Thursday, March 28, 2024

How to Tell if Your Roommate Is a Dead Cassowary

So look, back in the day, when the web was young, there was this website I liked with that title.  I remember it pretty darn well. There were helpful diagrams along the lines of

A cassowary:

A dead cassowary:

and there was a numbered list of ways to tell, which became more and more baroque. Fuck me, I even remember how the last one conclude: The other speaker here is a child you have just met: "'You think that's bad--this guy's roommate is a cassowary.' 'My roommate's dead,' you say."

So this was a real damn thing that existed. It may have been silly and inconsequential, but it existed and I liked it. And now it is...gone, unless my search powers just can't find it (there's nothing on the wayback machine, fwiw). How many thousands of OTHER early websites have just disappeared from existence? Obviously, this is not in the top billion concerns that one might have with the world today, but damn, man. Imagine if BOOKS just...disappeared like that. You want to revisit that novel you remember from high school? Too bad; it is now non-extant. I have nothing profound to say here; nonetheless, bah.

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

E.H. Young, The Bridge Dividing/The Misses Mallet (1922)

This was published first as The Bridge Dividing, then as The Misses Mallet.  Is that latter name more commercially appealing?  Maybe.  Everyone likes mallets.  As far as I know.  Interesting facts about Young: 1) she was in a long-term relationship with her lover and his wife; 2) She was an amateur mountaineer.  That first one MIGHT have some degree of relevance to the novel; the second-- seems doubtful.  Though I certainly WISH it did.

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Friday, February 23, 2024

I despair.

I really do.  The plight of the Palestinians is clearly one of the most, if not THE most, important issue today.  It warps reality with its gravitational field.  At first I was reluctant to use the word "genocide"--gawd, am I turning into a centrist?  I was worried on some level that it would make me look extreme or hysterical; there's no point in denying it.  But, I mean, the UN definition fits like a glove.  

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Thursday, February 08, 2024

Cleaners from Venus, "Denmark Street"

 So I've been listening to a lot of Cleaners from Venus lately--that being the name that poet/musician Martin Newell uses to record.  He's not prominent enough that his lyrics are consistently available online, so here's a song I've been sort of preoccupied with.  I don't know what "me, Queen Matilda, and Captain Ray" [Wray?] means, but I find it strangely evocative.  Anyway here, it is:


No Queen Matilda to ease the trials

Of Celtic drunks with broken smiles

Who miss their station by several hundred miles

Asking "where are the fields of Saint Giles?"


The street of starlets who stop to say

"I'm going to make it some day"

Where all the lepers got rich or ran away

Leaving me, Queen Matilda, and Captain Ray


In every window a song for sale

Whistled by the milkman can't fail

You get that hook line you find the holy grail

There's a check for you later it's in the mail


And David Bowie is on the way

The ambulance has gone today

But don't you worry I think he did okay

Now it's me, Queen Matilda, and Captain Ray


Some boy could have been me

Been apprehended by the CID

Looks old but he's twenty-three

Down Tin Pan Alley seeking sanctuary


There's music leaking from underground

Somebody's madness turned into sound

To get them dancing all over London town

This is rags into riches the wrong way round


Now Machiavelli drops by to say

Penny for your tunes boys eh hey

It's never happened in any other way

Not for me, Queen Matilda, and Captain Ray

Wednesday, February 07, 2024

A growth industry for hard times

I have a good idea for a business. It's going to be called either Algr or Indundatr, depending on marketing research. Our target audience is poor but virtuous and hard-working young guttersnipes, hobbledehoys, and tatterdemalions. Once they've downloaded the app and registered, they just have to click a few buttons, and we will immediately dispatch one of our agent to fling the nearest rich industrialist's child into a body of water, so that they can rescue them and get a sweet job from the grateful parent (and probably also marry the child, if she's a she--we'll have to charge a small extra fee for that).


So anyway, how about it? Can you help me program the app? We'll be drowning in venture capital in no time.

Friday, January 12, 2024

Let's listen to the pre-Beatles hit songs of 1964!

This image was posted on some facebook music group I'm a part of:

I'm not exactly sure where the rankings come from, I don't know why it goes to fourteen, and I have no idea what "big bonus" means, but it's an interesting look at the calm before the storm, just before the British Invasion changed everything.  Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to listen to them--see what our parents' generation were grooving out to.

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Wednesday, January 03, 2024

Christine Brooke-Rose, Textermination (1991)

So the idea of this here book is that a ton of literary characters gather for an annual conference in California, to try to, I guess, raise awareness of themselves amongst the public and get more readers.  Or something; it's not one hundred percent clear.  At any rate, the particular year, there's some fallout involving the whole Satanic Verses fatwa thing.  So there's that, and also some general academic parody, and then an ending that reminds me of Myron Brinig's Flutter of an Eyelid, a comparison that will be meaningful to exactly no one (but should be. Flutter of an Eyelid is awesome; read it!).

It does have to be said, Brooke-Rose includes an absolute metric fuck-ton of characters, some from remarkably obscure texts.  Of course, you don't need to actually know all these texts to do that--you can fake it with research, as she even notes at one point.  Still, it's undeniably impressive, especially in a pre (or proto)-internet era.  Also--as if this all weren't meta enough--we get an appearance by the protagonist of Amalgamemnon by one Christine Brooke-Rose, who is also posited as the author of Textermination.  So that's all right.

Well, within limits.  I have to admit, as I think about it I realize that, while not without its merits, it's definitely the weakest Brooke-Rose novel I've read to date.  If often does feel like it's just turning into a game of spot-the-reference, which is kind of fun, but also sort of limited.  Also, I strongly object to her characterization of Oedipa Maas as a kind of humorless-feminist type, and also for sticking her with the single worst line of dialogue I've ever read in a Brooke-Rose novel, or possibly any novel: "You're not even bright enough to be aware of Tristero."  Yes, okay, you've read The Crying of Lot 49, but what a horrendously awkward way to show it.  And not character-based, either: Oedipa doesn't know about Tristero for a long time, and then isn't sure if it's a real thing.  Proper postmodern indeterminacy.  There's no way she'd get all obnoxious about her secret knowledge. Bah.

Still, there's another question to be raised--and maybe it's even a relevant question, what with the recent public-domaining of [one version of] Mickey Mouse that everyone's talking about: how can it possibly have been legal to publish it?  Because, as the above mentions of Rushdie and Pynchon may make clear, it extremely does not limit itself to public domain characters.  There are plenty of those, sure, but it uses a comparable number from Brooke-Rose's own contemporaries.  Are you just allowed to do that?  Does it count as some sort of fair-use?  I mean, sure, it would be hard to argue that any given character here is being used as a selling point, but is that really the litmus test?  Or is it just the case that the book has such a small audience that all the authors whose characters were coopted either couldn't be bothered to take legal action of didn't even notice?  Hard to say, but it's certainly interesting to think about.