schmevil

For the first twenty years since yesterday
I scarce believed thou couldst be gone away;
For forty more I fed on favors past,
And forty on hopes that thou wouldst they might last.
Tears drowned one hundred, and sighs blew out two,
A thousand, I did neither think nor do,
Or not divide, all being one thought of you,
Or in a thousand more forgot that too.
Yet call not this long life, but think that I
Am, by being dead, immortal. Can ghosts die?

I thought there was no coffee. This was sad. Then I found secret coffee and suddenly all was well in world. (COFFEECOFFEECOFFEE) I don't have a problem.

So yeah. What kind of a day is it when Foucault is some nice, light reading? A damn good one, that's what! I'm working on my much-delayed summer project. I got seeeeeriously behind on it, so today I've been catching up. Also, I may have broken my brain. Time will tell. And hey, to pass said time, lets ponder this:

"The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control." - Martin Heidigger (The Question Concerning Technology)

***

June Night, by Sara Teasdale

Oh Earth, you are too dear to-night,
How can I sleep while all around
Floats rainy fragrance and the far
Deep voice of the ocean that talks to the ground?

Oh Earth, you gave me all I have,
I love you, I love you, -- oh what have I
That I can give you in return --
Except my body after I die?

At some point I will get back into making real posts. Things I need to get around to posting: May Feedback Challenge, the developing Iron Man movieverse fandom, the possibility of Iron Woman, Ms. Marvel's history and how parts of it are really quite skeevey, more on Birds of Prey and some comments Gail Simone made about the end of her run, the awesomeness of The Plain Janes, Criminal and Fun Home.

And hey, fellow Canadian geeks: do you watch Hypaspace? I'm a little in love with Natasha Eloi. She made a Wii Cake. A WII CAKE. I want Wii cake.


Until then, another poem. This is my first Sara Teasdale poem. Man, I love the intensity.

***

I Am Not Yours, by Sara Teasdale

I am not yours, not lost in you,
Not lost, although I long to be
Lost as a candle lit at noon,
Lost as a snowflake in the sea.

You love me, and I find you still
A spirit beautiful and bright,
Yet I am I, who long to be
Lost as a light is lost in light.

Oh plunge me deep in love -- put out
My senses, leave me deaf and blind,
Swept by the tempest of your love,
A taper in a rushing wind.

Who has ever stopped to think of the divinity of Lamont Cranston?
(Only jack Kerouac, that I know of: & me.
The rest of you probably had on WCBS and Kate Smith,
Or something equally unattractive.)

What can I say?
It is better to haved loved and lost
Than to put linoleum in your living rooms?

Am I a sage or something?
Mandrake's hypnotic gesture of the week?
(Remember, I do not have the healing powers of Oral Roberts...
I cannot, like F. J. Sheen, tell you how to get saved & rich!
I cannot even order you to the gaschamber satori like Hitler or Goddy Knight)

& love is an evil word.
Turn it backwards/see, see what I mean?
An evol word. & besides
who understands it?
I certainly wouldn't like to go out on that kind of limb.

Saturday mornings we listened to the Red Lantern & his undersea folk.
At 11, Let's Pretend
& we did
& I, the poet, still do. Thank God!

What was it he used to say (after the transformation when he was safe
& invisible & the unbelievers couldn't throw stones?) "Heh, heh, heh.
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows."

O, yes he does
O, yes he does
An evil word it is,
This Love.

***

I have stopped to think of the divinity of Lamont Cranston. Is there a Toronto branch of the Church of the Shadow?

HE KNOWS
HE KNOWS

remixredux08 is no longer anonymous. This year I wrote Mighty Dark to Travel (Full Fathom Five), in X-Men Movieverse. The story I remixed is Frosted World, by ms_jvh_shuh.

Reposted to my fic journal:
Mighty Dark to Travel (Full Fathom Five)
Fandom: X-Men Movieverse
Summary: After John is shot, Bobby loses control. (mid X2)
Character(s): Bobby/Rogue, Bobby/John
Word Count: 3333
Notes: I know medicine doesn’t work that way. Roll with the comic book science.

I really enjoyed writing this remix. The original story has several different povs, and I wanted to keep that but make it more explicit - really colour the situation differently in each part. So I added the perspectives of one of the cops who shot at Bobby, John, Rogue and Logan, and Bobby's brother Ronnie. I had the most fun writing the cop, an OC, and writing Rogue, who's in an ugly position in this story. The title comes from an old American blue grass song, and the funky remix title is of course from The Tempest.

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that does fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong,
Hark! Now I hear them – Ding-dong, bell.

The idea being that the road that John takes in the film, and that Bobby considers in this story is (duh) a dark one to travel, and this story, with five different povs, goes fully five fathoms deep (in that direction), or attempts to fathom five characters. Not too corny, I hope?

I was also surprised, though not so surprised in retrospect, to find that musesfool was the author of Packing for the Crash (The Black Brothers Variations), the remix of my Salt the Earth. Go read Vic's story, because it's great. It's funny, something about it was so familiar, but I couldn't quite figure out what. ;)

In other remix-y news:

Hijack Me HP is THE BEST THING EVER. Well, you know. Here's the deal: ( Read more... )

I have, of course, subscribed to the feed and am waiting for a special and unique snowflake to fall into my greedy and corrupting hands. Mwa ha.

***

I made two Director of SHIELD posts to scans_daily and the comments were mostly free of Ironhate and Civil War wank. It's a Christmas (in spring) Miracle! What continues to bug me, is how hard I as the OP, have to work to keep everything cool when wank threatens to explode. I had a couple of moments of pure, concentrated Intarwebs WTFuckery and just managed to resist the urge to respond with a flame the size of Australia. The community does okay much of the time, but the hand of mod is imo, just a wee bit light. There are times when I just want to share my squee, and don't want to spend the next three or so days a) justifying my squee; b) defending people who share my squee; c) defending people who DON'T share my squee; and d) soothing the savage, mouth-breathing beasts.

No one's twisting my arm - I could technically post and run (and watch the wank roll in), but the whole point of posting to a comm, and not my own journal, is sharing the love. And that's hard to do when posters are calling each other out over a fictional political dustup that happened two years ago. Or questioning each other's morality, based on their taste in fiction.

Not to say that my behaviour is perfect in every which way. There was one post, a month or two back, where I responded to all the constitutionality-of-the-SHRA comments with "LOLZ!1!1111"until they stopped commenting. *g*

And not to say that this is exclusive to scans_daily, because I swear, it's like this almost everywhere online. One second you'll be talking about the latest issue of She-Hulk and the next, the thread's devolved into a panel by panel dissection of Amazing Spider-Man, issue number whateverthefuck, and what Peter said, what Tony said, what Luke Cage said, in a comic that was published TWO YEARS AGO AND HAS NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO WITH SHE-HULK NUMBER 28. And ok, I think that's enough capslock rage for now.

So yeah, more modding on scans_daily. It would be good.

Who gave thee, O Beauty,
The keys of this breast,—
Too credulous lover
Of blest and unblest?
Say, when in lapsed ages
Thee knew I of old?
Or what was the service
For which I was sold?
When first my eyes saw thee,
I found me thy thrall,
By magical drawings,
Sweet tyrant of all!
I drank at thy fountain
False waters of thirst;
Thou intimate stranger,
Thou latest and first!
Thy dangerous glances
Make women of men;
New-born, we are melting
Into nature again.
Lavish, lavish promiser,
Nigh persuading gods to err!
Guest of million painted forms,
Which in turn thy glory warms!
The frailest leaf, the mossy bark,
The acorn’s cup, the raindrop’s arc,
The swinging spider’s silver line,
The ruby of the drop of wine,
The shining pebble of the pond,
Thou inscribest with a bond,
In thy momentary play,
Would bankrupt nature to repay. ( Read more... )

I subscribe to The Walrus, a Canadian arts and culture mag. In the October issue they published this poem:

The Eyes Have It
by John Bemrose

Just off the trail
among the quills of the birches
the porcupine had settled, comfortably
into its final business.
It looked like a fur hat
abandoned in the snow melt
a little mound of treachery
its white-tipped needles raked back
to its bristly, club-
handled, still-lethal tail.

It was clear the porcupine was up to something.

I knew he was dead and yet
his stillness kept a strange avidity.
Like a bullet in a chamber
or a fortress challenging the air
secretly, under his defences,
he was intent on something —
he was settling into a deeper focus
like a jeweller lost in the cellars of a diamond
no longer caring about getting back.

Curious, I kicked him over
exposing his black, wrinkled underbelly
like the face of a black person a century old
the little alien paws
like all things alien secretly human
the long, silver, jointed fingers
ripped from their contact with the earth
and his sooty squirrel’s face, so astonishingly small
under its mohawk of quills.

Later, driving off, I thought again of the porcupine —
how I had kicked over the hut of his privacy
broken his last dish
stared into the room
where his relatives sat grieving.

At least I could have tipped him back again.
But I had left him with his belly exposed
to the wind, and the constellations
and the quick, unholy communion of eyes.

The Walrus
10/2007

I don't especially care to break out the analysis - I'm just going to be here, quietly enjoying.

***

I just bought Kanye's Graduation and MIA's Kala. I haven't listened to them enough times to form coherent opinions about the albums but I know this: they are both awesome, but they are divergently awesome. Some reviews to back me up on this: ( click here god dammit )

Kanye and Maya are very different artists but they're probably the two I'm most excited about right now. I just like, mostly uncritically, what they do. Listening to their music gives me pure sonic pleasure - they're attentive, mindful and very deliberate artists. There's a lot of artifice in their work, but just as much emotional honesty. These are albums with real personality and character, and god, impatience - they want to be heard, and now.

It's interesting to listen to these albums together, or consider these artists together as Rolling Stone did in its review because different as their careers (and career goals) are, their are some freaky similarities in terms of the space they occupy in the market.

Neither is famous primarily for their vocal skills. They're both lauded for their articulation of ideas and experimentation with a wide and varied sonic palette. They sample and borrow widely and are just good synthesizers, a talent that's especially useful in a globalized, post-Napster music market. They're also willing and capable to talk about things, personal and public, and risk sounding juvenile in the process. There's something both charming and challenging in that.

They've both been the Next Big Thing and are brats, who weren't nearly as respectful of their NBT status as critics would have liked. And yet they both want to be liked and to parlay that NBT status into deeper, long-lasting success. They have things they want and need to talk about - whether it be Louis Vee or the Tamil Tigers - and they're respectful enough of their audience to do it intelligently and creatively. Kanye has an especially light touch on political issues. His favourite topic is of course himself, but when he does go there it's thoughtful and natural-seeming. Maya is often overtly political but not didactically, admonishingly so.

Anyway. To bed and the finishing of The Ignorant Schoolmaster.

I think they're both interesting enough, and hungry enough to do be here in ten years but don't quote me on that.

Now if only I could get them together to do a disco/bhangra/hip-hop record.