Fringe and mathematics
So there goes my attention span.
greygirlbeast inveigled me into Second Life yesterday with the promise of fire-dancing, and I was not disappointed. I meant to go back and see her after the show, but I crashed instead; I feel as though I should bring apologetic flowers next time. I still do not have a computer of my own (and the one I am currently sharing has almost nothing to speak of in the way of a video card), so my appearances in the Metaverse are likely to be infrequent, but if you run into a brown-haired woman in a rust-colored jacket at the Dark Goddess, there's a decent chance it's me.
My poem "In Ellipsis" has been accepted by Mythic Delirium. It was previously one of my oldest unpublished poems and possibly the only one from that period that I still considered viable, so I am very glad it has found a home.
Lastly, a meme picked up from
stillsostrange:
Name a CD you own that you think no-one else on your friendslist does:
Hah. I don't think anything I listen to is particularly obscure (and I am not counting recordings made from family or personal performances, which no one else would have a chance to own). Let's try the original cast recording of A Family Affair (1962) with Shelley Berman, Rita Gardner, Larry Kert, and lyrics and music by William Goldman and John Kander. If that fails, I nominate the self-titled Van Dik Hout (1994), which is Dutch rock.
Name a book you own that you think no-one else on your friendslist does:
The contraband 1928 (tenth printing, Shakespeare and Company) edition of James Joyce's Ulysses that I inherited from my grandmother.
Name a movie you own on DVD/VHS/whatever that you think no-one else on your friendslist does:
Not a chance . . . In hopes of strangeness, the film adaptation of Gian Carlo Menotti's The Medium (1951) with Marie Powers and Anna Maria Alberghetti.
Name a place that you have visited that you think no-one else on your friendslist has:
Taaffe's Castle in Carlingford, County Louth, Ireland. It is in reality a fortified townhouse near the harbor, but that didn't stop us from visiting it in the summer of 2004.
Name a piece of technology or any sort of tool you own that you think no-one else on your friendslist has:
The mortar and pestle once owned by my great-grandfather, who ran a pharmacy in Brooklyn. Otherwise it's back to the three-hundred-year-old onion bottle, which is a very loose definition of "technology" indeed.
I am sure there are much stranger things in my household, but it's like walking into a used book store without a search-list: the mind goes blank and you wind up staring at the poetry shelves until you realize that volume down near the end was written by the former Pope, and that's weird enough.
My poem "In Ellipsis" has been accepted by Mythic Delirium. It was previously one of my oldest unpublished poems and possibly the only one from that period that I still considered viable, so I am very glad it has found a home.
Lastly, a meme picked up from
Name a CD you own that you think no-one else on your friendslist does:
Hah. I don't think anything I listen to is particularly obscure (and I am not counting recordings made from family or personal performances, which no one else would have a chance to own). Let's try the original cast recording of A Family Affair (1962) with Shelley Berman, Rita Gardner, Larry Kert, and lyrics and music by William Goldman and John Kander. If that fails, I nominate the self-titled Van Dik Hout (1994), which is Dutch rock.
Name a book you own that you think no-one else on your friendslist does:
The contraband 1928 (tenth printing, Shakespeare and Company) edition of James Joyce's Ulysses that I inherited from my grandmother.
Name a movie you own on DVD/VHS/whatever that you think no-one else on your friendslist does:
Not a chance . . . In hopes of strangeness, the film adaptation of Gian Carlo Menotti's The Medium (1951) with Marie Powers and Anna Maria Alberghetti.
Name a place that you have visited that you think no-one else on your friendslist has:
Taaffe's Castle in Carlingford, County Louth, Ireland. It is in reality a fortified townhouse near the harbor, but that didn't stop us from visiting it in the summer of 2004.
Name a piece of technology or any sort of tool you own that you think no-one else on your friendslist has:
The mortar and pestle once owned by my great-grandfather, who ran a pharmacy in Brooklyn. Otherwise it's back to the three-hundred-year-old onion bottle, which is a very loose definition of "technology" indeed.
I am sure there are much stranger things in my household, but it's like walking into a used book store without a search-list: the mind goes blank and you wind up staring at the poetry shelves until you realize that volume down near the end was written by the former Pope, and that's weird enough.

no subject
Also I really need to read Ulysses.
no subject
Cool. May I ask why?
Also I really need to read Ulysses.
You do. If nothing else, it has terrific language.
no subject
(Before you ask, one's a marble one for grinding whole spices for curries; the other's a wooden one that I got from my parents, used solely for grinding up graham crackers for yummy bars.)
no subject
I don't own any of the really obscure tech in my household: the nineteenth-century microscope, the oscillator . . . Hm. Does the homebuilt radio telescope count?
the other's a wooden one that I got from my parents, used solely for grinding up graham crackers for yummy bars.
Awesome.
no subject
You're going to have to remind me whether you built it. But if so, I think that wins.
no subject
With my father, which is why I didn't count it off the top of my head as "technology or any sort of tool [I] own." But it was my high school science project for two years.
no subject
I keep intending to read Ulysses, and then something happens like I come across Vladimir Nabokov's article on Why Ulysses Is The Best Thing Ever and I sit there spluttering at it 'But you... you hate Jane Austen! Why should I believe you that this is The Epitome Of Everything?' and it is not rational but I put it off a while longer.
no subject
I don't know that it's the Epitome of Everything, but I like it very much.
How do you feel about Nabokov?
The grainy sand had gone from under his feet. His boots trod again a damp crackling mast, razorshells, squeaking pebbles, that on the unnumbered pebbles beats, wood sieved by the shipworm, lost Armada. Unwholesome sandflats waited to suck his treading soles, breathing upward sewage breath, a pocket of seaweed smouldered in seafire under a midden of man's ashes. He coasted them, walking warily. A porterbottle stood up, stogged to its waist, in the cakey sand dough. A sentinel: isle of dreadful thirst. Broken hoops on the shore; at the land a maze of dark cunning nets; farther away chalkscrawled backdoors and on the higher beach a dryingline with two crucified shirts. Ringsend: wigwams of brown steersmen and master mariners. Human shells.
—chapter 3, "Proteus"
no subject
You have convinced me to read Ulysses posthaste. When I have finished reading the current brick of a book, Boswell's Life of Johnson.