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Is it over? Is it over? Baby, it is over
1. My poem "Exauguratio" is now online at Goblin Fruit. I consider it an anti-ghost poem; it was written in January following a comment by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ashlyme: "I'm making one rule: no more dead boyfriends . . . No genius loci either." The title is the Roman term for the removal of a god from its temple or other sacred ground, differing from evocatio in that the latter is a ritual of assimilation (and warfare) while exauguratio is more akin to deconsecration or exorcism. Once cleared, the site can be dedicated to another god or returned to secular space, but the initial inauguratio must first be revoked. What happens to the god afterward, unless it has been provided with another home elsewhere, I don't know. Legendarily, when Tarquin the fifth king of Rome built the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline, the ancient gods Terminus and Juventas refused to be displaced by exauguratio and were incorporated into the new site, adding their strength to the foundations and their guardianship to Rome's future: youth and the maintenance of boundaries. They're the only cases I can think of. (And in any case, the temple no longer stands.)
2. Last February after my first 'Thon, I wrote about Dimensions:
The find of the festival for me was Sloane U'Ren's Dimensions: A Line, a Loop, a Tangle of Threads (2011), about which I would actually wish to write when I'm conscious. Last night turned out to have been its North American premiere; I am praying it gets a proper release, but until then: if it screens anywhere near you, see it. It is probably the softest-spoken and most intelligent treatment of a science fiction trope I have seen since Primer (2004). It also makes real use of Hugh Everett's many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, not just the popular glosses. The setting is Cambridge University in the 1920's and '30's. The attention to both objective period detail and the way that memories warp and flare with grief or nostalgia is astonishing; the invented technology does not look like a contemporary design given a quick crystal-radio polish, but genuinely of its time (and its designer's idiosyncrasies) and therefore not instantly easy for the modern viewer to parse, unless you know something about vacuum tubes and Leyden jars and jangly Edwardian upright pianos. The script is spare, suggestive, full of questions, and I would only change two lines of it—they stick out because the film otherwise explains almost nothing about itself. There is always action you're not seeing. We had a theory afterward as to why.
I never got around to writing the film up more fully, but it now has a very handsome trailer heralding its upcoming release in various formats. I'd have loved to see it playing arthouse theaters, but I'm going to order the DVD no matter what. I'd read short stories like it, but never seen another film.
3. I can't bilocate, so I won't be seeing Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling tonight at T.T. the Bear's Place, because I'll be seeing Ferry Cross the Mersey (1965) at the Somerville withderspatchel and rushthatspeaks, but interested parties should know about the former.
I must sign up for Arisia programming before this weekend is over. I have a writing deadline on Sunday as well. It would be nice to sleep somewhere in here, too.
ashlyme: "I'm making one rule: no more dead boyfriends . . . No genius loci either." The title is the Roman term for the removal of a god from its temple or other sacred ground, differing from evocatio in that the latter is a ritual of assimilation (and warfare) while exauguratio is more akin to deconsecration or exorcism. Once cleared, the site can be dedicated to another god or returned to secular space, but the initial inauguratio must first be revoked. What happens to the god afterward, unless it has been provided with another home elsewhere, I don't know. Legendarily, when Tarquin the fifth king of Rome built the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline, the ancient gods Terminus and Juventas refused to be displaced by exauguratio and were incorporated into the new site, adding their strength to the foundations and their guardianship to Rome's future: youth and the maintenance of boundaries. They're the only cases I can think of. (And in any case, the temple no longer stands.)2. Last February after my first 'Thon, I wrote about Dimensions:
The find of the festival for me was Sloane U'Ren's Dimensions: A Line, a Loop, a Tangle of Threads (2011), about which I would actually wish to write when I'm conscious. Last night turned out to have been its North American premiere; I am praying it gets a proper release, but until then: if it screens anywhere near you, see it. It is probably the softest-spoken and most intelligent treatment of a science fiction trope I have seen since Primer (2004). It also makes real use of Hugh Everett's many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, not just the popular glosses. The setting is Cambridge University in the 1920's and '30's. The attention to both objective period detail and the way that memories warp and flare with grief or nostalgia is astonishing; the invented technology does not look like a contemporary design given a quick crystal-radio polish, but genuinely of its time (and its designer's idiosyncrasies) and therefore not instantly easy for the modern viewer to parse, unless you know something about vacuum tubes and Leyden jars and jangly Edwardian upright pianos. The script is spare, suggestive, full of questions, and I would only change two lines of it—they stick out because the film otherwise explains almost nothing about itself. There is always action you're not seeing. We had a theory afterward as to why.
I never got around to writing the film up more fully, but it now has a very handsome trailer heralding its upcoming release in various formats. I'd have loved to see it playing arthouse theaters, but I'm going to order the DVD no matter what. I'd read short stories like it, but never seen another film.
3. I can't bilocate, so I won't be seeing Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling tonight at T.T. the Bear's Place, because I'll be seeing Ferry Cross the Mersey (1965) at the Somerville with
derspatchel and rushthatspeaks, but interested parties should know about the former.I must sign up for Arisia programming before this weekend is over. I have a writing deadline on Sunday as well. It would be nice to sleep somewhere in here, too.
no subject
... seriously, this has always struck me as a very strange miraculous attribution. We've talked about it on your pages before...
when does desanctifying a temple turn into an exorcism, I wonder? Is getting a god to leave a temple like getting an ex-lover out of your space?
no subject
when does desanctifying a temple turn into an exorcism, I wonder? Is getting a god to leave a temple like getting an ex-lover out of your space?
I suppose it depends on how badly the god doesn't want to go. (And what the two of you have done to one another before then.)
no subject
Boy do I love those two words. I'm going to have to make a T-shirt with the words, "The Dearth-Plethora Continuum" on it.
no subject
Huzzah!
I'm going to have to make a T-shirt with the words, "The Dearth-Plethora Continuum" on it.
Tell other writers about it, I'm sure you'll have buyers.