Piercing empty, familiar

11:47pm: Books from January 08

Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale

James Baldwin - The Fire Next Time

James Blish - The Seedling Stars

Octavia Butler - Fledgling and Kindred

James Branch Cabell - Jurgen

Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Allen Ginsberg - Penguin Modern Poets 5

Avram Davidson - Adventures in Unhistory, Clash of Star-Kings, ¡Limekiller!, Strange Seas and Shores, The Adventures of Doctor Eszterhazy, The Avram Davidson Treasury, The Phoenix and the Mirror, and Vergil In Averno

Avram Davidson and Grania Davis - Marco Polo and the Sleeping Beauty

Mike Davis - In Praise of Barbarians

Samuel Delany - Atlantis: Three Tales and Heavenly Breakfast

Thomas Disch - On Wings of Song and The Man Who Had No Idea

Thomas Disch and John Sladek - Black Alice

Gardner Dozois - Geodesic Dreams

Ralph Ellison - Invisible Man

Olaudah Equiano - The Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African

Steve Erikson - Tours of the Black Clock

William Faulkner - Old Man, Spotted Horses, The Bear, and The Reivers

Werner Herzog - Of Walking In Ice

J.-K. Huysmans - Against the Grain (A'Rebours)

Forrest Hylton and Sinclair Thomson - Revolutionary Horizons: Past and Present in Bolivian Politics

Ken Kesey - Sometimes A Great Notion

R. A. Lafferty - Annals of Klepsis and The Past Master

Fritz Leiber - Swords in the Mist

Thomas Mann - Death In Venice and Seven Other Stories (trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter)

C. L. Moore - Judgment Night

Vladimir Nabokov - Pnin

Kenneth Patchen - The Journal of Albion Moonlight

Joanna Russ - Picnic on Paradise

Johan Schimanski - Rhedeg i Paris

Lucius Shepard - Kalimantan and The Golden

Susan Sontag - On Photography

Michael Swanwick - Moon Dogs and The Dragons of Babel

Hunter S. Thompson - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Mark Twain - Life On The Mississippi

Various - Alchemy and Academe (ed. Anne McCaffrey)

Various - Changes

Various - Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism (ed. Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk)

Various - The Best of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine

Various - The Best SF Stories from New Worlds (ed. Michael Moorcock)

Various - Working (ed. Studs Terkel)

3:41pm: Books read January 2007 through December 2007

Paul Auster - City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room

Steve Aylett - Lint

Jesse Ball - Samedi the Deafness

Gabrielle Bell - Lucky

Jack Black - You Can't Win

Bertolt Brecht - Collected Short Stories

Rita Mae Brown - Rubyfruit Jungle

Stepan Chapman - The Troika

Bruce Chatwin - The Songlines

Hart Crane - The Bridge

John Crowley - Engine Summer

Benjamin Dangl - The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia

Mike Davis - Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb, Land of the Lost Mammoths, Pirates, Bats, and Dragons, and Planet of Slums

Samuel Delany - Babel-17, Dark Reflections, Dhalgren, Longer Views, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, and The Straits of Messina

L. Timmel Duchamp - Love's Body, Dancing In Time

Richard Farina - Been Down So Long It Feels Like Up To Me

William Faulkner - As I Lay Dying

Paul di Filippo - Harp, Pipe, and Symphony

Jeffrey Ford - Empire of Ice Cream

William Gibson - Spook Country

Jim Goad - Shit Magnet

Tom Godwin - Space Prison

M. John Harrison - Nova Swing

Eric Hobsbawm - Bandits

Kevin Huizenga - Curses

Shelley Jackson - Half-Life

Jay Lake - The Trial of Flowers

Keith Laumer - Envoy To New Worlds

Jonathan Lethem - Motherless Brooklyn

Thomas Ligotti - Songs of a Dead Dreamer

Nick Mamatas - Under My Roof

China Mieville - Un Lun Dun

Hope Mirrlees - Lud-in-the-Mist

Michael Moorcock - The Condition of Muzak and The English Assassin

Alan Moore - The Ballad of Halo Jones Book 3

Richard Morgan - Altered Carbon

Orhan Pamuk - My Name Is Red

Paul Pope - PULPHOPE

Eric Powell - The Goon: Fancy Pants Edition

Joanna Russ - The Female Man, The Two of Them, and Zanzibar Cat

Ntozake Shange - For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is Enuf

Anthony Skene - Monsieur Zenith the Albino

Norman Spinrad - The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde

Stendhal - The Red and the Black

Michael Swanwick - The Dog Said Bow-Wow

Various - Collapse 1

Various - Isaac Aasimov Presents The Great SF Stories 6

Various - New Worlds (ed. Michael Moorcock)

Various - Orbit 6

Sean Wilsey - Oh The Glory Of It All

Gene Wolfe - Caldé of the Long Sun, Exodus from the Long Sun, In Green's Jungles, Nightside the Long Sun, On Blue's Waters, Peace, and Return To The Whorl

Roger Zelazny - Doorways In The Sand

11:41pm: Youth and Waste
The best thing I ever said was "shut up". The best I did was shut up. Why can't I have more fun? I've stayed up late and got up early the past few days, but I still don't want to go to bed.

Youth's pursuit a cynosure. Its end is "free time", its means is waste, and it means waste. Determined as flight from alienation into a temporality dis-organized from any production. How else?

Thomas Disch killed himself on the 4th. He was 68. The Genocides made me shake to read it, but I never finished 334. I didn't know he was queer, I hope Delany writes an obituary.

12:52am: myself to sleep
Vaccinations on the 10th.

The H. Buss is drydocked. Ecuador is only Peru away from Bolivia, so I'll just go overland.

Have to create a couchsurfing account.

Party at Lindsey's tonight and I feel like: I never did it wrong here. I never did it poorly.

Papa died in the pool at his club last week. I'm taking the Greyhound to Oakland tonight, and coming back on Tuesday morning.

I'm quitting in August, and leaving in September. Got to get a frame pack, a visa, a yellow fever inoculation certificate.

Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Columbia, Peru.

Come with me.

4:44pm: immedicable wounds
Various dates with various redheads, to degrees unsuccessful. I took the train to Chicago and back. Our new housemate gardens, mows the lawn, and does the dishes every day. Brittany, Olivia's girlfriend, makes cupcakes every week. I have Thursdays off, Portland is still grey, it feels like home.

My passport only took four weeks to arrive. Railroad access to Bolivia is only through Antofagasta Chile; I can take a ship to Ecuador, and then another ship to Antofagasta, for thousands of dollars. I can apply for a residency visa once I'm in Bolivia. Hostel rates are around 6 or 7 USD a night.

Reading a lot lately. The Life of Olaudah Equiano, Kindred and (beginning a vampire theme with The Golden) Fledgling by Octavia Butler, whose Bloodchild, now I realize what she'd done, I still can't get over; Avram Davidson and Gardner Dozois; trying to finish more Delany; also the second-person autobiography of Jorge Semprún, who wrote Z, and which I found for $4 at Laughing Horse; and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, $1 at Laughing Horse, with photos. Also cooking again. Things are good.

Tonight I'm going downtown for the art, then maybe a noise show, and tomorrow I'm calling Talia to go to Pancake Clubhouse.

10:52am: Monday Tuesday
Monday I don't want to talk about it.

Tuesday a bombshell, I'm still shellshocked. I wished I could fly. I wish I could take a train to Hawaii.

Ruji, Beth, and Jo-Jo were all staying with me from midweek until Sunday. This was really fun but I am tired. I saw Justice on Wednesday and danced for three hours. Olivia's training at Rudy's, soon maybe I won't be working seven days a week.

I read Life On The Mississippi, then I read The Old Man by Faulkner, and I really feel the forty-year gap. Anyone write anything interesting about the construction of the levee system during the 1890's/1900's? So annoying.

I might go on a date tomorrow, oh no. I really don't need that.

2:06am: Sometimes these eyes
It's always better on holiday!

How you find out about lesbians, how you're asked if you have fun, how you only work when you need the money. $20,000 is the least of it. Nicaragua, Detroit, GenX clothing, the duct tape of Iraq II is the hoodies that zip up over your face. What that one doesn't understand--

I haven't seen such lines, since my days in the grocery store. There's a party at my house on April Fourth the Friday. Bands, Olivia and her friends, Sal-Pal, A Future Mouth, Saint Frankie Lee.

Yesterday I dyed a pair of bluejeans fuschia, they're mostly purple, the whites are fuschia. Next, a pair yellow, acid yellow and green. Bluejeans are a primary color. That's their weakness. A series of visions. I won't repeat them here.

YOUR BLUES

Retention and specificity: the first gulf war, Joe Strummer, a bomb painted ROCK THE CASBAH crying; the vista north of the Burnside bridge where it's too much to take in; Goldengrove unleaving; one more.

11:24pm: unsudden
I was so down last night, but no one else was down, so then I was just down. Of course they do, of course they do. I'm working seven days a week right now, but Wednesdays and Fridays I only babysit. Tomorrow the kids have school off so I'm free, it's going to be a big day of taxes, sewing and dying some clothes, and mailing a package if I get around to it--barnesandnoble.com sent me The New Crystal Silence instead of Tha Carter II on the gift card my grandma gave me at xmas.

Progressively frustrated. I watched Billion Dollar Brain. It wasn't very good, but I liked the soldiers inside the tanker trucks and it was horrifying when they fell into the ice even if it wasn't done very well. I'm reading Life on the Mississippi, Invisible Man, and Dyad still/again; once I finish two of these I'll start Á Rebours. I'm working seven days a week so I'm eating at Red and Black every day and not saving any money. I have ID again but I haven't gone out drinking because I work seven days a week. I spent fifteen dollars on pinball in the last two days though.

I lost someone's sunglasses on Friday. Alex and I were standing on the corner and two people I met at a party the week before walked by with a soccer ball, so we played in the rain and drank in the park until we biked to a party in the rain and like an asshole I left the sunglasses I stole from the party the week before at the party when we left to sleep at Allison's house. Will it be okay, I bet. I offered remuneration but she hasn't hit me back.

11:11pm: The veganest
Today for dinner I ate quinoa with some vinegar and nutritional yeast in it. Then I had a second helping!

8:38pm: It's hard to find enjoyment in life
Back in Portland, been sick on and off for the last week: I got food poisoning or something on Tuesday, then Saturday I had a flu; rode back up with a band I met and three of the six people in the van had coughs so now I have a different flu. We stopped in Arcata last night and today they're playing in Olympia, but on Thursday they'll be in Portland, so you should all go see Chow Nasty at Holocene. The Gomorran Social-Aid and Pleasure Club are touring with them and they're also really good.

7:25pm: the horizon binds the magnificent book of the day in the purple cloth of twilight
I'm in California now. I finally finished The Journal of Albion Moonlight: I read the first part in the car ride to San Francisco, then yesterday I read more on Deborah's roof, and today I finished it in Sebastopol. It wasn't very good, but it was satisfying to get it over with, I've been holding on to it for three or four years, and its structural influence on Dhalgren is tremendous, I think.

I'm going to be in San Jose this weekend, and then in San Francisco or Santa Cruz until the end of the month, so give me a call in the next two weeks!

1:22am: William
Bag Day
consciousness is division by zero
positive philosophies are the only possible philosophies as far as systems are language

"Waiting here, away from the terrifying weaponry, out of the halls of vapor and light, beyond holland and into the hills, I have come to"

The economy of art qua Art is feudal. If it weren't, where it isn't, it isn't considered art. When outsiderart, nature, are curated with love,

Kittie's husband's friends' blog was curated. They took it offline and burned CDs of the archive. (the friends)

doesn't affect art, it. Curation is an economic act. The primitive accumulation of cultural capital. The continual failure of illustration acceptance into the canon, preexisting economic organization.
Creative endeavor is to art as social endeavor is to the state.

novalis, lacan, aphorism is the only fame.

11:49pm: I have a personal relationship with time
Experiencing distinct urges to reread Dhalgren, almost exactly one year now from when I first read it. The same thing happened with a different book a few months ago. Is this the first successful experiment? What is testing?

I still have no identification. It's OK. Bars are just restaurants where it's okay to talk to strangers. I want to see Little Teeth play at Dunes on February 28th though, let me know if you can help out with that.

Ryann from work invited me and Jacq over to watch A Smoky Mountain Christmas. I love to meet new people! Our new housemate is Olivia, she's an old half-friend Maddie's younger sister. I think it will work out.

We had a party a week and a half ago that was the best yet. It ended around 6. At 7 a guy on the couch woke up and pissed in a grate on the living room floor. The duct below the grate goes into my room right over my bed, so I had to get up, wash all my sheets, and kick him out. He brought us some cupcakes later in the week to apologize, then I heard he got arrested on Friday for tagging.

I'm in charge of talking to the landlords now. What a deal. Life comes in waves.

11:50pm: I'm losing everything
Only literally though--my passport was there on Saturday but not on Sunday. I don't have any identification now. The next day my sunglasses, missing for three months and found at work ten days ago, were gone. Yesterday I was at the grocery checkout and when I took my wallet out my debit card wasn't in it. I found it in my pocket though. After work I ran into Sally's housemates at Valentines and went to their house; when I got home this afternoon, I realized I'd left my umbrella there.

Lindsey and I are okay and I don't have to move. She's moving, though, so we're doing housemate interviews for February first. I've got a nice scar running from my right eye down my cheek.

Bars I can go to: Dots, Tube, Valentines. Fortunately there're a lot of parties this month. I still have to ask the police if anyone found my passport, but I think it's in the river. If the Oregon DMV doesn't have my photo on file I'll get a new ID when I go to California. Man this sucks!

3:11am: I'm not saying that I love you
I haven't said anything because my livejournal is so transparent and I don't want to bother anyone. Involved with so many women to differing degrees in the last month. The old promise of male friendship has come true, to differing degrees in the last month. It started raining, in the last month. Lyra is visiting from the 26th to the 1st. I'm working on a mix cd for everyone. I'll be in California all February, in San Francisco and Santa Cruz after the 18th. I figured out everything about living in Bolivia, I've just got to get a visa and get there. It will happen in seven months.``

3:41am: Sorry about
I'll always!

9:26pm: I took notes
Gauss discovered that the distribution of primes on the number line conforms to a logarithmic curve. Riemann discovered that this distribution is modulated by an infinite series of waves. Each wavelength corresponds to a Riemann zero, and "pins down" one prime on the number line. The problem of predicting the distribution of primes is thus displaced to the problem of finding the Riemann zeros. With the full set of Riemann zeros, the Riemann-von Mangolt explicit formula will output the full set of primes; however, as the set of primes is infinite, so is the set of Riemann zeros.

Riemann zeros are so called because they are the (positive) values for which the Riemann zeta function is zero. They're all complex (i.e. 'imaginary') numbers.

Partition functions are used in experimental physics to predict statistical distributions in complex systems, for example, the atmospheric density in a given slice of a room filled with air particles, or the overall energy of the particles in a given slice. If you consider each prime as a particle, and its natural logarithm as its energy, then the Riemann zeta function falls out as the partition function of the set of primes, and the Riemann zeros correspond to the phase transitions of the system.

Possible hypotheses arising from this unexpected usefulness of a tool of experimental physics to number theory:

The number line (defined as the ∞-adic series) is in some sense a gas.
The Riemann zeros are the emission spectrum of something.
The number line vibrates, and the Riemann zeros are the vibrations.
More at Matthew Watkins' page.

12:58am: Elephants never forget
That's why they drink. Partying a lot--out til 3:30 on Friday, and 5 last night. I feel time-lapsed. I couldn't understand how you get old, but now I think perspective is only linguistic. I was talking to Allison about my times and what to do tonight, and she said I was sexually frustrated. I'm definitely frustrated.

12:24am: The H tribe
Mark K-Punk drank too much coffee and went off. It's pretty great. I've got to get the new issues of Collapse--does anyone else prefer reading about philosophers to reading the philosophers themselves?

7:04pm: I finally did it
Since my webspace was deleted this summer I've been keeping a sheet of paper and writing down every book I read on it, and today I finally typed the list up. Here's the books I've read so far this year. I like that keeping it on livejournal makes it easy to comment on, but I don't like that it neuters the html. Maybe I'll set something up eventually.

Our potluck last night was great! I cooked four tofurkeys, Lindsey made mashed potatoes, Carly brought rum and silk nog, Alex made a fruit tart and a pumpkin pie, and lots of people brought vegetables. It was so satisfying.

Today I watched the documentary on Helvetica; tonight I'm going to see Little Teeth. A Dios--

1:44am: Thanks for a nation of finks
When I'm alone I begin feeling strong and bitter like black tea and steep in myself. Emotionally alone. I saw the band Little Teeth on Monday night--it was one of the best shows I've ever seen. They're from San Francisco. On Friday they're at Backspace. You've got to learn to tell from recordings what bands sound good live. Don't bother with their myspace, just see a show.

I just read Samedi the Deafness. There's a heartbreaking disjunction on page 141:

"...a theory was not a good theory because it was right or wrong. A theory was good for entirely other reasons. Because it presumed to be right? Because it presumed to be wrong? A theory could be very good that presumed to be wrong. And certainly there were theories that presumed only to be helpful in small ways.... [it is proposed that the outcome of the current situation is predetermined]

....James felt very much that this was a correct theory. Of course, it was not a useful theory.

What theory would be useful?"

And then pages 193-194:

"....the world is complicated. I know there are problems.... How can they be solved? I feel instinctively that they can't be.... The world has always been chaotic. Suffering is a fact.... You live your life, you try to live compassionately, and that's the end of it. You do a little more than you should have in order to be a good person, but you don't go making big changes in the world.... There's only this: if everyone acts quietly, compassionately, things will go a little better than they would have otherwise. But people will still suffer.

And the first is the perfect judgement and dismissal of the second (which is the ethical/political stance of the novel). As if Jesse Ball doesn't recognize ethics as a praxis.

I heard that Charles Shaw is vegan and I haven't drunk a bottle of wine in so long. One less bottle for the potluck tomorrow, but I don't think a lot of people are coming. I feel like I remember I was last time I drank a bottle of wine (20), so I thought I'd try it; only maybe I won't call Stefanie tonight.

1:38am: Just because I bought these beers
on the same night that you did the dishes for the second time in a row, doesn't mean they're your beers.

Over and under.

5:37pm: I definitely have a type
etiolated
etiolated
that's fucked up
that's fucked up.
What am I talking to?

Staring into busses, making eye contacts more impersonal than the glance away. A block from home the rain picks up. I think of the buckled sidewalks in New Orleans.

Two weeks ago I had a strong urge to reread A Storm of Wings. I bought it in Minneapolis almost exactly two years ago and read it over the first half of November. I have a paranoia that most things are cycles with a periodicity too long for me to notice them--I started this livejournal partly to help with that; but looking back I never notice the right things or write them down, or I don't have the categories that would let me notice the repetition. In Dictionary of the Khazars there's a monk with eidetic memory who notices that every ten years the clouds over the mountains assume the same shape, but I think it would be more like the recurrent shape of the footprint in Bend Sinister or the splash of blood in Watchmen. Truth has the structure of fiction? Anyway, I reread A Storm of Wings after exactly two years. Watch out for 2009.

Now I'm rereading The Pastel City and halfway through Nova Swing. Vic Serotonin's vision of Elizabeth Kielar as the dragonfly woman is exactly Fay Glass's role as interpreter of the Mantis in A Storm of Wings. I forgot how Harrison does that, though now I remember how every story in Course of the Heart seemed to rehearse the next.

I also read Delany's examination of the Alyx novels, and the Sword & Sorcery genre, in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw. I realized that it was written as he began Nevérÿon.

10:29pm: Drinking at home
The least fun pointless thing!

Met a craaaaazy dude at Tube today. Dressed like he was at Tube, but had kind of a crackhead mouth, and kept saying "Glorious!!" and actually cackling. He's visiting from Seattle and is thinking of moving here. I asked him why he wanted to leave Seattle. He said he got fired from his landscaping job for missing too many days of work. Then he paused. "And I had some court bullshit."
"Ex-girlfriend, you know, kahakahahaha! Glorious!!"

I gave him my phone number so hopefully we'll hang out when he moves next month.

We did housemate interviews this weekend. Courtney's moving to DC to work for a PIRG. We have four "Yes on 49!" signs stuck in our lawn right now.

A lady at work today asked me if I'd voted yet, and I said I didn't vote. Thankfully she didn't ask why. She's volunteering at the voter registration table on Sauvie Island, "next to the pumpkin patch", which is the silliest thing I heard today.

I'm going to California in the middle of February for Ancient Ways, and I'm thinking about spending the whole month there, since my work will give me up to 30 days off with 90 days notice. Mayhap.

I'm probably going to go on a date this week! Girls from OKCupid are usually ugly or bourgeoise, so wish me luck.

4:32pm: as long as you think you're white, there's no hope for you
Beauford Delaney is the principle model for Arnold Hawley, I think. I wish I'd known who James Baldwin was when I read The Motion of Light in Water, but I only today found out.