(no subject)

Just now coming to myself, really - my wife's still knocked down. Haven't had for-real flu, as compared to the traditional cold plus fever, in quite a while. That is some nasty stuff. Had no idea who I was or what was happening most of the last two nights, and have barely been able to move all day for kidney pain. And those are just the undisgusting components.

Had an idea during a lucid spell about a reading plan for next year, since this year's arguably worked. Well, everything arguably anythinged - what a useless word. Anyway, why not take myself seriously about these c. 12 authors I claim are best, not prettiest or most consistent but best grasp for some moments the things needful, and just read them? Cutting Borges and Calvino, since I read pretty near every word of both so recently, leaving Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Proust, Wordsworth, Shelley, Whitman, Dickinson, Emerson, Kafka, Stevens. And adding Crowley, who I need to reread, and Abe, who I want to read something else by - and maybe learn if I'm deranged to put Woman in the Dunes up with Kafka.

I read bits of most of them this last year, but it's high time I went back to Proust and Tolstoy - been like ten years. And it fits that plan to go through Emerson, Dickinson and Kafka chronologically. And if I need novelty there's some undergrowth works I've never gotten to (the unspellable Jean Santeuil, Four Freedoms, probably lots of Leaves of Grass sections) or through (The Excursion, the prized Resurrection, I think Necessary Angel). As well as tons of weird Abe, presumably. If by Autumn I'm down to late moralistic prose by Tolstoy, so be it.

Actually I'd probably need an 'out' for something as austere as twelve writers. Maybe for every ten or five books by these people I get to pick some other one. A sanity clause, apologies to Kelly. Ever try to set yourself that kind of incentive goal, e.g. a minute of cleaning for every minute of television?

Or renew it after six months. Or three. Or never really take it seriously. Or end up reading just magazines.

Probably more important things I should be resolving. Like to not use the word 'arguably'- hey, maybe no qualifiers period. And no generalizations or over-broadening imagery. I am a serial abuser of 'world' for example. Does 'for example' count as a qualifier by diffusion?

I'd thought of more extroverted reading schemes too, like reading only female writers for a year, or non-Western, or non-fictional prose, or pre-1500 literature, or books only by people I've never read - all comparatively weak points of mine, though the last less shamefully since it's by logical necessity.

But the intensive scheme meets immediate personal needs, and sounds kind of fascinating from this end. With the out included.

(no subject)

Bememed by toctoc:

The city consists of four islands clustered together & a fifth, a little farther apart (it might be termed an "islet"), which disturbs the arrangement like a carefully positioned beauty mark. Local legend holds that the discovery of the archipelago occurred when a sloppy cartographer-nun nodded off at her work. A spray of ink from the brush in her lax hand stippled the southwestern corner of the map she had been laboring at a minute past--there--a tiny chain of islands. Unnoticed by the powers in charge of quality control at the abbey, the map was bought by a rather tiresomely intrepid sailor, who had never heard of land in those parts and was determined to seek it out for whatever economic & social incentives might be due to one who could call himself a discoverer of anywhere. His name, no doubt, should have made a fine appellation for the archipelago but it is, alas, lost to history. Though he reached the uninhabited island--& lived to tell of the accuracy of the map--he died alone in a minor port city of measles & a too-close acquaintanceship with gin. The onomasticons say that the name of the city now in that place is thought to be a corruption of the sacred alias of its original cartographex. But all this may be no more, at the last, than romantical speculation of the basest kind.

A variant of the founding myth claims that the archipelago did not, in fact, exist before the intervention of the sleepy nun. This story would have you believe that the cenobite's error did not serve a merely deictic function but called the islands into their very being. A fanciful tale.

By chance or design, Pomonix Epticor is a city of exiles. Fugitives, runaways, former prisoners of war & political refugees, people registered as missing the world over--they go there seeking asylum & almost always it is granted. Murals of sequential art line the walls on the first island; it is there they keep the museums and the vegetable gardens. On the second island are the fisheries and the antiquarian bookstores. On the third, the best bars and the thriving necropolis fight for space. Hospitals, movie theaters, workshops & cafés occupy the fourth & largest island, whose high point is occupied by the tumble-down spires of the Epticorian university. Of the fifth isle you know, for it is there that unexplained absences have often been noted. (It seems that even among the vanished, it is possible to disappear still more completely from the memory of the earth.) This final island is home to curlews, shepherds, sheep, & a shrine to a god long forgotten.

The citizens are not yet so good & wise that government has decayed altogether but they are interested in goodness & wisdom, which is a beginning. They have tried everything from socialism (broadly conceived) to direct democracy (broadly conceived) to Proudhonian anarchosyndicalism (broadly conceived) & the legislation committees may boast of range if not efficiency. Sometimes the members will fall fast asleep while still deep in meetings--so you see how they have progressed--heads on desks, eyes shut, silent--stranded between the guerrilla gardens and the sea, waiting for the law to come.

It won’t surprise you that one mystery of the city has to do with exile. If you ask an Epticorian how she came to the city, she will either tell you she was born there or of a fever in the blood. It is the latter that constitutes the pith of our concern but we must admit that the former is, in truth, no less mysterious. The lost ones say that when they stole away from their points of origin, they had no notion of where they were going, only that they felt a compulsion to go there. It manifested as a tingling itch in the tarsals that abated when they moved towards the source. Some have compared it to a mosquito’s bite or the beginnings of a headache, others to the faintest stirrings of carnal interest. It was as if there had been a crack in the world only they could see; they became obsessed with tracing it to its source, their eyes vacant & fixed, the pupils eating up the irids, the lids stretched back a little too tightly, as those of a horse when it wrests a last burst of speed from its lathered haunches. & so by land they came & then by sea: by boat, by raft, by butterfly stroke alike. They come in waves & only when the city wants them & in this way is the place like a virus that swarms out thick & fast once or twice a century, planting its epidemic flags in the pale cheeks of the afflicted, retreating swiftly & in silence.



Occasionally, the courts have tried to exile a citizen for some infraction. This, they have found, they are unable to do. For an exile from Pomonix Epticor finds himself drawn back to the city by a resurgence of the fever as inexorable as any more fatal disease. He will attempt return by any means necessary, even should it mean his death. Such a one is haunted past bearing by the airy bridges & the glass-bottomed barques, the blue fire of the sun on feldspar quoining at dawn, the jetties limned in rare barnacles, the half-remembered curve of a woman’s neck as she throws a grenade of seeds at a patch of ground in a public park. (It bursts & covers all with crocuses and potsherds.) Colonies of bioluminescent mushrooms light the streets at night. The islands lend themselves to patterns. A line drawn to connect them will reveal by turns a quincunx, as on the side of a die, or pentagram, a five-pointed star.