...written to Mona July 19, 2000, in a journal I plan to give her in another ten years or so:

Mona, you have already discovered the ciphers and marks that make words and numbers. You point them out in books, on mailboxes and doors, in the street, and even on the leg of your father's blue running shorts, which I sleep in sometimes. "ABC!" you cry, and bouying that exclamation is the effervescence of new discovery. I'm remembering that one of your father's favorite words was frisson and a favorite phrase was corpus callosum--the thick cord of nerve that unites one side of the brain with the other, marries one side of the physical self with its mate. An experiment once was carried forward with a man whose corpus callosum was irretrievably damaged: he was asked to look at a simple object and speak its name. He couldn't.

Then he was asked to write it, and he could.

Was that the story? I can't quite tell now.

Your father told it, but he never wrote it down. He told it to me, but I also never recorded it. So now I can't say it. Such is the power of the written word, that it can capture frail moments in amber.

You are growing up in a world that affords us a torrent of words and memory through the Internet--if I could conceive of the right phrases to search, I could probably find an old abstract of the original study of this singular malady. But I'll come up with nothing if I search what I'd like, which is, "That oddity of science, the corpus callosum, Gil's version."

Such is the power of people, the way they light fires in their own words, the way these fires die down after, and burn only in memory.

Your words now, Mona, at not quite two years old, and the way you say them, are so precious, so fragile in time. One day last summer you had only one sound, a dove's cooing that you never seemed to tire of. When I brought you here July 4 you had a hundred fine words but then one day you were combining them in pairs and now you speak whole sentences with thrilling emphatic stamps. "Change the diaper," "Effanu [elephant] flying!" "I cooking!" "People's houses." All so emphatic, and coming at me so fast I can hardly record it, much less the little gestures so nearly impossible to describe...

...End of entry. What else was happening that day, where we were and what we did, I can't remember. All but this was excised from memory by successive days, and selves, that sever me from who I was in the name of going on.

Moments of Greatness

Consider the ordinary wire hanger.

I know I just did.

The hanger is the place of last resort for much undervalued scrap steel, and it itself undervalued. But Americans use 4 billion wire hangers per year, and at a couple of ounces each, that's quite a load of scrap.

The hanger industry is as diverse as it is stultifyingly dull, with 100 different designs available since the post-World War II "Hanger Boom," according to the Laidlaw Corporation, manufacturer of quality laundry and drycleaning accoutrements.

The wire hanger's inventor, Albert J. Parkhouse, was an enterprising young man employed at Timberlake & Sons, a Jackson, Michigan-based concern that manufactured lampshades and wire novelties. In 1903, coming to work late one morning, young Parkhouse went to hang his coat and found all the hooks occupied.

The wire hanger was born that cold windy morning, once again proving it pays to procrastinate.

The winners write the history books. But the Slackers make them.

To attain True Slack, as with all holy endeavors, one must prepare. Just ask the fine people at HalfBakery.com.

PHSN and pass the comics.

[images via How the Wire Hanger Got Invented]

Rainy Day Fun

As I write this, it is pouring down rain outside. How appropriate for an entry devoted in part to the work of Chris Ware, creator the Acme Novelty Library.

Ware fashioned ANL on or about 1987 from within the queasy space once claimed by children’s comics and advsertisements in the marginalia of equally marginal magazines. It’s a place that evokes endless raininess and long interminable Sundays in which there’s nothing on and no one home and nothing to do but this.

Ware's chosen territory includes the preoccupations and amusements that make most of the rest of us, well, sad.

It was Citizen Jane (real name here) who led me to this place again as an adult, by sending me an earlier, addictive volume of Ware’s work. Thanks, Jane. A lot.

Back in the margins, Ware himself probably appreciates his entry in nndb, an “intelligence aggregator” operated by the drolly named Soylent Communications, which modestly claims to be tracking the entire world. Quietly parked under assorted other kinds of biographical information, there’s this: Risk Factors.

Perhaps the lure of Ware's work is the ways in which it perfectly mimics all the broken promises of those rainy-day comics and magazines. The muscle-builders and guaranteed-fun activities, the magic code rings, and, dare we say now, the Internet.

Okay, and life itself. But please don't make me go back there.

And nndb, too, it turns out, can be added to list of false promises. Because contrary to their vaunted claim, they don’t actually track the entire world.

Go ahead. Do what I did to find out. You know you want to.

Anyway, the other grave disappointment here today was that an intelligence aggregator actually won’t gather your scattered marbles for you. Nope. Here’s what nndb claims it will do, though:

"[nndb] mostly exists to document the connections between people, many of which are not always obvious. A person's otherwise inexplicable behavior is often understood by examining the crowd that person has been associating with."

Like Citizen Jane, for example.

So yesterday when I came across a handsome compendium of Ware's panels at MASS-MoCA (my favorite rainy-day place on my favorite place on earth) I purchased said compendium for Jane. Then put myselfe wonderfully off-balance wandering through the indescribable retrospective of Huang Yong Ping entitled House of Oracles, which is indescribable.

Did I say that?

Anyhoo.

Here's a little something for rainy-day fun. You can thank me later.

But go ahead and thank Jane right now.

[image via the sprightly Osprey Design site]

Poetry Thursday: Li Young-Lee

The Hammock

Li Young-Lee

When I lay my head in my mother’s lap
I think how day hides the star,
the way I lay hidden once, waiting
inside my mother’s singing to herself. And I remember
how she carried me on her back
between home and the kindergarten,
once each morning and once each afternoon.

I don’t know what my mother’s thinking.

When my son lays his head in my lap, I wonder:
Do his father’s kissses keep his father’s worries
from becoming his? I think, Dear God, and remember
there are stars we haven’t heard from yet:
They have so far to arrive. Amen,
I think, and I feel almost comforted.

I’ve no idea what my child is thinking.

Between two unknowns, I live my life.
Between my mother's hopes, older than I am
by coming before me. And my child's wishes, older than I am
by outliving me. And what's it like?
Is it a door, and a good-bye on either side?
A window, and eternity on either side?
Yes, and a little singing between two great rests.

—from Book of My Nights

Punch Buggy

Driving around on an average day, I tend to hear this from the back seat a lot:

"Punch buggy red [or yellow or green or black] no punch back"

What this is and where it comes from is somewhat in dispute, as are the rules and regs that govern it.

More than you need to know here.

The kids in my car ( a silver Mazda now) claim that a silver bug merits fifty punches and a gold one merits 100. We haven't tested this yet.

I agree with fellow Washingtonian Duane Thompson, who observes that the streets of DC seem crowded with many a punching Bug...

Blogger on a Cast Iron Balcony is another voice in the VWlderness.

(by the way, the Jetta is actually doing fine, with new tires and everything, although she still isn't speaking to me. she won't tell me the passcode to her separate blog, so I can't channel her to do the update. Trust me, I drove around in her all weekend, and she is fine).

[image via Purple Punch Buggy, the next-quietest blog to mine]

Poetry Thursday: Mark Doty

A Green Crab’s Shell
By Mark Doty

Not, exactly, green:
closer to bronze
preserved in kind brine,

something retrieved
from a Greco-Roman wreck,
patinated and oddly

muscular. We cannot
know what his fantastic
legs were like--

though evidence
suggests eight
complexly folded

scuttling works
of armament, crowned
by the foreclaws'

gesture of menace
and power. A gull's
gobbled the center,

leaving this chamber
--size of a demitasse--
open to reveal

a shocking, Giotto blue.
Though it smells
of seaweed and ruin,

this little traveling case
comes with such lavish lining!
Imagine breathing

surrounded by
the brilliant rinse
of summer's firmament.

What color is
the underside of skin?
Not so bad, to die,

if we could be opened
into this--
if the smallest chambers

of ourselves,
similarly,revealed some sky.

From Atlantis, published by HarperCollins. Copyright © 1995 by Mark Doty. Used for personal and educational purposes only.

[image: Crab Shell 1, by John Whalley. Represented variously by Spanierman Gallery and Greenhut Galleries]

"Slowly I turned..."

Step by step, inch by inch...

(Faithful backlink here. Everchanging forelink here.)

[title of this post, courtesy of America's rich vaudeville tradition]

The Cake that Drifts in Cyberspace

Rarity is one year rarer today.

Happy birthday, R!










[quantum note: It's just past the year anniversary of R's very first comment on tth, too--pretty much my first comment ever, and ocurring just one day before TTA's first, um, refreshing critique]

Poetry Thursday: Ho Xuan Huong

The Cake that Drifts in Water

by Ho Xuan Huong

My body is both white and round.
In water I may sink or swim.
The hand the kneads me may be rough,
But I still shall keep my true-red heart.

[more on Bánh Trôi Tàu via vietnamese god]

Erasure

Okay, I'm a liar.

Also a blunderer.

But then at least one of us knew that.

For unless I can find a more elegant way to conduct a backwards-looking blog--a method that even I can understand--the whole quantum experiment is over.

You can't beat a technology at its own game. And a blog--like its severe companion, Time--is a relentlessly in-the-moment creature. It eats relevancy and memory for breakfast along with the morning news, then doesn't even stoop to line its birdcage or ripen tomatoes with the remains of the day.

All I wanted to do was fix a few broken links in my old posts in a way that was both edifying and absorbing, plus relax, call this a book so I could stop feeling guilty, stop blogging, and start living.

But whatever.

We still haven't figured out a way to stop killing each other, so why should I figure out a new way to use the blog?

Beckett was right. People are bloody ignorant apes.

[image via arirang]