1077.

For those of you who are fans of integers, integers have returned. It should be a wild ride.

Okay, just this once

Normally, I don't do this kind of thing...but I find the above cover to be so very very cool I wanted to share. Plus: the homegrown Russian moire on that photograph is sort of wonderful. Is that chinless fellow the devil or Carter? I think -- given the Domino mask above -- it's the former.

Plus it's exciting to see footnotes, one of which (I'm guessing) explains the nuances behind the cry "This is for Custer! This is for the Alamo!"

Back to serial opacity.

-- 0 --

• Fewer red herrings. Unless they justify themselves. "Hey, cool! A herring! Gang, come over here -- it's a herring. It's red. Whoo-hoo!"
• Where does everyone go by the end?
• Benshi. As God is my witness...
• My scarecrow is still as wooden as ever.
  

-- More Intermission --

I can't read. I had one novel in mind, I felt it would make sense to start there as soon as my own work was out of the way. And I kept getting up from my chair. Book on armrest. Book back in hand. Being hyperaware of words in my ear, bees buzzing. What do words mean? How is it that pictures start forming in your head, or is it never that pictures form but you learn to shake hands instead and form an agreement with the author?

There is some kind of cognitive dissonance going on, and I think it has to do with being receptive to story telling.

In the meantime, I've gone back to a mainstay. Much like Homer Simpson and his six-foot-sandwich, I am taking years to gnaw on a very long and companionable memoir that one of my best friends recommended long ago. I find I can just open it up where I left off, even if I put it down six months before, and pick right up (in this case in Paris in 1750 or so).

-- Intermission --

Having finished with the War, I am learning to read again. More about this as I figure it out.

1090

1096

Marking a moment of optimism:

His mother introduced him to starfish and abalone, and how to pry them away from the rocks with a hunting knife, which he wasn't allowed to touch. And here were hermit crabs and there were fiddler crabs and sea anemones ("If you put a finger in there, they will suck it in and it will never come out" "Could you get it out?" "I could. But it would be very dangerous.") and sea urchins, the last of which he was allowed to take home if the spines were falling out, for that meant they were dead.

He grew up believing that the world was a very dangerous place that invited his mother's rescue. And between the ages of six and ten, he touched hermit crabs, put his finger in sea anemones, removed living urchins from their beds, and even stole the hunting knife from its hiding place in the broom closet.

And I figured out how to use the benshi. That's something which has wanted to be in a story since 1984.