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I figured out which movie is good for getting in the Pittsburgh state of mind: Inspector Gadget. It's a really terrible movie, but certainly features lots of nicely recognizable pieces of the city. And I recognized one person I knew, in a humorous cameo. Excellent.
I really need to be packing, instead of typing.State of Mind:  packing sucks |
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The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts,
One soggy summer's day.
Though graphic arts sling poisoned darts,
At least dessert's okay.
Strawberry-rhubarb. They're little, and delicious. A whole pie would probably have been easier, but this way I can take one with me as part of my lunch. Here I am, working small again. Phooey.State of Mind:  miniature |
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At school, I make books, and then I talk about them. This is called getting an education. Here is a poem about it, written by me and by the LiveJournal Haiku Generator.
goes to eleven
under normal circumstances
i don't think i should
last year's bfa show it
was fragrant then dumped in
a small conference
and had variations
on the wall and otherwise
in order and then
and ran a quick proof
just to make noise or i was
successful enough
sauce i just want to
make a little box to put
all my wretched book
thing into which the
prints go for protection and
display it took most
because i think it
looks like it's on purpose that
needs to happen by
grueling this last week
has been grueling i wish i
could describe any of
record of tedious
punctuality.and now i
really remember State of Mind:  meta |
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Late to bed and early to rise,
Lead to dark circles and bags under eyes.
Early to rise and late to bed,
Sleep-deprived students go soft in the head.State of Mind:  tiredtiredtired |
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This damnable and baffling assignment!
It doth befuddle and unhinge my reason.
I loathe each iteration and refinement
Confined amid co-ordinates Cartesian.
This simple rectilinear array
Of words and lines and open, empty spaces
Contains much more despair, distress, dismay,
Than text in merely arbitrary places.
Pushed past the bounds of sanity and wit,
I cannot make the smallest sense of it.State of Mind:  frustrated |
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Say not that Jell-O is the Comic Sans
Of eats, for though it may be declassé,
At times the ailing temperament demands
Translucent, shimm'ring food with which to play.
Congealed to perfect hemisphere by bowl,
Or sliced in ruby, rubbery, quivering cubes,
To squeak between the teeth, or swallow whole—
No roughness dare assault the fragile tubes.
Mar not its simple purity with fruit!
Nor cottage cheese, or such abominations.
Whipped cream will only render it dilute,
Obstruct the light, and dull the fascination.
How better to explain my satisfaction?
Not many other foods produce refraction.State of Mind:  somewhat improved |
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getting closer now
eyes burn, hands exacto-sliced
so tired, so hungry
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Woke up this mornin'
Put on my socks and shoes
Woke up this mornin'
Put on my socks and shoes
Had some photocopy problems
Gotta get me some of them non-photo blues
Oh my old colored pencils
They just ain't where it's at
Oh my old colored pencils
You know they ain't where it's at
They're the wrong shade of cyan
And besides, they draw the line too fat
Well there's thunder and lightnin'
Rain fallin' on my head
Well there's thunder and lightnin'
Rain fallin' on my head
But I walked down to the bookstore
Lookin' for mechanical pencil lead
That crazy Asian bookstore
They have ten thousand kinds
Oh that crazy Asian bookstore
They have ten thousand kinds
Oh point five or oh point seven?
Well it just 'bout blew my mind
And besides the different thickness
There are a dozen different hues
Yes besides the different thickness
At least a dozen different hues
So I bought up a whole rainbow
Because you know I couldn't choose
Now I'm home and back to drafting
Drawing letters all the time
Now I'm home and back to drafting
So many letters all the time
Those non-photo blues baby
They just make me feel so fineState of Mind: singin' the blues |
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Yesterday ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) blackbraid and I filled up our backpacks with delicious picnic food, and went to the beach. It was a perfect day for it; the weather had been hot all week, and was still flawlessly clear and sunny. Today was much cooler and overcast, so we got there just in time.
We built sandcastles and splashed in the water a bit, soaking our rolled-up trouser legs. I got a little burnt in spite of using sunblock. blackbraid's sandcastle was large and fairly elaborate, an oval fortress with towers and extensions. It attracted the attention of a couple of kids, who joined forces with us, adding to the structure. My own efforts were more of the dribbly Lava-Lamp school of architecture.
( Pile of sand )
I was also forced at gunpoint ballpoint to write poetry. We both wrote, taking turns choosing themes, scribbling quickly, and passing the notebook on. Here was my first poem, on the subject of "Punk Rock and Decadence," written on the paper deli wrapper from the lunch meat.
Sandy beach-picnicking:
Turkey pastrami with
Vine-ripe tomatoes &
Soft camembert,
Spread it on crackers and
Eat it with fingers,
Besmearing my knuckles,
My chin, and my hair.
I was tired by the end of the day, and walking up the ten thousand steps back to the bus stop was no fun. But I survived with no serious damage, except that today my legs are sore.
. . . . . . . . . . .
In other news, purple cauliflower is one of the coolest-looking vegetables ever.
( It's fractal! )
( It's a litmus! )
And it's pretty tasty when steamed. The pictures really aren't very good; I want to try again sometime with better light.State of Mind:  vacation-tired |
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- Shaolin Soccer is a ridiculous and wonderful movie.
- Eating the young coconut with chopsticks is possible, but messy.
- Banana-nut...that's a good muffin.
- Double dactyls
Fiddly stigery,
Mr. Velocipede
Printed some pictures,
Assembled a book,
Polychromatically
Organized chaos, then
Tried to explain it with
Gobbledygook.
( Further examples )State of Mind: hexasyllabical |
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I had some pictures I was going to post, but I got completely distracted. What a surprise.
I'll attempt to distract you, too, by pointing out that there's a group of people who are trying to define all the words in the dictionary, by means of limericks. That is to say, each word has a limerick written for it. This masterwork is known as the Omnificient English Dictionary In Limerick Form, or OEDILF for short. Within five minutes of finding out that such a thing existed, I had of course signed up to be a contributor.
In the couple of days since then, I've written two limericks, and it looks like they're both going to be accepted. Woo-hoo!
The project is going in alphabetical order, and has gotten as far as words starting with Ba-, which means some clever person has already written a limerick defining "anticyclone." And it's wonderful:
anticyclone by mike scholtes
Anticyclones are circling highs
And producers of fair-weather skies.
In the earth's northern parts
They go clockwise; on charts
In the southern, the converse applies. State of Mind:  rhythmical & rhymical |
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I went frivolling around this afternoon, and had some sushi and saw Gasworks Park and the troll under the bridge. It was a bit guilt-inducing, but I think it was good for me to take some time off, even though it means I'm now up too late drawing again.
My last couple of sketches have made me laugh. We're supposed to be drawing faces conveying different emotions, so I'm using old pictures as references, and doing terrible things to all my friends back east. jackspade has perhaps suffered the most, just because I have lots of pictures of him making faces.
I've also finished writing a Design Student's Alphabet. It's something I've been tinkering with for most of the semester, and now I'm wondering if I'll have time to put it into a book.
( A is for... )State of Mind:  still at it |
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I had another internet coffee date this afternoon: a nice guy with a cool accent and a degree in biomechanical biomedical engineering. (He's probably going to end up reading this. Hello! I don't have a clever online nickname for you yet.)
It's funny to discover how much I like meeting these random people. I don't know why I should be surprised; people are varied and interesting and it's fun to learn about them. It's just that it's such an actively social thing, and I never used to think of myself as particularly social. But maybe I am, after all.
The endsheets in my latest book are being difficult. I cut out two pieces of paper the right size and shape, and then totally screwed up the edges of one of them while applying glue. Then I discovered that I can't find the rest of the paper that's the same color. So I either have to paste in a non-matching endsheet on the other side, and have a book that isn't symmetrical, or I have to rummage through every box in my apartment trying to find the rest of that particular batch of paper. I'm not going to worry about it until tomorrow.
While digging through a box that didn't have the paper in it, I came across an old notebook full of scribblings from my early days on the internet. It was pretty funny to re-read my notes about how hexadecimal colors worked. I remember viewing page sources, trying to make sense of the code, and getting pretty much nowhere until I finally went and got myself an HTML reference book. But I did figure out that the numbers and letters stood for red, green, and blue, so I was on the right track at least.
The notebook also records one of my earliest fractal limericks:
I once had some fractal equations
Which I thought were complex calculations,
But they turned out to be
Merely z2 + c
At a thousand or more iterations.State of Mind:  placid |
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More poetry. Not limericks, this time.
I'm nearly finished reading House of Leaves for the second time, and this time around I remembered to pull one of the quotes that had caught my attention the first time I read it: "The greatest love letters are always encoded for the one and not the many." This is a weblog, not a love letter, but the good bits of it have always been written with just one person in mind. Which one person varies, but it's important for me to feel like I'm speaking to someone in particular.
I think, in most cases, you know who you are.
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Sonnet. with apologies to Wm. Shakespeare.
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thy temperature is ninety-eight point six.
Enfolded in the warmth of your embrace,
I sweat 'til all my clothing to me sticks.
The summer sky is purely, simply blue,
The color of your eyes much more complex.
And though I love to watch both sky and you,
The firmament inspires few thoughts of sex.
Dark follows twilight, and you may be sure
A summer's day lasts no more than a day.
Bright fickle sunlight cannot long endure,
Through evening's indigo my love will stay.
So be it summer, winter, spring, or fall,
Dear heart, you're hardly like a day at all.
—23 December, 2004 State of Mind: sentimental and sad, now |
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"And everyone who read Sonnets of a Sorcerer spoke in limericks for the rest of their lives."
—J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Wow, my readers are an impressive bunch. You guys can sling poetry as though it were corned beef hash on a diner griddle, and you were short-order cooks cranked up on black coffee.
Though truly the unrhymed is bland,
I'm not sure I quite understand
(Was it lateness of hour?
Were we dizzy with power?)
How the limericks got so out of hand.
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Also, it would seem that the Pope has died. Embarrassingly, my first impulse was to try and write a limerick about it, but that's awfully tactless and disrespectful, so I have refrained. He seemed like a nice guy in many ways, although I personally disagreed with some rather large pieces of his philosophy. Still, it feels weird that he's gone. He's the only Pope I remember; it's not like the President, who changes every few years.State of Mind:  ba-da, ba-da-da, ba-da-DAH |
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There once was a fellow so clever,
He thought it a worthy endeavor
To post something new
Instead of haiku—
But writing it took him forever.State of Mind:  I am the limerick ninja! |
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It's been a long, literary, and ludicrous evening. The Professor and Dan Zaphod The Antenna and Giuseppe and I went walking around town in the rain, had Thai food, and then spent hours playing with random text found on the internet.
I can't think of anything to write. I'm all out of words now.
Cross-eyed, brain-fried, nothing that will rhyme,
Overtensely, subimmensely, more another time.State of Mind: tenebricose |
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Edward Lear poems are stuck in my head. I find this slightly cheering.
When awful darkness and silence reign
Over the great Gromboolian plain,
Through the long, long wintry nights—
When the angry breakers roar
As they beat on the rocky shore—
When Storm-clouds brood on the towering heights
Of the hills of the Chankly Bore—
Then, through the vast and gloomy dark,
There moves what seems a fiery spark,
A lonely spark with silvery rays
Piercing the coal black night—
A Meteor strange and bright—
Hither and thither the vision strays,
A single lurid light...State of Mind: Gromboolian |
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A cipede exceedingly Velo
Whose verses rang fluously mellow
Employed faces of type
And perbole hype
In a spirit of ship jolly fellow.
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In other cities
Public transit is much more
Inarticulate.
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