$disanpoter

burn baby

there's a dramatic reading tonight of the Daughters of Troy that i'm thinking of going to. like the touring cabaret, though, it's a thing i would want to see with a few others so that i can have people to talk about with after. i've learned this. somethings one can get just as much out of alone; other things gain there value when the serve as a starting point for discussion among interested parties. not that it has to be deep and serious discussion; it can be casual and light or boisterous and punchy or any number of things. it's just that some experiences forms of are meant to be absorbed by the many and something is lost when they are instead absorbed only as a solitary mind. i was disappointed not to see the cabaret, but it would not have been the thing i was disappointed to miss even if i'd gone. Daughters of Troy is a bit less solidly located in that range of things i'd want to see in a group, so i may go even if no one else does. also, it's at mcnally robinson, and the stone there suits my mood today.
my mother's coming in tomorrow; we're supposed to meet in the morning to go to bloomingdales. i'm really not looking forward to this. i hate bloomingdales; it's a waste of resources, even if they're not my resources. also, my mood's been shifty lately. i find myself craving time to myself and still getting myself into time with others - because individually, i do want to spend time with each of those people. it was easier when it was all fluid-like and intoxicated.
other than that the last two weeks have been fairly rewarding. i'm stilling liking my work environment, and all the people i've met there. it's a nice mix. i saw my friend cecilia when she was in from san fransisco, and i always enjoy catching up with her. i've promised to compile a cog sci book list for her and i'm looking forward to the review of my own readings (and planned readings) that that will necessitate. also, i went to a developers meet-up for facebook applications, which inspired a near frenzy of information-structuring and -facilitating pipedreams that drove me through the first half of the week in hyper and high spirits - though, as you can probably tell already from the tone of all this, that's faded somewhat.
the latter half of the week has returned me to one of the major philosophical currents of my life: the nature of friendship and interconnectedness, of possibility and often its lack, and the minor-tragedies and pleasures that come from that.

when i don't want to be feeling what i'm feeling, i tend to flip it into a drifting contemplation of the literary or folk-historic tradition of it. thus the event bulletin for Daughters of Troy set me to thinking again about how very interminably long we've been subject to these hopes, fears, horrors, joys, insecurities, intractibilities, sufferings, humors, rages, snatches at eternity or glimpses of truth that compel us through life and generations - of how long we've been these human creatures that we are. thus, my frustrations with pottery class last night and my own temperament going into it steering my thoughts on the platform this morning towards selkies and short germanic peoples in the woods and by the sea weathering darkness and blustery winters and the high aching scent of solitude in the night air.

dispatches

Malcolm Gladwell, in the Tipping Point, extends a hypothesis of productive human inter-connectedness as a result of the combined contributions of three types of people - one of which is the Connector. For the other two, read the book. This is a role I make no claims of inhabiting. My aunt is a Connector, and an amazing one and person at that; I merely have a brain that inherently seeks to match-up incoming information not immediately relevant to me with the person(s) i know of who might find it most useful or valuable. It's a just a spin-off mechanism. That said, if i've tagged you on this post, for at least on of what follows, I had you in mind [feel suitably appreciative here]:

• thursday 23 Aug (tomorrow!): McNally Robinson (independent bookseller with stellar selection and equally exemplary attention to interior design and layout) hosts authors in the up-and-coming literary magazine New York Tyrant. check it out. live the dream or just talk the talk. the wine they'll be serving is sure to help with the latter.
• also of note at McNally Robinson,
  
  • book group focusing on International Literature (tell me, does this surprise anyone?)
  • spanish language discussion group, for those of you who have the good fortune to read borges, cortazar, and the others in their original words. every saturday at noon. led by the former owner of a bookstore in Montevideo.
  • 9 Sept 7pm fiction writing workshop: standard gotham writer's workshop free seminar. i may have attended one when i interned there; either way i remember them being fairly solid.
• intersting tidbit on evolution: in his foreword to The Deep Hot Biosphere, Freeman Dyson mentions a hypothesis extended by the author of the book and ultimately confirmed, that at one point in the history of the world the poles flipped by 90 degrees. This event corresponds with an explosion in the diversity of evolution. niftiness, no?

That's it for the dispatches. There was another, but i've forgotten it. I've had to finish this up at work, too, so i'll have to add the rest of my thoughts on the things i've been reading later.

it pleases me

i picked up a piece of bark that had fallen off a tree yesterday, but then wanting to leave the party unremarked, i left it behind. and yet it matters to me, that bark. it had a gentle curve and i liked the bands of easy contrast between the fresher, smoother birch-colored edges and the more textured sage and purple of the more exposed surfaces. EL said i was weird to pick it up, but it pleased me to look at it. when we got to the party i said it was 'pretty,' but this was inaccurate. it wasn't 'pretty' at all, but it held beauty and that beauty soothed me briefly. so this morning, i am sitting here thinking about how to get it back and what i could do with it to make it less of an odd piece of bark and more of an acceptable bit of decoration - all, of course, without endowing the bark with more significance than it warrants or causing greater external awareness of my interest in it. my motives today are all about lack of remarkability. i consider this a step up from impulses toward dissolution.

[the above paragraph exists and should be read as a prepatory exercise for fictional work. what fictional work that might be i can't say yet. perhaps one with the above title. on the bus out to the island this weekend, i was contemplating more on sensory experience and whether it's really as significant to me as i make it out to be. more specifically, i was thinking about the possibility and producability of trying to express these myriad moments that i so appreciate in my life - and suddenly they all fell into a big vacuous space. i get deterred by the repetitiveness i perceive in my own ideas. it's like i have this impulse to express something, but the something to express is a reference back to the impulse itself. argh.

then again, this morning, thinking about the bark, i was again thinking of the collection in my head of things i'd like to create if i were capable of effective visual expression. like the sculpture of faceless bodies scaling the cavernous inner surface of of a head. or the shape of a human perpettually crumbling in on itself, silently dissentigrated without ever losing mass. in mathmatics i'm sure there's a way to graph that, but i don't know what it is. or the series scenes that communicate the first person perspective while also focusing on the outward pointing view of people and events going on without awareness of the viewer. like an inverse of the painting from Auden's Musee des Beaux Arts - Icarus' perceiving the world not seeing him as he falls, only without that level of drama. the golem/humonculus project is too overt, being from within the head. what i would want to capture is the feeling of being unseen, unremarked upon, among events one is actually a part of, but i don't know how. and then again, all of this annoys me in it's clumsy and obvious fixation on identity and the flimsiness, or perhaps the inconsequence, of identity. the singularity of my interest irritates me, disinterests me in myself in recoiling sort of way. then i just go see any of the endless number of pieces by artists struggling to represent such things as lack and identity and lack of identity and all that very standard very done concept work.

it's not the same but is a similar frustration that comes from sharing something i find interesting or beautiful. i saw on my phone the picture i'd taken getting off the ferry of the sunset and my impulse was to show it to the people at the party, but the effect would be the same as that of that piece of bark. the implicit reflection of the arbitrariness of the statement, the why are you showing this to me question to which because it's beautiful seems to always be a less than adequate response. it makes me feel alienated. so, i don't share, and then that makes me feel alienated, because here's this thing i would want to share simply to extend that morsel of pleasantness, but it's pointless because it doesn't actually work that way.

so, yeah, even more so with writing. i think i don't actually do so in a more structured outlet than these posts because i suspect/fear/believe the would be experience by others as irrelevant. ]

of shoe horns and sweet moods

harvest moon. each time
it rises, it ends the world
with each breath, each sigh

the first time i saw a harvest moon, i thought perhaps the world was ending. not that i really believed that, but sometimes the vision of something can be so breathtaking it raises the thought in your head in spite of the soundness of your modern science-informed disbelief. i was alone in the first house we had on shelter island - it was the summer i worked at coecles harbor and thus lived alone during the week while my parents were in the city. the house was set just back from the wetlands and looking out, you saw first the tall reed grass and the lone scragley tree, then the still water, and then the gentle slope of the causeway and little ram, then the sky. the moon was rising where the causeway met little ram. it was a fiery orange, watery and wavering over the dark green of the island at night, and it was consuming the sky. i can find no more emphatic way of describing it for someone who hasn't felt it, it just seemed fitting that the world might end in the gradual swallow of that mellow yet massive orange orb.

harvest moons make my soul ache. i just told this to my friend A Ho, but i doubt it seemed very relevant or significant in the midst of an IM chat. we're picnicing tonight. i'm looking forward to it. as if the above isn't indication enough of it - i'm feeling in the mood for serenity and beauty. positively pastoral, which is always an odd feeling to have sitting in the hard, urban-minded chest of mine. it's the beauty thing. beauty heals me. it's my spirituality.

in other news, this morning i was thinking of having a party at my apartment in the not to distant future. this got me on the topic of themes and i thought i could have an silly 80's movie party where we watch Dark Crystal and the Neverending story. why did i think of these? i think because i've lately been in the mood (on the plasmating level of thinking and mooding) for a movie night and because i sadly do not get to go to a lecture tonight on parchment - oh and because in confluence with this someone on facebook had an image of two old elvish people - all of which reminded me of the aura of arcana cultivated in NES...anyway so this led to the slogan "M is for Mangey" because they both have mangey puppets. but, this, i quickly realized would not be an attractive party quip...but could make for an excellent smarmy t-shirt!

Co-incidentally, shortly after i thought this to myself in the midst of a simultaneous conversation about the shortcomings of the frameword we're building our data management application in, my co-worker CD offered up an equally amusing (and more usable) product. I had exclaimed in surprise and preemptory enthusiasm that i'd found some functions in the function reference that might actually be useful to us. A moment later, I corrected this saying, well...they show potential for being shoe-horned into something useful - and CD said, yes it's too bad they don't use that as a marketting tactic, pass out a bunch of shoe-horns with [the name of infrastucture service] printed on them. so it was amusing to me. so what. i'm a dork. we know this already.

a token for my mother

i think perhaps i'll make a painting for my mother that invokes the memory of the little cat. I haven't figured the whats and hows of this out yet; I don't want to make an image of the little cat, and I don't think I could even if i tried. Perhaps the seal point colors and the texture of fur along with the some sweeping elegant feline lines...

Helium

My grandfather made his annual january trip up from florida to check on his massachusetts house and visit his family this weekend. I so enjoy my grandparents. They've got such spunk. It's lovely to spend time with each of them. I didn't see them yesterday, because i was busy frantically trying to make my apt presentable to guest. I got to see them today, though. My aunt, my grandfather and I went first to the Whitney and then to the Met for a bit. Unfortunately, they weren't so interested in the asian art exhibits that have finally reopened, but we did see the special exhibit on Fra Angelico. Virgin with Child gets a bit old after awhile, but his execution and detail are breathtaking even after almost 600 years. I can hardly imagine how beautiful those tryptics(sp?) must have been at the time they were made. I especially enjoyed the warmth and character in his renditions of older men. That we didn't see the asain exhibit didn't upset me too much, rather it's given me motivation to go back hopefully sometime this week.

In the Whitney, I most enjoyed the work in the permanent exhibit on the top floor -- or rather, the pieces i most enjoyed were among those on the top floor. (I'm not such a fan of the bright flat swatches of color and irregular shapes branch of modernism.) One of the first, though, was of a public park and prominently featured a ballon seller. This was set in the early 1900s, so it got me wondering how they had helium for ballons so far in advance of nuclear physics.

Here are some interesting points in the History of Helium (and to some extent societal use of lighter gases):