Bloglet, the gentleman's mock turtle soup -- Moss made it sweeter than myrrh ash and dhoup
T.I.A.I.L.W.: H. E. Elsom. A queer, a classicist, a Liberal, a computer stud, a Sherlockian, an opera critic... my lord, could she be any more sublime? She wrote a Sherlockian parody of Nigel Molesworth! And one putting Irene Adler into Fidelio! Oh, sweet mercy. If I had a little extra cabbage and half a slug of chutzpah, I'd fly to Blighty and come scrabbling round her door like a fuzzy little supplicant. Whoowee!
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07:20:12 AM,Tuesday 17 June 2003
That bit a while ago about memorizing poetry, I think, was very wise. I've determined to memorize a poem a week, and who knows how long I'll stick to it, but it's worth a try, eh? The first poem I aim to memorize is "The Gardener's Song". I suppose I feel a bit bad about kiping the poem from the internet instead of reading the book (Sylvie and Bruno) which it's interspersed with, but I've heard that the story is kind of a drag. Silly feeling, but I'm sure you know it -- that a piece of knowledge is tainted unless you got it by an independent and unadulterated source. I like reading reference books, especially the witty ones, that dissect rare words or dig up obscure facts in easy portions, but when I trot the trivia out again in company, I feel a twinge for having gotten it in an easy modern slurry instead of having accumulated it myself, embedded in some deep and heady volume that, of course, I absorbed entire into my bristling intellect, ready to offer an infinitely profound discourse on it at any time; but, for the sake of my audience, I reserve the broth of it, and chose only to give them the sparkle off the salt mine, as one might say. Glaaaaaaaaargh. What a pompous putzwanger my brain wants me to be sometimes. I hope that this poem memorizing thing isn't going to be in the service of that, or at least not mostly. Devoting your life's purpose to strutting around spouting erudition is the surest way to suck your own soul out through your nostrils. I think I want it... ok, yeah, sure, I want it a little bit so I can show off in company, but I also want it so I can resist the supercilious snotnosed urge to show off in company, and I want it so I can satisfy myself that I've got enough in me so I don't have to flail around at seeming witty or learned in front of nobody. And I do also want it just 'cause poems in your head are useful and cool and toothsome things to have. That's the main reason, truly. So I'll see if I can keep myself at it. Yeah.
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06:45:07 AM,Tuesday 17 June 2003
I think, yet again in light of Moss's statistics page, that it's time to re-link to the utterly brilliant bit of Jeeves/Wooster slash languishing undeservedly in the musty cockles of tne 'net. It is to slash what caviar is to bar snacks.
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06:22:27 AM,Monday 16 June 2003
One of the gentlemen who repaired my computer at Best Buy (actually, sent it away to get its motherboard, CPU, and fan replaced; thank God for extended warranties) left it with a new dial-up networking connection named "fart", username "msn/bbystore593", password conveniently cookied. Should I use it for my own unscrupulous ends?
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06:06:00 AM,Monday 16 June 2003
You might make a joke on that -- something about [___________ and _________], you know.
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05:59:09 AM,Monday 16 June 2003
I'm rereading the Purgatorio slowly (I think I've discovered the source of my frustration at not reading as much as I used to -- certainly, this blessed bastard thing the internet has something to do with it, but also it's partly due to St. John's; in high school, I read lots and lots of books, mostly easy pulpy ones, with some exceptions. I'd just pick one up, usually a short paperback novel about anything at all, and read it in one sitting. It didn't matter if it was good or not -- it was just words to slurp up and get off on.
At St. John's, I read less, in terms of volume, but everything was more concentrated. I felt guilty when I went back to junkfood reading because I knew I could be picking my way precariously through Kant. Now that my brain is my own again, I'm drawn towards re-reading Program Books and their ilk, but since I have all this free time and feathery responsibilities, I feel like I should be reading the number of books I read in high school. Now, at work, the flipping TV is always on (though one of the guys I work with, bless him, sometimes brings a book and turns it off for an hour or two in the early morning), so I can't concentrate on what I'm reading, and have been playing gameboy games with my jukebox cranked instead. And at home, that tickling urge that used to hit me when I stared at my bookshelf has turned into the urge for a blt fix, or -- and this is kinda interesting -- an audiobook fix.
I've been reading some, of course. A few absorbing but easy reads in big splurts: the His Dark Materials trilogy, Tipping the Velvet, a silly bioterrorism thriller, and some others. But I've been starting lots of Great Books and then putting them down, or getting through them ten pages at a time, drawing them out over months. Audiobooks, though, I've been stamping through, though they take longer to read aloud than to read silently, and I've tried to stick with unabridged versions. Thing is, I play video games while I'm listening. Sometimes mindless puzzle games like Tetris or Jardinains, most recently two of the Metroid series. Having my eyes and fingers occupied stifles all my restlessness and lets me float along on the story for hours. So what does it mean? I dunno.
I'm starting to reconcile myself to not being a marvelous marathon monster reader like Moira or Lizzie, even though it's been the greater part of my own good opinion of myself -- whatever virtue I can come up with in me always seems to lead back to one of three things: 1. my parents' love, 2. reading my childhood away, and 3. the Suzuki method. But I realize that this niggling reflex to hoard knowledge against some future test or disaster instead of digging it for its own sake is just fruitless and silly. Too silly -- I feel like I'm wasting my time if I'm not edifying myself, and then I jerk against the stuffy task of edifying myself and go looking to do completely mindless, like looking for an exhaustive list of theramin-using surf bands. So audiobooks are something I don't have to gird my loins to enjoy. Why not enjoy 'em? Then when I've gotten over my finchy old clucking superego, I can start reading with my eyes again in healthy lashings.)
Hee hee. No, I haven't forgotten the close parenthesis. I just inverted the priority of what I really wanted to blog about without really meaning to... y'know how it happens. To reiterate: I was reading the Purgatorio and realized that some of the people in there, since their sin was usually multiplied by the number of years they were alive and then multiplied by 30, or some such involved calculation, are still stuck there, unless lots of people have been praying for them and getting them time off for good, uh, behavior by living people who learned their name from the book. If I ever write The Fractured Zink, which I still wanna do, sometime (it's really cool that now we have an echolalic client, I can get a more realistic sense of what echolalia really sounds like; 'cause, of course, the patient who was gonna be a counterpart to Echo in the opera had to be echolalic.), I think I'm gonna have a patient who spends all her time praying for people mentioned in Dante. Just in case, y'know? I mean, it couldn't hurt.
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05:38:30 AM,Monday 16 June 2003
My face got sunburned on the grassy hill at the Pride festival and happened to have a handy black-and-white sequined Mardis Gras mask with an ostrich plume on the side that covered the glowing raw area perfectly, so I wore it with my dinner jacket, black velvet pants, and black bowtie (the cheating one -- I still can't tie the real one to save my life) to the drag show. I liked the effect -- I got to act mysterious and avoid conversation -- but it seemed to unsettle the crowd at the bar. They looked askance at me. Oh well. Considering that the place was overrun with examples of the Unspeakable Grotesquerie that is the Mullet, I thought it was a bit unfair.
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05:05:11 AM,Monday 16 June 2003
T.I.A.I.L.W.: Sarah Waters. (Eeee! Ain't she a cutie? And so congenial. Plus, she's Welsh. The Welsh are just an inherently sexy breed, ain't they?) I finished the book weeks ago, but it's still been clanging around in my head at dizzy intervals -- that says a good deal for it, I think. Now I gotta get ahold of the BBC miniseries of it. They say it's on the campier side of high style, and the ladies never quite pass... but that's all right. If I can take fruffle-fronted mezzos, I can take lipsticked vaudevillians. Hum. That picture above reminds me of something I've been meaning to blog about: I need a peddler's coat. The one she's wearing was evocative of the kind of thing I mean, but not quite. I don't know quite how to describe it, or even if that's what it's called... a long rough leather coat with a great multitude of pockets. It's got to be weatherbeatable for sleeping in hedgerows and, at the same time, look snappy in a dark alley when you're revealing the lines of stolen watches hanging in the interior hooks under the left armpit. You know what I mean? A sort of Fagin/Gypsy/Tramp coat. It would be nice if at least some of the pockets had buttoned flaps so I could keep things from rain and jostling. And, of course, it can't be so big for me that I trip over it or look like a Mandarin when I try to fit my arms through the sleeves. Where would I go about looking for one? I like the leather jacket my mom bought me from the dollar store because it's warm and smells like leather and has five pockets, but leather jackets are too fraught with all this symbological flibble for me to feel quite at home in it. I've noticed that whenever I'm wearing it strangers treat me as if I'm acting like an arrogant jerkoff, even though I speak in the same way as when I'm wearing my usual geeky button-down getup. And I just don't have enough pockets. Even cargo pants, which have their own odd connotations, don't have enough pockets. So I need a peddler's coat. That's all there is.
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04:58:28 AM,Monday 16 June 2003
Actually, I'd decided to do this last night while I was sweeping the hallway, but after reading Moss's cool new referrer logs, I want to do it all the more. In case anyone googles the phrase "squid ink beats turpentine", um... hi. Why did you google the phrase "squid ink beats turpentine"? As what? As a wood stain? As a fuel additive? As a way to keep the snails off your cabbages? Or just in terms of general... potency? Please state your justification in a succinct but thorough paragraph of 400 words or less, and send them to thomasaquinas@catholic.org. I'll make it worth your while.
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07:16:33 PM,Friday 13 June 2003
"CONSULTATIONS BY
THE PSYCHIC NUDIST
Find out if he/she is a true nudist
I can help you psychically read between
the lines of a personal ad.
Free $5.00 reading
This is for real.
$2.50 per minute thereafter.
System clicks you off after $5.00 reached.
so there is no obligation to stay on longer.
Call 1-800-ask-keen x0140490
YOU HAVE TO BE NUDE TO CALL.
DON'T THINK I WON'T KNOW"
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12:29:21 AM,Friday 13 June 2003
My new favorite Shakespeare simile: "That kiss is comfortless as frozen water to a starved snake."
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12:41:38 AM,Thursday 12 June 2003
When first we went a-mowing,
the scythe was dull and wet.
The dew had spewed its residue
o'er every tooth and fret.
The day warmed up on paper,
but chill still thrilled my core;
the hay had black'd and sizzl'd,
but metal tempered hoar.
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10:02:08 AM,Wednesday 11 June 2003
T.I.A.I.L.W.: Salma Hayek. (My God, she can make a unibrow look sexy...)
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12:31:27 AM,Wednesday 11 June 2003
With the money I saved by buying a Nomad Jukebox 3 instead of an iPod, I bought a GBA SP with Metroid Fusion. Pet. Drool. Dandle. Slaver. It is so guiltily glorious.
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10:11:32 PM,Tuesday 10 June 2003
The most famous Bisexual Scotsman since King James!
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02:52:14 AM,Tuesday 10 June 2003
As far as I can remember, the only site I've ever seen with an "Order a Segway Today!" banner ad has been Theremin World. I think that's telling, somehow.
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02:48:35 AM,Tuesday 10 June 2003
Don't lean on a pitchfork! You may break your ribs!
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08:07:28 PM,Monday 9 June 2003
I dreamed I went to go watch The Marriage of Figaro at the Met, but when the conductor gave the downbeat for the overture, they started playing The Barber of Seville's overture instead, so the audience booed and the conductor waded out into the middle of the crowd and shot an "owie bomb" (apparently composed of a bottle rocket, a rubber band, and some of those little exploding paper snaps) into the ceiling, which shorted out the lights and woke me up.
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03:05:45 PM,Monday 9 June 2003
So remind me never to become a coke fiend -- two cups of coffee, and my insides felt like a vibrating hotel bed fed with four hours worth of quarters.
There was a squirrel on my roof just now. It looked in my window.
I read Dostoevsky's The Double last night. Trippiest Dostoevsky book I ever read. Head-to-toe wannabe Gogol, but in a good way. A little exhausting, though. The most surprising thing about it is that never once was the guy mistaken for his double by anyone else, even though they had the same name and identical features. I thought that every plot with the slightest doppelgangery twist always had to have a slice of mistaken identity thrown in somewhere -- I mean, usually that's the whole entire hinge of the idea. But not this one. Still gotta work out the metaphysical consequences and all.
When you fire a warning shot from a pistol, why fire it into the air? Why not the ground? I mean, if it's dirt. I'd think the chance of richochet from plain walking dirt would be less than the chance of a scalding bullet landing in someone's eye, but I know dick about ballistics, so maybe not.
I'm gonna go to sleep with Jeeves and Wooster.
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10:09:27 AM,Friday 6 June 2003
At my job, just like at SJC, we have what we call "Program Books". But sometimes there's some really baffling grammar in these ones. For instance, someone wrote yesterday that "KH's hair needs brushed." What?! Needs brushing, or needs to be brushed, either way you want it, but "needs brushed"? I've never heard anyone use any construction at all like this in speech, but I've seen it written startlingly often, and from more than one person (all of 'em native English speakers). Where on earth does it come from?
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10:01:57 AM,Thursday 5 June 2003
