My Scattered Thoughts

collander dreams, they hoop my own sweet dreams and strain them back from tumbling, mothlike into a caldera, a boiling cauldron of fire. these are the things which make my heart weep. if there’s a key dangling from a tree (a mechanical outspurt to unlock mechanicalico devices, doors, namely) what does it open? It’s been there for three days, and three’s a magic number, so what’s it open? it certainly doesn’t open the tree, trees not made for it, it certainly doesn’t open a volovo station wagon (trust me, no plastic top): what then, what?

to besure, froozazzle: nup.

I usually quite enjoy Professor DeLong’s fictional(?), philosophical/historical dialogues. This dialogue on the current state of the Union and the character of the “Founding Fathers” may be his best yet.

I mean: Hello! The Ghost of Daniel Webster! That may be the coolest thing I’ve read all week.

even when the laddios are drowning in cardboard boxes, there’s hope that some kind of preserver will be tossed off the lot and thrown about some place. “Quick! Unpack the box labelled ‘IN CASE OF EMERGENCY!’ who packed that, anyway?”

but all this change has led to a, what’s the word, gradual slowing gown of linguistic verbiage and gnatter flowing from the old cranial goo. hey, i’d like to say that the old brainclock was laser-like zeroing in on the things needing doing… but, alas, not so. instead, there’s a grand mushiness about the place. a feeble onceler that ‘wakes’ each morning with a grueling lack of it. and the dreams just get strange, but in a really uninteresting way. ho hum, what was that dream about the closet door. opening the closet door. which had all the things the closet had, anyway, and nothing even remotely interesting otherwise. yup, the coat’s still there. and the coat from years past. (should that be year’s past? is it possessed by a single year, anyhow?)

even now, witness the slow trainnova of typing this typing represents, watch the same words repeat and then watch some more as this one scrambles for his clock. or something.

can’t even get it together enough to write NONSENSE (admittedly, not always the easiest thing in the world, but O!, remember when those words just slid out of oneself like melted butter roiling down those stairwell handlebars) but hey, maybe all this nonsense is just indicative of me not remembering the right tommyhat (i mean word) at the right time. it’s all about the right word at the wrong time and wrong word at the right time (probably the latter, resulting in, as it were, more amusing crunchyhooligams)

but whoah! and what’s with the nightmarish family news, anyway? that’s a dream from which the waking must occur! but probably not…

Now, I’m not normally that interested in the “coming-of-age” novel, but The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon–with a huge, stove-pipe-sized tip o’ the hat to translator Lucia Graves, without whose effort, sad monolinguals like myself would be bereft of much beauty–mixes up a delicious stew of 1950s fascist Spain; bibliophilia; multi-generationally destructive love triangles; fantastically loveable (and loving) supporting characters; and, eventually, tacked on almost as an afterthought, “coming-of-age”. (I’d leave it off if I could, but it is a pretty central element.)

The mystery revolves around a book discovered in the “Cemetary of Forgotten Books”, a labyrinthine warehouse of lost and discarded books, by ten year old Daniel. A book which opens the boy’s eyes to the magic of the written word. A book whose author has died under mysterious circumstances and copies of whose books are being methodically destroyed.

A more subtle theme, perhaps, is the struggle of children to make their way in a world which has been structured and stifled by the generations which have come before. Again and again, Daniel finds himself powerless in the face of adults and their secrets. Just as his father will never speak of his wife’s death, so, too, none of the adults in the book will speak openly of the Spanish Civil War. Throughout the book, a story which spans 12 years or so, Daniel wanders darkling through a maze of secrest which he does not understand. The only thing Daniel has going for him is a youthful persistence and (naive?) good-faith in human nature.

I think I could probably write a lot about the way children are forced to make their way in (the often) crippled reality that their parents’ generation (and beyond) has created for them, but my brain’s beginning to hurt thinking about all of this… Maybe I’ll write more about this later.

*

for watching later, when i have the time

I can’t get enough of that Bruce Sterling guy.

Bruce Sterling’s “When Blobjects Rule the Earth”

anarchist squats
–huge mansions
bee shirt

click on the dot. you know. you. want. to.

I’m kind of a sucker for ancient computer games. The Macintosh Garden has heaps and heaps of old Apple games.

There’s also an old Apple emulator, too.

Some folks over at an organization called theIdentity Commons are working on creating a protocol for a universal digital identity.

I may be wrong, but I think this relates pretty closely to what they’re doing over at OneBigSoup.

Maybe they should chat.