Bloglet, the gentleman's mock turtle soup -- Moss made it sweeter than myrrh ash and dhoup
Quaint is sexy.
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08:20:27 AM,Sunday 18 May 2003
What does a literal Trial By Fire involve?
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(2)
08:11:19 AM,Sunday 18 May 2003
My nephew's gonna be living in my house 'til the end of the month, and then we go to MisCon! Yay!
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09:42:52 PM,Saturday 17 May 2003
Problem: I really want to read poetry, but I don't read poetry. And whenever I try to start reading poetry, with rare exceptions, my jaw goes slack and my brain idles. I like hearing people recite poetry, but then I'm not able to get much of the sense unless I listen to it over and over, which only works with books on tape and very patient friends. What I really really want to do is memorize poetry, 'cause then I'll have it of-a-piece inside my head and can prise it apart from all directions without the fuzz-shield of the printed page. But even back when I used to be really good at memorizing stuff, I didn't get much of anything into me except Jabberwocky and Kublai Khan -- I didn't make much of an effort, I admit. Now that my brain is broken, it'll be even harder. I just wish I knew the best way to go about it.
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(11)
12:39:09 AM,Saturday 17 May 2003
When I get one, I will be unstoppable.
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(3)
11:08:06 PM,Thursday 15 May 2003
All eight of my clients moved out today, and moved into a brand new $500,000 house across town. We're getting five new clients tomorrow, three who've lived most of their lives in the institution. None of 'em talk at all, which should be interesting -- of my other clients, two you could have a solid conversation with, and three others could say quite a bit in their own way. But it really is surprising how much you can groove with someone even when language is removed completely. I'm looking forward to meeting them. It's all guys this time, too, instead of two guys and six girls, and only two of 'em will be going into the center, so I'll only have to make two lunches instead of seven. We get to keep the cat (Iaro; Kaspar got put to sleep a few weeks ago, poor little beast), the alarm's off the door, they ripped up all the carpet -- basically, everything that bugged me minutely before, is gone. And, best of all, no screaming for up to five hours every night, hallelujah. I get to meet the new people on my shift tonight, though I'll definitely miss the guy I've been working with for the last couple months. He was a good egg. Two slight disadvantages: one of the new guys has a really severe seizure disorder, so we have to check him every fifteen minutes, unless they install baby monitors and we can hear if he's thrashing around. But then that means I might not be able to listen to music while I'm working, which would suck a lot. So I dunno. And also, I'm losing 8 hours from my week -- 32 instead of 40 -- so I won't have as much money and'll have to pay more for insurance. Still, though... I like changes. Stirs things up. I'll see how it all turns out.
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10:00:14 PM,Thursday 15 May 2003
Bellowing arguments about genetic engineering and vitalism vs. materialism in the Sizzler. Made me feel like I was back at St. John's again.
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(4)
11:00:35 PM,Monday 12 May 2003
Che faro senza Euridice (aka J'ai perdu mon Eurydice) is such a strangely heartbreaking song. Orfeo sings it right after his wife has crumpled, dead, into his arms, after nearly being restored to him. He's made the most thoughtless, unforgivable, wretched mistake. He broke a holy bargain with the gods, through his lack of faith in the very love he conquered hell to win back. He killed her. And yet... Gluck gives it such a light, pretty melody, in a major key! At first listening, it sounds so innocuous, just some kind of pastoral love song. But I read a story about how, in Iphegenie en Tauride, he sets Orestes's line "Le calme rentre dans mon coeur" -- my heart is calm again -- to a frenetic, obsessive counterpoint in the viola section. When the players were first reading through the parts, they assumed that there must have been a copying error, and broke off. Gluck shouted, "He's lying! He killed his mother! Keep playing!!" That's one of the things opera can do -- contradict the words with the music and show the truth swimming alongside both of them.
For a grief and shame that goes as deep as it possibly could go, to the depths of death, minor keenings and languishing moans aren't right. I knew that, but I still couldn't reconcile the free-floating feeling of Che faro... how can you possibly put enough anguish into that melody to overcome the sweetness and simplicity of it? Then I saw Janet Baker do it on video, and it crushed me into powder. She sat down very gently, cradling the corpse, and rocked back and forth to the rhythm of the strings. A tiny smile kept flickering off and on behind the stiff mask of her face, and her eyes were utterly, utterly hollow. The sound was so pure and rich and gentle... until she cried out "Euridice!" and, louder, "Euridice!" And nothing but silence came back. Then she sang the floating little melody again, just the way she had before, rocking and lifeless.
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(2)
03:09:56 PM,Saturday 10 May 2003
Remi, you're too goddamn cool. Friends, meet a man who submits his blogswap mix to the CDDB. Bless you, my son.
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(20)
12:03:04 AM,Saturday 10 May 2003
I suppose it makes sense that a pancreas should be sweet, and therefore a sweetbread, but what would make a thyroid sweet, the iodine?
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(2)
08:29:48 PM,Friday 9 May 2003
Yes, basking on a rock in the sun in order to raise one's core body temperature does have a certain naïve charm, but ooh, there's nothing like a hot goddamn shower in the morning to make you feel like an ASS-KICKING ENDOTHERM.
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(2)
10:08:59 AM,Thursday 8 May 2003
Aphrodite's buttocks are like unto a boy's.
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05:48:08 AM,Thursday 8 May 2003
I'm starting to think more and more that my ideal calling would be as a kept woman or houseboy for some prestigious dame of letters -- all that would be required of me would be sex and admiration. Oh dear, and arm ornamentation. That might be the sticking point.
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(8)
12:03:09 AM,Thursday 8 May 2003
T.I.A.I.L.W.: Antonia Brico.
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11:11:15 PM,Wednesday 7 May 2003
A nuthouse is the same thing as a booby hatch. But a nuthatch is no relation.
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(4)
10:34:29 AM,Wednesday 7 May 2003
Whoah. Ok, this is kind of freaky. You know I use catholic.org for email, partly 'cause I'm nominally catholic, and mostly 'cause it's free and partly 'cause I get to have a cute little address and all. The only disadvantage is the pop-up window every time I log in, but it's really not such a bad price to pay, all told. Check out what it says today, though:
Pray for Catholic Online
Heavenly Father:
We have learned that our apostolate of making the Gospel and the teaching of the Catholic Church known sometimes rouses spiritual forces arrayed against your eternal plan. Today, we experienced a substantial technical attack against Catholic Online, our server, and our operations.
Mindful of the words of the Apostle Paul, we ask for protection from heaven. In the name of your beloved Son, please send your Holy Angels to do battle on our behalf so that we can continue this vital apostolate. Expose these dark designs by the light of your Holy Spirit and protect us from any further attack. We pray in and through Jesus Christ...
In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit
Amen
... and then there are three little text entry forms where you're supposed to fill in your name and email address. Um... uh... heh.
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(10)
11:45:50 PM,Tuesday 6 May 2003
"Fanboy? What's that? The guy who stands in the whorehouse with the ostrich plumes?" -- My dad (who's 76 today, by the way, woo!)
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(3)
07:45:19 PM,Tuesday 6 May 2003
I wonder if there's such a phenomenon as the computer geek's sixpack -- that is, a cushion of flab brought on by too many fatty salty things and no actual aerobic activity, but with extraordinarily developed abdominal muscles lying just underneath it. I've just spent several hours kicking the shiznit out of Super Metroid with my laptop perched on my belly, and I feel as if I've done two hundred sit-ups. It won't burn the tub away, of course, but it must do some good to bolster its foundation.
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(1)
03:29:20 PM,Tuesday 6 May 2003
Ja, ja.
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(3)
04:26:46 AM,Tuesday 6 May 2003
Oh yeah, and I saw performance art tonight. Like, wow. It was a trio of three one-man plays, and the first one was pretty good, the second was really good, and the third was the performance art. Let me lay it out for you:
A man steps through a wire man-shaped frame on a screen. He is all in white, with splotches of paint on his pants and a white hood so you can't see his face. A film begins playing, and he narrates. It's basically a mix of old 50's stock footage (like the Duck and Cover video), blurry reproductions of old masters, and short segments from the 70's Italian cartoon Allegro Non Troppo (the kvell of pride I got for spotting this in no way obscured the shooting agony of having to watch the whole vile thing). His voice is somehow simultaneously flippant, fey, and grating, and he says things like, "Picasso. Bukowski. Lautrec. Cobain. All names we think of when we think 'Art.'" And "These people are trapped in conformity, the conformity of Society. And yet, I must try to be like them, to see in their way, to release them from their invisible shackles." And "Children are born into intuition. Intuition does not care about being right, because it is never wrong. But then they grow, and the left brain comes to life, and strangles the intuition, the creativity, the soul."
While this is going on, he's painting an ostentatiously juvenile landscape on the screen -- a tree with apples on it, M-shaped birds, a spikey yellow sun -- and just as the film comes to an end, he paints a giant floating BEET where the wire-framed man's head ought to be. Then two people hooded in black, one wearing a policeman's hat and one wearing a mortarboard, march on stage and calmly put him in a straitjacket. They leave, and he just as calmly takes it off (they didn't bother to buckle it), launching into a disgusting speech about a man who went to the opera (two times he yelled out, "sing Melancholy Baby!" And the third time he yelled out, "Well, if you won't sing Melancholy Baby, show us your c---!") (uh, yeah, that was the punchline.), and why the beet is the most artistic of all vegetables, because it's the only one that keeps its color on the way through the digestive system. Except he described it a lot more evocatively. Then he took a bow, like he was fucking Alexander the Great.
Maybe I haven't quite been able to get across how extravagantly annoyingly pathetically loathesome the whole thing was. If I haven't, feel lucky.
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(2)
04:20:30 AM,Tuesday 6 May 2003
