Author: shawn

all those furrows in the brain, that’s how it mushes together up there.
and what sorts of ploughs would you need to row a steady crop of thornbushes (with roses pasted on) or some other salutary crop. dunno.
feeling haberbashed or cornswoggled for no discernible.
there was a halting sort of–
as though the teardroppings kept–
but even now the things get off track and elegant.
or no, not elegant.
some other elevated word.

hush hush, the clabberbeast is roiling through the area.
and though that area is about as unclearly defined as can be, never fear, that’s a thing to be aware of, as much as.

I rather enjoyed Adam Nicolson’s God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible for its highly detailed portrayals of the quirky fellows who Translated the King James Bible. Nicolson is unafraid to confront the contradictions and flaws that these men evidenced.

He tries to answer an excellent question: How did the King James Bible turn out so well–seeing as how it was a book translated by a committee!??!

The book wasn’t quite as literary as I would have liked (are my standards too high?) and at times seemed over-simplistically written. Too much anecdote, not enough translating! to be short about it. Oddly enough, I read all of this book except for the last chapter… (though I did read the last page or two).

I would recommend this book, though not highly, and only if it’s a subject that you’re interested in reading.

Here’s a scan of an early KJB title page.

La la la.

“I’ve got really tiny bugs feet / I don’t even know what bugs eat…Why is everybody picking on me? / Now I’m sympathizing with fleas…

which came first? the chicken or the hopscotch?

Staggering past the munchkins arrayed in great splendour–we really must come up with a more fluid and reprehensible method of governing–Ogilvie Transistorsides wondered again what had gotten into him. He meant, of course, the three quarts of spoilt milk which he had, so to speak, token.

Not normally known for his deviation from the standardized set of mind-altering chemicals, Ogilvie Transistorsides had been seduced into the spoilt milk by the gregarious and vaguely altruistic charms of Googoorian Veld, he of the spangled hat and dusty drawers. When Googoorian Veld was on the prowl, meting out his canisters of spoilt milk, well, no one was safe from his honeyed, yet dare we say forked, tongue: not the bashful schoolgirl nor the bespectacled wayward minister (he means well!) nor the subway car driver nor the washer of great greens nor, it seems, our finicky protaganist, Ogilvie Transistorsides. This in spite of his gutteral and frangled reaction to the eyeball–one might even call it an obsessive phobia, were one inclined–upon which the spoilt milk was placed for which the full efficacy was achieved.

So, this staggering about, this wanton disregard of limbs and flagpoles, wasn’t even yet about the activation or the tunnellizing into a newly (drug-induced) reality, but instead was simply the result of milk-filmed eyeballs and the trouble Ogilvie Transistorsides had seeing through it and his posterboard sunglasses–each with a cranky sun pasted on: the cranky grin, the cranky frown. He only hoped no policer was on the prowl.

Any hope of lingering with (or lingerieing, grinning) some curly hatchensnap was puffing away like so much dandelion soap. A great milky tear froozed out and from behind the sun-shadowed specks of Ogilvie Transistorsides and crept shyly down his newly shaven dew-feathered chin. It left a clear white shriek down his cheek, much to like those milk-mustachioed billboard riders, lurking everywhere these days. O, what low! when even a not-so-curvy nastachio would satisfy his jointed lustings.

the toys: they are all mine!
[wobble wobble]

great gobs of gabbling, ya. it’s all there and everything finds itself on the interwebbing these days…

While on my vacation last week, I finishedPattern Recognition by William Gibson. I think it could be his best book. Or, at least, the one I’ve enjoyed the most, so far.

Someone somewhere on the internet–and, I know, shame on me for not remembering–wrote that the present that we’re living in right now is the future and that writers who take advantage of this (eg, Bruce Sterling’s Zeitgeist and WG’s Pattern Recognition) write books that are more like science fiction than most science fiction books.

I’ll admit that I feel pretty strongly that the world gets stranger and stranger all the time. Things change faster than people can really keep track of. Who had email ten years ago? Where was the internet ten years ago? Who had cameras in their cellphones ten years ago?

And those are just the technological changes. Who can say yet how these things will shake out to effect the day to day?

Here’s an example: A few years ago, I didn’t have a cell phone. Every year or so (sometimes more) I travel down to my home town to visit old friends and family and all that jazz. When I have done so in the past, I had to arrange things very carefully or risk getting stranded somewhere with nothing to do, waiting for another friend to contact me or become available. This time around, I had a cellphone with me and there was no dead time, unless I wanted there to be. If I wanted to get a hold of someone or let someone know that I was available, I didn’t have to travel all the way back to my “homebase” there. Now maybe I’m writing about something which is totally obvious and which people take for granted, but it is one very tiny thing that has completely altered (for the better!) the way that travelling has worked out for me. (Not to mention, avoiding the scraps-of-paper telephone record-keeping approach…)

Anyway, you can find Gibson’s book here too.

Also, you should check out William Gibson’s website. It’s groovy.

The Golden Path has some Movabletype tricks that I’ll probably check back on later.

Wow. I didn’t think many people knew about Raymond Roussel, but Tate whatsit at obscurantist.net linked to this Roussel link here.

Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus is perhaps the most amazing book I’ve read in the last couple of years. I looked for months for a copy to buy, but then finally broke down and photocopied an entire Inter-Library Loan book. I’ve described this book to quite a few people, probably most of whom think I’m an absolute raving. It doesn’t help that the book is in French, and I speak nor read none.