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Thursday, November 11th, 2021
Praise G-d, creator without flaws
Praise G-d, all creatures, without pause.
Praise G-d, don't hold back the applause:
Praise Father, Son, and Santa Claus
(or, "Creator, Christ and Santa Claus")
posted morning of November 11th, 2021: Respond
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Monday, November 8th, 2021
To be or not to be, that is the question, sir:
whether tis nobler to suffer, or not,
the slings and the arrows of outrageous fortune --
to play the hand dealt, or just give up the pot?
posted morning of November 8th, 2021: Respond
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Tuesday, July 27th, 2021
Got a new wallpaper for my desktop background: "Prime factorization: the first 1200 integers", by Juliet Fiss.
posted afternoon of July 27th, 2021: 1 response
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Saturday, June 19th, 2021
Imagination and Reality:
Two diaphanous N-membranes
floating in a soup of Time.
posted afternoon of June 19th, 2021: Respond
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Thursday, June third, 2021
posted evening of June third, 2021: Respond
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Sunday, May 30th, 2021
With Dylan turning 80 there was a lot of talk about him on the social media sites this week. In one thread we were talking about cover versions and someone pointed out that there are certain songs it's difficult to cover without slipping into an affected "Bob Dylan" voice; his examples were "Stuck Inside of Mobile" and "Idiot Wind". (I pointed out "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" fits into this category as well...) Elswhere Morris Windsor posted this astonishing cover of Stuck Inside of Mobile by The Soft Boys, playing at Slim's in San Francisco in October 2002 (the Nextdoorland tour) -- when/if I try playing the song I am going to find it difficult to avoid slipping into an affected "Robyn Hitchcock" voice.
posted morning of May 30th, 2021: Respond
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Wednesday, March 10th, 2021
A chapter of my and Ellen's life has closed; another will be opening in a few weeks. A little time to rest and prepare ourselves. Some reflections on where I've been and where I'm going.
I have been working as a computer programmer since May of 1994. I've been employed continuously over the past 27 years, with the exception of a month or so at the end of 2001, when Xyris Software downsized and let me go (with a generous severance package, no complaints). This past week I resigned from my current job (at Audible) and am not intending to work in software again. (Fingers crossed that it works out that way.)
This summer we will be leaving our home of 19 years in South Orange, and will make our way to Red Wing, MN, where I'll be studying violin repair and restoration at Minnesota State College Southeast's luthery program. At the end of the 1-year program I will seek employment with a violin shop or an orchestra, with the long-term goal of entering an apprenticeship with a luthier and starting my own business. Depending on how old and how skilled I am at that point, the business may be a violin repair shop, or may be an instrument-making pastime. The best-laid schemes of mice & men gang aft agley,/ an' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,/ for promis'd joy; and I'm open to things working out differently from the path I currently have in mind.
I've been dissatisfied with my career in programming for a long time, like 20 years give or take. I've been searching for a different path, and luthery seems like the right way. I've also been depressed, and in denial about being depressed, for a similar period; I've also been smoking weed pretty heavily, for a similar period. It's an open question which way the vector(s) of causation point(s), between drugs and depression and dissatisfaction with my career. (Maybe the arrow is tridirectional!) Over the past year I've been addressing all this with therapy and medication, and with not smoking grass, and with making plans. I'm feeling pretty good, compared to how I've been feeling for the past several years. I'm looking forward to the next chapter.
posted afternoon of March 10th, 2021: 4 responses
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Monday, February 8th, 2021
This weekend I was listening to Andrea Pitzer's marvelous history Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World. I happened on it thanks to Pitzer's lovely thread detailing her search for the King of Zembla -- turns out there was one, very briefly and only by chance, and that Nabokov very likely knew the story. So anyways: listening to Icebound on Audible, and early in the book where it is talking about Barentsz making his plans to seek a Northeastern Passage, I hear a reference to how Dutch scientists thought the climate at the North Pole was temperate. This rings a bell for me as something the Chums of Chance in Against the Day might have believed... I asked Ms. Pitzer for further reading suggestions and she forwarded me a link to Colin Dickey's excellent article On the Open Polar Sea, about John Franklin's lost expedition to the North Pole... I was well down the rabbit hole by the time I hit on Dickey's reference to "Cornelius P. Broadnag, who claimed to have the journal of an American named Jonathan Wilder, which told of an “internal region” inside the earth that Wilder had traveled extensively." Well: Broadnag's account is online in full at Google Books, a little illegible though and you cannot copy and paste from it. So I spent Sunday putting it into Google Docs:
posted morning of February 8th, 2021: 1 response
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Sunday, January third, 2021
A lot is going on in Book 5 of Eve's writings. The two have found themselves an oasis to the east of Eden (is what I get from a reference to the sun setting behind Monte Divino). They try and fail repeatedly to conceive a child, eventually understanding that they have to do it like animals do; brothers Cain and Abel are born, followed by Ara and her two twin sisters whose names are not given, one light-complexioned, the other dark like her mother. Cain is born without pain, occasioning suspicion on the part of his father; Eve conspires with an angel and a giant to create menstruation and the pain of childbearing, as a means of winning Adam's sympathy -- "Qué trama tan estúpida, y tan eficaz. V§50 [Such a stupid connivance, and so effective.]"
Throughout this book Adam is growing more distant and hostile toward his wife and his firstborn son. This culminates with Adam dreaming the story of their creation from mud by "His" hand -- the first reference to "Him" -- and making further elaborations on the story. Eve summarizes his preaching in V§51:
Y encima de eso, contaba Adán, no sólo él era el primero y el origen de mi persona, sino que yo, cuando comí la fruta, porque ésta era prohibida (?) por Yahvé (?), pequé (?), y traje a nosotros la expulsión (?) del Edén que era paradisiaco (fabulosa mentira); que por mí se nos impuso el trabajo como un castigo (barbaridad), y el dolor en el parto (ya saben la verdad).
[And on top of all this, Adam went on -- not only was he the first, the origin of my being, but furthermore I, when I ate the fruit, since that was forbidden (?) by Yahweh (?), had sinned (?), bringing on us expulsion (?) from Eden, a paradise (fabulous lie); because of me we were condemned (barbarity) to labor, and to suffer pain in childbirth (and you already know the real story).]
The parenthetical question mark after "forbidden" is making my head spin a little. In I§3, when Eve took leaves from the fig tree, it told her "Thou hast disobeyed!" So the idea of a prohibition should not be as incomprehensible as she is making it out to be. I am still puzzled about where the prohibition came from. Adam is inventing Yahweh as a source for the prohibition (which note, he is saying the violation was taking the apple rather than taking the leaves); this is an interesting spin on the idea that God is necessary as a "first cause" -- here He is invoked as the first cause not of existence but of law.
posted morning of January third, 2021: Respond
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Sunday, December 13th, 2020
Éramos de un material resistente, como las hojas de higuera que guardaron las brasas por meses. Al ir perdiendo las pezuñas, nuestros músculos se volvieron más firmes. Los tendones, más tensos. (p. 111 III§27)[We were made of a tough material, like the fig leaves that conserved the embers for months. As our hooves wore away, our muscles firmed up; our tendons tightened.]
In books III and IV of Eve's writings, her body and Adam's are becoming more like the reader's. They get assholes in Book III when she accidentally scratches one into Adam's backside and he poops out a "bagasse"; seeing how it benefits him she does the same to herself. (My initial reaction, beyond "ew", was to wonder how it connected to his digestive tract, and whether they had buttocks at the top of their legs; then I remembered I was not reading science fiction. Is this book "magical realism" though? not sure, I'm thinking no, need to think more about what the genre is. "Fable" seems insufficient and "Scripture" is not quite right either. Elements of both, certainly.) After they start pooping, they begin to feel hunger -- they had already been urinating and feeling thirst, though no mention is made until later of the mechanism for urination.
Book IV is mostly about their acquisition of sexual organs. Beginning in Book II bees have played an important (if not too clearly defined) role in their journey; in IV§32, Eve eats honey for the first time and has an extremely dark dream in which she envisions sexual intercourse as a male hyena eating female carrion. She wakes up and eats the seed which she saved from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (She has been carrying the seed tangled in the hair of her armpit) -- the seed travels through her body to the "duct for the exit of urine" between her legs, where it blossoms forth like a flower. Again the fruit from Eden, which has given her gender, now gives her sex.
Adam gets no Edenic seed, and is left to his own devices to give himself a penis by means of rubbing himself in IV§34-35... I have not yet understood a lot of this portion and am engaged in rereading.
posted morning of December 13th, 2020: Respond
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