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But God only knows, I sold it for a lock of your hair
1. I got home today to find two really neat things in the mail: a card which Dean sent from Maine and my contributor's copy of Mythic Delirium #26. The latter contains my poem "Scythe-Walk," which I wrote for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
teenybuffalo and the afternoon she carried a scythe home from a rummage sale on her shoulder. It also contains her poem "The Sisters," which she wrote for me and her rivers and the ocean. The convergence was neither of our doing and it makes me very happy. (My other favorites from the issue are Rose Lemberg's "The Journeyman in Kestai" and Erik Amundsen's "Under the Asphodel," but one of these is crow-epic and the other a temptation to descend, so please look surprised.) The former is illustrated with a sketch of sea-view. Good by me.
2. Courtesy ofderspatchel, I have a copy of David Macaulay's Great Moments in Architecture (1978). It's the direct precursor to Motel of the Mysteries (1979), which is one of the greatest books about archaeology ever written; if I had to play the comparison game, I'd say the contents resemble a freakish three-way collaboration between Edward Gorey, Chris Van Allsburg, and Charles Addams, although the back-cover text rather beautifully describes them as "the daydreams of a pixilated Piranesi." The captions make half of them. "This plate was formerly believed to represent the meeting of English and Metric."
3. I scalded some of the fingers on my left hand rather badly with hot tea on Wednesday; I went out to dinner that night holding them constantly against my water glass, having wrapped my hand in a bag of frozen broccoli as soon as I got off the bus at Rob's. (Also courtesy: Fuck You, Broccoli. I am actually quite fond of artichokes, but anything with phenylthiocarbamide can fend for itself.) They're healing, but it looks as though the forefinger is going to scar. I need a better cover story. "Very hot ginger tea" just has no experimental cachet at all.
4. I am very charmed by this installment of Wondermark.
5. Did I remember to link the record-breaking Rube Goldberg machine?
I am going to bed. Nobody else had better get sick this week. That includes me.
teenybuffalo and the afternoon she carried a scythe home from a rummage sale on her shoulder. It also contains her poem "The Sisters," which she wrote for me and her rivers and the ocean. The convergence was neither of our doing and it makes me very happy. (My other favorites from the issue are Rose Lemberg's "The Journeyman in Kestai" and Erik Amundsen's "Under the Asphodel," but one of these is crow-epic and the other a temptation to descend, so please look surprised.) The former is illustrated with a sketch of sea-view. Good by me.2. Courtesy of
derspatchel, I have a copy of David Macaulay's Great Moments in Architecture (1978). It's the direct precursor to Motel of the Mysteries (1979), which is one of the greatest books about archaeology ever written; if I had to play the comparison game, I'd say the contents resemble a freakish three-way collaboration between Edward Gorey, Chris Van Allsburg, and Charles Addams, although the back-cover text rather beautifully describes them as "the daydreams of a pixilated Piranesi." The captions make half of them. "This plate was formerly believed to represent the meeting of English and Metric."3. I scalded some of the fingers on my left hand rather badly with hot tea on Wednesday; I went out to dinner that night holding them constantly against my water glass, having wrapped my hand in a bag of frozen broccoli as soon as I got off the bus at Rob's. (Also courtesy: Fuck You, Broccoli. I am actually quite fond of artichokes, but anything with phenylthiocarbamide can fend for itself.) They're healing, but it looks as though the forefinger is going to scar. I need a better cover story. "Very hot ginger tea" just has no experimental cachet at all.
4. I am very charmed by this installment of Wondermark.
5. Did I remember to link the record-breaking Rube Goldberg machine?
I am going to bed. Nobody else had better get sick this week. That includes me.
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Even the time when I was dating Nicole and gave myself a second-degree cuppatea burn on the tummy and all the skin came off and it looked twelve times more spectacular than my at-the-time-new heart surgery scars, except on the roundest and most obtrusively flabby part of me. Ugh.
MOTORCYCLE ACCIDENT.
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The skin-sloughing is what my finger was doing earlier this weekend. I asked the Somerville pharmacy if I could just get a band-aid from them and the answer was no; they only sold them in boxes. I was saddened by this.
Also, ow. How did I not know that had happened?
MOTORCYCLE ACCIDENT.
Maybe I can use it as an excuse to learn to ride a motorcycle . . .
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You should totally learn to ride a motorcycle. In the interest of not making statements which objectify your physique in relation to said motorcycle in ways that would cause you to ponk me in the head, you already own a leather jacket.
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You make a compelling point. I even own a black leather motorcycle jacket from Israel that used to belong to my father when he was in his twenties and skinnier than I am now—the seam has split along the elbow, but I'm sure I could get it patched and then it would just look badass and go with
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Chicks dig scars.
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Thank you. I love the final stanza of "This Illusion of Flesh."
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I so want Fuck You, Broccoli to be written by a vegetarian. (I've recently found a taste for marinated artichoke hearts, but they are very, very strange.)
I personally think "hot ginger tea" is an acceptable story, but "duelling scar" also works for me.
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Yes!
I so want Fuck You, Broccoli to be written by a vegetarian.
That would make it incredibly charming.
(I've recently found a taste for marinated artichoke hearts, but they are very, very strange.)
I rather like them. I even like swiss chard. I can't argue with a single word about cauliflower, though.
I personally think "hot ginger tea" is an acceptable story, but "duelling scar" also works for me.
Maybe the ginger tea was the choice of weapons!
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Yes. The glove is precisely right.
(I also love the way its designers encourage it: "Come on, girl! Looking so good! Oh, please work . . . Sweet Jesus!")
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---L.
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I'd forgotten Macaulay had a wicked sense of humor. I don't remember people doing pratfalls off Cathedral, anyway.
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There are little things in the background that show humor: in Cathedral, for ex, in the progress of the vaulting for the nave, there's a birdnest that over a couple pictures is being built, has bird brooding, has hatchlings being fed, and so on. It isn't till around, oh, Underground that the wicked wackies start coming out. And of course Unbuilding is all about the wicked.
---L.
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Lucky!
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---L.
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And something else won? Man, clearly I need to track that one down too.
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See reply to
That hand at the end looks like it ought to be a prop for some Dr. T remake...
Oh, God, that's a terrifying thought.
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Thank you; we have a winner.
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1. Souvenir of a harpy. They bite.
2. It's a friction burn from seizing Fortune by the forelock.
3. This is from the time I struck while the iron was hot.
4. Oh, I got this plugging a leak in the dormant volcano.
5. Casting my own silver bullets.
6. I don't know where YOU grew up, but around here this is how we stir our coffee.
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. . . I should have thought of that one.
(I know why I don't have a Schmendrick icon; I've never seen an actor whose face I've liked for him. It's still faintly puzzling to me that if icons are supposed to be touchstones, I should have one somehow for my earliest identifiable favorite character. Maybe I could just make a text-based one someday.)
2. It's a friction burn from seizing Fortune by the forelock.
I like that!
3. This is from the time I struck while the iron was hot.
Hah. That, too.
6. I don't know where YOU grew up, but around here this is how we stir our coffee.
Okay, I didn't grow up in any of the right parts of New England to use that one, but if you want to write the tall tales . . .
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All in a small cafe,
A six-foot-seven waitress
To me these words did say:
"I see you are a logger,
Not just some common bum,
For no one but a logger
Stirs his coffee with his thumb."
James Stephens and/or Cisco Houston did the work for me. But I'm glad you like these.
In related news, a couple of weeks ago I was driving through Harvard Square--so obviously I'd made some poor decisions that morning--when I saw a bunch of punks/metalfaces/what-have yous, hanging out in front of Bank of America, dangerously close to traffic, and laughing together. One of them was remarkable for two things: being a pretty young woman, and having a long curly lock of hair at the front of her head while she'd shaved the back bald. She was Fortuna. I did not grab her by the hair, or anything else, as I cherish what good manners I have left, but I would have loved to know if she'd ever seen depictions of Fortune. Probably not.
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Stirs his coffee with his thumb.
I was, actually, thinking of that song. But I would still read your tall tales of New England.
One of them was remarkable for two things: being a pretty young woman, and having a long curly lock of hair at the front of her head while she'd shaved the back bald. She was Fortuna.
Poem!
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I'm sorry for the scalded fingers. I hope the healing goes well and smoothly.
4. I am very charmed by this installment of Wondermark.
I as well, now that I've seen it. Thanks for sharing.
I hope nobody else will get sick this week.
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I'd only heard of Great Moments in Architecture; I'd never seen a copy. It makes me very happy.
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<3
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Hey. It's good.
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