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Wednesday, March 17th, 2004
Last night (in the context of a longer dream which I cannot remember), I went to visit Robert Volokh, a former co-conspirator who had stopped blogging after fighting with Juan ("and other non-Volokhs", was the text of the dream, but I am not sure quite what this meant) over the excessively moderate nature of his posts... Robert had summoned to his abode a cabal of widely-read liberal bloggers -- I'm not sure quite why I was there, maybe in my role as taker of minutes or maybe I was tagging along with somebody else. I can't really remember who all was there but at least one Timberite, and probably Atrios. The gist of the matter was that Robert had written an Important Post on his rarely-updated personal blog and was requesting that people link to it. He was quite a mystical figure and seemed to be held in deep reverence by the assembled party. There was no actual ring-kissing but people did seem quite honored to be granted this audience.
posted morning of March 17th, 2004: Respond
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Tuesday, December 30th, 2003
My brother had a gig working as a clown at a party. I believe the location was a university campus or library, not sure. I was in his dressing room and was not sure whether to wish him good luck or say "break a leg!" so I settled for the universally-recognized thumbs up. Went in to the party and the only other person in attendance was Ophelia Benson, whom I knew at a glance. We were asked to write down a favorite quote and pass it up to the front of the room with our name on the same paper. Ophelia started, and passed me a stack of paper to use and pass along. (The room was starting to fill up.) All I could think of was "'Tis prithee to be wise" and I was about to write that down when I started thinking, that doesn't mean anything -- did anyone actually say that? I thought maybe I was misquoting and started hunting around for what word I could be misremembering as "prithee" -- "pissy"? "Shitty"? Well I locked onto "'Tis shitty to be wise" and could think of nothing else -- meanwhile I was missing my brother's act, I wasn't passing along the stack of paper (it consisted of old newsprint and Ophelia's notes, which were in red ballpoint), people were getting impatient.
posted afternoon of December 30th, 2003: Respond
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Sunday, December 28th, 2003
A weird montage of images in my head. I was talking to Jim, asking him which Hudson River crossing he thought would be best to use when I drive north tomorrow; he did not have much to say on the subject so I included Carl in the conversation. Carl thought GWB was the way to go before 8 in the morning. We decided to fly over the route in his plane. (This part of the dream memory is extremely vague -- there needs to be some transition to the next image.) Now we are sitting in Carl's plane looking at the freeway system, looks like a very big map. And now somehow, we are eating in a restaurant in NYC, a very expensive restaurant where everything is going wrong. Transition to a restaurant-kitchen setting of a sitcom, where the chef (very fat Andrew, who was in my class at Natural Gourmet) is not able to control the kitchen staff and relies instead on the maitre d'hote, a short, thin black man who is overly fond of liverwurst, to keep things going. The maitre d' is on vacation (in Vienna, looking for the perfect liverwurst) and things are falling apart. Sylvia told me the nature of her dream when she woke up this morning -- "There was a dinosaur movie called, called 'Dinosaur Planet'. It had a scary part and parts that were not scary" -- but would give no more detail.
posted morning of December 28th, 2003: Respond
➳ More posts about Sylvia
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Wednesday, December 17th, 2003
Been a while since I did one of these... Last night Nathaniel and I had tickets to hear Dolly Parton at a small venue in the city. When we arrived, Nathaniel crawled in through the most immediately available entrance, a hole in the wall above the back door (which was locked). I was too bulky for this means of ingress so I walked around to the front door. When we gave our tickets to the man at the front counter, we had to spend what seemed like an inordinately long time proving our identities by means of photo ID's; the first one I showed him was too blurry, the second was poorly posed; then I showed him a photo of myself and Sylvia but with no ID attached to it -- this he deemed sufficient. Nathaniel went right in to the concert but I lingered in the anteroom, where there was a bar, a florist and a restaurant of some kind, sushi IIRC. I bought a bouquet of roses -- I was not sure what for but eventually decided they were to give to Dolly. Some guys from my office were sitting at the bar, talking about the show, which you could see through an open doorway. (NB this does not jive with a detail from the second part of the dream; I take no responsibility for such dissonances.) I noticed that in addition to songs, they were performing anti-drug commercials which had recently been on TV starring Dolly's sister. The guys from my office were discussing these commercials, making lists of which ones they had seen already. At the intermission Nathaniel came out to talk to me, quite disheveled and enthusiastic. We went inside together and I told him I had bought flowers for Ms. Parton, and asked whether it would be appropriate to give them to her. I noticed she was sitting talking to some people in the audience, which seemed unusual. Nathaniel thought it might be proper to give her the flowers after the show. Then the second set started; I saw that what I had thought was a stage, was actually a bar -- Dolly and the band were sitting behind it as if they were customers and the audience were a collective bartender. There was a rilly cool visual effect when Dolly sneezed and all the lights went down instantaneously; in the pitch darkness, the point where your eye was drawn by the sneeze was illuminated with the logo of the company sponsoring the concert. (No, I don't remember what the company was.) The lights went back up and they started singing a song which sounded kind of like a number from "The Pajama Game"... Around this time I woke up.
posted morning of December 17th, 2003: Respond
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Tuesday, September 30th, 2003
Home Improvement day at the theater Tonight I was watching a movie and decided to bring along to the theater, the table I was working on -- it was nearly done and I did not want to lose the time of working on it. People curiously were not annoyed by my sawing, planing and sanding, or anyway no-one said anything -- there was quite a bit of vocal annoyance directed toward the woman sitting more towards the front of the theater, who was laying some floor tiles. When the movie was over I saw Gary and Suzie leaving the theater. They came over and said hi, and admired the table. Gary wanted advice about what style of legs to use for a table he was building; stifling an impulse to say "cabriole", I said it was hard to say without knowing what the table looked like and what context it would be in.
posted morning of September 30th, 2003: Respond
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Monday, June 30th, 2003
I was at a political event of some kind and was reading a newspaper article -- op-ed piece, in that pink paper from Britain -- the thesis was, we are currently at a historic cusp; because cat ownership -- historically correlated to poverty and superstition -- was increasing in the US at the same time that wealth and education were increasing. I went back to the same place the next evening and noticed that it was huge; a block-long, architecturally ornate (not in a good way), postmodern cathedral -- a cathedral as designed by P.T. Bridgeport -- the sign in front said, "Center for Faith and Reason". Inside a huge costume ball was in progress, in full Rocky Horror mode. I came to understand that it was a Wiccan ceremony although nobody I asked would say as much. -- Indeed nobody would meet my eye or talk straight to me.
posted morning of June 30th, 2003: Respond
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Friday, June 27th, 2003
One of the British bloggers -- I think it was Avedon Carol -- had a post up about the British response to the Academy Awards. Apparently, it was to broadcast a film by a British director whose avocation was masonry, of himself building a brick wall, followed by a mock ceremony in which he accepted a separate gold statue for each segment of the wall. Very weird...
posted morning of June 27th, 2003: Respond
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Wednesday, June 25th, 2003
Woo-hoo! The germ, the very germ of a fiction has come to me while I slept last night! Here it is: The story concerns two bloggers: a male programmer and a female cartoonist. The two interact for a while at the beginning of the story when he finds her site, is interested by the art, they e-mail back and forth; they add each other's sites to their links. Move forward in time, they have not looked at each other's sites for a while nor communicated, but the links remain. Fast forward a year (say) and he comes to be served with subpoena. She is under investigation by the Justice Dept. for violation of the CIPA -- she had begun a very graphic exploration of her identity as a rape survivor which includes images of her as a child deemed pornographic by Ashcroft's minions; a SWAT team has raided her residence and seized her computer with all blog data; and her referral log shows many visitors have gotten there via his link. Not sure quite where the story goes from there; -- I am not sure how plausible the whole CIPA thing is and how much of a case they would have against her. I am thinking maybe the investigation will go away after disrupting everyone's life for a while. At which point he examines her site, finds it repellent -- he would not have linked to her if this stuff had been up when he first browsed it -- perhaps due to unresolved issues of his own? Maybe they will have further dialog, I don't know how this experience will affect her and her work, though I think clearly it would radicalize her -- I reckon she would have been kind of radical to begin with.
posted morning of June 25th, 2003: Respond
➳ More posts about Story ideas
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Monday, May 5th, 2003
Yesterday it seems to me Sylvia told me she took a bath with Clifford and his head kept coming off. Which would make some sense, as the head of her Clifford soap container is its lid, and thus removable. However I cannot swear that this actually happened; it may have been a dream image.
posted morning of May 5th, 2003: Respond
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