deborahb.blog

A universe full of stars

Mon, 12 May 2008 12:18:41 GMT

markdeniz is the result of a scientific experiment into sustained sleep deprivation.

What we've learned so far is that, without sleep, subjects become embarrassingly productive and improbably focussed on areas of endeavour designed to promote & support entire groups of otherwise unrelated people.

Clearly we need to milk his productivity for all he's got before he realises what the heck he's doing, rapidly burns out & collapses in a mumbling heap.

This is my contribution to that cause.

But how did they know?

Sun, 11 May 2008 22:33:56 GMT

Subject Line of Today's Funniest Spam: We look forward to hearing from you Space Shuttle Drill God.

Went to ground, missed the rainbow

Thu, 08 May 2008 09:10:21 GMT

Damn! I missed this:

Wed 7th May - Dark side of the Rainbow. Dark Side of the Rainbow (also known as Dark Side of Oz ) is the name used to refer to the act of listening to the 1973 Pink Floyd album The Dark Side of the Moon while watching the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz)

... Is this really a thing?

Other people's poetry: Up and Down

Mon, 05 May 2008 10:38:15 GMT

Poets.org has ramped up the poems, with April apparently spilling into May with these pieces:

WHERE?
by Kenneth Patchen

There's a place the man always say
Come in here, child
No cause you should weep
Wolf never catch the rabbit
Golden hair never turn white with grief
Come in here, child
No cause you should moan
Brother never hurt his brother
Nobody here ever wander without a home
There must be some such place somewhere
But I never heard of it

According to Patchen's bio, a chronic spinal problem left him in almost constant pain for thirty years. Until some poet friends raised funds for an operation. It was a success, & Patchen enjoyed a brief respite -- until a follow-up surgery went wrong, & left him bedridden for the rest of his life.

During which "he created his most visually remarkable works".

Now read that poem again...

And then read this one:

May Day
by Phillis Levin

I've decided to waste my life again,
Like I used to: get drunk on
The light in the leaves, find a wall
Against which something can happen,

[read the rest...]

On a parched, drugless day

Thu, 01 May 2008 12:09:05 GMT

Rumours of my demise, etc. In fact, April has been Novel Writing Month in Debville. It has progressed well, but slowly, & left me in a state in between hopelessness & optimism. What is this state called? Perhaps 'normality'.

I am back.

In news, this: a joint venture by Mission Australia and realestate.com.au to raise money for the homeless. Click on the link below to donate a dollar to Housing for the Homeless.

www.housesforthehomelesscom.au

As usual, I am torn. In the words of Lee Stringer, it's presumptuous to assume the homeless need homes. Perhaps what they need is more complicated than that. Perhaps more simple.

Do we, of the middle-class, internet-surfing world, really think we have all the answers, for everyone?

This is one of the few answers I have for the right now. Click the link, give a dollar. Why not?

This is how Lee Stringer began to write. He lay in a crawl space underneath Grand Central Terminal, groping about for anything long and thin. At last his hand fell upon a wooden, dowel-like instrument. He thrust it into his crack pipe, and before long had freed up the last smokable resin. He lit up, and ''success, love, orgasm, omnipotence, immortality,'' as he describes the effect of the drug, were once again his. One parched, drugless day he was reduced to staring at the long, wooden thing, and noticed it was a pencil.
-- Kurt Vonnegut

And other reasons to be late

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 11:13:32 GMT

I'm sorry I was late.
I was on my way
when I felt a plot
thickening in my arm.
I have a fear of heights.
Luckily the Earth
is on the second floor
of the universe.
-- Jeffrey McDaniel, (excerpt) 'Compulsively Allergic to the Truth', from The Endarkenment, via poets.org Poem-A-Day

3am all day long

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 10:43:40 GMT

Last night, 3am, in the barely-dark darkness of the big city, I composed in my head a rant about the latest outburst from the factions of the 'Sleeping pills are bad' fashionistas. Those squalling, hawking, superstitious scuzzballs, those sentries of self-righteousness.

Suicide has given sleeping pills a bad name.

The fact that I was awake at 3am & the fact I was composing anti-anti-sleeping-pill rants in my head are not unrelated. It was an excellent rant, too, though probably nothing I haven't said before. Full of vim and verve. Or venom. Or whatever the words are I mean.

After ending the rant against the ranters who rant about sleeping pills, I went on to compose a lengthy explanation about insomnia, for the sleeping beings I disturbed during the night, who may not understand why at 3.30am I got up and turned on the mosquito lamp, or why at 4am (having sunken into fury about still being awake while a whole goddamn week lay ahead of me) I started in again on Michael Robotham's latest book, 'Shatter' (which is very good, but which wasn't responsible for keeping me awake). Or why at 5am I switched the light off again, 5.30am I moved the cat to a spot on the bed further away from my frown, 6am I swore at the red halo of the alarm clock (fuck that alarm clock). Or why when I got up at 7am, my face rigid with fatigue, why then I was so incensed to have been robbed of one night's sleep and my peace of mind. Left to stumble over my words for the rest of my waking hours and divide the day not into morning and afternoon, but nausea and headache.

Let them ask. I have devised an excellent explanation (that my wakeful-weary brain has momentarily misplaced).

They say they want to set up a national directory of sleeping pill users (since those of us who want to sleep are apparently closer to danger and death than those who hide their chemical imbalances with drink or drugs or bad television). I say: bring it on. Let the bitches who suck at the teat of trendy faux-concern, who enjoy the drama of overwrought anxiety, let them have their directory of dirty drug users like me. Let them, I say, suck on that.

Anaphoric euphoria

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 09:15:43 GMT

"I believe in poetry as a way of surviving the emotional chaos, spiritual confusions and traumatic events that come with being alive"
-- Gregory Orr

I know it's about, what, half way through April already (& I have been busy settling into a new job), but of course April is poem-a-day month at poets.org -- one of my favourite times of year. Not just for the poems that arrive in my inbox daily, but for the way it gently ignites the curiosity, causing the casual reader to click over to poets.org to learn such things as:

The term "anaphora" comes from the Greek for "a carrying up or back," and refers to a type of parallelism created when successive phrases or lines begin with the same words, often resembling a litany. The repetition can be as simple as a single word or as long as an entire phrase. As one of the world’s oldest poetic techniques, anaphora is used in much of the world’s religious and devotional poetry, including numerous Biblical Psalms.

To demonstrate, an excerpt from an anaphoric poem (one I've never actually been able to read in one sitting -- perhaps because I am frequently too sober):

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving
hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry
fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the
starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the
supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of
cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels
staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkan-
sas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes
on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in
wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
-- Allen Ginsberg, Howl

But I thought 'emaciated' was the in-look for Jesus...?

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 10:24:54 GMT

San Franciscans have flocked to Dolores Park in the city to compete in, or watch, what has become an Easter Sunday tradition - the "Hunky Jesus" competition.

Officiated by a gay charity group known as the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, which has been active in San Francisco since 1979, the contest pits costumed and usually scantily clad men against each other for the distinction of being declared the most attractive Jesus.

The invisible year

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 10:30:18 GMT

"People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist's office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off. These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were themselves recently bereaved. I understood for the first time the power in the image of the rivers, the Styx, the Lethe, the cloaked ferryman with his practice of suttee. Widows did not throw themselves on the burning raft out of grief. The burning raft was instead an accurate representation of the place to which their grief (not their families, not the community, not custom, their grief) had taken them."
-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

Because of my own passing interest in death and loss and, by extension, grief, I'd been meaning to read The Year of Magical Thinking for quite some time. I'd avoided it, though. I was afraid of it. I was afraid of being thrown back into grief (an awkward state from which escape seems impossible). But finally the erudite kaaronwarren mentioned it & finally I was in Berkelouw Books in Leichhardt looking for something to read and life seemed good. So I bought it and started reading it today and goddamn, goddamn, thank god Didion's only documenting a year.

What I'm learning, though -- for all the muted optimism of her title (The Year, one year, not a life, not life) -- is that grief, once it gets a hold, leaves a path. Grief alters everything forever. When grief knows you, knows how to find you, it's always there. Grief, the shadow, the warrior virus, the terrorist, the hitman.

Didion writes a story that feels necessary. She writes with a vocab that's recognisable. Hell, I think I myself wrote some of Didion's sentences years ago, and she's now written some of mine.

(I remember a friend of mine, in the midst of grief, one day saying, "I could lie down in the middle of the road and no one would see me.")

Don't read this book, don't read this book. Grief is dangerous. And Didion has left the door open.

And WHY did nobody tell ME!

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 07:51:14 GMT

Oh, my dear young writer, didn't anyone tell you that Live Journal is actually where the Living Dead of the writing world are created?
-- Robin Hobb

Damn.

Variable uses for the demon drink

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 07:52:53 GMT

Via lifehacker comes the suggestion to use vodka to painlessly remove band-aids. No, not in the way you think, but by soaking the bandaid *in* the vodka.

Apparently the solvent dissolves the adhesive.

Or, just do the old-fashioned thing and drink it. Then WHO CARES about bandaids!

*hums* 'Feelin' no painnnnnnn'.

Also excellent is the news that the Vatican, that bastion of moral rectitude, has released an update for the Seven Deadly Sins. Known as the Five Random Sins of Minimal To No Consequence (Including Three Re-Statements of the Same Sin*), the Vatican manages to name 'excessive wealth' as a sin. Having clearly never visited its own museum.

-----
* Since 'Contributing to a widening divide between rich and poor', 'Excessive wealth' AND 'Creating poverty' is surely the same thing.

The business of making money

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 07:34:19 GMT

Discussing with a friend the ideal path to independent wealth, we naturally hit upon the idea of self-employment*.

Perusing our own and each other's marketable skills (underline 'marketable' here, as we each have several *skills* ... just none that are obvious money-makers), we realised that, indeed, we had little to recommend us to this course of action -- or to clients or, even, to each other.

What, after all, could we actually *do* to make money?

It appeared: very little.

My friend commented, "So. We need a business idea that anyone can do. That no one has done."

...

What? Could happen.

-----
* We never really believed self-employment was likely to bring us wealth. Not any more than our current strategy, anyhow**.
** Our current strategy is the regular procurement of lotto tickets.

Not enough birthdays? You need interplanetary travel

Sat, 08 Mar 2008 23:26:35 GMT

It's my birthday!

Weirdly enough, I found this page in my browser History folder -- even though I don't remember ever seeing it before.

It calculates your age on all the planets of the solar system.

(Although strangely when I entered my birthday as 9 March 1971 two days ago, it told me that my next Earth birthday is Saturday 8 March, 2008. I may not know much about science, but I'm pretty sure that's wrong.)

Anyhow, on April 10 I'll be celebrating my Mercurian birthday, & on September 16 my Vesuvian birthday.....

Useful beautiful

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 22:46:29 GMT

Via joshrubin_feed comes Joana Meroz' crackery tableware and bra cups, and plenty of other objects that combine form and function.

Following the sun

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 22:29:22 GMT

Too totally cool: the world sunlight map.

Returning to some classic packaging for the story

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 08:59:30 GMT

As part of Harmony Week, Glebe Library is letting you borrow books. Human books, that is.

Move Beyond the Title Page with a human book!

Ever wondered what it would be like to grow up as an Indigenous Australian or to follow the Jewish faith? Celebrate Harmony Week with us and borrow one of our generous human 'Books'. You can chat with such a book for thirty minutes about their experiences and help make the world a more tolerant and understanding place at the same time!

Please return our Books in the same condition in which you borrowed them.
Books who are not made to feel comfortable sharing their story may terminate the borrowing session at any time.
-- Via sydcityevents

4 March 2008 6:00 PM – 8:30 PM (Doors Open 10:00 AM)
Glebe Library
186 Glebe Point Road
Glebe 2037
Phone: 02 9298 3060

Dog gets done

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 23:13:28 GMT

Over at The Fix, Dog Vs. Sandwich gets reviewed & my story, Conversations, gets a resounding slap: What we have, instead, is a collection of two scenes and one thinly veiled speculative disquisition. Reviewer Zinos-Amaro makes some thoughtful, insightful points that had me slapping my head in recognition.

Doncha hate when the smarts come AFTER the story is published?

Because I've been living under rocks for a year, I wasn't previously aware of The Fix, but I think I'll be a regular reader from now on. It's an intelligent, provocative zine, & there really aren't enough of those around.

In other news: the results of yesterday's poll are in, & it seems 29.2% of respondents, when threatened with impending deadlines, would spend most time on the story they like the most. In second place, 20.8% of respondents found the stress of the question was making them physically sick (they're not here to see this post, as they have taken the week off lj).

Not much difference between the market options: 16.7% would go for the story most likely to accept their stuff (ie. pragmatists) while 12.5% would go for the most respected market. buymeaclue noted in the comments she would work hardest on the story for the place she'd 'most like to sell to' -- which is an option I hadn't thought to illustrate in the poll.

I figure that, me, I'd probably follow her lead. Though I suspect the story for the market I'd most like to sell to would probably end up coinciding with the story I liked the most.

Thanks to all who voted. Only 8.2% of you (ie. 2 respondents) wanted to know where all the flowers have gone, so we'll save that answer for another post, shall we? ;)

One for the writers

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 01:47:25 GMT

Today I'm braindead.

View Poll: longshots

The end of humanity

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 11:58:33 GMT

Watching Terminator 3 on TV (a movie that was roundly disliked when it came out, iirc), I'm reminded again WHY I prefer T3 to another popular franchise conclusion of the time: Matrix 3.

The reason is: at least in T3 the humans actually seem to have a humanity worth saving. A humanity that expressed itself in honour & self-doubt in equal measures (witness the interaction between John Connor & his girlfriend, esp. in the film's final few scenes).

By the time Matrix 3 rolled around, humans were reduced to joyless, designer-sunglass-wearing automatons with no personality.

And yet they were worth saving because ... why, exactly? Saving the 'humanty' of Matrix 3 seemed nothing more than a knee-jerk reaction.

Frankly, the machines had more personality.

I am also able to ignore a ringing phone

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 03:26:32 GMT

View Poll: FacebookFriending

Want to be original? Don't try too hard

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 09:49:57 GMT

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
-- Clive Staples Lewis via Quoteworld

I love it. :)

When different is crazy

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 03:52:06 GMT

A word about the politics of diagnosis-making is in order. Over the years, DSM task forces have had to contend with bids, pro and con, for diagnoses such as masochistic personality disorder, sadistic personality disorder, pathological (racial) bias, and premenstrual dysphoric disorder (a.k.a. PMS). Soon, planners of the next edition, the DSM-V, tentatively scheduled for publication in 2012, will hear appeals to create categories for shopping and food addictions. Internet addiction will surely come up too -- as it did this summer at a meeting of the American Medical Association. Pro-life advocates hope to get the DSM to adopt "post-abortion syndrome" (indicating pathological regret after terminating a pregnancy). Meanwhile, there is a battle over gender identity disorder, with some members of the transsexual community wanting it evicted, while others wanting it to stay in so that insurance companies will pay for sex-reassignment surgery.
-- Sally Satel, a review of Allan V. Horwitz 'The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder'

Psychology has long had a hang-up about being seen as a 'science'. It's all about statistics and categories, measurable 'this' and quantifiable 'that'. It tends to twist someone up, that need to count and label. It tends to twist up an entire industry when it's enshrined into one definitive book -- psychiatry's Diagnostic & Statistical Manual.

I still love psychology, though. Probably because it's got -- pardon yet another pun -- personality. It craves respect -- but only on the terms psychology itself defines. I remember being taught to test for statistical significance across a group of subjects in a psychology experiment. If you test a hundred people, at least 5 should show the 'effect' in order for it to be considered real. Less than five, not significant.

In discussing this with my lecturer in The Philosophy of Psychology (my favourite subject), my lecturer said, 'If even one person feels the effect, surely that's significant? Isn't it significant for that one person?'

That contrast between the significance of one life, and the life of a group, has always stuck with me.

Which is entirely tangential to the above article on a book that investigates psychiatric categorisation.

Close, further away

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 00:52:46 GMT

Via mindhacks comes the story & images of painter Chuck Close. Renowned for his early photorealism, he suffered a blood clot that changed the way he painted.

In 1988, Close had a spinal artery collapse, on the day he was to give a speech at an art awards ceremony. He felt ill beforehand, asked to be first, gave his speech, then painfully went to a hospital across the street. A few hours later he was a quadriplegic and his painting career might have been terminated.

Take a look at the Wikipedia close-up comparison of his photorealism versus his later 'topographic' style.

Freaking amazing!

Voodoo death and being playfull bent

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 23:20:52 GMT

mindhacks is having a good day, with an article on voodoo deaths, followed by one on play. Apparently when you play, you bend differently.

Hence the title of this post. Makes sense now, eh?