Virent ova! Viret perna!
One doesn't get enough opportunities to pratice Latin these days unless you're transcribing the Pope's masses into the regional vernacular. So, when Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, Inc. offer up a new rendering of Doctor Seuss' classic Green Eggs and Ham in Latin, you have to be tempted.
Instead of literally translating the material, the authors have taken the spirit of Seussian whimsey on a trip through the way-back machine and put the text of the story into Latin trochaic verse. So, you know, it would read well from a food seller's stall in the Rome marketplace.
"Mihi placent, O Pincerna!
"Virent ova! Viret perna!
"Dapem posthac non arcebo.
"Gratum tibi me praebebo."
Catching Up On My Geek Reading
"CyberInsecurity: The Cost of Monopoly" is the report which outlines how Microsoft's insidious dominance of the desktop operating system market is asking for trouble. Dan Geer, one of the authors of the report, was removed from his job as Chief Technology Officer at @Stake, a security consulting firm which has done a good amount of business with Microsoft in the past. Draw your own conclusions.
Hack the Planet's summary of the Google File System paper is too delightful not to lift: "Those crazy scientists; you ask them to build a search engine and they throw in a scalable cluster filesystem for free."
What? It was either this stuff or Stephenson's Quicksilver. It's all just a matter of where I fall on the geek scale, rather than if.
Roundup
The remainder of the week got away from me. A power outage on Wednesday kinda blew a hole through the middle of the day and the rest of the week has sort of felt like playing catch-up. I've been trying to finish the paste up of the Jarboe interview which will go live at the next major Earpollution update on the first monday in October, as well as trying to work through the records I want to get reviewed. At some point -- was it only Tuesday? seems like a century already -- I had a very interesting offer dangled in front of me. It's a daunting project unlike nothing I've ever done before, but I think it has all the potential to be very, very exciting. And it looks like I'll be participating in a seminar in Seattle the first weekend in October where we'll be talking about writing around a full time job.
Somewhere in here, Melissa entered the final trimester before Solomon comes kicking out in the world. We've been trying to tidy up things around chez Teppo in preparation for the change in lifestyle that Santa's bringing by, but it seems like I've been losing track of days more than I've actually been getting things done -- office reorganization notwithstanding.
Nanowrimo is in November. It'll probably be the last chance I have for a few months to really knock out some words and I'd like to get a draft of the BOOK OF LIES done before the end of the year. It seems sort of impossible but I'm beginning to understand how to do things in very small pieces.
Listening to: Tomas Jirku Bleak 1999 [on No Type]
Neal Stephenson on Quicksilver
(and I'm paraphrasing here) "Quicksilver is a long arguement between Leibnitz and Newton with privateering and swordfights thrown in to keep it interesting."
I've returned from the swamped reading that took place tonight. Neal Stephenson has a bit of a fan base here in Seattle. Not surprising since he is a local. The other bon mot I appreciated was his comment that writing is an athletic exercise and not just an intellectual one. The first draft of The Baroque Cycle was done longhand. Close to a million words. On paper. Word by word. The mind boggles.
Annotations to The Baroque Cycle are going to appear at www.metaweb.com
You Know...Epic
An advertisement in the Seattle Times today reads: "From Neal Stephenson...it's your regular boy meets girl meets empiricism meets privateering meets the Glorious Revolution meets Louis Quatorze meets Turkish harems meets alchemy meets Samual Pepys's diaries meets slave rebellions meets neoclassism meets Adam Smith meets economics meets calculus meets the Great Fire of London meets the War of Spanish Succession meets St. Paul's Cathedral meets proto-computer technology EPIC."
Neal's reading at Kane Hall at the University of Washington tonight. I'll have my grubby paws on a copy of Quicksilver shortly thereafter. Doubt I'll be reading much else until, well, Stephen King's Wolves of the Calla comes out.
"Are You Okay?"
This is an old one -- 1996, to be exact -- and I've already checked Snopes and came up with nada. So, enjoy.
CORTEZ, Colorado (CNN) -- "Imagine you are a prairie dog and your landlord wants to evict you. One minute you're burrowed into your home sweet hole; the next minute you're hurtling through a vacuum hose and landing inside a padded yellow truck. You can't read the side of the truck, but it says, 'Dog-Gone: Prairie Dog Control' and below that, in green letters, 'Environmentally Safe.'
Meet Dave Honaker and Gay Balfour, who are ridding fields and prairies of prairie dogs, hole by hole, with the help of a revamped sewer truck. Not for them the aggressive techniques of rifles, poison or flooding...On a good day, Dave and Gay can suck hundreds of the 3-pound rodents out of their burrows."
Check out the full article, and be sure to watch the movie.
I shared this with Melissa earlier today and her anthropomorphic response was: "I'm not okay, you jerk! I've just had my eyeballs sucked cross-eyed!"
Ah, she makes me laugh.
Library Hotel
"The Library Hotel in New York City is the first hotel ever to offer its guest over 6,000 volumes organized throughout the hotel by the Dewey Decimel Classification. Each of the 10 guestrooms floors honors one of the 10 categories of the DDC and each of the 60 rooms is uniquely adorned with a collection of books and art exploring a distinctive topic within the category or floor it belongs to."
As you can imagine, the idea of staying in 1200.003 ("Occult") titillates me to no end.
A Dream of Snow
I made it to the second or third round of Project Greenlight last year (the top 250, I think it was) and was very curious to watch this go-round of the show on HBO. A buddy taped the entirety of the season and we blew through the second half of it last night. Which prompted the dream I had early this morning. It went a little something like this:
I won and the trick this year was that I had to write a script on spec. They (the producers) had a window of opportunity to shoot up north and they wanted to do a quasi-documentary about a native woman who sailed across the Arctic ocean in a boat made of snow. I had to write the script. There is a loop of footage still running in my head of the boat sailing through a channel between two massive icebergs. The water is getting warmer the further south she sails and the snow is rapidly dropping off the boat. I can see the boat crossing the frame again and again, pieces of it falling away.
There is a great train wreck sequence behind the scenes that follows. The director doesn't seem to understand that this boat can't be shaped like a modern cutter rig and I'm having this screaming match with him about the complete incoherency of having a native woman build and sail a style of boat that is more in keeping with wealthy socialites sailing out of San Diego than the indigenous culture of Greenland. The loop of film runs in the background, the snow falling away from the rigid outline of the cutter rig.
There are the standard establishing shots that stream through my head: a helicopter-based camera that flies across the ice, sizing up the camp and the production; the talking head interviews where the crew talks about what a bitch it is to "hurry up and shoot" in the ice. And then there is a sequence of me wearing a fuzzy duck suit. I'm standing out on the edge of a glacier with a wooden bat, whacking snowballs off the edge of the cliff.
It's a good shot. There is a perfectly shaped pyramid of snowballs next to me. The spray of ice as I whack the snowball off the cliff catches the sun and the ice scintilates as it falls. The orange and yellow of the duck suit jumps out against the blue and white of the sky and glacier. I'm sure it is insulated. It's not just fuzzy on the outside for show.
Foo
Luís Rodrigues' Goblindegook mentions the definition of "foo" in an entry today. Having become rather acquainted with both "foo" and "bar" over the last few months, I went for a look and discovered this was an entry that was part of the larger Jargon File. Oo la la. Learn to talk like a hacker or a phreaker. No, learn to understand what the hell they are saying. Including a rather pedestrian but probably true definition of "pr0n".
I See Your 404 And Raise You 500
I had been meaning to stroll through the 404 Research Lab tonight and give some thought to the ugly-ass 404 error that I'm saddled with by my ISP. Instead I've had the bountiful opportunity to get busy with the "500: Internal Server Error." Apparently today was the day that they decided to run a server upgrade which spanked a "666" permission over all the files in my website. And since I'm not smart enough to figure out how to get a recursive CHMOD script to run when I don't seem to have Telnet access to my site, I've spent the evening crawling through directories doing the point-and-click dance with my FTP client.
I'm going to go watch Survivor now.
Trip
The acid must be kicking in.
http://www.boohbah.com/zone.html
I can't even remember my own name now.
Relative Worth
Well, it appears that my CD collection is worth more than my soul. Somehow I'm not surprised.
"Your soul is worth £8978. For your peace of mind, 82% of people have a purer soul than you."
I Am Marcatura
Jason Z. and I were messing around with The Babelizer over lunch and he punches in the following phrase. The Babelizer pushes the Systran translation software beyond its normal operating limits by taking a piece of text and running it through several different languages. Here's what we were cackling about over lunch.
"Mark Teppo is dry."
Translated to French:
La marque Teppo est sčche.
Translated back to English:
The Teppo mark is dry.
Translated to German:
Die Teppo Markierung ist trocken.
Translated back to English:
The Teppo marking is drying.
Translated to Italian:
La marcatura di Teppo sta asciugandosi.
Translated back to English:
The marcatura of Teppo is being dried up.
Translated to Portuguese:
O marcatura de Teppo estį sendo secado acima.
Translated back to English:
The marcatura of Teppo is being dried above.
Translated to Spanish:
El marcatura de Teppo se estį secando arriba.
Translated back to English:
The marcatura of Teppo is being dried above.
Video Directors
Everyone has been playing Mark Romanek's video of Johnny Cash's "Hurt" since Friday which -- well, even Justin Timberlake recognized the tragedy that it didn't win at this year's VMAs. It's had me thinking about the art of the video and making a list of those directors who always turn in amazing product. There's Romanek, Floria Sigismondi (whose video for Sigur Ros' "Untitled #1" is a heartbreak to watch), Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham, Michael Gondry...and others which I'm sure will come to me as soon as I post this.
Palm Pictures is doing a Directors Label of DVDs which collect each of the directors' entire output of videos. The ones for Jonze, Gondry, and Cunningham have been scheduled and should be out in time for Christmas.
The Man in Black is Gone
| Johnny Cash 1932-2003 |
Occult Resources
For a long time, my favorite occult resource online was Shawn's Occult Resources which is, alas, now gone but for varying references to it in link farms which haven't been culled too recently. Shawn himself is still active on the Internet but is out of the occult reference business. Which means we have to chart our own paths now. So, under the category of clearinghouses of occult information, here's a couple of things that I'd like to keep handy:
-- Dark Side of the Net's Occult Links
-- Enochian Bookmarks
-- Occult Archive
-- Pharo
I've found an old bookmarks.html file from 2001. Of the fifteen "occult" specific links I've squirreled away there, none of them work any more. The sites have all moved or died or disappeared. Ah, the permanence of the Internet.
Feed Me
Since migrating to Movable Type with this site, I've been introduced to RSS feeds and aggregators. And, like all new technology, it has been both daunting and exciting. The exciting bits are (a) finding a news feeder reader which fills all my needs, and (b) discovering the great things which are available through RSS.
My preferred reader right now is Feed Demon. Written by Nick Bradbury who wrote HomeSite (which is an application that I would be crippled without) and TopStyle (a CSS editing tool which is pretty damn useful as well), Feed Demon is still in beta but it appears to be solid and full of delightful functionality. Tri-pane organization, tabbed viewing of feeds, mounds and mounds of organizational options, and a clean interface.
The newest RSS treat is the weather as received from www.rssweather.com. All that you need to know about your location shot right to your aggregate reader. Joy.
NYC online
I ran across a number of New York City references while catching up with links and blogs over the weekend, sort of a convergence of disparate sources. Some of them are too cool not to collate.
-- National Geographic's New York Underground. Complete with sound samples.
-- New York, if the Nazis had won WWII
-- Teresa Nielsen Hayden caps it all with an impressive rundown of available NYC resources that is staggering to behold.
Bass Profoundo
(Reuters) "In the first controlled experiment of infrasound, Lord and Wiseman played four contemporary pieces of live music, including some laced with infrasound, at a London concert hall and asked the audience to describe their reactions to the music. The audience did not know which pieces included infrasound but 22 percent reported more unusual experiences when it was present in the music."
Dr Richard Lord, an acoustic scientist at the National Physical Laboratory in England and Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire in southern England, built a seven meter pipe and snuck it in the back of a church during the Sunday session and experimented on the reaction of the attendees to the sub-20 Hertz sound.
There is some suggestion even that infrasound -- which may also occur naturally -- is responsible for the general creepy crawling sensation one gets in places that are considered haunted, leading to the conclusion that the "haunting" is the result of some localized natural phenomenon. Not to mention the fact that low-end sound has probably been experimented with by the US Military for some time, nor can we pass up the nod to The Swans and Throbbing Gristle who used it at more than once concert setting.
And, speaking of localized versions of infrasound, Reuters also notes today that scientists have discovered that the Perseus Cluster has been singing a bass note for billions of years, not that anyone could ever hear the B flat note which the celestial object is humming. The Perseus Cluster is about 250 million light-years from Earth.
Andrew Fabian of the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge, England, has been using NASA's orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory to gather information about the contents of the Perseus Cluster and have deduced that a supermassive black hole lay at the center. The discovery of the B flat note -- which is 57 octaves below middle C -- lends credence to existence of the superdense black hole.
By watching the Perseus Cluster, they've been able to detect concentric waves coming off the black hole, the result of gases being squeezed and heated before being drawn into the center of the hole. These concentric waves are pressure ridges which are the same thing as sound waves to the scientific mind. Measure the distance between crests and you've got a musical note. In this case, the wavelength was about 30,000 light years, or B flat -- 57 octaves down.
Not that anyone can hear it. Not even elephants who are known to communicate with extremely low level basso tones. Current guess is that this is the lowest note in the universe. This black hole is the Alan Cooper of the universe.
The Light! The Light!
Due to be released on September 17th for the Game Boy Advance, Konami's Boktai is a fairly straightforward vampire hunter role-playing game. However, the cartridge has a solar cell in it which has a direct effect on gameplay. When sunlight strikes the cell, sunlight appears in the game. In fact, you can only defeat the bosses in the game by attacking them in daylight. Real daylight.
A number of gaming sites have tested the cartridge and its solar eye, trying to outwit the sensor and they've all come to same conclusion: this is the real deal. You want to be a vampire hunter? Check your six and keep to the daylight hours. The game takes you indoors on a number of ocassions and the presence of daylight on the sensor shows up onscreen as sunlight streaming through windows and other cracks in the architecture. Why is all this important? Well, other than keeping the ghoulies at bay, your weapons -- especially the Gun del Sol (naturally) -- recharge when they are exposed to the light.
Maybe it'll teach the next generation that solar power really is a viable source of energy. Paradigm shifts via video games.
Arabian Nights
Sir Richard F. Burton's seminal Arabian Nights is always the book which comes to my mind as the classic example of the "story within a story" framework, and I've been on the lookout for a complete set for several years now. It is pretty easy to find an edition which is a selection from, and which usually covers those stories which we all learned as kids. The Burton Club has privately printed editions of a 16 volume set since around 1900 -- each print run was different in coloration and end papers -- but those aren't cheap. Not to mention the whole complication of actually finding a set. I even toyed with the idea of buying them piecemeal as I found them and completely discounting the necessity of a proper set but that would just mean that some poor bastard (well, 16 of them) would wind up with incomplete sets. Additionally, the 16 volume set contains a number of notes and annotatinos by Burton himself, which would seem to be worth reading as well.
I stumbled upon a Heritage Press edition from 1934 at Culpepper Books today while visiting the public library (who had very dutifully stepped up and filled all of my requests for the books on the list from a few days ago). The complete translation, notes, and terminal essay by Burton himself in three slipcased volumes with 1001 (naturally) decorations by Valenti Angelo.
This set has certainly appeased the treasure hunter in me. The idea of actually reading all 1001 tales is daunting me now. It's only what? three years if I do one a night. Guess I'd better get started. Well, after I get through the stack of eleven books which the public library will want back in three weeks.
The Open Space of Possibilities
Firstly, the Dead Letter Office. "The Dead Letter Office is a holding space. When you submit your words to The Dead Letter Office database, your letter is added to a collection of Dead Letters of other people from around the world whom you will never meet. In fact, you may read a letter from someone you know, but you may never know it."
The idea of floating bits of fiction -- either anonymously as the Dead Letter Office does, or not -- into the WWW as a means of quiet expression has a certain appeal. You aren't constrained by requirements of size, shape, or genre; you can just try ideas out and see what happens with them. Jeff VanderMeer is putting together the House with 87 Cabinets over at Night Shade Books as an online experiment with an ultimate eye towards publication and his precept isn't as anonymous but it still has that "no boundaries" format to it.
When Souls of the Living was first making the rounds in New York, we would get back responses like "liked it, but we're not doing horror right now" followed by "liked it, but we're not doing thrillers now." Pigeon-holing may be a necessary survival trait for the publishing houses but it certainly clips the wings of the writer when the definitions are narrow and rigid.
This is one of the things which I really like about the Web: it allows tiny fledglings the opportunity to find their wings. You can get lost in the noise, but you can also do anything you like.
Once Upon a Time
Last night, I caught a sneak preview of Robert Rodriguez's Once Upon a Time in Mexico, his final installment in the El Mariachi trilogy. Reflecting a bit more on the idea of time invention as discussed in the last SYMBOLIC entry, it becomes clear that Once Upon a Time in Mexico is a fable, an invented tale both entertaining and nostalgic in its design.
Myths are meant to be told around a campfire; they come from oral traditions and, as such, aren't intended to be overly complex and involved. They are simple stories that distract and educate; they make you laugh and show you something about how the world works. By their very introduction -- "once upon a time" -- they aren't meant to be taken literally (at least, not by our jaded world-weary 21st century cynicism), but rather their existence is buoyed by your willingness to suspend disbelief.
Okay, this all sounds like an explanation, a pre-apology for a film which will probably get savaged by critics and will die a quiet death at the box office. It will only happen because people will approach this film as if it were an important piece of cinema or that their time is so valuable -- "so many films, so little time" -- that their impatience will overcome the simple act of having a good time.
Which is too bad because everyone onscreen is having a grand old time. Especially Johnny Depp who, I believe more and more, can deliver any line of dialogue ever written and imbue it with enough gravitas that it overcomes any inherent affectation. Johnny "Balancer of Forces" Depp scampered off with Pirates of the Caribbean and does the same in Once Upon a Time in Mexico and why not? He plays the Trickster in either film and when does the Trickster not steal the show? Unemcumbered with the necessity of heroic action or dastardly villainy, the Trickster gets to willfully partake of either extreme in his pursuit of shaking the order of the universe.
Once Upon a Time in Mexico is a simple tale of Death and Redemption. Each of the players is seeking resurrection into a new body, a new lease on a wasted life. (The climax of the film takes place on the Day of the Dead, a useful cinematic event which allows for lots of visual flair but is really just a thorough bludgeoning of the audience as to the underlying point of the tale.) "What do you want in life?" Carolina asks El Mariachi. "Freedom," he says -- Libertas -- and her one word response to that answer isn't as simple as it sounds. Each of the characters knows the difficulty of freedom, and Rodriquez smartly gathers together a group of thespians who all have such a history associated with them that the lines and textures of their faces all speak of a clear understanding of the tiring complexity in striving for the simplicity of freedom.
Depp looks younger than everyone else, somehow tapping into the innocent baby face which made young girls scream with delight during the 21 Jump Street years. It isn't until he is made "real" by events in the third act that he becomes like the others -- a tired soul seeking redemption. Up to that point, he is a capricious figure, manipulating events and characters towards their inevitable and violent conclusion.
The intricacies of the subterfuge between characters are more byzantine than necessary and the film bogs down a bit with the unnecessary double-turns, obscuring the small poignancies to be found in the stories of Mickey Rourke's exiled assassin and Rubén Blades' retired FBI agent. The archetypal weight that El Mariachi is saddled with is handled in a nicely understated way by Antonio Bandaras, and Salma Hayek's turn as the Mother Protector could have been given a bit more screen time. Minor quibbles though. As a story which is really nothing more than a roaring campfire tale, Once Upon a Time in Mexico is entertaining, distracting, and ultimately bittersweet.
"Who are you guys?"
"We're the sons of Mexico."
I mean, come on. We all wish we could have heroic enough lives that we could stand tall and utter lines like that.
Slip the Fantastic
Okay, I'm behind. So very, very behind on things.
Matthew Barney's The Cremaster Cycle
Edward Whittemore
Jeff VanderMeer
Dave McKean's Mirrormask
M. John Harrison
Jans Potocki's Saragossa Manuscript
K. J. Bishop's The Etched City
And Jack O'Connell hasn't written anything since Word Made Flesh. At least I'm current there.
Anything else?
Art Weekend
We got away to Portland for a few days to wind up our summer before school begins again on Tuesday for Melissa and, well, I guess another week begins for me. I still haven't gotten to the Bullseye Connection Gallery over near the Brewery Blocks, which is silly considering how close it is to Powell's. But we did visit the Portland Art Museum.
[Why do I always type in ".com" when searching for museum web sites? When is a museum ever a .com?]
PAM had an exhibit of Joan Miró's sculpture and cocktail napkin scratchings which left me rather cold. Sure, it is surrealism and all, but a little too simplistic when you get right down to it. Especially when you consider the scribbled "idea" in connection with the final result. They remind me too much of Picasso's bike handles twisted into the vague shape of bull's head and, at that point, it stops being art and is just a glorified lawn ornament.
Unlike Thomas Moran's picture of the Grand Canal in Venice. Moran, to me, has always been an American landscape painter and I never even knew he'd been to Venice (much less done paintings of the city) until I saw this one in the Portland Art Museum.
Reminds me so much of Turner's watercolors from Venice. No, actually, reminds me so much of the city itself.
And, speaking of Venice, yesterday we went to the Tacoma Art Museum and dutifully admired the prodigal son's latest glass creation. I have to admit a certain ambivalence to Chihuly's work, a "feh" which rises from the fact that, at this point, most of it is done by the hands of others. It tweaks my sensibility of what an artist should do before calling work his own. But there is a certain grandeur and majesty to it all that commands a bit of admiration and respect. Not to mention just some simple appreciation for the beauty of the colors.
Noney for Breakfast
Noney is a project where aesthetics are more important than currency, or maybe they are equivalent. Hand drawn and then hand screenprinted onto polyethylene fiber, the Noney is a bill whose worth is exactly what you choose to make of it. Part physical art, part performance art, the Noney is circulating. You may buy your own (which is somewhat counter to the idea, I suppose), and then put it to work -- as a means of barter.
I'm going to out for breakfast now. I doubt they'll take a Noney at the Hob Nob. They are kind of a hard currency in exchange for toast and omelets sort of place.
(Nod to Boing Boing for the Noney)