searching for the ineffable
Prompted in part by an email to a list, in part by Jake’s detailed comment about additives to illegal drugs (hello, Jake!), I point you to a short documentary on transforming coca leaves into cocaine.
Some things I really, truly never want to put into my body.
Ethan’s taken geeky anti-vandal measures. Plus, we now have a set of functioning motion-sensor floodlights. Come back, kid. I want you to show your face.
This repeated-senseless-violence thing has been… distracting; I had been unsuccessfully trying to work for two days and instead somehow getting sucked into the WaiterRant archives again and again. But lo, as soon as I sit down to read/annotate some primary sources (instead of writing the second chapter, which is due – oh – at the end of the month), work gets interesting again. Go figure.
Reading and annotating, in this case, is a lot of pattern-searching. All afternoon and evening my peripheral vision has been crazy-sensitive. I wonder if the two are related.
Some bored soul has busted in the rear windshield and one of the back door windows of our car tonight. Probably with one of those little hammers that come in safety kits: the windshield is broken in the middle and also around the edges, but not in-between – and there are no marks on the metal around the edges, so it probably wasn’t a sledgehammer.
Fucking punks. Completely pointless vandalism. Unless they know us and are trying to make some sort of a statement, which I highly doubt: nobody really knows us around here, except by passing hellos. I hate this sort of shit, this mindless mean-spiritedness. [ETA: They didn’t take the ipod that was in the glove compartment, or my passport, or the road atlas. Really pointless.]
Now, instead of angsting about my dissertation tomorrow, I get to call the insurance company and sweep up broken glass, and maybe drive the car over to some repair place or other (or maybe wait until they get the part in, since these cars haven’t been sold in the States for that long). Plus there’ll be a deductible-sized hole in our budget that we just didn’t need. All of it because some idiot broke stuff for ha-has.
There’s free wireless at the car dealership. This is particularly convenient given that I’m here for 3-4 hours, they said. It’s amazing what a change of scene can do: sitting here on cushy chairs, with hubbub all around and Regis and Whatsername on the plasma screen about 12 feet away… and I’m being productive. I mean, except for writing this. But, like, getting work done.
Ah, the post-human present.
Toasted fennel seeds, left over from yesterday because what you actually meant to toast was cumin. By themselves, nothing else.
Big blog updates, what? So many things I keep meaning to write about, and they just never get written down. Have to start again somewhere.
Oh, all right. Here’s some content: Y: The Last Man is a great graphic-novel (you know, comic book) series. Well written, intriguing in its treatment of gender, beautifully drawn.
Today Albert Hofmann, the chemist who first synthesized LSD (and took it, back on Bicycle Day, 1943) turns 100 years old.
I can think of few scientists who changed the Western world as much as he did during the 20th century while managing to create nothing destructive. Thank you for the insight, for the tools, for the kindness and courage, Dr. Hofmann.
Check out this symposium being held in Basel, Switzerland in his honor.
I am translating a few pages of Giacomo Leopardi‘s Lo Zibaldone for an unrelated (someone else’s) project. A philosophical tract with sentences that neither end nor make sense, meandering on and on and ON.
What a pain. On the other hand, it’s fun. On the third, fourth and fifth hands, I do not understand some of these sentences at all. How am I supposed to translate them?
Sigh. Philosophers. :)
Ethan, while doing homework, to Aki’s latest move in the Cats’ Campaign Against Literacy (wherein he will walk, sit or lie on just the book or magazine you’re trying to read):
“You are going to interfere with my anaerobic fermentation. Because you are a contaminant. So I’ll have to remove you, dilute you, find something that complexes with you…”
I’ve received an unexpected gift from a stranger. It totally floored me.
It began innocently, with a blog comment. Joe, you see, wrote this post about the Moscow Cats Theatre performances going on right now in New York.
Omigod, Kuklachev and his cats!!1! I grew up watching them on television. The clown’s art has a special place in Russian hearts: the circus still comes to town, indeed lives permanently in most major cities, and clowns are a huge part of that. The skits are generally mimed, or nearly; it’s all physical comedy, but not all of it is slapstick. They make you think, they tug on your heart strings.
I’m getting all nostalgic here. If you want to know more about Russian clowns, this article in The Moscow Times is a pretty good start.
Anyway, so I react to this effect in a comment to Joe’s post. Go see them if you can!, I wrote, I’d sure be there in a heartbeat if I had the money.
A couple of days later, a letter arrives from Charlottesville. I’m all confused; I was just recently in Charlottesville for the digital tools summit, and don’t remember meeting someone by the name on the return-address stamp. I open it, and out comes a color printout of the poster for the show and another one with the Ticketmaster blurb. And money to cover a ticket.
Well, holy shit.
Ethan and I were so excited about the prospect of going (we can swing another ticket, and no way I was gonna see this without showing him a part of my childhood) that we talked some of my family into going with us. So at the end of December, when my mom flies into New York for New Year’s with my brother-and-family and us, we’ll all be going. The two of us, and my brother, and my sister-in-law, and my nephew (who is going to LOVE this), and my mom, for whom this is possibly more nostalgic than it is for me.
Thank you, Joe. You’ve brought me back some beautiful memories from the old country.
current mood: pretty damn thankful
Well, I was going to write up a thorough account of the rest of the summit, but am a bit blogged out – if you’re interested, see what I wrote about it on the VHL blog. A large chunk of that is my previous post to this blog, so it’s not as long as it looks; on the other hand, I also link from the VHL post to the summit notes on TADA which are long but are also worth a read.
After the summit was over, I spent the weekend in rural VA not far from Charlottesville with a friend named Free who fully lives up to his name. It was lovely; there were three dogs, a horse and many children and friends, open-air fires at night and marshmallows and hot dogs roasted on long sticks. And I got to participate in prepping the foundation for a greenhouse. The air was quiet and clear, and the stars looked alien: I couldn’t make out any familiar constellations because most of the sky was taken up by tall tall trees, it was like peering up through a window to the multiverse.
Meanwhile, some intensely cool stuff is being documented on the net. For example, here’s a Quicktime movie of the Northern Southern lights from space and an .mpg movie of solar activity, both courtesy of NASA.
Also, omigod, a new Beowulf is coming out in 2007 or so, and Neil Gaiman has writing credits. !
Having missed the opening one-two-punch weekend of Serenity and Mirrormask, I’m very much looking forward to seeing both.
