waste

Book

I am pleased to announce that the children's book I've been working on, The Querulous Quercus, has been accepted for publication by Quick Sir Press.  It's going to be sort of a cross between The Giving Tree and Janet, the Girlfriend Who Could Only Ever Complain.

Dr. Johnson and the Social History of Sputum

There's a bit in the Waste Books where Lichtenberg mentions a poem, or possibly novel, whose title had obviously been composed before the work itself.  I assume that Seven Deadly Wonders is such a book.

Not necessarily of the same type, but nevertheless annoying:

• Borges and the Eternal Orangutans
• Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl
• Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

All by different authors.  The Education of Arnold Hitler and Insect Dreams: the Half Life of Gregor Samsa escape by virtue of their form.  These, though, by the same author(s), are also annoyingly titled:

• Wittgenstein's Poker: the Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers
• Rousseau's Dog: Two Great Thinkers at War in the Age of Enlightenment

Needless to say, I haven't read them (except the Lichtenberg one, natch), preferring to check my facts after posting nonsense to Usenet.  I am reminded of an article long ago, possibly in the New Yorker, about a young director who made a student film about some basketball players and then tried to market a longer movie also about basketball, inspiring questions about whether he could actually make a movie about a different topic.  Also, Gregory Maguire.

The OC

Two points:
1. The lights of LA County do not resemble diamonds, in the sky or anywhere else.  Lyle Lovett: great phrasing, but a liar.
2. As long as I'm stuck in Irvine, I figure I should repay Scott Eric Kaufman for his compliment I didn't deserve with something he doesn't deserve, like having sex in his office.  Anyone wishing to aid me in this endeavor should email or comment to that effect.

I admit it

These chess games are getting a little silly.

Previous contests have been between Immanuel Kant and David Hume, and Tobias Smollett and Ernst Gombrich.

blargh

A system of logic, a perfectly logical machine, is so far from wholly predictable that it cannot, Turing showed, even predict what it can or cannot do, and this when it is functioning perfectly.  This truth, which the great comedians seem to have known intuitively, belies the Romantic notion that machines are models of tragic implacability, and it is not surprising to learn that [Buster] Keaton for one was a considerable mechanician.

Doesn't the machine's inability to tell a questioner what it's going to do make its implacability (for its ignorance certainly doesn't change that—for one thing, the predictability of a machine and what it can predict aren't the same) all the more tragic? And while it might not be surprising to learn that Keaton was handy with tools, isn't it a bit of a stretch to claim that that lack of surprise is connected in even the most tenuous fashion to Turing?

My gift to each and every person in the world

Oh boy!  Because I enjoy the prospect of spending six hours in a small room by myself, I'll be broadcasting music from this list, on the 26^th, tomorrow, from 9am until 3pm, PST.  With a bit of luck, by the end I'll have gone totally crazy.  I have decided to ignore this bit, in the annotation to the list:

some artists are listed for obvious reasons, some less-so, some are there just for one track!

and will just play whatever I want to from what I have by the artists I'll be playing (which may not be the albums listed).

Also, some Nurse With Wound & NWW collaborations, and some Current 93.  I note that at the moment, I am the only one signed up to do a show tomorrow, for some unfathomable reason.  (Extra unfathomable since today is mostly booked.)  The playlist will be here, and you'll be able to subject yourself to it if you like.

Post-broadcast update: that went really well, I think.  In order to get into the station, since I have no key and was the first on the air today, I had to drive down to Mountain View to borrow someone else's.  That was pretty, uh, fun.

Interrogatio illis qui Latine sciant

Decetne redderi Latine "don't you need someone to love" a "nonne aliquam eges quam ames" aut "nonne aliquam eges quam amet"?  Aut aliquid aliter omnino?

Entrepreneurship

People with jobs that start late, or no jobs, who live in Brooklyn or whatever other areas are served by the bridges in NYC over which drivers need four people in their cars to cross should hang around said bridges and rent themselves out as bodies, then walk back across the bridge (or rent themselves out again at the other end, if traffic's going in both directions) and repeat.

I can certainly see how having no aspirations would tend to produce frustration

An advertisement for tonight's specials at a local bistro-alike featured prominently: Anger Steak with Shallot Sauce.

Impressive results!

Between the start and the end of the broadcast of Julius Eastman's "Prelude to the Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc" (just now finished), online listenership declined from mid-40s to 29.

Finished!  Playlist.  Wanted to play a piece for flute & clarinet by Elliott Carter, but no time.

Aquarius Records: bad for my wallet

I got: Rod Poole & Sasha Bogdanowitsch, Mind's Island; Ethiopiques 19 (as a gift); Koji Asano, Sunshine filtering through foliage; Mountain Goats, All Hail West Texas (also a gift); 31 Knots, It Was High Time to Escape; Blast, Wire Stitched Ears; Time of Orchids, Sarcast While; Lyle Lovett, Live in Texas; Nurse With Wound & Cyclobe, Angry Eelectric Finger 2: Paraparaparallelogrammatica; Jandek, On the Way; and Julius Eastman, Unjust Malaise.

Fortunately, almost all of them were used.

Sun-Treader

I used to read a lot more novels than I do now, and also a lot more book reviews (and those book reviews seemed to review a lot more fiction than they seem to now, though I can't really be sure about that), and people would even ask me for recommendations on occasion.  That this continued, though at a slower pace, even into college is evidenced by the fact that I recommended Embers to several people sometime in my second year (must have been not long after the winter break, since this review is from December 2001 and I know had a review copy, which I now can't find, so I hope it's just in southern California and not actually lost).  But it seems as though my nonacademic reading, and awareness of what's out there, has been declining steadily since late high school, and now, if someone foolishly asks me to recommend something, I can only advert to the same things I would have recommended a year or more ago.  (Relatedly, I can almost never remember the identity of what I've read as little as a month after I've read it.)

On the other hand, my music listening, internet use, and inability to focus are way, way up.

Drums whisper spacy

Please listen to three hours of generic college rock twaddle, DJed by me, tomorrow (Friday the 16th!), from six to nine PM, PST.  It's not as if you had anything better to do, and you don't even have to stop crying.

Well, aside from a few horrendously terrible fuckups, that didn't go so badly.  Playlist.  Resolved: next show, fuck this noise, I'ma play what I wanna.

Million-dollar idea

Tapioca balls in horchata.

A rush and a push and the hatred is ours

I hate it when I discover that I've done or allowed something extremely stupid to happen which could easily have been prevented had I been more attentive.  An example of this would be losing a lot of money because I don't pay enough attention to the doings and transpirings of my bank account, to which, it seems, other people have been helping themselves.

Hate it!  At least I didn't discover it at a time when I had other things to think about; just a few typing exercises.

Bimbo punch

Cool people are now allowed to like the Cure again.  This fact is a balm: I just listened by random chance to the last song from this album (one of two mp3s by the band downloaded in the Napster days, many years ago), and, doing a search for information on the band, since really it's not a bad song, if, like me, you can't actually make out the lyrics, came across this review, concluding thusly:

A great start for themselves and Windraven [their label]. And a return to the old sounds of the Cure and others of that ilk. This is the sound that I left punk for. This is the splendor that made me buy my first set of lipstick and eyeliner.

Yesness!  I'll just chalk it up to prescience on my part.

The force that through the green fuse drives your mother

From now on, when I think "Gary Farber", I think of the yeti in the lower-right corner.

One can't, but two can.

A thousand, though, is evidently right out.  It is seemingly impossible to find a picture of a regular chiliagon on the web.  I suspect it would be more or less indistinguishable from a picture of a circle (interior angle of 179.64 degrees, after all).

Christophe Peacocke seems to think it's plausible to suppose that the reason one's imaginations of a chiliagon and of a 999-gon are indistinguishable is that the experiences of seeing a chiliagon and of seeing a 999-gon are indistinguishable.  The latter statement might be the case but my mental image of a chiliagon (such as it is) has discernible sides, which is not the case with circles.  (NTM I've never actually seen a chiliagon, knowingly anyway, despite efforts, though I'm not sure if that's supposed to matter.)

Studied so much evil just to keep me honest

The process of becoming allowed to broadcast at KZSU, frustrating and bureaucratic as it was, was made completely worth it by the receipt of praise:

Your demo tape was great.
The transitions were sweet, the mic breaks were confident, the choices were intelligent and diverse. I loved the Ligeti.
I don't have any constructive criticism.

Damn right.  Didn't even mention that it was clipping like hell.

The process of writing my mammoth Uexküll-plus-Husserl-Heidegger-and-some-Cassirer paper is teaching me something, I think, and that something might be that it's better to take detailed notes on reading in library books which one isn't going to mark up, instead of just something like "250: eliminative character".

I admit it

Sometimes, Linux sucks.   

Undone by the text

Last night, shortly before thinking of the question below, I misremembered part of "On Bullshit", thinking that in the following bit, "try out" was "try on":

What tends to go on in a bull session is that the participants try out various thoughts and attitudes in order to see how it feels to hear themselves saying such things and in order to discover how others respond, without it being assumed that they are committed to what they say.

Alas!  Had it been "try on", I could have responded: there's trying on, and then there's trying on; at least one species of bullshitting involves sighting a minor article of clothing—a frayed sock, say—and stitching together (out, naturally, of whole cloth) an entire outfit with concern only to match the patterns and colors already present in the original spur, putting on the result, and going out wearing it as if it were not just the most natural thing in the world to wear, but among the most fashionable.

C question

Suppose you had some declarations:

typedef struct {
int datum;
void (*func) (void* s, int count, ...);
} A;

typedef struct {
int datum;
void (*func) (void* s, int count, ...);
int anotherdatum;
} B;



and a pointer to a B struct (call it bp).  You pass bp to a function expecting a pointer to an A, so you typecast it: somefunc((A*)bp);.  Call the formal parameter to somefunc foo.  That's cool (as I understand it), because the two structs share the same initial layout.  Within somefunc, the following line: foo->func((void*)foo, 0);.  Within the particular function that is bp's func, s is cast to be a pointer to B.  My question: will s be able to access anotherdatum?

Red shoes by the drugstore

Something puzzling—here we see "Der Lindenbaum", elsewhere titled "Am Brunnen vor dem Tore", after its first line, attributed to Wilhelm Müller.  But we also see two different, though more or less equivalent, Latin versions (I prefer the one on the right).  What's the relation?  Did Müller write it, only to see it translated into Latin?  Did he translate it out of Latin?  Are they all folk songs originally, and Müller collected the German one?

That very site provided the text when I wrote about the song for a class on The Magic Mountain lo these many years ago.

The simple pleasures in life

Victory is mine!

I do all my best work in bed

Probably because it's dark, so not only am I not looking at anything, but nothing can obtrude on my vision, and I'm not listening to anything, and I'm usually not even very tired, so I have nothing better to do than lie there thinking about the concerns of the day, then get up, turn on a light, fumble around for my glasses, find a pen and paper, and write one perfect paragraph after another, then lie down again and get afterthoughts, ad infinitum.  Low refractory period, too.

You know those overpriced chocolate oranges you can buy, which, prior to eating, you whack on a flat surface so they break into segments?  This is like them, except ten million times better.

Really just amazingly stupid

Rush! Save us!