agent of entropy

it's a very small roadtrip, but... roadtrip!

hopefully the rain will hold off, and the twisty coast-highway will be beautiful, and at the end of it there will be good food and a warm place to sleep by the ocean.

back tomorrow evening, in time for class.

today was a sweet day; a perfect day, like the song says.

there was long lazy sleep, with no nightmares, and then i met jencallisto and we wandered through the tail end of the farmer's market. we ate satsumas in the afternoon sunshine, and the band played 'Midnight Train to Georgia.' we had a lunch of thanksgiving leftovers, much very good conversation through the afternoon and evening, and a rare kind of peace and simple comfort. and as the daylight slipped away, we went out for another bit of wandering, up to the hill at the top of the cemetery. there were brilliant fall trees, and we made the top of the hill just after the sun went below the city to the west, and in the cold clear air we watched the clouds and the changing light.

...and she sang me a gift, one that made me grin and laugh: '1952 Vincent Black Lighting,' one of my favorites, but genderswapped to young Jane Adie, on her fine motorbike, and Red Bobby, from the corners and cafés.

Says Jane, "In my opinion, there's no greater joy
than a '52 Vincent and a red-headed boy
Now Nortons and Indians and Greeveses won't do
They don't have a soul like a Vincent '52."
She reached for his hand and she slipped him the keys
She said "I've got no further use for these
I see angels on Ariels in leather and chrome
Swooping down from heaven to carry me home"
And she gave him one last kiss and died
And she gave him her Vincent to ride.

and it still makes me grin and laugh now; a lovely song, a sweet twist to it, and a voice that fits the last dance of colors in the sunset.

thank you, jencallisto.

just a roll-call for my own records, this time, going short on the commentary.

65. Phantoms in the Brain, V.S. Ramachandran. a re-read, still good.

66. The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, Patricia McKillip. fairy tales, fluff.

67. The Book of Jhereg (containing Jhereg, Yendi, and Teckla),
68. The Book of Taltos (containing Taltos and Phoenix),
69. The Book of Athyra (containing Athyra and Orca),
70. Issola, and
71. Dzur
all by Stephen Brust. it is like opiate candy for the weasels, and fun to read, too. i'm missing one book out of this series (Dragon), and then i'll have to go hunting down the few others of his that i haven't read yet. and then i'll start all over again.

72. Nextwave: agents of H.A.T.E., vol. 1, Warren Ellis & Stuart Immonen. full of violence and superheroes and Ellis-style ridiculousness. good stuff. (thank you, violin!)

73. The Five Fists of Science, Matt Fraction. yet more silliness, but this time with Nicola Tesla and Mark Twain! made me giggle. "So what do you do, just sit in your special science chair?" "...Well, yes."
*grin* (thank you again, violin!)

74. The Best American Comics 2006, ed Harvey Pekar and Anne Elizabeth Moore. an excellent collection, and i want to go back and re-read each little bit again sometime soon. and because pumapreysize rocks, it's signed by both the editors and has little drawings from three of the artists; my favorite signature-sketch is a grumpy-looking little bird by a fellow named Hob, pointing a wing at one of the other artists' sketches, saying "Don't listen to that boy."

75. To the Hilt, Dick Francis. standard suspense-and-whodunnit with a dash of racehorses and antique bejeweled things, but good enough to make it an effective distraction.

and still in the pile are Calvino, Frank O'Hara, Asimov, a few others. and more Brust if i can get my hands on it. any suggestions, since i have a library card now and all?

from Ellis, on Nextwave: "It’s an absolute distillation of the superhero genre. No plot lines, characters, emotions, nothing whatsoever. It’s people posing in the street for no good reason. It is people getting kicked, and then exploding. It is a pure comic book, and I will fight anyone who says otherwise. And afterwards, they will explode."

a few links, first.
from nacht_musik, who knows how to make me smile:
Kermit the Frog and Sandra Bullock, with another Mahna song...Phenomena! (even better, the phrase "Ik zie allemaal rare beestjes...")

from Zoz:
a series of video clips on/by Tats Cru, with some good footage of the creation of their Big Jimmy memorial mural, and other bits from their time at MIT. (it took me a little while to realize that much of the everybody-sitting-down interview footage was recorded in the housemasters' apartment at Senior Haus. awww, nostalgia.)

and a small note, a bit of thinking, memory and family and stubbornness. my grandfather's been in the hospital for the past few weeks with congestive heart failure. this is a hard thing for me, for all of my family; i don't really have a handle on how to deal with it. ( but today's news made me smile. )

family is a strange and powerful thing, and i've been very, very lucky.

i'm working through a lot of difficult bits, in five or six directions at once. i'm trying, in my same piecemeal, day-by-day way, to make sense of the world, of people and trust and honesty, of family and memory, of health and body, of future and action and learning and place-in-the-world. sometime soon i'll get around to writing these things out in a way that i'd be good with sharing.

in the meantime, perigee and tamnonlinear have written some sharp, clean, clear pieces that make a lot of sense to me, that speak to some of what i'm dealing with right now. so i'll start with that.
perigee's "On Being Good"
and
tamnonlinear's "Process and Product"

The rest of the spoken-word piece (from welcome to oblivion) didn't grab me nearly so much, but this quote struck me clear and deep:

"Nothing will prevent me, neither close attention nor the desire to be exact, from writing and speaking words that sing."

That's an important thing, for me -- that openness and truth, being as honest and clear as possible, paying close attention, are all vital and important, and that with all of that the words still sing, still have such tremendous power and beauty. That there is not a necessary tradeoff between poetry and truth, stories and honesty.

from tamnonlinear, a sad sweet poem that makes me want to drop everything, pack Matilda up with the two or three bags that i need, pick up a tent and a sleeping bag, and go.

"When We Sold the Tent" by Rhina P. Espaillat

When we sold the tent
we threw in the Grand Canyon
with its shawl of pines,
lap full of cones and chipmunks
and crooked seams of river.

We let them have the
parched white moonscapes of Utah,
and Colorado's
magnificat of flowers
sunbursting hill after hill.

Long gentle stretches
of Wyoming, rain outside
some sad Idaho
town where the children, giddy
with strange places, clowned all night.

Eyes like small veiled moons
circling our single light, sleek
shadows with pawprints,
all went with the outfit; and
youth, a river of campfires.

i spent the latter half of the day thinking that today was Friday, rather than Thursday, and now it's nearly two in the morning and time to sleep soon, especially if i'm back to needing so much more sleep than normal. more science tomorrow, and maybe my data and my chip will behave properly.

but, since i want to give my brain some brief respite before sleeping so i can finish my cocoa and perhaps not have nightmares about animated meat, a brief movie review: Lunacy, Jan Svankmajer's new film.

Svankmajer introduces it himself with a blasé speech about how it's a horror movie and not art, because art doesn't exist anymore, except as a "sort of trailer for the reflection of Narcissus". and it is a horror movie, and as D. pointed out after the movie, it's got that classic horror-movie trepidation where you know what's going to happen, and that it's going to be bad, and you watch the characters blunder through it anyway. there's a good bit of speechifying that makes a summary of the extremes of philosophy from the past two centuries or so, roughly coming out to "absolute free will/indulgence" vs. "control and punishment" vs. a sort of naive and shallow religious moralism. with, ya know, the Marquis de Sade, Edgar Allen Poe, the French Revolution, a blasphemous orgy, a therapeutic funeral, and stop-motion animated meat. (yes, stop-motion animated meat. go watch the trailer. or don't, if that's not something you want to see, obviously.)

yeah. i think i'm glad i watched it, and i am glad that i saw it in the theater rather than telling myself that i'd rent it later, because i probably wouldn't, and i'd've had a hard time sitting through the whole thing if it was easier to get up and walk out. it was thoroughly disturbing in a number of ways, and there's some interesting bits for thinking-about, and Svankmajer is (as always) really, profoundly strange. i've often had a hard time watching his films, though with Conspirators of Pleasure and perhaps also Faust, it was more because i kept falling asleep. Alice is the only one of his full-length films i've watched all the way through. it's worth, at the very least, watching some of the trailers or movie-clips to see his stop-motion animation, because his talent and skill with that is impressive. (edit: a-ha! YouTube wins again. here's a copy of Svankmajer's short Darkness/Light/Darkness. probably not worksafe, and also involving small bits of animated meat, but mostly just clay, and generally just really neat.)

another and rather more thorough review here: "Lunacy: Svankmajer's political allegory".

mmm, 2am writing. so crunchy. time for sleep.

i picked up a ridiculous quantity of swatches of tie silk at the Depot last week. i bought two packs of one particular pattern -- a small-curlicue brocade with little dots -- with the idea of making a quilt. as it turns out, each of the ~150 swatches is a slightly different color, woven from a combination of 4 (or more) colors of thread. the shades range through golds, sage-greens, reds, blues, purples, and a little bit of black and silver.

thanks to snowninja7's enablement, i got started on the quilt this weekend, and just finished stitching the first set of pieces together. i thought about planning out some fancy pattern with piecework and/or colors...and then decided that while that would in theory produce an absolutely amazingly gorgeous quilt, the thing would never actually get sewn, and i'd have much less fun. so instead i went with my usual kamikaze approach, and i'll end up with a patchwork quilt made with gorgeous brocade silk.

each patch-square is ~5" x 5"; there will be 9 blocks, each 5 squares on a side. haven't decided yet if i'm going to just do a solid 15 x 15, put a border on the outside, or if i'll separate the 5 x 5 blocks with a border of some sort in between. also haven't decided what to use for the backing. but here's the first step: 23 sets of 5 swatches stitched together. ( 2 fabric photos behind the cut. )

the next step is to cut them into strips, then arrange the strips into blocks.