Norma -

a squirrel jumps over the window...
there comes the chill of a season-lost, (in the air)
my breath feels heavy, tongues feed on smoke-steel
"Vincenzo Bellini has what it takes...!"
and again, the jump!
thunder comes, steps go easy: in-love and unaware;
strand of hair resting on the sink then the light darkens
to a shade of blue,
your eyes; the
. . . faint rustle of dried leaves. Look!
Penelope stays up in bed tonight,
radio static inside: pointe-shoes hang forever,
time stops on the glass,
lightning cracks - in the distance
over there beyond the seasons -
and the world starts humming on the dial, again.

- © Khan Boha

[Notes: i just noticed that the poem wraps itself around the occurrence of thunder
which time-wise go ahead and then comes the lightning instance which should have
preceded the thunder, neat! hehe]

a thought.

There is an idea of me that I aspire to and then there is this real-time flesh-and-blood-me who stays with me, all day and night. And most of the time the latter betrays the former in a creative way.

Jimenez on writing

"Si te dan un papel pautado, escribe por detrás".
(If they give you ruled paper, write the other way).

- Juan Ramon Jimenez.

The Recognitions - pg. 230

- Van der Goes. He died mad, you know. Settled down in a convent, working and drinking. He believed himself eternally damned, finally ran about telling everyone about it. Such exquisite flowers, he painted. And such magnificent hands, Basil Valentine added, looking at his own.

The Recognitions - pg. 217

To A Child, BEHELD IN SUMMER RAIMENT

Little girl, one lesser garment
Will suffice to clothe your crotch,
Hide that undiscovered cavern
Where old Time will wind his watch.

-- Esme's poem read by Otto

The Recognitions - pg. 208

Otto lit an Emu and sat apparently absorbed with it, indicating that its complete enjoyment required all of his attention. He blew a ring of smoke one way, another another way, and another to the floor, where it sank and settled upon the carpet. The carpet ended halfway across the room in an indecision of color and design, its surface the flat and slightly ribbed lay of Aubusson because of th uneven texture of the floor. Its intricate design, beginning under the daybed where Otto sat, gave way to abstraction, threatening even worse where it came suddenly to an end, a sense of delirium in the hand of the painter who had painted it there, cross-stroking the warp and the weft with a two-inch brush. Chaby tapped a shiny foot, accompanying an evil rhythm which played endlessly within. Esme sat down on the arm of his chair. He got up and went to the radio, which he turned on with the casual thoughtlessness of a tango. In silent disdain, so watered down that it approached charity, Otto contrasted his own attire to the padded, pleated affair swaying across from him, until he realized that Chaby had taken off his coat and drawn Esme's waist closely and somewhat below his own. They were dancing. Otto followed the first intimacies of that tango with painful intentness. He adjusted his sling, as though to indicate that but for this injustice he might dance or do battle. Then he yawned; but the yawn did not succeed, simply left him sitting with his mouth open. With his unharnessed hand he reached for a book.

Concert Music List

• Adagio For Strings - Samuel Barber. He was born in West Chester, PA
• Concert Suite for our town - Aaron Copland
• Clarinet Quintet In B Minor OP. 115 - Johannes Brahms
• Symphony No. 8 (unfinished) - Franz Schubert (Leonard Bernstein conducting)
  

The Recognitions - pg. 197

-She looks like she thinks she is a painting. Like an oil you're not supposed to get too close to.

"I like to read a good book..."

So, last night I was sitting at the bar having the taste of my second Guinness in a month and then Ed bought me a shot of Jameson, so yea the second-first taste of that too; and this girl was closing her tab and asked me about a good book to read. Jeremy and I were having our usual comparing-the-book-notes moment across the bar, he wanted to bring The Road's copy that he had been meaning to and I was gonna exchange it with The Blood Meridien. Then, came the comment nudging the conversation, about a 90 degree off-kilter to the side-rails, on "reading a good book": What good book? How would one get one? and more importantly, What good a good book would do to anyone? - I didn't know about any of that. It just threw me off.

The Birth of Tragedy excerpt

In order to be able to live, the Greeks must have created these gods out of the deepest necessity. We can readily imagine the sequential development of these gods: through that instinctive Apollonian drive for beauty there developed by slow degrees out of the primordial titanic divine order of terror the Olympian divine order of joy, just as roses break forth out of thorny bushes. How else could a people so emotionally sensitive, so spontaneously desiring, so singularly capable of suffering have endured their existence, unless the same qualities manifested themselves in their gods, around whom flowed a higher glory. The same instinctual drive which summons art into life as the seductive replenishment for further living and the completion of existence also gave rise to the Olympian world, by which the Hellenic “Will” held before itself a transfiguring mirror.

Problems with Chandra's Channel Assignment Paper

1. It defines a centralized scheme to do vertex coloring
2. The scheme takes (|V|) ^2 complexity
3. They have a distributed version which takes (rD|V|^2) complexity. Where 'r' is the radius and D is the degree of neighborhood.
4. Assumes Orthogonal channels.
5. For non-orthogonal channels: Paper uses data from a firmware paper where the spectrum of overlapped channels is used to calculate the interference. This does not take into account the overlapped band's usage that actually creates interference.
6. 
   

The Recognitions - pg. 178

When they both got married they both wanted to write. Everything was fine until the books came out, then they found they'd written about each other. That was the only reason either of them wanted to get married, to study the other one. They used to sit and ask about each other's childhood, and all kinds of things, and they both thought the other one was doing it for love. Now, they just watch each other's sales, and whoever's ahead takes all the cream at breakfast.

The Recognitions - pg. 167

Around the weight of the cathedral, the town looked transitory, brightly colored and haphazard, as though without that weight it might disintegrate, to wander off and be lost in the green hills.

The Recognitions - pg. 152

Images surround us; cavorting broadcast in the minds of others, we wear the motley tailored by their bad digestions, the shame and failure, plague pandemics and private indecencies, unpaid bills, and animal ecstasies remembered in hospital beds, our worst deeds and best intentions will not stay still, scolding, mocking, or merely chattering they assail each other, shocked at recognition. Sometimes simplicity serves, though even the static image of Saint John Baptist received prenatal attentions (six months along, leaping for joy in his mother's womb when she met Mary who had conceived the day before): once delivered he stands steady in a camel's hair loincloth at a ford in the river, morose, ascetic on locusts and honey, molesting passers-by, upbraiding the flesh on those who wear it with pleasure. And the Nazarene whom he baptized? Three years pass, in a humility past understanding: and then death, disappointed? unsuspecting? and the body left on earth, left crying out - My God, why dost thou shame me? Hopelessly ascendant in resurrection, the image is pegged on the wind by an epileptic tentmaker, his strong hands stretch the canvas of faith into a gaudy caravanserai, shelter for travelers wearied of the burning sand, lured by forgetfulness striped crimson and gold, triple-tiered, visible from afar, redolent of the east, and level and wide the sun crashes the fist of reality into that desert where the truth still walks barefoot.

Depth Theology - poems by Peter O'Leary

The Recognitions - pg. 129

-Esther it isn't the secrecy, the darkness everywhere, so much as the lateness. I mean I get used to myself at night, it takes that long sometimes. The first thing in the morning I feel sort of undefined, but by midnight you've done all the things you have to do, I mean all the things like meeting people and, you know, and paying bills, and by night those things are done because by then there's nothing you can do about them if they aren't done, so there you are alone and you have the things that matter, after the whole day you can sort of take everything that's happened and go over it alone. I mean I'm never really sure who I am until night, he added.

July Book List

• Journey To The End Of Night - Celine
• Savage Detectives - Roberto Bolano

The Recognitions - pg. 128

-And do you know the worst thing? she went on. -Do you know the hardest thing of all? The waiting. A woman is always waiting. She's ... always waiting.

The Recognitions - pg. 112

-Listen ... , he said. He'd withdrawn his hand on the table top automatically. -That's what it is, this arrogance, in this flamenco music this same arrogance of suffering, listen. The strength of it's what's so overpowering, the self-sufficiency that's so delicate and tender without an instant of sentimentality. With infinite pity but refusing pity, it's a precision of suffering, he went on, abruptly working his hand in the air as though to shape it there, -the tremendous tension of violence all enclosed in a framework, ... in a pattern that doesn't pretend to any other level but it's own, do you know what I mean? He barely glanced at her to see if she did.
-It's the privacy, the exquisite sense of privacy about it, he said speaking more rapidly, -it's the sense of privacy that most popular expressions of suffering don't have, don't dare have, that's what makes it arrogant. That what sentimentalizing invades and corrupts, that's what we've lost everywhere, especially here where they make every possible assault on your feelings and privacy. These things have their own patterns, suffering and violence, and that's ... the sense of violence within its own pattern, the pattern that belongs to violence like the bullfight, that's why the bullfight is art, because it respects its own pattern ...

The Recognitions - pg. 111

-Yes, she murmured, watching him cross the room toward her, with his head up. He paused to say something to Esteban, and came on, looking at the floor. A chill touched her shoulders, and was gone. When he sat down, she sat speaking quietly under the music, - How handsome you were just then.
-What do you mean? He paused, filling his glass.
- The way you were standing there, when you hit your heels on the floor, with your head up. Were you doing it on purpose, looking so arrogant?
-You ... make it sound theatrical.
-No, but that's it, it wasn't that, up on a stage, not just you being arrogant, not just your expression, it was ... you had the back of your head thrown back and kind of raised but still your face was up and open in ... I don't know, but not like you are sometimes now. She watched the glass shake slightly in his hand when he started to raise it, and he put it back on the table. -Wyatt, its ... sometimes when I come in and see you looking down looking so lonely and ... but just now, it was the whole man being arrogant, it was towering somehow, it was ... it had all the wonderful things about it, that moment, all the things that, I don't know ... but all the things we were taught that a man can be. He said nothing, and did not look up, but took out some cigarettes, - Heroic, she said quietly, watching him light a cigarette with his head down, and then in the same tone. -Could I have one too?

The Recognitions - pg. 100

The lust of summer gone, the sun made its visits shorter and more uncertain, appearing to the city with that discomfited reserve, that sense of duty of the lover who no longer loves.

The Recognitions - pg. 95

this passion for wanting to meet the latest poet, shake hands with the latest novelist, get hold of the latest painter, devour ... what is it? What is it they want from a man that they didn't get from his work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he's done his work? What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology.

William Faulkner, Sufjan Stevens

"are you writing from the heart?"

To Do List

• - Run Quadratic Programming in Matlab
• - Random Channel Assignment Algo.
• - The Recognitions
• - David's party

The Recognitions - pg. 89

"That romantic disease, originality, all around we see originality of incompetent idiots, they could draw nothing, paint nothing, just so the mess they make is original ... Even two hundred years ago who wanted to be original, to be original was to admit that you could not do a thing the right way, so you could only do it your own way. When you paint you do not try to make it better, so you copy masters, only masters, for with each copy of a copy the form degenerates ... you do not invent shapes, you know them, auswendig wissen Sie, by heart ..."

The Recognitions - pg. 78

There was a historical genuineness about Esther, which somehow persisted in spite of her conscious use of it. In her large bones there was implicit the temporal history of a past, and a future very much like it. There was size to her. She had the power of making her own mistakes appear as the work of some supramundane agency, possibly one of those often vulgarly confused with fate, which had here elected her capable of bringing forth some example which the world awaited. Principal among these (and no less a mistake, somewhere, which she must live out as though it were her own) was being a woman. She worked very hard to understand all this; and having come to be severely intellectual, probing the past with masculine ruthlessness, she became an accomplice of those very circumstances which Reason later accused of being unnecessary, and in the name of free will, by which she meant conscious desire, managed to prolong a past built upon them, refurbished, renewed, and repeated. With great diligence, and that talent of single purpose with which her sex pursue something unattainable in the same fashion they pursue something which is, her search for Reason was always interrupted by reasons. Things happened for reasons; and so, in her proposal it may have been simply her feminine logic insuring a succession of happenings which reasonably might never have happened at all. Or being a woman, and the woman she was, her proposal may have been an infinite moment of that femininity which is one of humanity's few approximations to beauty, asking no justification and needing none to act in a moment of certainty with nothing to fear, one day to be recalled in a fearful moment threatened by certainty.

The Recognitions - pg. 72

Il faut toujours en avoir sur soi, de l'argent, vous savez ...
Like lions, out of the gates, into the circus arena, cars roared into the open behind the Opera from the mouth of the Rue Mogador. Around it this faked Imperial Rome lay in pastiche on the banks of its Tiber: though Tiber's career, from the Apennine ravines of Tuscany, skirting the Sabine mountains to course through Rome and reach with two arms into the sea, finds unambitious counterpart in the Seine, diked and dammed across the decorous French countryside, proper as wallpaper. Nevertheless, they had done their best with what they had. The Napoleons tried very hard. The first one combed his hair, and that of his wife and brothers, like Julius Caesar and his family combed theirs. J. L. David (having painted pictures of Brutus, Andromanche, and the Horatii) painted his picture looking, as best he could manage, like Julius Caesar; and Josephine doing her very best (the Coronation) to look above suspicion herself. Everyone rallied round, erecting arches, domes, pediments, and copied what the Romans had copied from the Greeks. Empire furniture, candlesticks, coiffures ... somewhere beyond them hung the vision of Constantine's Rome, its eleven forums, ten basilicas, eighteen aqueducts, thirty seven city gates, two arenas, two circuses, thirty-seven triumphal arches, five obelisks, four hundred and twenty-three temples with their statues of the gods in ivory and gold. But all that was gone. There was no competition now. Not since Pope Urban VIII had declared the Coliseum a public quarry.

Stephen Dedalus' manifesto

I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use--silence, exile, and cunning.

-- Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

The Recognitions - pg. 65

Before their displacement from nature, baffled by the grandeur of their own culture which they could not define, and so believed did not exist, these transatlantic visitors had learned to admire in this neatly parceled definition of civilization the tyrannous pretension of many founded upon the rebellious efforts of a few, the ostentation of thousands presumed upon the strength of a dozen who had from time to time risen against this vain complacence with the past to which they were soon to contribute, giving, with their harried deaths, grounds for vanity of language, which they had perfected; supercilious posturing of intellect, which they had suffered to understand and deliver, in defiance; insolent arbitration of taste, grown from the efforts of those condemned as having none; contempt for others flourishing from seedlings which they had planted in the rain of contempt for themselves; dogmata of excellence founded upon insulting challenges wrought in impossible hope, and then grasped, for granted, from their hands fallen clenching it as dogma.

The Recognitions - pg. 57

- Mithras? Of course, he answered to some question of Wyatt's. - It didn't fail because it was bad. Mithraism almost triumphed over Christianity. It failed because it was so near good. He mumbled something, and then added, - That's the trouble today. No mystery. Everything secularized. No mystery, no weight to anything at all ..., and he got up and left the room, as he did often in the middle of conversation.

Virginia Woolf

I never thought that listening to someone reading out loud a passage from Virginia Woolf's book could be such a confusing (bordering on infuriating) experience...

Christopher Hitchens on Proust

I have not been able to discover whether there exists a precise French equivalent for the common Anglo-American expression "killing time". It's a very crass and breezy expression, when you ponder it for a moment, considering that time, after all, is killing us. Marcel Proust was the man who, by contemplating in a way that transcended the moment, attempted to interpenetrate these two forbidding alternatives.

The Recognitions - pg. 53

Here, after the throbbing flow of the night was broken by the first particles of light in the sky, he often pulled a blanket from the bed and crept to the window, to sit there unmoving for the full time it took until the sun itself rose, the unmeasured hours of darkness slowly shattered, rendered into a succession of particles passing separately, even as the landscape separated into tangible identities each appraising itself in a static withdrawal until everything stood out separate from the silent appraisals around it.

India Unbound - pg. 20

The American South was infamous for slavery, but it was famous for growing fine, long-staple cotton, which it supplied to the textile mills of Britain. The mills converted it to cloth and sold it around the world. Overnight, the American Civil War came and cut this supply chain. As the supply of raw cotton dried up, prices began to skyrocket. Traders in Bombay smelled an opportunity. The enterprising ones took off for the villages and convinced the farmers of western India to switch over to the particular long variety, suitable for the English mills. Soon the Indian farmers had converted, and with prices booming, a number of traders made huge fortunes in the 1860s supplying the cotton to Lancashire. Shiv Narain Barla was one of them. Some of these fortunes were reinvested in the first textile mills in bombay and Ahmedabad in the 1870s and 1880s.

India Unbound - pg. 7

Although our family was apolitical, dinnertime conversation would often veer around to politics. My grandfather used to get impatient with people who did not realize that the Japanese posed a bigger threat. My uncle would retort that we were already under alien rule, and who was to say one foreigner was better than another? My mother would add that we should be neutral in a conflict that did not concern us. My uncle confessed that he had secretly enjoyed Britain's discomfort in the East. He had applauded the successive fall of Hong Kong, the Philippines, then Malaya and Indochina. He was amazed at the speed of the Japanese advance. It meant that the colonial empires were flimsy structures built on pillars of rotting clay.

Framing device

Before I forget, an idea came to me today. How about using a novelist as a protagonist who writes long realist (accessing Tolstoy and Mumtaz Mufti and all the progressive urdu writers) novels who is trying to find an anchor on a story or a novel about something. And using him and his writing as a framing device.

Invite for a party

Please bring yourself, yourselves, a friend, a relation &, if you are wish,
some refreshment.

I am calling it a tea party, but there will be stronger beverages than tea,
if the spirit moves you in that direction. I have been threatening to have a
party for sometime & the coming of the summer solstice is what moved my
spirit to undertake a celebration. This is why I have invited you- to make
celebration possible.

Please stop by on the 24th after 4 pm. The light can begin to grow less, the
roses fade, people in high places pretend that they know what they are doing
when they are no wiser than Nebuchanezzer wandering in the meadow on his
hands & knees... I still believe celebration is as necessary as breathing.
Come & join me,

Steve Erickson - Our Ecstatic Days

Delcat Catalog No.

Quote: TedG FilmsFolded.com

And yet we like it because it is so economical. Its bare, honest, true. So we like it, just like we gravitate to an open person regardless of whether she is dumb. I appreciate Bresson for this, his economy which blesses the viewer with a mind that necessarily filters what we see. But Bresson goes too far and presses into the impress of abstraction. Malle is real because it is overtly untheatrical.

The Recognitions - pg. 12

At night, his was the only opened window in Madrid. Around him less than a million people closed outside shutters, sashes, inside shutters and curtains, hid behind locked and bolted doors themselves in congruent shapes of unconsciousness from the laden night as it passed. Through that open window he was wakened by lightning, and not to the lightning itself but the sudden absence of it, when the flash had wakened him to an eternal instant of half-consciousness and left him fully awake, chilled, alone and astonished at the sudden darkness where all had been light a moment before, chilled so thoroughly that the consciousness of it seemed to extend to every faintly seen object in the room, chilled with dread as the rain pounding against the sill pounded into his consciousness as though to engulf and drown it. - Did I close the window? ... The door to the carriage barn? Anything .. did I leave anything out in the rain? Polly? ... a doll he had had forty years before, mistress of a house under the birch trees in the afternoon sun, and those trees now, supple in the gale of wind charged inexhaustibly with water and darkness, the rest mud: the sense of something lost.

To Do List

1. Linear Programming Optimization
2. Get the CPFlex software running'
3. Comparison between Random Channel Scheme vs. LP
4. The Recognitions (pg. 60)

mp3: Lismore - 1979 (smashing pumpkins cover)

Lismore does Smashing Pumpkins by turning 1979 on its head.

The Recognitions - Opening Line

Even Camilla had enjoyed masquerades, of the safe sort where the mask may be dropped at that critical moment it presumes itself as reality.

- William Gaddis
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY. NEW YORK

Light Years - Last Sentence

Yes, he thought, I am ready, I have always been ready, I am ready at last.

Light Years - pg. 296

These women with their needs and assurance, their dazzling selfishness, their smiles - he would never conquer them, he was too timid, too consenting. He was helpless with them; he was close to them, yes, enormously close, even kindred, but at the same time completely different and alone, like a lame recruit in barracks.
Alone, he lay in the sheets of the still-warm bed. He had drawn the covers to his waist, he could feel a wetness, dense and chill beneath one leg; alone in this city, alone on this sea. The days were strewn about him, he was a drunkard of days. He had achieved nothing. He had his life - it was not worth much - not like a life that, though ended, had truly been something. If I had had courage, he thought, if I had had faith. We preserve ourselves as if that were important, and always at the expense of others. We hoard ourselves. We succeed if they fail, we are wise if they are foolish, and we go onward, clutching, until there is no one - we are left with no companion save God. In whom we do not believe. Who we know does not exist.

Light Years - pg. 261

She formed her life day by day, taking as its materials the emptiness and panic as well as the rushes, like fever, of contentment. I am beyond fear of solitude, she thought, I am past it. The idea thrilled her. I am beyond it and I will not sink.
This submission, this triumph made her stronger. It was as if finally, after having passed though inferior stages, her life had found a form worthy of it. Artificiality was gone, together with foolish hopes and expectations. There were times when she was happier than she had ever been, annd it seemed that this happiness was not bestowed on her but was something she had herself achieved, had searched for, not knowing its form, had given up everything lesser - even things that were irreplaceable - to gain.

Light Years - pg. 249

He liked brandy, crystal glasses, vermouth cassis at the Century. His life was solid, well-made, perhaps not happy but comfortable; there were feasts of comfort like nights in sleeping-trains with their clean sheets and cities floating in the dark. The first anachronisms were appearing in his clothes, the first blotches of age on the back of his hands. There was seldom music in his house. Books and conversation, reminiscences. He wore blue-checked shirts faded from many launderings. English shoes a little out of style. In his face a marvelous alertness, in the iris of one eye a small dark key like a holy stain. He had traveled, he had dined, he discussed hotels with the affection one usually reserves for women or beasts. He knew exactly in which a museum a painting was hung. His French was rickety structure based on a vocabulary of food and drink. He spoke it grandly.

Light Years - pg. 187

Her life was her own, but it was deeply entwined with these other lives: her gnomelike father’s, with her mother’s brilliant smile. She was like a young tree demure in the sunlight, in a clearing, graceful and alone, but the moss on the earth around, the stones, buried roots, the distant groves, the forest – all of these had their influence and spoke to her still.

Light Years - pg. 225

"I don't think you can pick one. It's really more a question of which of them is nearest at hand. I mean, there's an hour in the day when one's tongue begins to depend, when nothing will avail except to have a drink, and to be close to one of these establishments at that time is like Mahomet's paradise."
"I don't believe you'd find any liquor there," Candis said, "not in a Moslem paradise."
"Right," Peter said. "Which would rule it out for me."
"But women in abundance," the husband said.
"I think," Peter began, "that by the time I am being conducted into paradise..." He had risen to go into the kitchen, it was he who cooked the dinners "... my connection with women will be entirely historical."

Light Years - pg. 174

The room was too small for three people. It had a low ceiling, a little fireplace covered by glass. The whole house was small. It was a house for a writer and a cat, off the street at the end of a private alley, a disciplined writer, probably homosexual, who ocassionally had a friend sleep over.

Light Years - pg. 173

"Do you know how Mahler died?" Viri said. "It was in a thunderstorm. He'd been very sick, he was in a coma. And then at midnight there came a thunderstorm. He'd been very sick, he was in a coma. And then at midnight there came a tremendous storm, and he vanished into it, almost literally - his breath, his soul, everything."

Light Years - pg. 12x

She was in country vaguely familiar to her: the slope of the hills, the dark trees. The road had become visible, smooth and pale, the woods as far as one could see were without a single house or light. She was thrilled; may it always be thus, she thought. The early day, like dawn at sea, stunned her and gave her new life.
Soon there were the first farms, barns beautiful in the silence, the radio giving prices, the number slaughtered of sheep and lambs. Old houses of faded brick that struck the heart, white pillars on the porches, the occupants still asleep. The sky grew more and more faint, as if washed away. Suddenly everything was colored, the fields turned green. Helplessly, she recognized her source, though far from it for years, the vacant, illiterate country, the hills that were long to walk up, the vulgar towns. She passed a single car, just as the cows were coming in, a lone Chevrolet, silent as a bird in flight. A boy and girl were in it, seated close together. They did not seem to see her. They drifted behind in the brimming light.
Small gardens, churches, hand-painted signs. She felt no warmth of recognition; it was desolation to her, ruin. What failure to someday crawl back; it would erase everything in a single day.
Morning in the heartland. Early workers driving. Near a farmhouse two ducks wandered dazedly in the road where, amid white feathers, a bloody third lay, killed by a car. Greenhouses, ancient schools, factories with their windows broken out. Altoona. She was turning down streets she remembered as a girl.

Light Years - pg. 122

Her face was cool and gleaming. Her laugh was gorgeous, it was like applause.

Porträt des Albert Paris von Gütersloh by Egon Schiele

Blooms Day!!

Happy Blooms Day!! It's lunch time in Dublin and Mr. Bloom is writing a letter to his mistress in a seedy pub somewhere.

Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

Light Years - pg. 74

"There are things I love about marriage. I love the familiarity of it," Nedra said. "It's like a tattoo. You wanted it at the time, you have it, it's implanted in your skin, you can't get rid of it. You're hardly even aware of it any more. I suppose I'm very conventional," she decided.

Light Years - pg. 69

Their life was two things: it was a life, more or less - at least it was the preparation for one - and it was an illustration of life for their children. They had never expressed this to one another, but they were agreed upon it, and these two versions were entwined somehow so that one being hidden, the other was revealed. They wanted their children, in those years, to have the impossible, not in the sense of the unachievable but in the sense of the pure.
Children are our crop, our fields, our earth. They are birds let loose into darkness. They are errors renewed. Still, they are the only source from which may be drawn a life more successful, more knowing than our own. Somehow they will do one thing, take one step further, they will see the summit. We believe in it, the radiance that streams from the future, from days we will not see. Children must live, must triumph. Children must die; that is an idea we cannot accept.

Bianchi Paper

"Performance Analysis of IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function", G. Bianchi.

Battles LP, iPod

I finally gave in and bought Battles LP, Mirrored. Also, I got a pretty good deal on a 30 GB iPod. I like books that carry the markings of the previous readers: underlined text, strained scribblings here and there, coffee-stains. The Recognitions copy I got from the library has 'em all! The book looks grand. It is going to be a fun summer. I can now feel it seeping down into my bones along with all the double-espressos, I am having these days. Beautiful summer days.

mp3: Marie Antoinette's Soundtrack

Two mp3s from Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette. (Junaid, I don't know if your ISP in Karachi will let you download them in a decent amount of time. :P)

• "Hong Kong Garden" – Siouxsie & The Banshees
• "Ceremony" – New Order

To Do List

• Check out a Graph Theory text from Library
• Interference Modeling Work
• Check out "The Recognitions"
  

Concert Music Pieces To Get

1. Igor Stravinsky - Firebird
2. Edvard Grieg - Lyric Pieces
3. Edvard Grieg - Piano Concerto In A. Minor

The Workman's Friend - Flann O'Brien (Brian O'Nolan)

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Light Years - pg. 35

But knowledge does not protect one. Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside. Passion, energy, lies: these are what life admires. Still anything can be endured if humanity is watching. The martyrs prove it. We live in the attention of others. We turn to it as flowers to the sun.
There is no complete life. There are only fragments. We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands. And yet, this pouring, this flood of encounters, struggles, dreams… one must be unthinking, like a tortoise. One must be resolute, blind. For whatever we do do prevents us from doing the opposite. So that life is a matter of choices, each one final and of little consequence, like dropping stones into the sea.

Light Years - pg. 25

The city is a cathedral of possessions; its scent is dreams. Even those who have been rejected by it cannot leave.

Light Years - pg. 24

Their life is mysterious, it is like a forest; from far off it seems a unity, it can be comprehended, described. But closer it begins to separate, to break into light and shadow, the density blinds one. Within there is no form, only prodigious detail that reaches everywhere: exotic sounds, spills of sunlight, foliage, fallen trees, small beasts that flee at the sound of a twig-snap, insects, silence, flowers.
And all of this, dependent, closely woven, all of it is deceiving. There are really two kinds of life. There is, as Viri says, the one people believe you are living, and there is the other. It is this other which causes the trouble, this other we long to see.

Light Years - pg. 14

All friends are friends in a different way.

Light Years - pg. 7

She had trimmed the stems of flowers spread on the wood of the counter and begun to arrange them. Before her were scissors, paper-thin boxes of cheese, French knives. On her shoulders there was perfume. I am going to describe her life from the inside outward, from its core, the house as well, rooms in which life was gathered, rooms in the morning sunlight, the floors spread with Oriental rugs that had been her mother-in-law's, apricot, rouge and tan, rugs which though worn seemed to drink the sun, to collect its warmth; books, potpourris, cushions in colors of Matisse, objects glistening like evidence, many of which might, had they been possessed by ancient peoples, have been placed in tombs for another life: clear crystal dice, pieces of staghorn, amber beads, boxes, sculptures, wooden balls, magazines in which were photographs of women to whom she compared herself.

To Do List

- WLAN cross-channel Interference modeling.
- Channel Assignment papers - recap
- Working on short-story project: Rain (tentative)

Light Years - First Sentence

We dash the black river, its flats smooth as stone.

Absalom, Absalom! - Closing Sentence

"" "I dont hate it," Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately; "I dont hate it," he said. I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!"

Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 361

""Wait. Listen. I'm not trying to be funny, smart. I just want to understand it if I can and I dont know how to say it better. Because it's something my people haven't got. Or if we have got it, it all happened long ago across the water and so now there aint anything to look at every day to remind us of it. We dont live among defeated grandfathers and freed slaves (or have I got it backward and was it your folks that are free and the niggers that lost?) and bullets in the dining room table and such, to be always reminding us to never forget. What is it? something you live and breathe in like air? a kind of vacuum filled with wraithlike and indomitable anger and pride and glory at and in happenings that occurred and ceased fifty years ago? a kind of entailed birthright father and son and father and son of never forgiving General Sherman, so that forevermore as long as your children's children produce children you wont be anything but a descendant of a long line of colonels killed in Pickett's charge at Manassas?"
"Gettysburg, " Quentin said. "You cant understand it. You would have to be born there.""

Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

Delcat Catalog No.

August Book List.

Franz Rosenzweig Quotes

"The peoples of the world foresee a time when their land with its rivers and mountains still lies under heaven as it does today, but other people dwell there; when their language is entombed in books, and their laws and customs have lost their living power."

"War as it was known to the peoples of antiquity was in general only one of the natural expressions of life, and presented no fundamental complications. War meant that a people staked its life, for the sake of its life. A people that marched to war took upon itself the danger of its own death. That mattered little as long as the peoples regarded themselves as mortal."

"[Unlike the Jews] the peoples of the earth cannot be satisfied by the affinity of blood; they drive their roots into the night of the earth, itself dead but also life-giving, and take from the permanence of the earth their own permanence."

"Their will towards eternity clings to the earth and its dominion, to territory. The blood of their sons flows upon the soil of their homeland; for they do not trust to the living community of blood-relation, were it not anchored in the steady ground of the earth. The earth nourishes, but it also binds, and where a people loves the soil of its homeland more than its own life, it remains subject to the danger - and this danger hangs over every people of the world - that even if that love saves the soil of the homeland from the enemy nine times, and with the soil also saves the life of the people, nonetheless the 10th time the soil will be more loved than life, and the life of the people will be spilled out upon it."

mp3: Destroyer - The Spirit Of Giving

Destroyer - The Spirit of Giving

This is an earlier song by Destroyer, almost sounds like an afterthought, post-melodic. The superband, The New Pornographers where Destroyer does his other apprenticeship are going to release it as the closing track on their forthcoming album so I am dreading, this turning into some massive egotistically complex, layered guitar-chorus laden monster. But so far, it is giving out the right vibes. Melancholic, perhaps a little bit.

Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 322

"Because why not? Because listen. What was it the old dame, the Aunt Rosa, told you about how there are some things that just have to be whether they are or not, have to be a damn sight more than some other things that maybe are and it dont matter a damn whether they are or not? That was it. He just didn't have time yet. Jesus, he must have known it would be. Like that lawyer thought, he wasn't a fool; the trouble was, he wasn't the kind of not-fool the lawyer thought he would be. He must have known it was going to happen. It would be like you passed that sherbet and maybe you knew you would even reach the sideboard and the whiskey, yet you knew that tomorrow morning you would want that sherbet, then you reached the whiskey and you knew you wanted that sherbet now; maybe you didn't even go to the sideboard, maybe you even looked back at that champagne on the supper table among the dirty haviland and the crumpled damask, and all of a sudden you knew you didn't want to go back there even. It would be no question of choosing, having to choose between the champagne or whiskey and the sherbet, but all of a sudden (it would be spring then, in that country where had never spent a spring before and you said North Mississippi is a little harder country than Louisiana, with dogwood and violets and the early scentless flowers but the earth and the nights still a little cold and the hard tight sticky buds like young girl's nipples on alder and Judas trees and beech and maple and even something young in the cedars like he never saw before) you find that you don't want anything but that sherbet and that you haven;t been wanting anything else but that and you have been wanting that pretty hard for sometime - besides knowing that that sherbet is there for you to take. Not just for anybody to take but for you to take, knowing just from looking at that cup that it would be like a flower that, if any other hand reached for it, it would have thorns on it but not for your hand; and him not used to that since all the other cups that had been willing and easy for him to take up hadn't contained sherbet but champagne or at least kitchen wine. And more than that. There was the knowing what he suspected might be so, or not knowing if it was so or not. And who to say if it wasn't maybe the possibility of incest, because who (without a sister: I dont know about the others) has been in love and not discovered the vain evanescence of the fleshly encounter; who has not had to realize that when the brief is all done you must retreat from both love and pleasure, gather up your own rubbish and refuse - the hats and pants and shoes which you drag through the world - and retreat since the gods condone and practise these and the dreamy immeasurable coupling which floats oblivious above the trameling and harried instant, the:was-not:is:was: is a perquisite only of balloony and weightless elephants and whales: but maybe if there were sin too maybe you would not be permitted to escape, uncouple, return. - Aint that right?"

[current mood: speechless]

Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 313

"(showed it to him who not only had no visible father but had found himself to be, even in infancy, enclosed by an unsleeping cabal bent apparently on teaching him that he had never had a father, that his mother had emerged from a sojourn in limbo, from that state of blessed amnesia in which the weak senses can take refuge from godless dark forces and powers which weak human flesh cannot stand, to wake pregnant, shrieking and screaming and thrashing, not against the ruthless agony of labor but in protest against the outrage of her swelling loins; that he had been fathered on her not through that natural process but had been blotted onto and out of her body by the old infernal immortal male principle of all unbridled terror and darkness)"

Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 298

"... he not even knowing that all kids didn't have fathers too and that getting snatched every day or so from whatever harmless pursuit in which you were not bothering anybody or even thinking about them, by someone because that someone was bigger than you, stronger than you, and being held for a minute or five minutes under a kind of busted water pipe of incomprehensible fury and fierce yearning and vindictiveness and jealous rage was part of childhood which all mothers of children had received in turn from their mothers and from their mothers in turn from that Porto Rico or Haiti or wherever it was we all came from but none of us ever lived in. So that when he grew up and had children he would have to pass it on too (and maybe deciding then and there that that it was too much trouble and bother and that he would not have any children or at least hoped he would not) and hence no man had a father, no one personal Porto Rico or Haiti, but all mother faces which ever bred swooping down at those almost calculable moments out of some obscure ancient general affronting and outraging which the actual living articulate meat had not even suffered but merely inherited; all boy flesh that walked and breathed stemming from that one ambiguous eluded dark featherhead and so bothered perennial and ubiquitous everywhere under the sun..."

Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 295

"It did not matter to them (Quentin and Shreve) anyway, who could without moving, as free now of flesh as the father who decreed and forbade, the son who denied and repudiated, the lover who acquiesced, the beloved who was not bereaved, and with no tedious transition from hearth and garden to saddle, who could be already clattering over the frozen ruts of that December night and that Christmas dawn. that day of peace and cheer, of holly and goodwill and logs on the hearth; not two of them there and then either but four of them riding the two horses through the iron darkness, and that not mattering either: what faces and what names they called themselves and were called by so long as the blood coursed - the blood, the immortal brief recent intransient blood which could hold honor above slothy unregret and love above fat and easy shame."

Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 289

"And Father said he must have realized then that it would not be much after dark when it would happen; that he must have sat there and sensed, felt them gathering with the horses and dogs and guns - the curious and the vengeful - men of Sutpen's own kind, who used to eat at his table with him back when he (Wash) had yet to approach nearer the house than the scuppernong arbor - men who had led the way, shown the other and lesser ones how to fight in battles, who might also possess signed papers from the generals saying that they were among the first and foremost of the brave - who had galloped also in the old days arrogant and proud on the fine horses about the fine plantations - symbol also of admiration and hope, instruments too of despair and grief; these it was whom he was expected to run from and it seeming to him probably that he had no less to run from than he had to run to; that if he ran he would be fleeing merely one set of bragging and evil shadows for another; since they (men) were all of a kind throughout all of earth which he knew, and he old, too old to run far even if he were to run who could never escape them, no matter how much or how far he ran; a man past sixty could not expect to run that far, far enough to escape beyond the boundaries of earth where such men lived, set the order and the rule of living: and Father said that maybe for the first time in his life he began to comprehend how it had been possible for Yankees or any other army to have whipped them - the gallant, the proud, the brave; the acknowledged and chosen best among them all to bear the courage and honor and pride."

Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 280

""No," Shreve said; "you wait. Let me play a while now. Now, Wash. Him (the demon) standing there with the horse, the saddled charger, the sheathed saber, the gray waiting to be laid peaceful away among the moths and all lost save dishonor: then the voice of the faithful grave-digger who opened the play and would close it, coming out of the wings like Shakespeare's very self: 'Well, Kernel, they mought have whupped us but they aint kilt us yit, air they?' - " This was not flippancy either. It too was just that protective coloring of levity behind which the youthful shame of being moved hid itself, out of which Quentin also spoke, the reason for Quentin's sullen bemusement, the (on both their parts) flipness, the strained clowning: the two of them, whether they knew it or not, in the cold room (it was quite cold now) dedicated to that best of ratiocination which after all was a good deal like Sutpen's morality and Miss Coldfield's demonizing - this room not only dedicated to it but set aside for it and suitably so since it would be here above any other place that it (the logic and the morality) could do the least amount of harm - the two of them back to back as though at the last ditch, saying No to Quentin's Mississippi shade who in life had acted and reacted to the minimum of logic and morality, who dying had escaped it completely, who dead remained not only indifferent but impervious to it, somehow a thousand times more potent and alive."

Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 278

"Well, Kernel they kilt us but they aint whupped us yet, air they?"

Wash Jones

Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 275

"He left for Virginia that night. Grandfather said how he went to the window and watched him ride across the square on the gaunt black stallion, erect in his faded gray, the hat with its broken plume cocked a little yet not quite so much as the beaver of the old days, as if (Grandfather said) even with his martial rank and prerogatives he did not quite swagger like he used to do, not because he was chastened by misfortune or spent or even war-wearied but as though even while riding he was still bemused in that state in which he struggled to hold clear and free above a maelstorm of unpredictable and unreasoning human beings, not his head for breath and not so much his fifty years of effort and striving to establish a posterity, but his code of logic and morality, his formula and recipe of fact and deduction whose balanced sum and product declined, refused to swim or even float."

Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 271

"... seeing if Grandfather could discover that mistake which he believed was the sole cause of his problem, sitting there in his worn and shabby uniform, with his worn gauntlets and faded sash and (he would have had the plume by all means. He might have had to discard his saber, but he would have had the plume) the plume in his hat broken and frayed and soiled, with his horse saddled and waiting in the street below and a thousand miles to ride to find his regiment, yet he sitting there on the one afternoon of his leave as though he had a thousand of them, as if there were no haste nor urgency anywhere under the sun and that when he departed he had no further to go than the twelve miles out to Sutpen's Hundred and a thousand days or maybe even years of monotony and rich peace, and he, even after he would become dead, still there, watching the fine grandsons and great-grandsons springing as far as eye could reach; he still, even though dead in the earth, that same fine figure of a man that Wash Jones called him, but not now. Now fog-bound by his own private embattlement of personal morality: that picayune splitting of abstract hairs while (Grandfather said) Rome vanished and Jericho crumbled, that this would be right if or that would be wrong but of slowing blood and stiffening bones and arteries that Father says men resort to in senility who while young and supple and strong reacted to a single simple Yes and a single simple No as instantaneous and complete and unthinking as the snapping on and off of electricity, sititng there and talking and now Grandfather not knowing what he was talking about because now Grandfather..."

Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 25x

"But Quentin did not continue at once - the flat, curiously dead voice, the downcast face, the relaxed body not stirring except to breathe; the two of them not moving except to breathe, both young, both born within the same year: the one in Alberta, the other in Mississippi; born half a continent apart yet joined, connected after a fashion in a sort of geographical transubstantiation by the Continental Trough, that River which runs not only through the physical land of which it is the geological umbilical, not only runs through the spiritual lives of the beings within its scope, but is very Environment itself which laughs at degrees of latitude and temperature, though some of these beings, like Shreve, have never seen it - "

Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 25x

"...high mortality was concomitant with the money and the sheen on the dollars was not from gold but from blood - a spot of earth which might have been created and set aside by Heaven itself, Grandfather said, as a theater for violence and injustice and bloodshed and all the satanic lusts of human greed and cruelty, for the last despairing fury of all the pariah-interdict and all the doomed - a little island set in a smiling and fury-lurked and incredible indigo sea, which was the halfway point between what we call the jungle and what we call civilization, halfway between the dark inscrutable continent from which the black blood, the black bones and flesh and thinking and remembering and hopes and desires, was ravished by violence, and the cold known land to which it was doomed, the civilized land and people which had expelled some of its own blood and thinking and desires that had become too crass to be faced and borne longer, and set it homeless and desperate on the lonely ocean - a little lost island in a latitude which would require ten thousand years of equatorial heritage to bear its climate, a soil manured with black blood from two hundred years of oppression and exploitation until it sprang with an incredible paradox of peaceful greenery and crimson flowers and sugar cane sapling size and three times the height of a man and a little bulkier of course but valuable pound for pound almost with silver ore, as if nature held a balance and kept a book and offered a recompense for the torn limbs and outraged hearts even if man did not, the planting of nature and man too watered not only by the wasted blood but breathed over by the winds in which the doomed ships had fled in vain, out of which the last tatter of sail had sunk into the blue sea, along which the last vain despairing cry of woman or child had blown away - the planting of men too; the yet intact bones and brains in which the old unsleeping blood that had vanished into the earth they trod still cried out for vengeance."

Khan Boha

Khan Boha was a character that appeared in only one of the pulp detective urdu novels that used to get published on third-grade brownish paperbacks. The novel was a middle of the road story of one country-side feudal whose shady dealings brought the two heroes of the detective series together. Along with their entire troupe of brave, mad-retarded do-gooders including their kids; they went inside the estate of Khan Boha and about five hundred pages later managed to come out after administering a thorough ass-kicking to Khan Boha. Khan Boha was later apprehended and brought before justice and everything started looking promising again while you got your little thrills worth 3 Rupees.

mp3: Sufjan Stevens - "Come on! Feel the IIlinoise!"

I have always been kind of confused about Sufjan's brand of "pop" and his weaving of mythologies, like there is something ungenuine about it: plastic, synthetic and safe. But somehow, well, yes, somehow this tune is on my playlist for a day or two now. He references The Cure's "Close to me" in an interesting way, here. Plus, the second part gets darkly biblical in subject matter.

Sufjan Stevens - Come On! Feel the Illinoise! – 1. The World's Columbian Exposition 2. Carl Sandburg Visits Me in a Dream

Chorus line: "Are you writing from the heart?" (Faulkner)

July Book List (tentative)

god help me (this is big).

- The Recognitions - William H. Gaddis

[tip: 30 pages per day]

The Last Puritan: A Memoir In The Form Of A Novel

George Santayana's novel that came out in the 30's looks something to be looked into before this wonderful summer leaves. (possibly August Book List)

The Last Puritan: A Memoir In The Form Of A Novel

VoiceOverIP Performance Monitoring Paper

Voice Over IP Performance Monitoring

Excerpt from Tao Lin Interview

Tao Lin is supposed to be the next break-out act in the lit. world, I can't reliably confirm. He's got two books coming out this month and I happened to chance upon an interview:

Q - Gene Yuen Lang, who grew up in San Francisco, makes it look very terrifying. He represents all of the Asian stereotypes with a grotesque named "Chin-Kee" who eats cats. The book won the Printz Award for Young Adult Literature in 2006. However, he grew up in the late 1970s.

Maybe the racism is worse there. I'm not sure. I went to NYU. There were a lot of Asian clubs. Whenever some place portrayed Asians as eating rice, holding chopsticks, having slanty eyes, or anything like that the Asian club would have boycotts against whoever had done that. But the Asian club called itself the Asian club. An Asian who is "proud" of his or her heritage is racist. Stereotypes are strange. An Asian in a group of Asians at an Asian club can joke about being Asians being computer experts, or something, but if a white person does it the Asian club becomes very angry. I feel interminable thinking about this. I feel interminable thinking about existential issues also, like limited-time, death, the arbitrary nature of the universe, the demands of genetics vs. the demands of society, philosophy, and consciousness, etc. I don't know. I try not to use the word "Asian" ever unless sarcastically. If I say, "Look at that German," I say it kind-heartedly and sarcastically. I know that 98% of all human beings think in preconceptions, cliches, and not factually. I don't think French people are “smarter” than Americans or whatever. I try to view each person specifically, and only their concrete attributes. Someone saying, “I'm French,” is meaningless to me. Ideally it's meaningless to me.

802.11 Background Reading

802.11-r is 802.11 variant for VoIP
802.11-e is QOS spec.
802.11-i is security spec.

Lolita - Part 1

Lolita has one of the best openings ever for a novel.

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns."

Three shots of Jameson

in one hour makes me want to throw up. Ed poured me last night, I had 'em all and then It all came out, the dark, mean, resentful, ego-laden effluvium that coursed through my veins. The kitchen sink saved me(again).

Research Proposal for Stephan.

It is finally taking shape. Looking into the roaming capabilities of mobile wireless devices that connects automatically to the access points and the open problems therein; sounds exciting!

Performance Study of Fast BSS Transition using IEEE
802.11r

Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 149

"... who was not spying, hiding, but waiting, watching, for no reward, no thanks, who did not love him in the sense we mean it because there is no love of that sort without hope; who (if it were love) loved with that sort beyond the compass of glib books: that love which gives up what it never had - that pony's modicum which is the donor's all yet whose infinitesimal weight adds nothing to the substance of the loved - yet I gave it. And not to him, to her; it was as though I said to her, 'Here take this too. You cannot love him as he should be loved, and though he will no more feel this giving's weight than he would ever know its lack, yet there may come some moment in your married lives when he will find this atom's particle as you might find a cramped small pallid hidden shoot in a familiar flower bed and pause and say, "Where did this come from?"; you need only answer, "I don't know."' And then I went back home and stayed five years, heard an echoed shot, ran up a nightmare flight of stairs, and found -"

Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 145

"four years younger than Judith, four years later than Judith's moment which only virgins know; when the entire delicate spirit's bent is one anonymous climaxless epicene and unravished nuptial - not that widowed and nightly violation by the inescapable and scornful dead which is the need of twenty and thirty and forty, but a world filled with living marriage like the light and air which she breathes. But it was no summer of a virgin's itching discontent; no summer's caesarean lack which should have torn me, dead flesh or even embryo, from the living: or else, by friction's ravishing of the male-furrowed meat, also weaponed and panoplied as a man instead of hollow woman."

mp3: Jackie, Dressed In Cobras - The New Pornographers

Looking at the stuff, I had, today on this computer to burn a new cd that I promised to Ava for the coffeeshop music project. And I dug out the New Pornos' tune which was actually the indestructible Dan Bejar's work with the New Porno crew mostly providing a chorus line (Neko Case is the most prominent). Dan Bejar is crazy, his words reminded me of Rebecca's dream.
The New Pornographers - Jackie, Dressed In Cobras
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Look we've seen this kind of thing before.
Jackie flirts with cobras at the door.
Dont live your life inside an arrow filled with glances
New York's sick, you've had your chances,
Yes you've had 'em. Yes you've had 'em. Yes you've had 'em.
On a train devouring the land,
theres a kid going insane over her man,
insane over her man, insane over her.

Look, we've seen this kind of thing before,
Orchids hanging from the Reverend's door,
and if he hollers, let him out 'cause gonna shout.
See, something in the way she moves just shouldnt be allowed.

Wrecked on the jungle floor, Jackie's dressed in cobras,
giving me ideas. What I really need now is ideas.

Look, we've seen this kind of thing before.
Vampires drawn across the ballroom floor.
Mistake this bloodlust feast for dancing.
You felt sick. You've had your chances,
Yes you've had 'em. Yes you've had 'em. Yes you've had 'em.

On a train devouring the land,
theres a kid going insane over her man,
insane over her man, insane over her.
On a train devouring the land,
theres a kid going insane over her man,
insane over her man, insane over her.
On a train devouring the land,
theres a kid going insane over her man,
insane over her man, insane over her.

Wrecked on the jungle floor, Jackie's dressed in cobras,
giving me ideas. What I really need now is ideas.

Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 142

"That's what I found. Perhaps it's what I expected, knew (even at nineteen knew, I would say if it were not for my nineteen, my own particular kind of nineteen years) that I should find. Perhaps I couldn't even have wanted more than that, couldn't have accepted less, who even at nineteen must have known that living is one constant and perpetual instant when the arras-veil before what-is-to-be hangs docile and even glad to the lightest naked thrust if we had dared, were brave enough (not wise enough: no wisdom needed here) to make the rending gash. Or perhaps it is no lack of courage either: not cowardice which will not face that sickness somewhere at the prime foundation of this factual scheme from which the prisoner soul, miasmal-distillant, wroils ever upward sunward, tugs its tenuous prisoner arteries and veins and prisoning in its turn that spark, that dream which, as the globy and complete instant of its freedom mirrors and repeats (repeats? creates, reduces to a fragile evanescent iridescent sphere) all of space and time and massy earth, relicts the seething and anonymous miasmal mass which in all the years of time has taught itself no boon of death but only how to recreate, renew; and dies, is gone, vanished: nothing - but is that true wisdom which can comprehend that there is a might-have-been which more true than truth, from which the dreammer, waking, says not 'Did I but dream?' but rather says, indicts high heaven's very self with: 'Why did I wake since waking I shall never sleep again?'"

Spengler quote on "high" art

"The object of high art is to lift the listener out of the misery of his personal circumstance by showing him a better world in which his petty troubles are beside the point. What is the point of music that assists the listener in wallowing in his troubles? Some country-music fanciers no doubt will find this callous, and I want to disclose that I do not care one way or another whether their wife left them, their dog died, or their truck broke down."

To Do List

- 802.11 k card info.
- 802.11 n,g,r standard documents
- Proute simulation and analytical model
- Absalom, Absalom! to pg.200

Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 114

"...and Henry, the countryman, the bewildered, with the subtle tide already setting beneath him toward the point where he must either deny the friend for whom he had already repudiated home and kin and all; the bewildered, the (for that time) helpless carried by the friend, the mentor, through one of those inscrutable and curiously lifeless doorways like that before which he had seen the horse or the trap, and so into a place which to his puritan's provincial mind all of morality was upside down and all of honor perished - a place created for and by voluptuousness, the abashless and unabashed senses, and the country boy with his simple and erstwhile untroubled code in which females were ladies or whores or slaves looked at the apotheosis of two doomed races presided over by its own victim - a woman with a face like a tragic magnolia, the eternal female, the eternal Who-suffers; the child, the boy, sleeping in silk and lace to be sure yet complete chattel of him who, begetting him, owned him body and soul to sell (if he chose) like a calf or puppy or sheep; and the mentor watching again..."

Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 109

"I can imagine him, with his puritan heritage - that heritage peculiarly Anglo-Saxon - of fierce proud mysticism and that ability to be ashamed of ignorance and inexperience, in that city foreign and paradoxical, with its atmosphere at once fatal and langorous, at once feminine and steel-hard - this grim humorless yokel out of a granite heritage where even the houses, let alone clothing and conduct, are built in the image of a jealous and sadistic Jehovah, put suddenly down in a place whose denizens had created their All-Powerful and His supporting hierarchy-chorus of beautiful saints and handsome angels in the image of their houses and personal ornaments and voluptuous lives."

Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 96

"Henry was the provincial clown almost, given to instinctive and violent actions rather than to thinking who may have been conscious that his fierce provincial's pride in his sister's virginity was a false quantity which must incorporate in itself an inability to endure in order to be precious, to exist, and so must depend upon its loss, absence, to have existed at all. In fact, perhaps this is the pure and perfect incest: the brother realizing that the sister's virginity must be destroyed in order to have existed at all, taking that virginity in the person of the brother-in-law, the man whom he would be if he could become, metamorphose into, the lover, the husband; by whom he would be despoiled, choose for despoiler, if he could become, metamorphose into the sister, the mistress, the bride."

Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 74

"Because the time now approached (it was 1860, even Mr. Coldfield probably admitted that war was unavoidable) when the destiny of Sutpen's family which for twenty years now had been like a lake welling from quiet springs into a quiet valley and spreading, rising almost imperceptibly and in which the four members of it floated in sunny suspension, felt the first subterranean movement toward the outlet, the gorge which would be the land's catastrophe too, and the four peaceful swimmers turning suddenly to face one another, not yet with alarm or distrust but just alert, feeling the dark set, none of them yet at that point where man looks about at his companions in disaster and thinks When will I stop trying to save them and save only myself? and not even aware that that point was approaching."

Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 69

"Often twice and sometimes three times a week the two of them came to town and into the house - the foolish unreal voluble preserved woman now six years absent from the world - the woman who had quitted home and kin on a flood of tears and in a shadowy miasmic region something like the bitter purlieus of Styx had produced two children and then rose like the swamp-hatched butterfly, unimpeded by weight of stomach and all the heavy organs of suffering and experience, into a perennial bright vacuum of arrested sun - and Judith, the young girl dreaming, not living, in her complete detachment and imperviousness to actuality almost like physical deafness."

Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 62

"He named Clytie as he named them all, the one before Clytie and Henry and Judith even, with that same robust and sardonic temerity, naming with his own mouth his own ironic fecundity of dragon's teeth."

Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 60

"The aunt had taught Miss Rosa to look upon her sister as a woman who had vanished, not only out of the family and the house but out of life too, into an edifice like Bluebeard's and there transmogrified into a mask looking back with passive and hopeless grief upon the irrevocable world, held there not in durance but in a kind of jeering suspension by a man who had entered hers and her family's life before she was born with the abruptness of a tornado, done irrevocable and incalculable damage, and gone on. In a grim mausoleum air of Puritan righteousness and outraged female vindictiveness Miss Rosa' childhood was passed, that aged and ancient and timeless absence of youth which consisted of a Cassandralike listening beyond closed doors, of lurking in dim halls filled with that presbyterian effluvium of lugubrious and vindictive anticipation, while she waited for the infancy and childhood with which nature had confounded and betrayed her to overtake the disapprobation regarding any and every thing which could penetrate the walls of that house through the agency of any man, particularly her father, which the aunt seems to have invested her with at birth along with the swaddling clothes."

Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 8

"Her voice would not cease, it would just vanish. There would be the dim coffin-smelling gloom sweet and over-sweet with the twice-bloomed wisteria against the outer wall by the savage quiet September sun impacted distilled and hyperdistilled, into which came now and then the loud cloudy flutter of the sparrows like a flat limber stick whipped by an idle boy, and the rank smell of female old flesh long embattled in virginity while the wan haggard face watched him above the faint triangle of lace at wrists and throat from the too tall chair in which she resembled a crucified child; and the voice not ceasing but vanishing into and then out of the long intervals like a stream, a trickle running from patch to patch of dried sand, and the ghost mused with shadowy docility as if it were the voice which he haunted where a more fortunate one would have had a house. Out of quiet thunderclap he would abrupt (man-horse-demon) upon a scene peaceful and decorous as a schoolprize water color, faint sulphur-reek still in hair clothes and beard, with grouped behind him his band of wild niggers like beasts half tamed to walk upright like men, in attitudes wild and reposed, and manacled among them the French architect with his air grim, haggard, and tatter-ran. Immobile, bearded and hand palm-lifted the horseman sat; behind him the wild blacks and the captive architect huddled quietly, carrying in blood-less paradox the shovels and picks and axes of peaceful conquest. Then in the long unamaze Quentin seemed to watch them overrun suddenly the hundred square miles of tranquil and astonished earth and drag house and formal gardens violently out of the soundless Nothing and clap them down like cards upon a table beneath the up-palm immobile and pontific, creating the Sutpen's Hundred, the Be Sutpen's Hundred like the oldentime Be Light. Then hearing would reconcile and he would seem to listen to two separate Quentins now - the Quentin Compson preparing for Harvard in the South, the deep South dead since 1865 and people with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts, listening, having to listen, to one of the ghosts which had refused to lie still even longer than most had, telling about old ghost-times; and the Quentin Compson who was still too young to deserve yet to be a ghost, but nevertheless having to be one for all that, since he was born and bred in deep South the same as she was - the two separate Quentins now talking to one another in the long silence of notpeople, in notlanguage, like this: It seems that this demon - his name was Sutpen - (Colonel Sutpen) - Colonel Sutpen. Who came out of nowhere and without warning upon the land with a band of strange niggers and built a plantation - (Tore violently a plantation, Miss Rosa Coldfield says) - tore violently . And married her sister Ellen and begot a son and a daughter which - (Without gentleness begot, Miss Rosa Coldfield says) - without gentleness. Which should have been the jewels of his pride and the shield and comfort of his old age, only - (Only they destroyed him or something or he destroyed them or something. And died) - and died. Without regret, Miss Coldfield says - (Save by her) Yes, save by her. (And by Quentin Compson) Yes. And by Quentin Compson."

To Do List

1 - Mesh Network Labwork. Literature Survey
2 - Bohacek meeting
3 - Bike maintenance
4 - Absalom, Absalom! to pg. 100
5 - Revise the first draft of short-story

Absalom, Absalom! - pg. 13

"Whatever her reason for choosing him, whether it was that or not, the getting to it, Quentin thought, was taking a long time. Meanwhile, as though in inverse ratio to the vanishing voice, the invoked ghost of the man whom she could neither forgive nor revenge herself upon began to assume a quality almost of solidity, permanence. Itself circumambient and enclosed by its effluvium of hell, its aura of unregeneration, it mused (mused, thought, seemed to possess sentience, as if, though dispossessed of the peace - who was impervious anyhow to fatigue - which she declined to give it, it was still irrevocably outside the scope of her hurt or harm) with that quality peaceful and now harmless and not even very attentive - the ogre-shape which, as Miss Coldfield's voice went on, resolved out of itself before Quentin's eyes the two half-ogre children, the three of them forming a shadowy background for the fourth one. This was the mother, the dead sister Ellen: this Niobe without tears who had conceived to the demon in a kind of nightmare, who even while alive had moved but without life and grieved but without weeping, who now had an air of tranquil and unwitting desolation, not as if she had either outlived the others or had died first, but as if she had never lived at all."

Absalom, Absalom! - First Sentence

"From a little after two o clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that - a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashed full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them."

Book Club - 2007

The book club, I was thinking to reinstate this summer had somehow been worked out by peeps. I suggested "Moby Dick" which was ruthlessly rejected in favor of Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom!" by Freddy and Danielle. I was supposed to be apologetic for picking up Thomas Mann's brilliant "Magic Mountain" for the last Book Club so no one cared for my pick. Fair enough. But this book that they picked up (apparently on a whim brought on by a coffee mug at the good ol' coffeeshop in Freddy's hand) won't be a "fun" (whatever that means) read either. It is Faulkner's most intense work which builds up on the Compson Family's history from "The Sound And The Fury". This time though, the book club exists only as online forum without any meetings planned. The only meet is planned at the end of reading. Plus, there are more people reading than the last time. I am not sure how many will make it to the end of the book. Let's see.
People in the book club:
1 - Me
2 - Freddy Rodriguez
3 - Emily Altimare (President)
4 - Danielle Todd
5 - Dain Simons
6 - Devin Harner
7 - Dan Halprin
8 - Nina Juliano
9 - Rebecca Faye Northrop
10 - Brett Tomashek

A group-pic will be a good idea at some point.

The Sound And The Fury - pg. 306

"The air brightened, the running shadow patches were now the obverse, and it seemed to him that the fact that the day was clearing was another cunning stroke on the part of the foe, the fresh battle toward which he was carrying ancient wounds. From time to time he passed churches, unpainted frame buildings with sheet iron steeples, surrounded by tethered teams and shabby motorcars, and it seemed to him that each of them was a picket-post where the rear guards of Circumstance peeped fleetingly back at him. "And damn You, too," he said. "See if You can stop me," thinking of himself, his file of soldiers with the manacled sheriff in the rear, dragging Omnipotence down from his throne, if necessary; of the embattled legions of both hell and heaven through which he tore his way and put his hands at last on his fleeing niece."

The Sound And The Fury - pg. 274

"The room grew warmer. Soon Dilsey's skin had taken on a rich, lustrous quality as compared with that as of a faint dusting of wood ashes which both it and Luster's had worn as she moved about the kitchen, gathering about her the raw materials of food, coordinating the meal. On the wall above a cupboard, invisible save at night, by lamp light and even then evincing an enigmatic profundity because it had but one hand, a cabinet clock ticked, then with a preliminary sound as if it had cleared its throat, struck five times. "Eight oclock," Dilsey said. "

Aloha - Brace Your Face

This song reminds me of ol' pink floyd and king crimson - the so-called prog-rockisms are littered here aplenty. There was a subtle shift of tempo halfway through the tune and that got me hooked.

Aloha - Brace Your Face

Quoting TedG - FilmsFolded

"Its like relaxing into love with perfect trust."