2015.01.06 — On an 8-Track Fushigi Horror

@ 9:24pm in the WSS game thread, A Horror Story in Two Sentences, I wrote:

In some kind of cosmic joke, it just so happens that the reason history repeats itself is because God's master creation was the 8-track tape. Unfortunately, His manufacturer has gone out of business, and the last unbroken tape is starting to squeak in the machinery of time.

I wrote this to follow the previous entry, which does not make any reference to 8-tracks or 70s retro.

@10:16 pm, I walked out of the bathroom after a shower to say good night to my wife before going to bed. She was watching an episode of ‘My Retreat’ on the TV station Cottage Life. I don’t watch this, except by accident when I am in the room when my wife has it on. The episode was of an octogenarian’s ‘cottage’ in Whistler Village (about two hours from where I live). He is stuck in the 70s, and his place is still decorated in that era, including an 8-track player built into his bed! The photo is representative in style, although in the episode it was blue velvet and didn’t have the chrome lights (I don’t believe). And the owner went over and touched the tape in the machine and commented that it still worked.

Too funny not to generate a quick post.

And as I was writing this I could hear the episode wind down. The octogenarian commented that his son, after years of complaining about the horrible retro decor, has now thanked him for not updating the place. And so, all things old become new again, and history repeats itself — like an 8-track! LOL!

2014.10.26 — Upanishads, Making God Small and The Beauty of Beauty Fushigis*

Out of the blue, The Upanishads have jumped into my life with a quick pair of peculiar and, perhaps, blog-worthy fushigi. (And provide me with an opportunity to blog one of my stories! Oh frabjous day, callooh callay!)

The 1st Upanishads fushigi was set up with a small fushigi that began 2014.10.14 with my resuming to read Your God is Too Small by JB Philips in the morning before work. I sticky-noted what I'd read then because I felt I would refer to his argument when I wrote my review of the book. On the sticky I had written “The physical [is seen by Philips as] less beautiful [than the metaphysical that exists in our hearts and imaginations].” I read in Philips’ argument that he considers the existence of physical beauty as a pale simulacrum of a meta-beauty that is to be found where God resides. (This follows the Greek idea of an image of life that is outside life and which fallible life aspires to grow towards.)

Philips makes the argument that the existence of beauty is a suggestion supporting the existence of something beyond the limits of somatic reality, a hint of ‘God,’ so to speak.

Is it possible that beauty is a hint of the real and true and permanent…? No one, of course, can say. But the appeal of beauty which is universal, however distorted or debased it may have become, cannot be lightly dismissed. It is a pointer to something, and it certainly points to something beyond the present limitations of time and space. We can at any rate say that beauty arouses a hunger and a longing which is never satisfied (and some would say never can be satisfied) in this world (p68).

When I got to work, my intuition directed me to do something I haven’t done in perhaps a year, which was to read a particular post in a poetry group that I belong to on Goodreads, called The Boathouse. At one time I was very active in that group but, like my blogging, I have not been active of late because of a general time of busy-ness in life. I have no idea why I visited that particular post with the (to me obscure and completely unknown) title Dana Giola by Ruth. She had been to see the poet (I didn’t know that until I Wikied him) give a talk. From it she related the following observation:

Right on point was his topic, "Beauty." He defined it not as something pretty, but as something exactly right, a beautiful sunset, or a cruel hawk sweeping down on his prey.

He thinks there is not enough beauty in the contemporary US. He particularly cited the buildings. I have an idea that I might consider beautiful some buildings he would hate. But I have to agree with him about schools and public buildings which are utilitarian, but have no grace.

This lead to a typical discussion from several members of the group over the course of a week on the immemorial problem that one man’s beauty is another person’s ugly. I have no idea what drew me to join the discussion, but I did, and posted a comment only because of the fushigi of having read beauty defined an hour to two earlier.

On the morning of the twentieth I read RTO’s comments, and while driving in to work … well. Here is what I posted in that thread:

While driving into work this morning I was thinking about RTO's conflation of mind brain and ego. And I was thinking that with the body we easily distinguish between the function of a toe and an elbow, even though they are coterminous with 'body.' It would seem, logically, for things to be coterminous does not preclude distinction of function and perception of that function.

And I was also thinking, as to the specific notion of 'spirituality,' that one of the severe problems of existence is its existence. If nothing existed before something did, how did something arise from nothing? Old question of course, but given the way matter is being found nebulous and untouchable with modern physical examination, it is not facile to ascribe matter as a spiritual expression: in that it is because it is and predates logic and mind and the ability to be explained except vaguely and inconsistently. And if matter is, then the limitation of spiritual expression to 'just' a mind/body function is problematic: where does spirit in matter end and the 'fact' of the matter begin? And we enter the tail chasing dog arguments again, which makes me smile.

Anyway, I wasn't going to post these meaningless mindless (mindful?) meanders except that as I was pondering them, in a kind of fushigi, my intuitive function asked me to open a copy of The Upanishads I have at my desk. (I haven't actually read it, but keep threatening to.) But this morning I flipped it open, randomly, to Ch.10.2 of Chandpogya VI.II.

...good lad, all creatures, once they have come forth from being, do not know that they have come forth from being. Whatever they are here — a tiger, a lion, a wolf, a boar, a worm, a flying thing, a gnat, a mosquito — they become that.

This subtle part is what all this has as self. It is truth: it is the self. You are that...

Well, I found this funny. Well, the whole enchilada, which in all likelyhood doesn't really exist except as that which creates gas! LOL! Have a good day. My work function calls.

The 2nd Upanishads fushigi began 2014.10.26 in the morning with my getting notice that one of my short stories on the UK reading/writing site ReadWave, “The Unwritten Room,” has officially become popular in the USA with it having reached the milestone of 50 US reads.

When I finished my busy Sunday, I came upstairs a bit tired, and thinking I’d like to blog my Upanishads’ fushigi, and so picked up the book. But I wondered if I might something else amusing and perhaps enlightening in it. And so I flipped it open and stopped on Book III. I was surprised and delighted to see that not only did what I flip to correspond to the beauty discussion, but it connected it to ‘The Unwritten Room’ and to JB Bishop too! Here is the opening to my story:

My Janelle. To think
I once dipped strands of her hair
in India ink!
M.

It, the BIG it, has been called by physicists string theory. I have frequently wondered at that. Why not call it strand theory?

This is what I read in The Upanishads:

… the five subtle elements are called by the name ‘element’, and the five gross elements are called by the name ‘element’. ‘Their coming together is called ‘the body’. So the one who is said to be ‘the self in the body’ is said to be ‘the elemental self’. This self is to that one as a drop of water to the blue lotus on which it rests. The elemental self is overcome by the strands of nature. Because it is overcome, it falls into utter delusion. Because of this utter delusion, it has not seen him resting in the self — the lord, the blessed one, the causer of action. Delighting in the mass of strands and grown dirty, unsteadiest, fickle, utterly bewildered, full of yearning, distracted, it falls into conceitedness. ‘I am this: this is mine”: thinking like this, it binds itself with itself like a bird with a net. Overcome by the fruits that follow on from action, he wanders around (356, my emphasis).

To repeat myself: I find these funny. And, in their own way, very beautiful.

2014.10.28 Fushigi Addendum

The fushigi extended itself the day after I blogged this when I went into The WSS / Weekly Short Stories Contest and Company to see about entering this week’s Poetry Stuffage contest, the theme of which turned out to be 'A Winding Road'. And I was delighted and surprised to see this little fushigi continue with the title of M’s entry of the week: Unwritten Things. (It is a beautifully written villanelle!)

And so it seems to go, the winding road of fushigi appears to be an endless one.

P.S.: I did write a poem, too. Here it is:

The Road Not There

The rock, that rock looked familiar to me.
Had I seen it before, really? When? When!?
I stopped walking,
affirming with words directed to it in waves of air,
‘I do not know you you are a stranger to me!”
I looked at it and felt a tickle of dread, fear,
burble up up from a depth of darkness I didn’t want to know I knew.
I had seen it before, of that I am sure.
This winding road to nowhere is not endless.

My thoughts begin to tumble with the unstoppable possibility
that I had been on this road before and before that too.
I notice this rock’s familiarity. Noticed it today.
And that makes today special in some unperceivable way
because all the other days I’ve passed this way before have been forgotten
even as this winding road has been whiling me down its easy slope and pretty views.

The certainty of truth I had has become sand.
The feeling of earth’s rock hard knock hard lessons are fled.
When the spinning in my head stopped
And the clock spring on my watch stopped winding itself down
I turned and saw that the road I was on wasn’t there anymore.
The nowhere I was at awed me
Because there was nowhere left for me to go.

2014.10.02 — A Milestone, Secrets Like Gravity, and a Nice Little Fushigi*

Where to begin? At the beginning of course! But what if the beginning is outside the proper sequence of time? Hmmmm. So I will begin with the poem I wrote while I had a friend in mind. I submitted that poem to Amy King’s October Poetry Contest in Goodreads. It managed to receive an honourable mention.

Secrets Like Gravity

We carried secrets
That like stars their gravity
Have moved and bound us.

Their weight guides our paths
With such soft unseen fingers
That we are like breath.

The breath that finds skin
And caresses it even
As the stars watch us.

SMALL MILESTONE in a minor key in this Song of Life

My pair of blogs passed 60,000 page views today! :-) LOL! Sometimes it is the small things that bring to our faces a smile. And as a friend likes celebrate these things, Snoopy Dance!


Nice fushigi.
At the end of August my yoga instructor closed her studio. And, on my last day there, she calmly extended to me two yoga mats. “Give these to M.” And I took them, her statement seemed to not allow me to refuse even though I didn’t know M’s address, phone number or last name. I stuffed them in my car, and waited, confident that I would see her.

Friday last I went to see my chiropractor. He is in the process of correcting my posture and ease some discomfort in my neck. He was preparing for a day long seminar the following day, and after he gently helped me, said ‘Wait up. I’ll come with you. I need to get a cable for my projector for tomorrow.” He was going to the store downstairs, and so I waited for him.

In the lobby of the small mall, I grabbed my smart phone to call my wife before braving the pissing rain. As I’m talking I see M, who is carrying three boxes and some bags. It was obvious M was getting ready to walk home, so when I waived M to stop. And thus I came to relay to her her mats, and have the pleasure of driving her to her house instead of getting drenched. Such a small event, but oh so delightful.

2013.08.03 — So Little, So Late; Reached 40k, Some Haiku, a Fushigi* and some (a)Musecorn.

Hello. I am shocked that it has been seven months since I got my blogging fix. I could say that my life has gotten busier in that time, and in a way it has. But the reality is that my writing time has been consumed with other writing, stories, poetry and something called (Interactive) Musecorn.

Musecorn is a variation of the play-like writing that has come to be called Popcorn that was initiated by Al, head moderator of the Goodreads writing group, Weekly Short Story Contests and Company. (And Al is a very fine writer. Please check out her poetry and prose in the WSS or on her blog Pens and Erasers.)

Popcorn is a way for authors to interact with his or her characters, by giving them a voice though which they can express their personality directly with their author. This has been running since January 2010. For a short and interesting and not atypical example of popcorn go to From Seagulls to Mice, Exhumed Babies to Diarrhoea.)

Musecorn is a slight refinement, in which the interacting personalities in the play-snippets are not characters created by the writer, but the writers' muse or muses. Some of the popcorn is more specifically musecorn. It sounds odd, I know, but it is a great deal of fun, challenging to write, and liberates the imagination.

A few months ago, and one of the reasons I've not been blogging as I used to, Al and I began to create Interactive Musecorn while talking via a chatterbox window. We had no idea how this would work, but to my surprise and immense pleasure, it has become as alive as anything I can imagine writing. I have, here, published an early exchange. I expect to turn some of it into a play for fringe festivals.

Interactive Musecorn
Note: In this extract, Guy's muses are the Professor (Prof), Neve, and Pandora, and coloured as shown.
Al's muse is Frank and coloured as shown.

Prof: [Speaking to no one in particular.] Al's rabbit-coitus dream has been puzzling me.
Frank: Me too. VERY puzzling.
Prof: [He pauses.] Freud would have a simple answer, I think.
Frank: Quite creepy, too. I don't like having to share her with some bunny man.
Prof: But it is about hidden wish fulfillments. At least that's Freud.
Frank: And everyone knows how much I loathe that fruity man. Oh dear Lord. And now I'm making typos! How embarrassing.
Prof: [Laughs.] What's that got to do with anything?! She gets you a lot, so you aren't a hidden wish fulfillment.
Frank: [He raises his eyebrow.] And now you're on the same list as Freud....
Al: Frank. Be nice.
Neve: Did Al have sex with a rabbit? OMG, that's gross!
Al: Not a rabbit, a man wearing a rabbit suit.
Neve: [Mutters under her breath.] How big was the rabbit?
Frank: And here I thought I was your only bunny.
Al: He was massive.
Neve: Oh! [Pauses.] But really, isn't that even, sort of, more gross?
Frank: [He wanders off.] Is Pandora here?
Neve: Well, you never know. Why?
Frank: Oh, no reason.
Al: He wants to have a "chat" with her.
Prof: That is just displacement, Frank.
Frank: Who asked you, fruitcake?
Prof: You think that if you can touch greatness, you will become a better man.
Al: Fruitcake? [Bursts into laughter]
Frank: You, clearly, have no idea what being a "better man" is all about.
Al: Frank...
Prof: [Laughs.]
Frank: [He rolls his eyes.]
Prof: Frank, you have all the behaviour of small man syndrome. And I don't mean your height, if you get my meaning.
Al: Remember your promise, darling. Don't do anything stupid....
Frank: [Ignoring her.] You insolent little man! If I wasn't being elbowed by Al, I'd strangle you!
…
[Continued on separate page, for those interested. Go to: Musecorn.]

End of that 'phase' of this blog.

Sigh! So much to write. Even now I have a choice between writing a story, quickly to meet today's deadline — I have a creative idea for this week's topic in the WSS Awkward — or put up this blog post so as to stop feeling guilty about my not doing it for so long. It would seem I have decided to blog and feel a little guilty about not writing a story for now. (Might get to it tonight.)


So, first ego-blog post:
My long absence from blogging, and no my doing it, is overwhelming my fingers. I want this to be a complete ego blog, to put in a bit of everything. Then, of course, no one will read it. But, I will, anyway, by cheering at my blogs having gone past 40,000 page views. This happened a little over a month ago, and I actually started toblog that astounding success, but just kept doing other writing instead.

Second ego-blog post
I also wanted to post some of my writing. I have been writing poetry and short stories. Lots of Haiku — well, more often than not Senryū, target="_blank">Tanka, or 575 or 57577 forms, in particular. I may have written a couple of good pieces in the lot. So here is some short form poetry-like verbiage. (Note, these are extracted from an interactive Haiku game thread, and these will read better within the context of the other fine works that inspired my efforts. I've attached the links to the titles. Enjoy, if you can:

the moon, he doth wax with eloquence

He waxed his belly
Until it was mistaken
For the waxing moon
On a starless cat-less night
With white wine, a dark future.


back in the tank

Drunk and far from home
Ziggy spent time in the tank
going star crazy.


to be or not to be dancing

His ghost danced lightly
with a quick and gentle step.
He kept perfect time.
When the rains came he stayed dry
and sang 'Fly Me to the Moon.'


the wind up boy

She bade susurrus,
With a siren's soft whisper,
To dance in his ear,
Bid him strip inhibitions,
Seek her umbrella.

There has been a lot more than that, but that is more than enough to give you a taste.

I was tempted to throw in a short story, but have managed to resist that.


*fushigis:
Here are two small, somewhat recent fushigis.

On Friday, July 19th, my co-worker NR asked me to read and critique/edit a letter he was going to send to a project manager of BA Blacktop. They are doing the road re-arrangement and overpass for the Vancouver Ports. NR's letter was an apology on behalf of the logistics people in our office who had failed to get the work done on time for the project, despite NR having completed his design on time and having given the logistics people instructions on what needed to be done. Nothing special about that circumstance, anymore, as that is more-or-less the norm for the department as it suffers under the poison of severe MBA mismanagement and bureaucratic dysfunction as my employer continues its drive to eliminate its labour to an outsourced engineering department.

The following morning, @ 9:50 am, I was exiting my condo's parking garage in order to begin my Saturday morning chores. Parked across from my egress was a van with a BA Blacktop red and black logo. I have, since then, looked every day, every weekend for that van. And nothing.

Well, before I left to do my chores on that Saturday, from the TV that my wife was watching, I heard the word/phrase Doppelgänger.

She was watching the movie Doppelgänger Paul, and asked me what 'Doppelgänger' meant. I defined it for her. When I got to Safeways about thirty minutes later, I heard a young woman standing in line talking about having to keep clear of doppelgängers. I can say that I have heard that word used by people other than me perhaps less than twice in the last 15 years. It is, however, a favourite of mine.

Fushigi Addenum:
After writing the above, I went back to the top of this post to find a good extract of Musecorn to post. While looking for it, I came across a recent chatter post (google hangout), and smiled to read the following, which I'd forgotten I'd written:

Does that count as a part of the fushigi too?

Fushigi Addenum II:
Stuart McLean, on his radio show Vinyl Cafe, read the letter of an amazing fushig. So amazing, I'll blog it here. To add to the fushigi nature of the story, today was the first time I've listened to McLean in months. Zahida Murtaza, from Pakistan originally, relayed how at the age of 12 she fell in love with the writing of Stephen Leacock. I was desperate to read more stories written by this author, but I had no way of doing that. Instead, I read the story so many times that I memorized it. She had no idea of where Canada was, or even if Leacock had written anything else than the short story she read from the English Literature Anthology her class was studying. On a random drive, she and her husband, some 40 years later in Canada, stop at random at a small town in Ontario, visit the church and its graveyard, and discover the grave stone of Leacock. The short letter is a delight to read. You can read it here.

2012.12.17 — 30k and Counting to Pi and Puke, Naming and a Coq fushigis*

On December 14, 2008 I posted my first blog with the inauspicious title 2008.12.14. That means I've been blogging for exactly four years to the week, despite my expressed concern on that blog about not having anything to say because everything that can be said has already been said.

Well, this morning, 4 years and 3.14159 days from that first blog post, my two blogs have had, combined, the 30,000th page view. Thirty thousand! When I first started, I was ecstatic with even one! Thank you everyone for making this happen, the one time hitters and especially the regulars who, with an apparent streak of masochism and/or a perverse humour, keep coming back. [I just checked the count before posting this: the official count is 30, 089.]

I was going to just post the milestone, but a small fushigi jumped in to pervert that. Okay, that and the funny fushigi that it was early in the morning 3 days after the 1 year anniversary, (3.14159… days? LoL!)

And, okay, my going back to re-read that blog created in itself a small fushigi. Doubly funny because the fushigi's genesis came from the amazingly talented Gregory Charles. (I loved his radio show, one of my all time favourites ever!) The show he broadcast on that day had as its theme Secret, during which Charles discussed that (some) ancient philosophers posited the existence in the universe of a secret melody. And why I find this doubly funny, is that my previous post, 2012.12.16 — Pi Fight it? 3.1416 Fushigis* and an Also Ran Poem, had a fushigi-connection to my current favourite CBCR2 show, The Signal and the number pi and the music of pi and a movie about a musician who falls in love with a girl named Pi.

When I looked for the musical expression of the number pi because Laurie Brown of The Signal had played it, I came across a peculiar YouTube video called The Miracle of 528 Hz Solfeggio and Fibonacci numbers. It makes the argument that certain secret 'musical' frequencies, once 'lost' (????) but now un-lost, are being used by scientists— [interrupted @ 3:30pm by ML to prep oranges and then make supper.]

Now supper is done, and the dishes too. Question: how to write this next bit? While cutting the peel off of a bag full of oranges and then cutting them into chunks, ML turned on the TV. She was watching trailers for future movies on the movie channel.

One of them was for an Alvin and the Chipmunks' movie. I wasn't paying attention so I didn't know until later that it is for something called Chipwrecked. What caught my fushigi-ear was when one of the monks, not Alvin, said "I'm going to puke". What was fushigi significant about that is that I was flipping through my stacks of fushigi stickies and near the top of the pile was one about, of all things, puke from various people and of different kinds. See image of fushigi sticky note.

@ 7:05pm I interrupted this blog write in order to write a letter to RoMA in Goodreads. He had replied to my request to post some of his Haiku, and I wanted to acknowledge his okay. While writing the letter he commented about having seen only two of my shortlisted poems. So I mentioned 'Cotton for Comfort', and that I'd recorded it. I went to SoundCloud to get him the link. In my SoundCloud list, I have two readings of Comfort. R4 didn't satisfy me and so I listened to R3, which I like better. As I was creating the link and the text in the e.mail to RoMA the next reading in the list played. And so I listened with half an ear while composing my letter to what I think is one of my better poems, What Cannot be Expressed. And as the end is coming up, I am surprised to remember that the narrator pukes! The poem's last line is .../as my body heaved its stomach wordlessly into the muck and its mud splattered books." This poem was published and originated from a photographic prompt in the Houseboat Blog, for December 19, 2012. There was created another poem from that image, which is very fine. Anyway, here is the text of:

What Cannot Be Expressed

Far from urbane strictures, while in yet another distant and impoverished land,
I was contentedly alone and self-contained in a noisy crowded decrepit bus when,
as if from a great distance, I thought I heard a kind of drumming I did not recognize.

I paused, stopped reading, marked my page. I looked out the dirty window and,
unexpectedly, I remembered the wet summer day I read on a VW van's bumper sticker
'live life as a tourist.'
I was a young man then. Because I could read, I thought I understood.
And, when I did become that well-booked tourist, I thought I was happy.

The bus slowed at a corner crowded with colourfully-dressed ebullient villagers.
Behind them my word-drunk eyes mistook the makeshift grain-bag windbreak as a soiled deconstructed yin-yang art-piece.
I laughed at how easily the eye is fooled by false appearance and because the book in my hands was the I Ching.
With a bemused shake of my head at this odd coincidence I returned to the book, where I read

Writing cannot express words completely.
Words cannot express thoughts completely.

At that moment the stony weight of verbiage I had made myself blind to fled my fluttering heart.
In an animal panic I pushed my way past the press of shoulders and jabs of elbows.
With my hands grasping my mouth and books I stumbled down the bus's step-well
and crashed though the rickety doors to splash down on the rain-soaked earth.

Now silent, the villagers' heads turned and their eyes watched my hands flail uselessly
as my body heaved its stomach wordlessly into the muck and its mud splattered books.

On the sticky note I have noted M's 'puking cat Haiku.' When I went and did the research, it turns out that that was a funny addendum, because he'd written them a couple of months before the date on the note. But the Haiku are funny, nonetheless, so here's the link to them for the curious: 2012.06.19.

2012.12.19 Addendum
I sat down after supper and turned on the TV to see if there was anything interesting being broadcast. Eventually I stop on a Sarah Jessica Parker movie I Don't Know How She Does It. The best of a poor listing! I think the movie was about halfway through. The character played by SJP has been scratching her head during some kind of sales pitch with Olivia Munn to Pierce Brosnan.

She gets a text saying her child has been found to be infected with lice. When SJP's assistant, Olivia Munn, learns that, she say's 'I think I'm going to puke.'

And, now, near the end of this post, I return to the Gregory Charles' Secret frequencies fushigi: the claim made on the video is that particular frequencies use by Gregorian chanters can promote health and other physiological effects. They make specific reference to scientists using a frequency to heal DNA (I think). Anyway, a subtle aspect of this fushigi is that, if you haven't heard him, Charles is a musical prodigy: he, like a magical sponge, remembers every note of music he hears, it seems, and can replay it. Listening to his show was like listening to pure musical genius, musical magic, if you will.

2012.12.18 Post 17th Addendum.
I had meant to blog this yesterday, but as it was being written yesterday's post went sideways. So, here is a post post fushigi addendum, comprised of some of what I'd wanted to blog originally.

2012.12.15-16
I visited my one 'secret', meaning private, Goodreads' membership, called The Boathouse, which is a collection of about 20 amazing poets, some famous, and by some weirdness in life, me. I have been so busy with work and with the WSS that I've not been a regular there. However, on the 15th, I popped in because, I guess, the WSS was slow and because I am on vacation and had some free time. So I visited a post by Ruth Bavetta.

She was looking for our response to a list of proposed titles for a book of poetry. I had a bit of fun with the list, and morphed some of the elements from the various proposals into one title, on the 15th.

The next day, I continued my perusal of Stanley Park, and was bemused to read of a series of critical path issues, i.e. a list, associated with making happen the opening of a restaurant. But that isn't what caught my fushigi-ear, originally. Only was when I was re-hashing it while doing this blog that I caught that. No, what originally caught my fushigi-ear is:

Critical Path Issue #2 had been fabrics, a half-hour discussion that evolved directly into yet another debate about suitable names. This topic had been open for days, but market research had come up with a final proposal (294-5).

And what Ruth had been doing, of course, was critical debate and market research, because the group was being polled for their opinion.

2012.08.29-30
And, I've thrown this one in here,

despite the odd date, because the fushigi sticky note was attached to the cover of Stanley Park as one I hadn't got to yet. I attached it to the book yesterday, when going through my old fushigi stickies because it is about food and SP is about a chef and food and cooking. Anyway, way back, on the 29th of August I saw on the TV show Chopped one of the contestants make coq au vin.

On the 30th I was standing in line behind a man in a wheel chair. He

was having a struggle with getting his groceries attached to the back of his wheel chair: the cashier was having a hard time figuring out how to get everything hung without the bags rubbing against the wheels. During the course of the engagement he mentioned that he was going to the wine store next to get the wine he needed to make coq au vin. In 35 years of buying groceries I've never heard any mention making coq au vin.


So, a bizarre, interweaved, nonsensical story that goes nowhere, like the end of pi. And that is, I believe, a perfect celebration of my blogs' milestone.

2012.12.10 — Dripping Noses and Skin Colour: Two Small fushigis*

Today was a day of two weird, tiny fushigis. I guess I am feeling a bit bored, tonight, and so here I am blogging them.

The first begins with a drippy nose in the WSS game, called TPBM (The Person Bslow Me).

Post# 2295:

TPBM's nose keeps running and he/she is very annoyed with it.

Nothing special. But later that day, I heard a pre-news news announcement. The tag line was something like

"Have you had a drippy nose that doesn't seem to want to clear up? Well, a woman had a constantly dripping nose for months and wait until you learn what was finally determined to be the cause."

I didn't turn on the news to get the scoop on the drip, but it struck me as amusing enough that I noted it on one of my fushigi sticky pads.

The other began last night. I stumbled into a CNN broadcast of Defining 'Black' In America, which is a part of the series called Black in America. The host for the Sunday (2012.12.09) show was Soledad O'Brien. I haven't seen any of this series before, and I do not even clearly remember having heard of it before. I suspect that I must have, but dismissed it out of hand In part, I imagine, because I do not respect CNN very much and because I have, rightly or wrongly, been completely un-impressed by O'Brien as either a reporter or anchor (or whatever she is).

But, for whatever reason, I caught the title and the opening without being aware that I was on CNN, or watching a CNN series, while I was flipping through the stations looking for something to catch my interest. Well, what caught my eye on this show was the poetry I was seeing spoken by two young women, and then later, a university professor. I learned a new, bizarre, word: colorize, as it applies to people. (I went to find it on a google search, but came up empty.) I found the state of American social intelligence to be extremely depressing, in this show. And didn't watch it to the end, in part because I didn't find the direction of the questions and exploration of the issues to be fruitful. Perhaps it's what America needs, given that I have seen them arguing about removing Mark Twain from syllabuses because he used the word 'nigger' in his writing.

Anyway, I'm not here to critique America's racial madness, nor solve the problems of skin colour in the world. But what got me writing this fushigi blog was that this evening, December 10th, I visited Gareith's blog My Continuing Education: A Rich Jewel in an Ethiop's Ear. And it was about the lack of black images to accompany text in literature that includes black people. Gareth sites Shakespeare and Coleridge. And the painting The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch.

(It struck me as interesting that my quick look at this massive painting did not reveal to me obvious black men, just the few woman shown here, and another one elsewhere.)

Okay, the final reason for my including this as a fushigi is that the silly and inane television show, TMZ, which I guess originated as a web page, was looking at Dutch Christmas practices. In point of fact they were kind of making fun of the Dutch Christmas having something / someone called Black Peter (Zwarte Piet), who accompanies St. Nicholas to take away the bad kids. And TMZ was also poking fun at American racial hypocrisy, by pointing out that they still have a football team called 'The Redskins'.

As I said, two tiny fushigis, but ones I find amusing.

Addendum 2012.12.11 7:45pm
Well, the world continues strange. Tonight for no well defined reason and, if truth be told, in complete contradiction to what ostensibly is demanding I write and bake, I decided to re-watch the brilliant movie Groundhog Day for the first time in five or six years.

I was amused when within the film the skin fushigi was once again extended. This is what I wrote as a comment on Gareth's blog My Continuing Education:

Hello Gareth. Once again one of your posts that interested me also managed to attach itself to a tiny synchronicity in my life. I've blogged it @ Dripping Noses and Skin Colour - Two Small Fushigis.

And that got extended tonight when I watched Groundhog Day, again for maybe the 5th time. However, tonight I noticed something I hadn't before, and that is that the ER Nurse, an Afro-American, had pearl or silver earrings.

Now to your comment about finding images: I went to find an image of this scene on the web, and was unable to find any Groundhog Day images with her or that scene. Nor, as it turns out, in the movie/celebrity web sites. The name of the acrtress is Dianne B. Shaw. I did find a fuzzy image of a Diane Shaw singing Blue Moon on Youtube which has the silver/white on black skin.

Bemusing. Maybe.


2012.12.012 Sigh: Another Addendum — but stretching it!
I turned on CBCR2's The Signal, and the host, Laurie Brown introduced the next musician as: "If David Bowie were a black female, he might sound like this. This is M'shell NDEGEOCELLO and Rapid Fire.

And Brown was quite correct! Except that Ndegeocello is quite a bit better than Bowie I think. Okay, not quite good enough to fushigi, but on the off chance I wondered if there would an image of Ndegeocello with pearl or silver jewellery — maybe even earrings, to help Gareth out. And, yes! And quite an interesting ear 'ring', too. I think I've just discovered someone new to me to listen to!

And, with this beautiful image, it has been elevated into fushigi-hood. And I will go and provide the link to Gareth.

2012.10.29 — Another Brush with Success: Newton's Figs. — The Latest Last Place Poem

A while ago, in one of these blogs, I promised myself I would blog poems that achieved some kind state of publication, near or otherwise. Well, I was pleasantly surprised when out of the blue a 'throw away' poem I posted in Amy King's (Goodreads') Monthly poetry competition was in fact shortlisted. Callooh, callay, oh frabjous day!

Well, it appears that I only farted. Again. My latest shot at reaching the top in final round competitive poetry will have to wait for another day. I am a dead and distant last in the voting. And so as needs be I will take whatever solace I can, and some sense of accomplishment, at being picked from over 250 other entries. So here is:

Newton's Figs.
I know, I know, I've bleated this blah blah before.
Your eyeballs roll backwards yet again.
No more will I pray to reason's god
for a chink in its armour through which
we can squeeze the motes of living unpredictability.
The strength to be still,
the courage to mute unsounded truths
that ache with a heart's loss,
not to the flatulent many,
but to the miasma of a squared world
well rested in Newton's figs.

This was a poem I tossed off as a mild rebuke to a group within which I am a member, and which had become bogged down with trying to 'logically' choose new members. I found the conversation had been enervated by trying to build a 'rational-focused' review best of and voting methodology. I suggested that what might be interesting would be something grounded in the same kind of synchronicity that was very much a part of this group coming together in the first place.


No, my idea was rejected with silence. Twice. Newton's Figs. is my homage to William Blake's Newton's Sleep:

Blake tried to show the blindness of this [Newton’s] orientation to nature; and nowhere did he say it better than in his verse letter to Thomas Butts (1802):

Now I fourfold vision see,
And a fourfold vision is given to me;
‘Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And threefold in soft Beulah’s night
And twofold always. May God us keep
From single vision & Newton’s sleep!

Berman, Morris. The Re-Enchantment of the World. Toronto: Bantam Books, in conjunction with Cornell University Press, 1984, pp.122-3.

2012.08.21 — The Devil Wears Prada: A Ten Bulls Review

The Devil's in the Details, and She also Wears Prada.

M and Al, two people I respect in Goodreads, the book-biased social networking site, panned this movie. M was mostly ambivalent, seeing in it some positives, but finding it not to his taste. Al dissed it quite harshly. I was surprised, because I actually like it enough to have watched it more than once. On 2012.08.18, this is what we wrote:

Al: mm, I just experienced a fushigi moment. I walked downstairs and my mother was watching The Devil Wears Prada. Guy just mentioned that movie not long ago and then I walked back upstairs went back on GR and saw the book in my recommendations. How strange.
M: I hope the book is better than the movie.
…

Guy: I confess to enjoying The Devil Wears Prada movie. And not because it is a 'good' movie, because I doubt very much that it is. I enjoyed it in part because it is a guilty pleasure. And it is a guilty pleasure because it is in a very curious way, a western hyper-stylized version of The Ten Ox Herding Songs of Zen Buddhism, A.K.A The Ten Bulls! LoL! It's funny, I didn't think of that until I tried to figure out why it was I liked it.

M: …
The Devil Wears Prada isn’t my kind of movie, though I think it’s very well, and very expensively, done. I don’t feel that I know Andrea or Miranda or Emily much better at the end of the movie than I did at the beginning. The movie is loaded with atmosphere, a sense of place, but a kind I find offputting. The music in the movie is a complete turn-off for me—though I think it’s perfect for the movie.

And so it was that I began with a peculiar thought. What made that thought even more peculiar is that when I began to examine it more closely, it is actually a pretty strong link. Here is what I wrote:

Re Prada I find your comment interesting because you are correct and, I think, not. [I was going to make a quick and oh-so clever comment, but as I started writing it my ideas and connections continued to expand and multiply. So…]

Here's the Ox Herding Songs thing that I see in the movie:

Andy (played by Anne Hathaway) begins the journey with a strong identity of her place in the world. She (with the ostensibly masculine name) is a journalist, a documentarian of the 'real' world. And that real world demands she soil herself in the grime of money acquisition and its challenges to identity. When she is first faced with its challenge, she rejects it as being beneath her — her contempt for the fashion industry and those who profit from it. This is the first hypocrisy of Andy as the seeker of truth: her morals have given her the arrogance to be able to predetermine where the truth of the 'real' world can and cannot reside. This is an example of the classic Taoist problem of where the Tao does and does not reside: the mind, dazzled by its glittering truths and moral edicts, believes in demarcations and separations that do not in real reality really exist. [LoL at that sentence.]

Fortunately, when the student is ready, the teacher appears. Her hypocrisy is challenged by Nigel (played by Stanley Tucci). 'You haven't tried, not really,' he tells her, 'so don't cry to me about how badly Miranda is treating you. If you want her respect, you need to respect your place here.' [That's a paraphrase, of course.] Slap! She is awakened to her hypocrisy, and moves into the fashion world fully. With skill and focus, she learns a new truth and rises to the top of the industry. But typical of all truth acquisition, she has in the process replaced her other truths with it without being aware of that change. Her other real world keeps reminding her of where she is from, and how far she has moved from it. She doesn't see it, so blind has she become to her new truth, which is to become fully one with the world — of fashion.

When the student is ready, the teacher appears. This time from Miranda (played by Meryl Streep), who slaps Andy with the truth of her journey. And so Andy leaves that world, the 'real' world, and applies for a job at a 'real' magazine. LoL. This scene transforms Miranda from being a mere puppet in her world, to a fully aware participant. She doesn't change or grow, but with the end we become aware of her self-awareness. We may not agree with it, but she has made a conscious choice to be, to embrace, her nature. In fact, without that self-awareness she would not have been able to teach Andy in the end and return her to her self with enlightenment.

So, what we see in Andy is the journey of the young idealist, who leaves her ideals to join the grimy world, and then move back to her ideals, but now with the acquisition of real-world wisdom.

Emily (played by Emily Blunt) remains unchanged and, we see, largely without self-awareness. The hope that she will change is when Andy gives her the clothes without expectation of anything return. In Emily's world view, such 'exchanges' are unheard of because there are no free gifts. That is what I call planting a seed of doubt about the 'reality' of one's beliefs. Furthermore, the gift of clothes is a confirmation of Andy's spiritual growth: she is a part of the real world but apart from the real world at the same time.

I'll paraphrase and shorten the ten songs (or bulls as they are also known).

Here is the journey to one's Self:

   1) seeking for truth because of ignorance/hypocrisy;
   2) discovery of a path towards it (or a) truth;
   3) finding what you think is the truth because vision is too small to understand you haven't yet;
   4-7) struggle with that truth (Miranda/boyfriend, Emily/co-worker loyalty, etc.)
   8) Find the various faces of the truth.
   9) Rediscovery of self.
10) Return to the world.

Amusingly enough, even the name of the movie is a gesture towards this path: the devil is the archetypal energy of carnal physicality. The devil is what keeps us mired in the real world. And, it is only in embracing the physical world fully, that the truth of our spiritual connection to it can be made. The shoe is often a dream symbol of 'understanding' because it holds up our feet. It also represents the intellectual (man-made) separation or gap between our soles/souls and our being grounded in the real world. The shoe may epitomize the fashion world, and also the crippling of feminine (anima) understanding: highly stylized, expensive, hobbling and, if kept on too long, ultimately crippling.

Sorry to have gone on so long, but as soon as I started thinking about this, more and more of the ideas and connections came into my consciousness. And yikes! This sounds so pompous. Sorry about that.

2012.06.03 — Cotton for Comfort — a Nearly Successful Poem

Hello!
It has been too long since I have posted here. I have been busy writing. Elsewhere. Primarily for the Weekly Short Story Contest and Company — WSSCC in Goodreads. But it is long past time to post something. I have been amassing a long string of tiny fushigis (March to June), but today's blog won't be them. Instead this blog will be entirely self-promoting.

I have been having the smallest of creative writing successes over in Goodreads and the WSSCC. Today's post began with the story/poetry prompt Cadaver. I wrote 'Cotton for Comfort' and subsequently had it critiqued and with the help of some excellent writers revised it into a form good enough to make it as a finalist on the Poetry Group's monthly competition (out of 300+ entries). And even though it finished 5th out of the 6 finalists, this constitutes a form of publication, and so here is:

Cotton for Comfort
The cadaver wanted to signal the world
That the remains of the she
she once was was not all that she was!
But her tongue remained still, thoughts stillborn
under the weight of entomological entropy.

The cadaver remembered
all her apprehensions, understandings
and now even their misses. All of them.
Misses. Missus. Masses. Mass. Mas. Maws. Mauls. Mulls.
Mulligans! Now that is a great word!
Missed. Mist. Miss. Misses.
Where's the mulligan?

The cadaver wondered
at the state of her body.
It would seem, by the sights
she couldn't see, and the sounds
she couldn't hear, that she had been abandoned
somewhere wild, wild where the wild things are.
Where the wild things were returning
her once complex interleaving of molecules and cells,
with a macabre dance,
to the more natural chord of thrumming humming humus.
Humus! Hum Us. Humour Us. Humorous!

She wondered that she could hear
that chthonic humming
now that she couldn't hear words
that chimed charmingly
with an importance she could no longer fashion.
Fashion?
She began to soundlessly laugh
at being alive in vain.

Vain. Vanity. Inanity. Insanity.
She'd left that morning wearing her badly worn,
tired and holey underwear,
underwear her mother told her
not to be seen dead in,
but in which she felt natural.
Nature all. All Nature. All Natural.
Cotton for comfort. Comport. Come apart.
Be apart. Be a part of. Be a part of wordlessness.

One of the people who commented on this poem asked to hear it. With Koeeaddi's prompt, I proceeded to record it with music. If you are curious about how it sounds as read brilliantly by Rose Mary Boehm click Cotton For Comfort. To hear me read it not as well as Rose Mary, click on Cotton for Comfort.

And I encourage you to visit the WSSCC if you like creative writing of all short stories, not just short stories. Recently a script writing thread/competition has been started.

2012.04.21 — Young Writing Talent: Introducing the Poetry of Jessica of the WSSCC

Today this blog isn't about me or my creative efforts, or even those peculiar fushigi things I seem to like.

Today I would like to introduce you to Jessica through her Haiku:

1
I prefer shorts and
A blanket in cold weather
To Chicago Junes

Within Goodreads, which is a reading/writing oriented social networking site, there is extant a little group called Weekly Short Stories Contest and Company!

13
I have got to do
something about this wasteful
Rapunzel leisure

I stumbled into this quiet and unobtrusive — modest — thread by accident, and it has become a source of endless delight and genuine creative inspiration. It is one of the most creative little things I've discovered on the web and as such is an excellent example of what makes the web a social good. (Okay, okay, I spend more time sitting in front of the computer than my demands for exercise would like for my personal well being.) It is moderated primarily by a young college student whose energy and contributions are astounding. Alex's writing and energy and imagination are all a huge part of its success. And for the most part it is a venue for young people learning to write. The few older people like myself who participate also bring something to it, but I consider us to be the exceptions that prove the rule.

31
Her strange silhouette
That lurks, encompasses us
When the lights turn on

The WSS has expanded to include a delightful and quirky poetry thread called Weekly Poetry Stuffage :) Here I and the others who read this thread have been blessed to read a diverse range of poetry, much good, some not so good, and some truly excellent. One of the best, and some of the best poetry I've read anywhere, comes from the keyboard of a young woman by the name of Jessica.

36
Those heavy scented,
dusty Yankee aisles make
me want to vomit.

Jessica began the Haiku thread. Wow, has this been a fun thread. Huge creativity, both with 'real' Haiku and farcical, multi-verse, interleaved rhyming "Haiku." But Jessica has recently written some that hit me so hard I remembered them for days, and kept re-reading them. They need to be shared with the world. So here, with Jessica's permission are Jessica's recent Haiku:

1062
Remember when he
crawled into a butcher's shop
and said, "I hear God"?

Remember when they
tied him up and put him through
the sausage machine?

And fed the whale with
his end bits, the ones that writhed
like belly dancers?

…
1149
Residual sleep
fell down the tip of his nose
and stayed there awhile.

But the drowsiness
wore off toward a buff shine and
he asked for a dance.

These are a few of Jessica's Haiku. She has also written some astounding modern poetry.

With this blog I would simply like to publicly say, 'Thank you, Jessica! Keep writing.'

2011.12.21 — Some fushigi* — Shameless, Cabinetry and Philip K. Dick's Stigmata and Adjustment

Each of the *fushigi in this blog began so small that I didn't blog them at the time of their occurrence. Rather, I noted them with pen and paper and waited to see if enough small one's warranted an amalgamated blog. And, after the third one linked to an event today, here they are.

The first one began on the morning of December 12. I was doing something I have never done before, nor ever really expected to do. (And hope not to do again.) My wife decided she wanted to have some cabinets installed in our laundry room. She's only recently begun to web surf and so after a struggle to find cabinetry places on the web using Google she asked me to see what I could find.

So there I was, Googling for cabinets instead of doing the morning chores I had been earlier assigned to do. This search turned out to be an oddly difficult web quest and relatively boring. And it took far far longer than I'd wanted and put my start to the day behind.

That evening I experienced the smallest of small fushigis after I turned on the TV to watch something that had yet to start. I flipped around the stations to kill the few minutes and stumbled into an episode of the Showtime series (being broadcast on HBO-Canada)

Shameless. This show had been suggested to me by BY, one of the TV-watchers at work when it started in January this year. Thus I came to pause on it to give it a quick look. The episode was about halfway through when I began to watch and saw almost immediately the character Frank Gallagher, played by William H. Macy, working at a cabinet manufacturing plant. Serious? When was the last time you saw someone on TV working in a cabinet manufacturing factory?

The next one started five days later, when I wrote some Haiku-like things as part of a Haiku game-chain in the WSSCC group in the Goodreads word lovers' social networking site. This is what I wrote as my continuation of M's theme about how a gravesite became a hangout for drunks and harlots. (M's pair of Haiku have an extremely clever play on words.) On the 17th I wrote the following doggerel:

A harlot, one day,
saw fresh blood on the grave stone
seeping from two cracks.

She screamed in delight
for she knew this smoker's grave
was now stigmata

and that unlike pee
would de-stigmatize their squat
to bring Facebook fame.

She took a picture
of the miracle in stone.
So a Saint was made.

The Stigmatization of St. Francis

Certainly not great poetry! But fun. I have no idea why 'stigmata' came into my head for this, but once there I wanted to play with it.

Today I visited Renaissance Books and was greeted by J with a big smile.

'I have a Christmas surprise for you,' he said to me. 'Follow me.'

He led me into the basement and then into a 'staff only' section. He reached up to the top shelf and voilà, there were Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman's two volume The Political Economy of Human Rights. This was very exciting to me, as my Chomsky collection is now big enough that stumbling into new-to-me-books by him is getting harder and harder to do. Well, this find completed my set, as I already had volume I but not volume II.

But that isn't the fushigi, but is what lead to it. On top of the book shelf, just to the left of the Chomsky volumes, were three Sci-Fi paperbacks by Philip K. Dick. What first struck me funny about that is that I had watched a movie two days ago, more or less by accident, called The Adjustment Bureau with Matt Damon and Emily Blunt. It is an adaptation of the Dick short story The Adjustment Team that I was not familiar with so that when I turned it on I had no idea what the movie was

about beyond the cryptic cable TV description. It wasn't until the closing credits that I saw it having been inspired by the Dick story and had that feeling of 'Of course that was! It felt like a PKD story!'

So, that, and the fact that as a teen I loved PKD, made these books stand out, initially. Well, because of the movie and my misspent youth, I asked J if I could look at these. He commented that PKD was becoming really popular lately, again, and that he had set these aside to take them upstairs. 'These are PBOs,' he said. 'Paperback originals, and so are quite expensive.' They looked like old acid paper degraded paperbacks to me, but he commented that they were worth about twenty to thirty dollars each.

But the one that stood out to me, and which I was willing to buy, was The 3 Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

What a convoluted fushigi! J commented that he thought he had a non-PBO copy of Stigmata, which it turns out he did. So I bought it.

And now I will toss in for bad measure two of the oddest of the odd things. I am quite sure they do not even qualify as near fushigi, but I'll throw them in anyway. Well, the first is an obvious one, but was the last thing that came to mind. And that is that the concept of 'The Adjustment Bureau' provides an explanation for the existence of fushigi! (The mind is a funny thing that I didn't even think of that while watching the movie!)

And the second one also relates to some doggerel I wrote, called 'Rock Sun Paint,' for a photographic poetry prompt-blog called Houseboat—photo #5. (I was invited to join this blog via one of the Goodreads groups with which I am a member.) The poems that were created by the other participants are excellent! I highly recommend this blog if you enjoy poetry and photography. Anyway, here's what I wrote:

Rock Sun Paint

I can see the stone walls are old,
despite efforts to paint them
with the saturated youthfulness
of blue, white and ochre.

In the blink of an eye
nature will chip this façade.
The kiss of colour will be etched away
under the brutal barrage
of the sun's stone-cracking light,
which reveals itself in harsh shadows
and the brilliance of blue,
white and ochre.

Faded stone cobbles
wind through doorways and spaces,
unpainted, unmasked, tired.
Their purpose is obscured
by an inevitability denied
by the foolish who walk
this path with bared heads,
as if doing so could mock
as myth the diurnal sun.

I tap my watch, what time is it?
The battery is dead, is what I think.
I cannot know the truth,
that its silica-inspired movement,
abashed by this painted timelessness,
simply stopped, unmasked
by blue, white and ochre.

Before this poem made it to publication it went through a vigorous critique/revision process, during which one of the members wondered at what I meant by 'with bared heads.' I explained "As to 'bared' head … it is [a] metaphor for thinking the head (mind) has the power to ignore nature's energy." Well, in a kind of fushigi irony, the 'adjustment agents' (aka angels) of 'The Adjustment Bureau' require hats in order to allow them access to warping space/time and allow them to move god-like through the world. I find that reversal brings a smile to my face.


Addendum

After posting this — and I mean immediately after posting this, I turned away from the computer to watch some TV. The movie station was running a movie called Shelter with Julianne Moore. No sooner had I sat down than a man, with multiple-personalities, I think, is being questioned about a male body found in his home that had had a stylized cross cut into his back. Stigmata, of sorts?


Addendum #2

Okay, life is TOO strange. On another TV-station tonight, Showcase, the movie Minority Report with Tom Cruise is being broadcast. 'Minority Report' is, of course, a movie adaptation of the PKD short story The Minority Report.