$disanpoter

so sweet and so cold

i took myself to mcnally robinson again today - this time for a reading by the authors of A Book of Beginnings and Endings and The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner. I'd been more intrigued by the former, because i have always been interested in the idea of publishing a collection of endings. I bought both books; i think they will be thought provoking, though the first author's reading was annoying. she was clearly responding to the cultural expectations of poetic prose emerging out of the slam poetry movement, for she employed the same softened speech, sing-song intonations and arbitrary word stresses you find in bad slam poetry, the kind that mimics the style to compensate for a lack of substance or genuine motive. it's a shame, too, because what i read of the work beforehand was fairly good and got completely lost in the delivery. both authors had a refreshing balance of theoretical and critical knowledge of narrative without getting mired down in over-intellectualizations either in the work or the discussion.
during the question and answer, betsy called. i hopped out and agreed to come meet up with her and the D of infamy up at chat n chew. that made for some interesting interactions, not least of which was an evolving friend:not friend motif. more on that can possibly be found here, either in the presence of words or by way of their absence. after we went to decibel to digest the situation and dispense of any lingering misgivings by way of innebreation and a bit of willful absurdism: we played drunken haiku. it was, as it should be, amusing and a poor literary showing (on my part at least...betsy's were better). hers are at the link above; mine to follow (bold words are the ones we had to incorporate):

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.

haiku, she mentioned, / are fashionable memes plunked / between char(13)s

done wrong

there is fish in my
nebe yaki udon. i
tear and tear. dispair.