tl;dr

There are years when you have more to say, and there are years when you have less to say.

This is one of those years.

Apophenia

A stone with strange inscriptions on it. It’s the only line I remember from Fort. It has been four years and four months since I last mentioned it.

Tudor breasts and the parade of daughters (blowers, bonesetters, heretics, alchemists). At least one of them from something Imani said, somewhere, some time ago.

I read Dr. Bloodmoney a few days ago. I’m trying to save them for the years to come. Some day I will have read them all, but— they say Dick got here before the rest of us did, and I don’t want to have to leave him behind.

I love Cayce Pollard, I think. That’s why I reread her -to be with, or to be her, the familiar partly-tamed pathologies and obsessions. Postdrome migraine euphoria is like shoegaze drone, pleasant and buzzy and sad, made for the end credits of a movie with Bill Murray as the gaijin face of Bikkle. It’s the first and gentler half of the book that I love the best, before events overtake us.

I’m having trouble with the year, the October that won’t end. The season, but more so than usual, and what should have been over by now has crept into me and will not out.

I need to take care of myself, I know. And I am, in my fashion. But it should hurt when you break something, and it does.

The Best Jesus vs. Dinosaur Fight Scene Award, 2007

The Best Jesus vs. Dinosaur Fight Scene Award for 2007 goes to Jeff Rowland, and will probably be the same for 2008, or forever, if nobody can top this.

The Knights Templar are suing the Pope

The Knights Templar are suing the Pope, hilariously.

The only thing more awesome than this would be if zombie Galileo and zombie Bruno were to invade the Vatican riding dinosaurs and carrying lots of guns, blowing the Swiss Guard’s stripy baggy pantaloons off while shouting “Eppur si muove!“

JJ Abrams vs. Moratuwa

Fringe has a comic-book prequel, scans of which can be seen here.

This comic is supposed to be giving us more background on “the pattern” -a series of inexplicable, seemingly paranormal events- that will presumably be the central mystery of Fringe. This preview describes several such events, including:

• 200 mysteriously dead cows in Kansas
• a tsunami that wipes out Moratuwa and kills 83,000 people
• a missing American kid re-appears (nobody dies) in Munich
• a man wakes up from a decades-long coma in Lisbon (nobody dies)

Is there anything about these events that seems just a tad unbalanced to you? Eh? Eh?

Yes, it’s this: where all the dead white people?

Now, I know this is a preview of a comic which is a prequel to a tv show, which means it is probably complete throwaway handwaving, just part of the hype machine -I don’t even know who writes it.  And I’m not saying that JJ (or whoever) can’t kill a whole buncha fictional Sri Lankans in any way he pleases. I myself often fantasize about The point is -well, if JJ Abrams had, instead of an inexplicable tsunami in Moratuwa, had a mysterious plane crash into some towers in an American city (and casually named a death toll more than twice as high than that of 9/11, to boot) would that have been an equally acceptable “mysterious disaster” to the audience of Fringe? I imagine not.

JJ has used Sri Lanka as shorthand before; in Lost‘s “Sri Lanka video” thing this place was just, almost literally, a certified sticker of exoticity. It was just a way of saying “somewhere far away and inconsequential”. Now, in Fringe, the place and the disaster are conflated together into a convenient package -emotional shorthand layered on top of the geographical shorthand.

Who watches the Watchmen trailer?

Who watches the Watchmen trailer? I’m not sure why I’ve watched it half a dozen times. It’s interesting, but not necessarily good. Ozymandias looks nerdier than I thought he should; Laurie just looks completely different -the ridiculous vamp-stalk through the flaming wreckage just has me rolling my eyes- and Dan seems to be lacking that distinctive owly pudginess.

And I don’t know. Presumably the Watchmen movie will not have the Hollis Mason story about the garage owner with the fake boobs and the Ride of the Valkyries. It probably will not have Blood from the Shoulder of Pallas, Dan’s little monograph on owls. It pretty much can’t have the shipwreck-pirate-horror story-within-the-story. And I don’t know if the Mars sequence can even be done outside of comics at all.

I am just complaining for the usual reasons. The movie will probably be all right, for a movie. It’s just, you know. It’s the goddamn Watchmen. You have higher expectations than your common-or-garden Hulk movie. Mind you, I thought both Hulk movies were pretty good.

Tardigrades! In space!

Tardigrades! In space! It’s more than a little ridiculous that they are called “water bears”, but at the same time it is extremely awesome.

Finally, the ultimate terrist-foiling technology: just ring the city with laser beams. We will all get used to the constant protective pewpewpew soon enough.

Things that explode unexpectedly

Things that explode unexpectedly: now including lakes, frogs and ants.

I’m thinking of getting a Device, and attaching it to my head or something. When the red light starts to blink, duck.

Every now and then your head swims.

Every now and then your head swims. Doesn’t it? It’s like the way your body sometimes shudders, that involuntary myoclonic twitch when you come awake from being half-asleep -it’s called the hypnic jerk, though it amuses me to call it the hylic jerk instead. Some say it happens because something in your brain thinks you’re a monkey falling out of a tree. Some say it means your soul is returning from wandering and bumped its shin on the catflap on its way back in -that would make it a pneumatic jerk as well as a hylic one. Heh. Both of those things are about a dislocation, a mis-fitting, a readjustment of perspective.

There is a corresponding dislocation of mind, when you suddenly look up and for no reason see your life from the outside, as if it were a play, and a distant play. It is most startling when it happens mid-sentence, because it breaks the illusion of self. Your head swims, as you try to reorient yourself. Something in you is out of time. Or perhaps it is the other way around, and something that is out of time is what you are. It is not an effort to return to being something that is in time -no, it’s a lot like falling, though not like falling from a great height. More like falling off the first step of a ladder. A breathless moment and a thud as you drop and hold your balance.

When we say “I”, this is metonymy.

This is the dislocation, the psychic jerk: suddenly through our own eyes to remember our face and our name. That despite the space we feel about us -or that we felt, when we were not ourself, or a self at all- a space of possibility, of contiguity, or both -we are not free of everything that we have done, or not done; and all these things are what bind us into one name, one face, out of the many, many. Out of the endless space, falling off the first step, not losing your balance, reclaiming the right and obligation to a name.

And no, I don’t believe in pneuma, and no I don’t make such a sharp distinction between hyle and psyche as the people who first used these words, but then nobody makes that distinction any more, because it long ago became obvious that if we were any thing at all, we were continuum. A myoclonic twitch, a psychological segmentation fault, a second of terror, fear of the fall.

I tell you: we are not free.

Kinds of Thing, Kind of Thing

There are something like 19,500 different kinds of bees. That’s more kinds of bees than there are kinds of mammals and birds combined.

A tangent on Plurk recently brought up rhetorical devices, which are always fascinating reading not least because they have such evocative, wonderful names. Praecisio, breaking off a sentence for effect: what in the name of— ? Adnominatio, to assign to a proper name its literal or homophone meaning -my father was always particularly fond of those, and I might add that this made him no friends whatsoever. The scissor-like snicker-snack of “scesis onomaton” as it excises verbs; the disturbing cacosyntheton and the time-travelling paradoxes that may be caused by overuse of the hysteron proteron (which incidentally sounds like something in Buzz Lightyear’s utility belt); tmesis as in “abso-fuckin’-lutely!” vs. anastrophe as in “fuck the what?”, and so forth.

It seems a lot of people are charmed by this subject, because there are many listings and collections online, including the Rhetosaurus and the Silvia Rhetoricae. Leafing through them is fun, not only for the archaic charm of the names, but because you are reminded that language -as it is normally used, every day by just about everyone- is a subtle and beautiful thing. And it amuses me greatly to think of generations of rhetoricians hunting down each mutant in distant thickets of discourse, tagging it and naming it and labouriously describing it in their books, more kinds of turn of phrase than there are kinds of birds and bees together.

The sun is broken. That is all.

The sun is broken. That is all.

Vanderlust

Warning: fanboy post. If you don’t know who Jeff VanderMeer is, well… well, you will soon. Unless you’re one of those people who never clicks on the links. Yes, I see you.

A Jeff VanderMeer interview in which, among other things, he lists his favourite books! Jeff VanderMeer on novel outlines! Jeff VanderMeer’s own definition of the New Weird!

And in some sort of incredible vortex of awesomeness, Wired is giving away a PDF of VaderMeer’s latest novel, The Situation, which he describes as “Dilbert meets Gormenghast”. Download and enjoy. There are blurbs and an excerpt here if you are the cautious type.

Not Talking About Your Feelings is good …

Not Talking About Your Feelings is good for you.

Plurk! Gwan then. Plurk! Is it the new Twitter, or just the new Jaiku? Or, god forbid, the new Pownce, or whatever the hell that thing was called.

Comics about the quake in China. I suppose that makes it non-fiction, obviously supposed to be emotional and heart-wrenching, I think. Heartlessly, I think these comics are actually rather bad. Clumsy, sentimental, tedious -reading them distances me from the events they describe, makes everything less human and more annoying. Alan Moore did a small piece in a similar vein after 9/11 -it was called This Is Information and it seems to be completely unavailable on the internets now, apart from the opening panels- which was not particularly sophisticated but considerably better than this sort of would-be tearjerker cheesefest. Of course, he’s Alan Moore and it’s unfair to compare against him. OR IS IT? I am tired of the relentless relativism of mediocrity, the idea that we should be applauding cheesy, schmaltzy, maudlin rubbish because these people Tried So Hard. Speaking of which… were there tsunami comics? I hope not. Odds are they’d be like that terrible book that guy wrote.

Goosh, the Google shell, is outstandingly awesome. Now if only it was a downloadable shell.