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November 15th, 2009
03:23 am - i have all the stickley catalogs in pdf
I've got a couple of posts in the head-writing pipeline that may or may not ever show up here. I've been reading some things – not many, which I believe, possibly wrongly, to be because I don't have the right chair. I've got an old wingback armchair my grandmother gave me that I'm quite attached to, but I made the mistake of standing on it to reach things back in Maclean, and I think I wrecked the springs, and now I can't sit on it without sinking into it and hurting my back. Even the armchairs at libraries and coffee shops are mostly those weird formless boxy things that I've never been able to get comfortable in. Given that people have been making chairs for thousands of years, you'd think that most of the surviving chair designs would be good ones, but somehow it's not so. And now I've written a whole paragraph about chairs, but then, chairs are very important.
I've been making a little bit of money by doing freelance editing. I might have a lead on a way to do more, which, if it pans out – and given that I have a reference testifying that I can do the exact task I would be doing, I've almost convinced myself it might – could allow me to move wherever I want. (Well, not wherever – wherever the rent is low – but at any rate to a place of my choosing.)
I've spent overly much time cruising around the Peninsula. Overly because, as I've testified before, I don't like the Peninsula, but I can't park in San Francisco without risking the impoundment of my car because of a crazy legal SNAFU involving the parking tickets incurred while the car was stolen. Granted, the BART does exist, and I should probably take it.
It's starting to get a little bit cold. It ought to be colder.
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October 23rd, 2009
05:47 am
I always thought the most beautiful yards in Chicago were the untended ones in poor neighborhoods. Here are some houses that have themselves been taken over by plants. I wonder if it would be possible to design a house in such a way that plants could be allowed to freely grow over it without damaging it.
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October 18th, 2009
02:06 am
I just read the tenth Duino Elegy – I came across a text online, here. I don't think I had read it before. I have owned the Mitchell Selected Poetry of since sometime in high school, and given my years of preoccupation with Rilke I ought to have read every poem in that small book. Certainly every Elegy. But somehow I've mostly read the Elegies over and over, and with decreasing frequency with each successive one. My copy of that book is in the basement, and since the Mitchell translation is almost certainly better than the one I just linked to I should have gone and fetched it.
I haven't. Rilke tends to make me reluctant to do certain things I would normally want to do. I know nothing at all about the man himself and have read no secondary literature about his work. By personal policy, I don't introduce any individual person to Rilke – though with that one, I do somewhat understand why I do it; it's better to keep certain things separate. (In this case, I mean fetching the book, it's because it doesn't feel right to me to read nontrivial books in this house. But that itself does not seem to make sense.)
I've learned, as most people must have, to ignore words like "amazing" in commentary on books, even if it comes from an author I trust. I almost never find anything in the books to justify them. But Rilke is different from everyone else. I think ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) betterthanrain once wrote "How does he know to say such things?" and that has been my question ever since I stared at the Elegies long enough that they finally began to make sense. He took the things that can't be grasped, because they have no connection to anything outside us, and he grasped them. He broke the conspiracy of silence – which may not be much of a conspiracy at all, since it is only in my better moments that I am aware of being a participant in it.
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October 11th, 2009
12:25 am - i'm posting a silly book meme because i damn well feel like it
These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users. As usual, bold what you have read, italicize those you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. Add an asterisk to those you've read more than once. Underline those on your to-read list.
( list )
I have a tendency not to finish books stuff.
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October 6th, 2009
October 1st, 2009
10:32 pm - this species of manzanita grows on two mountains only
Some time ago I got around to climbing Montara Mountain. Not sure why I hadn't done it earlier. In most places that have a significant vertical dimension, the way to make those places suck less is to go up. Downtown Chicago is that way – did I ever write here about climbing the Congress Plaza hotel for the second time? Probably. Everything was different from the top floors – all perfectly silent and saturated with sunlight. The buildingtops were beautiful abstract forms from up there; much better than the identical blocks of blank concrete you see at the bottom. I found downtown beautiful once, with its vast banks of white and gold lights reflected in the river and buildings so tall they seem to reorganize space. Once that wears off it's one of the least interesting parts of the city.
Anyway, the mountain is much the same for reasons I was going to mention but don't entirely remember anymore. Some of the valleys you pass through are totally contained, with no visible trace of the not-really-towns that dot the peninsula like discarded scraps of cloth on a factory floor. The peak is somehow all the more a haven for being totally exposed. You can see both the sea and the bay from there – the peninsula is smaller than I thought. Made me appreciate how much land I was really seeing when I climbed Taishan years ago. I had no scale for it at the time.
Some of you probably learned from Facebook that my car was stolen some weeks ago. Recently it came back; the thief left it a block and a half from the place I'd parked it without even removing anything. Now, I suppose, I can go to the gym, and join some of the group sorts of things I'd thought about. Maybe actually meet some people. Not that I could go with them to do anything that costs money.
I haven't been working as hard at the job thing as I should have. The chances of any individual attempt yielding any result seem to be so low that it's hard to convince myself it's worth it. At one point before I went on Effexor even thinking too hard about jobs would make me so angry at myself for certain past failures to act that I'd be completely incapacitated for the next hour or two, and I practically had to train myself not to do it. Now I just sit there expecting the rage to come, and it doesn't. If the symptoms of depression hadn't hid themselves among situational factors so effectively I might have a work history now, and consequently might have a much easier time. But maybe not.
I do wonder why I've spent the past couple of days feeling like my head is sitting improperly on my neck and my brain has been replaced with styrofoam. There's never been much of a pattern to these things that I can divine. I seem to have built up a tolerance to British mystery programs and may need to replace them with something else.
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September 18th, 2009
12:20 am - mm again
Restarted Mark Mazower's book on Salonica. It begins with a completely apropos quotation from Invisible Cities, so you'd expect it to be good, and it seems to be very, very good so far, although in a very different way from Dark Continent (which is also very much worth reading, BTW). I wanted at one time to be a historian, and while reading a book like this it's difficult to understand why I could have pursued any other job. Of course, the reason I didn't major in history is that I wanted to pursue something that I could continue in graduate school with the expectation of getting a job afterward. What else could I do with my particular skill set but become a scholar? Yet I've had doubts about that for a long time. Working largely in isolation on a vast project that invades your whole life, without any immediate reinforcement for anything, while situated in a vast social maze that I'd have to navigate to gain advancement, seems like an excellent way to drive myself completely crazy. I fear the academy.
And in a way I hate the academy, although I'm not entirely sure how or why. Certainly not for the same reasons as the anti-intellectual rightists, who seem to be motivated by vulnerability – the scholars claim to know more than they do, and because the rightists can't or won't engage the scholars on their own terms, they can't grip the situation, and flail around in anger. No, I hate the academy for the only reason I've ever hated anyone: they have something I want. And I suspect they're misusing it, and I'm not sure if they will give it to me. (It's not surprising that my attitudes here would be contradictory. My first impressions of the academy were formed in the wonderful wooden back halls of the UM Natural History Museum, where my mother brought her toddling son as she labored at her dissertation. But those same wooden halls failed her in the end.)
I have a theory about occupational choice. People who grew up rich want to maintain the lifestyle they're used to, so they try to become CEOs and investment bankers. People who grew up poor, or in financial uncertainty, want to avoid being poor again, so they go for the most secure jobs – medicine, law. The middle class engenders neither desire and produces people like me.
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August 29th, 2009
05:26 pm
Last night, being unable to sleep, I decided to drive into San Francisco and visit a 24-hour Starbucks. Some people on Yelp had commented that SF has a dearth of 24-hour establishments - a remarkable statement, I think, because compared to Chicago it has loads. (Apparently in Portland there are many more.) I drove with the windows down – since if I have to travel distances that make walking impractical, I'd at least like to be able to smell the places I'm traveling through, so as not to be utterly cut off – and with no music, except for the unnerving rhythmic grinding that might be from the rear differential. San Francisco is beautiful at night, as most cities are, although in a slightly different way.
The Starbucks itself was a nice enough place to be. It was filled with students at work and a few teenagers chatting among themselves, and one middle-aged man seated beside me who was watching YouTube clips about the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. I almost got the feeling that if I started to go there regularly I might eventually speak to someone.
I would like to have a job as a barista – not permanently, of course, but for a while, and preferably on a late shift. I don't imagine it's actually very pleasant, but the idea is appealing. It's never seemed entirely natural to me to have a job that consists of completing projects and achievements, and I'd like to have one that expresses itself in space instead of time. One where I'd be responsible for one very particular place, a pleasant one where people would come in and out, and would simply have to ensure that everything there was as it should be. (This is also why I've applied to be a park ranger.)
The aloe in the back yard is in bloom, and attracting hummingbirds – not surprising, given the shape/color of the flowers, but I was unsure if this would happen since aloe and hummingbirds do not coexist in nature.
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August 26th, 2009
August 24th, 2009
09:31 am - nuova!
Spent much of last night reading articles about engines and car suspensions. My possession of a driver's license has set off a wave of obsessive interest about car models, much as when I turned 21 I read up on the history of alcoholic beverages and learned numerous cocktail recipes, most of which I have little interest in actually drinking. Anyway, I've just learned that the new Fiat 500 is probably going to be marketed in the US, in the same marketing niche as the Mini. That's nice – the Mini is a car I'd like to have for various reasons, but the way in which its appearance is distinctive is kind of ostentatious, and I see so many around that the point of the distinctiveness is lost. The Fiat is also distinctive-looking, but in a much more understated way. And the interior is nicely 60s-retro. Of course all this is moot anyway, because if I'm ever in the market for a new car it will not be soon.
(Hopefully they would sell the diesel model here. Something like half the new cars sold in Europe are diesel, but the price incentives for diesel here are a bit perverse.)
I didn't sleep a wink last night because I'd slept until three after accidentally leaving my headphones in and failing to hear my alarm (See, I have to use iTunes+iCal as my alarm clock, because I can vary the music file; if the alarm always sounds the same, I'll get used to it and will always sleep through it even if it is very loud. DSPS, how I loathe thee.) That's probably why I'm so boring right now.
I want to go hiking, but the car's in the shop and I've been to San Pedro County Park twice this week already. Got a nibble from a very interesting job, but I'm trying not to get my hopes up. Watched both seasons of True Blood, which takes itself unseriously enough to be very entertaining.
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August 18th, 2009
12:49 am - the lament
Why are no coffee shops here open late? Nine o'clock is the latest they go, and for some reason I suspect that if there are any people here I want to meet, they would hang around coffee shops between nine PM and three AM. (Actually, I made up that justification just now. I just like coffee shops at night, regardless of any other occupants.) Actually, I can drive into San Francisco relatively easily now, so I should probably look into things there.
Granted, there is a bar in town that's open late. But going to a bar alone feels to me like an excursion into an alien culture, and Googling "how to act in a bar" brings up only this.
(Side note for those who care: family drama has mostly subsided. The last post reflected an unexpected event that threw me for a loop, but seems to be more good than bad so far. Also, I have some new job leads via some family acquaintances, though who knows if they'll pan out.)
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August 11th, 2009
06:57 pm
I get turned down from a job I wanted badly, the family drama kicks off a whole new round, and my wonderful high school calculus teacher's daughter dies. (I don't remember ever meeting the girl, but it's hard not to be affected when she was all of eight years old.) I never liked Tuesdays to begin with.
Also, I think there's something wrong with my car.
ETA: Okay, I'm told she was significantly older than eight. This is what I get for forgetting journalistic discipline.
ETA 2: Obituary link.
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August 10th, 2009
11:55 pm - one day, this shall be my car
Actually, it will not be my car, because they aren't exported to the US and probably have street-legality issues here. But it's adorable. (There's a whole class of very small cars in Japan that exist because vehicles below a certain size and engine displacement are largely exempt from vehicle taxes there. Subaru tried marketing one here in the late 80s, and predictably it failed miserably. If fuel prices continue to climb, I wonder if they won't try again; some of these get mileage comparable to something like a Prius even though they have regular gas engines.)
This guy was recently lamenting the American taste for angry-looking cars, and of course I agree wholeheartedly. Even VW is redesigning the Golf to be more "aggressive," which is a pity; I liked their styling because it was so subdued compared to some of their competitors'. I can't be the only person who feels ridiculous in an aggressive car. (Actually, given how many Mini Coopers I see around, I'm probably not.
Drove to Burlingame today. The downtown street parking is all diagonal instead of parallel. Easier, sure, but damn unsightly. (This is also one of the towns that turned down a BART extension to keep the riff-raff away. It also has its own Apple store despite having fewer than 30,000 people, which should tell you something. And yet I still go there, because it does have a more attractive downtown than most Peninsula towns.)
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August 5th, 2009
05:38 pm - rrrm rrrm
Well, I have a driver's license, only six years behind schedule. (And one testing date behind schedule, since last time I managed to discover what might be the single least dangerous act to cause automatic failure.) I'm still not particularly pleased that you have to learn to dance a poisonous metal block in order to be a competent adult in this society, or that built-up areas are designed to be driven through rather than walked through, making pedestrians aliens in our own cities and alienating us from our surroundings and filling everything with ugly parking lots etc. etc. Not to mention that the expectation of routine driving is crippling to people who can't/shouldn't drive. Europe doesn't have this problem because they were sensible enough to slam massive taxes on cars and gas</i>.
But, I have to admit, it is useful.
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August 1st, 2009
11:50 pm - Viridium deer
I went to the county park yesterday afternoon with the intention of walking in the hills in order to exercise. I sat on a bench in the valley to drink some water, and the position of the sun and the shadows it cast reminded me of late afternoons I had spent in elementary school. Most children had gone home from after-school child care at that point, and for those of us who were left things became quieter. No more loud carrying-on, only – what did we do? I can't remember, but I remember the place and how it was. I don't think I was conscious at the time of how much I enjoyed this, and I wonder if the other children experienced something similar.
Anyway, I sat in one place for a long time. I felt sad, for reasons that are not important, and realized that I enjoyed feeling sad. It always used to be that the times I was most happy were interspersed with sadness, even despair, from day to day and even from hour to hour. I didn't understand this, and don't now; there may be a biological explanation. The times I am thinking of weren't merely pleasing ones, but somehow beautiful and astounding in ways I've never really understood. That trip to Chicago for Pitchfork in 2006 – fun, yes, but why should it have been like that? Yet it was.
The word melancholy is often used, especially in older sources, to signify depression. That is not, I think, the association it has for most people today. (The word depression is anyway very unsatisfactory – Styron says in his memoir that the man who coined it was a non-native speaker of English, and I can well believe it.) In my personal system of definitions, melancholy has as much in common with depression as a birch-tree has with a pile of rotting meat. Melancholy happens when we apprehend beauty, but are simultaneously aware that we are unable to grasp or retain it. It is the nature of the human mind that we can grasp nothing firmly. And so a certain kind of sadness (but not despair) has an almost Pavlovian association with all the best things. Possibly. There are also mechanistic explanations.
So it is not surprising that I would like to be melancholy more often.
But I wish that the county park could stand on its own in my mind. It used to be that trees and buildings were numinous; either they pointed to something beyond themselves or they were simply full of themselves. And now it seems like every tree is not the right tree. I'm not sure if I will be able to develop relationships with new places like those I had with the old places. I can't ask others about this because I know of no one who can relate to the inanimate quite like I do. Or, they can, but I don't know about it, because these things can't be conveyed to other people as far as I can figure out. If I ever am again like I was, I'll know it when I constantly try to express myself and find that language is useless.
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July 25th, 2009
12:46 pm - Lines and more lines
I wonder how long it would have taken me to figure out on my own that you shouldn't wear a striped tie with a pinstriped jacket. (Ties seem to be ugly lately anyway. I looked up some tie patterns from the 1930s and 40s, thinking they'd be more tasteful, but many of them were even worse. Sigh.)
This comes up because I managed to score a job interview with a tutoring center near San Francisco, one which seems like a better employer than most companies in that field. They give qualifying tests to their applicants, so if I can manage to get that far I might have an advantage. I've also heard back from a medical device company recently, so I'm beginning to actually think I might be employable.
These bog-standard three-button suits are dull to begin with – it would be nice if three-pieces or double-breasted suits would come back in, not to mention hats. But then I'm philosophically opposed to fashion, and if I need to dress formally in some other context I might as well wear them anyway.
More interestingly: when I was in high school I came across a book at Borders full of drawings of fantastic architecture by a pair of Russian artists. I thought, "I must remember their names," but for once I forgot them, and Google turned up nothing. But I did happen to come across them again today – they're Brodsky and Utkin.
Incidentally, I found that via Bibliodyssey, which is a blog of illustrations from old books – full of awesome, really.
EDIT: Recently re-encountered this page, which displays the 250 images most recently uploaded to LJ. If you're lucky you can find some interesting things. Porn is a near-certainty, though.
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July 16th, 2009
06:13 am
I haven't had a real nightmare since I was a child. I thought that maybe the dreams were just as bad, but because I was older, I could shrug them off more easily. I was wrong about that, I think. I've just been asleep for less than two hours – just woke up – and I feel like it was much, much longer.
I'd been asleep for who knows how long. Twelve hours, sixteen, more. I wanted to wake up, and so I did, over and over. Every time I'd try to check the environment around me to see if it was as it should be. It was difficult, because most of what I remembered came from previous iterations of the dream and not from real life. And just when I thought I'd finally succeeded, things would start to go wrong.
Sometimes it seemed that I really did wake up, but I was too tired or too asleep to rise. I do not know how many of these occasions were real. I think most were not.
Even though it just happened I've already forgotten most of it. There were themes developing across the iterations. One time I saw brightly colored clothes hanging on lines all crisscrossing the street. The next I saw the clothes of a seven-year-old girl hanging outside my window, and the girl appeared and killed me because I had seen them. Once I saw flies alighting on horses, and then I saw horses with cardboard shades under their eyes, and resting on the shades were flies, and quail, and scorpions. I wrecked my laptop by thrashing around, trying to wake up. I spilled mushroom pasta on the blankets. My stepfather killed me accidentally by burning pinecones on the carpet. A rapist killed me to conceal his crimes. Tupac Shakur killed me; I don't know why. I'd always awaken in a room that was slightly different from all the others, and I'd try moving, probing. I grasped the slats above my bed, to find they were made of wood, but I couldn't remember if they should be there.
( The end )
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June 21st, 2009
07:31 pm
Today I got offered an interview at a lab studying obesity in mouse models. Then I went for a walk in the mountains and saw a mouse squeaking frantically as a snake carried it away. (This kind, specifically. They are, I will admit, pretty.) Moar grant money for botany, plz.
(Also basic science in general. Politicians seem to have great difficulty understanding that you need basic research to even discover what questions to ask in clinical research, much less how to answer them. Also that human evolutionary biology and population genetics are good things to know about for various reasons.)
Made porcini mushroom pasta. It was good.
ETA: Watching wrenching depictions of civilian suffering in war makes me want to go back to Michigan. This is less strange than it sounds, or stranger than it sounds, if you inferred the most obvious explanation. Of course, I'm not sure I do want to go back there, because when I get there it might seem that the city has nothing to do with me anymore, and then I'd have nowhere. But somehow I think it isn't quite done with me yet.
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June 18th, 2009
01:02 am
In lieu of original writingz, more quotes from authors on other authors:
Tolkien explains that he has a 'cordial dislike of allegory'. Amen! Amen! And just to be clear, there is no contradiction at all between this fact, and the certain truth that his world throws off metaphors, can and should be read as doing all sorts of things, wittingly or unwittingly, with ideas of society, of class, the war, etc. But here is precisely the difference between allegory and metaphor: the latter is fecund, polysemic, generative of meanings but evasive of stability; the former is fecund and interesting largely to the extent that it fails. . . . His dissatisfaction with the Narnia books was in part precisely because they veered too close to allegory, and therefore did not believe in their own landscape. A similar problem is visible now, in the various tentative ventures into u- or dystopia by writers uncomfortable with the genre they find themselves in and therefore the worlds they create, eager to stress that these worlds are 'about' real and serious things--and thereby bleeding them of the specificity they need to be worth inhabiting, or capable of 'meaning', at all.
Yes!
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June 15th, 2009
07:56 pm
More crazy-vivid dreams last night. I can only recall snatches, of course, but at one point I can recall seeing a human skeleton suspended in midair. Tissues and organs appeared on it layer by layer, and as the circulatory system appeared, every vein and artery individually visible, I wondered how my brain could possibly be doing this.
It's the second time this month that I've been aware that I was dreaming and the dreams have somehow been so. . . other to make me wonder if I was going crazy. A couple of weeks ago I saw a space of curving and twisting shapes that emitted and refracted light in ways that should not be possible, and although I can't bring to mind just how it felt, I knew that I had never seen anything so beautiful or tremendous. And then I saw chambers of wet flesh and grinding teeth, heard spines crack, and I had never been so terrified.
Those experiences are there, somewhere, in the design space of the mind. Every day I know they are there and every day they are inaccessible.
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