Unbelievable to me that Salinger would sue to prevent publication of a sequel to Catcher in the Rye: what higher praise (even if the writer doesn't do it well) is there than someone enjoying your novel so much he writes a story or poem or novel using yours as a springboard? Now, to be fair, some of the frilly plethora of Austen and Bronte sequels are so very bad as to be punishable by public flogging on my homeworld. Some are middling: Emma Tennant's Adele, for instance is merely wrongheaded & makes one question how drunk she was when she'd last read Jane Eyre. A few are brilliant: Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, for one.

Returned, Reluctantly

I haven't posted in a long time. Not because there's nothing to say, but because I haven't much wanted to say it. I will be posting again, as I've missed this blog, but I needed to step away from myself in a way. I have for the most part completed the poetry manuscript and am preparing to wallpaper the kitchen with rejection slips over the next few months. I discovered Deadwood, wasted time on Facebook (which both entertains and disappoints me) and realized that I have no momentum beyond trying to figure out how to fuckin' live again--to paraphrase Jane Cannary from Deadwood (bet I spelled her last name wrong). But I've read a ton, and written quite a bit, and am needing to reprovision myself in terms of what I do with my free time, such as it is. It's good to be back here.

Jude, but Not Hardy's

The Winterbottom Jude, which I have waited years to watch, is despicable. As much as I love Eccleston's work and know him to be talented, I could not finish watching this. Winterbottom butt-raped this novel. It is so utterly inappropriately removed from the novel itself that it made me stalk about in rage. C. & I are both outraged to the point of not even being able to laugh at it. How horrid it is.
My god, how could anyone so misread Hardy?
I want to track down anyone who read the screenplay prior to making this poxy, smarmy, gratuitous and shameful film and bludgeon them with a bust of Hardy until the blood runs from their ears & then prevent them from ever adapting anything to the screen again.

I really will follow up on the caract thing, but I need more than the time I have to detail all of the things it has shifted. I am rebuilding a section of the Hadrian's wall while waist deep in mud in the middle of a torrential rainstorm in my head and mad flowers and plants grow between each stone as I work--I stare and toil and stare and laugh--and it is hard, interesting, bizarre work.

Different

I don't know if I am going to like all of the strange alterations in my sight. Some are things for which I was unready but am pleased with: the reality of colors, the return of colors. Fascinating and shocking and amusing. The change in my reading vision, however, is a vexation that I don't know if I will find an equanimity for. I am glad not to be blinder; yet, I feel hobbled by some of the changes; of course my eye, a full day later, is still dilated, and that may be contributing to an overall sense of loss of how I read. It's slower now--which is enraging. I can't fit the whole page in my field of vision, as before, but I have to hold it farther away, the book or paper, and it flings sense out the window. Shadows are back, contrast is really back, which is good. But it is not how I see, or it is now and I just can't process it yet. I'm relieved, pleased, but also feel like an amputee. Once the dilation has gone down I will try to explain this conflict.

Blogging Blind

i'm home already from the cataract surgery already and am bored out of my mind. i am going t let the typo's and bizarre keypunches stand & then edit this post and put it up a secnd tie as it will be when i can take the patch off my quasi-sighted eye. I'm not sure yet if it worked becayse I have to wear this studi eye shield for another few hours and it actualy sucks but has taught me that I could--albeit annoyed as hell all the time--function in a world where I had to rely on the even quasier ((ha) vision in my very bad left yey. I suppose when I remove the patch I should know more--I'd better be able to read (not to mention type) but knowin g I can sort of touch type enough to compose drafts and so forth and then have Chris or, it he's busy or otherwise unable, tedxt to speech software, to rea the stuff I've written back to e.
The surgery itself was fascinating. If I am not totally retconed at soe random point in the afternoon once the patch coesoff I will edit this so that it actually looks vaguely edited and makes more sense. I'm really surprised that I was awake and aware of the entire surgery becasue they normally dope people pretty good and I got the nice nurse anesthetist to no overwhen me with drugs. The Versed is a little creepy--but most of the problems poeple have rported with it are in cases of colonoscopy or in children with sexure disorders where they use the drug over a lenghty period of time.

Here's what it was like. They put me on a bed sort of thing with wheels00not a stretcher but not a gialnt bed wither, and talked at leghth (I'm sure the ocd questions didnt' help with that) about everything I wanted to know. TH eh oops the real nurse anesthetist was very nice. I got to have a trippy oxygen tube that freaked me out a bit, and then they put moniors on me and a bluood pressure cuff that took my blood pressure every five minutes or so and a thing on my finger that beeped a lto. No aurora chair type seating, but the effects once the surgery started were kuje giubg tgriygh a wirngike,
. Grays and whites and darknesses. First black pinpricks exactly as when one takes tpushpin and pokjes oles in a sheet of paper and looks at it against a light, or the oopisute if s\the night skjy, like black stars on a white sky. Pinpricks, wilds or them and no order whatsoever, no logical reason a t the time00just th eprocess I realize now, of what I think was the attempt t to blow apart the lens in my eye, an d then with a very satisfying synesthesia, there aws a sound like a chirstams cracker in my head and the e little silvery things went spinning off into space like mad, whrligigging and wheeloing off into the black periphery and it was very beautiful in a strange way. Then the gray, the endless field of flat gray like the nothng in the Neverending Story, or trying to focus an oldfashioned nucriscioe when there's no slied to focus on. This bit lasted a moment & theb they put the lens in and it unfolded in a most blakean or soething like Blake but not blake cirled around and unpleated in a foldy pleaty sort of way, clear accordioned or fanned, ribbed...don;'t know what to call it. But It was fantasitc to get a group of people woh go t the writer tinging and the ocd thing an dtook me serously abd dudb;t over-doope ne so i ould see wha t was gong on.'
I can't actyally see thi s an dI can't etell ny habs are iff ciyre sinegiwm s U wukk reoist wutg eduts kater ib,'update the results... hopefully I can read!! that's wahat it was all about after all.

Scorpy Puts Me In the Chair

This is it. Eventually I imagine I will be able to add to this. It definitely prompts a lot of farscape quotes--hopefully no Frau Blucher or Aurora Chair... the diagnosan? Ah, fuck. Get the comfy chair.

In a Week, It's the Pin for Me, or Why I Haven't Been Blogging of Late

So a week from tomorrow I get the retcon-lens-transplant-fest. As a consequence I have been working more hours than is reasonable or rational in order to get things done before it goes on. There is an essence of necessity, the shove of a hot wind at my back which insists I do, do, do. I've been reading as much as I can, but mainly working, much of the working time spent too busy to notice what turns out to be inexplicable drama, rage, confusion, bizarrete and then I find myself trying to sort it on the fly. Today--no shift--I talked to no fewer than 9 people who didn't understand there was no shift, two of them were absoloutely freaking out Evelyn Waugh style...men with voices when upset or confused that only dogs can hear.
So, I should apologize for not updating sooner.
I say "Hi" and "ye gods, it's been a long time!" to Tina, to whom I owe an email when I can sit still for longer than 3 minutes which is how long it has taken as of fourteen seconds ago to do this post.

No Title Yet

Nicholas Hughes has apparently hung himself; it is mentioned in multiple comments that he did so '40 years to the day' that his stepmother gassed herself and her daughter. Assia Wevill was not his stepmother--Hughes and Wevill never married--and the comments show a decided lack of knowledge of the families and issues involved. Assia Wevill did not kill herself on 16 March; she did so on 23 March, so it was not to the day, and anybody who is trying to create a "doomed! doomed!" soap opera out of this death only further belittles the individuals concerned. There is no reason to assume that Nicholas Hughes, an esteemed biologist who taught at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks (a dream of mine--someday...) and a longtime Alaska resident, killed himself for any reason other than depression.
What people with no first-hand knowledge of depression or mental illness don't realize is that the suicide isn't a suicide because of a single problem or issue; this isn't ancient Rome or anyplace where suicide was or is culturally accepted as an honorable way out of a big mess (treason, for instance). Certainly there are anomalous suicides, the capitalist who hung himself from the clock on whatever building it was in 1929 when the market crashed, etc., but most suicides are people who have battled depression for decades.
Plath, Hughes' mother, wasn't a suicide because she was a poet. Nor was she a great poet because she was a suicide; while certainly the circumstances added to the interest in her work, the death did not write the poems but merely made them available.
Nicholas, it is said by his sister, suffered from depression for a long time. I hadn't known of this, but always felt an interest in him because of Alaska, the fishing, and because he reminded me in photographs--something about his gaze--of my own brother, whose interest in animals and biology seemed to come from a similar place.
I think of my time in Alaska--it is a hard place to live even in summer, and the winters there are brutal, dark and exhausting. Being a university professor in and of itself, for someone who is different or peculiar is probably quite depressing in and of itself.

I want to write more about this--it struck me in the chest this morning when I read of it. I am simply out of time.

UPDATE: WHAT RUBBISH AND IDIOCY IS THIS?

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/46811,opinion,the-suicide-of-nicholas-hughes-killed-by-his-envious-mother-sylvia-plath

Where You're Calling From

Just in case friendly (or not--who knows?) readers don't know this yet, when you read this blog from the Job, it shows on the Job's server in Lehi, Utah. It shows on my widget, and that was when I first atarted to think about it: the people I work for might be reading this.
But for us at the Job here in Eugene, this means two things: firstly, They know what you're doing, whether it's reading my blog or looking at rotten.com or doing physics homework. Secondly, it's why I don't update this oftentimes offensively worded chaos of rants from the Job. But be aware that They are watching. And now, maybe reading this, too. It might be time for me to write about happy, sweet things for a while, but don't count on it.
I've been happy to discover there are some new readers, and that pleases me because why one writes, in the end, is to provoke thought (whether one's own, which has been the case with me for a very long time) or that of others (new to me, and not completely unenjoyable). But please keep in mind that this is where I write to stretch, the way a runner stretches before a long run; I write here before I write.
It's the 21st century equvalent of everything from hair shirt to strigil to cleaning house to ornamentation. It's a mask, it's makeup, and it's not always how I feel a week later or a day later or even necessarily the second after I post. Comment freely and I will answer you; email to brontepunk@gmail.com will always be answered. comments, no matter how they make me feel, will always be posted unless you're selling anal spangles I'm glad people are reading, but remember that this is all subjective and you must take me with a fistful of salt; I am no prophet, nor do I always know what I mean until I've reread myself a year later; I try very hard to let all posts stand as originally written and leave them unrevised un;ess I have misquoted or very badly mistyped. So know that something I wrote in 2004 may be so far off from how I think in 2009 that a new post on the subject is in order. Ask questions if you want--I always meant this to become a dialog someday.

Ulysses Concordance Redux

So I've noticed a lot of traffic to what is actually a pathetic post I made some time ago and wonder if it's merely a bunch of people trying to do homework assignments or if the title comes up in some common search.
I have to point out that there are plenty of other Ulysses Concordance resources, especially luddite ones, that don't need to be crammed into anybody's orifices, elitist or otherwise. I just hadn't looked and was miffed that there are particular resources only available to those connected with academia; I still think having to possess a username and password to learn something is asinine; I feel the same way about most library systems and the requirement of an address: why must one live in a building to read? Why should a person with no money have to get identification to read? I think a lot of the rage I have when I encounter things like sites restricted to those affiliated with a University or particular profession enrage me not only because I can't use them, but because the implication is that independent scholars don't exist, or if they do, they have money or connections. But one thinks of Jude Fawley.

Get Your Own Muse, Motherfucker

I want to know what possessed Robert Graves (not to mention a host of other poets) to believe that women can't write, as Graves put it, true poetry. It has filtered down into current attitudes and the number of male writers I've known who look for the muse in tits and ass outweighs the few who write with the invisible Muse in mind. The Muses belong to us all regardless of gender, and when one looks at the lives of Graves (whom I admire for his storytelling far more than his poetry--one of the ten worst poems I think written by a serious poet in the 20th century is 'Down, Wanton, Down' or whatever it was called) and others, some of whom are among my favorite poets, one sees the relentless serial accordioned quasi-monogamy that suggests the endless seeking of a physical muse.
In my own experience, being what I was, I watched as poets I knew slept their way through the cluster of the most muse-like (meaning, in the given time, physically attractive and bright yet not indomitable) female writers. At the time, I occasionally wondered why this should be so--having read so many woeful accounts of relationships between writers, I knew pairing off with a poet or writer frequently ended in disaster for one or both--and because I was extremely young, naive, and ridiculously insecure, I also debated what was wrong with me and thought I knew. I didn't.
I know now that being a muse means not being a poet. The relationship between a poet and a muse-figure is not symbiotic, it is parasitic. And everything points madly to a gendered concept of the relationship between muse and poet; we have the White Goddess, just for a start.
I'm formulating here, and don't expect this to sound rational at all, but there must be space for some ungendered guide; Sappho wrote poetry, must have kept the Muses in her mind, slept with men and women both if her poetry mirrors behavior... more on this.

Mad North by Northwest Half West

We've very nearly finished the writings related to the Mutiny on the Bounty. Not the novels one read at twelve, but the historical writings and documents. It's too bad, for it makes excellent reading in the late night before sleep.
I've always had a passion for what school stories call 'sea stories' but find I vastly prefer Hakluyt and random 200 year old travel writings to the fiction. The Worst Journey In the World by Apsley Cherry-Gerrard (spelling wrong I am sure, order even) is one of the best. Next it's either Scott's journals of the polar expedition or an Oxford book of early travel writings.
Bligh was unstable certainly; it glimmers through his writings like snail trails; he was not a reasonable or particularly intelligent or insightful man who rose through the interest of friends to a position for which he was peculiarly unsuited, and this shows not only in what the mutineers had to say (to be taken with the handful of salt to be sure) but through his own words. Fascinating and moreso considering the Rum Rebellion and his utter failure as the Governor of New South Walse. One wonders what dirt the man had on various superiors.

Bollocks!

Between the inability to put my space bar back on my computer after cleaning it (damn laptops, anyway) and the 911 madness C. had today with a friend who had a diabetic crash that was scary before the 911 goon squad (one of whom commented on 'having to come back soon' because of an unsharpened & unfinished albeit very large sword that decorates the space next to where I'm typing this) showed up and in between caring for our friend found it necessary to make quite unnecessary search of our bedroom & having found an empty prescription bottle of mine (I wasn't even home) assumed that our friend had been taking pills--the asswipe had neither reason nor right to enter our bedroom and rummage about; the paramedics did their job, and the fuckwad who searched the bedroom never identified himself as a cop but one imagines he probably was: our friend is African-American & that, in this outpost garrison town, is enough to invite suspicious and nefarious racism--insidious the moreso because Eugene paints itself as liberrruuuuuul (radical it is not, progressive, before you get fooled into moving here because you've heard there are leftists here, it is decidedly not: the leftists here are of the Hilary Clinton water and actually LIKED her POLITICS... so don't move here & expect to meet a plethora of people who've read Trotsky or who don't think Zapatistas are a sort of thing you need a special pan from Williams Sonoma for; I've worked with people who think the Spanish Civil War was called--WHY???--the 'Franco-American War'). The guy in the poorly fitting fireman's jacket who was probably a cop expressed incredulity of the most moronic kind (duuuuuuuuuuh, whut, rully?) that C. and our friend have been friends for 5 years plus. How come nobody made this guy read 'Free to Be You and Me' or something when he was a kid? The general assumption despite perfectly obvious and plentiful evidence to the contrary was that our friend had od'ed. Yeah, and had it been a 51 year old white dude on the floor with all the symptoms of a diabetic crash, they'd have thought so, too, right? Sure. And there's this bridge in Brooklyn....
Then there's the fucked dinner cooking catastrophe which is so stupid it isn't worth going into, and the EWEB nightmare that may or may not work out all right and the foulness in general of our cranky possibly terminal coffeemaker and... well, in all, a lot of frustrating minor key shit that when put in perspective seems trivial but piles like shit just the same.
Lastly the incessant pissing and moaning of the one person who makes a living wage (nearly twice what anyone else in the office makes) of having to work more than 27 hours for his 40 hour paycheck for the first week this year and how it spread to a couple of others at the CATI all morning along with some other work b.s. was enough to make me want to come home and do things I didn't succeed in doing.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow....

There ain't nothing so complicated as the inside of a torpedo.

One of the things that keeps surfacing lately is the way we all go about normal activities even when it has become quite clear that nothing is normal.
The lack of stability is exactly what keeps some of us coming back day after day--it's like the bit in the African Queen where Charlie mentions that someone dropped a screwdriver down the safety shaft and he keeps meaning to fix it someday. Eventually one of us will have to find that screwdriver; there's this strange feeling of unity crashing headlong into disunity--I can't explain it better than that--and the result is a sustained leak of adrenaline into a system of lethargy perhaps too great to notice except in fits and starts.
One of the important persons who in part controls the Machine in which I work proved yesterday that there is more communication amongst those of us here in our Job than in the corporate realm--he had no idea that one of our managers had been fired, and she was someone of whom he was particularly fond. His suggestions and advice were fascinating and not to be gone into in this forum; suffice to say, given how we work and how well we do as a whole in comparison, the thought of taking a sledgehammer to a functional overriding ethos for the sake of some arbitrary standard which exists in a business-sense vacuum when things are already so precarious is shocking to me.
Tell us you don't know about a wide range of things that have happened & then tell us how much attention you've been paying: this is what's going on with the economy as a whole. ideas rather than realities.

More on Mirrors and Windows

I wrote a poem today called "Caul" & I'm not sure what to make of it. There's another one in the process called "The Physics of Resiliency" that I'm also not sure what to make of; both poems unnerved me during the process of writing them, and I never thought I could scare myself with my own poetry. I have frightened myself with prose many times, and am used to it.
A serious reading of Blake--the complete Blake--is a massive and overwhelming undertaking; I find so much verisimilitude that I fear it, and yet it sounds egotistical to say so. But there it is: the poets who have gone before are the teachers; there is only so much one can learn from being lectured: it takes the poems and the poets to provide signposts in the sea.
I'm afraid for so many people right now; I've had more people ask for copies of their references on their applications in 2 days than in the preceding year. I wish there weren't so many people hurting now & not just at the Job but in general. Friends who have been through so much already having strokes and stuff--young people whose shock level is probably similar to my own with the cataracts--the friend who had the stroke I haven't even seen in years and years, but our mothers are friends, she'll be fine... but never what she was previously: unwary. And as cavalier as I've been about the cataracts, I've also been reading & the more I learn the more wary and edgy I become. People with 2 functional eyes have problems after the surgery; there is nothing out there about anyone with my condition in terms of positive or negative experience. It goes on; but the stories of others who are in odd or dire or shocking states at the moment are their stories, and I dare not fictionalize accidentally the experiences that belong to them; I merely wish I could help in some real way.

Finding Windows in Mirrors

I've been working my way through William Blake at the same time that I've been working my way through papers and refuse that extend back over 12 years that the Job has been in existence here in Eugene. The marriage of heaven and hell versus the marriage of entertainment and duplicitousness. I've managed to preserve some really funny things for the ages, but have mostly been filling bin liners with shreds of things that ought to have been shredded years ago.
I went in early and stayed ridiculously late--was the last person in the company on psi 2 nights unning, which felt funny, even the everpresent T. was gone eventually--and got a lot done; the awareness that other people have been trying to help when they have time wasn't apparent until I got to the bottom of a big box where someone had gone to town with the paper cutter (hope none of that stuff was important) and still have more to go. There's something soothing about the work done after the noise and chaos have moved off into the distance.
I thought a lot about what keeps me there--it isn't the money--and what prompts me to want more out of my days than what I do.
I have a great deal to think about right now.