Sculpin

Against Entropy

The worm drives helically through the wood
And does not know the dust left in the bore
Once made the table integral and good;
And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.
Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,
A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;
The names of lovers, light of other days—
Perhaps you will not miss them. That’s the joke.
The universe winds down. That’s how it’s made.
But memory is everything to lose;
Although some of the colors have to fade,
Do not believe you’ll get the chance to choose.
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.

—John M. Ford, 1957-2006

More at Making Light. I wish I’d known him. My condolences to all who did know him.

Nature rejects the monarch, not the man;
The subject, not the citizen; for kings
And subjects, mutual foes, forever play
A losing game into each other’s hands,
Whose stakes are vice and misery. The man
Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.
Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate’er it touches; and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame
A mechanized automaton.

– Percy Bysshe Shelley, from “Queen Mab”

Something I love about Aaron, owner of The Dreaming comic book shop, is that I can walk up to him and ask, as I did yesterday, “So, can you recommend anything with a really good story that isn’t a bunch of sexist twaddle? Because I have reached my limit with the sexist twaddle.” And he does not twitch and cover his groin; he laughs loudly and knows exactly what I’m talking about. That “Friends of Lulu” sticker on the front door tipped me off, years ago, that this was a cool comic book store for women.

Unfortunately, I’m already reading all the stuff that came to mind: Finder (my very favorite) , Mouse Guard, Castle Waiting, Polly and the Pirates, Y: The Last Man, and Fables were some of the more-or-less current titles we mentioned. I might also have mentioned Astro City and Scary Godmother. They’re not exactly current now, but I loved Transmetropolitan, Amy Unbounded and Hopeless Savages. I also like what I’ve seen from Andi Watson.

So, I’m looking for some new titles, not necessarily written from an explicitly feminist point of view, but necessarily written from an implicitly feminist point of view: you know, the radical belief that women are people. I’m not looking to be empowered; I manage that perfectly well on my own. I’m just looking to be entertained without being thoroughly annoyed. I haven’t yet found any shôjo manga that I’ve found particularly riveting, but it’s probably out there. Mostly, though, my tastes tend to run to independent, Western, creator-owned titles. Stuff for kids is fine, as long as it’s intelligent.

Any recommendations?

I’ve played around with some ideas for felt jewelry, but I came nowhere near dreaming of anything like this.

Simona Catapano and Elena V. Targioni are the designers of Pezziunici. “Everything is created by them and is original: Hats never before thought of, dolls with assorted expressions, puppets to hug, bags in shapes of animals (or animals in shape of bags) and all with a pinch of irony.”

My favorites tend to be the impossible rings:

via Fieltromanía

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.

– Rainer Maria Rilke

More and more, the X Division is formless, shapeless, directionless, like a blob of pudding chasing its own tail.

Aww. Sad, sad little hyperactive pudding. Karl, you rule.

I’ve been letting my yoga home practice slide pretty egregiously, and I thought a new challenge might help me breathe some new life into it. So today I’ve been working on Ardha Chandrasana, Half Moon Pose. When I tried, several months ago, to do it unsupported, I crumpled in place without even getting into the pose, let alone holding it. It was humbling. I do not enjoy being humbled.

I’m fairly well used to doing Half Moon fully supported with my back against a wall, but now I’m trying to move out into the center of the room. (Hello, atrophied muscles. It’s my old friend the glute medius that’s going first.) As an intermediate step, I’ve been bracing my free foot against a wall while I work to put more and more weight on my standing leg without locking the knee. It’s a minor milestone: I can now hold the pose for about 1.5 seconds before it falls apart. That’s if I start with my upper foot semi-pointed with toes at the wall, and then flex the foot so the wall no longer supports me; I haven’t yet lifted straight up and held the pose successfully.

It seems to help me a lot to strongly imagine lifting from the hip and inner thigh of the raised leg.

As for the home practice, I’m going to do half an hour of yoga a day or more for the next week and see how that feels.

Holy… Okay, see, when I wrote that Eggplant Oop recipe? I guess I’d been eating a lot of hot peppers right around then. I just made a batch for dinner, and let me tell you, five cayenne peppers is a lot. A lot. Yeeeoowwww.

I tried making it in the solar oven this time, and it worked pretty well, though not brilliantly; I still had to start and finish it on the stove. This batch seems eggplantier than I’m used to. I’m not sure how I feel about that. I’m used to eggplant being more of a garlic delivery device than much of a presence of its own.

To cut the heat: Microbakery bread (locally made from locally-milled flour by Larry, my favorite farmers market guy), killer Rama Farms organic nectarines, Appel Farms quark. I had no plans to buy nectarines today, with my plum tree as loaded as it is, but when I overheard one of the market volunteers calling her friends to tell them that Rama was there with nectarines, I knew they were something special.

Oh, great. Hundreds unite in march for… various stuff. Immigration rights now! No war in Iraq! Better mental health care! Save reproductive rights! And stuff! Good old Seattle organizing: concentrate on “solidarity” and “alliances” until your message is an indistinguishable mush. That drove me up the wall, back before I retired from all that crap. I can almost hear it:

“What do we want?”
(indecipherable babble)
“When do we want it?”
“NOW!”

Used to be that I knew fall was here on that One Day. People who’ve lived in the Pacific Northwest for a while know about that day, I think. We have seasons here, but they’re a little bit subtle. One day, the clouds come scudding in just right, and you know that autumn has arrived.

But this year, I think, I’m coming to identify fall in a new way: bean-saving season. I’m saving seeds from the green beans (“Ura”, I think) and “Scarlet Emperor” scarlet runner beans to plant next year. I let the pods dry most of the way on the vine, then bring them inside to dry all the way on the kitchen table before popping them open. The green bean seeds aren’t much to look at: plain, smallish white beans. But the scarlet runners! When I was planting them, how did I miss how gorgeous they are? They’re big, shiny midnight-purple beans with lavender-pink splotches. It’s a pleasure to pop open the drab, crunchy pods and find these extravagantly beautiful beans inside. I’ve collected over a hundred grams of them so far, just from fifteen vines or so, and there are still plenty of pods left. It’s occurred to me to try to keep the house cool next summer by growing scarlet runners all over the outside walls. At this rate, I should have enough to do the whole house and maybe still have some to trade!

Plum season is just starting. I experimented today with drying plums in the solar cooker. I have a little black perforated pan that fits nicely in the top, but not so well that it doesn’t prop the lid open a little bit for ventilation. It’s close to a perfect set-up, and keeps the fruit at a good 180-200 degrees. The plums are concentrating their juices pretty well, but not fast enough to dry in a single day, and the cooker can’t hold much. If I really were to go to town, I’d make a large solar dryer and finish off the half-dried plums in the electric dehydrator. But I think this year I’ll be making a lot of plum jam. Maybe this will be the year I learn to can it.