November 2004 – My Scattered Thoughts

MadeinMTL is very groovy interactive map of Montreal.

It’d be cool if Seattle had one of these.

arrrrrrrr

here’s a pirate thing to keep you happy, matey

The Mythical Troutburger

That prickling stream that does so,

does so with fire

does so with underwire supports and trestles and—

oh my!—

but yardarms and tasty skeeter-bugs are slip-slithering about

on water viscosity

what a ride!

Cast your tangled net upon the waters

pull those fabled creatures loose—

nary a fabled creature but that doesn’t

but that hasn’t

but that wiln’t

be pulled from this winedark stream

chimaeras, gorgons, krakens and all–

catch those dangly strings in rushes and yarkled knobs and twisted pebbles.

Toss the junk away—

your serendipitous trash–toss it!

your boiled mittens

your scalloped and freezedried mustachios—

look! it’s Don Quixote floating in the slime!—

your cracked and burning hatchet wives

your misers and your dew-eyed orphans

your pennywinkles and

your gauzy nostril flares:

throw them all into that heaving bosom of a trickle of a stream:

where troutburgers dance their flipping way up

the cold old wet fishy trail—

as fires yoinkle those fishy loins—

to the headwaters, to the frothy

salacious pebble-strewn lustbeds

of their mothers

of their grandmothers

of their evermothers

and with great hooplah:

flowers and streamers and big-redded clowns

twirling bears on tumbling balls and peanut smells

candy weeping in the sun:

this hooplah

that hooplah

these hooplah:

the troutburgers expended, expire and die…

Mario, greengrocer, with tickergun

pencils stuffed in shirt

belly bubbling over belt

still-dripping mustachio crammed to lip

cold and withering eyes

sees expired troutburgers, tosses them into trash.

And he and all his groceries—

fuschia tiles and all

drilling muzak and finger-polish smells—

everything folds up and slides away downstream

trickling away into larger waters.

That’s not to say that we will miss him: Mario.

We won’t.

We can’t stand the spiny pustule’s greedy heart.

He took his pound of flesh from us—

we wanted those troutburgers!—

and tossed it in the gutter with no thought

for us, for quivering bellies and

shaking fingers

scattered nerves slipping through our bloodless hands.

But sigh not so! let them go.

For we shall yet feast upon the feast of gluttons,

drink from the liquored dreams of winos and

tearing women, those utter-mad-with-wine women.

Cast your holey net upon the stream:

who knows what we shall receive

but he who gives and takes.

Weep not, dear friends, into your empty plastic goblets,

stop your nibbling on forks of lead!

Though these troutburgers be gone,

lost to us forever,

yet we shall still eat!

(Completed sometime in 2000.)

That really huge list of boooks down there

After months and months of being a kind of sore thumb or nagging hangnail kind of thing, I’ve decided to address that long list of books down there that I haven’t really addressed at all for, well, for a really long time. (As part of my sort of neurotic/obsessive personality–in the same way that I have trouble tossing aside a book that I haven’t finished reading–I’m having trouble re-envisioning this here blog-thing (God, I hate the word blog. It’s so… un-aesthetic.) while that long-in-the-tooth list of books I’ve read keeps malingering there. I mean gadzooks!, it’s not even really up-to-date…) So here goes my attempt to bite-size these books I read oh-so-long ago:

The Crime Studio and Slaughtermatic by Steve Aylett: Could these be called surrealist neo-noir? I don’t know, but it sort of fits. Both of these books concern themselves with a city called Beerlight in which everyone is a criminal (especially the cops). The Crime Studio is a collection of interwoven stories and Slaughtermatic is a mostly incoherent novel–which works in its favor, oddly enough. Aylett’s use of language is astounding and hysterical. I suspect that most people would absolutely loathe these books, but I got a huge kick out of them. Probably the most original things that I read all year. Read the first story in Crime Studio: if you throw it across the room, it’s not for you. If, on the other hand, you find yourself chortling into your cereal spoon, oh do, do keep reading.

The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde: The third book in the Thursday Next series. Bubble-gum reading for literature nuts, these are all about literature and genre in-jokes. It’s a bit too bad that this book should be so narrowly focussed, as the Thursday Next books feature such a crazily creative world. People keep dodos as pets! I’d really recommend reading the first, The Eyre Affair, as this book contains many elements that would be utterly bewildering without that background. Even though his world is fraught with silliness, Fforde’s characters are not: it’s a fine line that he walks, but he’s managed to pull it off for three books now.

The Magic Pudding: Being the Adventures of Bunyip Bluegum and His Friends Bill Barnacle & Sam Sawnoff by Norman Lindsay: A very funny Australian children’s book from more than 80 years ago. They have a very surly magic puddin’* (it wears its bowl for a hat when it’s walking around) that is continually being stolen by a possum and a wombat. There’s nothing a good punch on the nose won’t solve! Hysterically funny. The book is in the public domain, and you can download it here.

*(Magic because it never runs out and can become any kind of pudding imaginable.)

Voice of the Fire by Watchmen and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen fame.” href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Moore”>Alan Moore: If you can get past the first story or chapter or whatever of this book, I salute you! The first chapter puts Faulkner’s idiot protagonist/narrator to shame. I’d almost recommend skipping it, if the symbols and themes and whatnot established in the first chapter weren’t so ubiquitous throughout the entire work. But oh is it worth it! This book has the ability to blow the top of your skull off your brainpan. It’s all about the illusion of time and the magical power of place, specifically Northampton, England.

The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language by John McWhorter: I learned more from reading this book than perhaps any other I’ve read in the two or three years. His particularly gift seems to be making incredibly complicated ideas ridiculously simple. (I mean, what’s more difficult than explaining grammatical concepts that don’t exist in English?) He discusses the ways in which spoken language changes over time and the difference between spoken and written language; pidgin and creole formation as language-formation in process and dialect as a gigantic, complex in-joke. He makes a strong case for the preservation of dying languages. This book is excellent.

Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson: I’m at extreme danger of geeking out here. In the last four months, I’ve read four of Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen books. These books are incredibly dense (and huge), filled with scores of characters and plot structures which span an entire (fictional) globe and hundreds of thousands of years. I know that this kind of huge fantasy series isn’t for everyone, but if it is for you, then really, pick up a copy. These books have seriously cut into my sleeping time. They also defy easy summarization, so I’m not even going to try.

ride of the spamologues

that crazy, crazy mr. bangalour!

scribbled superheroes

a perfectly lovely thing

and i always wondered what it looked like beneath a duck… (well, okay. i never wondered about it before, but it just seemed more, i don’t know, poetic the other way.)

A Theory of Fun

It seems there’s this fellow named Raph Koster who is writing a book called: A Theory of Fun for Game Design. There’s a PDF cartoon summary that you can download here.

It’s very very cool. Check it out.

all the books are in their right place….

….and all is well with the world

shakin’ the cobwebs off

i’ve just got all these cobwebs and i’m shaking the nerves off my hands. trying to piece together some sort of jigsaw puzzle of words; all these windows leading into some kind of theoretical or modular nightmare. or not nightmare, more like a tangle of thread just zooming around and getting caught in the cacti.

this then that and that then this. and on and on and on. just plonking one word after another into place. smashing them in with a hammer if they don’t quite fit, only to find, at the end (lord will it comes soon!) that garden gnome’s left eyeball is floating upside down in the air, miles into space.

cream soup, or cream of the crop soup, or cream of the harvest moon soup. it’s all beautiful, whatever kind of soup it is. i’m craving a kind of soup that will steam out from that overheating belly, watch the tears fall and the drops of sweat scatter about the room with every wagging of the head. don’t fall asleep inside your soup! there’s not enough room for peas and carrots and leeks… and you.

even so, with all that, i can’t keep from obsessing over fantastickal things. the words written on the page that drill right into the middle of my brain, and of all things merlin, why does that have to crawl? feel the daze of sleeplessness spin the creatured turntable right-round, see its mesmered claws reaching out, sliding into focus and away, until that bubble-gaze just pops.

hot dog! i sit and watch (not now, earlier. or later) my fingers paralyzed, sitting, and where’s my brain at? maybe gone out for a coffee and a scone. the kind with a chunk or two of chocolate stuck in the middle (yeah, but how’d they get the square of chocolate inside of there, unmelted like? but hey, now i know it’s not a scone i’m thinking of at all, but that french pastry, withal that flaky and etc.) where’s the will to type or talk with those hollow, aching fingers?

jump in and type, fool, there’s no harm can come from it. no harm that’s worth speaking of anyhow.

(Orange Power by The Falcon Project)

Month: November 2004

He’s no Dick Van Dyke!

Interactive Maps