Bloglet, the gentleman's mock turtle soup -- Moss made it sweeter than myrrh ash and dhoup
I am profligate! I am prodigal! I am unclean in word and deed! Wheeeee!
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(1)
02:00:11 PM,Saturday 28 June 2003
I want to play in:
a mariachi band
a marching band*
a string quartet*
a dixieland band
a symphony orchestra*
a wind ensemble*
a recorder consort*
a Medieval dance band*
a Renaissance loud band*
a chamber orchestra*
a bassoon quartet*
a Hindu chanting group*
a Shakespearean alarum battery*
a duo-tag-team-trio*
a cathedral
a tango band
a jugband
a circus band
I've played in the asterisked ones before, and I wanna again. The other ones I've never done, but I could if I wanted, and I would if I got the chance. I'm not playing nothing with nobody at the moment. It's sad.
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(7)
09:45:02 AM,Saturday 28 June 2003
Fresh figs. Peacock plumes. Jets of warm water. Where the hell am I?
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(3)
12:30:09 AM,Saturday 28 June 2003
I've never had a drink thrown in my face. What am I doing wrong?
On a related note, what's the best way to proposition one's supervisor?
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(5)
10:22:11 AM,Friday 27 June 2003
There's a taste of almonds in my mouth. I haven't eaten almonds in lord knows how long. Did I bite down on my cyanide-filled tooth too hard?
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10:20:45 AM,Friday 27 June 2003
The secret: try to be ephemeral.
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(2)
09:47:02 AM,Thursday 26 June 2003
Hm. Well, the "Fire Dispatcher" and "Janitor" jobs on the Raytheon site are closed... but "Dining Room Attendant" is still open. Maybe there's still a small chance? Man, I hope so. Life is too good and easy here. I want to go brave the shoggoths.
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(7)
07:37:23 PM,Tuesday 24 June 2003
I just read Djuna Barnes's Nightwood again (first time was right outta high school, and I didn't understand a lick of it), and I liked it. A short book, dense as a concrete flan, but satisfying. I'd recommend it, sure. It does some things that not many other books do -- the two books it most reminds me of are Angela Carter's The War of Dreams and Flann O'Brian's At Swim-Two-Birds, if that conjures up anything. Anyhow, T. S. Eliot liked it and so do I. I really don't want to knock it; it's obscure and underrated enough as it is. Nevertheless... I don't see how there can be any excuse for this kind of sentence:
"As the altar of a church would present but a barren stylization but for the uncalculated offerings of the confused and humble; as the corsage of a woman is made suddenly martial and sorrowful by the rose thrust among the more decorous blooms by the hand of a lover suffering the violence of the overlapping of the permission to bestow a last embrace, and its withdrawal, making a vanishing and infinitesimal bull's-eye, of that which had a moment before been a buoyant and showy bosom, by dragging time out of his bowels --(for a lover knows two times, that which he is given, and that which he must make) -- so Felix was astonished to find that the most touching flowers laid on the alter he had raised to his imagination were placed there by the people of the underworld, and that the reddest was to be the rose of the doctor."
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(4)
01:57:07 PM,Tuesday 24 June 2003
Who put a Bengal tiger in the Kaiser's latrine?
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(1)
01:49:10 PM,Tuesday 24 June 2003
Ok, I still haven't memorized the Gardener's Song, 'cause I am the Duchess of Suck. But I've decided that once I do, the next one I'm gonna try for is the odd poem by the Puritan Minister guy that I brought in to Senior Language last year.
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(1)
03:32:38 AM,Monday 23 June 2003
Goddamnit... musta been 3 years ago, Sara stuck a sticker on my Summa Theologica with some guy named The Incredible Moses Leroy on it who looks just like her except for the goatee (that guy doesn't have a goatee! no, but my ex-girlfriend... um, I mean... yeah. He has a goatee. But aside from that, the resemblance is uncanny.) and I tried to peel it off -- 'cause I don't care how incredible he is, he ain't no match for the Big Dumb Sicilian Ox -- but now there's all this gummy sticky residue all over my book and it reminds me of the gummy sticky residue on my HEART! Man, wouldn't it be nice if you could just take a cotton swab soaked in isopropyl to your heart and rub away all the unpleasant lingering schmutz? But no, "external use only", it tells me. Well, fooey.
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(11)
02:24:41 AM,Monday 23 June 2003
There should be words for:
1. the feeling you get when the phone rings and you can't tell if it's yours or if it's on the t.v.
2. the feeling you get when you're watching something you're enjoying but you think that the person you're watching it with is maybe being bored by it so you put yourself into a transplanted hypothetical state of trying to imagine that you're bored too so you can gauge how bored the other person is and whether you ought to shut it off
3. the feeling you get when you're so tired that the delicious food you're eating, even though it's hitting all the pleasure receptors on your tongue, can't get through to your brain, so you know objectively that what you're eating tastes wonderful but you can't enjoy it because your brain won't let you think of anything but sleeping
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(10)
11:14:32 PM,Sunday 22 June 2003
O.o.C.P.Q.o.t.D:
My Ma: "Go and watch your dugga... your iggadug... your gidabum... bumdig..."
Me: "'Bomb-diggity'?"
My Ma: "Go and watch your bomb-diggity!"
My Dad: "I mean, I don't know... she may be a crack whore and all that, but twenty years ago, when she was in her prime, I mean -- whoowee! What a powerhouse!"
My Dad: "She's got rubies on her boobies!"
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(7)
11:06:55 PM,Sunday 22 June 2003
My ma asked me what my favorite operas are... numbered lists are silly, especially for something like this, but I guess, for the next five minutes at least, the order goes something like:
1. The Magic Flute -- Mozart
2. La Clemenza di Tito -- Mozart
3. Orfeo ed Euridice -- Gluck
4. Don Giovanni -- Mozart
5. Idomeneo -- Mozart
6. Semiramide -- Rossini
7. The Marriage of Figaro -- Mozart
8. Der Rosenkavalier -- Strauss
9. Ariodante -- Handel
10. Cosi Fan Tutte -- Mozart
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(9)
11:04:04 PM,Sunday 22 June 2003
It's getting too hard to find a male gynecologist these days.
And why do all the tone deaf people I know have such nice voices?
Um. The preceding statements are not connected in any way. I just happened to be listening to Tycho Brahe's "Rainbow Connection" mp3 while thinking about male gynecologists.
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(7)
05:31:21 PM,Sunday 22 June 2003
Moss's recent link reminded me of something I'd been planning to blog for a while. I wish I could be a rhapsode. Now, maybe I wouldn't have the voice or the memory for it anyhow, even if you could make a living at it these days, or there was a proper equivalent to Homer in modern English, but it just seems like such a rich and blissful thing to be. You memorize some long, genius poem-story that everyone's heard but no one reads, and you travel around everywhere reciting it, over and over. You go deeper and deeper inside it until you can almost understand everything in the world in terms of it, and everything in it in terms of the world. And when I say recite, I don't mean chalk-drone metronome -- I mean sing, or chant, or something between the two, and have different voices for each character and hushed intonations for the solemn bits and raucous trumpeting for the flashy bits and... man, wouldn't it be perfect? And people would pay you for it, and you'd buy some food and drink and go on to the next town and deliver your poem again.
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(4)
05:04:53 PM,Sunday 22 June 2003
What sloughs?
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(3)
04:57:45 PM,Sunday 22 June 2003
Oof. What a good book.
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(14)
01:01:36 PM,Saturday 21 June 2003
I don't know if this is true of anyone else (I'd be very interested to hear either way), but the sting of desire in me is so much like the feeling I get when I'm in free-fall for a few seconds, in an elevator or a roller coaster, that I can't think of how to distinguish them except in the ineffable way which makes the first so unspeakably delicious -- though always, I think, mixed with a little fevered anxiousness -- while the second is just precarious whoopsiness, though that itself can be a little pleasurable now and then. But they seem to come from the same place: my belly (I guess I can't really distinguish between stomach and womb except when one or the other of them hurts, but they've been in good working order for so long that they're mixed up together in my sense memory). And they last for nearly the same amount of time: a second, two at the most, with a rapidly diminishing tingle after each stab. I guess, intermediate to them, is the bouncing nervousness I get throughought my whole midriff when I'm about to go on stage or do something important and fuckupable, or if I've had too much caffeine -- those two are also indistinguishable from each other, though neither's very pleasant. One thing that won me over to Der Rosenkavalier instantly, in spite of the dissonance that usually balks me, was the way that the strings, in the first meeting between Octavian and Sophie, imitated those peculiar sweet attacks, one after another, with precisely the right timing and insinuating acuteness. I've never heard the phenomenon described explicitly, as far as I can tell; you usually hear of people being washed over with it in a rush like it's a tsunami that takes you all at once, or a slow, continuously building rumble like an avalanche. This is more like... discrete little blowgun darts in your belly that shock you each time they penetrate you so that you don't notice the venom diffusing subtly into your limbs and altering your reason second by second.
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(6)
11:41:00 AM,Tuesday 17 June 2003
Have any of y'all read Silas Marner? I just finished it last night (playing Metroid Fusion all the while... what a glorious game). I've never read (or, uh, listened to) any George Eliot before, so I had a relatively open mind about the thing, but now it's over I'm not sure what to make of it. First off, the prose style was wonderful, and worth relishing for its own sake. The narration (and occasional philosophical-whimsical comments) was so well-balanced and solid and articulate -- and the last audiobook I got through was Wodehouse, so I've worked myself up into a snuggle with style -- and the dialogue (Read on my version by the guy who played Manuel in Fawlty Towers! And damn well, too, I gotta say.), though yokely, so different from the sober and cultivated narrator's voice, was as easy and true as I've ever heard conversation be in a book. Y'know, even the characters had a sort of good stamp to them... I guess. They were sort of broad and not so deep, but you were able to think their thoughts along with them if you wanted to. The story -- I dunno, dude. It just... I mean, maybe I'm too shallow or slighting or finicky to appreciate the simple good-heartedness of it, but it seemed... empty. It was too realistic to be allegorical, and too bantering to be soulful, and it just dawdled along on more or less of a straight line until it wrapped up all happy and oh life's meaning life's joy. Nuh? Tell me where I'm going wrong. It ain't jiving with me. I'm still more than willing to read Middlemarch, just to get more of that awesome word-plunking, but if this is what she's like all the time, I gotta push her back into the ranks of Dickens and Defoe (and maybe Bradbury?) -- plenty of brilliance mired in a murky soup of I-guess-you-had-to-be-there sentimentality.
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(12)
09:59:05 AM,Tuesday 17 June 2003
