[JANUARY 2021.]
January was humid and warm, and February fooled the forsythia: none of the townspeople had ever seen such weather.
—Lolita
The end of time as a shear layer moving alongside you, always one step ahead of memory. Yesterday the end of time was placid, an evenly washed sky like the surface of a lake. Today it’s warmer, with birdcalls.
Wie man wird, was man ist.
The past wears its old clothes, it won’t be resuited.
Do you go to the country?
It isn’t very far
There’s people there who will hurt you
Because of who you are—Blur, “Coffee & TV,” 1999
Apocrypha
And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven, and he fell to the earth. There he beheld two snakes entwined, and struck them with his staff. And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales.
Attractor States
A right-hand glove could be put on the left hand, if it could be turned around in four-dimensional space.
—Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.36111
The difficulties: how do you imagine the process unfolding in time, where do you set the axis of rotation, and what in fact is the nature of the glove, this familiar object you’ve been pulling onto your right hand your entire life without ever suspecting it was other than what it seemed?
Assuming the axis of rotation transfixes the object: if the glove is in fact no more than it appears, a three-dimensional object with no extension along a fourth spatial degree, then the commencement of rotation will cause it to wink instantly out of apparent existence—except, theoretically, for a widthless line segment coinciding with the axis of rotation—until the transformation completes, at which time it will wink back into existence as its own mirror image, every point in its body affording a strict bijective correspondence to its former self but the geometric relations between those points now inverted.
If, on the other hand, the familiar glove turns out to be the three-dimensional tip of a four-dimensional iceberg, an object with previously unsuspected contours extending into hidden space, then before it attains its final transformed state—newly mirrored, but in every other respect the same old article—it will pass through warpings and deformations such that it ceases to resemble a glove at all, shrinking and distending, exhibiting unforeseeable prominences and depressions, splitting into multiple bodies before fusing back into one, and generally inducing nausea and fomenting outrage among church, state, academy, press and even those many private hearths that suppose, wrongly, they’ve already seen it all.
Sōjun Mel Weitsman (1929-2021)
I only knew him at Berkeley Zen Center for a couple of years, but that much listening and a few quiet encounters were more than enough to be certain I was in the presence of wisdom, and wisdom that knew to wear itself lightly. I’ve encountered the trait elsewhere, but not often, and never in someone whose position of authority enabled him to do so much good.
There have been so many tributes over the last few days, public and private. I hadn't known that he was given the same name on ordination as Ikkyū. That astounds me; everything I knew of his manner was so mild and measured. But perhaps those contraries coincide as well.
Hakuryū Sōjun Daiōshō
白龍宗純大和尚
Fending off the devil in georgia
seems like it’s rainin all over the world
turn up the volume
the opposite of bullshit
well I’m not the world’s most physical guy
The kid in elementary school who taunted me with the name “Pauline.” I don’t remember who he was; the image comes up of a thick-necked lout, budding Fred Flintstone. How did he even know the name? Were his parents film critics?
When Joyce’s names were recorded on his birth certificate, his middle name was misspelled, and so he was registered as James Augusta Joyce (rather than James Augustine Joyce). Joyce later uses a similar slip for Bloom’s name in Ulysses: Bloom’s name is recorded as Leopold Paula Bloom rather than Leopold Paul Bloom on his birth certificate.
I have never done anything creepy like track IPs on the comment box (or even look at usage or referrer logs, really) but I wish I had some way of knowing who it was that asked me to improve my attitude about heteronormativity and Joyce in 2005, because at the time I didn’t want to acknowledge that my attitude needed improving, and the response I gave wasn’t adequate.
Hoov is present, anyhow implicitly, around the first year of this site (written 20 years ago by an idiot, please don't put weight on it, but is part of the “we” who felt old at 22 going to see Weezer in decline, for instance). A few months before I started writing here, I crashed for the summer on his couch in the Western Addition. He was a year ahead of me in getting out of college: a big deal then, I thought of him as worldly-wise. Took up bass duties in our band without much experience and put all his heart into learning the instrument. Wanted us to cover “Subbacultcha,” which shows exactly the right ludic sense even if it outstripped my abilities as a vocalist. A generosity with no second thoughts, to let me and my library suitcase sprawl all over his room for two months, thereby subsidizing the bad novel draft I wrote at Café Abir before driving out to Iowa with Jen and subsequently failing to conquer the world. It all only just happened. When I find myself around Fulton and Divisadero I swear it’s still happening.
1.
Dating for everyone. Just do it! Follow this link: [link suppressed]
2. Sketchbook
HAL 9000 takes off its crown and walks in disguise among the common soldiers.
Things base and vile, holding no quantity,
Love can transpose to form and dignity
οὐκ ἔστ’ ἔτυμος λόγος οὗτος,
οὐδ’ ἔβας ἐν νηυσὶν ἐυσσέλμοις
οὐδ’ ἵκεο πέργαμα Τροίας
(you never went to Troy)
3. Fragmenta adespota
] injured mockingbird,
nymph syrinx, rings all registers of song
but grips the wire with one foot only.
I would write more if I were more lonely.
