Below are the most recent 21 friends' journal entries.

Friday, July 4th, 2008
breathe_poetry [ voleuse ]	10:56p	"So You Would Listen to Me" by Laura Riesco So You Would Listen to Me by Laura Riesco So you would listen to me I tangled your silence My words became shrill with the wind The starry shadows of all my poems plunged in your eyes So you would listen to me God put you in the night The whole world put solitude in our steps So you would listen to me I diverted your path How many nights spent I gave you in a minute You were to blame for the tremor of my hands You were to blame and now you listened to me Illuminated knives crossed my breasts I dug from the cavity the reason of my dreams So you would listen to me I tangled your silence I was falling in parts and in parts in silence I was leaving the soul to you. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
tigermilkdrunk	3:31p	Fun with kitchen chemistry Maybe three weeks ago, I was in Spain for the weekend, visiting my aunt in Girona (after promising so to do for the last nine years). The visit itself was lovely; it was rainy and cool, to be sure, but rainy and cool in Spain is immeasurably preferable to rainy and cool in Scotland, especially when the latter is packed with tourists. I read several long novels (including, finally, Independent People - Halldór Laxness is becoming one of my new favourites [alongside Antonia White, who I just can't believe I only just discovered]), and took the dogs for walks, and picked a lot of fruit. One of my aunt's tricks when her house is overflowing with fruit is to make various cordials and fruit-infused liquors. One of the most exciting I tried was an herb-based one - sort of every herb you can imagine, along with lemons and green walnuts and some flowers. On returning, I immediately filled a jar with herbs and gin, and really can't wait to see how it turns out. I also, however, made a small batch of rose-infused vodka. Here's the curious part: immediately on contact, the rose petals (a light pink) turned the vodka yellow. As the mixture aged over two weeks, it turned a slightly darker yellow. Yesterday I removed the petals, and the vodka turned pink. A day later, still petal free, it's a sort of dusky red - one might even say 'rose-coloured'. I haven't tried it yet, although it smells rather nice (well, like roses and vodka), but if anyone has any idea why it would be yellow when mixed with the flowers, and pink when not, I'd love to know. And if you have any brilliant ideas for what I should do with it, please pass those along as well. Interminably busy these days, mainly writing, with a little bit of conference-going (Aberdeen next week, for my first properly large conference) and work for the book festival thrown in. Fairly exhausted, and still fairly anxious about my continued unemployment and so on, but it's summer (though it rains every day, and rarely gets above 60), and the book is progressing surprisingly quickly (I'm currently on chapter five of six), and love/job/stable living environment/did I mention job might be just around the corner. Anyway, there is, as always, June's list: Books: Brown, George Mackay: A Spell for Green Corn Brown, George Mackay: Three Plays Gauchet, Marcel: The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion Dagerman, Stig: A Burnt Child Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: Volume 1: Introduction and The Concept of Religion Macmurray, John: The Self as Agent Brown, George Mackay: Time in a Red Coat Arendt, Hannah: The Human Condition Brown, George Mackay: Vinland Riley, Gwendolyn: Cold Water Bloch, Ernst: Traces Brown, George Mackay: The Golden Bird: Two Orkney Stories Brown, George Mackay: Beside the Ocean of Time de Man, Paul: Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust Bilson, Gay: Plenty: Digressions on Food Nussbaum, Martha C.: Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature Mitchison, Naomi: The Corn King and the Spring Queen Fuller, Alexandra: Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier Laxness, Halldór: Independent People Lewis, Norman: Voices of the Old Sea Patočka, Jan: Body, Community, Language, World Woolf, Virginia: The Voyage Out Hollinghurst, Alan: The Line of Beauty Kavanagh, Patrick: The Green Fool Laxness, Halldór: The Fish Can Sing Durkheim, Émile: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life Burnside, John: Selected Poems Wallace, Gavin and Randall Stevenson: The Scottish Novel Since the Seventies: New Visions, Old Dreams Lewis, Saunders: Monica Brown, George Mackay: Pictures in the Cave MacDonald, George: Alec Forbes of Howglen DVDs: The Return of the King: Extended Edition - Peter Jackson Six Feet Under: Season 2 - Assorted The Savages - Tamara Jenkins 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days - Cristian Mungiu Six Feet Under: Season 3 - Assorted Eastern Promises - David Cronenberg Jindabyne - Ray Lawrence And I still haven't been to the cinema in months, especially embarassing given that the film festival was last week, and I had no reason, but work and poverty, not to go. And now back to the rip-roaring adventure story that is Tönnies's Community and Civil Society. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
breathe_poetry [ voleuse ]	2:45a	"The Order and the Days" by Alicia Galaz Vivar The Order and the Days by Alicia Galaz Vivar The clear air, the tree's shadow and your shadow, the order and the days. Yesteryear's blue rose and the dove of wire. Your in-tune steps throughout the house, the mismatched furniture, the transparent wine of your blood, the tic-tac of your sleep on another pillow. to play with marked cards and words – everything according to the order and the days – Sunday newspapers, coffee and dense air. The brown blue rose of the world stripping its petals. Wasps buzzing hate. And treachery round and circular like the smoke of your pipe. You add a black rose to your animal misery, furiously barren, emptied of your tenderness in your harsh demand and, nevertheless, you are to plant the same crosses and kill the same gods. Summon deaf death to this, your yellow heart. (Comment on this)
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008
mthrtongue	9:54a	I'm working on Ulysses again, this time via Daily Lit. Also Anna Karenina, and I read Washington Park this way as well. I think it'd be difficult to read any book via email if you actually stuck to the installment-a-day plan, but I find that, between appointments at work or when I'm drifting for a few minutes between one project and the next, I'm way more likely to read 10 or 20 pages via email than I am to pick up a book, which feels like more of a decisive and committed action. Only in chapter two of Ulysses, about here: "He tore the flower gravely from its pinhold smelt its almost no smell and placed it in his heart pocket. Language of flowers. They like it because no-one can hear. Or a poison bouquet to strike him down. Then walking slowly forward he read the letter again, murmuring here and there a word. Angry tulips with you darling manflower punish your cactus if you don't please poor forgetmenot how I long violets to dear roses when we soon anemone meet all naughty nightstalk wife Martha's perfume. Having read it all he took it from the newspaper and put it back in his sidepocket." And the google sidebar is asking me, "Would you like to... add to calendar meet after the rosary. Sun Jul 6, 2008" (1 Comment |Comment on this)
breathe_poetry [ voleuse ]	1:24a	"Exile" by Teresa Calderón Exile by Teresa Calderón And tomorrow: what will become of the faces I invented to search for me, and of the words that I could not imagine in my presence? Tomorrow, I ask what will become of the land of the weeping araucaria and of the anonymous bird that ate from the plum trees beyond the cement and wire fences? Tomorrow, what will become of the shelter among the linden trees, and of those who waited so long for a return? What will become of the little boy that we left protected among the violets and who still winks like a secret between us? And tomorrow, what will become of the rain that cooled down the apple trees in the corner of our eyes? Will life perhaps be an infinite twilight and the street an immense motionless mirror? (Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008
breathe_poetry [ voleuse ]	6:10a	"Attitude" by Magda Portal Attitude by Magda Portal I am quiet, like this, stubbornly quiet face to the night, face to the dead moon and the stars, and face to the sea, I am always quiet, I have such fear of words! They come headlong, like torrents they come the blue words, the red, the violet, and capsize their anguish and tarnish dawn, and they open like wounds like no blood. A secret fright disturbs me, but how would I be able to tell someone of this coming death, tell it, but run from it, road walked and unwalked, question without answer, desolate look. A round of light steps but sure steps, where are your visible prints leading me? if my hands do not ask nor my eyes worry my overflowing anguish seizes still. World round and alone, I would go around you, I would go to the people for whose love I live still, I would take their rhythm, their ingenuous innocence and the smile would return to my face. But each time I leave feeling more foreign, more distant and absent and foreboding comes near no my pain, no more love, no more anguish, but no longer will I feel foreign. Like a collusion with oneself the stripping of all that is unnecessary, the useless vanity and desires, and the fear, and the love, the pleasure, the ambition, the feeling. And like this, cleansed of bonds, of ties, of ballast freely ascend like a dream without fantasy, night of folding wings, the stars will illumine my final hour of exile. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008
mthrtongue	4:35p	LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Are you up for some cutting-edge slashing and smashing and crashing? I'm talking about slashing the price you've been paying for following your dreams; smashing beliefs that made sense years ago but are irrelevant now; and crashing parties where your future teachers and allies are gathered. Once you get the hang of all that, Leo, you can move on to other brilliant demolitions, like cracking codes, breaking trances, and shattering spells cast on you by the past. (Comment on this)
mthrtongue	3:27p	This sounds interesting- 2008 August Poetry Postcard Fest (Comment on this)
Monday, June 30th, 2008
breathe_poetry [ voleuse ]	10:44p	"At This Juncture" by Blanca Wiethüchter At This Juncture by Blanca Wiethüchter When the night has already turned to the core of voices and the distant barking to accomplices of the circular moon and the open eye. When stripped of many decisions I find myself always with the same desires with the same profound currents, the body impregnated with the splendor of every beat. In full invention of myself I feel strong immensely uncertain having chosen already forgiveness to walk and drink life in. When the living has spilled into an invisible grimace with the vision of the first deaths, I have only learned this devotion matured in smallness that ties me infallibly to everything alive. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 29th, 2008
breathe_poetry [ voleuse ]	8:16p	"Reencounter with the Goddess" by Olga Nolla Reencounter with the Goddess by Olga Nolla In order to reach you I had been baring myself throughout the centuries. I stripped all I had learned: Man's laws and the order of its ire. And I cursed you again and again. . . I threw you in the trash. I broke the delicate threads of your soul. And now I rediscover you living in my mirror. And I dress in your tunic, I don your crown of stars. the rays from your hands, I remember you standing over the world. But I will not step on the serpent. I twist it around my arms, my powerful arms which give and sever. And the serpent smiles because at last I have discovered its scent. (Comment on this)
Saturday, June 28th, 2008
breathe_poetry [ voleuse ]	11:51p	"Tea at the Magdalene" by Clara Silva Tea at the Magdalene by Clara Silva Where do I sit to write my name where do I place its syllables furrowed by the winds of danger? Lost among the ruins of disaster — tea at the Magdalene — the news satisfies me like hungry mice climbing through the bed to sense that day is approaching. Then I let the newspapers drop and read in the obscurity of my conscience the overlooked guilt the sterile fig tree transformed in the blind mirrors of time. And placed between two provisional worlds. (Comment on this)
breathe_poetry [ mythomanic ]	9:47p	a selection oh drat, oh drat, oh drat! i started work this week (FINALLY!) and things were so hectic i forgot to post. i am clearly MADE OF WIN. Kate Clanchy Poem for a Man with No Sense of Smell</p> This is simply to inform you: that the thickest line in the kink of my hand smells like the feel of an old school desk, the deep carved names worn sleek with sweat; that beneath the spray of my expensive scent my armpits sound a bass note strong as the boom of a palm on a kettle drum; that the wet flush of my fear is sharp as the taste of an iron pipe, midwinter, on a child's hot tongue; and that sometimes, in a breeze, the delicate hairs on the nape of my neck, just where you might bend your head, might hesitate and brush your lips, hold a scent frail and precise as a fleet of tiny origami ships, just setting out to sea. From Slattern (Picador, 2001) Robin Robertson Wedding The Locksmith's Daughter</p> The slow-grained slide to embed the blade of the key is a sheathing, a gliding on graphite, pushing inside to find the ribs of the lock. Sunk home, the true key slots into its matrix; geared, tight-fitting, they turn together, shooting the spring-lock, throwing the bolt. Dactyls, iambics — the clinch of words — the hidden couplings in the cased machine. A chime of sound on sound: the way the sung note snibs on meaning and holds. The lines engage and marry now, their bells are keeping time; the church doors close and open underground. Note: 'locksmith's daughter': 19th-century slang for a key. From Slow Air (Picador, 2002). (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 26th, 2008
_deneuve_ [ peppermintxrose ]	6:04p	"A Slightly Pregnant Man" (1973) Continuing my screencap frenzy lately, I have made screencaps from Catherine's lesser-known film with Marcello Mastroianni, Jacques Demy's A Slightly Pregnant Man. This is a silly, fun, funny little movie that offered a different, "warmer" role for Catherine. :D ( Teasers & link! ) Up next is Umbrellas of Cherbourg. ^^ (4 Comments |Comment on this)
mthrtongue	6:17p	Tom Waits' Purina Commercial Beef. Liver. Bacon. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
mthrtongue	5:00p	I can't remember -- did I mention that in 48 hours I'm going to be seeing Tom Waits? And then 24 hours after that I'm gonna see him again? Did I already mention that? (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008
mthrtongue	5:19p	Carrier Pigeons Used for Good and Evil Pigeons With Backpacks Carrying Drugs Pigeons Get Backpacks For Air Pollution Monitoring (Comment on this)
mthrtongue	10:54a	Currently reading Washington Square- "She has got such an artificial mind," said Mrs. Almond, who always enjoyed an opportunity to discuss Lavinia's peculiarities with her brother. "She didn't want me to tell you that she had asked me about Mr. Townsend; but I told her I would. She always wants to conceal everything." "And yet at moments no one blurts things out with such crudity. She is like a revolving lighthouse; pitch darkness alternating with a dazzling brilliancy! But what did you tell her?" the Doctor asked. What do you think that actually means, to have an "artificial mind"? Clearly an insult here, but I think I like the idea of it... (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
mthrtongue	3:00p	Let's All Go to the Lobby- I love shady, big-treed college campuses during the summer, when no one's around, and all the unlocked buildings are so quiet you can hear your footsteps and the hum of the electric lights and the AC. Decadent, I know, but I love being the only person in a space meant for lots of people. DU's campus is not very interesting, but it tries to look like an old college, which means it has lots of big, old trees and gentle landscaping. There are actually a fair number of folks around during the summer -- taking classes or borrowing the space for something. My favorite is a group of 6-12 year olds, mostly boys, I keep seeing out on the lawn with a guy in his twenties, who hits them with big foam tubes. They hit him back, of course, but not very well, even when he yells out pointers -- the other day it was really hot, and I saw him pour a whole bottle of ice water over one little boy's head, and the boy shivered and giggled and turned a different color. Some of the kids wear capes, and others handmade shirts with letters pinned to them. I don't want to ask any questions. ******************** Over the past few days I've seen The Happening, Mongol, and finally The Last King of Scotland. Interesting to see the last two side-by-side; I really enjoyed them both and ended up thinking a lot about the way point-of-view decisions were being made. Neither "inside" the mind or experience of any of the characters (Mongol prevents this especially well via all those abrupt, black-screen cuts), nor ever really being able to see them from the outside: it seems like both movies really depend on this notion of "charisma": Amin's is less explored, but everyone falls all over themselves to make nice with young Genghis Khan and Dr. Garrigan, seemingly because there's "something about them" that makes an impression, but -- it's not that the movies deconstruct that charisma, but rather that the charisma or draw of these people seems to have been excised, especially in The Last King of Scotland (where it seems to be a foregone conclusion that every woman Dr. Garrigan meets will want to get nekkid with him immediately). Of course all the characters are humanized, and there are moments when you feel empathy where empathy weren't previously, etc. But I'm interested in how removing that charismatic element (re: "the banality of evil"?) makes both stories less about "humanizing" the individual and more about a set of social problems. By the end of The Last King of Scotland, Garrigan's hubris and disregard make him seem just as dangerous and problematic as Amin, and all through Mongol I kept thinking about that early remark of Borte's -- something about not being able to cook two rams' heads in the same pot -- that at least confirms, if not incites, Temudgin to behave in a way that seems to contradict the whole societal system he suggests that he is trying to uphold. I probably wouldn't be comparing them if I hadn't seen them in the same weekend, but that tension between the communal and the personal leads pretty interestingly into The Happening. I don't know why I'm fascinated with M Night Shyamalan -- according to IMDB, his three favorite movies are Raiders of the Lost Arc, The Exorcist, and Die Hard, and yet I imagine that there's something mysterious and outside of the blockbuster going on, that he has some complicated aesthetic that he's working out. Before we went to see this, I listened to a local critic rip it apart -- stilted, undeveloped characters, weird pacing, could have been a 20-minute short. I don't disagree with any of these individual points, and yet I don't usually think this makes his films bad ones -- the quirkiness and artifice and fable-like quality and diversion from plot makes me curious. And I was curious, watching The Happening, but it *did* irritate me in a way that others have not -- maybe I'm losing my patience, or my faith. Most bothersome was Zooey Deschanel (and I usually really like her), who seems to be playing a sketched version of the flaky character she usually plays. There are a lot of things explained aloud that seem like they ought to be inferred, and a lot of them have to do with her and her marriage. I'm not going to "spoil" anything for you, but I'm interested too more in what this movie seems to suggest -- intentionally or otherwise -- about the personal versus the community, how narrow notions of the nuclear family, the married couple, etc., seem to affirm or incite a lot of problems. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 23rd, 2008
mthrtongue	6:57p	Four More Days Til Tom Waits (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 22nd, 2008
mthrtongue	9:08p	He met Hedy Lamar in the summer of 1940, when they were neighbors in Hollywood and she approached him with a question about glands: She wanted to know how she could enlarge her breasts. In time the conversation came around to weapons, and Lamarr told Antheil that she was contemplating quitting MGM and moving to Washington, D.C., to offer her services to the newly established National Inventors Council. They began talking about radio control for torpedoes.... (Comment on this)
breathe_poetry [ mythomanic ]	9:20p	Roger McGough - The Way Things Are The Way Things Are No, the candle is not crying, it can not feel pain. Even telescopes, like the rest of us, grow bored. Bubblegum will not make the hair soft and shiny. The duller the imagination, the faster the car, I am your father and that is the way things are. When the sky is looking the other way, do not enter the forest. No, the wind is not caused by the rushing of clouds. An excuse is as good a reason as any. A lighthouse, launched, will not go far, I am your father and that is the way things are. No, old people do not walk slowly because they have plenty of time. Gardening books when buried will not flower. Though lightly worn, a crown may leave a scar, I am your father and that is the way things are. No, the red woolly hat has not been put on the railing to keep it warm. When one glove is missing, both are lost. Today's craft fair is tomorrows boot sale. The guitarist weeps gently, not the guitar I am your father and that is the way things are. Pebbles work best without batteries. The deckchair will fail as a unit of currency. Even though your shadow is shortening it does not mean you are growing smaller. Moonbeams sadly, will not survive in a jar, I am your father and that is the way things are. For centuries the bullet remained quietly confident that the gun would be invented. A drowning surrealist will not appreciate the concrete lifebelt. No guarantee my last goodbye is an au revoir, I am your father and that is the way things are. Do not become a prison officer unless you know what your letting someone else in for. The thrill of being a shower curtain will soon pall. No trusting hand awaits a falling star I am your father, and I am sorry but this is the way things are. -- Roger McGough (1 Comment |Comment on this)