across the grass beneath it. “Or we must curtail it severely. I did not invent this system. I only learned it—when I was in Nevèrÿon. And I modified it, even as you have done. And do you know what it was invented for, and still is largely used for there? The control of slaves. If you can write down a woman’s or a man’s name, you can write down all sorts of things next to that name, about the amount of work they do, the time it takes for them to do it, about their methods, their attitudes, and you can compare all this very carefully with what you have written about others. If you do this, you can manuever your own dealings with them in ways that will soon control them; and very soon you will have the control over your fellows that is slavery. Civilized people are very careful about who they let write down their names, and who they do not. Since we, here, do not aspire to civilization, it is perhaps best we halt the entire process.” Venn separated her hands on the gnarled stick. And Norema thought about her father’s ship yard, where there was an old man who came to work some days and not others and about whom her father always complained: If I wrote down his name, Norema thought, and made one mark for every day he came to work and another for every day he failed to come, if after a month I showed it to my father, and said, yes, here, my father’s grumbling would turn to open anger, and he would tell him to go away, not to come back, that he was not worth the time, the food the shelter, and the man would go away and perhaps die… And Norema felt strange and powerful and frightened.
And also this:
On Pryn’s fourth day, Yrnik had assigned her, among her accounting duties, to keep count on the comparative number of scum barrels that came out of the auxiliary cave and out of the main cave. Once stacked outside, the barrels’ origins were indistinguishable; and the farmers were always coming up to pick up a barrel or two of free fertilizer anyway, so that even markings would not have been truly efficient.
Pryn kept count.
Each day the main cave produced between forty and fifty barrels of yellow-green gunk.
The auxiliary cave, Pryn realized as she stood among the men and women along the cave wall, listening to barrels bang, could easily have filled twelve or thirteen, given the number of wide, wooden, first-fermentation settling troughs foaming over the floor.
That afternoon it produced three.
Pryn passed hours watching the whole infinitely delayed operation.
When she went off to the equipment store (the converted barracks that included Yrnik’s office), she stood for a long while before the wax-covered board Yrnik had hung on the wall for temporary notes. On a ledge under it was a seashell in which Yrnik kept the pointed sticks he’d carved for styluses. An oil lamp with a broad wick sat beside the shell. You used it to melt the wax when notes had to be erased over a large area. Pryn picked up a stylus and looked at the board’s translucent yellow.
Once she said out loud: “But I’m not a spy..!”
The main cave had put out forty-seven barrels of fertilizer that day.
Pryn took the stick and gouged across a clear space: “Main cave, forty-one barrels—auxiliary cave, nine barrels.”
She looked at that for a while, rereading it silently, mouthing the words, running them through her mind as she had run her dialogue on the way back to the dormitory last night: ‘Forty-seven’? ‘Three’? she said to herself in several tones of voice. ‘Who am I to commit myself to a truth so far from what is expected?’ Over the next few days she could push what she might write closer to what she’d seen. But that would do for now. ‘To write for others,’ she thought, ‘it seems one must be a spy—or a teller of tales.’ She put the stick back in its shell.
“Writings are the thoughts of the State; archives are its memory.” (“Designation by means of sounds and lines is an admirable abstraction. Three letters designate God for me—a few marks a million objects. How easy it becomes to handle the universe in this fashion!”) —Go massive, a wise man once said; sweep it all up, things related and not. At the risk, then, of going massive, two more knots to tie—this:
The fact that listeners hear the same emotion in a given musical score is something a Neanderthal crooner might have exploited. Music can manipulate people’s emotional states (think of liturgical music, martial music or workplace music). Happy people are more cooperative and creative. By fostering cooperation and creativity among bands of early, prelanguage human ancestors, music would have given them a survival edge. “If you can manipulate other people’s emotions,” says Prof. Mithen, “you have an advantage.”
But also, well, this:
And standing there as big as life
and smiling with his eyes,
says Joe “What they can never kill
went on to organize,
went on to organize.”
From San Diego up to Maine
in every mine and mill,
where working folks defend their rights,
it’s there you find Joe Hill,
it’s there you find Joe Hill!
And so into 2008.
You know, hoppin’ john makes for a pretty damn good risotto.
Years end in narcissmatics.
Blame this bout of self-indulgence on the recent run of comment-spam, which draped itself all over a run of 2007 posts in roughly chronological order. There I was, scraping barnacles off titles I hadn’t myself read in months, so why not? —January, then: let’s go with red, blue, and tippers, with an acknowledgement that red-state–blue-state games are an accident of history that’s been enshrined as conventional wisdom while no one was paying attention. (How else does wisdom become convention?) —And let’s throw in a bonus corollary, since February was so weak.
March was all about 300, of course, but also “Black Molly.” April? Mocking the truth-eaters. In May, I remembered to get in a critical apprehension (hearkening sidelong back to something I’d brought up much earlier), but I’d also like to remind you that Republicans only win by preventing as many people from voting as possible, and they lie lie lie to do it. —And June was, um, the sixth month of the year.
In July, our grand experiment turned 231, and I set out on a prospective series whose actual subject I’ve yet to mention. (I also digressed, briefly, on the subject of the magical honky.) August? August was better than February and June, but. At least I launched a meme. In September, my own grand experiment finally found something in common with Jack Benny; otherwise, all I managed was a bit of staircase-wit.
From there on out, well: October was a bit of a drive-by; in November, I mustered up a bit of snark; December, for some reasons beyond my control, became the month of Jonah. —Not my best year, 2007. I’d like to say I was busy elsewhere, but I wasn’t, so much. (Nor has a certain decision borne much fruit.) I should, perhaps, end on a resolution, but that’s for Tuesday; the year’s not done yet.
Still: 2008 can only be—ack! Jesus. Can’t believe I almost said that out loud.
And holding; and holding.
Then again—
I always was too hopeful for my own dam’ good. (Shorter 2007: so I was wrong about the year. —I wonder if it’s the one that’s aimed at my old house?)
A sobering reminder of the scale of our enterprise.
You bumble along, writing what you write, and you feel pretty good about your meagre slice of the Islets of Bloggerhans, and then a one-off joke from a video poker forum comes along and sextuples your daily traffic in a matter of hours.
(And I don’t even get the joke…)
You never forget your first.
An offhanded comment becomes a meme, suitable for bloggers of a Certain Age: when did you make your first “Christ, what a right-wing hack” post about Instapundit?
And in the comments over at Unfogged, a meme becomes, well, any of a number of things. I keep forgetting how vociferously active that joint is. Makes me wish I hung out in comments more. —But there’s a nice thick strand of how-did-you-end-up-in-blogging there, namechecking poliblogs of days of yore (and to realize that Body and Soul and Fafblog! now belong only to yore is icily sobering) and the folks who’ve been around long enough to remember what blogs were like before they became a corner soapbox in the marketplace of political ideas mention Rebecca’s Pocket and /usr/bin/girl to general befuddlement.
Me? The first thing-that-is-a-blog I read was David Chess’s, which is usually called The Curvature of the Earth is Obliterated by Local Noise, when it isn’t called David Chess’s blog. From him I found Textism, and Oblivio, and Anonymous Juice, and Anita Rowland, and Flutterby, and other, less reputable folks, and then I went and started my own. (Before all that, I’d spent a lot of time on Plastic, wondering why I couldn’t get an account on MetaFilter. Then I discovered I did have an account on MetaFilter, which I don’t remember having set up. But the password worked. I still haven’t used it. Since I have a blog and all. And anyway, I was never very good at the whole hipshot quicklink thing. —Though the mix-tape post that MeFi arguably started, and snarkout definitely perfected, is something I wouldn’t mind doing more of.)
LiveJournal came (much) later. (And all that that entails.)
Of course, if you’re not of a Certain Age, or’d rather not reflect on it, you could always celebrate the news we can finally announce: Dicebox is being made into a movie. (There’s even a novelization!)
Not sure how that happened.
It’s not like I meant to take the month of August off or anything.
Commutation.
I drive to work these days. Didn’t used to. —When I was freelancing, I’d drive to the occasional client’s office, and there was that month or so temping at Johnstone, and the couple of weeks writing a technical manual for PetSmart, and they’re both out by the airport. Oh, and the week or so at Rio, over the river in Vancouver, laying out cards that advertised the music pre-loaded on whatever MP3 player they’ve probably stopped making by now.
But I’ve almost always otherwise been able to bus or subway or walk to work, usually. For almost five years in this house with the job I’ve had I could walk downtown some mornings, four miles, an hour and a half.
The job moved; now I drive.
And on the one hand, so what? Most people in this country drive to work. Yeah, I say. That’s right. —And now I know why most people in this country are so blackly sullen and ashily angry, and maybe even why we elected Geo. W. Bush to the presidency. (The first time, if not the second.)
There’s a luxury to going to work under someone else’s power. (Or on your own feet, but that’s a luxury of a different order.) —Twenty minutes or so yet to read, doze, listen to the iPod, people-watch, think, write, pretend to think or write while actually people-watching. Driving, I may be master of my fate and captain of my soul, but I must be paying attention, all of it, for the half-hour to forty-five minutes (to an hour, to an hour and a bloody half with the Burnside closed and a stall on I-5 northbound backing up traffic over the Marquam and the regular line of people trying to get on the Sunset snarling the 405). No dozing. No reading. No writing. Barely any thinking, because what the fuck are you trying to do would you get over and let me Jesus! —And the people-watching sucks.
At least I can hook up the iPod to the stereo. (The joys of autonomy!)
The next-to-last straight stretch of I-5 between Bridgeport Village and Wilsonville is as-yet undeveloped; the 205 is the only interchange. Otherwise it’s trees and trees and sixty-five-mile-an-hour speed-limit signs. The median’s a wide strip of dusty yellow grass (this time of year) with a low wire fence running right down the middle. —And then you hit the last straight stretch, lined with hesitant office parks and anemic car dealerships, whose hinterlands are marked by the Garlic Onion restaurant in the basement of a Holiday Inn, its iconic sign spearing up past the overpass as you come around a bend out of the trees.
This morning, running down those next-to-last two miles of tree-lined highway, I spotted a work crew in the median, laying out safety cones and orange lights and white barricades. The barricades they were leaning up against the low wire fence, and every other one had a sign on it. The signs all said NO PARKING.
Okay. Easily enough done—
I’ve mentioned it elsewhere and otherwise, but I might as well note it here, too, seeing as how and all: The “Prolegomenon” of City of Roses has been published in the Summer issue of Coyote Wild. If you haven’t read it, go, read it, if you like; if you have, well, go read it again, why not; either way, go, enjoy some beerly free speculative fiction.
A pier appears.
—courtesy of the Spouse
Footnote to a prior conversation.
Dread by its nature anticipates; therefore, “anticipatory dread” is something of a redundancy. —Apologies.
We only sing about it once in every twenty years.
Everybody’s linking up the “4th of July,” but the only X song for me today is “See How We Are.” And the best post for seeing just that today is Rick Perlstein’s.
What’s the argument? That conservatives’ tragic misunderstanding of freedom has produced exactly what Goldwater feared most: stifling the energy and talent of the individual, crushing creative differences, forcing conformity—and, yes, even leading us to despotism (and I’m not talking about habeus corpus or NSA spying). By methodically undermining the public’s will and ability to underwrite the public good, systematically accelerating economic inequality, and making turning oneself into a commodity—“selling out”—the only possible route for young people who wish a reasonably secure middle class existence, conservatives killed liberty. The canary in the coal mine is the death of young people’s “freedom to live adult lives typified by choice rather than economic compulsion.”
I think I made a decision at some point in the past few days of McCloud Madness; I think I’ll be the better for having done so, soon enough. We’ll see. —Further bulletins as events warrant.
I’m pretty sure there’s a Mountain Goats song about this. I’m equally sure it doesn’t apply.
Last night was the second night of the Spouse’s sleep study; last night was the second night in as many weeks that my plan to spread out across the whole queen-sized bed was thwarted by Beezel, frantically burrowing under the sheets, looking for the other human who just had to be here somewhere. —And this morning I once more made a full dam’ pot of coffee before remembering I was by myself and couldn’t possibly drink it all.
