Sunday, May 31, 2009

Short Stories

Chipper Lowell's parents, as I recall the story, were carnies. They were disappointed with their son's decision to become a *comedy* magician. He is a splendid trouper, and you should see him if you get the opportunity. It just goes to show.

I remember back around 1995, Paula Abdul speaking about body image problems she had, and Greg Louganis, gorgeous Olympic medal-winning diver, talking about the low self-esteem that allowed him to stay with an abusive partner. It just goes to show.

These is always something over which to be unhappy. Or not. I can choose.

Saturday, May 30, 2009

The Changes

So during the recent trip to Charleston, I saw something fascinating.

My cousin took off that Sunday in order to sit in the pew and worship with her family as they visited in the church where she is pastor. She brought a birthday cake of surpassing deliciousness to share with her congregation. So they sang to her, and she cut a piece, and then, nothing. No surge of church ladies coming forth to marshall the orderly distribution of cake and napkins and the like, in the venerable tradition of church hospitality--and this was in THE SOUTH--the very bastion of gracious hospitality.

So in a demonstration of what being a man can mean these days, my brother in law, a fine individual and an experienced hospitality professional, --*and a visitor to this church*-- stepped up, cast his practiced eye about the room, and proceeded to cut and plate the rest of the cake with breathless speed and skill. Only four very reasonable-sized pieces were left at the end.

Over the course of this whole visit, my beloved dedicated himself to careful and attentive childcare, from the five year old niece to the teen-aged cousins. The brother in law took over the kitchen, and he and the teen aged nephew went grocery shopping and then male-bonded in the kitchen over meal prep. The women sat in the living room and treated of the great issues of the day.

All these spaces need filling, whatever politics or culture say about them at any given time. They are all dignified, and I came to realize that their dignity belongs to whoever can fill them best at any given moment.

(P.S. The cake came from Sojourn Cafe in Charleston. Very good. Stop by if you have a chance.)

Friday, May 29, 2009

Hope for Bird's *Travels*

The nice lady who runs Metropolis Books down on Main (the other direction from the Nickel Diner, if you are standing at the corner of 5th and Main) has very kindly helped me look for a copy of Isabella Bird's *Travels in Persia and Kurdistan* that is complete. She sympathized with my trauma over the previous copy I had that ended with "Volume One." We also found a likely copy of Nellie Bly's account of recreating Verne's *Around the World in Eighty Days*. I believe she did it in something just over seventy. *And* we found some Mary Kingsley, so I am happy. Gawd I just LOVE a brick and mortar shop! As a wise and kind magicianne who works in one of the brick and mortar magic shops I like has observed--"the computer can't point you to what you don't know about; a live person can." So true, so true.

Will we find search engines narrowing our inquiries? What happens when you can't just graze the library bookshelves, or chat with adepts or crazies?

Steampunk right in the midst of the era in question, and another window to be made into the past

Well if you like this sort of thing, and if you have not heard of this yet, let me tell you of it. *Tomorrow's Eve* by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, translated by Robert Martin Adams (1982). University of Illinois Press, first paperback edition, 2002. It was first published as a volume, in French, in 1886. Thomas Edison and a sensitive young English nobleman make a rather Faustian pact to create a female android. Zowie. The translator's introductory notes are engaging, and so far I have read through "Book One" of the novel. The most dedicated pastiche writer could not sustain the evenness of tone that an actual old novel has. Like many old products, plenty of this novel has aged greatly, but plenty is still disturbingly current. It can be perhaps playfully regarded as a superb steampunk novel, all the more so for being written in the period and not intended as such. So far, I've enjoyed the long discourses upon what modern humanity has come to. Anyone who has been a cubicle-denizen will get a shiver reading it. More on that as I finish it.

An idea that hit me a while back--using Moleskine City Notebooks for historical and literary notes on the place. Yum. Has anyone tried that yet?

What do I choose to look at?

I've grown viciously intolerant of divergent political opinions--wildly hating everyone who isn't as broadminded and tolerant as I am.

(Why yes I *do* intuit an incongruency there....)

Do I look at what feeds my fear and anger, do I look at what feeds my hope. How do I balance my knowledge that whatever I look at, the other options are there too?

I begin to think much of this comes down to hospitality. However much we think the world is fast going to hell, we seem to still all be going to hell *together,* so maybe we can still have some decent manners with each other even as we fight. Let us fight fair, with, yes, "good sportsmanship." No using the legislatures for revenge, but rather to make sure everyone gets their share. No killing people who don't agree with us. No claiming that God hates who we say God ought to hate.

Now that's one thing we can all get together on--how uniformly offensive God is to everyone's sensibilities. And thank God for that.

Thursday, May 28, 2009

The Future of Airships

Oh my heavens!

The latest issue of dwell magazine had a small article on how airships could be making a comeback! They can carry more than planes can, and they can move faster than ships can. They don't require nearly the same infrastructure as many other forms of transport. They don't fly so high as to hurt one's eardrums, they are more energy-efficient. The article did say that a Los Angeles to New York flight would take 24 hours instead of what I believe is currently a 6 hours. So okay, although a new airship would be slower than a plane, it would still be faster than a train, yet still be close enough to the ground to see things.

As my beloved and I travelled to and from Charleston recently, we fantasized about what the trip could be like in airships. Maybe we could have boarded the ship from a landing pad right at Union Station, or at the combination helipad on top of a skyscraper. Maybe we could have had a cozy sleeper like on the Amtrak long-distance trains, and meals in a dining room, and no ear pain. There would probably have been plenty of meandering stops on the way. Maybe the ship would have been made of nylon and Kevlar.... The ideas go on and on.

We would like to see a future of quiet enviromentally sound airships hauling people and cargo about the country, as easy as trains, more flexible than buses.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Steampunk and Fear

Bruce Sterling wrote in an essay about steampunk (What Is Steampunk?") "The past is a future that already happened." I am not clear if this is his statement or if he was quoting, but I like it. I think it is true. The past *can* be our best laboratory for how the future *may* play out, if looked at carefully.

That's the dratted thing about the future, how utterly unknowable it is. All we can know about the future *is* the past. If certain things are done, the result tends to be thus-or-such. No extraordinary divinatory powers needed. Now of course a great many factors can be put into the analysis, and that can be a donnybrook.

What this all can add up to is a great antidote to fear. Fear is a great bother, outside of its salutatory function as the way to keep us from getting killed. Past that, it is a great enemy of hope or problem-solving. So this is part of what I like about steampunk. It has nothing to do with "recreating" an era, but rather skipping through what has come before to find possible solutions for current issues. It saves time and effort to do so, time and effort that may be spent on yet more creative pursuits. How's that for using the modern demon of "efficiency" to good purpose!

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

the Human Size of Historic Charleston

So I was in downtown Charleston, South Carolina over the weekend. It dates back further than any city I have been in before, as I can recall. The streets are narrow to a modern eye. The buildings are right against the sidewalks, which are right against the streets, so everything is close. The houses tend to present a narrow edge to the street, then a long high gallery to meet the sea breeze. A great deal is very close together, easily walked--an open air market, the oceanfront, restaurants, parks, the works. Horse-drawn vehicles and trollies ferry people about. Plenty of trees provide shade where the close buildings don't do the job.

If I didn't know better I would have thought it was a Modernist experiment in environmentally sound, revolutionary urban design. (What the heck was all that awkward, badly-adapted-Corbu-flavored "International Style" crap attempting to produce? I may be getting my design lingo confused here I admit.)

Heehee. Forward into the past. But let's avoid as much of the icky stuff of the past as possible. Sure, chattel slavery is outlawed all over the country, but a permanent underclass is being created. Will it end up serving much of the same functions as chattel slaves did?

I suppose I'm back at the old question of how does design influence the lives lead amid it, and how does the technology available affect it all? I've long been intrigued by what connection may exist between domestic violence and domestic architecture. Looking at Charleston had me wondering again about what the unforseen fallout can be of the spaces we build; what is one generation reacting to from the previous one, only to have that hated feature picked up and valorized by a latre generation who saw how the reaction played out...

I finished Bird's *Travels*!

only to discover I only had *Volume One*! Feh! So here I am, left in the middle of territory largely unknown by Europeans in 1890, with Isabella Bird doing quite nicely thank you amid the "fierce savages" who are treating her very kindly as she doles out cough treatments and eye drops, and I DON'T KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT! Apparently Virago Travellers only published this one volume back in the day, and I am beside myself with figuring out what comes next. I putter about on Amazon.com, but what help is that, with the not being able to *handle* the books, and *look* at them? Gah!

Sunday, May 17, 2009

Just Lusting

I discovered the Stanley London website. Oh my goodness gracious....

Sextants, telescopes, compasses, various optics and navigational helps, a few pocket watches, a heavy antiqued brass chain for a pocket item--compass or a watch. Lots of handsome functional brass and steel items. I desire most of them fiercely.

Now you know I have a perfectly funtional compass and a pocketwatch. Oh, but, but, but. I'm thinking that going steampunk would be a good style decision to support my wearing a bush jacket of peculiar design to accomodate all the little telescopes and compasses, and watches and whatever else, each fastened with its own handsome chain, (would I end up looking like a Victorian gentleman-gangbanger, with all the chains? Well not if I wear a skirt....) and the fountain pens each with different colored inks, and the collection of Moleskines (feh, yeah, the ones magically altered to take fountain pen ink! Feh.) Then my discreetly handsome leather knapsack can hold my colored pencils, and watchsprings and gluestick, and little stainless steel coffee thermos, and my Sigg water bottle, and a nice snack packed in a tiffin....

Well, truth to tell, I can do alot of this already, and I am well-supplied for places to visit once this well-provisioned. Sorta a grown-up Dora the Explorer I suspect....

Saturday, May 16, 2009

Isabella Bird

Talk about someone who walked around and looked at things! Regretfully I near the end of her book, Journeys In Persia And Kurdistan. (Virago Press, 1988.) Like much travel writing, it is an utterly engrossing read about one miserable day after another, punctuated by some relief and some pleasure. As I slowly emerge from such texts, I shake my head over their strange power to absorb my attention and grant such pleasure. With historical texts there is the added spell of the sense of a portal opening up in time and allowing one to look if not enter, in this case, Persia of 1890.


(If you like that sort of thing, I cannot too highly commend to your attention old stereoscope cards. The very dust off the Pyramids stings your lips as you gaze through the shaded lens at the old photos. I'm not quite clear on this, but my beloved gives me to understand that 3-D photography is making a resurgence in astronomy, so run off to your local antiques mall and snatch them up while you still can. Sometimes old Viewmaster reels reprinted old stereoscopic images too.)


Thursday, May 14, 2009

How to Get Divine Energy Into the World

I'm not sure I know, but I'm pretty sure it has something to do with knowing where you are, when you are there. I carry around a cheap old compass on a chain, and the abandoned pocketwatch my beloved inheirited from a long-ago roommate. Both items are useful, literally and symbolically. Which I guess makes them liturgical-- the material and the spiritual are so completely suffussed into eachother.



Well what are your thoughts?

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Beginning

A friend says, "You have the time right now, start blogging," and proceeds to set this up for me over the phone. Well okay I think.

For reasons I won't go into at present, I am away from my long-held job, with pay, for an unknown length of time. It has been some time already. My health at present also prevents me from just sitting around the house making much of anything. Well except meals. Thus circumstanced, I've had nothing much to do but walk around and look at stuff, or read. Which can be done after walking to a place that serves coffee, and can be interrupted by looking at whatever is around.

This is a rare strange lovely opportunity, the nibbling anxieties of my postion aside. It is rather like falling into an alternate world, that has been running tightly parallel to mine. Now I ride trains because I feel like it, not because I'm a grizzled old communter of long hard experience. I have now ridden trains I only ever saw listed on the schedule, and discovered who rides at these exotic times, late in the morning and all afternoon. I dress in clothes far different from my work wardrobe and ride with them.