This is one of those years.

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 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!“

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.