Monstrous

locust roots 5

In my dream I commanded giants, one of them natural, the other a robot. Their literal-minded loyalty terrified me. This is my sister, I said, protect her with your lives. But what could we do when the sky had turned to such implacable concrete? I woke to moonlight & an air so still I could hear a trickle from the measureless caverns under the front lawn.

locust roots 6

Immediately after I turn on the computer, a pop-up appears with a minor fanfare of bleats. Symantec Security Alert: A remote computer tried to connect to your computer on a port commonly used by a Trojan horse.

So this is Troy! The armies at the gates are all Greeks, then, & we the barbarians, erecting barriers to foreign investment & the free trade in fictions launched from Olympus.

locust roots 4

The make-believe conservative talk-show host asks the bestselling guru, Do you exfoliate?

And something else I heard yesterday that made me chuckle: a British friend describing the output of another bestselling author as monstrous twaddle.

locust roots 3

No epiphany on Epiphany

daddy longlegs

Cross-posted with shadow cabinet.

Experimented last night with making recordings of myself reading poems. I forgot how damn difficult it is to get that right! And without a live audience, it’s hard to muster the necessary, tense energy. For some reason I decided to record Dump in the Woods — I guess I thought it would be fun to read. I posted the result, but then after listening to it myself, changed my mind and took out the link.

Re-read After Word this morning and found the whole prose part, about the poem set in concrete, too wordy. There’s no reason to include stuff that I feel even a little iffy about, so I cut it. As for the part that remains: I like it, but looking through the VN archives later, realized that I’d used a very similar image in the thing about Roentgenisdat. So if at some point I decide to put that one into the game, the other might have to sit out.

Then I got a strange idea: Why not try going through VN using the “Poems and poem-like things” category pages? Right away, I found some recent pieces that I had already forgotten about. The Wait, Landmark, Blast Area, Advice for Prospective Troglodytes, and Diet Plan all made the cut after a few changes.

I’m beginning to think that 2006 may well have been my best year for poetry yet. If so, I’m not sure what the cause might be — maybe just that I found myself increasingly willing to shirk on everything else in order to write. I do know this: the kind of work I am engaged in on shadow cabinet is no substitute. There’s too much ego in it, and not nearly enough reward, compared with the out-of-body experience of actually writing a poem.

*

During lunch, Mom spotted a bright white spot moving along the top edge of the field and realized it was our hunter friend P.’s bleach-blonde hair. She stopped and stood in place for about five minutes, and we figured she was out with her two-and-a-half-year-old grandson, who would’ve been hidden by the tall grass. But then when she started moving again, she walked rapidly up into the woods, and we decided that she was participating in a deer drive instead.

In a normal winter, it would’ve been her dark clothing that caught our attention, not her light hair. This year, not only is there no snow, but the temperature was 56 degrees at dawn. It hardly feels like winter at all.

Today is Epiphany, and therefore also the end of the Feast of Fools and the sovereignty of the Lord of Misrule. Starting tomorrow, things are supposed to return to their normal order. Poets — and all other foolish epiphany-mongers — take note.

On message

stacks

Along the old highway, soon to be replaced by an interstate, a billboard touting the benefits of advertising on billboards: THINK BIG, it says. And right beyond it, a billboard with this message:

There are times when she pretends
to be delighted with your gift.
This won’t be one of
those times.

It is an ad for, I think, diamonds. I only spotted it at the last moment as we sped past, my mind on the Engineered Rock Placement Area — the mountain of toxic rubble that will soon begin to take shape a quarter mile away along the creek.

*

In the patio outside the new wing of the library named after the football coach, the university sold the rights to inscribe names in foot-wide bricks for $2,500 apiece. The coach and his wife, public-spirited citizens that they are, each purchased a brick. You can’t have your name in too many places, I guess. Some of the bricks contain clever messages: one alum admonishes people to stop reading the bricks and go study. Another brick simply paraphrases Pink Floyd, “We are all bricks in the wall” — kind of silly, since this is manifestly not a wall. I do like one of the messages, though:

this brick

A few feet away stands a sculpture entitled Stacks, by an alumnus named Peter Calaboyias (see photo at top). Four large, bronze tablets lean together conspiratorially like football players in a huddle. They are embossed with a hodge-podge of glyphs with no collective meaning.

Those images were created out of twenty-five scripts, including the foundations of Cherokee, Armenian, Thai, Greek and symbols of Braille and Hieroglyphs. The sculpture is supposed to visually represent the function of a library as a repository of methods and systems for communications. The plate images only represent characters and symbols of communication, not languages, according to a University Libraries’ Office of Public Information and Relations press release.

To me, though, the unreadability of these tablets makes a statement about the occult nature of the specialized languages peculiar to academic disciplines. And the artist’s vision of information as context-free code rather than message seems highly compatible with an emphasis on “electronic information resources,” the purchase of which is supported by those $2,500-dollar bricks.

By contrast, the faí§ade of the other wing of the library, named after a pioneering professor of American Studies back in the early 20th century, features much more conventional carvings of cap-and-gowned scholars with the messages, The Library is a Summons to Scholarship and The True University is a Collection of Books. These sentiments seem more than a little mossy now: the part of the library’s budget dedicated to buying books continues to shrink as more and more funding goes toward electronic material. That wing faces southeast, and stands at the head of an elm tree-lined walking mall. Its nearest neighbors are office buildings for the College of Liberal Arts, and have the names of Great Men — Kant, Goethe, Shakespeare et. al. — carved in Roman letters all around the entablature. It is, as the kids say, very old-school.

The new wing faces in the opposite direction, toward the big new Spiritual Center across the street. This is mostly happenstance, of course, but I do think that information resources make a far more comfortable fit with spirituality than knowledge. The former term makes no implicit claim about truth-status, and thus doesn’t threaten the sovereignty of that mix of assertions and emotions that most people mean by the term spirituality. And whereas the acquisition of knowledge might lead to wisdom or inspire ethical behavior, the gathering of information serves merely to empower. Knowledge is active and alive; information is passive and inert. I like the inviting quality of the “Stacks” sculpture, but if I’d been the artist, I would’ve dispensed with all the exotic glyphs and covered the tablets instead with ones and zeros.

Beer and ecology

I don’t know if I’ll have time for a regular post today, but in the meantime, I’d like to call to your attention to two promising new ventures. The first is my buddy Chris O’Brien’s fabulous new Beer Activist Blog. Chris is the author of the recently published book Fermenting Revolution, a very fun read (I got it for Christmas), which takes writing and thinking about grain-based fermented beverages in a whole new direction. If you like beer, be sure to stop by and give him some encouragement so he’ll keep blogging. He just finished a series on the Twelve Beers of Christmas. Here’s an excerpt from #12:

Avery Brewing in Bolder, Colorado and Russian River in Santa Rosa, California both brew Belgian style beers they independently named Salvation. When the coincidence was discovered, rather than become adversarial, they chose a path of cooperation. Instead of competing for the rights to the name as other breweries might do, they decided to live and let live, and even decided to brew a special beer together that is a blend of their Salvations.

The result is a beer they named Collaboration Not Litigation Ale.

*

A just-launched blog carnival aims to showcase “the best ecology and environmental science posts of the month from all across the blogosphere.” Oekologie sounds as if it will be considerably more science-focused than Festival of the Trees, but I think it ought to meet a real need. Here’s what they’re looking for:

Oekologie is a blog carnival all about interactions between organisms in a system. While Circus of the Spineless might look for a post discussing the hunting techniques of a trap door spider, Oekologie is looking for posts discussing how a trap door spider’s hunting techniques affect prey populations or its surroundings. While Carnival of the Green might look for a post discussing a big oil policy decision regarding ANWR, Oekologie would accept a post describing the ecological consequences of pipeline construction in the area.

Again, we are looking for posts describing biological interactions – human or nonhuman – with the environment.

Topics may include but are not limited to posts about population genetics, niche/neutral theory, sustainabilty, pollution, climate change, disturbance, exploitation, mutualism, ecosystem structure and composition, molecular ecology, evolutionary ecology, energy usage (by humans or within biological systems, succession, landscape ecology, nutrient cycling, biodiversity, agriculture, waste management, etc.

The deadline for submissions to the first edition is January 13.

Feedback

porcupine tree

There’s a popular software plugin for WordPress blogs that closes comments on posts more than a month old, thereby cutting down enormously on spam. But I really enjoy the few comments that do come in on archived posts. Just the other day, for example, someone dropped an appreciative comment about my piece on flowering dogwood from last spring. It’s always nice to attach a voice to one of those hundreds of daily page views from search engines. And here’s another person, who just took the time to let me know how much one of my rare attempts at food blogging had meant to him:

jesus christ man. all i wanted was a fucking recipe and i got a 7 page long set of instructions of how to obtain a freakin’ tasty egg. I don’t give a shit. eggs are eggs. i just wanted a recipe for some decent egg salad and I get this wordy bullshit. christ man. you’re a good writer but save that shit for outside the recipes. as much as you wanna be, there’s no need to elaborate on a god damn recipe. short and sweet, man. there’s some hungry folks out there who don’t wanna read all this garbage just to make a sandwich.

See, this is why I allow anonymous commenting, too. I live for comments like that!

Come outside

Chickadee 1

Qarrtsiluni, the literary blogzine I help edit, begins the year with a new theme and a new guest editor. Fiona Robyn writes,

Come outside. Put on your coat, leave your comfortable home. Outside there is weather, the generous sun, the lonely stars. Outside there are gardens, with slugs and poppies and last night’s half-empty wine glasses. Outside there are tangled forests, wide rivers, fields of corn. Outside there is a boy kicking a can across the street, and an old lady talking to herself at the bus stop.

I’m looking for words or pictures that will transport me to where you are. I’m looking for work that shows attention to detail, that is pared down to the bone — something that will shock me a little. I can’t wait to see what you’ve got for me.

Send your submissions through right away — they’ll be considered until February 15th, for publication throughout January and February. A shorter-than-usual word limit of 1000 words, please.

* * *

In other news, yesterday afternoon and this morning, filled with the New Year’s spirit, I scored two genuine, personal “firsts.”

  • I successfully edited a PHP element on my own for the first time. PHP is the scripting language used for this and many other websites, and boy is it powerful! By changing a single word, I was able to reconfigure all the monthly archive, category, and search result pages so they display full posts rather than excerpts. This is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. Since the Table of Contents provides the option of browsing by post title, it really didn’t make sense to have all other browse and search functions restricted to excerpts. Now, categories such as “Photos” are a whole lot more fun to browse, I think. And I’ve begun going through the archives and assigning “Words on the Street” cartoons to a new category page, too, though it’s going to be a while before I finish.
  • Emboldened by this success, today I redesigned my old Geocities web page — my first attempt to write CSS from scratch. Don’t laugh. I wanted that minimalistic look, I swear!

Firsts

fog wires

Festival of the Trees #7 appeared a few hours early last night — I presume the host had a party to go to, unlike me — and was one of the last things I looked at before going to bed at around 11:45. The rain was loud on the roof. Just as I was drifting off to sleep, I heard a distant rumble. Thunder, I thought. But in January? It was followed by a second rumble a few seconds later. The surprise of it woke me enough to look at the clock and realize that it wasn’t thunder I was hearing, but human beings marking an arbitrarily designated moment of time by discharging guns and explosives. My first thought of the supposed New Year — “Thunder!” — had been a delusion.

foggy view from porchI woke eight hours later, grateful for the rare gift of a full night’s sleep. When I stepped out on my porch, coffee mug in hand, I was greeted by thick fog and the honking of Canada geese. They flew right overhead, so low that I could easily hear the wing beats, though the cloud hid them from view. My first birds of the New Year had been invisible.

I was reminded of New Year’s Day 2000, which began here with a thick snow fog — and with the turn of the millennium still a year away, contrary to the widespread popular delusion. Looking back, it makes me a little sad to realize that the tenacity of that delusion prevented us from enjoying a really memorable, planet-wide millennium-ending celebration on December 31, 2000.

Ten minutes later, a single crow flew in and landed at the top of a tall black locust tree at the edge of the woods. Unlike the “maybe crow” in the poem I just linked to, though, there was no doubt about this one’s identity. At least, not on my part — for all I know, the bird itself was in the middle of an identity crisis. Corvids are certainly smart enough to be capable of self-awareness, and thus also self-doubt, I suppose. Anytime you see a crow by itself, you have to wonder what it’s up to. It sat there silently for less than a minute, then flew off to the southeast. My first omen-like observation of the New Year had been — as always — highly ambiguous.

My first mammal sighting was of a gray squirrel — no surprise there! — perched on the head of the dog statue in my front yard, chewing open the hard shell of a black walnut. This silly game, taking note of first things, had led me to focus on a scene that was no less charming for being commonplace.

After a while, I got up and fetched camera and tripod for a few pictures of the fog. This galvanized me to lace up my shoes and go for a walk — one of my very few, inflexible New Year’s customs. I didn’t realize until later, when I uploaded my photos to the computer, how much trouble the camera had focusing in the fog. My first photos of the New Year were out-of-focus!

bear poleI was getting pretty hungry by this time, so I only took a short walk. I noticed that a couple of the power poles appeared to have fresh bear markings on them, though most likely they’ve been there for a couple of months and I only noticed them today because last night’s rain made them stand out. The bears are probably all in hibernation right now, though as warm as the weather’s been, I wouldn’t bet too much on that. We’ve seen bears out wandering around in Januarys past, whether from insomnia or an improperly triggered internal clock, who can say? Something like a rumble of thunder might wake them up.

*

Another New Year, 8:30 a.m.
Like a bear making claw marks
on a telephone pole,
I decide to take roll.

Low-flying geese,
solitary crow,
squirrel on the head of a concrete dog,
the fog.

Here, I answer.
Here.

Out (sort of) with the old, in with the newer

my old computer

All my computers have been hand-me-downs. This was my third — a 1997 or 98 Proteva. It used Windows 98. It was slow but serviceable — literally. At one point a couple years ago, the fan broke and my cousin-in-law Jeff (see Credits) kindly installed a new one.

my new computer

Two days after Christmas, Jeff arrived with a newer computer, a two-year-old Dell with 1.5 GB of RAM and 214 GB of free space on its hard drive. Now I’m learning how to use Windows XP — after changing everything to look and act as much like Windows 98 as possible.

To the left of the sleek new black box you can see the gray case that contains my manual backup system in case of apocalypse or an extended power outage. It’s an old Olympia typewriter — the one I wrote my college papers on, and all my poems up through the late 80s. My dad got it when he was a kid.

We kept the hard drive from the old computer, too, mounting it inside the new box alongside its faster, emptier counterpart. It has a mere 917 MB of free space, but so far — knock on veneered particle board — its little motor still works. Now that I have a CD burner and working USB ports, I can think about backing up my files.

It’s hard to believe that years of work can fit so snugly in the palm of a hand.

hard drive

The old doesn’t go out, exactly, but more deeply inside. And what comes in — well, it’s new to us, perhaps. But on the other side of the world, they’ve seen it already. We’re all living on borrowed time.

Weather report

sheets on line

It got up into the 50s today. Where’s winter? There’s no snow in sight.

hoarfrost on wild turkey feather

A heavy hoarfrost this morning covered roofs and fields with the thinnest coat of white. When the sun came up, it vanished in minutes. By early afternoon, winter insects were flying. My brother Steve hiked up the hollow and reported seeing a strange species of fly with red eyes.

witch hazel 2

It’s hard to believe a new year is right around the corner.