mokie | Reading

Today will be hot. Tomorrow, they say will be even hotter. I looked out and the air was so clear it seemed the hills had moved a mile closer.

A Friend gave us a talk yesterday about the Samaritans and their work in prison. At least one of our other friends said, "Suicide and prisons? No thanks. I'll give it a miss." But the talk was inspiriting. Our prison system is horrible. It shuts up unhappy people in conditions guaranteed to make them even unhappier. But the Samaritans- who go in and train inamtes to be "listeners" bring a little light into the gloom. Our friend says the work keeps him sane.

Here's Lewes Prison (not my picture)

It makes me think of my boarding school. For two reasons.

1. We used to drive past it on the way to school- and as we turned the corner by those high, horrible grey walls I knew my own incarceration was only half an hour away.

2. It's a building of the same period (mid-19th century) and of a similar design. The Victorians thought you could terrify people into good behaviour. It doesn't work.

Unbelievably... no scrub that and substitute all too believably....Lewes Prison is a Grade Two listed building, which means the fabric can't be altered without permission from on high. In consequence the people who run the prison have to pay a recurring fine to the authorities for further uglifying their ugly building by topping it off with razor wire.....

When I was chopping the tall grasses down a week or two back I left a clump of barley standing next to the bird bath. This morning I watched a jackdaw jump up, pull a stalk down onto the path and proceed to peck away at it. Clever bird!

"I dodn't suppose anyone falls out with you," said Mark. "Oh, but they do," I replied,"And especially since I became a Quaker elder." I forebore to mention that he'd come close to falling out with me himself a few weeks before.

I'm reading Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour. It's not what you expect. There's comedy, but it's no longer heartless- and there's an understanding- that there rarely was in the earlier books- that people, even obnoxious people, are trying their best. When Waugh divests himself of farce he stands revealed as deeply unhappy. It's not exactly autobiographical- Crouchback is very much not Waugh himself- but it follows the trajectory of Waugh's own wartime experience- which wasn't glorious- and gives a lot away. It's a stoic book. I'd even call it brave......

I walk with a stoop. I've done it all my life. Comes of being a bookworm.

But now I'm 74 people see me prowling around with my eyes on the ground and mistake me for an old man- and we can't have that. Time to straighten up.

Picture Diary 96.

1. Forward to the Past

2. CAN

3. Romantic composer

4. Avians

5. Autumn

6. New Ice Age

Judy is annoyed about a book that says Hollywood is finished because in a few years time movies will be entirely constructed in AI- with no need for actors or cinematographers and- what hits her hardest- screen writers.

I'm not going tp play the prophet but I'm inclined to think- as she does- that old-style movie making will continue as a craft- just as other things superceded by the machine have done- like cabinet making or lace making or watercolour painting.

All the same I cannot help noticing how AI image-making proceeds by leaps and bounds. I have been making AI pictures for less than two years and when I started it was cutting edge and now the things I'm producing are looking a bit old hat. This morning on YouTube I was watching some nice little clips of people walking with dinosaurs that were created using MidJourney. Very good they were too. Effects that once cost millions can now be knocked off in someone's back bedroom.

According to the media the mysterious bottle that cleared several streets in the heart of Eastbourne was found in a house previously occupied by squatters. The contractors tasked with clearing the property called the police who summoned the bomb squad who sent in a robot to blow it up.

Was there a mighty explosion?

Apparently not.

The police had discovered a bottle of "mysterious liquid" in a house in the centre of town and had sealed off and evacuated the surrounding streets. It was all very discreet and if the Daily Mail hadn't told us to look left as drove up Grove Rd we'd not have guessed anything was out of order. Entrance to the afflicted area was sealed off with tape and a single affable copper was standing by to deter the general public from ducking under it.

Nothing to see here. Now move along please.....

We were on our way to the tennis. The Eastbourne Open has been downgraded this year but a good number of top players have shown up anyway. I sat myself down alongside Court 4 and watched this match....

Note that Rakhimova doesn't get a flag which means she's Russian.

Here she is

And here's Cocciaretto....

Rakhimova won.

I've never been to Wimbledon. A friend who has been to both says Eastbourne is quiter, more relaxed and better tempered. There's no champagne, no strawberries and cream, but the sea-food infused mac and cheese I bought off a kiosk was perfectly nice. They have a big screen so that those who haven't paid for seats on Centre Court can watch the action at one remove. No extra charge is made for the very comfortable deckchairs.....

You know, I think this is the very first time I've attended a professional sporting event of any kind.

I remember a blind man telling us that what he saw- in his mind's eye- was not darkness- as we'd presumed- but a "wonderful golden light".

A "wonderful golden light " is what I "see" when I close my eyes in the Meeting House.

"Golden" is not quite right. There are other colours there. You know when you look at a sunset and you can't tell where one colour ends and and the next begins and you call it golden because words fail? Well, its a bit like that- only the colours don't shade into one another but are all present at once. Also it's soft and deep, as gold, the metal, isn't.

And I don't just see, I also hear and feel. And all these verbs are approximate. The light is bound up with the silence and has dimensions beyond the senses. It has consciousness, an internal movement as of motes in a sun beam- and is somehow involved with Peace and Love....

In the long, silent void since my last post, I have two writing things to announce. The first is that Nightmare Diaries: An Anthology of Horror has been released from Moonstruck Books (in print and e-book). It contains a short story I quite enjoyed writing and that I am personally fond of, Mother's Work, which combines homesteading, lilies and a dead infant. Best to get the anthology directly from the publisher via the link above, but it is also available on Amazon and Barnes & Nobles if these are your usual sources.

The second isn't quite yet something I am sure I can announce formally, though I can at least offer the broader strokes. Some of you may have been aware that I spent the past half year and change bashing my head against my keyboard at a fairly large writing project. Part of this upcoming work is based off a very old novella concept I had that I could never quite get into good form. The setting was a somewhat futuristic alternate world; the culture there ate the dead as part of their funerary rites and the whole thing happened one evening at a restaurant as a murder mystery. I won't lie--the concept was rather more ambitious than I could pull off at the time with my skills. Mid-last year, I was asked if I could put together something by a lovely editor. So I did, weaving together bones from that old idea and more recent influences into something I hope is at least coherent, perhaps, even something others might like to read. I like to think of it also as partly a reaction to the stupid world we currently live in. Not even a figurately stupid world, these daily headlines that make The Onion look sober clearly stem from decision making by tantrum-throwing toddlers supported by sociopaths.

I spent a good part of writing this project listening to the Violent Femmes (the album by the band). Frantic, twangy acoustic sounds worked oddly well with how desperate I was to get the thing done already. Altogether, I want to say there were about four months of actual writing. Four months of listening to waspy singing about a bad trip and irreparably angry ex-ing set to some amazing bass. This was also when I discovered my cat is amazingly tolerant of my music playing from my tablet while napping on my legs. He still hates me being at my desk though.

When I was done writing, I spent several weeks collapsed in a heap playing Rogue Trader (the Owlcat video game) and being frustrated at how comically theatrical they do the Heretic route. There is no subtle evildoing in the 41st Millenium A.D. But, but! Alongside stuff like the Noise Marines, surely someone was also plotting more quietly? Without the slaves hanging in cages as bedroom furniture? Just when I was about to open a hole into the warp in the middle of Dark Eldar territory after figuring out from disparate player chatter I had to go sacrifice a whole room of people to the dark gods first, my editor came back and I was into edits.

Oh, edits were painful. My editor was lovely, line editing was a breeze. It was just that I had to elaborate on prior scenes and add new ones, amounting to about two more months and change of bashing my head against the keyboard with over a week in Malaysia in the middle. I had hoped to write while abroad, but my trip was primarily about dealing with administrative chores. By the time I'd settle down at the end of the day, I was too tired. So when I finally got back to San Francisco, I was pretty much chasing an ever closer deadline on heavy jet lag. While in Kuala Lumpur, my parents tried to get me to listen to some guy called Dimash. I have no idea what the kids listen to these days, so I had no idea who they were talking about. He's apparently a classically-trained Kazakhstani fellow who looks like a pan-Asian idol with perfect pitch. Apparently, he got everyone's panties in knots when he showed up for concerts in KL. Listening to him, it's clear he can sing six octaves and the higher ones at that. To my ears, he sounds like a sort of shrieky Josh Groban.

While not my cup of tea, I was curious to know what the original version of one of his staple songs, S.O.S. d'un Terrien en détresse, was. This led me to Starmania, the weird sci-fi musical it came from--apparently famous in the Francophile world--and an amazing cast recording version by Norman Grouix from 1988. There is a majesty in the way his voice progresses upwards through the chorus that I found very fetching. Starmania itself is weird. I don't necessarily recommend it unless you're that curious. I thought the music was mostly banal pop with a heavy cabaret feel. Until you read the lyrics and realise that the whole space rock opera is meant to be very, very transgressive. The main love number is a woman singing her unrequited love for a gay man; there's a song about the joys of being a transvestite actually called Travesti; somewhere in this there's a plot to topple an anti-immigrant oligarch. In this, I regret my lack of understanding of French. Clearly, if I knew what the songs were saying as I was listening to them, they would have more effect. Not all transgressive music has to sound transgressive, obviously, but I don't have to really know Japanese to figure out Buck-Tick aren't singing about tea and biscuits when I listen to them. On second thought, they could probably still sing about tea and biscuits, and make it sound like a sin. But you get what I mean.

As for S.O.S., it's the distress monologue of an earthling mourning his humanity. It's great to listen to when your brain is fried trying to come up with conversation for a banquet while you hate yourself for making it an eight-course menu. It's somehow still great to listen to after two weeks on repeat even as you start to question your sanity a little bit listening to just one song decrying the meaninglessness of the human experience. Almost at the end of adding enough text for an extra third of my whole project, my frustration with understanding Starmania reminded me how much I liked Nouvelle Vague, incidentally also a French band, who specialise in soothing covers of very dark music. Quite a bit of that music is in English, so I am also able to get just how delightfully naughty it is immediately. I remembered I honestly preferred their version of Killing Moon over the original. This, still interspersed with S.O.S., was my last week of writing.

Last week, the publisher emailed to say the artist I chose is doing the cover and all I am thinking is, "Oh, dear. It's really happening isn't it?" It's exciting although mostly it is frightening. Are they sure they really wanted me to write for them; could they possibly have mistaken me for someone else; etc.

I dreamed I was attending a church service. It was sort of Anglican, sort of Methodist, sort of Quaker. The building was very grand. I was sitting next to an old lady who was being friendly and I was racking my brains to remember her name. A snarly man stood up and made a nasty comment and someone else started arguing with him and I thought, "This is horrible. I need to get back to my own Meeting House...."

Next to the church the nudists were lying on the grass, sunning themselves and indulging in rough horseplay. "I can't go that way..." I thought.

The route I took led up hill, through town. It was a very large town. I had been separated from my wife (who wasn't Ailz) and this bothered me....

I woke and there was a thunderstorm going on.

hi again! i think how i can make my layout fonts looks like here -> sarliina.livejournal.com

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The Summer Solstice- and it's going to be another in this run of very hot days.

Yesterday we drove across the County to buy the intensely local cheese they make in Rudgwick up against the Surrey border. The cheese is called Sussex Charmer and I've been eating it at the Long Man Inn. The outlet in Rudgwick has a cafe alongside where the speciality is toasted cheese and just about everything they serve is finger food. Where are the knives and forks? we wondered. But, of course there aren't any. This fed into the dream I had last night where I was working at a school and my job was to give out cutlery to the children then collect it up at the end of the meal. It was a peach of a job (though it entailed early rising) and I got on wonderfully with the kids.

Rudgwick has a church. I thought it a very average sort of a church. The pictures I took of it were very average too (the sort of uninspired, documentary pictures I've taken in a hundred different places: view of the tower from the south-west, check, close up of tower, check, view looking eastward down the nave, etc.....) so I wasn't particularly upset when I got home and found I'd been snapping away without a memory card.

We hadn't seen Joyce in something like 30 years. No problem. It could have been 30 minutes. We just carried on as we always have done. Friendship never ends (that's Yeats again) or as I said to her (and it's one of my favourite things to say) "Time is an illusion."

She's been visiting Eastbourne with a bunch of "wrinklies" (her word) on a coach holiday. Yesterday she spent the morning with us at the Meeting House. Our Quakers were lovely with her. They're a friendly crowd.

She's had good weather for it. Temperatures in the mid 20s.

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hi! anyone know how i add header and background image for this layout --> https://shinemagic.dreamwidth.org/2821.html?style=mine#cutid1

I've had Maxwell's Silver Hammer popping into my head for weeks now.

It's a song the other Beatles hated- mainly because McCartney took it so seriously and made them work overtime to get it right.

They thought it was a throwaway bit of Granny music, but it ain't. For one thing it's about a mass murderer, for another it treats its subject with unbecoming levity. It's nihilistic but cheerful with it- in the best tradition of Mr Punch and the English music hall.

And this morning I stumbled across a piece of info that pulled everything together:

Macca had been taking an interest in Alfred Jarry, That's why "pataphysical"- a Jarry coinage- crops up in the first verse.

Jarry, you may or may not know, wrote a play called Ubu Roi- about an obscene little fat man who murders his way to the throne of Poland. It is absurd, scatalogical and an affront to all the decencies. Yeats was at the first night in 1896, cheering it on, but then went away and was sad because he knew it meant the end of the Celtic Twilight and all that greenery-yallery stuff that was his stock in trade and he'd have to toughen up if he wanted to survive in the new artistic environment. "After us," he wrote, "The savage gods."

Ever since he erupted onto the political scene I've thought of Donald Trump as Jarryesque. He's the living image of Pere Ubu. The savage god come into his own at last, or- Yeats again- the rough beast prophesied in "The Second Coming."

So here's the whole lineage: Mr Punch, Pere Ubu, Maxwell Edison, Donald Trump....

Maxwell's Silver Hammer is a song for our times.

Picture Diary 95

1. You called?

2. What are you doing here?

3. Through the Stargate

4. Friends

5. Treat it with care

6. Lotus

A few more days and we'll be half way through 2025. Six more months and we'll be in the second quarter of the century.....

The 20th century was a drag. At least towards the end it was. Year after year after year- and the Millenium still such a long way off! As Ray Davies wrote at some point during that slow, slow process, "I'm a 20th century man but I don't want to die here...."

But now the 21st century is flying past.....

"Should I know any of these people?" asked Ailz from the next room

"Which people?"

"The people in the photograph on the mantlepiece."

"There is no photograph on the mantlepiece."

"Yes there is. Come and see...."

And indeed there was. I hadn't put it there, Ailz hadn't put it there. I asked Carolina and she said it had been there when she entered the room and she'd carefully dusted round it.

Here's the photograph. I knew the image but I hadn't known we possessed this particular print. It shows a bunch of young people in fancy dress posing with some elders who have moved beyond that kind of frivolity. The only ones I can certainly identify are my grandmother and her three sisters- Ethel, Kathleen and Joan. Violet, my granny, is in the back row just off centre holding a parasol. My guess is she and the other parasol carriers are dressed as the "three little maids from school" from Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado. Joan, my favourite great aunt, is the kiddie in the foreground in the feathery hat holding what I think is a toy trumpet.

("For, God's sake, someone take it off her. She'll deafen us all!")

Did granny put the photo on the mantlepiece? Did Joan? Did they conspire together? What are they trying to say?

That they're still around?

Well, of course they are.

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mokie

January 2025

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Base style: Abstractia by chiming
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Page generated Monday, 30 June 2025 01:49 pm

About dream/reading tags

y-* tags categorize dreams.

For types: beyond the obvious, there are dreamlets (very short dreams), stubs (fragment/outline of a partially-lost dream), gnatter (residual impression of a lost dream).

For characters: there are roles (characters fitting an archetype), symbols (characters as symbols), and sigils (recurring figures with a significance bigger than a single dream's role/symbolism).

x-* tags categorize books.

Material is categorized primarily by structure, style and setting. If searching for a particular genre, look for the defining features of that genre, e.g. x-form:nonfic:bio, x-style:horror, x-setting:dystopian.

people I read

Reading

A Kindly Light Amid The Encircling Gloom

Bits And Pieces

Improving My Posture

Picture Diary 96

The Future Of Movies

Not With a Bang....

The Eastbourne Open

Golden

The strange sound of writing

Back To The Meeting House

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Sussex Charmer

After 30 Years

Adding a otf font to a pre-existing theme.

(no subject)

The Savage God

Picture Diary 95

Unreal

It's A Mystery

Profile

January 2025

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