many anniversaries
J: It's been a long week. I'm
working a lot, preparing for a talk I'm giving at a scientific
symposium in San Diego this coming Monday. As my friend Roger told me, "
Symposium" comes
from an ancient Greek word that means "to lie around all day with
friends, drinking wine, listening to music, and talking about the finer
points of philosophy and women." Usually these ancient symposia would
degenerate into what we today call "wild parties." Ahh, the good old
days. I have terrible anxiety when talking to large groups. Throwing a
wine glass would be so much nicer.
Speaking of symposia, Gina and I attended three birthday parties this
week, one of which occurred at our house, so that was convenient. Got
to see my old friend Kathy at our party (where we said happy birthday
to Jsun), she's still adorable. Then at Greykell's birthday party
(happy birthday Grey) I had nice conversations with my old friend
Trapper, who is still marvelous. And at Mina's first birthday party
(happy birthday Mina) I stuffed myself with fruit, which was most tasty.
A big welcome to any
BoingBoingers
who are clicking through our pages. A brief introduction: Gina and I
(Ginohn) have been running this ragtag website for ten years now, well
before there were many
internets
that were a
series
of tubes, and even before we
got
married in a tree.
By the way, last we heard: TLC's Wild
Weddings—with clips from our wedding—moved their show to next Thursday,
August 17th, one day after our 9th anniversary. We'll see.
Dig around; you'll find all sorts of missing links and ugly code.
Enjoy! Lately our weekly proto-blog contains the week's news (for
family and friends) in this box, and a rant or some other kind of
brain-spewage in the box below.
rendering poetry
I've long felt that science fiction poetry, even more than its prose
counterpart, has not been given enough thought or attention— by readers
or authors. I guess it's difficult for sci-fi to outlive its pulpy past.
Science fiction literature is usually segregated into a back section of
the store, which is good for people looking for sci-fi, but bad because
it also allows the literarily prejudiced folks to continue shunning it
and shying away. I see parallels to American ghettos. It's interesting
that the more popular (but not necessarily best) writers of sci-fi,
like Michael Crichton, are "allowed" to move out of the sci-fi ghetto
shelves and place their books in the mainstream fiction shelves.
Maybe the online bookstores, with their all-inclusive search engines,
will help to desegregate fiction a little. Poetry might take longer to
rise out of the muck, since its position in today's culture (loosely
following the same social metaphor) is more like a single group of poor
pigs caught up in the machinery of modern factory farming— which puts
out some tasty stuff and makes even more smelly crap, and some of it
gets mashed up until people don't know what they're eating. Excuse me,
I don't know where I'm going with this. Oh yeah, buy free range, buy
organic.
This all reminds me of a great poem by
some guy called "
Eating Poetry."
:-j
