Bloglet, the gentleman's mock turtle soup -- Moss made it sweeter than myrrh ash and dhoup
I'm still obsessed with that bloody book, months now after I've read it. But it strikes me oddly that there's only one line out of the whole thing that stuck with me verbatim (or as near as damnit): "Well, it's not the Salvation Army, Socialism."
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(1)
11:16:35 AM,Friday 19 September 2003
Did I just set my Nomad's start-up graphic to a scrunchedy monochrome version of the Guidonian Hand, thereby revealing myself irrevocably as the most pathetically predictable theory geek who ever wadded a gim?
Uhh... that's a big 10-4.
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(5)
11:02:08 AM,Friday 19 September 2003
Because it is September, and because I am definitely in That Kind of Mood, I will give you the September poem from The Ladies' Almanack by the most triumphant Miss Djuna Barnes:
"LISTS AND LIKELIHOODS
The Vixen in the Coat of red,
The Hussy with the Honey Head,
Her frontal Bone soft lapped up
With hempen Ringlets like the Tup,
The Doxy in the Vest of Kid
Rustling like the Katie-did,
With Panther's Eyen dark and wan,
And Dov's Feet to walk upon.
The Jockey with the Pelvis plump,
The high-hipped Wrestler with the Rump
of yearling Mare, firm, sleek and creased,
The tamer smelling like her Beast,
The starry Jade with mannish Stride,
The Sister Twins in one Sash tied,
The humpback Jester at her ease,
Her Jollies coiled on their Trapeze.
The Virgin with the Partidge call,
Stepping her rolling azure Ball,
The Queen, who in the Night turned down
The spik's of her Husband's Crown
Therein to sit her Wench of Bliss
The whole long year will be like this!
For all the Planets, Stars and Zones
Run girlish to their Marrow-bones!
And all the Tides prognosticate
Not much of any other State!"
So may it be. Wouldn't that be nice?
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(1)
01:12:33 PM,Thursday 18 September 2003
Yesterday I saw a car with a bumper sticker that read "I hit badgers with spoons."
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(8)
10:41:46 AM,Thursday 18 September 2003
I think one day, just to spite my dad, I am going to write an adventure comic called Goethe and the Hottentot.
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12:28:18 AM,Thursday 18 September 2003
Maybe that's why I'm such a sex maniac: it feels like a creative act even when it isn't, because, in its purest form, it is.
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(2)
12:42:31 AM,Wednesday 17 September 2003
T.I.A.I.L.W.: Ewa Podles. Damn, that is a fine piece of Polish Contralto Booty (P.C.B.). She's very distracting to listen to when one's playing Nintendo, though, 'cause she'll whip down to one of them growly low notes, and it shakes you so hard you slip and fall into a pit of bubbling lava. Still, it's worth it. I am also perpetually I.L.W. Naxos, 'cause I got three CDs today -- Ewa does Rossini, Vesselina Kasarova does Lieder (that one wasn't actually Naxos; it was used), and a mass and some motets by Adrian Willaert for frikkin' $7 each. Life is insanely good.
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12:41:52 AM,Wednesday 17 September 2003
"I collect antique bellows." "Shouldn't that be bellowses?" "Bellows."
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(3)
08:49:22 PM,Tuesday 16 September 2003
I haven't done this in nearly a year. How nostalgic.
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(6)
07:02:16 AM,Monday 15 September 2003
I like:
* Pollen that's fallen from flowers onto a table into a bright little pile.
* Dryer lint.
* Being able to hear musicians breathing on their recordings.
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(14)
02:22:16 PM,Sunday 14 September 2003
I need a name to give to people in bars. The music's loud, the lights are hazy, everyone's bellowing... but they still gotta ask you your bloody name. I'd be happy with sleazy anonymity, but it's considered bad form to refuse a simple question like that point blank. But whenever I sigh and try to oblige them, it's always "Mirabai!" "What?" "Mirabai!!" "What? Neerm-lah?" "MIRABAI!!!" And then we both get red in the face and our throats are sore and it's a sorry business all round. The possible solutions, as far as I can see them:
1. Tattoo it, along with a phonetic guide, and possibly a brief explication of its history and origins, on my forehead. Painful, expensive, and -- tell you the truth, a little tacky.
2. Use a derived diminuitive. My parents call me "Mira", and I like it when they do it, but for some reason, it's not something I've ever liked offering to strangers. Maybe because of this one time when I picked up a random book in a random bookstore, opened it to a random page, and saw the sentence, "Any woman with a name like 'Mira' is not one with whom I'd ever suffer myself to share a railway carriage." Cut me to the quick, it did. And I like "Mir-Mir" and "Mira-Mira" when it's coming from my friends, but you understand how I can't very well go about introducing myself as same. That leaves "Mir", which seems about the best I can think of at the moment, though I'd have to anticipate a lot of "What, like the space station?" Which could be worse, I know, but... hm.
3. Find something fetching that has nothing to do with my actual name and start using it in public. You know, a 'handle'. Thing is, this has to be done very carefully. If it's too contrived, you sound like a pretentious dorkwad. "How nice it is to meet you. You may call me Hermes Fellowfilter. 'Rme', for short." But if it's too generic, you get blown off as just another poser. You know: "Red", "Spike", "Mac", "Bubba"... they just ain't right. I wish I could think up a good one of these, 'cause it would be so convenient, and I could keep my real name a tasty little secret for when they're curious enough to ask. But it has to be the right one, and flexible enough to be useful in different settings without being awkward.
Suggestions?
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(32)
10:12:02 AM,Sunday 14 September 2003
Remi gave me these questions ages ago, but, you see, I had nothing to procrastinate about, so I procrastinated on answering 'em. Then I suddenly got a bucketload of homework, and needed something to do while procrastinating on that, so... here they is.
THE RULES
1. Leave a comment, saying you want to be interviewed.
2. I will respond; I’ll ask you five questions.
3. You’ll update your website with my five questions, and your five answers.
4. You’ll include this explanation.
5. You’ll ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed.
If there was one sound (musical instrument, vocal, natural, anything) you could be stuck listening to for eternity, what would it be?
A bassoon playing low Bb. It's a nice rumbly engulfing sound -- screechy things, tapping things, and white noise all get on my nerves like crazy after about five minutes, but rumbly things just sort of sustain you, like the ground. No one's annoyed by the ground. They're annoyed by the wind, or the flying bits of debris, or the hailstones big as gobstoppers. So you see. Plus, when you actually play Bb on the bassoon, it makes televisions and computer monitors wobble, which is fun. (You can duplicate this effect, should a bassoon not be at hand, by putting a chopstick between your teeth and plucking. The screens go woob-woob-woob. It's great.) I know that doesn't work just for hearing it, but I'd have it in mind, at least.
If someone wanted to get into opera, where would they start?
Ok. I actually started answering this question when Remi first gave it to me weeks ago, and then I accidentally closed the window after I was six paragraphs into it and I kicked and fumed and now I'm finally calm enough to start again. Ahem. Caution: this might be loooooooong.
The big main important thing to remember, if you ask me, is: watch it before you listen to it. I know this isn't true for everyone, that some people just like to put on a CD while they're cooking pasta to whistle along with and don't care who's singing what or what about. But for me, the essential thing, why I watch an opera and not a play or a movie, is the way the music uncovers and enriches every word a character says. Speech is an immensely powerful, flexible, subtle thing, but music... it can say things that words can't. Everyone knows that. In opera, you take a story and stretch out maybe an hour's worth of words into three hours of words and music; it takes longer for them to say what they're saying, and sometimes they say it more than once. Of course this is infuriatingly boring if they're not saying anything, even if they're making pretty noises, but in the real operas, the ones that know what they're doing, you can get such a visceral, immediate understanding of what the characters feel and why they act precisely because of this stretching out of time and emotion and experience -- a phrase of music can contradict the words, overshadow them, plumb them, or even spin them out until the meaning's all deafened by beauty and power. But the catch is that the power of the music seldom overwhelms you until you've got a reason to really listen to it.
That's why my first advice would be: pick out an opera whose plot interests you. And make sure you see it -- live if you can; if not, on video. Then, once you've watched it enough to be able to associate different bits of the music with certain characters and parts of the plot, you can put on a CD and act it out in your own head as the music goes, instead of letting your eyes do it. That can be a very satisfying thing. But always watch it first, or it'll never be anything more than pretty noises.
I could go into ridiculously more depth, of course. You want composer or opera recommendations, or tips on how to get that "classical voice" sound to be less grating, or how to keep yourself from seeing 'em as ridiculous when they're supposed to be divine, you just ask me. I'll rabbit on for pages. But that's the best short (ha!) answer I can give. Oh, and if you just want to get into the thing via silly fandom (don't laugh -- more fans are hooked by the peripherals), go to Queer Opera Punks and read them for a while. You'll have no idea what they're talking about, of course, but their smartass obsessiveness will get under your skin, and you'll want to check this stuff out for your own self. That's only if you're piqued rather than frustrated by in-jokes and know-it-alls. I am, but if you're not, there are plenty of other avenues to try. I love sucking in new converts to the cult of opera, so if you got any questions at all, chat me up.
Hunchback or Harelip?
Well, I've met people with each. The harelip was just a little baby. The hunchback is one of my clients. I know the latter quite a bit better and, by virtue of his age and experience, he's got a lot more character and pizazz, so I gotta go with hunchback. Even in general, hunchbacks are kind of cool. Mad scientists, and all that. Y'know, quite a lot of people are born with harelips and cleft palates but get 'em fixed very young so you can't even see they ever had it. That's true to a certain extent with hunchbacks, but not as much. Of course, it's also more uncommon to begin with. So I like hunchbacks on principle; they're rare and extravagant rather than common and concealable. That's true of camels versus hares too, come to think of it. And I like camels better.
In Athens, there's a lot of political activity at the local level. In fact, the mayor and a councilman live within three blocks of my house. I find the local politics fascinating and personal. Is there an interesting local political situation in Missoula? What it's like?
I feel really ashamed by this question, because if there's any kind of politics I shouldn't be hiding my head in the sand about, it's local politics. But I just can't bear it. I can't bring myself to educate myself about politics, on any scale. This is a personal failing. I'll tell you, though, that Missoula does have a pretty slick system going on, especially compared to the rest of the state, which is mostly hardline Republican/Libertarian. Missoula was the first city in the country to elect a New Party majority on its City Council. All the hippies and commies and granolas and queers in the state wind up here, and it shows. I was in the Montana Youth Senate my senior year in high school, and we wound up legalizing pot and gay marriages, which gives me some hope for the future for the state as a whole (and in my High School's mock 2002 election, Gore won, with Nader a close second). But oy, politics. I haven't even voted in Montana since I was registered. Bad, uncivic me.
If you could have a useless superpower, what would it be?
I would like to be able to separate egg yolks with the POWER OF MY MIND.
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(17)
09:06:35 AM,Sunday 14 September 2003
Inverting the interval. Duh. Ok, that will make the next fifteen pages of analysis rather a lot pleasanter, by gum.
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08:07:50 AM,Sunday 14 September 2003
Cabin Fever was fun and dumb. It was nowhere near the same league as 28 Days Later, and didn't aspire to be, but it fulfilled its own modest aims very well. I liked the surreal bits especially.
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03:00:03 AM,Sunday 14 September 2003
Vg vf n wneevat naq gebhoyrfbzr guvat gb or frag n ybir yrggre jura bar vf abg va ybir.
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(1)
02:43:42 AM,Sunday 14 September 2003
Pureed toast is tastier than you'd think.
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02:40:23 AM,Sunday 14 September 2003
Why is it apparently completely freaking impossible to find a pair of pants or shorts that fulfills the following two conditions simultaneously:
a) Don't fall down when I'm standing up.
b) Don't jab me in the belly when I'm sitting down.
Ok, I admit I generally sit all hunched over in a manner that makes my belly bulge, but one would think the solution would be to buy nice big roomy pants made for people with big bellies, right? But when I was wearing my big bellied shorts this evening and needed to run over to the gas station real quick like, I had to keep a death grip on the waistband the whole way or they would have slid down to my ankles. Then I sit down just now and they jab me in the freaking belly unless I unbutton them. This is monstrous.
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(12)
02:39:49 AM,Sunday 14 September 2003
Go to sleep, dumkopf!
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(1)
01:15:18 PM,Friday 12 September 2003
Scooting home today, I was suddenly seized by the urge to sing "Libera Me, Domine" for all the worms squished on the sidewalk after the rain. You don't argue with urges like that. So I did.
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(3)
12:06:33 PM,Friday 12 September 2003
I'll feel extremely silly if, the day after I lose this Buddha belly I've had my entire life, the apocalypse comes and I starve to death.
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(3)
11:44:26 AM,Friday 12 September 2003
