2012.06.10 — A Blast of Fushigis* — Time to Clear the Sticky Note Pile (1)

I have been away from my blog over the last couple of months. But I have been writing in the WSSCC on Goodreads a lot, and work and life in general has been keeping me busy. I will be posting some of my other writing at some time, but for now, it is time to begin to clear up my BIG pile of *fushigi scrawled sticky notes of many colours festooning my desk and challenging my wife's sense of household propriety.

I will warn you right up front that I wouldn't label any of them as being 'WOW! That was amazing' But what may not be extant in the individual can perhaps be made up with in their power as a collective with a steady flow and peculiarity. Although Jung would be castigating me if he'd heard me elevate the collective to be on par the individual!

As this Blog post will takesome time to complete, I will post it in instalments over several days. I will post my addenda as separate blogs with this date, but with the name incrementing. And just to make it a little more confusing, instead of picking up where I left off my fushigis at 2012.03.17 — A Half March of Little Fushigis, I will work backwards to them.

2012.06.06/09 So, today's strange little fushigi began a few days ago when I copied into iTunes a CD I'd borrowed from the library. It was a random pick during a get a couple of quick CDs while the take away pizza across the street is being cooked. So, amongst two others, I grabbed a weird one by someone I'd never heard of before. The CD was Mysterious Mountain and And God Created Great Whales by Alan Hovhaness. I had wanted to like this more than I did, although I did enjoy it enough to not delete it from iTunes and will continue to re-listen to it to see if it grows on me.

So, the fushigi — and I'll ignore the kind of obvious one, which is that I am well into and thoroughly enjoying Melville's masterpiece Moby Dick right now, which I didn't even think of until now, righting out this blog!

This morning, after doing my shopping, I got into the car, turned the ignition and heard not only the engine start but a woman, cellist Amanda Forsyth as I subsequently learned, describe being terrified as a girl of five by a piece of music called Voice of the Whale by I had never heard this music before and may have heard the name George Crumb with having listened to CBCR2 for almost thirty years, but I do not have any conscious awareness of him, his music or his reputation. (Okay, now wasn't that music truly … unusual? It certainly is engaging, but I find myself hard pressed to see it as what I understand to be music.)















2012.06.04
At 11:10pm I finished and posted a character/author dialogue in a thread of the Weekly Short Stories Contest and Company in Goodreads @ Poems Topic: Car Music. It ends:

Me:
Well, what about your students? I've heard that, in a rather pathetic sounding sports parody, professors get their share of groupies, too.
Professor:
Yes, I've heard that too. [Quiet.]
Me:
Well!
Professor:
Well what?
Me:
Are you serious?! I am going to bed, you educated moron! [Leaves]
Professor:
[Pulls out his pipe. Before initiating the tobacco ritual, he wanders over to recover the remote control and turns on the TV. He doesn't look at the screen after confirming that the volume was low enough to be heard but without being disruptive. He very leisurely cleans and stuffs the bowl, assures himself of a proper draw, and with a great sigh, fires it up.] That Guy guy. Just when you think he might have his sh*t together, he shows himself to be no master, but simply eking out adequacy. [Draws in the smoke, sits in the big leather overstuffed library chair. He turns to the bookmarked tome beside him and begins reading it with the Simpsons playing softly in front of him.]

Nothing special there, of course, although I have emphasized the germane bits. The fushigi completes when I re-commence Moby Dick @11:30pm at Chapter 27 'Knights and Squires', where I read:

What, perhaps, with other things, made Stubb such an easy-going, unfearing man, so cheerily trudging off with the burden of life in a world fail of grave peddlers, all bowed to the ground with their packs; what helped to bring about that almost impious good-humor of his; that thing must have been his pipe. For, like his nose, his short, black little pipe was one of the regular features of his face. You would almost as soon have expected him to turn out of his bunk without his nose as without his pipe. He kept a whole row of pipes there ready loaded, stuck in a rack, within easy reach of his hand; and, whenever he turned in, he smoked them all out in succession, lighting one from the other to the end of the chapter; then loading them again to be in readiness anew. For, when Stubb dressed, instead of first putting his legs into his trowsers, he put his pipe into his mouth.

I say this continual smoking must have been one cause, at least of his peculiar disposition; for every one knows that this early air, whether ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless miseries of the numberless mortals who have died exhaling it; and as in time of the cholera, some people go about with a camphorated handkerchief to their mouths; so, likewise, against all mortal tribulations, Stubb’s tobacco smoke might have operated as a sort of disinfecting agent.

2012.05.28
This is a very boring fushigi, but peculiar in its own right. It begins with my catching a part of the televised conversation of reality TV protagonist Bethenny Frankel that my wife watches. Normally I tune out and listen to music with my headphones while writing. Anyway, what I caught was BF talking/crying with her therapist about how alone and lonely she feels. (After the fact, I noted the time as being around 7:45pm Pacific.) The fushigi completes around 9pm when I became curious about the translation of the Tao Te Ching I bought the previous weekend. Well, I quickly read through it — the translation is good — and laughed when I read Chapter 42. Stephen Mitchell's translation of it goes:

The Tao gives birth to One.
One gives birth to Two.
Two gives birth to Three.
Three gives birth to all things.

All things have their backs to the female
and stand facing the male.
When male and female combine,
all things achieve harmony.

Ordinary men hate solitude.
But the Master makes use of it,
embracing his aloneness, realizing
he is one with the whole universe.

Of course what makes this peculiar one very funny, is that this BF is a celebrity extraordinaire, who became a near billionaire 'overnight', etc., but the Tao sees her as ordinary.

[2012.06.11: Solitude Addenda.
I finished writing this pile of blog last night, with the final post around 11:00pm. This morning as I was driving into work, at around 6:25am or so, I was bemused to hear that solitude had cropped up again. This time from Neil Young's song Lotta Love. (Note that my commute was less than 15 minutes, and so I heard about 3 songs, max.) From 'Lotta Love':

…

So if you are out there waitin'
I hope you show up soon,
'Cause my heart needs relation'
Not solitude.
…

Now, I don't really think of this as strong enough to fushigi blog, although it did catch my ear. (I'm not a big fan of Neil Young, nor of that song, actually.)

This became a bit more interesting when I bumped into TK in the kitchenette area at work at around 2pm. We had a long discussion about various things, but mostly about her mother who is developing dementia. Last week was a bad week for her, TK said. She commented that her mother is feeling lonely, and needs to be with someone. Specifically, her brother walked in to find her sitting beside the phone, feeling too tired and sad to answer it.

But it truly gets fascinating when, about 20 minutes later, when I left work (late!) I turn on the car at 2:23pm or so. When I turned on the car I heard Holly Cole singing a song with solitude lyrics in it.

When I looked it up, she was covering Hank Williams song I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry. Here's the lyrics:

Hear that lonesome whippoorwill,
He sounds too blue to fly.
The midnight train is whining low,
I'm so lonesome I could cry.

I've never seen a night so long
When time goes crawling by.
The moon just went behind a cloud
To hide its face and cry.

Did you ever see a robin
weep when leaves begin to die
Like me he's lost the will to live,
I'm so lonesome I could cry.

The silence of a falling star
Lights up a purple sky.
And as I wonder where you are
I'm so lonesome I could cry.

And then, tonight, I joined a new thread in the Dims Hall group in Goodreads. One of the threaders wrote:

… I want a real person to love me. Sometimes I just want a real person to say they love me and I don't even care if they really do or not. It's horrible, but sometimes I'm just so lonely and being alone is a dreadful feeling….

And that's it for the lonely/solitude stuff! At least for now.]



2012.05.19
Today I listened to Naqoyqatsi by Philip Glass for the first time with care. It has been in my stack of CDs for a long time, and I have listened to it before, but I had a creative/intuitive urge that this music would work with the poem Cotton for Comfort that I'd recently written and read into Garageband at the request of a poet with the nom-de-plume of Koeeoaddi. (Ko is a great poet! You can listen to my reading her poem 'Migraine' at Guy's Soundcloud Space.)

Oops back to the fushigi. Naqoyqatsi's soloist is the famous American cellist Yo-Yo Mah. Oddly enough, I have never been a big fan, although I have tried various of his CDs. Oddly enough, I am not a huge cello fan to begin with — except for Zoë Keating's Avant Cello. Anyway, shortly after listening to Noyaqatsi on my iPad, I turn to my attention to networking poetry on Goodreads. I visit the private group with which I am a member, and visit a poem put up by Joan Colby's looking for critiques.

Joan gets some, including a very technical one from RTO on the musicality of the cello. RTO is familiar with the instrument and is balking at Joan's depiction of 'chords being plucked' as being extremely rare and not really appropriate for the cello. So, from Joan' lovely poem 'In the Pines, In the Pines':

…
Peeling a tangerine, the golden juice
A blessing or how a cello sounds
Its deepest chords plucking at the strings

Of dailyness. …

From this line evolved the cello discussion, which culminated in my reading reference to Yo-Yo Mah literally within fifteen minutes of listening to him, and actually enjoying the performance and the production!.

This pile-up of sticky-noted fushigis is to be continued as addenda blogs.

2012.03.28 — Published: A Sonnet & a Haiku

Enough of those dumb ass fushigi blogs. Now for a dumb ass blog of web-published creative writing.

The multi-media and very beautiful and engaging Houseboat blog and its multi-talented creator, writer/artist/photographer Rose Mary Boehm, has graciously published two of my poems in the last few days!

The first one is a Shakespearian sonnet that I wrote several years ago. Imagine that, not only is there at least one nut bar writing sonnets in the world, still, but there is also extant someone willing to ask my okay to publish it!

In Black, Shadow Puppets Dance - A Sonnet
       inspired by Kimberly Keith & Revised 2011.12.29

In black, shadow puppets dance with the light
That leaps in bounds to fire a new year born.
Wicked stories fill with dread an endless night
Of starry dreams dreamt once but now stillborn.

But how the gilt flames leap over these limits.
They tickle open hearts with glittering scenes
Of thick plated truths, gold carded credits,
Hard hitting livers and bilious spleens.

I stare and stare. To my dark eyes' chagrin
Sharp smoke caresses them and makes them tear.
I blink through brine and my mind starts to spin
A tale of two halves — my mask-face and fear.

     The flickering night has caught spots in my mind,
     Spots black in my mind my mind minds to find.

Now I have mixed feelings about the 'goodness' of this effort, but I think that at least a couple of the parts in it are more than acceptable.

Of course there are those in the world who viscerally loathe this format, like it was ipecac. Okay for those people they will be spared looking at the next poem that Rose published. That is in the even more despised Haiku format. This one came to be as an expression of my reaction to a subject photograph Rose published in the Houseboat to stimulate poetry.

Here's what I wrote.

I am a white dog
playing in the dirty snow
of late spring.

Hmmm. Now that I've written that — and the sonnet before that — you may be dis-inclined to visit the Houseboat blog. !f that is your feeling-reaction, please reconsider. HB has truly great poetry and visual art from real and seriously published writers, poets and visual artists like Joan Colby, Jefferson Carter, Ruth Bavetta and brilliant new poets like Sara Clancy and Danny Earl Simmons, Naomi and others.

2012.03.17 — A Half March of Little Fushigis*

Some strange little *fushigi.

2012.03.06
I came home from work to find my wife watching Anderson Cooper's day time talk show, which had as his guests dominatrixes. This didn't particularly interest me. Later that night, at 6pm local time, Bravo Canada had the comedy movie Walk All Over Me about a dominatrix and her naïve sister.

2012.03.07-8 (#1)
On the 7th I used the word accost in a rather amusing way — at least my workmates around me laughed. I related to them, with a bit of tongue-in-cheek, how my 2nd level manager queried me regarding the state of the office's planned computer replacement programme by 'accosting' me as we were existing the washroom. The understaffing has become so extreme that all of us seize these kinds of opportunities to talk about work.

On the 8th I was again accosted immediately after urinal bladder relief by another manager who queried me regarding the state of the training I had agreed to do for his staff, but which I've been too busy doing my day-to-day must do work to even have begun it. And I again joked with my podmates about being accosted in the bathroom.

At home, later that night I was pleasantly surprised to see that the British director Trevor Nunn's excellent adaptation of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night with Helena Bonham-Carter and Ben Kingsley was on. I've seen this many times since its release in 1996, but this was the first time on our HD TV. I was amused when I came to Act 1 Scene 3:

SIR TOBY BELCH: Accost, Sir Andrew, accost.

SIR ANDREW: What's that?

SIR TOBY BELCH: My niece's chambermaid.

SIR ANDREW: Good Mistress Accost, I desire better acquaintance.

MARIA: My name is Mary, sir.

SIR ANDREW: Good Mistress Mary Accost,—

After laughing at this absurdly stupid fushigi, I stopped watching Twelfth Night and did some writing. A bit later I flipped back to the TV and for some reason turned on the new series Awake. I didn't really know anything about it, but I found it to be an interesting take on the problem of awareness of being awake or being asleep. But, to the point of this fushigi, there was spoken the line "He's the one who accosted me."

2012.03.07-8 (#2)
With just a tiny touch of curiosity I decided to watch on TV the recent movie The Sorcerer's Apprentice with Nicholas Cage. I was not excited about this movie, despite my having been at one time a huge fan of magic and sorcery films and books. I am not a huge fan of Cage and I find that many of today's so-called blockbusters have become filled to excess with special effects, when what interests me most is the characters and the writing.

And the movie lived up to my expectations. Cage was adequate, not great, effects were plentiful, although they could have been worse (see, for example, Jim Carey's A Christmas Carol). However, it became much more interesting the following day, after BV told me about one of her most vivid and memorable dreams from her youth.

In the dream, it is dark. There are puddles, like glass, within which she sees Chinese people.

Well, what makes this interesting is that 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice' contained two scenes in which glass mirrors were used as a trap for the sorcerers, who would be caught behind the plane of the glass. They couldn't get out, but people could see them in the mirror. When passing into the mirror, the glass behaved like water.

2012.03.09-10
On Friday March 9th @ 6:42am I sent an e.mail to my friend Marty in Nelson telling him to break a leg with their premiere performance of Khaos, the brand spanking new opera he helped produce. It subsequently went on to rave reviews and calls for a tour to the big city. (Have a listen to a pre-production taste of Persephone's NIghtmare.)

Later that Friday my podmates and I at some point began talking about CBCR2's Vinyl Cafe. As I often do whenever talking about this show, I describe the one in which the protagonist, Dave, accidentally inhaled a fly. (You can pre-hear the beginning of the story in iTunes The Fly.)

On Saturday the 10h, I managed to catch the beginning of a repeated story. It opens with Dave resolving to overcome his antipathy and past hospital horrors to visit his friend Marty. In telling the story Stuart McLean refers to Dave's past experiences, including the time he inhaled the fly. (The reference to the 'fly' story is @ the 29:03 minute of Hospital Dave.)

2012.03.12
As has become our routine BH and I were down in the atrium for our coffee break and to talk about dreams. On that Monday the discussion began with the movie The Tree of Life. (Amusingly enough, this is the movie BY wants me to watch to see if I rate it 'WTF' like a few of our fellow USB watchers have. I've only seen a snippet of it, and it was a bit peculiar. But what I saw was broken up so I've not made an official judgment yet.) BH commented that this movie looked like a dream, or had dream elements to it.

When she said that I was upset with myself, because before going to bed Sunday I had just finished reading about Jung's pre-WWI dream, and I immediately thought of bringing the book in to read the section to BH, but talked myself out of it because my rational mind thought it was being too pushy.

In the third dream frightful cold had again descended from out of the cosmos. This dream, however, had an unexpected end. There stood a leaf-bearing tree, but without fruit (my tree of life, I thought), whose leaves had been transformed by the effects of the front into sweet grapes full of healing juices. I plucked the grapes and gave them to a large, waiting crowd (Roderick Main Jung on Synchronicity 133-4; or Memories, Dreams, Reflections 176.)

A bit later BH shared her dream that includes, among other interesting images, that of a vampire and a candle with a blue flame. There were also a large number of votive-like candle holders without candles. So we explored some of the different meanings and images the world 'blue' evokes. I asked BH if she'd ever listened to Regina Spektor's song Blue Lips. 'No.'

[Interlude 2012.03.18
While I was writing that my stomach began telling me in no uncertain terms that it wanted food. I argued with it since it was now very late (00:07hrs). As is usual I had music in my ears, but very unusually I was listening to iTunes DJ, within which I have hundreds of songs. I was pleasantly surprised when one of the many Kate and Anna McGarrigle songs started playing in my ears. Then the lyrics blew me away:

I eat dinner at the kitchen table
With my daughter who is thirteen
We eat leftovers and mashed potatoes
No more candlelight
No more romance
No more smalltalk
When the hunger's gone
…

And the title of the song is "I Eat Dinner", which I didn't have tonight but which I am now going to amend. (And did.)

2012.08.03: Interlude Addendum:
Tonight, while sitting with my wife on the balcony, something strange happened. So strange that I can only attribute it to there being a full moon tonight. What was strange is that my wife actually asked me about what I wrote on my blog and, for the first time, with real follow-up. She's vaguely asked about it while distracted by other things once or twice before. And she has never once asked to see it nor on how to find it or for me to bookmark it on her Macbook Pro.

I pointed her to a spot, and she flipped through for a while while I read Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber. She found her way to this blog, and then commented about the part where I described being hungry when Kate and Anna's song started playing.

Then she said 'I'm hungry. It's time to eat.' And I was hungry too because we'd not had supper yet and it was after 7pm. We chuckled that in a way even that was kind of fushigi. But I did not consider it to be worth blogging.

Okay, so why have I blogged it? Because tonight, after coming in around 9:45 to watch some Olympics, I wound up multitasking by going onto Goodreads. I poked around a little and saw a comment from a 'Jessica.' And so I went to see if the WSS Jessica whose writing I find brilliant was still active. I haven't seen anything from her in a while, and so visited her Goodreads' profile. From there I went to her tumblr blog.

Wow! Visit her blog! The writing is diverse and amazing. But it became totally bizarre when I read the following:

…
I meet you and three others in a room of someone else’s home. Perhaps there is a fifth friend, but she exists in the shadows. The three others take my food and congratulate me: “We didn’t know you were so competent!” You sit at my left while they eat at my right, and I feel starved. The three talk among themselves as I watch and as you fade alongside the fifth friend. I try to engage in conversation with one of the three, but she declares that I am pissing her off. I had only asked if she was excited to go to Cornell this fall.
…

7-30-12

Okay, now we start entering the truly bizarre. Before writing this I had turned on the TV to watch some Olympics, but it was only swimming, so flipped to Adventures in Babysitting an old guilty pleasure. I didn't catch it from the beginning, but just in time to catch the kids escape to sing the blues. Shortly after that, there is a scene in which the 'starving' girlfriend cannot buy a hot dog because she has only cheques and the vendor takes only cash. (Broadcast on YTV, with this scene showing up at about 10:12pm.)

The final oddity has to due with debt and money. As mentioned, I'm reading Debt: The First 5000 Years, early in the book. Graeber discusses the moral behaviour around debt, with an emphasis on the hell that is created when debt is abused by either the debtor or creditor. One of the themes that runs through Adventures in Babysitting is debt and financial obligation. The movie looks at when it is abused, such as with the hot dog vendor, the car thieves, and the Thor-like tire repair person; and when it is dealt reasonably, by the stranger at the party and the young car thief and, eventually, by the reformed Thor-like repair man.

Meaningful? Absolutely not. And yet, didn't you kind of shake your head at the improbability displayed here?

And yes, I did find that funny, too.
End of Interlude]

That night I decided to visit the Houseboat blog, something I haven't done since early February. There I found that the blog had recently featured the poems of Robert Strickland. The last of his poems is called 'Blue'. From 'Blue':

...

II. Blue
Blue is a cold way
to see beauty, dying
a difficult inspiration.

I once saw a blue guitar,
godawful ugly
and cheap.

I once loved blue-grey eyes
but she loved
a theologian.
…

So, after reading that I decided to ignore my fear of being pushy, and I sent BH an e.mail with Strickland's poem and the words to the song Blue Lips.

As soon as I finished with that I returned to reading Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal. And the in the second next paragraph I read:

…
Here, what struck me first was the mild blue light that filled the room; yet I did not wonder at this at all (134).

Jung mentions this blue colour several more times in the balance of the description.

2012.03.14
Around 9pm I read a poem by Joan Colby on the Houseboat blog. The poem, Two Deaths beautifully describes an owl's and a colt's unsuccessful struggles to stay alive. Around 10pm my wife announces that the highly touted series Luck, which starred Dustin Hoffman, is being ended after the death of a third horse during filming. [Interlude: I wrote the above around ~2:30pm 2012.03.18, and was shortly thereafter interrupted by the need to make supper and prepare tuna salad for lunches. Shortly after supper I watched my guilty pleasure Lost Girl. The show, about supernatural creatures from myth and legend, opened with a warning from the animal kingdom that the world going to a hell in a hand basket. Their warning was compared to how animals behave before earthquakes, but which in this supernatural case were far more extreme and bizarre, including ten horse killing themselves by running into an electrified fence. End of interlude.]

2012.03.15-6 #1
On the 15th I watched the pilot of the new series Touch. Wasn't keen on watching another Kiefer show, but the concept of the world of numbers and their quality is, of course, aligned with my interest in Jung and synchronicity. So I thought I'd give it a try. It was, overall, pretty good. Better than I expected, anyway. One of the story lines follows a lost smart phone whose owner is desperate to have it back because it has the only pictures of his dead daughter. He's travelling around the world as part of his job, and in the end the images from his phone are broadcast via the web onto giant billboards in Japan, where he happens to be.

The next day, Friday, at work around 8:30am or so, I heard Tom Power, the host of CBC Radio2 Morning, tell the story of a professional photographer who lost his camera and how eventually through the tiny world symptom of the universe, was eventually directed to a blog wherein he saw his photographs. Normally I am not at my desk at 8:30am, but am instead at coffee. However, on that day my coffee date had taken the day off to get passport (travel, photograph) renewal paperwork done.

2012.03.15-6 #2
I had lunch with a coworker. We wound up talking about having come from co-dependency and dysfunctional families. At some point I discussed my father having gone back to school in his forties and 'to get a degree even more stupid than my BGS. Like father like son, and in ways that are crazy.' I didn't add, in this conversation, the many small behavioural and psychological ways I've noticed this truth, and that my awareness of the similarities seems to be expanding in a highly disconcerting way.

On the way home in the car, late as usual, I was listening again to CBC Radio2. This time Tom Allen's show Shift. I was very amused when he introduced the folk singer / songwriter Greg Brown, whom I am not aware of having knowingly heard before. In his introduction Tom talks about how men become like their fathers. The song was Billy from the Hills. (And here's the link to the CBC playlist for Friday's Shift.)



2012.05.05 ADDENDUM

http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/268295?page=17&utm_medium=email&utm_source=comment_instant#comment_50016777

Popcorn post
Al # 828.

Blue light / Betty dream fushigi /


...
Al: (She jerks upward suddenly, choking and gasping for air. She feels a hand on her bare back.)
Fredericks: Are you alright? Al? You had a bad dream, it’s okay now.
Al: (She looks at him. He looks distorted in the blue light coming from the window in the bedroom.) That-was…that…?
Fredericks: (He gives ….