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mercredi, mai 09, 2007

My Horoscope

Well, I finally finished all my classes for the year, yay! But I guess I am supremely relieved because I am finding myself in a bizarre humor today. For example, I read my online horoscope, and was most childishly amused to read,

"While you're putting gold stars on certain days in May for love, put one on May 25 too, when Venus will send a kiss to Uranus. "

2:16

1 Comm.

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lundi, mars 05, 2007

Bigots

"But the bigots always see those whom they hate as morally corrupt, as if they confuse their own aesthetics of disgust and fear with actual ethical critique, rationalizing their emotional response, and enforcing their moral certainties with passion, establishing themselves, subtly or brutally, as arbiters of reason. On a website under the domain name www.godhatesfags.com, some Nazi Christian fuck called Phelps has a little gif animation of Puck doctored from a newspaper photo, smiling as the flames of hell burn his soul in an eternity of damnation, far hotter, we can be sure, than the cigarettes that the two murderers used to burn his naked body, torturing him even as he begged for his life.

"And that's reality. That's the truth, the gospel truth."

Hal Duncan, Vellum: The Book of All Hours (New York: Del Rey Books, 2005)

1:34

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vendredi, mars 02, 2007

The Voice of God

"The Voice of God has a name - Metatron - but it's a made-up name, a chosen name; it's not the name he was born with and it's not even the first name that he's taken since abandoning the one his mother and father gave to him, back when he was still human. Needless to say, it's not the name on the passport that he hands over to the painted china doll of a woman at the check-in of the KLM flight from Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam, to Newark, or at customs and immigration, or the transfer desk in New York: on the passport, he's Enoch Hunter, a solid, straightforward name that's not going to raise any eyebrows. Traveling to the States as Enki Nudimmud, in this day and age, would be just plain foolish. Slipping through the cracks in reality requires subtlety; and given the . . . situation in the Middle East, the last thing he wants is to draw attention to his origins. It would be ironic if the very architect of the new crusade was detained under the Homeland Defense Act for "motivational profiling," as they call it. He could beat the lie detectors and the truth drugs, but it would waste his time, and he would be tempted just to tell them everything.

"'You want to know the truth?' he might say. 'You really want to know the truth about your war on terror?'

"And then he'd whisper one word and they'd see it all, the Dead Soul Deeps and the demon Sovereigns walking in the shape of men, angels begging for their lives on Al Jazheera. And Malik in Damascus, at the heart of it all, graving Shariah law and hatred of the West into his followers. The real Cant under all the rhetoric."

~Hal Duncan, Vellum: The Book of All Hours (New York: Del Rey Books, 2005.)

1:10

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dimanche, janvier 21, 2007

Katie Katie, Diaper Lady

Katie Katie, Diaper Lady

German Shepherds are beautiful dogs. They are smart and majestic, and seem to have an inborn sense of grace. They are incredibly protective of their owners, and yet very, very loving. I had a wonderful German Shepherd when I was a child, and for that reason I decided early last year that it would be nice to get another one.

We went to the pound and found a beautiful female shepherd. We named her Katie. She was 12 weeks old when we got her, and when we brought her home it was obvious that she must have been abused as a small pup. We played fetch with our other dog Jimoa, picking up sticks in the yard and tossing them for Jimoa to chase. When my husband picked up a stick near Katie, however, she flattened her ears back, cowered, and then threw herself down on her stomach with her chin shoved against the ground. It was so sad!

And then there is the peeing. She would pee every time we came in the house, especially me. We have finally got her confident enough that she rarely pees spontaneously like that, but she still dribbles everywhere. After visiting the vet and not finding anything physically wrong, we are convinced she just has emotional problems.

And so . . . our little one-year-old Katie Katie must wear diapers. The diapers have helped reduce the constant dribbling, and she actually is better about not peeing and pooping in the house now, but I don't think she is ever truly going to "get it."

Here she is, in her usual submissive pose, and yes, she is wearing a diaper:

2:00

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dimanche, janvier 14, 2007

all that we do

Eidolons

I met a seer,

Passing the hues and objects of the world,

The fields of art and learning, pleasure, sense,

To glean eidolons.

Put in thy chants said he,

No more the puzzling hour nor day, nor segments, parts, put in,

Put first before the rest as light for all and entrance-song of all,

That of eidolons.

Ever the dim beginning,

Ever the growth, the rounding of the circle,

Ever the summit and the merge at last, (to surely start again,)

Eidolons! eidolons!

Ever the mutable,

Ever materials, changing, crumbling, re-cohering,

Ever the ateliers, the factories divine,

Issuing eidolons.

Lo, I or you,

Or woman, man, or state, known or unknown,

We seeming solid wealth, strength, beauty build,

But really build eidolons.

The ostent evanescent,

The substance of an artist's mood or savan's studies long,

Or warrior's, martyr's, hero's toils,

To fashion his eidolon.

Of every human life,

(The units gather'd, posted, not a thought, emotion, deed, left out,)

The whole or large or small summ'd, added up,

In its eidolon.

The old, old urge,

Based on the ancient pinnacles, lo, newer, higher pinnacles,

From science and the modern still impell'd,

The old, old urge, eidolons.

The present now and here,

America's busy, teeming, intricate whirl,

Of aggregate and segregate for only thence releasing,

To-day's eidolons.

These with the past,

Of vanish'd lands, of all the reigns of kings across the sea,

Old conquerors, old campaigns, old sailors' voyages,

Joining eidolons.

Densities, growth, facades,

Strata of mountains, soils, rocks, giant trees,

Far-born, far-dying, living long, to leave,

Eidolons everlasting.

Exalte, rapt, ecstatic,

The visible but their womb of birth,

Of orbic tendencies to shape and shape and shape,

The mighty earth-eidolon.

All space, all time,

(The stars, the terrible perturbations of the suns,

Swelling, collapsing, ending, serving their longer, shorter use,)

Fill'd with eidolons only.

The noiseless myriads,

The infinite oceans where the rivers empty,

The separate countless free identities, like eyesight,

The true realities, eidolons.

Not this the world,

Nor these the universes, they the universes,

Purport and end, ever the permanent life of life,

Eidolons, eidolons.

Beyond thy lectures learn'd professor,

Beyond thy telescope or spectroscope observer keen, beyond all mathematics,

Beyond the doctor's surgery, anatomy, beyond the chemist with his chemistry,

The entities of entities, eidolons.

Unfix'd yet fix'd,

Ever shall be, ever have been and are,

Sweeping the present to the infinite future,

Eidolons, eidolons, eidolons.

The prophet and the bard,

Shall yet maintain themselves, in higher stages yet,

Shall mediate to the Modern, to Democracy, interpret yet to them,

God and eidolons.

And thee my soul,

Joys, ceaseless exercises, exaltations,

Thy yearning amply fed at last, prepared to meet,

Thy mates, eidolons.

Thy body permanent,

The body lurking there within thy body,

The only purport of the form thou art, the real I myself,

An image, an eidolon.

Thy very songs not in thy songs,

No special strains to sing, none for itself,

But from the whole resulting, rising at last and floating,

A round full-orb'd eidolon.

~ Walt Whitman

10:22

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lundi, janvier 08, 2007

Plath poem

The Shrike

When night comes black
Such royal dreams beckon this man
As lift him apart
From his earth-wife's side
To wing, sleep-feathered,
The singular air,
While she, envious bride,
Cannot follow after, but lies
With her blank brown eyes starved wide,
Twisting curses in the tangled sheet
With taloned fingers,
Shaking in her skull's cage
The stuffed shape of her flown mate
Escaped among moon-plumaged strangers;
So hungered, she must wait in rage
Until bird-racketing dawn
When her shrike-face
Leans to peck open those locked lids, to eat
Crowns, palace, all
That nightlong stole her male,
And with red beak
Spike and suck out
Last blood-drop of that truant heart.

~Sylvia Plath

3:35

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mardi, septembre 26, 2006

How NOT To Treat Your Dog

So, we recently "rescued" a puppy. My husband was in Petco when a woman came in with two little four week old puppies. They were *covered* in dirt and there were so many fleas on them that you could see dozens of them crawling in and out of the puppies' fur.

It turns out that this woman's aunt's dog got pregnant and her aunt didn't know, so one day out pops a litter. The mama's milk went dry at around 3-4 weeks and this woman couldn't afford dog food for that many animals. So she showed the dogs to her niece, who scooped up two and brought them to Petco to ask whether there was any way they could help find homes for the little tykes.

My husband, an unabashed dog lover, took one look and promptly forgot that we already have two incredibly active 9-month old dogs and two anti-dog cats and said he'd take one. Then he remembered the animals and called me to see what I thought, lol. Of course, I couldn't say no to a little puppy in need.

We went to the woman's house the next day to pick up the puppy. The mama, a Corgy mix, was out back next to a doghouse that sat upon an old packing crate. The crate left about a 4-inch gap between the ground and the bottom of the crate. The puppies were all hiding underneath the crate and doghouse. We managed to pull our little guy out and he was a mess - mud, fleas, terrified of us strangers, and mom adding to the confusion with her protective, frantic barking. But after we petted him for a bit his little tail began to wag and we immediately fell in love.

I felt so horrible leaving the other pups, but I just knew that 3 dogs and 2 cats was already the maximum of our abilities to cope. (And we found out the next day that several of the folks at Petco adopted the rest of them. Go Petco!)

So we brought him home. John had already called the vet to ask about the flea situation. She told him that the puppy was too young for flea medicine. However, she said that if we used Johnson's baby shampoo, lathered his whole body, and left it on for 5-10 minutes that it would suffocate most of the fleas. So we did this, much to his terror. I felt like an evil bitch. However, . . . on his little 3/4 inch by 1/2 inch left ear, more than two dozen fleas surfaced. And there were as many on his other ear, and I couldn't even count the number of fleas on his body.

See this. (The shot wasn't taken until I had removed most of the fleas, but all the little black dots are still remaining fleas. The pink spots on his chin and neck are scabs from the flea bites):

It was horrible! Unfortunately, we were unable to get all the fleas, so we took him to the vet the next day for one of those pills that kills all fleas and sterilizes all eggs. He was a little too young for it, but the poor dog was covered in scabs from the flea bites and scratching. The pill killed the rest of them within a day, and we were left with our cute little pup, who was by then hungrily drinking formula from a tiny bottle.

He is a quick learner and rapidly moved onto small bites dog food, mixed with canned puppy food. I can't believe how much he eats! He lets me know he is hungry by coming up to me and sucking on my lip. (I guess mama dogs take that as a cue to then regurgitate aka puke into the little one's mouth, but somehow I just don't see myself doing that, lol.) And his name is Hobo.

Here's our "Hobo" all cleaned up:

Lots of joy in return for a little added chaos! And the good news is the true dog-hater cat allows him to come up to her (briefly) and the big bad he-man hunter cat plays with him. I guess they can handle a dog that is half their size.

3:47

4 Comm.

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samedi, août 19, 2006

Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

In 1996 The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation passed the now-famous Telecommunication Act. This act contained in it what is now called the "Communications Decency Act," which has since been declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. It attempted to regulate indecency and obscenity on the Internet, and essentially made it illegal to publish certain "dirty words" or references to bodily functions that are anything other than completely sterile. In his now legendary response, John Perry Barlow published "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace." Since he said that he didn't care who republished it, or even whether they gave him credit for it, I reprint it below. It is fascinating to me that 10 years after its initial publication it remains as relevant as ever.

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

by John Perry Barlow

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

Davos, Switzerland

February 8, 1996

9:26

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dimanche, août 06, 2006

My last hallucination was a long time ago

Being a proud parent, I can't help but notice upon occasion (usually several times a day) how incredibly adorable my children are. Since my nine year old is the only one still at home, many times this realization comes as a result of some incredibly brilliant or amazingly cute thing she says. Every now and then, though, I realize that even as I kid myself that I know my kids, they continue to surprise me.

The other day I was talking to Jessica (the nine year old), about what I don't even remember. At some point she mentioned something she thought she had heard or seen. I flippantly joked, "Aww, you were probably just hallucinating."

She looked at me quite solemnly and matter of factly (you must understand, Jessica is the Queen of Matter of Fact) and then responded, "No. I haven't had a hallucination in years."

10:50

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