fantasy

what a wonderful way to write:

http://overnighttomanydistantcities.blogspot.com/2007/07/this-post-has-been-much-delayed-by-need.html

(discovered through uncle zip's window, here:

http://uzwi.wordpress.com/2007/07/25/mckie-in-alexandria/)

apparently, what M. John Harrison had done with quantum physics (in Light and Nova Swing), and what i thought i'd been trying to do more completely but, to date, less successfuly, had already been done by Durrell with relativity.

everything has, in fact, been done before.

but now you have some idea what i've been up to lately, yeah?

recently added to the spinner: The Thrills, Teenager; Jarvis Cocker, Jarvis; and Modest Mouse, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank.

meanwhile, no, i have no idea why The Lone Gunmen was cancelled, and it would be interesting to find out why...

Maddie and David K.O. Watersprite in First Round...

...and the crowd goes wild! men weep! women throw underwear! and even as the president shakes their hands on the Whitehouse lawn, they promise themselves they will always be the same.

that's right folks, they've still got it. do birds fly? do ducks duck? yes they most certainly do, and i'm totally totally loving it.

http://www.davidandmaddie.com/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088571/quotes

biblioteca

Jose Eduardo Agualusa's The Book of Chameleons is even lovelier than Javier Cercas' Speed of Light, not that there's any reason to compare them. except maybe for the fact that those are the only two books in recent memory that have taken me less than a day to devour, and that they both, in their own very different ways, deal with the surreal, the reliability of the unreliable: memories and perspectives and 'truths', not to mention Histories and violence; and that they were, less 'importantly'(?), both translations...

discovering the (public) library has been -- most certainly -- a good thing. i've actually finished reading more books in the past couple months since i got my membership than i would normally have in half a year accumulating shoring for my shelves.

for the curious and incurably bibliomaniacal, here's the score on my library card:

Children of the Albatross by Anais Nin
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard Feynman
Speed of Light by Javier Cercas
The Child in Time by Ian McEwan
Hidden Camera by Zoran Zivkovic
The Book of Chameleons by Jose Eduardo Agualusa

only now i find myself with an unchanging pile of unread books i actually own...

still slogging through Einstein's Relativity, which is turning out to be a tougher read than i expected, and John Nash's dissertation on Non-cooperative Games, the latter provided by my good friend E. Cross Saltire. (who, incidentally, has been saying some very sensible things over at nontrivialpursuit; as can only be expected, NtP is really shaping up into something i really think people would really do better paying attention to than not. really.)

Michael Moorcock's The Final Programme rounds things out nicely, for the moment, i think, something off my own library.

not much solace for You in any of that, is there? but i hope it helps that i feel that, in some small way, things are actually getting better for me here, and i'm pretty sure it'll all be 'good for my writing', in the end, if for nothing else...

on the spinner: Kings of Convenience, Riot on an Empty Street; still alternating with the edgy electronic pummelings of Battles and the persistent cool of David Holmes, with an occasional dash of Shapes and Sizes' split lips winning hips a shiner.

headlines

The Daily Show is back from break!

anyone still paying attention to this thing will know what that means. and if you are, i'm sorry to hear it. either you have a very good reason for it, or you don't.

(wait for it, it's on its way up. unless you read this too late, by which time it will have come and gone.)

stolen from Mike

i like to think i had something like this in mind when i started korzybskian autopsy:

I don’t know the proper name for this kind of blog–maybe it’s just called a
journal–or have any idea what its function is supposed to be, ie what am I
contributing if anything. But what I try to do is swim in the possibilities
according to who I am. I wanted to dispense with ventriloquism & speaking in
tongues.

-Mike Harrison

which, i suppose, does make this a kind of ventriloquism; though also makes this post more appropriate over there than here. but i have since the beginning resolved not to say anything over there that might be construed as 'my words'.

anyway, i don't think i could possibly have put it any better.

postmortem-ish, like

i still have no idea what this is meant to be about, but i've started up korzybskian autopsy out of sheer...ennui? despair? a fatalism that i will most likely never come up with a proper definition, much less a purpose, for the neat little title i came up with on a whim so that i can spam people on wordpress who choose to restrict their opinionated community to the registered?

it's not a blog; the closest i can come to a definition would be to call it a kind of notebook of caprice in which i might take down, for posterity and like that, what i feel like taking down from whatever and wherever i am at the moment. or maybe whatever and wherever i'm not. i'm not really sure. i'd add something about it hopefully eventually arriving at some revelation, some universal and/or intimate truth about me, language, maybe life, the universe, whatever, but i wouldn't get anybody's hopes up too high.

there isn't much up yet, but the fatally curious are free to muck about and drop little notes of affection/disaffection here:

http://skinnyblackcladdink.wordpress.com/

on the spinner: Battles - Mirrored. i'm uncertain whether it's appropriate to put an apostrophe anywhere there, whether to refer to them as 'the' or what; only that i'm currently thoroughly delighted and entranced in an utterly head bobbing, foot tapping way by the dementedly vivacious, overbearingly percussive, odd motion picture soundscape they've created. they remind me of Zappa, early early Steve Vai and his deranged munchkins, maybe, and Les Claypool and Primus.

for those appropriately intrigued, i may be persuaded to put the entire album up on me multiply in a day or two, possibly to coincide with the airing of a new episode of The Daily Show over on the Comedy Central site. since i've already had one near-fatal brush with the robots, it won't be up long, so keep your browsers peeled and your mice at the ready if you're inclined towards the piecemeal deconstruction/destruction/whatever of consumerist culture.

but if you can get your hands on a legit copy, i strongly advise you to do that instead.

meanwhile, i've been spending way too much time here:

http://questionablecontent.net/

i advise you to start from the first, and work your way up the drama from there.