Category: Writing

Happy new year

The Darkling Thrush
BY THOMAS HARDY
I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

another fine morning today

I did absolutely nothing yesterday except

one load of laundry

production of two meals, both of which involved standing and cooking, which miraculously I am now able to do after weeks of having trouble standing for any period of time

calm avoidance of invitation to Jerome’s (Mike called around 4 and I told him to drop by after if he went). I just thought my lack of social contact would turn into me autistic gabbling for hours while being worried about COVID and RSV and I couldn’t hack it

creating that L.M. Sacasas quote from yesterday using the absolute stinkpot software ‘paintbrush’ although it IS simple enough for my grandchild to use, so…

training, cuddling and brushing Buster repeatedly over the course of the day, including holding paws with him when his feets were cold (he genuinely likes holding paws with people, it’s adorable)

realizing that the balm from the bee place did actually heal the crack in my heel (I’d started bleeding, most distasteful) and now I need to reapply to the dry bits (face hands elbows etc.). It spreads well and smells lovely. Looking forward to getting more, stuff’s miraculous.

Realizing that it’s time to do Paul’s feet again. I’ll call him today and try once again to find out what he wants me to do about the car.

Checking if I have enough money to pay Suzanne, I do. However her car has been totalled thanks to this fucking weather we had last week so we may need to go get her.

continuing to produce coughs/mucus – substantially noisier than yesterday though I feel no worse, and in fact my mood continues to trend good although I had quite a crying jag yesterday evening thinking about how I’m likely to survive Buster and HOO BOY but I def. feel better today.

a complete review of Part II including copy edits and clarity edits

bringing the mail in… hey, there was mail!

Talking to Dave on the phone, and how lovely to hear his voice. He awaits word of a launch for his book. It continues to emit its own vibrations in this ever renewed universe.

posting in multiples to facebook, tumblr, twitter and dispensing goo on reddit

cheating to get the Wordle of the day after four guesses(Suzanne never cheats but she has a better starter word and doesn’t just guess, she has a system)

doing my Lumosity training, my scores have risen dramatically thank goodness

rewatching Here There Be Dragons (Expanse S2E11) which has SO MANY OF MY FAVOURITE LINES AND SCENES from that show

falling on the treats that Jeff brought back after his dental appointment with the savoir faire of a starving seagull           I M SNAKKY

taking a call from Tammy at the airport. It was an absolutely lovely conversation, she was SO sweet to me, and helpful too. That convo was everything about why I love her so much even if we slide past each other once in a while in terms of understanding – we talked about the book she gave me (about Henrietta Lacks) and the rest of the visiting she did, about what she’s going home to (she never takes ten days off so she’s expecting… a lot of emails, overflowing cat litter since the housesitter won’t have done it etc.) and she told me about the last hour of Banshees of Inisherin after I told her that brO and I bailed on it and you know what??? I’m not sorry we did; as much as I ADORE the two principal actors it was just too fucked up for me. Colin Farrell can do shit with his eyebrows that funambulists drool over.

Calling Rex Murphy a ‘harrumphosaurus’ on various social media platforms. I mean I could call it a day just with that one comment, I M JEENYOUS

Emailing my mOm a picture of a parrot perched on a bird identification book and looking with interest at a picture of a conspecific.

This morning I’ve done my Lumosity, cheated once again on Wordle (I should just stop doing it, it’s morally hazardous), mentally congratulated the Ukrainian forces for fending off every single fucking rocket the Russkys sent toward Kyiv yesterday, made coffee and consumed it, made peppermint tea for Jeff, shuffled stuff in the kitchen and started thinking about eggs and toast (again) for brekky. It’s easy and the cast iron pan’s perfectly seasoned now; how I love hearing the snap of eggs in butter on a nice hot stovetop.

I’m thinking of ordering more no-drip undies today. I don’t have much planned, but do I really have to? Do I?

 

 

 

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New poem – how to be conscious

Life powers consciousness and unmakes it.

Here I am, sleeping again, but I don’t know that. An entire world crawls into my skull and spectates, and somehow that world is me. Unconscious for whatever registers dreams, I sleep with a heaviness that obliterates care and hangs a sheet over an ugly view. The drowned city dreamscapes of my childhood have given way to a glacial blue crevasse into which I fall each night; Del Toro and such? – these terrors cannot find me.

My griefs and wounds depart. I waken in a world where my eyes are so dry I’m momentarily disoriented, then I enact Warren Zevon’s plan and start to cry. My griefs and wounds settle back in my flesh. Break time is over.

How does it happen? To travel galaxies in flight and perspective, and never move; to be snoring for most of it.

The cat is sleeping on the couch. Ears flick, paws twitch. Someone’s in there, dreaming.

Here I am, on the phone with my mother. She is sad with the normal sets of woes plus the indignity of current ‘lurgy. My job is to cheer her up without making her laugh. She’s coughing as a new career. Laughter turns into a long stretch of wheezing irritated pain and a claim that this has gone on for too long. To maintain this conversation I am picturing my mother in her den, surrounded by books and papers; I am leaning my mind against hers through our voices. I was a dream she once had. She built a programmatic nest for me, with twigs from Pa, and now I am talking to the woman who taught me how to be conscious.

Good morning morning

I did not go and pick up my prescription, so now I must find my crampons before I go outside.

10642 words on current project

ventusky.com is a beautiful site that visualizes weather data in real time across the globe. Hours of fun.

pOp is still in hospital as far as I know but should be home shortly.

There is beautiful shiny white snow all over everything and the world is quieter. It wasn’t even that cold in the house yesterday because the wind dropped away to nothing.

L.M. Sacasas said in his newsletter this morning that long form reading seems to be getting forgotten as a readerly activity… all we’re doing is dipping in to things.  I’m quoting a large piece of it because I think it’s an important thought.

Reading is not one thing

This is another point that (Maryanne) Wolf stresses throughout her interview. It seems pedantic to mention it, but, again, we are dealing with realities so deeply woven into our daily practices that we cease to think about them at all. Their obviousness paradoxically draws a veil over them. Even though images and video have proliferated exponentially in just the last two decades, we are still swimming in a sea of written words. Many of us spend hours each day reading various kinds of text: emails, text messages, posts on social media, product descriptions on retail websites, reviews, articles, recipes, essays, books, reports, etc. The list can go on and on. But these various texts invite or require different forms of reading. We might glance, we might skim, we might do little more than search for keywords, we might read deliberately, or we might find ourselves immersed in what Wolf calls deep reading. We can imagine these modes of reading existing on a spectrum of effort and care with many other points in between.

It would be a mistake to say that deep reading is the only kind of reading we should ever do.¹ In fact, it would be absurd to think that. The problem, in my case, is that I am constantly engaged in modes of reading on only one side of that spectrum, which then habituate me to be resistant to forms of reading on the other end. As I began reading the novel I’m now close to finishing, it was difficult for me to get lost in the story. When I do read something that is intellectually demanding, I find my mind wandering from the page after only a few moments. I assume that by now this is just how most people feel about reading and that some may not even know that there is any other way. (Of course, I could just be consoling myself by projecting my own vices onto others.)

And it is not just that there are various kinds of texts, some more demanding and others less. It is also that the physical form of the text matters. The history of reading or the history of the book is instructive on this point. One of my favorite books about reading is Ivan Illich’s In the Vineyard of the Text, which is unfortunately rather hard to find. In it, Illich focuses on a very specific moment in the 12th century when a set of textual innovations changed the nature of the book and, thus, how we read. Consequently, Illich argued these developments changed the whole intellectual culture of the Western Europe. What were these innovations? They were seemingly trivial things like chapter headings, indices, and page layouts conducive to silent reading.² Much of this had to do with facilitating random access to the text. The end result, in Illich’s view, was the sundering of the text from its material instantiation. In How We Became Posthuman, Katherine Hayles sets out to tell the story of “how information lost its body.” For his part, Illich would say that this happened decisively in the 12th century when it became possible to conceive of something called the text separately from its instantiation in the material form of a book. “The page,” Illich observed, “lost the quality of soil in which words are rooted.”

New poem – in the subtitles

In the subtitles

do sirens do anything but wail
I’d love it if one time
maybe I’d have to be really high
but it would be great if the screen read
‘(sirens yelling)’
since kids these days sound just like sirens

Let’s hear it for ‘(eerie crunching sounds)’;
‘(bones splintering)’ let’s pare down English
into eyesized chunks
and glue it on a soundscape

New poem: pentimento and palimpsest

Pentimento & palimpsest

Need alters how I see things
To smother dullness under the hot metal
of discovery
To give it an edge! Ken this
and the hard slap of wave and sail –
the pause before the engagement

I am the old woman who sings
flushed but calm enough

To force the flatness of a bygone age
up and up in brilliant knotted folds
an origami statue, now
perhaps an ornithopter or an owl

The lines reform

The poem is a queue

It is a brief piece of logic tilted against
the pressing and persistent is of essence

The red of the horse harness
the gold of the headdress
all will be re-sown, re-shown, cut
carefully and edited, my ancestors’ bones
are reclaimed
tamped back into the ground

to grow fruit trees and grandchildren

Seas die and flint is born

Flint is knapped and trees are felled

Islands die and people take to boats

Boats sink and brave souls raid the wreck

It all is written over in the end
Earth, sky and water queue for the last word

walkies

Jeff frowns, swings closed

Jeff and I went for a little walk in the gorgeous sunshine yesterday afternoon. Jeff said that he should go for a walk and I said, “I’m going to stagger up the stairs, stagger up the hill to the park and stagger back again,” and he thought I was joking; he joined me after watching me put my shoes on. This is the same park at the start of the pandemic; the logo has all washed off that hoodie but the hoodie remains.

I missed the DD celebration yesterday. I am not sad, I don’t feel sad. I am somewhat immobilized though.

Russians out of Kherson. They’re starting to put anti tank cement blocks on their side of the border, which triggered Finnish Twitter to do a most pointed and technical takedown of how insanely useless it all was. (Altho the discussion was in Finnish you can translate tweets on the fly and man the Finns were just shaking their heads, it was wonderful. There were also comments that since it WAS useless, some oligarch musta got paid for it, ten times what it’s all worth. Lovely.)

Supposedly the new washer will come in the downstairs back door around 11 am today. No movement on the tree, not that I’d expect it on Sunday.

 

by aquilegiaformosa on tumblr
guys we’re not being cringe to keep out the twitter users. we’re being cringe to keep out the ALGORITHMS, the CAPITALISTS, the INFLUENCERS. twitter users are welcome as long as they agree this site is UNMARKETABLE

In other words become ungovernable by being someone you can’t make money from…. by being cringe. You know who’s cringe ? autistic people, by virtue of the intensity of their many hobby horses.

I prefer to be ungovernable by having my own website, that nobody ever looks at, but which will be invaluable to my family after I’m dead. That’s how things work. It’s the longitudinal and continuous energy of it, not the content, necessarily.

Worked on yet another fanfic, “Special Deputy on the Run” yesterday.  I’ve poked into the file for Part II but I think I added 36 words.

The amount of shit kicking Zibethicus (my name for Elon, means muskrat) has taken on the internet is amazing. In a few short weeks he’s scorched his fortune, facing a lawsuit for over 50 billion dollars from a former investor choked that he essentially stole shares from Tesla, received the brickbats of the commentariat and been held up as a model of everything not to do in business. Every time he says so much as boo on twitter hundreds of thousands of people tell him he’s a fucking idiot; it’s glorious, but not enough to get a twitter account.

Continuing counts in the US election still trend Biden’s way. They didn’t poll people who never voted LOL__  so many pundits have tender buttskin hanging out on this that another public spirited activity on twitter these days is going through the pundits’s last two weeks of salty prognostications and retweeting it, saying things like THIS AGED LIKE MILK or DO YOU SUPPOSE YOU WILL EVER BE RIGHT ABOUT ANYTHING EXCEPT AS THE SPECTRUM FOR YOUR POLITICS etc etc.

It is GLORIOUS and marvellous in our eyes. The night show hosts are having a field day.

Mitch McConnell, easily one of the most corrupt and disgusting politicians in American history, is not Senate GOP Leader any more, and rumblings are someone is going to grab his 15 year old perch in the Senate. The people who are candidates in replacing him aren’t as likely to be as competent at either whipping votes or stealing anything they can reach.

We are about six episodes into Farscape. Every episode is weirder than the next. Truly bizarre show.

Virtually every pediatric ICU in the country is at double capacity. There are so many sick children that you cannot buy children’s aspirin in this country right now.

Spoke to Tammy on the phone the other day, she called. She confirmed that she’s coming at Christmas and I’m seeing her on Boxing Day.

 

the latest fic

is about a bunch of heading for middle aged guys in a cover band, their rehearsals and romances….

and the first song our two heroes rehearse is “Addicted to Love” which of COURSE is a cover band song given that it was a number 1 hit in 1985.

And it was playing on the Muzak in the store this morning so I started to laugh.

I am easily amused.

Nothing done about the tree

No progress on writing. FINALLY got my package to m&d into the mail to them; includes Alex’s art and the Guest 23 mag I have a poem in, thanks to Dave.

Ball lightning: shown in the video is either ball lightning or a transformer dying, although there was no ‘bang’. … there are family stories about ball lightning that EERILY mimic a story from 1963 recounted in this article. (pOp saw ball lightning move down the centre of the fuselage of the Argus he was flying in). Also, Grandma Susie Hinde saw a troika of ball lightning moving above the frozen surface of a river, as she told me sometime in the 1980s about an event from her girlhood in SK.

Drove Paul around to run errands and get him out of his apartment yesterday. He was in much better shape than on previous days and we had something approaching fun. Keith was about to go for a walk with a friend and Suzanne was there cleaning when I arrived.

Ukrainians who are Orthodox are switching up when they celebrate Christmas to distinguish themselves from a version of Russian Orthodoxy whose Patriarch Cyrill the Biggass Hypocrite has announced that any Russians killed in the UK campaign go straight to heaven. VOOP! YUP  up we go! Local parishes have a choice now about the 25 December or 7 January date for celebrations..

Shlep this morning. I already bought milk at Walmart in Lougheed Mall yesterday. Also came home with about 20 bucks of Purdy’s chocolate TIS THE SEASON.

Justin Trudeau is ‘standing up to China’ which basically means whining and not putting more federal money into chasing down Chinese nationals openly laundering money in this town, the single biggest reason nothing is being done about it.

I HAVE COFFEE, the world is ok.