It's a far cry to payday

[sovay]

First, the serious thing: I will not be at Worldcon. For anyone who was scheduled on a panel with me, I am sorry not to be there to talk poetry, influences, and bad art; between my finances and some family things, it just turns out not to be possible this year. Send me postcards, you people who have my address. I will hold out hope for next year.

The other things are better. Last night, Eric and I (and Anita and Eddy) ventured out into the Second Coming of the Deluge to hear Birdsongs of the Mesozoic at AS220 with humglum and greygirlbeast. Except for short clips off their website, I had never heard the group before. I knew they contained Roger Miller and Erik Lindgren, and that Eric once described them as "the world's hardest-rocking chamber music quartet." I am tempted to gloss them if Stravinsky did not exist, it would be necessary for mad scientists to invent him, but that would not do justice to their three keyboards, tape loops, guitar, record player, and washboard with Mr. T painted on the reverse. With sheet music. I type this and my brother suddenly stops short in the hallway and asks, "What are you listening to?" which happens to be the last piece on their self-titled EP (1983, although I'm playing it off their recent and fantastic compilation Dawn of the Cycads); it is called called "Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous" and features birdcalls, piano arpeggi, and multiple tracks of percussion. I hope that's a better précis. By now you can probably tell I like them. I should also mention the opening act, a man with three different kinds of squeezebox and two bows for his fiddle who played slip jigs, reels, a bunch of Playford, and led the audience in chanteys like "Haul Away for Rosie," throwing out casually technical asides of comparative musicology as he went along. I kind of want to hear "The Trim-Rigged Doxy" accompanied on a Hardanger fiddle now. In any case, terrific music and company, we survived our run-in with a very loudly drunk man on Empire Street, and we did not drown on our way back to Boston; it was a very good night all round. I am only disappointed that Birdsongs of the Mesozoic do not sell T-shirts, because I really want one.

And this afternoon, rushthatspeaks, weirdquark, and I watched Vincente Minnelli's The Pirate (1948), with Gene Kelly and Judy Garland. This film may be indescribable. I can write that it contains a ballet sequence with Gene Kelly in artfully tattered hot pants and the stage on fire, or that Judy Garland performs, while hypnotized, a broadside-ballad number whose scansion depends on two different pronunciations of "Caribbean," or that the finale involves beating Walter Slezak with a hula hoop, but I'm not sure that really conveys the experience. There are the costumes. And the sets. And . . . In the middle of one dance scene, rushthatspeaks said in a tone of wonder, "Gene Kelly is pole dancing." She was not wrong. I do not think I will ever need to drop acid now.

I think that's it for the day. My brother's wedding shower is tomorrow. The recently discovered daguerreotype of Phineas Gage makes me happy. Tell me something strange.

Comments

[sovay]

The only place we've been together in flesh and blood is at Readercon, and I had the impression of standing with you outside some room with chairs, and you saying those words. I could hear your voice so clearly in my head.

Thank you. I never know how the words I write sound to other people when I do not speak them. I'm glad they come through.

The story of Phineas Gage scares me, and the sleeping half of his face in that daguerreotype also scares me.

They do not scare me, because what I learned originally about Phineas Gage—I must have been in first or second grade, although I did not know until last year that his skull was in Boston—was a horror story, a man whose personality was so radically altered after the tamping iron went through his brain that his friends considered him unrecognizable and he was never really a functional adult again. Now I know that for years afterward he was a stagecoach driver in Chile, which is not a job a severely brain-damaged person would have been able to hold down, physically or socially. He worked in a livery stable in New Hampshire, on a farm in California. Maybe he did become someone else, but the someone else he became had a life and a livelihood and a face that makes me think of Odin, who traded an eye for wisdom. That's not fearful to me, but something of hope.

Tonight I was talking with people who heard them fall. The life guard at the town beach saw them fall.

That is very strange.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

more on Phineas Gage--

I had only known that he suffered the spike through his brain and that his personality changed; I didn't know anything beyond that, one way or another. The follow-up you give makes me feel better about the whole thing. I still don't like the idea of a personality change, but I think, upon reflection, that I believe in a baseline person beneath personality--and so even if he, say, went from being phlegmatic to being excitable, or from being morose to being cheerful (or vice versa), he would have done so in a himself sort of way.

So yeah, I guess I feel less bad about it. Also, your kind and thoughtful way of looking at his face makes me look at it with more accepting eyes.