Turbo Kong

Real soon now, I'm going to be moving things over to protean. Please refriend over there if you're (a) still around at all and (b) have any interest in reading scribblings of mine anytime in the future.

I can't promise any excitement for at least a few days, but I really do have a real plan to really update that journal, really.

Really.

See you over there, I hope!

Josh

In recent weeks I've become increased enamored of Crooked Timber, a multi-author UK-located blog that seems to dabble in literature, international politics, and anything else they can think of about which they have something to say. One of the great pecularities of blogs, and of the great strengths, in a way, is that I have no idea who these authors are or why they should choose to keep a blog together. I was drawn by the thoughtful, articulate writing, and I stayed for the thoughtful, articulate writing, and sometimes it is nice to encounter that without any sense of participating in a broader social framework. By which I mean, great, intelligent writing, without any of those "but what does it say about me that I subscribe to the New Yorker?"-type questions.

Of course, if I'm an idiot and someone wants to clarify that these CT writers are of course important and well-known and here's who they are, I'd appreciate that too.

Anyway, that's a long way of prefacing the point of this post, which is: in the last couple of days, they have held an online "seminar" on Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which consists of 5 or 6 very nice essays on the subject, the last of which is written by Susanna Clarke herself.

It can be found here.

Massive, massive spoilers for JS&MN itself, so if you haven't read but plan to, might want to skip until you're done.

There is also a seminar linked on the sidebar that they did for China Mieville and he, too, wrote an essay for them. Haven't read any of that yet though. Will let you know.

I let Halloween sort of happen around me this year; although I was at parties on Friday and Sunday evenings of the weekend and was out and about Monday night, I never even thought about a costume, and while everyone else was packed into the Village for the parade, I was up in Midtown having dinner with blackholly and theoblack and angdee and Tony, who were passing through on their Field Guide tour. (We ate extremely delicious food at Rue 57, and took a cassie-bag back to the hotel so Cass could eat when she joined us after getting off late from work, and all was good.)

However, I also discovered that all Halloween weekend, you can play an exciting new game on the subway called...

So Is That a Costume, Or What?

This is sort of a variant of other popular New York City games, such as "Model or Tranvestite?", "Girlfriend or Rental?", and of course, "Crazy or Cell Phone?" But especially when on hipster turf, where half-assed costumes predominated, Cassie and I spent whole subway rides making sotto voce comments like, "So, is he really a DJ? Or is he dressed up as a DJ? He's a bald white guy with huge headphones and a messenger bag full of CDs...." and "Hey, that guy's dressed as Napoleon Dynamite!...No, wait, he's just a guy with blond curly hair and a hideous suit" and "If she's only dressed up as a crack whore for a party, man, she's really gone all out."

What this really means, of course, is that Halloween caused me to more closely examine my fellow New Yorkers. And let me share with you the lesson I've learned: don't ever do that. This city is full of fucking crazies.

Today's terrifying personal news is that my best friend from high school, M, and his wife, S, are officially having a baby. S is about 11 weeks pregnant, and they are very excited, and I am very happy for them, and also stunned into silently musing on topics such as getting older; how to reconcile the 12-year-old dork I became friends with with an expectant father; mortality; etc.

He's not even the first friend of mine from high school to have a baby, but he's the closest. Jesus, we used to sled down the 12-foot vertical banks of the creek near his house and slam the front of the toboggan directly into the rink-hard creekbed at a 90 degree angle in freefall. We used to "duel" with sticks in the backyard, leaping around the giant embedded boulders that litter my parents' neighborhood; it's a wonder nobody ever broke a limb. Somewhere between us there are stacks and stacks of spiral notebooks passed back and forth through four years of classes together, packed with endless insanely threaded conversations that went on for weeks and ranged from the sort of stupid puns and inside jokes and Monty Python references that make adolescent nerds hell to spend time with, to the sort of animalistic, half-baked notions of manhood that make adolescent boys in general hell to spend time with. None of this feels that long ago.

He got married right after college, and before the ceremony, he and the groomsmen hung out in the backlot of the church and played Wiffleball in our tuxedos. Like we were getting away with something.

S is due in late May. It's hard to even wrap my mind around.

Reuter's headline of the daymorning: New Yorkers Return to Subway After Terror Warning. I'm shocked! Apparently they went with that one because the one they had in reserve, No One in New York Reports to Work Due to Vague, Unexplained Threat Unsubstantiated by CIA in Time of Federal Political Desperation; City Grinds to Halt, didn't pan out. I am not usually a "this is news?" person but really, does anyone learn new anything from that article? That's the whole reason urban infrastructure is considered a popular terrorist target, is that the city is dependent on it to function. Message to Reuter's: No duh.

Here at work we have a change freeze, which means that no changes can be made on computers running live line-of-business servers for the company. (Yes, I've been in the corporate world for four weeks and I'm using terms like "line-of-business." Send help.) This is fine, except that the change freeze was for safety while they launched the beta of a new product, and that product launch has now been delayed *counts on fingers* a week. This means that not only have I not done anything technical for work in a week, I am starting to run out of non-technical things to do. I am almost to the point of organizing my files by color or, like, transcribing my handwritten notes onto the computer. Things are start to feel timeless and circular, like the insomnia sequences at the beginning of Fight Club.

Also, many people who I like to talk to online are at this thing this weekend, partying. If any of you are reading this: pour out a 40 for me on the shores of Boston Harbor, will you?

And also, Ms. cassandraclare has gone off to Amherst for the weekend to finish her book in the company of blackholly and theoblack and so I am all alone in the apartment with only a small, extremely talkative cat for company.

BUT. Tomorrow I shall fly away to Wisconsin for the wedding of nearly_there and her fiance C, both of whom are very old and dear friends. I shall see many people I have not seen in way too long (like amadea and carpenter), and I shall, also, play the flute in public for the first time in *counts on fingers* I don't know, maybe nine years?

So that'll be interesting, the flute thing.

So I'm walking through the first floor of my office building this morning, and I past the newsstand, which, by the way, is clearly labeled "Newsagent," because Anglophilia makes everything classier, apparently.

Anyway, it's a newsagent's, so it pretty clearly is going to have, you know, news. Nevertheless, this morning someone had hung a sign, lettered in Sharpie, outside the stand, which read, I swear to God:

TODAY'S

NEW'S

PAPER'S

HERE!

That's right. Get your fresh new's paper's there.

So now the question is: was the sign lettered by someone who really does think that random punctuation can give your sign more excited (e.g. Try our--"hot" dog's!!!) or is it a strange ironic metacommentary on bad apostrophe use?

"Is that stupidity or irony?" -- the great question of our culture.

I decided to read the new's on the internet's instead.

I don't know about y'all, but the very first thing I typed into Google Blogsearch was "tromboneborges."

And what I found, interestingly, was a bunch of references in LJs of people I have never heard of, who do not have me friended. Ours is a strange little community. I invite y'all to say hi, if you're still around.

It is strange, as because of New Job, I had been thinking of making the whole journal friends-only, as so many others have. At this point, I no longer really feel like a node in any kind of purposeful community -- I'm completely nonparticipatory in anything fandom-related except to, sometimes, curiously peer over the fence when something insane or dramatic is happening. I have a pretty good group of people whose journals I read and should comment a lot more in, and who read my journal and I wish would comment all the time, because that is the Official Blog Commenting Double Standard, I believe. *lets the double standard proudly fly*

But now I don't know. Is it really stupid to leave this journal open for all to see? Is it silly to worry about locking it? Does it somehow sell out the fandom because I act all embarrassed about it, like there's something wrong with being part of it, when really that's just giving in to the Man, man? Opinions solicited.

Also, as per the subject, I think my last umpteen posts have been more about the meta-business of having this journal and what I want to do with it, and less actually doing anything with it, so I promise to actually say something interesting, or at least diary-like ("hate everyone. had oatmeal this morning.") soon.

As soon as I can think of anything.

*drums fingers impatiently on desk*

Hate everything. Had oatmeal this morning.

Exciting discoveries of the day (and it's only 11:30):

• If you walk around the meat-packing district in Manhattan at 8 or 9 in the morning, it will be filled not with posturing scenesters hooking up over $15 cocktails, but rather with actual meat-packing. How quaint.
  
  
• On day four of New Job, have finally (a) started actual project, (b) gotten printers set up on computer, (c) gotten keycard to let me into the office without pathetically bugging receptionist through window.
  
  
• New Job is an extremely short walk from both Pastis and Markt, neither of which I have been to, although until I begin getting paid by New Job, that will remain unchanged.
  
  
• Despite the fact that there is actual bona fide meat-packing happening about 100 feet away, there will still be scenesters eating breakfast at Pastis at 8:45 in the morning. Perhaps they are simply still out from their partying the night before, in which case, way to rock your Wednesday night, scenesters.
  
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PSA.

NPR's list of organizations seeking donations and volunteers to help with the Katrina relief and rescue operations.

Local New Orleans station WWL's live blog of updates on Katrina relief and rescue.

Katrina Help wiki, modeled on the TsumaniHelp web site that was created last December

Boing Boing post, nominally about how techies can help, but full of added reader comments linking to various helpful sources. Also includes fabulous concise information (search for "Erik V. Olson" in the page) on why donating cash is probably your best bet unless you are local.

Whilst conversing with offline friend G this morning, who finished HBP last night around 3 am, he made the following extremely trenchant point:

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