Wax Banks

Key to understanding me during dark times.

Tribute to nature's majestic majesty.

Spike crosses the Alps.

Miracle at St Anna feels like a Spike Lee movie, of course; all Spike Lee's movies do. Even without Terence Blanchard's usual lovely/portentous/overwrought score blaring over every over scene, you'd never mistake the camera moves, the endless didactic direct addresses, the astonishing quick-cut montages unearthing the media history of race (in this case German propaganda posters), the effortless dialogue rhythm, the sexy Italian lady whose role boils down over the course of the film to temptress/icon, the clean choreography, the lingering shots of the Whole Wide World with tiny protagonists in it, or the sometimes-flabby dramaturgy for anyone else's stuff. At his best, Lee is one of the modern greats, even at his worst he makes loopy orgiastic symphonies like the wonderful She Hate Me. Blanchard might be the man with the horn in Lee's films but Lee reminds me of Wynton Marsalis: an artist too talented to make small mistakes, only great big American belly-flops - and whose best shit pretty much laps everyone else's.

Cut a couple minutes from the epilogue and ten minutes from the middle of the film and you have...I dunno, less of whatever's frustrating about Miracle, but perhaps less too of what makes it such a pleasure. The opening firefight is too long and too ridiculous and too all-these-things, but so was the second goddamned world war, so complaining seems small. The cast is sharp, some of the dialogue flies, and a few clumsy cuts and dead-fish speeches aren't enough to ruin a fine-if-slight story - not even the unforgivable final moral-monologue. The speechifying and hammer-to-the-skull metaphoricizing are all part of Spike's method, right? Even if they're bad, and at times they really are bad, how do you cut overblown stuff from a movie in which every emotion is overblown, every drop of Import wrung from every scene?

When I first saw Bamboozled I thought I was going mad; 25th Hour disappointed and bored me and might have been brilliant; Inside Man was near-perfect; She Hate Me is Black America's answer to Southland Tales - or wait, Southland Tales is the White She Hate Me with fewer lesbians and more guns. Spike Lee's a live wire and I hate the idea that he needs to head off to Europe for money like he's David goddamn Lynch. Miracle at St Anna isn't a sin, but it's not a landmark film either - just a clean World War II band-of-brothers-in-peril story, capably told by a gifted director working outside his comfort zone. 'Ho hum' seems churlish and undeserved; I had a good time, and once - I won't say when - had my breath taken away. Complain if you must, but can your lesser art do that?

Addendum to previous.

My wife points out that the 'Sun set' post just prior to this one draws on two main sources for inspiration, which we watched this weekend: Mad Men 2x02 and Baby Mama starring Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. I leave it to you to figure out which show inspired which bits of pretension.

Sun set.

She said to him Want to get a drink? and he nodded. They went to a bar down the street. He had lived on the street for two years but couldn't have named his 'neighborhood bar' had she asked. He said It's been a long time and she smiled in apology. She said I'm pregnant. He didn't ask Is it mine? though he wondered. He noticed she had only ordered a Coca-Cola. Outside it rained a little. She said the baby was hers. He didn't smile. She said the father was a guy she had been dating but He left about a week after we conceived, actually. He wanted to know What are you doing to do? When she asked him What does everyone do? he thought it was a rhetorical question but it might not have been. She thought he looked trapped, and felt sort for him. Outside it stopped raining. A couple of his friends came into the bar and ordered vodka, and he was angry at them for interrupting. She thought he was hiding. So what are you doing to do? he asked again, and she cocked her head to the side and said I'm having a baby. It's happened before. He smiled and wanted to offer help, or something. He couldn't imagine what he could do. She was proud of how excited she felt. Two hours passed. She said to him People don't actually stop loving each other, and he responded I don't know about that, and she squeezed his hand and said No, you don't know. Smiling. Outside the sun guttered, scrambled, spilled deep red and orange light on young and old as it set and slept and waited.

Adventuring boldly - what else would he do, given his job description?

When the day is nearly done.

Brief note re: fans and how little they matter, the colonization of Hollywood by the likes of J.J. Abrams notwithstanding.

1) Abrams isn't ultimately a fanboy, though he has the aesthetics of one. He's a huckster, a carnival barker. He's interested in the same juvenile shit as the other kids who watched TV in the 80's instead of reading novels, but his cynicism is breathtaking. That said, fanboys have risen to some prominence in Hollywood in the last few years, Joss Whedon the most talented among them - the first Hollywood-writer generation to have watched Twin Peaks on TV - and we can thank them for expensive dreck like Abrams's Star Trek, Terminator: Salvation, X-Men 3, and Transformers.

2) Fans didn't save Dollhouse. Whedon's zero-budget coda 'Epitaph One' did - because it points the way to bigger profit margins for Fox. It's important to understand that this is quite literally the only thing the suits at Fox care about. If they cared about the content and cultural role of television they wouldn't, e.g., be working for Fox.

Older.

As-you-were is a stranger to you now. Well you have to make do somehow. The problem isn't memory but imagination: the future history to have been. You didn't want to be this did you. Whatever you wanted, the other thing, 'better' and 'worse' don't apply. There was a someday became a now, you couldn't have predicted, and what size does it make you. You swore you'd never do what's today your job, hated the woman who became your wife - called 'love of your life' the first man you betrayed - but it goes away. The past is only past, no longer looming. Much worse is the phantom limb pain of futures fallen away. Highway signs you didn't read in time.

Missing your strong right arm you maybe resent your remaindered left. Inadequate. Why couldn't I have seen? Seeing isn't for us but you can't know that.

Or you thought when you were older and got big you'd travel to the jungle or a faraway city, all the colours would be different, there'd be music on every ancient street corner and the girls with fresh flowers in their hair would smile privately, looking forward to summer. No one would ever grow old because you had no idea what that could possibly mean. You had opinions about stories you'd never read starting with: life itself. You brimmed and wanted.

Colour's only colour; you remember feeling it but how could that be? But don't hold darkness against the dark. It's your eyes you wish to escape, not what they see.

Glow fondle.

Not dead, just busy.

Pure, unmitigated nerdery: a sorta-Romantic RPG adventure notion.

[Months old, this one. If you feel even the faintest inclination to leave it alone, do so. Trust yer disdain/self-preservation!]

i set myself a challenge. randomly pick two NPC's from the one-sentence NPC list and craft an adventure around them. here were the choices:

'addict bon-vivant actress dominated by monster likes to party.'

'the god who now walks earth as a normal human suddenly falls in love with...'

dnd

Wacky. Stuipid. Incumbent!

Apparently this is a real Senate Republican ad. I'm allowed to point out that these guys are idiots, right?

Five.

She had native American blood, I realized only much later, which gave her straight black hair and skin the colour of a deep summer suntan. Her head and torso hardly moved when she ran, her legs deeply bent, and her motions were fluid; even suddenly skipping she was never jerky or clumsy. Our grades were similar in high school but I never really saw her as competition - in my arrogance I supposed we were entirely different creatures. We would see movies together, listen to cassettes in the car, joke around backstage at concerts, and I seemed to have a crush on every girl in school but her. For years she loved me. She suffered and not in silence, but I paid no attention. (And what would I have done, had I been able to acknowledge her feelings? What could I possibly have done or said?) Her skin smelled like woodsmoke and earth and she dressed in old clothes, but I never noticed, or never admitted it. When the time came to go our separate ways for college we kissed finally, and more, and after a week together and a couple of months apart we had moved on. I moved on first.

* * *

I can't remember what she looked like crying though I must have seen. Within a week we were in bed and within two I was in love, or supposed so. She had a smattering of Italian and an overbite, a radiant smile and a horse laugh that disarmed me, and had slept with older boys; I let my hair grow long and knew that we were meant for each other. I knew nothing. We spent fifteen months dating and another six breaking up, and she'd leave our escalating fights troubled, and tell me so. I realize now, a decade on, that while she constantly projected happiness and comfort, she had long since lost hope. In us, anyhow. I wished for blindness, to escape responsibility for seeing unhappiness I was causing. She left in early September, but it was February or a year or five years later before I realized how much happier she was without me. I'd like to tell you what she loved, but I don't remember. I know she loved me and then didn't. Which is my blindness rather than her darkness, right?

* * *

I wore silly red pajamas and assumed she'd be impressed, and she was, or played along. Her eyes let me see myself as a man. A year passed and graduation, and we spent the summer reading novels together, crawling in and out of bed, unwinding. It was a good time. We were sexy together and foolish and it was perfect. She was unhappy. She left for grad school, a year of starting over, and I stayed put for a year of more of what I knew. She returned shaken. We moved in together and survived the year - our third - but only just. I moved on first. Her shoulders were pale broad and bony, small breasts set wide apart, and she took long heavy-booted strides and loved joking around. I guessed her hair looked better short, and was right. She said she wanted to wait and I said 'I don't see any reason why.' We both should have known but how can you? And in one way or another each was the love of the other's life 'til then, but that's what love is for: it destroys emotional context. She loved the outdoors and gave it up entirely while we were together, and I was tired of blaming myself and ready to break something long before I kissed someone else, another friend, while rain fell.

* * *

She wanted to be a writer but wouldn't, isn't, and a friend said 'She was ready to be in love with you from the first day' and, who knows, maybe she was. Maybe I wanted. We talked about dead family members, cried, and what I took for narrative one-upmanship she saw as confession and connection. You can make a whole life out of that if you don't mind destroying someone else's. She walked like a rag doll on its way up to claim a gold medal: joyfully, unself-consciously, a little goofily. If we had a relationship I spent a lot of it drunk and all of it unhappy, and passed the latter affliction on to her. We dreamt of growing old reading one another's literary first drafts, and when the time came for her to leave for graduate school we'd wasted a year more on fighting than friendship or anything else. That sin was largely mine; others were shared. You can mistake persistence for strength. She was ready for something desperate and pure but I was empty. We might have been something, my only such, but not then. Nothing then. And not since. I pulled away first - from the start actually - but for a while she was the only one who had moved on.

* * *

I disliked that she was gorgeous and thought of herself as mature - wrongly to my eyes - and she disliked (rightly) that I was not and not. Her grades were much much better than mine but I made some excellent mistakes. She was rail-thin, her spine a shallow sine curve, sandy hair or red or brown as mood dictated, and a hard shell protected whatever was inside, or so I'd learn in time. Half a decade passed and more. Each of us was nearing the other side of something exhausting. She knew what music could do, how sentences sing. She hoped the way I did, it looked like. We became slow friends and fast lovers; the former was irreplaceable and the latter unpalatable. When the friendship blossomed and the need to impress one another passed, the other parts worked themselves out quite nicely. She moved into our house of six before we'd worked out what (or whether) we were as a pair, and for a year it was fine for me and bad for her. We broke up in April or May, something inside me rotated 180 degrees (and warmed another twenty), and a few years later we were married. We weren't broken up long. I laugh aloud at her jokes and admire her work her honesty her effort of every kind, she moves like everything matters, and her smile and scent and savour are to me a lesson in dangerous geography or topology, undiscovered cities at the burnt fringes of a map where seadragons wait. She is my new world.

For Sherv et (maybe) al.: Hite on Lovecraft.

Notes for a story entitled '2010.'

Well, I don't imagine I'll write this, so take 'em away, Darling Reader(s). Notes from last week. (I did in fact write a story with that title, which had nothing whatsoever to do with this lame attempt at comedy - not to say the Thing Itself wasn't lame as well.)

* * *

swine flu: "Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napilotano says roughly 12 million doses of the drug Tamiflu are being released from a federal stockpile so that states can get it if needed.

Napilotano said at a White House news conference Sunday that the emergency declaration is standard operating procedure—one was recently declare for the inauguration and for flooding."

Timocil - ecstasy and mood-enhancement

the federal government releases a five-step road map to eliminating the ATTENTION DEFICIT by the year 2010. giving everyone drugs, ground-up building a culture so simplistic-yet-complicated it practically SCREAMS for junkies, deadheads, adderall-snorting college students, conspiracy nuts to get into it. the only ones who can wrap their fucking minds around it.

"the attention deficit threatens the operation of the nation itself; even more worrying, it threatens the smooth functioning of the american GOVERNMENT."

the new green program means cutting back on electricity use except during PRIME TIME

ten or twenty thousand protestors show up in atlanta for anti-tax demonstration. 'vitamins' are distributed. the group gets EXTREMELY focused and comes up with a fantastic alternative budget. obama treats it as the 'best idea to come out of the republican party in twenty years.' right-wingers protest that they're not the republican party at all! GOP approval ratings plummet, practically out of contrast alone.

the government is assailed for 'socialized attention' - obama announces a plan to privatize certain forms of 'socialized self-medication'

* * *

socialized attention: cognitive-collectivism: everyone bears responsibility for getting everyone (else) to pay attention to the task at hand. 'it takes a village to pay attention to a child.' designing social security to address INSECURITY - which isn't the lack of security but the lack of confidence. of faith. weird how we make that turn.

we were supposed to be on jupiter but we're running behind schedule at the moment. on the other hand, the robots are evolving really slowly as well - by now shouldn't they be near-omnipotent beings murdering astronauts in space and carrying out detailed natural-language conversations? but we shouldn't hold that against ourselves. it's the robots' fault, i think. ultimately, what will start the human-robot war isn't that robots are superior, logical beings, but that they're INFERIOR creatures. built in our image.

we don't wish to believe that the problem is with our image. so the problem is with the goddamn robots! stupid bastards can't even get themselves together.

SO OBAMA ANNOUNCES ROBOT WELFARE. to bring the robots along in line with the Central Planning Committee's original plans for the robot race we'll have to provide them with equal opportunity. we need to close the achievement gap.

others - anti-robot reactionaries - argue that robots are coming along just fine, and we shouldn't give them any more power than they already have. the radical robo-pluralists point out that isolated cases don't indicate systemic change/advantage: "a computer winning at chess is like a black guy being good at basketball: no surprise. THAT'S WHAT THEY WERE BRED FOR."

adorable implicit racism there, right?

children's puppet shows advertising Timocil - TV programs designed to induce spastic attention-deficit symptoms so as to prompt ADD diagnosis and push people into the socialized attention program so beloved of the government. anti-pharma ranks suddenly swell with conservatives. cognitive dissonance leads to a spate of psychotic breaks among right-wingers previously supportive of big pharma.

SO WHAT IS THE 'TASK AT HAND'? what's obama rounding up the nation's *attention* for? what's the grand purpose?

he forgets to specify one.

that turns out to be a problem. now a nation built to fixate has nothing to concentrate on. robot welfare ends up giving jobs to robots despite perfectly suitable humans being available.

like three hundred adderall abusers at college deciding to clean their dorm rooms instead of write their papers, the u.s. is seized by a fit of extreme productivity but manages not to apply it to anything. ends up paying really, really close attention to whatever's on TV. of course because of the non-prime-time electricity-usage limitations, there's no TV during the day. literacy spikes, book sales soar. video game sales as well. dueling clubs with unreadably overwritten rules (typical adderall problem) start up in several cities. tv fansites see a huge rise in both average level of comprehension and dedication, and post length.

obama himself seems even more unruffled and calm compared to a nation of drug-addicted speed-TV freaks. he plays with the dog and with his daughters, has gentle, mutually-satisfying sex with his wife, and generally projects the look and attitude of a born leader and unflappable moral center.

GOP senators now faced a filibuster-proof majority so they threatened to stop showing up. obama magnanimously reached out: 'on a personal note, though my senate career was brief i have a great deal of respect for that body, and i hope that our republican colleagues in the senate will continue to take active part in the decision-making process, bringing new ideas and strong criticisms to the vital debates going on today.' harry reid pointed out that the senate could actually continue without the republican legislators even being present, so the GOP senators went away. FOR TWO MONTHS. the senate continued to make laws and so forth without the republicans. improbably, GOP JOB APPROVAL RATINGS SOARED.

Fox News found that it was unable to cover rapidly-changing current events without chemical assistance; as its commenter corps (hannity, beck, kristol) was largely drug-addicted already, this only caused small changes in corporate culture. news coverage by Timocil addicts was vastly more effective, it turns out, but only at first - within a month the entire staff had suffered psychotic breaks, never having learned how to work without extrinsic motivation and authority. turns out conservatives on ADD medication are a great danger to themselves and others, becoming even more rabid followers. focused the way orcs can be focused.

Seated at counter.

She's perched on a stool at the chest-high counter overlooking the main body of the store, straight brown ponytail rubberbanded between her shoulderblades, blue jeans slung low and white knit blouse pulled up by her clerical posture to reveal the tiniest layer of baby fat on her lower back, skin suntouched and fine peachfuzz hair. Never looking up from her work. Denim legs dangle unconsidered or once in a while feet tap. She leans close over the counter writing in pen, looks up. Some faces broadcast a posture or mood or judgment, others reflect an inner state as if accidentally, like someone left an open mic to pick up conversation among the panelists before the seminar starts. She gathers her possessions, sits up, stands easily - an athlete's steps maybe - and walks round the rail to the stairs leading up, the bathroom her destination presumably. Eyes wide, almost melancholy, her face pale, the barest hint of a wattle behind her chin. What do you know without knowing? Only yourself: you rush in as shadow to fill the space where a life's light should be. Or you are the light that obscures others' angles and crenellations, makes everything daytime, softens all being's edges...oversteps day's borders and so vanquishes its meaning. And then while you wonder about eliding her identity she's - just - gone.

Tabata.

To cycle in to tabata circuit:

situps
pushups
squats
pullups
jumprope
dumbbell bench presses flat on floor, legs up in crunch position
burpees
lateral lifts
squat/presses
shoulder rolls
decline pushups (yoga ball), move to press-ups (upside-down pushups)
running/sidestep laps, alternating directions
straight-arm dumbbell lifts from side to clap (chest exercise)
three-point headstands, handstands
lie on back, partner 'throws' legs, you lift (crushing abs exercise)
row

Eldritch MIT.

[Wrote this the other day. First, shaky, incomplete, rough, and altogether gleeful draft.]

Eldritch MIT

The Institvte has a long history of involvement in government programs, of course, and the government is still a major source of its funding. The noisy inrush of corporate money in the 1980's (centered on the Media Lab, at least - ha - in the media) earned the school negative publicity, but this was very much in MIT's interest - after all, the public would be a good deal less understanding about the school's spectrum of government-sponsored research initiatives. Indeed, military involvement in the school is the most run-of-the-mill form of government investment in MIT; less money has been spent in the Eldritch Science and Engineering program, but the impact of the program has been more far-reaching than that of even the splashiest military systems.

FOR INSTANCE: thought exists in the brain as electricity and passes through suspensions of complex, largely unknown media to affect physical matter. Human thoughts can of course be amplified and transmitted by normal electrical means, but it is well-known by eldritch scientists (and understood practically to the dismay of their counterparts in engineering) that eldritch media respond to qualities of thought understood discernible by few humans. Indeed it is speculated that the sense/translation capacity of eldritch media could enable a kind of eldritch computation, likely not directly adaptable to mundane human display/interface but able to characterize and untangle metaphysical (supernatural) systems and relations. Optimists in the field of eldritch studies project that a prototype eldritch computer could be functional inside of a decade. MIT scientists do know that other groups are dong similar experiments, though it's not known whether such progress has been made.

The difference between amplified and unamplified thought-signals, from the perspective of a medium of eldritch transmission, is analogous to the difference between a piercingly loud upper-register musical note and the burnished sound of a lower-register tone; if you can imagine remapping amplitude to frequency, think of eldritch matter and media as responding to chordal tuning rather than the content of a single neural signal. 'Second sight' has long been understood as a matter of 'seeing differently,' which noninitiates take to mean 'seeing more.' Again, this is to mistake volume for purity.

Devices to amplify and reconfigure eldritch stimuli are essentially mood organs, which alter the nature of thought, its contours, its musicality. Ritalin is a stimulant that speeds up the brain, syncs the rate of mental processing to the information throughput rate, and so enables deliberate thought - it slows down thought by speeding up the brain, and so focuses the user. Eldritch tuning is analogous to this cognitive reconfiguration; eldritch computation, when it arrives, will systematize the application of tuning methods to the human (and superhuman) brain.

ANOTHER EXAMPLE: One of the more controversial initiatives to come out of MIT's eldritch sciences program in the last decade recharacterizes lycanthropy not as a blood disease of a single organism but as heightened receptivity to an atmospheric transformation, which induces something like a bit flip in the organism - actually removing the human self from this plane and replacing it with another creature via a metaphysical conservation law. In this framework, vampirism can also be rethought as serving not the human host but an extraplanar entity for which the human 'vampire' is himself nothing more than a vessel - with blood serving not as food but as a kind of interdimensional lubricant. In these terms vampirism isn't a disease but an unwanted responsibility to an unwelcome third party. This links up the 'demonic soul' and 'bloodthirsty lost human' theories of vampirism - the vampire's loss of moral compass is a form of eldritch Stockholm Syndrome, eliding the barrier between the host (the human 'vampire') and the rapacious vampiric entity and giving rise to a hybrid creature. In line with normal principles of eldritch embodiment, this elision manifests physically (and simultaneously!) as unnaturally extended youth and physical decrepitude within the most convenient physical framework, i.e. the vampire's (former) physical appearance, bone structure, etc. Study of the 'mysteries of the universe' - supernatural laws in other words - makes certain modes of physical transformation available to the supplicant, whether she's a psychically-sensitive human or a vampiric host, of course. But vampires are known to have easier access to these methods of transmutation, and can indeed suffer induced lycanthropy under controlled, amplified conditions (one of the key findings of the MIT lycanthropy initiative, though the lycan/vampire relationship fell outside the project's original ambit).

ELDRITCH GEOGRAPHY OF MIT: The Institvte's location across the Charles River places it within Boston's paranormal penumbra, but certain physical features of the campus do increase its suitability for eldritch research. The steam tunnels that crisscross the campus are laid out such that certain weather patterns, particularly certain confluences of coastal climate and lunar phase, yield much greater than normal amounts of eldritch gusting and pooling; the concrete superstructure of the tunnels masks a substructure of rare ferromagnetic substances not fully characterized by mundane chemistry.

(Yet another case of 'no such thing as bad publicity': media attention to BU's supercollider plan for south Boston handily drew media focus from an MIT plan to expand its subterranean extent by 150% over ten years, largely at the behest of the only-unofficially-titled Dean for Eldritch Studies. The Mayor of Boston is a powerful man with a good deal of influence over local comings and goings; the Mayor of Cambridge has long served at the pleasure of MIT and its larger neighbour to the northwest Harvard University, de facto co-regents of Boston's younger, smaller sister city. Eldritch Harvard is a subject for another day; suffice it to say that Harvard's focus has always been on more traditional arcane studies - alchemy, astrology, invocation, necrography, necrohistory, diabolism, etc. - and its more traditional scholarly scholarly has much in common with that of the great Oxford/Cambridge magical societies, whose members tend to dislike the rationalist approach of MIT's eldritch research programs.)

The tallest buildings in Boston (the new Hancock Tower) and Cambridge (MIT's Green Building, geographic center of campus) were designed by world-famous MIT graduate (and secret eldritch adept) I.M. Pei, who customarily produced two separate sets of plans for each building. The public documents are available from the respective municipal planning offices, while the secret and of course more accurate plans are open only to MIT adepts. The proper plans for the Harvard Bridge are open only to Harvard's arcanists, though MIT engineers determined in the 1920's that the Bridge serves as a walkway for the dead among other things.

HACKING: MIT's hacking community has always straddled fields of mundane and eldritch inquiry, and the best-known MIT hacker signs (Jack Florey, Irving Q Mojo, J Arthur Random) unwittingly honour arcane adepts of the late 19th century. Jack Florey in particular is well-known to lovers of fairy tales, though in mundane tales he goes by a different surname. Abstract 'hacker signs' spotted throughout MIT have historically been attributed to old-time tunnel hackers; their true purpose is magical and their provenance dates back, in the strangest cases, to before the founding of MIT itself in Boston in the 1860's. Of course MIT's present-day main campus in Cambridge wasn't built and opened until 1916.

And yet there are the signs, clear as night.

('Nevertheless, it moves.' --Galileo)

Like all brainy college students, MIT undergrads hold on to fanciful numerological traditions - Random Hall's 17, Tep's 22, the Discordian fives at East Campus, various fraternity signs, etc. But the hidden numerology of the campus is a good deal more interesting, and largely unknown among students, except to the research apprentices who generally end up bound to the campus all their lives in some semi-official capacity. What do you think drove Stallman mad, for instance? Or drove Lebling and Blank to reimagine the Colossal Cave as the Great Underground Empire? Or prompted Marvin Minsky - a madman and former prodigy who could allegedly play complex piano pieces backward after a single listen - to imagine his emotion machine, his Artificial (emotional) Intelligence, which is nothing if not a cosmic mood organ, an Overmind embodied only in hypothetical computational devices beyond the capacity of silicon and electricity?

Do you imagine that the symmetry of MIT's campus is accidental, or worse - ornamental? And do you suppose that the school's tradition of numbering its buildings is really just a navigational aid, when studies have long shown that humans typically retain lexical schemata more readily than numeric? Do you suppose the main lobby of MIT is numbered twice-five for...convenience?

No, of course not. You would never be so naive. Nor would MIT's hackers, crafty engineers that they are. Even among mundane MIT students there's long been a suspicion, an imaginative motive, that part of the campus remains hidden. 'Zork' is of course an encoding of this fancy, as is the 1980's fiction of 'Miskatonic Institvte of Technology.' The truth - that part of the campus exists outside the visible realm - can compel student hackers but is unlikely to be revealed by them, though the astonishing incidence of mental illness and suicide among MIT students might reflect unwelcome, unfathomable knowledge as well as preexisting emotional instability or normal college jitters and self-selecting social maladaptation. The central artery for MIT foot traffic is, after all, a hallway called the Infinite Corridor; since the key fact about that hallway is its impressive but decidedly finite length, we can label its name a juvenile fancy, or credit it with identifying something true and yet unseen. 'Infinite,' for most (mundane) users of the word, may as well mean nothing more than 'Beyond the visible,' and we can suspect that MIT's famous Corridor - the aorta of a hallway-network larger than any but the Pentagon's - might indeed stretch beyond normal sight.

The twice-yearly phenomenon of MIThenge sheds light (ahem) on the Corridor's true nature - two days on which the sun shines directly down the Corridor, blinding and bright and utterly breathtaking. The same phenomenon occurs in New York City, which naturally has its own arcane tradition. Like the odd structure and layout of MIT's tunnel network, the idiosyncratic lineation of MIT's aboveground Corridor refers to something other than itself. Built during the twentieth century's first great mechanical horrorshow, the 1914 outbreak of 'world war' which would give us chemical and trench warfare, MIT's campus layout reflects a common urge to rationalize and reorder the world, to stave off dark fancy that feeds on itself and the minds that give in to it. But the school's layout exists in dimensions beyond the merely spatial. Its physical array has metaphysical uses - serving a salad with a tuning fork misses the device's use but no one's stopping you doing it, and whatever the Corridor's purpose, it's not upended or subverted by women and men merely walking through it.

It is speculated that a system of complex formulae relates MIT's layout nomenclature (even-numbered buildings east of the campus center, rough increases as buildings radiate outward, mirrored pairs across the N-S axis of campus, etc.) to the absolute locations of buildings and certain eldritch-geographic characteristics. Inquiry into these matters would be aided by consideration of the design and construction history of MIT's campus, particularly in the years just prior to 1916. (Was the campus designed during WWI? What effect would that cataclysm have had on an American architect?) Special attention should be paid, in the course of such study, to the list of scientists' names which ring the inner green court of campus, and the layout of text on the walls of Lobbies 10 and 7 (and 10+7=?). The line connecting transmitters/receivers atop the Green Building and the Hancock Building should also be considered, as - (un)naturally - should the experiments that utilize the complex scientific apparatus atop Building 54, which location has long carried a ten-times greater fine for trespassing than the standard $50 for MIT's other rooftops. The sensitivity of the rooftop equipment explains the hefty fine, but 'sensitivity' refers in this case not to atmospheric phenomena but to something far less well understood...

C'thulhu fhtagn.

I finally read 'The Call of Cthulhu,' Lovecraft's 1926 introduction of the great squidheaded dragon creature. I'd never read any Lovecraft before, but am interested in the new Trail of Cthulhu game (by Ken Hite, the best prose writer in games) and wanted to investigate the source.

I'm having trouble writing these sentences because of what that story just did to my mind. Not the story, actually - the writing. The structure is fantastic: the narrator tells about his uncle's interviews with a cop who narrates his interrogation of a cultist who relates a dark history, then pop back out to the narrator relating the deathbed ravings of a Norwegian ship captain...Lovecraft uses, at arguably a lower level of sophistication than his High Modernist contemporaries, wild narrative trickery for devious epistemological and imaginative purposes. Of course there are more adjectives and adverbs in there than anything this side of a junior high fantasist's diary entries, but when the narrator gets going and the cadence elevates, sentence structures begin inverting in a vile mockery of High speech - damn, it's just wonderful stuff. A great yarn. The end of the story is anticlimactic as it must be: a proper description of Cthulhu is either the longest string of adjectives in the history of English prose or (as it is here) an insistent looking-away from a horror which the narrator insists - ya gotta trust me on this one, no seriously, believe me - is just Too Awful To Speak Of. Which, in a story as fantastically verbose as this one, is a hell of a claim to make, and while Lovecraft's imagination was no doubt up to it, his rhetorical skills maybe weren't. Which isn't actually a strike against the man - no one else could describe Cthulhu either.

The architectural splendour and histrionic prose of 'Call of Cthulhu' invigorate me but the piece isn't particularly horrifying - with two exceptions, one of them subtler than the other. Lovecraft mentions the non-Euclidean geometry of R'lyeh a couple of times, but his descriptions of it are a mixed bag - the great door is a wondrous image, but the, um, obtuse angle that shoulda been acute is just silly. House of Leaves does that subject right. The curious bat-creatures in the Louisiana swamp, on the other hand, are a throwaway detail, which HPL leaves unresolved at story's end. The brief passage in which Old Castro insists that the Cult's killings were the work of something else is the most chilling in the whole story - if 'Call of Cthulhu' weren't so carefully, hysterically overwritten I'd call it tasteful restraint on Lovecraft's part.

Then again, Lovecraft's literary excesses are part of his appeal. On Hite's advice I'm reading 'The Colour Out of Space' next, maybe tonight, and I confess that I'm looking forward to it. More than anything I want to read his famed creepy-Massachusetts tales, of which 'The Colour' is allegedly the finest. Show me something close to home, HPL. In any case I'm excited to keep reading, one of the few feelings of pure pleasure available to me now in the same form in which I encountered it as a boy. Proof again of forces in the universe which outlast mere men, I guess.

Gladwell and Goliath and blah blah blah.

Got bored, read the latest from Malcolm 'in the middle' Gladwell: an unbearably laboured metaphor about David vs Goliath. He's waving at something interesting but not quite getting there. The idea is that as long as Goliath plays by Goliath's rules, he has to lose, because the game is built for Goliath. Gladwell doesn't take the poetic step, the spiritual one, because he can't, because he's a business writer instead of a cultural critic or poet: he ends with Goliath wondering whether he's really a giant, but the real lesson is that 'giant' is a made-up category, and it does not connote. It means only size, and entails certain abilities, but strengths and weaknesses are entirely context-dependent. They describe interactions, relationships. 'Giant' is about identity. When you think the game is one thing, a still-life, you cease to look at it truly, as a realm of interactions. As process, movement. Basic zen, of course, and also basic games theory.

Naturally Gladwell has an interest in keeping things low-key; that seems to be his temperament, but it's also one of his audience's major demands. So there's almost nothing to the article - just the straightforward observation that the only way to win the written game is usually not to play. Which is a teenage insight. 'Why don't people understand this simple thing?' he asks. Partly because he's describing, essentially, games - war, basketball, single combat. One-on-one contests. And of course his characterization of basketball is exactly as simplistic as his characterization of social networks, war, scientific research, university admissions, single combat...halfway-decent basketball teams are trained on how to beat the full-court press, and the energy of grown men flows quite differently from that of teenage girls; Gladwell's usual Tiny Little Bit of Insight doesn't even scale within the narrow domain he's discussing. Never mind that the purpose of basketball isn't, ultimately, to determine superiority - it's a symbol, a dance. He admits this in his piece, yet doesn't understand why it matters! And so his usual Big Central Metaphor is even more strained than usual, which is why the piece's language is so fucking amateurish and inelegant.

Gladwell's pop-psych tidbits and half-digested snippets of overheard math and social theory are as they've ever been: undeniably intelligent, unbearably self-satisfied, anything but courageous. He's an ad man, and bless him for taking his job seriously, but they're only ads - selling lifestyle poses and cocktail-party conversation-starters. Gimme a break.

Late: Eagleton on The God Delusion.

This is how you slaughter an intellectual out of his depth:

These are not just the views of an enraged atheist. They are the opinions of a readily identifiable kind of English middle-class liberal rationalist. Reading Dawkins, who occasionally writes as though ‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness’ is a mighty funny way to describe a Grecian urn, one can be reasonably certain that he would not be Europe’s greatest enthusiast for Foucault, psychoanalysis, agitprop, Dadaism, anarchism or separatist feminism. All of these phenomena, one imagines, would be as distasteful to his brisk, bloodless rationality as the virgin birth. Yet one can of course be an atheist and a fervent fan of them all. His God-hating, then, is by no means simply the view of a scientist admirably cleansed of prejudice. It belongs to a specific cultural context. One would not expect to muster many votes for either anarchism or the virgin birth in North Oxford.

[...]

It thus comes as no surprise that Dawkins turns out to be an old-fashioned Hegelian when it comes to global politics, believing in a zeitgeist (his own term) involving ever increasing progress, with just the occasional ‘reversal’. ‘The whole wave,’ he rhapsodises in the finest Whiggish manner, ‘keeps moving.’ There are, he generously concedes, ‘local and temporary setbacks’ like the present US government – as though that regime were an electoral aberration, rather than the harbinger of a drastic transformation of the world order that we will probably have to live with for as long as we can foresee. Dawkins, by contrast, believes, in his Herbert Spencerish way, that ‘the progressive trend is unmistakable and it will continue.’ So there we are, then: we have it from the mouth of Mr Public Science himself that aside from a few local, temporary hiccups like ecological disasters, famine, ethnic wars and nuclear wastelands, History is perpetually on the up.

Apart from the occasional perfunctory gesture to ‘sophisticated’ religious believers, Dawkins tends to see religion and fundamentalist religion as one and the same. This is not only grotesquely false; it is also a device to outflank any more reflective kind of faith by implying that it belongs to the coterie and not to the mass. The huge numbers of believers who hold something like the theology I outlined above can thus be conveniently lumped with rednecks who murder abortionists and malign homosexuals. As far as such outrages go, however, The God Delusion does a very fine job indeed. The two most deadly texts on the planet, apart perhaps from Donald Rumsfeld’s emails, are the Bible and the Koran; and Dawkins, as one the best of liberals as well as one of the worst, has done a magnificent job over the years of speaking out against that particular strain of psychopathology known as fundamentalism, whether Texan or Taliban. He is right to repudiate the brand of mealy-mouthed liberalism which believes that one has to respect other people’s silly or obnoxious ideas just because they are other people’s. In its admirably angry way, The God Delusion argues that the status of atheists in the US is nowadays about the same as that of gays fifty years ago. The book is full of vivid vignettes of the sheer horrors of religion, fundamentalist or otherwise. Nearly 50 per cent of Americans believe that a glorious Second Coming is imminent, and some of them are doing their damnedest to bring it about. But Dawkins could have told us all this without being so appallingly bitchy about those of his scientific colleagues who disagree with him, and without being so theologically illiterate. He might also have avoided being the second most frequently mentioned individual in his book – if you count God as an individual.

Eagleton got me through my first Literary Theory class in college, and remains one of the most entertaining Big Brains in the Big Talk. I think I'll read his new book at some point. Anyhow, there that is.

Scary.

Stephen Gammell scared me maybe more than any single person as a child.

He illustrated these.

I'm not the only one he's frightened.

The monsters who make their living off my nightmare-induced screams thank him for funding their retirements.

...a good way to hear God laugh.

I had difficulty going a few days without reading the Internet. I kept relaxing my standards: first nothing but CNN and email, then a quick look at political blogs I don't comment on, then glances at community sites (MeFi, Whedonesque), then over to blogs that irritate me without reading comment threads, then look-don't-comment in those same threads. I'm currently at the odd stage where I read comment threads, write responses, then don't post them.

What do the prolonged-adolescents say?

"SELF-DISCIPLINE: UR DOIN IT WRONG"

??

Keeping busy though. Writing short stories, revising things. What I posted the other day, about All-County Jazz Band, wastohavebeen an early section in an essay about the Grateful Dead. Here's a footnote from that essay, which I abandoned in tears:

[**] One important point of comparison between the Dead and Phish is that Phish's songs have way, way, way better arrangements than the Dead's. The Dead had mastered a form of back-porch Americana that Phish don't really attempt - indeed they often sounded like an unusually sympathetic group of musicians at a thrown-together jam session - but the Dead never did have an in-house composer of Trey Anastasio's technical competence and fearlessness. For many Phish fans the great feel-good tune is 'Fluffhead' - which is thirteen minutes of full-band written composition with a brief guitar outro, and invariably a concert highlight. There are longish Dead songs but none of them can approach the tightness of Anastasio's compositions.

Tears because my mindbrain broke a little and I wrote the following instead. Note that the original text uses italics, like all my shit, but they're lost in blockquoting. All of the mere world to learn to live with:

And then break. Right there. I'm home now. I was going to ride the Minuteman Trail with sunblock on my bald spot but once I took my shoes off at home there was no hope of going out. I was also going to be a great American novelist but once I took my shoes off...

There.

See? And now we're out of it and hurry across the lawn so as not to burn and into the other one.

Outside it sounds like an arboretum, or the Aviary at the local zoo (wherever your local zoo is, where are you from?). I hear, like, a million birds singing. It's quiet in the apartment but there's no silence, the birds never stop making those extraordinarily varied noises. I'm supposed to _____ this week. Two weekends before I _____. We have a _____ in Chicago. Pulling threads, slackening. The wine bottle we didn't finish on _____. My jaw is always tight, it aches all the time. When I manage to loosen it I yawn instantly. I didn't bring my glasses to the futon along with my laptop, so I can't look at the screen for too long without getting the first echoey drumbeats of a headache. My posture is so terrible! I'll surely grow up looking like _____. Or worse, a _____. How long the mood can carry over and seep into the weekend or early week when on a _____ evening you unexpectedly _____ and then can't sleep.

No music. No music.

The thing about the Grateful Dead is I don't care about the Grateful Dead. The thing about the future is I don't care about the future. Everything through a tissuey paper layer that resists when I push at it, a horror movie effect. Reading without my glasses gives me migraines. Well, but it doesn't - it used to. In high school physics class I got a pain behind my eye so piercing and unbearable I thought I was dying. I worried I had a tumor. (Have you noticed this affectation of mine where I used British spellings for words like 'colour' and 'favour'? I wrote 'tumor' and in my brain the disk skipped and I wasn't sure whether it was spelled right or what kind of person I was.)

The thing about me isn't that I don't care about me. Ha ha, but no, but thanks for saying it. I'm absolutely obsessed with me. Could I meditate for five hours straight? I think it's possible. Find a comfortable sitting position, close your eyes, hands flat on your thighs or knees, legs shoulder-width apart on the floor. Hee hee, I thought it was such a big deal when I mentioned to my psychotherapist that I never ever sit with both feet on the floor. I had no idea what it meant. Well, but if it means anything at all, I mean. (I don't have a writing style. I think I do but there's no coherence and my habits don't add up to anything.) My therapist had me meditate during the session. This was a year ago. I told him it felt great to sit with my feet flat on the floor, which is halfway true; it gave me a sore back but it felt good to think about. Like i was directly experiencing the metaphor and not, you know, the ground.

Or I just say that to play on the metaphor-about-metaphor? Well, you know how that goes. You, you, you! Charming. How I pretend you exist. (Sometimes I see Shervin's face when i write, sometimes my wife's, sometimes my dad's or brother's. Or an ex-girlfriend's. Depends on what I'm writing about. Journal entries I see my friend Krevice. Or Scott Kaufman, whom I've never actually seen. They always, all of them, look disappointed.)

It's 86 goddamn degrees outside.

The whole point here is: there's no music on. Just the birds. Me and listening and the very very small probability of an outbreak of peace.

Al Swearengen says 'Announcing your plans is a good way to hear God laugh,' and capitalizing the word 'god' I feel like I'm playacting. Trying to still be a little boy, but I feel the same way doing the other thing, so maybe the problem isn't with words.

It really was 86 degrees and I really didn't go out in it.