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Fringe and mathematics
So there goes my attention span. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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 It was previously one of my oldest unpublished poems and possibly the only one from that period that I still considered viable, so I am very glad it has found a home.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 fromstillsostrange:
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.
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.
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Oh, you lucky lucky lucky lucky lucky lucky lucky
(I'm going to think more about what you have and what I have after I meet this work deadline!)
Lucky
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WOW. That is...amazingawesomeunbelievableincredible. Your grandmother must have been a fascinating woman!
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Congratulations.
What would happen if a person mixed World of Warcraft with Second Life?
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Thank you!
What would happen if a person mixed World of Warcraft with Second Life?
I'm sure it's been done, but personally I think the cocktail would fry my synapses. I am having enough trouble dealing with the slowness of my computer in interacting with other residents.
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I got to teach a class on Ulysses last spring, and I brought the book in at one point. It made me very happy.
Your grandmother must have been a fascinating woman!
She was born in 1923, so I think she must have gotten it from her parents: which I now find fascinating in its own right. Her father was the man who gave a critical hardcover of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass as a courting gift to his not-yet-wife, so maybe they were simply literary . . .
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It was the first version I (very carefully) read . . .
(I'm going to think more about what you have and what I have after I meet this work deadline!)
(I look forard to the results!)
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Any chance I could see your course notes? :)
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Seriously? Of course. Everything came home in one cardboard box or another, so it may take me a little while to locate them, but they are around here somewhere.
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Also I really need to read Ulysses.
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Cool. May I ask why?
Also I really need to read Ulysses.
You do. If nothing else, it has terrific language.
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(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.)
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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.
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You're going to have to remind me whether you built it. But if so, I think that wins.
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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.
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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.
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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"
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Congratulations.
I bought a copy of Postcards from the Province of Hyphens last week, by the way. I'm enjoying it so far. The first few poems have been incredibly sexy, though I'm sure you've been told that before. It's a bittersweet read, as it seems to exacerbate my sexual frustrations.
I read from it just before falling asleep last night and I ended up dreaming about a young Daryl Hannah working in a costume store in a bad part of town. She was having an affair with a black haired girl. Towards the end of the dream, Hannah double-crossed the girl and left her naked with two 1920s gangsters on an abandoned garbage scow, which was then sent floating out to sea.
personal performances
I don't suppose there are mp3s of those . . . ?
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You have convinced me to read Ulysses posthaste. When I have finished reading the current brick of a book, Boswell's Life of Johnson.
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Thank you!
a young Daryl Hannah working in a costume store in a bad part of town. She was having an affair with a black haired girl. Towards the end of the dream, Hannah double-crossed the girl and left her naked with two 1920s gangsters on an abandoned garbage scow, which was then sent floating out to sea.
I am entirely honored that my work seems to have inspired lesbian film noir.
It's a bittersweet read, as it seems to exacerbate my sexual frustrations.
My poems refuse to apologize for their sexy.
I don't suppose there are mp3s of those . . . ?
There are some, although the most recent are only from 2003. Mostly classical music and folksongs.
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They're certainly the Dom in our relationship.
There are some, although the most recent are only from 2003. Mostly classical music and folksongs.
May I hear some? You may ask a boon from me in exchange.
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Fascinating list you've got, especially the Taaffe's Castle--I've been through Carbury, which is supposedly associated with my family name, but it's pretty tenuous altogether. Fortified houses are close enough to castles for government work, I think.
I think an onion bottle could count as technology, although the mortar and pestle is very cool. We've got my grandfather's adding machine, which is considerably less interesting. ;-)
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Hey, I don't own an adding machine (that I know of). That's neat. What did he do?
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*blushes* Thanks!
What did he do?
He was a CPA, or at least that was the reason for the adding machine. I'm told he'd also at various times worked as a purser on ships going down to Central America for fruit, owned a deli, been a blackjack dealer, and possibly held some sort of minor job in Louisiana state government during the Hughie Long administration.
God knows how much of it's true--I'm sure that sometimes my father embroiders things, and I never got to hear any of it from himself.
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strange world. I hope you're feeling better, too.
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That's awesome. Where was he from?
I hope you're feeling better, too.
I'm working on it! Thanks!
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