Wax Banks

I slagged off Ze Frank back in the day and I apologize.

I didn't get it, but I've finally gotten it, I get it; and though I don't care at all, his The Show has at times lifted me up, and there is much to be grateful for, there. The new 'A Show' has started well. I hope it goes somewhere new. Or just somewhere. I hope it works.

My dismissal of Frank was petty and I'm ashamed of it.

A Monster Calls (Patrick Ness, 2011).

I read this 'YA novel' in a single 90-minute gulp before bed last night. It's lovely and I very much enjoyed it (thanks Norah). I'll note, almost as an afterthought (I forget things like this), that the illustrations are a dark delight.

[SPOILERS FOLLOW for a story worth reading unspoiled.]

* * *

I feel churlish picking on Ness for this, but the climax is frustrating, and throws an uncomfortable light on the rest of the book. A Monster Calls is, after all, about a single mother dying, and her son Conor's complex ambivalence about her impending death -- he knows she won't survive her cancer and his dark secret is that he wants it to be over even so. In his recurring nightmare, his secret, (he thinks) he can save his mother from falling to her death, but he lets her go -- he lets her die. The climax of the book is Ness's rendering of Conor's nightmare, and his confession to the Monster that he wishes for the dying to end, for death to come.

But.

The words 'die' and 'death' don't appear in the book. The words 'It's not your fault' do, of course. This strikes me as an evasion, and a mistake.

Ness retreats from his (strong) rendering of Conor's limited perspective only to make speeches through the Monster, and that's a mistake too. What's missing from the book is a clear picture of what the other characters are going through; after all, that's the thing that no teenage reader is going to understand on his own, but it's the real story, even the cosmic one: Conor's isn't the only life here, but it's the only one Ness focuses on.

The story is divided between somewhat didactic (and in one instance weirdly tonally mismeasured) scenes at Conor's school, somewhat incomplete scenes with Conor's father and grandmother (a fascinating character who deserves, but doesn't get, a moment of revelation comparable to Conor's), and the Monster's evocative stories, which are the best part of the book. Indeed, the novel is a little stiff until the Monster tells his first tale; Ness takes obvious pleasure in the Monster's Entish voice, and the tales themselves are evocative and meaningfully ambivalent.

Each of the three tales contains more wisdom than the novel as a whole, I think -- if that's even possible.

After my own mother died I spent a long time -- years -- seeking comfort and withdrawing from the world, which is knowledge (which is experience). My 'healing process' was slowed by my own insistence, and various people's ready agreement, that it was in fact a discrete process, and that its focus was pain or suffering.

People die. Death isn't special. There's no one to blame; blame is a fiction. It's comfort.

What I needed, in order to 'heal,' was knowledge: to realize that I wasn't the center of the 'story,' that it had no center. My mom's death was pointless. Yours will be too.

Conor's grandmother buries her only daughter. Conor's dad isn't there for his ex-wife's death. These stories are as much a part of Conor's life as his own suffering.

Why do we comfort ourselves by fixating on our pain, when pain is part of something larger? Why are we quick to narrow our vision at those moments of deepest transformation?

I don't think my 'youth' was or is a good excuse for my selfishness.

* * *

These things I'm saying feel ugly even as I say them. Conor is a kid and his story is meant to provide solace for young people trying to understand the emptiness of death. But I can't help thinking that the truth of dying -- its physicality, its inevitability, its nothingness, how small a thing death is -- isn't a problem to be solved. It is the solution. The problem, I've come to believe, is that we make other people's deaths about us, and avoid the mounting evidence that nothing in the world is about us. Not even mom dying. Especially not that.

It seems to me that A Monster Calls is part of a true story, but by its partiality it implies something false. The stories it doesn't tell, the ones Ness skillfully alludes to in the Monster's tales and the grandmother's story but is unwilling, for some reason, to tell outright...those stories belong in this book too. I wish they were here.

Noticing; or, One form Seasonal Affective Disorder can take.

In winter I start to experience lust as always-already thwarted -- not by winter clothing (c'mon) but by my own inward-retreating lethargy or self-protectiveness or body shame or something. I don't look at women on the street in the same way as in spring.

I expect porn websites do brisk business in winter.

(I do gaze longingly at my wife in winter, of course, because I'm still stupid in love with her; and because my desire for my wife, this galaxy of needs, is a hell of lot more complex than the anyway-reductive notion of 'physical attraction.' But my lethargy and retreat and shame do bear directly on our relationship in other ways (see below).)

When the weather breaks I feel more confident, permit myself to look at other people with confidence, and my own confidence invests them with some new energy: I trust in (my perception of?) their beauty. Something like that. Maybe I just enjoy the pull. The force all living beings exert, myself included.

Cambridge is getting some stunningly nice weather at the moment. I'm reminded that a 'new look' for springtime isn't about your appearance, it's about literally looking anew at the human beings around you.

So this isn't actually about lust; lust is just an example of the feelings which I stop second-guessing when the sun comes out. One of the disorders I experience in winter is loss of trust. The sun returns, trust is restored, and I feel attractive -- attraction -- again. Gravity is symmetrical, duh.

One tiny Internet-era pleasure...

...is watching the semifamous dude who banned you from commenting on his blog descend into alternately childish and crazy bullshit in his comment threads -- and realizing that just because he decided you were the bad guy doesn't mean you were actually the bad guy.

Brilliant post, though. Absolutely brilliant. But what a miserable buffoon.

(No, not linking. Sorry.)

Kick, back to me.

Ever have that experience of listening to an album and realizing that you know the whole thing, all the way through, and have done so since you were eight years old or so? I'm having that experience right this instant with INXS's Kick, and being reminded in the process that the album is simultaneously (1) dead-simple and even 'unsophisticated,' and (2) basically a perfect pop album. I'd be a little embarrassed to play Kick right after Thriller or 1999 at a party, but that's just me and my anxieties, 'cause this is naked pleasure from first not to...

...oh my god 'Never Tear Us Apart' just came on, and since (notwithstanding the cheesiest sax solo ever recorded) we're close to the peak of Eighties pop here I'd better just stop typing and listen.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, radio series (LP reissue), by Douglas Adams et al.: a quick review and a general point.

I first read the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books in elementary school, on my friend Scott’s recommendation. I think he’d heard about the books from his older brother Sean; over the few years of our friendship I got a lot of my cultural learnin’ from Scott/Sean. (Good stuff too: Depeche Mode, Zork, Talisman, the Avalon Hill Civilization, Paul Simon’s Graceland, early Chili Peppers…)

Over the years I reread the first three volumes of the increasingly inaccurately named Guide trilogy many, many times. (I read So Long and Thanks for All the Fish only twice, and Mostly Harmless just once, though I imagine I’d think more of its daddy-anxiety material now.) I also listened many, many, many, manymanymany times to a cassette of the Restaurant radio series – or rather, its LP rerelease, which abbreviates the radio show’s second storyline into an hourlong, headlong Magrathea > Milliway’s > sunship > B-Ark story of unusual-for-Adams structural cleanliness and utterly-typical-for-Adams comic density. The LP rerelease is actually a brand-new performance by the cast, from a revised version of the original radio scripts.

The performance is better by far than the original, with much stronger production, and I heartily recommend it to any DNA fan. For aforementioned personal reasons I’ll always consider it the definitive Restaurant recording, though like any right-thinking person I dearly love Zaphod’s trip to the Frogstar and Marvin’s duel to the death with the battle tank at Guide HQ, and have read those sections of the Restaurant novel more times than I can count.

God I love these stories. God Gosh I miss Douglas Adams.

* * *

Anyhow I just want to make a quick point about the Hitchhiker’s Guide stories: the remarkable business of Adams’s fictional universe – its crowded urban vibe, the way Adams piles up incidental details through Guide entries and interpolated vignettes, always with a dead eye for his ongoing satirical project – invariably gives way, at peak narrative moments, to a powerful sparseness which not only serves his original narrative form (linked comic sketches for a handful of actors) but reflects Adams’s deeper concerns, which would find clearest expression in Last Chance to See.

Think of the moments of unexpected (but always totally earned) emotional seriousness and weight in the Guide trilogy: the songs of Krikkit, Ford’s look at the bartender near Arthur’s house, Marvin’s death, the factory floor on Magrathea, Ford and Arthur and the Scrabble pieces, Arthur and Fenchurch on the airplane’s wing, Arthur and Thor, Marvin’s hilariously sad monologue in the Milliway’s carpark (‘After that I went into a bit of a decline…’ is perfect), Zaphod on the Frogstar(!), and – of course – Zaphod, Trillian, and Zarniwoop visiting the man with the cat.

Almost without exception, they’re moments of stillness and isolation amidst a great deal of very effective background bustle. At these peak moments, the characters are afforded a sense of their own smallness, which less crushing than freeing – these are moments of taking responsibility. (The Total Perspective Vortex is a literalization of this two-sided revelation, though with Zaphod around you have to play for laffs, of course.) Indeed, one of the lovelier narrative arcs in the trilogy is Arthur’s slow journey from unhappy connectedness to melancholy contentment – learning to accept the immensity of the universe and his own essential aloneness in it. (By the end he’s done with all the other characters, isn’t he? Except Random, I suppose.)

The end of the Restaurant radio show has Ford and Arthur accepting, with characteristic good humour, the futility of trying to help prehistoric Earth’s cavemen: they’ve lost the evolutionary race, and humanity will evolve thereafter from the useless bloody loonies on the Golgafrincham B Ark, the telephone sanitizers and management executives and hairdressers and documentary filmmakers and insurance salesmen. The moderns. In one of the radio show’s deft little running gags, Ford relates a wild story (billiards this time); Arthur asks where he heard it, and Ford says it’s from the Guide. Arthur is totally underwhelmed. ‘Oh, that thing,’ I think he says. Nothing special. Just a travel book, after all, and the real human race is slowly, sadly wiped out all around them.

And Louis Armstrong sings ‘What a Wonderful World.’

Gets me every time. A moment of perfect love for all living things, turned sideways a bit, with a ‘comic’ story of planetary genocide nested within another ‘comic’ story of planetary genocide (and ecocide, per the colonists’ mad tree-burning deflationary fiscal policy), sung with a sigh rather than a belly laugh. Ultimately the Guide isn’t about hijinks in a crowded galaxy that’s a merciless riff on the awfulness of modern ‘civilized’ life – or not just that, anyway. Not really. Deep down it’s about escaping, not even into space, but into the feeling that space affords. The matter is distance, and smallness.

Our yellow sun is close enough, important enough, to beat down on us, to beam, to burn. A ball of angry light with no mystery to it. Other stars must be content to hide during the day and be (barely) visible only at night – and to us they seem like tiny pinpoints, formless. Kind of pathetic, really.

But they twinkle.

What a wonderful world.

Miss you Adams.

A moment for Sasha Laxton.

'Gender-neutral' parenting -- i.e. a posture and policy of nonintervention in a child's experiments with social roles -- is a reasonable practice, or set of practices; at the minimum it can serve as a counterweight to the pathological limitations on sex roles found in (American) adult society. I have no great problem with gender roles as such; insofar as they're social/cultural conventions which amplify sex-linked traits and behaviours, I feel I should act neutrally toward them too. And defend against any intrusion on what I see as best practices, of course -- even if I surrender in the end.

I have a replica WWII GI's map case in olive canvas with a stiff cardboard back; it's the most convenient shoulder bag I've ever had. I refer to it as my purse, and get the occasional strange look for doing so. But it's a pretty butch bag all the same. I take this as a very very very small example of acknowledging the usual boundaries, tweaking them a bit, and going about my business such that my own convenience and comfort are kept high, even if productivity remains at a minimum. I also acknowledge that I get a giggle out of calling it a purse -- but I also explain, more often than is necessary, the super-masculine origins of the bag. Perhaps this is overcompensation in two opposing directions: an unstable equilibrium. Well, I'm not perfect. You?

Sasha Laxton is a five-year-old male. His parents claim to have kept his sex secret for five years. Now he's entered school, and they've publicly revealed that 'he's a boy.'

Here's a picture. Here's a TIME story about some backlash. Here's a quote from Sasha's mother:

“Stereotypes seem fundamentally stupid. Why would you want to slot people into boxes?” Laxton told her local news outlet, Cambridge News. “It affects what they wear and what they can play with, and that shapes the kind of person that they become.”

I'm sure Laxton has done a lot of thinking about the nature of her/their experiment. I don't wish to engage in amateur psychology. And I do understand the progressive passion for replacement gender norms which are more just, or perhaps just differently unjust, than the ones we've got going today. So I want to point out two small things:

• This is not 'gender-free' or indeed 'gender-neutral' parenting. It is indeed explicitly interventionist in a ploddingly conventional way:

  Sasha dresses in clothes he likes -- be it a hand-me-downs from his sister or his brother. The big no-no's are hyper-masculine outfits like skull-print shirts and cargo pants. In one photo, sent to friends and family, Sasha's dressed in a shiny pink girl's swimsuit. "Children like sparkly things," says Beck. "And if someone thought Sasha was a girl because he was wearing a pink swimming costume, then what effect would that have?"

  Good idea, bad idea, doesn't matter: whatever her experiment was meant to accomplish in the beginning, she's cocked it up. Sasha knows what 'hyper-masculine' clothes are -- 'skull-print shirts and cargo pants.' Which of course 'affects what [he wears] and what [he] can play with, and that shapes the kind of person that [he becomes.' His parents -- by all press accounts his mom -- gave him a totally run-of-the-mill gender stereotype as a reference point and said YOU MAY NOT BE THAT. Good choice, bad choice, doesn't matter: now the kid thinks 'avoiding stereotypes' means not wearing traditional boys' clothing.

  The hypocrisy is important. The kid won't be five forever, and someday he'll learn about stereotypes and gender roles and the nature of sexual difference from someone other than his mom and dad. He'll still carry big lessons about the joy of not worrying whether you're doing what everyone else is -- but he'll also carry a lesson, bigger than it may seem at first, about choosing the right stereotypes to please the grownups who made him think he could choose freely...

• Look here:

  So is she hoping that dressing Sasha in pink will change anything? “Yes. If it just made one person think: ‘No, I won’t put that frilly dress on her because it’s a bit silly’ or: ‘Yeah, if he really likes that doll, then that’s OK,’ then that would be really brilliant.

  “All I want to do is make people think a bit.”

  And will she mind if Sasha grows up to be a butch rugby player or, indeed, a hairdresser?

  “I just want him to fulfil his potential, and I wouldn’t push him in any direction,” says Beck.

  “As long as he has good relationships and good friends, then nothing else matters, does it? What’s more important than being happy, and making other people happy? It’s all that matters.” [my emphasis --wa]

  Whatever sentiments Beck is trying to express, these quotes make me...uneasy, to say the very least. I hope you see why: the emphasis on (other) people 'think[ing] a bit,' the weird equation of not pushing a child with 'fulfilling his potential,' the silly idea that frilly dresses are themselves inherently silly -- like cargo pants and skull shirts, presumably, only Sasha seems to be encouraged to wear the dresses and forbidden from wearing the other stuff. (I'll note too that the not-so-faintly condescending tone of the interview just pisses me off.)

The interview isn't about Sasha, it's about Beck Laxton -- just as the furor over Amy Chua's frankly abusive parenting style (like her contemptibly self-serving bestselling account of it) was all about Amy Chua. Fine, fine, that's the media for you.

But consider: if Beck Laxton had taken any other approach to gender norms, and been this self-righteous about it, and given such incoherent justification to the press, and picked such weirdly specific issues to take a stand about ('ruched sleeves and scalloped collar?' seriously?), but not in the name of 'gender stereotypes' -- how would you receive the article? Would her politics be more interesting and important than, say, her hypocrisy?

That said: why is the media covering the story? Whose side are the news media always on?

Lost some steam here, sorry.

Collected worlds of...

[An excerpt from my current big project, whence came also the Sasquatch thing a while back. Dedicated respectfully to A.R.R.R.R. Roberts, an obvious Bilbo Baggins manqué, who bears no resemblance to anyone in this piece, my hand to God, except in terms of one coincidental isophony -- and Englishness, of course. Oh, oh, dude's got Englishness coming out his ass.]

* * *

Collected worlds (complete with scholarly annotations) of authors famed for what the donnish corpse with the tobacco pipe called ‘subcreation’: chief among them Dandrel’s horrible but influential Helion trilogy (Apogee, Perigee, Anapsis). God I spent so many hours wishing I could live there. The interstellar-travel-by-giant-solar-trampoline conceit was more or less the cognitive soundtrack to my ages 13–15. Play and dissipation. So much wanting to believe that swashes would in the spacegoing future still be buckled, planks (airlocks, probably) nervously walked (or the equivalent) by those richly deserving of such mistreatment – or heroes sure suuuuuure c’mon c’mon! to make it Outta This Scrape in one piece. Back then there was this growing idea that outer space was at once a solved problem, ready to fade from dream to waking like a Christmas present turned out to be socks, and an increasingly distant/inaccessible bureaucratic zone, cowboys being replaced by factory farms, except the cowboys were never actually real, not in my lifetime anyhow. Machines all the way down. Nah. That tentative/reckless phase of early space exploration was done by the time I popped out. Or in, I guess.

So in order to get at the shared pre-Sputnik awe and aspiration of limitless space, indeed the recognition or belief that a place could still somewhere exist which was limitlessness itself, a dark principle, well ironically enough you had to turn back the clock a little. Big-time thing with kids all throughout history, probably: realizing first that time passes, then finding a way to escape into a new present which was the past’s future, today what shouldabeen. You dreamed of being an astronaut, but always as somebody’s angry libertarian writer grandpa had imagined it: the spacesuits less marshmallow, more race car; rocket ships like big sleek motorcycles, or just nuclear-powered flying cocks pretty much (because of course that – the implied parallel term, ahem – was the other forbidding limitless void to focus on, back then, after you’d learned that babies come from there but before you really internalized that holy shit babies really actually come from there; and maybe that’s the moment Cthulhu awakens?); laser guns actual guns, instead of…

Come to think of it, that was the worst part. The further along time went, the harder it was to convince ourselves that we’d be able to defend against whatever Inevitable Menace might rear up out of the frigid wastes to, not eat us probably, but digest, or cognitively-scramble, madden, suffocate, poison, freeze, unmake us…the way grief manifested in those days was I was never going to geta laser gun because by that point it’d be utterly pointless. You didn’t need one to deal with your fellow man, and even low-slung hip-holstered laser pistols (such as F.R. Dandrel’s interplanetary gunslinger Tubby Crozan might wear) would be no match for bacteria that turned flesh to slime, or movies so entertaining that to look at them was to will yourself suddenly toward death by consumption (by consuming – just looking into the staticky whatever it was supposed to be, forever). Fuck grownup literature. And fuck the Department of the Galactic Interior or whatever for spending all its astronaut time making minute adjustments to the lenses of telescopes, as if slightly clearer pictures of nebulae were some kind of substitute for the immensity, impersonality, the divinity of the frontier. It was UN-AMERICAN.

Tubby Crozan comes in for it hard in the footnotes, is one of the additional childhood-beshittenings awaiting the grownup SF fan here. The greatest of all mechanical-engineers–9th-class-turned-pistol-packing-mercenaries, the first man to make a solar trampoline jump in just a suit (not even a ship! the unmitigated gall, the titanic fucking balls on that guy!)…and all editor Avram U.N. Robers wants to talk about is ‘Crozan, a too-obvious Heinlein manqué, comes close at times but never quite breaks with the dreary juvenile misogyny of his author, not to mention his thinly-veiled SFnal homage-referent; the lasting popularity of the Helion cycle is testament to the guilelessness and vivacity of Dandrel’s prose and his just-left-of-the-familiar plotting rather than any psychological insight. Like C.S. Leavis’s Hornea books, Dandrel’s novels grow more difficult to like as their readers grow older; though perhaps – like reactionary family members sinking into familiar, almost comforting gesture, thereby losing their power to wound – for the very same reason they grow easier to love.’

Robers won an award for the annotated edition, not a big deal award but enough to feel good about being, at death’s door, a SF scholar of all things; and it’s hard to separate gratitude for his hard, revelatory biographical work (Dandrel collected butterflies but refused to kill them, adding them to his library only after they’d died natural deaths in captivity?!) from frustration at the characteristically British is-it-really-ironic-after-all-these-centuries snippy melancholy which pervades his scholarly work. Robers (an obvious Franklin C. Kitzis manqué if you must know) deserves his reputation, though perhaps we can with a wink-n-nudge admit to one another, right here and now, that that’s not meant solely as a compliment. Fa!

…

Oh, shit. Damn. That felt good. I can’t tell you how much I hate Frank Kitzis. And no, it’s not because he dated one of my grad school professors for a while and was cheating on her either before, during, or after the worst of all time guest lecture he gave in our SF-and-feminism class, which I think he actually had the stones to call ‘Criminal, Liminal, Subliminal: something something something Rosetti something something rape.’ I liked that class well enough for most of its run, but maybe it’s testament to every thinking human being’s overall feelings about grad school in the humanities – so long, fuckers – that that really is all I can remember of the talk’s title. And nothing whatsoever of the content. Kitzis had fashion hair, you know? The kind you’re supposed to look at and maybe notice without recognizing outwardly that you’re noticing it, like Wow that guy’s got Cool hair, it’s just messy, but then it’s only hours later you’re supposed to realize that he must’ve spent ten minutes and five dollars in product (people just call it ‘product’ now) to get his hair into that ‘artful’ dishevelment, only my curse – talk about First World Problems so to speak! – is that I always notice the time/’product’ costs of hairstyles right in the moment. Right there in that instant. Or like how someone’s courier bag is brand new but he’s walking around like he’s King Hardcore Biker of Bikerville, complete with the clip-in shoes and everything, but also brand-new sunglasses that he takes off super carefully because while he wants you to think he doesn’t care about the money, He cares. About. The Money. Wouldn’t you? That’s why they call it money.

Or how all the pronouns are ‘he’ and all the metaphors are balls this and stones that, and there’s some racism maybe, plus weird nationalism? And who actually thinks it’s awesome that spaceships look like dicks? I notice that stuff too. But since they severed my corpus callosum in the course of an otherwise routine cranial probe, prefatory to my first Saturn trip (boooooooring!), even when I see my worst impulses as if secondhand, even in moments of what pre-AI cultures called ‘self-awareness,’ I’m powerless to prevent such heedless action.

And you know what?

‘I’m a man,’ Crozan said, and aimed the laser blaster at Freia’s heart. ‘You’re a monster,’ she replied. Her eyes were defiant but she shrank back. Crozan laughed then. ‘A distinction without a difference, Your Highness.’ He pulled the trigger, and as warm blood splashed his handsome face – her blood, his lover’s blood, royal blood – he found that he could not stop laughing. He laughed and laughed, and in his triumph he grew larger, and darker, and more joyful…

I’m a monster.

Snobbery.

[Wrote this a while back. Deleted names and links; the post's point isn't ultimately about the specific writer in question.]

A fella whose best writing I continue to greatly value reviews a gamebook:

I'll admit that I was quite prepared to dislike [this book]. Being a big fan of Westerns, I tend to be more than a little snobby about the way the genre is so often misused and caricatured, especially in crossovers with other genres. And while a post-apocalyptic setting is a very good fit for Western themes and esthetics, I was nevertheless apprehensive. I've seen too many poorly executed Western-influenced creations not to assume the worst.

(My emphasis.)

I see and SAY this kind of bullshit all the time, and it deserves to be called out. This is childish nonsense and he should be embarrassed by it.

Snobbery about Westerns has nothing whatsoever to do with Westerns. It happens because you are (or in this case, because the writer is) a snob.

This stance is willfully ignorant because he cares about the 'correct' way of doing a genre, and anyone with a basic understanding of how literary genre works knows that this brand of ignorance springs from private anxieties rather than the text-system itself, but he's smart enough and educated enough to know that -- to know better;

It's self-regarding, because he spends breath preemptively defending what is a totally personal, idiosyncratic, indeed possessive feeling about 'Westerns,' which is a matter of ego rather than critical analysis;

Reactionary because he's railed time and time again about 'revisionist' understanding of 'classic' texts -- his particular hobbyhorse is interpretive deviation from the letter and spirit of the original Dungeons & Dragons rules and, weirdly, Gary Gygax's private intentions -- and because, in this particular case, he's also an unabashed cultural reactionary, expressing next to nothing but contempt for 'new-fangled' cultural texts. (re: Westerns, he is particularly bothered by Firefly -- you can probably guess why.) Preserving the past for the future is not the same thing as fetishizing pastness.

Throw in some acute status-consciousness -- he was a young nerd apparently raised, if his religious callouts and bits of churchly Latin are any indication, in a hierarchical cultural environment -- and you've got some pretty conventional snobbery in a man old enough to know better.

Millions of people enjoy Westerns without feeling the need to apply private criteria to determine whether they're WESTERN ENOUGH. These people have a healthy relationship to the pleasure of viewing/reading these stories, even if they persist in ignorance about the history and source texts of the genre. Ignorance isn't much of a sin. Willful ignorance is.

I'm a snob about plenty of things, and I HATE IT. It is a failing to be addressed -- to grow out of.

One of the many differences between him and me is that I don't try to pass off my snobbery as an inevitable result of really really caring about things. It's pure ego, I know just enough to know it (arguably nothing more!), and I wish to be able to overcome that adolescent insecurity. If you go into a reading/viewing experience expecting -- i.e. WANTING -- to hate it, in order that your prejudices will be confirmed, you and you alone have fucked yourself up.

This writer isn't an idiot -- quite the contrary, he's a damned fine writer when he surpasses himself. But snobbery is a problem, maybe one of his biggest problems as a critic, and it saddens me (and pisses me off) to see it. His fans and regular readers don't mind, of course -- and that's an even bigger problem, which presumably no one needs me to explain.

Oh Sunday.

Pain of the past in its pastness. Today I'm thinking about...I don't know what. Nothing really. In the car with Feliks sleeping in the backseat and inside the apartment (a few feet away) Agi and the organizer lady, Erin, just a couple years out of college, are getting the place ready for deleading. I miss my parents. My mom is nine years dead. My dad is old, alive, warm, slowing down, far away, a good man I've never known quite how to emulate. He feels in a language I don't know. Mystery to me since I was young though I've long known I was meant (meant!) to come up like him, good and strong and sure. A straight-backed man bent only by time and care. He hasn't lied or wormed his way around, ever. Nothing to hide. He is a good man and I worry that we've never understood each other; or not worry: I mourn. Early to be mourning. He is a living man and good and true, wants nothing but love for his sons. But I fall into the solecism -- or I mean solipsism, I guess -- of mourning.

Meanwhile we're all sick. I feel old. But small and young -- old, I mean, before my time, unearned. Which is to say weak. I mean I'm sorry I've never undertaken to make myself into the strong straightforward man I was to have been. Wheels spinning against inner wheels. I have to go indirect to get to things. To what I think I want (am 'meant') to say.

I got a fine education but I suppose it's done now, in the formal sense. Though learning continues thank god. My brother asked me, back in middle school or high school, to exchange books with him. I suggested 'Dune' and he gave me 'A Tale of Two Cities.' More than 15 years ago. And I never did read it. Never did read a single word of Dickens in my whole life.

All the ways I've hidden from my family. Meeting them always far less than halfway.

Hitchens died at the Anderson center in Houston. My mom went there for examinations when she first found out -- was finding out? was living with the discovery that? -- she had cancer. Today we go to a bed & breakfast up the street where we'll stay for a few days. Then to see my in-laws near Denver. The apartment will be full of poison dust for a few days. I wrote maybe 47,000 words worth of a new manuscript in November. I had to stop writing just before the 30th, and haven't taken it up since.

I'm never able to talk about my family, or death, or my friends, or even just time's passage, without talking too about writing.

It is not my job, I realize. It's how I think. Wasn't always but there you have it.

I don't know what I did before I wrote.

I might have a job for spring semester after all. Then we'll be able to afford day care for Feliks. I'm unusually well-suited to this job and would be happy to have it. All the more reason for things not to work out: I haven't earned that kind of happiness, have I? It's a 'writing job': actually, I'd be teaching writing to bright technically-minded college students. Almost a dream.

I am preoccupied with the people I've been.

I never say 'men.'

Well what sort of man am I. Sitting here in the car sickly, my boy is sleeping in the backseat. I don't know that I respect myself. I used to piss in the kitchen sink so as not to wake our son walking up the stairs. After a while it stopped being a problem -- walking noise I mean -- but I took a while longer to stop pissing in the sink. I'd gotten used to it. So much easier than going all the way to the bathroom upstairs. Now we live in a one-story apartment and the floor outside the bedroom is squeaky all over again, but I've unlearned my shortcut. I thought of it as generous. But I walk on by him now and feel civilized pissing in the toilet. I didn't used to think of it as any big thing. Maybe that's a small win. For me, I guess? Or Western civilization?

I quite like it, you know. The West. Absolutely devastating to authentic self-knowledge, but it's alright.

This week my brother finally disposed of a gigantic sombrero he bought in Texas. He took a long train trip with my mom. I was in college, or maybe grad school. Perhaps they were going to the Anderson center even then. Maybe she was given a schedule at that time, pertaining to the order in which her internal organs would be crippled and destroyed by cancer. First your DNA turns against you, as I understand it, babbling in a new language, mutated -- apoptosis undone too -- so that the logomaniacal babble can no longer be stopped even by death; and your immortal cells band together and grow into a tight-knit community which eats you. Maybe they put the schedule on a nicely-formatted spreadsheet for my mom to peruse while she died by degrees. Your colon, charmingly, to begin; and later on your lungs. Quiet your beautiful voice and steal your cultured appetite. All your learning. No sleep and no rest. Forget how to read. Here is a sombrero for your boy to wear at the train station while carrying all the suitcases. He looks so small surrounded by those bags and you will die long before your time.

Your eldest son will not watch every moment of your collapse and disintegration because he will be 'living it up' in Boston. Too far to quickly drive. Please do not again ask what he plans to do with his graduate degree in video games. He will later fly home on a 'bereavement fare,' though, saving a substantial amount of money on that one-way plane ticket. The world revolves around a dying star. He isn't thrifty but he's not the fool he seems. He'll know he's failed.

If I could only tell you how much I hate myself for not being part of my mom's last years on earth, for not working to preserve and restore and join our shared family body. If I could quiet down long enough to breathe in simple facts like All Things Pass.

The first time I meditated I nearly cried at the realization that I wasn't alone in the office building where I sat. Think of that so tiny thing. That it could mean so much to a man. Not to be alone in a city of millions!

I could be a better friend to my brother. Really I could. We disagree on so much. I told him to 'piss off' two days ago on the phone and he hung up on me. No talking since.

I guess I'm saying this to him. Hello Come back. Or to her, I guess. Come back hello I love you in spite of myself.

Phish 11/21/97, Hampton VA.

I’m an unapologetic Fall ’97 booster, fanboy, partisan, evangelist, and myopic egotist – i.e. I insist that Fall ’97 is the best of all Phish tours, partly because it’s my favourite…though I also insist that it’s my favourite because it’s the best (see above re: ‘myopia’ and ‘egotism’).

But some things are worth going crazy over.

(The following is occasioned, of course, by the long-awaited official SBD release of November 21 to 23, 1997.)

The fandom responded ecstatically to the tour at the time, as you’d expect; among other things it represented a sea change in how the band approached show structure (never mind the pornographic music itself) – some folks were convinced that ‘there [were] no first sets anymore,’ and given that this show kicks off with a 20-minute funk workout, it’s easy to see why. Time has been kind to the tour as well. With the benefit of hindsight we can see how Fall ’97 began a darkly generative period for the band (their imaginative freedom nightblooming even as their technical command and professionalism began to falter amidst a rapidly decaying backstage/fan scene), while representing a historic peak of possibility and intensity. With only a couple of exceptions, the band was just absolutely there every single night, taking song after song to deep dangerous places.

It was a good time to be a Phish fan.

The best jams of 2011 – R’n’R at the Gorge, the Tahoe Light, the brilliant ‘elements’ set at UIC – seemed to draw some of the same dark energy that powered Phish’s late 90s music: layered textures, intricate polyrhythms, effortless group interplay, soaring ambient passages, guitars put to unholy new uses, keyboards much abused, drums caressed and then shattered. Above all, the music flows now almost as it did then, with extraordinary patience and organic inevitability.

But what’s missing from Phish 2011 is the black ice that became their premillennial music’s center: cool austerity of early ‘cow funk,’ anxious chaotic ‘space jams,’ the scary quality it had. (Hear the way Izabella comes roaring out of 12/6/97’s fog like an angry undead stowaway, or the teeth-gnashing mania of the Hartford Char0 > 2001. A lotta Hendrix in the air, then.)

For all the expansiveness and ambition of the band’s Fall ’97 work, the tour feels All of a Piece; it all belongs together, the maniacal Hampton/Winston-Salem stuff and the knives-in-blacklight Worcester jamming and the retro-dufus-turned-pornstar goodtimes in Dayton and the astral lullabies in Utah and, and, and oh those sorcerous goings-on and splashings-crashward in Auburn Hills (cloudpiercing peak of a deepwater volcanic island). The same can’t so much be said of the new music; ironically, as the band’s palette has grown to include more lived-in sounds (and whatever eerily the goddamn ‘storage shed’ jamming is, when it eerily ever is), they’ve lost the glasseyed focus of back-in-the-day. They might sound like any number of great bands these days, even Zeppelin a bit when the moon’s right, but there was something harrowing and deeply pleasurable about knowing (walking into a familiar room, strangers at close quarters in the dark) that the approach was gonna be, ready set go, THE METERS AND PINK FLOYD ARE TRAPPED TOGETHER FOREVER ON A DERELICT SPACESHIP ALL ECHOES AND GHOSTS AND ALONE AND THEY ARE SAVED FROM COLD DEATH ONLY BY THE WEIRD COSMIC FAVOUR OF PLUNGING SLOWLY INTO AN OCTARINE SUN, GAINING SPEED, FALLING, HOLD ON…

To the matter at hand.

Emotional Rescue isn’t a great choice of cover beyond its novelty/comedy value – the jokey falsetto and sparse texture wear thin some time before the jam starts – and the jam does feel like a show-opening warmup, which of course it is. But 17 minutes of shambolic Phish funk (climaxing in a transitional few minutes of lovely dark ambience) is a fine easygoing thing, regardless. And it leads into a very nice Split, for which we supplicants are naturally thankful.

Et cetera et cetera, and Caspian (a tune tailor-made for smoky indoor-venue AUDs, by the way) is a strange but appropriate choice for a first set closer: excellent version here, particularly Trey’s digital-delay offering to Hades in lieu of those closing rock chords from the album, which…

1. fondly recalls the beloved 12/31/95 Mike’s, and…
2. helpfully signals to the crowd that we are setting our course for darker night in Set II.

The show’s back half kicks off seven consecutive must-hear sets (next breather: 11/28 I). During Ghost the players bail on that song’s basic funk patterns in favour of a haunting spare passage typical of Fall ’97: minimalist assembly, assured group rhythm work, and a patient crescendo and sighing wavebreak into a wry, spry midtempo jog at the outro. 1997 is THE year for Ghost, but this performance trades its standard snap/pop/wah funk for something moodier and more meaningful.

Then yeah, a true segue arrow before AC/DC Bag, and get ready for this Bag. Less decisive and authoritative than the canonical 12/30/97 version, but also less linear, the 11/21 Bag takes a few minutes for somewhat clumsy I-IV thrashing (a climax too early, it seems) before settling into a deadly take on the introductory PYITE groove. Fishman slides over to the ride cymbal, Page leaps onto piano, Trey sprinkles some space-jam fairy dust over everyone, and suddenly we’re working a slightly ambivalent variation on that I-IV, posing as Triumph while whispering Collapse, Dissolve…and after a twinkling ambient passage, we return to ambivalence: minor-melancholy rock clatter and swerve, Page’s piano diagonals zagging at everyone else’s zig, or I guess vice versa. 25 minutes of top-shelf Phish, and another true segue into Slave.

Slave, as you’d expect after the foregoing 50 minutes of music, is devastating. Well, it’s a 1997 Slave; the mycological languour of late–90s Phish was well suited to tunes like this one.

More Stones to close, of course. They’ve always killed on Loving Cup. And is there a better, more coherent long-form composition in Phish’s catalogue than Guyute? Pure prog mayhem in the encore. Nice.

…

11/22 gets the press, 11/23 gets the ‘underrated masterpiece’ tag, and of these now-forever-conjoined triplets, 11/21 is the li’l sibling with – hey whaddaya know – some earth-shaking powers of its own. I think you can pass on this first set without feeling TOO bad, if you really don’t think you can spare that hour of your life, but that’s a swell half-hour you’re missing at the opener, and a ringading Caspian to close. The second set, meanwhile, is as good as Fall 1997’s usual, which is to say it’s a solid hour of deadly focused improvisation, favouring eventide melancholy and dissolution, crescendi desperately imploding or exhausting themselves in gouts of terminal noise, minimalist funk with a mischievous dancing step and slow poison on its blade, visible in the right kind of dark…

Ego-costumes aside, in the end it doesn’t matter whether Fall ’97 is the ‘best’ Phish tour. (One hopes the best is yet to come, right? What kind of person doesn’t hold that hope, or pretends not to?) Those are fun arguments to have, but it’s all just circles around imaginary selves, signs that read No Trespass: there’s no place for borders like those when the music begins. I’ll say instead, quite confidently, that on these nights 14 years ago, Phish reached the windblown jagged top of one peak, bringing thousands along with them; several other peaks would follow, as several had come before, but this one had a Weird light, and everyone why got up there saw something extraordinary. And would you believe it: it’s still there. Might I recommend heading up alone some night. Go on: follow the strange glow that won’t fade. The dark will keep you warm.

A few words about writer-me.

My name is Wally. I generally post online as Wax Banks. It is a college nickname.

I am 32 years old. I live in Cambridge. I have been married for three+ years.

My full-time job is taking care of our son. He is a toddler.

Prior to shifting to full-time parenthood, I was a writer, editor, and occasional teacher and tutor.

I write. Many of my developed skills are writing-related. Since I finished graduate school I have produced a very large, very scattered body of work, which I sometimes forget to think of as 'work.' But it is that, and I am proud of some of the products and much of the process.

I have written essays, short stories, novels, screenplays, novel-length mock self-help books, monstrous collections of intertwined short fictions, and of course 'blog posts' - the latter a category large enough to encompass almost all the others, though I usually stick to essayish bits here.

When I have been able to commit myself to it I have preferred to spend all day writing, but that is of course impossible at present. I have been partly successful at overcoming my resentments about enormous changes that parenthood has made in my life. Being a father is the best, the happiest, the hardest thing I have ever done, and the joy it brings me far outweighs the frustration I feel at not being able to focus on writing.

Though I have not been paid for writing or editing since last year, I still tend to think of myself as 'writing for a living,' and I hope to return to making money with my work in the near future.

I am a father, a husband, and a writer, in that order. I am happy with this state of things; it is a conversation.

tavern note (the other day).

the bartender here is a hipster with two blonde pippi-longstocking pigtails. yay? the female employees here are refreshing real - zaftig, a little unkempt, with normal-sized everything and none of the obtrusive done-up magazine sexuality of, say, the affectless mannequins who work at Whiskey's.

wow. a woman just gave me That Look. wow. i confess to being surprised and gladdened. cute too. and she was leaving with two jocks. i win, i guess.

oh, but an elderly man just looked at me the same way. do i have something on my face?

The Empress.

This one gets autobiographical, a bit. * * *

Part of a sequence of four portraits of earthly authority (priestess/empress/emperor/hierophant), the Empress sits in a field of golden stalks in a flower-print robe on a pillowed settee, a flowing stream behind. Clad in white upon red velvet, ready for the alchemical wedding with the red-robed white-bearded Emperor. She's even got a heart-shaped stone bearing the symbol of Venus, for heaven's sake. Any rube can read this one: fertility, sensuality, feminine languor, all that jazz.

The Waite-Smith deck has her slender and fair, crowned with stars (her tiara overgrown too with flowering plants?). Along with the Emperor she forms the inner, secular pair of the four-card portrait run, both of them trumped by the Pope/Hierophant. So far so canonically early-20C mythohistorical.

* * *

Modern renderings often take the fertility symbolism further along toward literalism, by necessity - the average city-dwelling tarot reader/querent probably hasn't set foot in a wheat field in years, never mind mulled over the seasonal/menstrual symbolic parallel. So you get pregnant Goddess types with flowing hair and garlands of flowers, or nursing mothers looking out of the card with bizarrely come-hither looks. ('Baby' translates directly to 'control' in microcultures where motherhood is the only way to get male respect on female terms.)

Aleister Crowley's Book of Thoth, meanwhile, glosses Frieda Harris's gorgeous watercolour art like this:

With regard to the Pelican, its full symbolism is only available to Initiates of the Fifth degree of the O.T.O. In general terms, the meaning may be suggested by identifying the Pelican herself with the Great Mother and her offspring, with the Daughter in the formula of Tetragrammaton. It is because the daughter is the daughter of her mother that she can be raised to her throne. In other language, there is a continuity of life, an inheritance of blood, which binds all forms of Nature together. There is no break between light and darkness. Natura non facit saltum. If these considerations were fully understood, it would become possible to reconcile the Quantum theory with the Electro-magnetic equations.

There are many, many, many ways in which I want to be nothing at all like Aleister Crowley. But when he gets going, prosewise, no one can touch him. The archetypal occultist, in some ways, trading his sense for visionary poetry, then whirling his way back through ironic self-awareness to something mirroring sense, darkened and distorted.

Anyhow the Book of Thoth is a load of bollocks, but what a read. Alas, no one's putting out new work in Crowley's mode anymore. The language of Tarot-interpretation (and -extrapolation or -narrativization) is, like most 'spiritual' writing, more straightforwardly autobiographical now; 'psychology' has been absorbed into our pop-thought idioms while the various esoteric/mystical traditions have been passively, and in some cases actively, put aside. There are plenty of Magical Thinking brotherhoods - ever been to a political convention, or hung out with hardcore sports fans? - but the fetish for systematization and taxonomy, for encyclopedic knowledge-gathering and -correlation, has largely passed.

You can have the Book of Thoth or Google, but not both. Even if Google just links you to the monomaniacs, the Browsing and Delving urges are distinct - i.e. you can only take pleasure-as-an-end from one of those activities at a time, I think, and if Google is always everywhere, well...

Part of the appeal of the Waite-Smith deck, for me, is the lovely simplicity of the art. The faces resemble those of standard-deck court cards, the proportions straight out of classical statuary, the colours unnaturally simple. (Some say 'garish'; I say 'faintly otherworldly,' and recall a certain lyric about 'the sky was yellow / and the sun was blue'...) Other decks have more technically accomplished art, to be sure, but tarot artists seem to be unusually prone to zealous overreach; there's a lot of stuff in the average tarot card. This is a well-intentioned pain, the idea being to give the reader lots of material to work with, but the end result being visual clutter, which affects the experience directly at its point of initiation.

Rule one of visual art: get the visuals right!

I actually prefer Smith's pip cards (non-trumps), which tend to be more austere and less worked-over, to her beautiful but comparatively busy Major Arcana. The 'mood' of the Waite-Smith deck speaks to me.

Oh, I just remembered why.

* * *

I bought my Waite-Smith deck at a store called 'Bell Book and Candle' in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1993 or so, hanging out one afternoon with an unbearably beautiful girl whom I'd met at the National Spelling Bee. (Many nice friendship stories begin this way, with a great beauty and a Caribbean island and the Spelling Bee, but in the history of mankind not a single sexy story has included the words 'Spelling Bee.')

I recognized the bell/book/candle symbolism from one of the Zork games. I never did get the hang of tarot reading. It didn't accomplish anything for me so I put the deck aside, lost the book I'd bought with it, and only pulled the cards out again in 2003, while teaching at Tufts. I'd discovered the brilliant tarot-themed 1987 puzzle game, The Fool's Errand, whose villain (I'm reminded) was the High Priestess. There was something about the image of a happy-go-lucky rube wandering alone in a world of strange but solvable puzzles that appealed to me. Go figure.

I went for the cards again a few years later, after picking up a copy of the startling, darkly inspiring urban-fantastic Deviant Moon deck as writerly inspiration. I preferred the Deviant Moon deck to the Waite-Smith, as a visual art object, but the old deck still struck me as complete in a sense. You might describe the difference this way: the Deviant Moon deck, brilliant as it is, looks like a concerted attempt to capture a coherent aesthetic, a little steampunkish, dark, surreal, co-opting Odd(tm) imagery (like old headstones and asylum chimneys).

The Waite-Smith deck looks like someone's travel notebook of another universe, complete unto itself, not even Strange on its own terms...and haunted. Melancholy. Quiet.

That quiet always sang to me; I realized recently that I stayed away from the cards not because they were boring, but because their seeming inactivity was precisely what unnerved me about them. An eldritch quality - like British medieval folksongs about frolicking on the heath, which turn out to be about the Black Death.

Pastoral disquiet. That's it.

* * *

The Waite-Smith Empress isn't disquieting though. She just looks bored. Because the Major Arcana don't erupt into magical oddity and celestial glory until about the halfway point, the Empress just has to sit there are symbolize, basically, herself. Even Waite sounds bored in the Pictorial Key:

She is above all things universal fecundity and the outer sense of the Word. This is obvious, because there is no direct message which has been given to man like that which is borne by woman; but she does not herself carry its interpretation.

Snooze.

Maybe if the weather was nicer today I'd be more...up. Though I can blame the Waite-Smith cards for that too: even their sun doesn't really look sunny! Talk about melancholy, half the Waite-Smith figures look like they're trying to go about their business and remembering that a close friend died last month.

* * *

I never did get in touch with her after that, nor her with me. I'd have to look up her name, even.

And you know what? It wasn't the Spelling Bee where we met, and it wasn't 1993. It was 1995 and we met in Baltimore, her name was...Christ, was it Annalicia? Did I wear shorts and feign confidence? Did she laugh about me on the phone with her friends afterward, or never mention me again?

And yet I'm absolutely certain of the name of the occult store, Bell Book & Candle. It's still there. Lonely Planet says it 'pulls in the vacation crowd.'

The Empress doesn't care one way or the other what's going on, and the Emperor looks pissed off. Yeah, that's pretty much how I remember it.

Wanna buy a book?

Specifically, would you like to buy a book of my writing, most of it new-to-all, pretty much right away?

EVEN MORE SPECIFICALLY, would you like to send me $12 for a right'n'proper locally-printed copy of THIS BOOK?

YES: That is Falsehoods, Concerns by yours truly. YES!

The book contains the following 220 180 pages of PURE 100% MAGIQUE:

• A house, a bay (oceans, curtains, scalar incomprehension)
• There is a shiny brass lamp nearby. (dungeons, Watergate, Floyd Collins, terrors)
• Little Smoo goes to the library (marital friction, children, Galatea 2.2)
• Pregnancy, possibility (sex, swollen uteri/bellies)
• 'In the tomb...' (live music taping, media archaeology, inappropriate titles)
• Kids today. (nerd gaming, obvious stylistic ripoff of David Mamet)
• light is growing brighter now (...)
• love/hate (the difference between them)
• Muddlemind (memory, identity, unknowingly rewriting other people's movies)
• No flash, no fuss (ATHEISM IS BORING! THANK GOD!)
• There are no teenagers (possibly the titular claim is incorrect?)
• Classroom logics (I get so, so, so angry about classrooms!)
• FIXING YOU (excerpts) (my greatest achievement - original semifiction!)
• Panoply (more original semifiction!)
• Five ('I fall in love too easily')
• Nails (I pull mine)
• Hillary Clinton (this one took it out of me)
• Fraud (obvious stylistic ripoff of DFW)
• Notes on 'In a Silent Way' (seriously, just figure out for yourself what this is about)
• Fun-Loving High School Kids! (zany fiction about high schoolers! and mass murder!)
• The Going Concern (bits and bobs about, among other things, love)
• Amen (more stuff about love, you feel me?)

Hey, I'll ship you a copy anywhere in the U.S. for $12. Multiple copies, internat'l shipping, that sort of thing - we'll figure something out.

My address is waxbanks@gmail.com. Drop a line and we will make this happen to your mind; once I've got a sense for the number of copies we'll need, I'll email you with info on PAYOLA and SHIPPING-OLA.

Tell your friends! They stand to benefit most from this kind of brain-rearranging wisdom/nonsense.

Jobs.

'Untitled 1' will do.

Thinking about (but not listening to) Vampire Weekend this morning, for some reason. The memory of the idea of their music playing in a club; or else the idea of the memory. Creepy: all those 30-year-old hipsters dancing to knockoff Afro-pop made by 18-year-old prep schoolers. Maybe the whole point of forming the band was So The Older Kids Will Like Us. But then when did a 30-year-old turn into a kid? Thinking back, I wonder (conversely) when I turned into an adult. My instinct is to say 'When we decided to have a baby,' or 'When we got married.' But shouldn't the answer be 'When I went off to college on my own' or thereabouts? I seemingly spent my 20's fucking and attending funerals; isn't that 'grownup stuff'?

Trying to synthesize years' worth of data regarding a particular observation: I rarely see well-off folks walking down the street yelling into phones or at other people on the street. What I take to be 'working-class types,' though, it happens all the time. Heavyset women in tracksuits with penciled-on eyebrows and heavily hairsprayed bangs telling their boyfriends DON'T CALL ME AGAIN I HATE YOU I'LL CALL YOU over cheapass cell phones.

Did I say 'types'? Do I say that? I do.

My baby is up and crawling about, throwing his rattle-blocks on the ground. His version of 'throwing' does not inspire Major League dreams. Not that I'd ever actually have those. He can be a doctor instead if he wants.

A vision.

Tell me a story.

In this century, and moment, of mania,
Tell me a story.

Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.

The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.

Tell me a story of deep delight.

--Robert Penn Warren, 'Audubon: A Vision'

Else waxwhere / Where elsewax / WAX ELSEWHERE (whew): 'Unfamiliar Rooms' in Fiction Brigade, READ IT NOW GOSH DARN YOU.

A piece of 'flash fiction,' whatever that could possibly mean, by a certain Mr Wax Banks IF you can even believe sane parents would ever name their child that, appears in the premiere issue (congrats and yay!) of Fiction Brigade which is RIGHT HERE. Please have a look, and enjoy!

Well, but my therapist would say...

'What a grotesque, cliched title this post has, WB.'

No he wouldn't. He'd say I don't need to make a grand gesture of 'ending it all' etc., @toading myself or what have you. He'd say, Do what you can and try new things, but don't make it about the gesture. Just, y'know, pick a thing and do it right. Even (especially) a small thing.

Small things:

MUSIC: Instead of downloading music to order, I wish I trusted the radio more. I wish I listened to less Phish, and more stuff I've never heard before.

BOOKS: I desperately want to read more books cover to cover, and to take more chances on new things. In the immediate future I want to finish The Man in the High Castle and Fairyland, then get on with reading Aegypt for heaven's sake.

MOVIES: I haven't watched one in ages. There isn't really time. But I wish I watched great films again.

FRIENDS: Not to be seized by anxiety at the thought of writing even a short email to a friend. I would like to write to my friends all the time. To be close that way, trusting, trusted. To reach out unself-consciously. A couple of letters a week, maybe. Maybe even by hand, but let's be realistic: typing would be nice too. There's even a letter class in LaTeX! OH MAN A LETTER CLASS!

FAMILY: Better in every way.

WRITING: It hurts too much to say.

Small things.

Digital utopia indeed.

Some dude spent some time 'yelling' at me in ALL-CAPS ON PHISH.NET BECAUSE I M IGNORANT, etc., etc., and now he's been banned from the site or something - which I had nothing to do with - and his rants about it at Phantasy Tour, announcing his desire to do me physical harm, have also been deleted by the moderators there.

This is why I want nothing to do with the Internet. As hard a time as I have maintaining decent humanity in online exchanges, some other people have it worse. And it's easy to shoot the mouth off.

Increasingly tempted to take down my blog, withdraw from every site I'm a member of, and just focus on physical things for, hmm, three years or so.

I don't much like my fandoms? Is that it?

Maybe that's my problem: the fandoms I belong to one way or the other (left-leaning politics, Phish, Joss Whedon, 'literature' broadly construed) all annoy me. As does the world of roleplaying games. And arguing in blog comments.

Getting into a stupid pissing match on phish.net has ruined my day. I keep having to remind myself that hundreds or thousands of readers do not hold the same personal animus toward me as the loud trolls and breast-beaters. Ugh.

Oh, and PROGRESSIVE PARENTING. Goddamn wasteland!

I need a vacation. Maybe just from the Internet, until we move house during the first week of September?

Twaddler/toppler: morning notes starring our 11-and-a-half-month-old baby, Feliks.

• I lie on the ground pretending to be unconscious because I'm a good and caring father. He crawls over to me and begins to poke me in the face with one of his wooden drumsticks. I get up before he has a chance to begin whacking me on the skull.
• He mounts a low Amazon.com box in order to climb to a slightly higher one; falling backward off the low box, he lands on one knee, then rises up en pointe (without the benefit of e.g. ballet shoes or professional dance training) and executes a sly leaping maneuver to get back on the low box. I grab him before he has a chance to mount the coffee table and destroy all our possessions.
• I challenge him to a duel, i.e. I grab one of his drumsticks and start whacking the drumstick he's holding. At first he is confused by the obvious stupidity of this activity. Then he shifts his drumstick from right hand to left and closes on me with a series of attacks learned from the master Thibault. I am driven back nearly to the edge of the Cliffs before realizing I can, in fact, simply reach over and pick him up or crush him like a grape. Sobered, exhilarated, flushed with battle, I surrender manfully.
• Places his drumstick gets caught during his solitaire game of 'Whack the puree-pouch lid around on the ground, hockey-puck-style, with my drumsticks while dad watches': his diaper, my underpants leg, folds in the blanket, eddies in the spacetime continuum.
• My, that is an enormous quantity of vomit, isn't it.
• My friend Farhad once proposed to write a rock opera setting the water-stealing backstory of Chinatown in outer space. Among the songs he listed 'Love Song of a Dying Robot.' What he does not know is that I've actually written and even recorded several versions of the song (and other songs from the cycle, including 'Space Ace' and a variety of asteroid-miner shanties) in the intervening years. I've never been happy with any of it. Sample lines:

  it takes these words ten minutes to reach you
  a million miles away
  longer still when you were in my arms
  dear, that's why today
  feels much like yesterday

  and of course

  oh, row, the sailor sings
  of polycarbon starship wings
  oh, row, the solar winds
  carry me across the galaxy

  now i'm going nowhere
  
  but there's nowhere else that i would rather be

  That sort of thing.

• We listen to parts of DJ Shadow's Endtroducing... and Feliks's actions take on a somewhat louche character. He plays with his outlandish Sassy foam-grippy-rattle-ball object, possibly the most psychedelic/seizure-inducing item I have ever seen in real earth life, with a kind of fin de siècle dissipation, as if biding time in the unlit corner of some cabaret waiting for the secret police to cancel not just the performance nor the fun, but the very idea of progress or continuance; as if aware that he can't stay a twaddler/toppler forever. His cynicism, if that's what it is, is elliptical. Or is it resolve? Or does he need a diaper change? I put on some Duran Duran to lighten the mood but it all feels very, very several-years-too-late...
• He attempts to climb onto the futon/couch. Mercifully, it's too high for him. He contents himself instead playing with my hospital ID bracelet, which I take away because it's probably the single least sanitary object in this impressively unsanitary apartment. Then he reaches for the nightmare toy, about which I will say nothing more at this time in case it reads my blog and decides, in retaliation, to steal my eyes while I sleep.
• He engages in good old fill'n'spill behaviour with his colour/shape blocks, with a twist - he only pulls the blocks out of their little pail in matching pairs (two orange stars, two green squares, two red triangles). I encourage this racist behaviour because of how I was brought up, in a rural area.
• Yay! Stackers!
• Yay! Affectlessly throwing all the stackers over the side of the playpen over and over and over again!
• I would do anything for him. Indeed, I suspect I will: the scariest thing about parenthood, which is to say in the right light the most joyful, is that twenty or forty years from now I'll remember sacrifices and transformations that today, 20 August 2011 in Cambridge, I couldn't possibly have imagined. I have no idea what he's becoming. I have no idea what I'm becoming.

  Meanwhile my wife catches up on sleep just offstage, which she desperately needs because as hard as I feel like I work, she works ten times harder, dies a thousand times when our son cries, is lifted up and lifts me up with each stumbling advance or strange detour he takes. She is the molten core; she's his light, and mine.

• Duran Duran do not have a limitless supply of great songs.

Trouble online, trouble behind.

I don't get along with people online, and that's the plain fact. It's taken me a while to be matter-of-fact about it, but there it is. I spent a bunch of time discussing the situation in therapy a couple years ago, but never did arrive at a satisfactory solution.

OK. The the problem goes deeper than incivility.

The summer after 10th grade (1995) I spent five weeks at Johns Hopkins, taking classes in the Pre-College Program. (It's different from the well-known precocious-child program, CTY.) I got my first C (in a stultifying molecular biology lecture) and worked hard to get a life-changing A (in a small, prescient 'Explorations in Text-Based Virtual Reality' humanities seminar). Both grades were portents, but I didn't understand them.

The focus of the seminar was MUD/MOO/MUSH culture - 'A Rape in Cyberspace,' Barlow's 'Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,' Neuromancer, some Bukatman, some Dery, that kind of thing. One of the requirements was to spend a bunch of time exploring the Diversity University MOO (moo.du.org:8888). I did. I also signed up for LambdaMOO (lambda.moo.mud.org:8888).

I'd never used the Internet before.

Some days I would get up, read the Millennium Whole Earth Catalog or my newly-purchased Principia Discordia for a while, then head over to the computer lab for a 12-hour stint in Lambda. I missed meals. I even missed class (see above re: 'my first C'). Tuition for the program came to $3,600 for five weeks. My dad mowed lawns to raise a few hundred dollars. A wonderful man in my hometown lent us the balance of the tuition and it took us a long while to pay him back; or else we never did.

I got some sun but not as much as I needed. I fell hard for a girl in the next dorm, who didn't notice me. Then I fell for someone with the username 'Sirena,' and that's one of the weirdest stories of my whole life, I think.

I learned to 'speak in public' on LambdaMOO but I learned plenty of other things as well; and I came to rely on it. When I went home at summer's end I felt totally disconnected from my hometown. I told myself and my family and even my couple of close friends that I just missed Baltimore, had a great time 'at college,' had never been around people who shared so many of my interests, just needed a little time to adjust. Junior year ahead, yay. That kind of thing. All of which was true, I suppose -

- but it occurs to me today, for the very first time, that as much as I missed the people and the school and the freedom, I was also going through withdrawal from the online world where my new self was being born. I mean that literally.

The term we're looking for is addiction, of course, more specifically a form of 'Internet addiction,' which in the late 90's was a subject of no small concern in the press and in academia.

You never hear about it now. Once everyone does some activity all day every day it's not an addiction, it's just 'part of life.' Like TV, or worrying about work, or hating the government.

* * *

I check my email several dozen times a day, yet I fail to respond in a timely fashion to friends and acquaintances. I may in fact be the worst correspondent I know. Yet I don't immediately forget about the 'need to respond': indeed, waves of anxiety about my Inbox full of unanswered emails continue to ripple for weeks and weeks. I am never, ever free of anxiety about these communications - but I avoid responding.

I've destroyed friendships - and strained family relationships - this way.

When I have spare time, I read websites and occasionally comment on them. Sometimes I do this even when I don't have spare time. Altogether I spend hours (hours!) a day looking at webpages and retaining almost nothing. I take no great pleasure from this activity. Indeed it has the dry sterility of pure compulsion, like pulling the arm of the slot machine.

I've posted to this blog more than 3,100 times since 29 September 2003. In that time I've been banned from one website, slunk away from several others, and stormed off several more. I get into fewer 'flame wars' than I used to, but it still happens. I still feel anxiety about websites I've 'stopped reading'; indeed, at the site where I've been banned, I continue to comment under a different name.

I feel contempt for such behaviour but haven't found a way to stop it, as yet.

Since 2009 I've posted upwards of 150 reviews to the phish.net - but I've only posted one or two since June, during which time I've posted 50 comments in discussion threads and in response to the admins' blog posts. I consciously avoided any such discussions until this summer. This correlation between 'chatting' online and posting more thought-out frontline pieces (reviews and articles) has held, in my case, for many years.

After building a (very very minor) reputation as a thoughtful writer at whedonesque.com, I've all but scuttled it by turning into a persnickety, ill-tempered commenter. Unsurprisingly, none of my posts have been featured there since I started commenting more regularly.

The term isn't brand dilution, but then what's the term? Would I be happier if I knew?

* * *

A longtime netizen (remember that term?) told me this when I was banned from phishthoughts.com (for 'trolling'):

You are a highly intelligent, very cerebral and I believe well meaning person but it seems that you have some form of internet Asperger's which makes it impossible for you to determine what is and is not socially acceptable in many circumstances online.

I wrote him a long email telling him, essentially, that he had no idea what he was talking about and I was perfectly justified in what I said about the site's owner and EVERYONE NEEDS TO THICKEN THE OLD SKIN, ETC., ETC. But I didn't send it. My wife approvingly refers to this kind of thing as de-escalation and always looks so relieved when I choose not to carry on such exchanges. The look on her face breaks my heart. I realize, at such moments, that I don't actually know how much damage I do to myself - or I won't acknowledge it, or (worst of all, and most likely) I've decided I need to hurt myself 'socially' in order to continue living as I am.

Last summer I wrote this:

I think we should purge the books and sell them, to alleviate my guilt (not a writer, not a devoted enough reader, nothing special...) and maybe recoup a bit of money. My wife thinks we should keep the books around[...] And dust them. I try to explain that life will stop and start over, better, if she'll just allow this one gesture; I mistake my self-indulgence for patience.

She evidently believes -- insists -- that life can't start or stop, can only continue, so we might allow ourselves to do the same. I imagine that our future must resemble my past. The books, I'm certain, are signs of my...well, my irresponsibility, profligacy, compulsions, status-consciousness. My individual failings, you might say. Don't I get the future I darkly deserve?

But what comes next is ours, not mine. `Mine' is just for comfort -- like the books. In our future[...]I'm glad my wife[...]made me keep the dreadful damned books way back when, and frustrated my urge to reduce our life to my story.

In grad school I went to a conference and met a young professor from some college out of sight/mind, and over the course of several joyful drunkening hours it became clear that we wanted to fuck each other, quite, but I was dating someone and she had to get back to her friends' house where she was staying, and in any case it would have been an absolutely colossal mistake, quite, but unforgivable? Who knows? Probably yes and deservedly so I'd say (were the situation reversed). Well. One of those stories I hold onto in which I 'miss an opportunity' to have a conventional 'good story' but still come close enough to some inner horizon that the light goes strange and new (or very old) things are revealed. So how bad a story can it really be, what I've got now? She was a Buffy fan too and I definitely should have called her when I was single, later. But I wasn't ever really single.

I mention it because, though I can't find the email she sent a few days later in response to my own message, I've memorized these phrases:

• 'maybe too smart for your own good'
• 'extremely socially awkward'

* * *

Shamefully, I often use 'Asperger's Syndrome' as a term of derision.

This is inappropriate and callous.

It would be, even if I were Oprah Winfrey.

* * *

Everyone wants his favourite band to also be The Very Best Band. This is really important to teenagers, who in this country have nothing else to do, but it stays important to nominal adults. Like me. Same for books/films of course. (Phish, Coltrane, James Joyce, Fight Club, etc.) Same for people, though I wouldn't know. I can't imagine what I'd be like if I didn't map my tastes on to the cosmic quality scale.

* * *

The point being that there are two problems compounding one another: I compulsively fiddle about on the Internet, either getting into arguments or zoning out pretending to be interested in what Ezra Klein and Arthur Silber have to say about anything, but at the same time I have very serious trouble maintaining a civil tone and spirit of congeniality in online fora. I tend to monologue at people - ever notice how rarely I respond to the wonderful comments around here? When the conversation gets two-sided I lose control of something (maybe just the conversation), and I end up saying things I regret. 'Being misunderstood,' HORROR!, but more than that: no longer trying to understand the people I talking to. Not reaching out.

And that's where I am this morning. Worried, if you're wondering, that I'll slowly lose friends and alienate readers and never stop doing the things I most hate about myself. And - you must know this is deeply related - worried, too, that I'll never write freely because it will always be about me.

You want 100% employment? Assign every single citizen to border patrol. The true meaning of the nation-state right there, the geographic Self. OK, hold one guy back to make dinner I guess. One guy for laundry. And someone to make sure the cable bill gets paid.

My son will probably wake up soon, and my wife with him. The day will start. Real life will start. This...this is the shadow. If you walk toward the light it'll hide from your sight, but not as a favour: your shadow will follow you wherever you go.

Love and market corrections.

Seeking last night to explain my seeming negativity in response to friends' recounting of their newfound romantic/domestic hopes, I hit upon the following imperfect analogy:

The day-to-day hopefulness of people (particularly young people) in love relates to the systemic health of a relationship, its sustainability and integrity, the way the Dow Jones Industrial Average relates to the underlying strength of and productivity of the nation's economy: i.e. pretty much not at all.

When we're in love or just in hope - when we're pulling for a relationship to be something new and healthy, disregarding years of precedent because This Time Things Are Different - we tend to react strongly to daylong improvements, week-to-week healthy signs, small symbolic gestures or moments. Committed (at least rhetorically) to 'living in the now' or 'for the moment,' we devote ourselves in fact to the next moment, the promise of something swell just around the corner. We give full voice to our hopes and fears and think of ourselves as being at the center of something monumental.

But the Dow Jones has never been higher than when the American economy was going tits-up even as Wall Street raked in record profits; which is to say the soaring stock markets and financial-sector profits of the 90's were a lie agreed upon, a single number more reassuring than the many sets of complicated numbers recording the collapse of the industrial economy and the hollowing-out of the USA's basic material productivity. If you watch the day-to-day movement of the market you'll start seeing 'green shoots' and 'bear markets' even when the fundamentals are unchanged.

Romance is fun and trivially easy but you build your life on the fundamentals. 'He bought me a diamond ring' and 'The sex is great' and 'She's so awesome, she makes me forget my troubles' are single-day market upticks. But the market isn't the economy, as America's small investors have learned over and over to their chagrin these last 20 years. There are plenty of fundamental indicators, ready reflections of the true order of things, if you know where to look:

'Are you kidding me? We can't talk about that kind of thing.'

'At this point I've just given up. He won't clean the bedroom and I'm tired of asking.'

'He can be a real asshole sometimes, but I know that's not the real him.'

'What with the wedding planning and all, we just haven't had time to sit down and have the "do we want kids someday?" talk. I'm sure there'll be time later.'

* * *

The scary thing about a 'market correction' isn't just the vertigo of watching our money disappear hour by hour, it's the realization that the state of the market didn't actually reflect the state of the business concerns it ostensibly followed. Precipitous systemwide drops in stock prices theoretically increase the accuracy of the representation that is 'stock price,' bringing share prices in line with the actual economic prospects of their respective companies. And when prices creep up again, we call it a 'recovery' - and allow ourselves to live in/for the map while disregarding the territory.

Funnily enough, no one refers to stock market increases as 'corrections.'

* * *

Object/representation mismatches are big trouble in relationships. To address them after the fact is painful (the 'market correction,' so to speak). They are easily prevented, though, when both parties in a relationship work hard to foster an environment in which open, honest communication is the norm, and neither party is expected to perform reassurance solely to palliate the other.

I had other stuff to say but I'm feverish, dehydrated, dog tired, and unable to follow my own writing. This will have to do! HOPE THAT HELPS!!

(bliss is body)

our ~11-month-old son got his first musical instruments today: a marching drum and a little wooden xylophone. at first he just wanted to bang things with the sticks and mallets, which was a joy in itself. seeing him control his environment, even in that small way, is pure pleasure for a parent.

then he and i got into some mallet/stick trading game - he would play with one of each, then i'd trade him a stick for a mallet, and we went back and forth that way for a while. agi was reading her book ('ancient bodies, modern lives') and beaming at us every once in a while, as was her father, feliks's grandfather, who is a painter/sculptor when not working as a thin films engineer, and who obviously wants the kid to turn out a foolish artist. (am i projecting?)

then feliks started drumming on the drum.

i think that's the widest smile i've smiled in a long time. absolute bliss. he was more adroit with his left hand than with his right, surprisingly(?) - tapping in natural rhythm atop the drumskin, hitting just off-center, then sweeping the stick around to rattle on the rim.

i know it's not 'music' to him; on the other hand i'm not sure my own music is 'music' in any essential sense. it's feeling, aurally encoded; echoes of some innerworld, or sense-mapping of a possible world yet to fall into mere physicality.

each day of parenthood is another invitation to tumble laughing into the family-body, the triple-helix that is our own memory-making being. feliks can't know how happy he makes me, not yet; because 'happy' isn't for him a separate category. it's just one way of being. he needn't 'think' about it. but surely he feels it - surely he feels deeply those moments of joyful becoming. feeling deeper than thought.

i don't know what i know, but what i feel is that growing with my son and my wife, being welcomed into the greater body (welcoming all of us each in turn; dissolving), is the truest feeling i know, the most fulfilled. not 'best'; that language is inadequate.

i think: i hope he loves music. i wonder whether he'll love making music as i do, will hear and see it all day. i remember the look in my then-future-wife's eyes as a beloved song rumbled out across a dancefloor (my god it was) nearly a decade ago; she was the music, momentarily. her body a melody line. i hardly knew her then. she was then for me a lovely idea, arm's length: 'Woman' or something. now we have a chance to be one body. it is bliss. we are bliss.

i should be floating

Do you get up up up?
Clouds stop and move above me
Too bad they can't help me
What is the right way?

Do I float up up up?
When I stop and look around me
Grey's where that colour should be
What is the right way?

Old glasses clinking and a
New order's blinking
and I -
I should be floating but I'm weighted by thinking

--Animal Collective, 'What Would I Want? Sky'

yesterfree writeup warmday.

[this is how i warm up to write in the mornings. W20 is MIT's student center. the buckles is of course starbucks. --wa.]

here at the buckles in harvard type tapping away, tips and topplings, tenuous at best. rhymes tipping tapwise out of electrical taping. sniffles, snorts, watery eyes, sore neck. thick chest-filling mucus. tv on the radio on the headphones on the computer (and by way of inspiration playing on the PA system here at starbucks, else why would i have turned toward vocal music at all, writing freewriting?).

managed to turn out something halfway decent yesterday, or so it seemed. something and something else put together into some third thing. some goddamn high school girl sitting across from me interrupting her homework to text dispassionately someotherone. maddening to see total affectlessness on another human face. do i look that way? ever? face goes slack, studied indifferent posture. same hands same eyes same dead non-smile. same will to power will to powerlessness. same whatever. every high schooler like every human being is totally different but the normalizing pressure on behaviour is incredibly strong. the ones who escape the orbit of the prevailing culture find something else, some orbital base on one or another poorly-lit basement asteroid playing D&D or punk rock in a twelfth-rate garage band with his buddies or they fuck a lot or refuse to, yes or find jesus entirely or just gesture at being a scientist, write sonnets ONLY I INSIST using elizabethan vocabulary and modern pseudo-psychology of course. 'i am a snowflake melting each morning reforming as new dark ice each night' that sort of thing.

all poems written by high schoolers are essentially the same poem. SOMEONE HOLD ME CLOSE SOMETHING MAKE ME WHOLE SOMEHOW LET ME ESCAPE

dude barking loudly into his cell phone over there in celtics gear and beaten-up brown boots, scars on the back of his arm (burns from hot metal looks like). man with miles on him. frayed edges on his t-shirt, worn jean-hems. earned his age. plenty to be said for a man who lives into his form and fate in this way. look gathering motes of time upon leatherworn skin like the settle of ancient dust, once was skin (all of us all of ours)

every surface edge of you frays and wears with the idiot passing of (we call it) time

commander controller i found you

defender destroyer i found you

dirtly little whirlwind

all caught up in the flesh of a girl

-- tv on the radio

time is a name we give to forgetting

tv on the radio is one of the sexiest bands i've ever heard in my life. ever. i mean i've never heard sexy music that wore its intelligence right on its sleeve like that and dared the listener to find that sexy. the push and pull of carnal and intellectual impulses makes for the music's complexity i think.

* * *

ok i think it's time to get down to work. 10:45am, i need to be home by 3pm, plenty of time to nail down the final comments on the four papers. give each of them a half-hour or so. something like that.

ok here we go.

* * *

just a little time before meeting agi for the ol' baby-changing-hands afternoon routine. weird being the one to receive the baby at day's end i gotta say. ok let's not dick around too long here. reading D&D shit online annoyed/rattled me i gotta say. the usual annoyance over petty things, aggravated by middle-aged men bitching about Those Kids and the (Inevitable) Decline of Culture. same old shit. no generation wants to be mislabeled that way.

crowded tables at the buckles. like W20 with more attention to paid to grooming. i wish that were something i valued. to be the kind of person who cared about things that other kinds of people cared about. to have that connection-via-abstraction. subcultural membership. only i don't much feel that way day to day. well you can be part of the mythical-alone too, if you like. another subculture.

Holy moley!!!!

My handle, 'Wax,' is apparently used as a verb meaning 'to banish from the thread' on another blog! This in honour of my own banishment!

If the dude weren't a dufus it'd be almost sad, or funny!

Finishing a draft is like...

...waking to find your sprained ankle has healed and you can walk for the first time.

Mind out of mind.

Reading other fans' memories of Phish (and the fandom) in mid-to-late 1997 - the moment when the band tipped over a cliff from nerd-prog rock algorithms into deep dark free improv - has me a little misty right now. My peak fandom began that summer and burned out in Fall '98; it was the happiest time of my life for a long while. Merely a moment.

Might have to bust out my 7/22/97 DWD → Mike's and travel the spaceways tonight...

Irrelevant update(s).

1. My Aegypt-reading has been delayed: I reserved Swanwick's Stations of the Tide at the library and wanna blast through it first. Should be quick.

Can't read Crowley distracted. It's a moral imperative.

2. First two chapters of Swanwick's book: golden. Weird, though, to read a book set in a high-tech spacefaring civilization, written between the advents of cable television and the WWW. Communications technology poses difficulties for the SF writer, just as cell phones make horror/mystery stories that much harder to write. (Buffy featured cell phone use in one episode, as I recall, and only then as a spoof...)

Unrecovered.

Objects I lent out in high school and never got back:

The Illuminatus! Trilogy (to Nate Winston) (recently replaced).

The Essential [Harlan] Ellison (35-year edition).

An Arrested Development CD.

The No Alternative CD compilation (to Fred Fenner).

Arturo Perez-Reverte, The Club Dumas (1993).

[Spoilers follow for what the jacket copy accurately describes as a 'beach book for intellectuals,' which I recommend only if you haven't seen its film adaptation.]

The trouble with reading this enjoyable book now is that I've long since seen Roman Polanski's atmospheric but ridiculous (and thin) film adaptation The Ninth Gate. I've also read my share of Umberto Eco, alas - and never did read The Three Musketeers, nor do I have any particular interest in it. Finally, I picked up the book in the first place because of its place of honour in the bibliography of Ken Hite's Bookhounds of London, which takes P-R's antiquarian-bibliomania-plus-black-magic thing several steps further than the novel itself.

So The Club Dumas has several strikes against it from the start: Polanski's movie spoils the Nine Doors mystery while revealing the Dumas subplot as an obtrusive cute-intertextual red herring; Foucault's Pendulum is less seedy and creepy than The Club Dumas, but it's got a better ending and vastly more implied secret history; The Three Musketeers is a big preoccupation for Perez-Reverte but it's never clear why one should care, other than for the thrill of allusion-spotting; and as mentioned, Hite's book ably steals most of this novel's thunder.

It's well-enough written - mostly brisk and surefooted plotwise, only occasionally belaboring the cod-numerological obvious, prone to agreeable amounts of syrupy sentimentality where women are concerned. Corso is a compelling character, though his flatness of affect grates by the end, especially at the end, where he seems not disagreeably/attractively mercenary but completely heedless; the kicker ending doesn't make that scene 'cool' in retrospect. The feel is everything, here, and it feels fine, but by the halfway mark I was ready to skip ahead to the end - and, incredibly, I did just that. 60 or 70 pages, whoosh, gone from view. I'm glad I saved myself the hour, but I'm glad I gave Perez-Reverte his, too.

I might have a look at the Captain Alatriste novels if no one stops me.

Bossypants (Tina Fey, 2011).

Everyone like me seems to have a crush on Tina Fey, but I don't. I get why they do, she's swell, but I don't share the feeling. I think reading Bossypants has helped me figure out why:

1) I never saw her on Weekend Update, which was apparently a Thing for male writer-nerds.

2) Her style of comedy mixes this slight didacticism that's so constant, and pitched just above comfortable frequency levels, that you want to say it's semi- or unconscious...but how could anything about this serious craftsman's craft be semi- or un- at this point? Her ironies are just a little more defensive and uncomfortable-with-self than I'm used to. That makes for nervy comedy (though 30 Rock is hit-and-miss, at best, in its topical seriousness) but over a couple hundred print pages it starts to sit badly. With me, I mean. Probably lots of people will eat this book up. I liked it. I liked reading it. I like Tina Fey well enough. I like her the way I liked the girls with good grades when I was in sixth grade and had the best grades, or thought I deserved to have the best grades because I was smartest (I'd heard) but I didn't work as hard as the girls, so they'd get 98's and I'd either get 100's or (when I didn't care) 88's. I like Tina Fey in a resentful way, or resent her affectionately; she makes me wonder what I'm doing wrong. Either way I don't have a crush. I wonder what I'm doing wrong.

Oh look at me I had an idea:

Some people break rules because they want you to notice the rules. Some people do it because they want you to notice them. I think maybe I'm not sure what kind of person Tina Fey is, but the idea I have is that I want to think she's the same as me, and she's the kind of person I think I am, but I'm not actually that guy, I'm the other guy, and my jittery handwavy self-consciousness is that other kind, the kind that if I ever admit to myself that's my thing I'll look in the mirror and just be like, 'You asshole!'

On the other hand maybe you do the right thing thinking you've got the right reason but you've got the 'wrong' one, but by acknowledging it it becomes right, in a way? See? And this sanitizes you and makes you OK for the world, and you go about your day making the world a touch more OK. On the other other hand, Tina Fey says that Lorne Michaels says that The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30. So then would I ever have had the whole self-accusatory moment in the mirror if I hadn't been checking to see whether I was Ready for My Closeup or whatever?

* * *

It's a library checkout, not a buy. So there you go.

Does making a fool of yourself count as making something of yourself? Hi?

(wine)

[March 2009. How one gets, when one is newly 30 and in love. Aah, 'poetry.']

hey sure
sounds fine
and while you're
at it
could you
baby
get me
a fine, fine
glass of
yeah
blood-red wine
?

because
lover
the sight
of you
winding
like
a river
away from
here by me
leaves me
darling
wanting
.

(girl; boy)

[Oh my god, I know this is more or less just bullshit (circa February 2008), but I seem to recall two things: (1) $20 copay every session to hear that I need to finish something and get on with life and etc. etc. etc. and he was right, very much right; (2) a friend watching me fall apart on a sidewalk awaiting a light-change and he says 'Maybe you need to finish something you've started'; well these things will bury you if you don't shovel them on top of someone else. Baby, but no one ever collected enough diamond dust to make a diamond, am I right? But it's better than regular dust. Right? Am I right?]

pretty girl looking for work
couldn't say where she's headed
rich boy from just outside new york
never let you forget it

he seemed to treat her with respect
she seemed to have half a brain
he was nicer than she'd expected
to find here - mom was surprised, too

one week they were everywhere holding hands
skating at rockefeller center
he bought her tickets to museums she'd never seen
threw snowballs in the park in early winter

late nights talking about everything
love language, a duet in creole
she thought he looked like a flower and was twice as sweet
he even paid to put her on birth control

she wrote home saying 'i think he loves me'
he wrote home saying 'great time wish you were here'
she called a friend, said 'you've gotta meet him'
he called his ex, said 'when do you visit, dear?'

when the day came she decided
'i'm ready to say i do'
he was outwardly delighted
though he didn't ask, it's true

just smiled and said 'you know i love you'
also true - but it left her feeling blue
('i love you' can be an excuse too)

when he got bored of undifferentiated kisses
he planned on saying goodbye
right before a couple weeks in europe
she could sit around, have a good cry
(and then move on like the weather)

but he found a note instead:
'i've had a premonition
of you and me waking up in ten years
you've traded me for some new possession

i'd rather not be in the position
of being any man's acquisition
nor indulgence, nor vacation
nor consolation'

he thought, 'she learned those words from me'
praised himself, gave a sneer
but she'd learned them from the last guy
he was more patient - and sounded more sincere
and left her just as far behind
another lesson, another year

(hush)

You are six years old looking forward to your seventh birthday party in a couple of weeks and on the TV the intercom voice with the southern accent says 'Flight controllers here are looking very carefully at the situation.' He says 'Obviously a major malfunction.' You are six years old and your teacher is covering her mouth and looking around. Everyone in the classroom is looking at the TV and then looking at her covering her mouth not saying anything. No one is saying anything. You are six years old and want to be an astronaut like the teacher who is on the space shuttle. You are so excited this morning and are wearing your sweater with a U.S.A. flag and your mom and dad said you could imagine yourself up in space like the teacher who is on the shuttle. You even learned her name. Her name is Christa McAuliffe she is from New Hampshire. No one is saying anything.

One of the proudest moments of my young, nonnegligibly proud life...

...is recognizing the name of the author of Passport to Magonia among the characters in the X-Files(!) episode 'Jose Chung's From Outer Space,' which - believe me this is not an easy confession to make - is one of the most interesting episodes of TV I've ever laid eyes on. Yes! PROUD! Do you know what that book is about? I bet the Internet can tell you. MY HEAD IS A JUNIOR BRAIN INTERNET STORAGE CAPSULE HEAD!

I thought I didn't like this show.

(what becomes of the breaking wave of you naked upon this bordering skin; i breathe your warm mist; in order to return we must first walk up out of this ocean oh yes)

mournful mountainside forest lit up anew with birdsong
to me your voice in this old home is

dry lightning snap your angry quick quiet

your hand in my hand resting is
settling sigh of earthly castles
or seafoam soft skimming by fingertip

you see me

spiral fire of you, sprawling center, muscles hold firm
hiss of tidewater receding is your breath in my ear
your embrace echoic on all sides
your pulse
i feel

everywhere

Scarf magic.

Apropos of nothing!

(buttons-buttoned)

It's cold in the outside but warm upon the inside, is the problem. My son is in the backseat, his baby seat, in a bear suit - with adorable little bear footies and everything, and ears - and the sun doesn't reach him directly, but it does warm the air. Me, on the other hand, it absolutely bludgeons. I feel it as a physical force on my chest, even when I park in the (when-I-got-here-it-was) shade. Creeps around the corner of the building, I imagine, and just jumps on me like a night-mare. (Do you know that the 'mare' in 'nightmare' isn't a horse, it's a hag?) F. likes the engine's rumble but I don't know how to compensate for the ventilator-leakage (hot air) or the sun breath-stealing on my several-layered chest - I mean F. is pretty far back, around the seat-corner in his canopied shade-within-our-shade, so mightn't it get cold back there long before I notice any chill? This is what worries me: not only can I accurately judge his situation solely according to my own standards, the 'real world' for him follows some entirely other set of standards that I can't even begin to grasp.

The point being, I keep shutting off the engine for a while to let the car cool (and stop slow-murdering every living thing within inhaling distance of the exhaust pipe), but that curtails the sleepening rumble, and my baby stirs, Christ; then the emphysematic ignition-cough threatens to rupture sleep too (I am an idiot), but is 'apartment-warm' the right setting for the heater? Won't it be 'basement-chilly' in the backseat, the baby seat? Well, doesn't the baby seat have its own thermal effects too? Anyhow Hot is too hot and Cool is obviously cold, a pointless deception. And the sun, the sun (I missed you all winter, I always do, I can't admit it though) just abuses me all the while. I bet I get a sunburn all the way through my t-shirt and thermal, right there on my man-tits. What a laugh! See? Being a parent is all about the good times.

pleroma, hermetica, gnosis, et cetera.

In lieu of a review of M. John Harrison's The Course of the Heart, which I finished in my now-traditional sitting spot in the parking lot of the Burger King off Route 28 near Union Square today (the air too cold for windows-down, the sun too bright for buttons-buttoned):

* * *

pleroma and so forth.

gnostic divinity. the unification of man and woman into some greater being, more complete, more capable. this seems clear to me; obvious. though i suppose the man/woman schema is a naive sexual predication: how could the ancient gnostics have known about the limbic system? it's so clear now that humans can't live separately from one another, though some are more able to regulate their thoughts/emotions than others. but computationally speaking ALONE you'd need (for real happiness) the capacities revealed by connection, by interface. 'interference' in the holographic sense: a pattern, exposed to light, reveals a literal (though i suppose we have to say 'virtual') new dimension. we reconstitute this additional dimension by looking into the play of light in the pattern. human beings pattern for one another and become each other's hidden dimension. i suppose i mean you reveal something that is the rejected or essential or just another part of me, and i for you, but then this thing exists yours-within-me, vice versa, and this dimension exists in the space between us, at our interface: we let light in to scatter in fragments (waves breaking upon seaworn stones, sounds variegating as they carom, baffled) and that is our capacity for illumination. not the world, see, except insofar as the world is the plane we define. our interweaving lines constitute a new space at angles we could never have perceived on our own.

parallax IS inventiveness of course, of a simple kind. love, i think, is holography: reality's new spline-curved z-axis irrupts from us. there are no straight lines in nature, except for the terminal fall of one object toward another. (but don't we simply fail to perceive perturbations at a distance? isn't it more right to say we curve toward the earth at last, rather than 'falling?')

i think the old teachers had it right: there is a new world you can make, it is a form of magic to give birth to this world, it exists in the erotic or confessional or confrontational or simply (not so simply) honest interstices between us, and its name is Love Truly Given. stars boil away in the cold but i think maybe the birth of an ascendant shared mind between two minds (do i mean 'making love?') is the wildest and most dangerous release of energy that possibly exist, because it can contain all others. i mean imagine. nothing can contain, only share. the world-between, the Innerworld, can only be given, not possessed. that's the difference between joy (which is love) and death.

* * *

hermetica and all that.

not puzzle-stories but a kind of cognitive recipe book. the esoteric tradition is about possessing (and exerting) a will-to-knowledge, which i suppose is easily enough perverted into a will-to-power. well nothing draws the bruised social misfits and maladapts quite like the promise of doing magic spells.

* * *

gnosis and other such.

self-knowledge as the highest goal of a human being. well you have to work with what you're given. we seem to have the strongest selves so it makes sense to build a faith around self-analysis. you might call zen 'peripheral gnosis': knowing your self without acknowledging its primacy or essentiality (which acknowledgement actually constitutes those things - zen is very much a philosophy of peaceful combat with the self).

we live in a world of objects but experience a universe of perceptions/interpretations. it makes no sense to begrudge that fact. but then self-knowledge will always be incomplete unless it's part of a greater body of knowledge of all things (perceptions, interpretations) and through all things. if you aren't complete unto yourself then your self-knowledge can't be complete either; by extending your self through the imaginative parallelization and exponentiation that is...well, i suppose it's love...by this extension you extend too your capacity for reflection, the fidelity of your self-image, which is the self! the self-image is the self-object, and it is available to us both in private reflection and through the imaginative gift of our loved ones.

when you love all things - seeing that you are inseparable from all things - then all things are revealed as aspects of your greater self, and you have that much more to work with, self-image-wise. you can be high on yourself but can never really love yourself until you live the fact that you'll live some and then die (and live no more).

the more freely you love, the more loved ones you have. that's not terribly complicated but we tend to choose otherwise.

Diaper.

[removed by the author, sorry...]

Moxy Früvous.

I spent a lot of time listening to these guys as a teenager - going to three shows in a week, for instance, with my freshman-year girlfriend Jennifer.

I am listening to some Moxy right now, in fact.

A mixed bag: several decent-or-better, more or less aggressively Beatlesque tunes ('I Will Hold On,' 'River Valley,' 'Horseshoes,' 'Fly,' 'The Incredible Medicine Show,' 'Love Set Fire,' 'Fell in Love,' 'Bittersweet,' 'Laika'), lots of cheeseball please-notice-me-I-am-a-poor-busker comedy, an alternately ingratiating and grating eagerness to please (see above re: busking), and - surprisingly - one singer (out of four) prone to moments of nasally off-key nails-on-chalkboard moments, particularly in his frequent role as 'emotive' lead voice. It's Jian, of course, whose ensemble singing is reasonable but who's always easy to pick out of whatever winding chords they're getting up to, for better or worse.

Unlike, say, their nerd-rock brethren They Might Be Giants (another favourite among MIT kids), Moxy were made for witty cabaret melancholy rather than (ironic) bombast. Cheerful novelty tunes like 'King of Spain' and the Romeo & Juliet riff 'BJ Don't Cry' made them mini-famous, but their woodsy love songs carry real feeling, even when lines like 'I was a person who would censor / Pee-Wee's Adventure / She was exceedingly liberal / (was she?)' threaten to torpedo the mood. That same song ('Fell in Love'), after all, also goes 'She said my pasta was 'delicious, bit repetitious' / That kind of thing made me crazy,' which is just the right scale of sentiment, if that makes sense.

It's often hard for smart songwriters and performers to rein in their neocortices and just spill their guts; Moxy Früvous could do it, though not always, nor indefinitely. Their spare live cover of the Beegees' 'I've Gotta Get a Message to You' (on Live Noise, which smartly captures the vibe of a live Moxy show) builds steadily in power through two verses and two choruses, and the stepwise modulation during the outro delivers an actual emotional punch - Jesus Christ, what a great song - but the proceedings are marred by a brief a capella take on the instrumental break, which feels like a slide into kitsch despite the stark surrounding quiet. (We can say this: they were talented ensemble arrangers.) Otherwise it's an affecting cover, showing their singing to best effect, modulo a couple of clams from Jian.

Anyhow, they broke up a few years ago, which isn't a great loss for pop music but which gave a lot of sentimental geeks and their boy/girlfriends cause for, I'd like to think, a tearful moment of fellowship in/and reflection. Y'know, doofy as it all was, as everything was back then (did I ever not know what death was? hopelessness? to lie and be lied to?)...well, without the encumbrance of mere living it's easy to slip swept wonderfully up into the stream of Life, Man, Just Life, You Know? which I'm grateful for. So hi, Jennifer, though I hope that's not what I meant, or not all.

See? I want to know what kind of writer/person I am, and maybe I'm the last one to figure out that this is it.

Relics from Arkham.

As a kid I read the book Relic, a 'technothriller' by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, later to be made into a terrible movie. I got into it in hardback at the Prendergast(!) Library in Jamestown, NY (which, to give you a sense of its richness and depth of selection, just added Face/Off to its DVD racks), long before it became a megaseller in paperback. Later on I read its sequel, Reliquary, which spins out from Jennifer Toth's The Mole People and is both less acutely frightening than the original (due to the first book's brilliant setting, NYC's fictitious but vivid Museum of Natural History) and more unsettling (the whole Mole People bit). Both books gave me years of nightmares; indeed I still can't think of the words 'fetid, goatish stench' without looking over my shoulder.

Which brings us to 'The Dunwich Horror,' and my realization that in addition to its status as guileful knockoff of Jurassic Park and Sherlock Holmes, Relic (along with its sequel, to a lesser extent) is a nice little Lovecraft pastiche as well. All the signifiers are there: dark alt-anthropology, the doomed Whittlesley(!) Expedition, unfathomable aboriginal carvings of lurking horrors, cargo cults, the endless reuse of phrases like 'fetid, goatish stench' (which means...?), the cast of determined but doomed museumfolk and scientists granted maddening views of the theretofore-unseen realm beyond their discipline's knowledge, hamfisted ethnic characterization, half-digested sciencespeak, intimations of the evolutionary irrelevance of man...cults of a dark god! unspeakable rituals! loony diary entries!

It's ALL THERE, Reader(s). Wish I'd been up on HPL 20 years ago.

Of course Relic and Reliquary (both of which I heartily recommend as feather-light nighttime reading for paranoiacs and museum nerds, despite their unbelievably shoddy prose) owe a lot more to Michael Crichton's novels than Lovecraft's - not least in that their Essential Problems are eventually solved with preternaturally effective gunplay and the concerted efforts of the NYPD, followed by an Ominous Ending telling of Scary Science to Come. And the nearly omnipotent Agent Pendergast is a decidedly un-Lovecraftian hero: Sherlock Holmes with a perfect pistol shot and not a single humanizing deficiency of character. (The Pendergast books are extremely efficient, effective competence porn.) More importantly, none of Lovecraft's significance is there. Relic is a beach book. But the signs, the signs...

fixation.

'Waiting' is actually 'thinking.'

Calling it by its true name is healthy. Same as anything.

'Why isn't the pizza here, dude? We've been waiting a half-hour!' Well, a half-hour has passed. Were you philosophizing about the pizza the whole time? Are you calling the pizza guy to indict him for his absence -- or yourself, for your boredom?

Are you less hungry on the phone complaining?

You should think healthily, i.e. sustainably. In that case there will be nothing to take out on anyone else -- only more and less successful collaborations, which can be improved upon.

Which is another way of saying that you can care deeply about learning the material or passing the test, but not both.

morning freewrite though evidently not quite free

ok, just to see the text scrolling by. flying upward out of frame. offscreen. cut to image of a man walking down a lonely street, sword in hand, there's a woman he's remembering (you can't see this onscreen of course except insofar as he is SCOWLING or alternately and maybe more affectingly SMILING IN A LOST WAY, little puppy dog, whatever). his sword scrapes along the ground. its tip through puddles, across seams in the sidewalk. 'lonely street' is like the world champion of clichés but push on. he walks into a bar, orders a drink, someone tries to make trouble, he's sad, he almost doesn't even want to turn around. he's got this stupid sword. dude tries to pick a fight with him. he says he'll have to defend himself if attacked, please don't, please, but the guy's not listening -- asshole -- so our man turns around with cuts him down with tears coming out of his eyes. the others in the bar either run out into the street screaming or pile right on to avenge their drinking buddy, but it makes no difference -- he's Fated to Live So Long. or whatever the shit. cursed to walk the earth. man out of time and all that. actually kind of an affecting image in a way. he's been made immortal and thought it would help. honour-bound to defend himself against threats, even though it ruins everything around him, not to mention his own life. not to mention his marriage. did he have a young kid too? well he or she is gone as well.

that word count is a real boon. lets you know you're not just SITTING THERE pretending to type. o for a muse of fire. o for a flaming sword. a grape juice concentrate in a can, frozen, tasty, but not so tasty you're not willing to share it with friends, only secretly it's the best thing you've ever had, you're a kid and you don't even care that it's 'bad' or whatever your mom says, it's perfect and you want to share it but secretly you don't want Scott and Jeff or whoever to drink too much of it, because you're not going to the Kroger until thursday mom says so don't use up all your snacks too fast, but you can't help it. you drink that stuff absolutely as fast as you can because you want it to land right there in your stomach right away, to be spreading out into your veins flowing right to your heart and brain, pure sugar really plus a flavour of grape, but you don't even care. you don't know how to 'appreciate' food and drink so you just love it, love it while it lasts then let it go. or no, you don't even know to 'let go' do you. you just drink it and then move on to the next thing and there's no higher-level activity at all. is there. later on you'll say it was principled or you were admirably engaged with the moment or something but like so many things this is an accident of wiring we're talking about. and you grew up thinking accidents were the things the world is made of. or was made of until you started to ruin it with your choices. now the world is made of choices and it lies in ruin. you suppose it's your fault.

Regular expressions, introductorily, with an explanation en passant of how time is lately spent at the Wax Banks household.

[Note: Between in-house distractions and the frustration of HTML formatting AAAAAARGH, this post ended up more opaque, vague, and lengthy than it should've been. Not a good example of my didactic writing, alas.]

My Stay-at-Home-Parent-Project for the week has been a collecting and prettying-up of the entire run of Ken Hite's Suppressed Transmission web-column (minus those columns already collected in book form, which I recommend). The files float around the ol' BitTorrent sites in skeletal HTML format, unattributed(!?) and not particularly pleasant to the eye. I've spent a few hours transforming the HTML into beautiful LaTeXed PDFs. What's the difference? This:

Currently the PDF runs to nearly 1,100 pages. It's lovely to read, particularly iPadwise, and seeing those ~230 columns in one place has convinced me that the Transmission is the best writing to come out of the field of roleplaying games. Not necessarily prosewise, but certainly in terms of intensity and depth of engagement with a complex central idea (broadly 'bisociation,' though let's leave it aside for the moment).

Anyhow, I bring this up just to illustrate the usefulness of regular expressions, a text-processing tool built into every halfway-classy programming language. Perl nerds have long understand their power; perhaps an example will serve to illustrate it for normal humans.

As you can see in the image, the HTML Transmissions have straight-up italicized quotes, split by linebreaks, and attribution like this: -- author. The code looks like this:

	<p><i>"Unless the fates are faithless found<br> 
	And prophets' voice be vain,<br> 
	Where'er this monument is found<br> 
	The Scottish race shall reign."</i><br> 
	-- attributed to King Kenneth I MacAlpin (Sir Walter Scott trans.)

LaTeX offers alternatives like the quote environment; instead of specifying the text's presentation inline, LaTeX wants you to call out its function in the layout: 'This is a quotation' rather than 'This is an italicized paragraph with a little dash jobby at the bottom.' The syntax looks like this:

\begin{quote}
	``Unless the fates are faithless found\\ And prophets' voice be vain,\\
	Where'er this monument is found\\ The Scottish race shall reign."
	\sourceatright{attributed to King Kenneth I MacAlpin (Sir Walter Scott trans.)}
\end{quote}

The sourceatright command, specific (if memory serves) to the memoir package for formatting book-length manuscripts, will set the attribution at the bottom right of the quote - if there's room on the last line it goes there, else it gets its own line. Nice, huh?

Let's pretend, for the moment, that the half-million words of HTMLized Transmissions used consistent formatting for their quotations. (Aah, if only...)

How do we programmatically transform the one into the other?

Let's leave aside the linebreaks and just focus on splitting the last two lines of the HTML into quotation text and an attribution. Say we've managed to go through the file and standardize the quotes, such that the MacAlpin quote appears in our evolving LaTeX source file like so:

	<p><i>"Unless the fates are faithless found<br> And prophets'
	voice be vain,<br> Where'er this monument is found<br> The
	Scottish race shall reign."</i><br> -- attributed to King
	Kenneth I MacAlpin (Sir Walter Scott trans.)

(That's one long line, broken up here for ease of reading.)

OK, what've we got? A paragraph-open tag, an italics-open tag, then a long string of text (of indeterminate length) terminating in an italics-close tag - which abuts the linebreak tag/single-space/double-dash/single-space construct, then the attribution itself. We don't know the lengths of several of those parts. We want it to look like the nice LaTeX above.

Go ahead and try to do that using yer basic Search-and-Replace function.

You might start by simply changing the </i><br> -- string to \sourceatright{. OK, but now how do you know where to slap the closing brace after the attribution? With a different quote-author every time, you're gonna need wildcards - and what if, say, you're quoting material (e.g. Charles Fort) that includes plenty of italics/double-dashes?

I'll skip to the end of this mini-drama. I applied a single command to the half-million word file, and changed the quotes from HTML to more robust (and readable) LaTeX. The command was this:

find: ^<i>(.+?)</i>\\\\ -- (.+?)$

replace: \\begin{quote}\n$1 \\sourceatright{$2}\n\\end{quote}

What do those characters mean? Precisely this:

'(1) Find a string containing only a beginning-of-line marker (^), an italics-open tag, the shortest subsequent nonzero-length string of characters (.+?) ending in an italics-close tag, a double-backslash (LaTeX for linebreak), then a space, then a double-dash, then a space, then another string of whatever length, then an End of Line; store the two arbitrarily long strings in memory. (2) Now replace them with the quote environment opening tag, a carriage return (\n), the first stored string ($1), a space, the \sourceatright tag, the second stored string in braces({$2}), a carriage return, and finally the closing tag.'

The shortest-matching-string thing is interesting, actually: if you tell a regular expression to search for the string TEEN.+BARF (TEEN then one or more non-whitespace characters then BARF) inside the string TEENSMOOTHBARFCHUNKBARF, it'll return the whole thing - but if you insist that it search 'non-greedily,' for TEEN.+?BARF (TEEN then one or more non-whitespace characters, then the first subsequent instance of 'BARF'), it'll return TEENSMOOTHBARF instead. When you play around with Search-and-Replace in apps like Microsoft Word, it's easy to take that kind of distinction for granted, or just get annoyed by Word's mysterious behaviour; but using a proper regex allows you very fine-grained control over your searches. A regular expression is the perfect tool for, say, grabbing every single email address (even the oddly- or improperly-formed ones) out of a giant text file; or changing the format of a million phone numbers. Or switching a listing of names from LAST, FIRST to FIRST LAST (that one's a freebie, assuming they're simply and consistently formatted with no middle names: s/(.+?) (.+?)/$2 $1/g).

Same thing works for filenames and the like, of course.

There's no direct filesystem access on the iPad; the limit of your file-management abilities is the power to, say, add or delete PDFs in iBooks. That kind of thing. I imagine that from now on that'll increasingly be the norm on all 'computers' save for those aimed at so-called power users. (Do you use iTunes to manage your music? If so, do you even know how your mp3's are organized on your hard drive? Probably not - well, that's the future of all your files.) I hate this situation. Regular expressions, scripting languages, beautiful applications like LaTeX: these (freely-available) tools empower folks to do as they will with their data.

OK, enough highfalutin' nonsense. Wax Out.

Christ, I don't recognize myself anymore!

I just read a column by someone who has dubbed herself the 'Teafaerie,' over at Erowid, and GOD HELP ME right now I think it's kind of fantastic. It's about sex and psychedelics, and it is a fine piece of writing, and ends with a kick, so there you have it. Go on.

While you read, I'll sit here thinking about what in the world could have happened to me, that I am who (what?) I evidently am. Then I'll see what I can do about this awesome capacity for judgment and negativity that I've come to identify with my Self. Fun, huh.