Eulogy

My bike is trashed.

There's a crack in the top tube--brought on my the stress I impart to the frame--and, unnoticed, it has been spreading and spreading in a circle around the tube. And I wondered why it was creaking so... It's about 85% of the way around. I noticed it today on the way to work. If the top tube failed in transit, it would probably have hurt me a lot. I love my bike. I will miss my bike. But I'm glad I found out it was broken the easy way, and not on my twenty-five mile ride of two weeks ago, or my drunken hill sprint of last night, or the forty-mile ride I was going to take in two days.

It gave me what it had to give, and now I will ruthlessly strip it down to components and rebuild around another frame. Which was this bike's genesis--my cranks, gears, stem, headset, and rims are from the bike before that. I'd be tempted to call this my Neurath boat, but a frame failure is not something I can really rebuild in transit.

Rhetorical Device is, as always, apt.

I remember it in building, I remember hauling it across the country, and I am thankful it took me to every street in a mile radius of my house, and more than half the streets in the city. It built my calves and whetted my appetite for long-distance bike travel. It will live on.

Requiescat in pace.

I rode to Davenport today—coastal route 1, beautiful scenery, light traffic (heading out of town at eight in the morning is a good idea), little bothersome wind, and something I think was a bobcat.

My little skinny-tire single speed is becoming more and more dear to me. Even though I made it through the whole ride uneventfully and then tore a valve stem off topping off my tires at the bike shop next to where I work. The more practice I have fixing flats, though, the less of a bother it’ll be when it happens at the side of the road. And it probably will and some point.

21.5 miles from 8:05 to 9:55. At that rate (plus some stops) it would take me eight hours to get the eighty-odd miles from Santa Cruz to San Francisco. Today will end up being my first twenty-five mile day—possibly more than I’ve biked some weeks—so there’s a way to go on the training front. Before I end up trying that, I’ll need some synthetic socks. And, yes, bike shorts of some fashion. Next step: my house to the San Mateo county line past Waddell Creek? That’s thirty-eight miles there and back, give or take…

[Slightly later edit. I’ll need vast quantities of food to do so. I cannot stop eating at the moment.]

...and in the three weeks since that last post, I've biked over a hundred miles, all within two, two and a half miles of my house.

Biking Santa Cruz update: I've biked ~99% of the streets within a mile of my house and probably 75% within a mile and a half. It's getting harder and harder for me to get to places from my house that I haven't been to yet. Seem some interesting things, but my body (and bike) are hanging in there despite the hills.

Of course, I have my own reasons for obsessive amounts of biking. Add to this the fact that my dog died this morning. RIP Mickey.

For no sane reason...

I just biked up Western Drive...in the middle of the night because it was there.

Of course, now I'm shaky and nauseated. And my fingers, neck, and lower back are sore.

But I biked from sea level up to the USCS arboretum on my single-speed without stopping. Gotta be a couple hundred feet, anyway. [Edit: Research tells me I went about 320 vertical feet up in a mile and a half. That's only halfway to upper campus. Better keep trainin'.]

God, I'm going to hurt in the morning. I hurt now.

Mourning.

I'm undergoing a pretty big change right now--the reasons I had for being where I am are being taken away. Perhaps that's too cruel--maybe those reasons weren't particularly hardy to begin with, say--but right now I do feel somewhat adrift.

Still writing, though. And my binoculars came, though I haven't had much time to use them of late.

Everyone's warm regards have been incredibly helpful.

Cheers.

There have been...issues with internet access.

Nevertheless, I am fascinated with Nick's new project. I do adore the pokings-around in natural places sprouting up in otherwise built-up locations. I just like knowing my surroundings in a more complete way--schematic maps and road maps are just so incomplete.

Also, I'm a fan of birding, and will be able to do more of that once my binoculars arrive from Kansas.

Alternate-day posting comes to a near-crashing halt.

Closing Friday, opening Saturday, loads of biking and bike-tricking-out...and I am beat.

Today I wrote nothing. But I did swap a bike chain out on my lunch break.

I love the internet.

Stalactites and stalagmites? Oh, that's so yesterday. Seriously, it's nice to see other people interested in the same random thing, even if no one seems to know why there's a difference. Merriam-Webster tells me the words date back to New Latin in the 1660s or 1670s, and so they were probably coined for someone's science research...but my inclination to look wanes beyond that.

Which is a good thing, really, since I've been distracted by sketch comedy.

Icicles

Been tinkering with the old and tinkering with the new, and came across the odd fact that Czech apparently has two words for icicle, neither of which is etymologically related to the word for ice. There's one from a word possibly meaning "drip" or "flow," and another related to the word "roof."

That got me thinking about the English word icicle, which seemed odder to me the more I looked at it. -icle is familiar to me as a Latinate diminuitive suffix (test-, veh-, etc.) but ice isn't a Latinate word, it's Germanic.

Turns out, according to Merriam-Webster, that the -icle part comes from Middle English ikel from Old English gicel, meaning icicle; cognate to a German ihilla with the same meaning that's no longer extant in Modern German, which has, if I'm not mistaken, Eiszapf "ice-spike."

So somehow English ended up with a Latin-seeming but very Germanic word for icicle that means "ice-icicle." Presumably the -ikel lost some of the semantics of icicle itself and was strengthened by the first "ice." I suppose I would guess that it was due to interference from the Latin suffix that confused me.

Next post: how did stalactite and stalagmite end up with their roof-floor differentiations in meaning, since they're from the same damn Greek verb?

Another Godforsaken Translation Update

I've scrabbled my way through another three thousand transcribed words of Mr. Mundstock. Twenty more handwritten pages to go--both sides--maybe twelve thousand words in total.

I've reformatted a whole load of fables (why didn't I do it properly to begin with? I must love three-key commands to center and right-justify) and edited maybe half the understories. (I still hate that decision, though I do like the way these stories are coming together. Undertales? Sub-stories? Fairy tale-lets?)

I'm drawing up plans for Almanac, and poking around with a bit of handwritten translation there, while resisting the urge to get bogged down in planning my own Hipster PDA.

This [title] is not true [for me the day I posted it. It is a good read, however.

Progress?

Progress. The rust is coming off the wheels. I'm editing Capek fables, transcribing Fuks' Mundstock, and drawing up crazy plans for a calendar-cycle collection of Capek's for 2009. And then another for 2010. Maybe.

I can't be thinking about soup right now.

STATUS REPORT:

Fuks:

Burner of Corpses. Farthest along. Revised multiple times. Still needs work. The self-indulgent footnotes could go too. (Anyone ever get through this thing?)
Mr. Theodor Mundstock. Version one handwritten. Probably four-sevenths typed up.
The Way to the Promised Land. Transcribed. No thorough editing.
My Black-Haired Brothers. Transcribed. At least one major overhaul. Haven't touched it otherwise since December of '06.
Death of a Guinea Pig. Oh right now I'm not even sure.


Čapek:

Fables and Undertales: version 1 online. Editing proceeding sporadically.
Almanac Faint scribblings. Perhaps a next project? A premature assessment. Why would I even think of a new project right now?

I'm sure it's a fairly common thing, but on some levels I'm very common.

This blog's up out of semi-retirement to wish one and all a happy Leap Day.

Everyone enjoy their March 0th.

New 2008 project.

Resolutions, incremental actions, and all that. I'll update it until it's done. I think it's the first time this has ever been done in English. Well, for a theoretically large audience, anyway.

Two momentous bar-going birthday parties in three days, the latter on Christmas.

I'm taking a bit of a break.

Thought I'd post once in December. No real content here, move along.

My Slavicist hobby continues...

I've recently read my first book in Slovak, and think it would make for an excellent translation into English.

Granted, "The Old Man and the Ocean" is a bit of a clunky title, and "Ernest Hemingway" doesn't seem like a Slovak name, but it was a compelling read nevertheless.

New hobby: trying to learn things about Sorbian!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

...oh, is that all?

One earthquake under my belt, anyway. Well, one California one.

Pro pána krále!

Burner of Corpses was just over one hundred and thirty pages. I translated a first draft in nine and a half months. Six pages was probably my maximum for any one day.

I've done that amount of new writing in the last seventeen days. Twenty-eight more pages to go. I think I can be done in the next forty-eight hours.

Pan Theodor Mundstock

So this novel, Fuks' first, had been the bane of my existence.

Not really, but it certainly was a non-starter.

I tried a hand at it in October 2005, after I got done transcribing Burner of Corpses. Got a few pages into it.

Didn't pick it up again until October 2006. Did maybe a page, couldn't even make my way out of the first chapter. I put it on my to-do list for 2007 back in January, after a whole lot of other stuff (The Way to the Promised Land, some reading, lots of transcribing.) Did the aforementioned stuff, and then stalled.

Wrote part of one sentence on August 17. Part of the same sentence on August 19. Finished the sentence on September 1st. Managed to hack my way into Chapter 3--twenty-four pages, all told--right before I moved.

I picked it up again a week and a half ago, figuring if I did a page and a half a day I might get done by the end of the calendar year. But then it became my job for four hours a day. Eighty pages done since last Monday--eighty pages in eleven days. Forty-seven of those since Monday morning. That's four days. I've broken my own record for productivity, I think, five or six times, and certainly all four days this work week, and am about to write through my second pen.

Seventy-eight pages to go. If I keep this pace up, I'll have done a quarter of everything I've thus far translated in three weeks' time.

Wow.

"Instantly there was a racket that sounded to the keen ears of the bloodhound like a police dog being forcibly dressed in women's clothes by a leopard, and that is precisely what it was."

James Thurber, Further Fables For Our Time.


I love Thurber, and not just because of The Thirteen Clocks He's strongly reminiscent of Čapek. Except less horticulturally inclined, I suppose, but no one's perfect.

In California, unemployed, translating up a storm, &c.

We don't know where we're landing yet, but we're definitely taking the leap. Random errands and packing today.

Montpelier--->Burlington today.
Burlington--->Ann Arbor (we think) tomorrow.

And points west.

Sorry if I've been hard to get ahold of. It's going to get slightly harder (goodbye my cell phone). I'm gonna keep writing, both for myself and for others.

To work.

Pan Theodor Mundstock

I translated originals for the first time in over five months today, rattling off a couple of pages of Pan Theodor Mundstock, and did some editing on a collection of short stories I finished transcribing, oh, a year ago?

Progress is being made. I'd like to have edited and formatted versions of the two collections of short stories, as well as a second computer draft of the novella I've just finished. All while continuing to chip away at the largest project I've yet undertaken.

This illustrates some of the problem of a massive quixotic project composed of several slightly-less massive projects running in parallel. And highlights the important fact that you really can't do multiple things at once.

No way out but through, however. We'll see what September brings.

Wheat and chaff

Casting a ruthless eye to one's library, especially in the light of a very long move, leads to some interesting discussions. What complicates things is that there are two conversations at work--what can I get rid of wholesale (and the concomitant question of "how?"), there is also "what can I take with me?" The results have been...interesting. Mostly it's a matter of giving up, grudgingly, some side interests. I don't need seven books right now on German, I need an actual desire to learn to read German.

I need one translation project text and that's it. In May of 2005 I was translating Czech with a book, my dictonary, a red pen, and the back of an e-ticket confirmation in the Vienna airport. (I still have those integrated into the notebook I'd run out of space in, naturally.) I don't now need three Čápek plays, say, even if they are Czech postwar editions, even if one is R.U.R, which I might want to read at some stage, it's just distraction. I hope this streamlining is good for productivity. (Now, don't think I'm trashing these other texts, oh no. They'll be kept.)

I guess the more I look at it, the more it's how many books I take with me, versus how many I leave behind, with an eye, to borrow a phrase, towards radical parcimony. I'm even toying (halfheartedly) with the idea of leaving my giant Czech dictionaries at home, though that would leave me at the mercy of the Internet for my word-finding needs. I might even leave some Fuks behind. That's unlikely too, but this feels like a healthy streamlining instead of a purge.

Ten more days of work.

EDIT: I think I can get everything I want to take with me, books-wise, into a single paper box. It's hurt, and it will hurt, but there's a lot of good in there. Nick, heads up that you may be getting another box of mailed books, if you're so inclined.

Finished with two things...

I put in three and a half weeks' notice at the job today, and then came home, and, after some desultory packing, finished transcribing The Way to the Promised Land . Two short story collections, the novel, and now this novella. About 160,000 words, all told.

It's a start.

If it weren't for punctuated equi,li?bri;um...

I was going to follow that title up with "there'd be no equilibrium at all" but then realized that didn't make sense. It's the equilibrium-rupturing what's important. It's the punctation that's important, for many reasons besides separating us from the e e cummingses of the world.

I'm nine thousand words into an August transcribing jag. ( The Way to The Promised Land emerges from an inchoate state) Three months of negotiations with management have left me itching to take on a landlord who is acting both childlishly and illegally tomorrow. The lease is up in three weeks, and California beckons shortly after.

So how much can I get done before then?

To work.

You know those Germans...

So evidently the middle English had a word for Prussia, a variant of the then-Middle French Pruce (currently Prusse, if my high-school French hasn't mouldered away completely). This variant was Spruce.

Whence the name of the genus of tree (whose leaves provide an emergency source of Vitamin C), and (I am given to understand) the verb and adjective, after an apparently trim and tidy "Spruce leather." Those Germans were stereotyped for their meticulous cleanliness even then, it seems.

I'm seven thousand words in to August's transcribing binge, and brought my Czech-English dictionary home from work, where it had languished lo these several months.

I daresay I'm sprucing my writing up a bit.

UE 203 contract negotiations finished--ratification on Monday!

So I've been engaged in contract negotiations: what are our rights and protections as a union? How much money's on the table, and how do we spread it around?

After three and a half hours on Tuesday and Wednesday, almost seven on Thursday (until 11:30) and then another six yesterday (9-3) we finally hammered out a tentative agreement. It's a two year contract, we kept fully-funded single-premium health care for the life of the contract, and got some nice raises this year, and at least cost-of-living increases (if not more) for those who stick around.

Ugh. Trying to revise and update a seven-tier wage scale with a bunch of different steps with people placed on those steps in different ways back when it was a different scale the year before and trying to figure out contract language to deal with all the random situations people have worked their way into.

But we had a good committee, and no one has to deal with this for another 21 months or so. Now we just sit around and watch the daily machinations of store life show us where all the loopholes are.

It's good to be done.

A second post?

Well, it is a day off now after all. After some interesting-ish bouts with productivity, I may have inadvertently stumbled on a way to get some things done.

My afternoon:

1-2:50. Internet-based wasteland. Although I supposed I did archive a bunch of e-mail. Better strike that second sentence and refer to the first.
2:45. Mix small vodka tonic. Add ice. Have preliminary sip.
2:46-3:05. Shave, clean bathroom, make bed, shake out dog bed, wash dishes, put away dishes, rinse recyclable bottles, wipe down counter, finish getting dressed, hang up some clothes.
Now: Back to computer, lightly sipping drink.

This seems like something it would be easy to abuse (jusht one more and then I'll shweep the kitshen, I shwear!) but it seems to be working so far.

Yes, it's a worthless blog post, but it's something, and that, I feel, must be better than the nothing that was up here. Hmm. Maybe I can type a thousand words before my ice melts...

Apologies and explanations...

To Jef and Jesse, I offer apologies for the lack of a letter. It's been a good summer, but times have been trying of late, what with the increasing stress of negotiations and the summer thunderclap that was the death of an old friend which has hit me harder than I would have thought possible.

I cannot write more right now. Nevertheless, I remain optimistic. My grandmother would have told me that everything would look better after a good night's sleep. And I look to get up swinging in the morning.

Ars longa, vita breva and all that.

To work.

Let's try something

You write me a comment and I'll mail a letter within two weeks of getting your address. The catch: you'll have to send something back within two weeks of getting something.

Also, am struggling with productivity on the Czech front. But one thing at a time.

First the cell phone...

...and now I have my own MacBook too. Mmmmmm, laptop-y goodness. I'm trying to integrate all my writing projects (like the ones I've posed piecemeal to this blog) into nicely organized Scrivener files. (Nick, do you have the full version? Is it worth it?) and beginning to try to conceive of hosting some of my increasing collection of Fuksiana online.

Also, random music uploading and my third Finnish lesson. I suppose I must loves me my adessive case, but I mean, come on. Finnish has such a multiplicity of these things and the adessive has to be a locative "on" case, the instrumental, and the basis for indicating possession (no verb "to have") all at once? And if I have to say Mannerheimintiellä (On Mannerheim Avenue) one more time....

If I...

If I awoke on New Year's Day as the Lord God--no, wait, that wouldn't work, the Lord God doesn't sleep--then if I awoke on New Year's Day as St. Peter, I would say: "What should I do this year for those irascible Czechoslovaks? They are such heretics, and sometimes--blast them--entirely ungrateful; but there must be some good in them. I think that their weather is too extreme; maybe that is why they are so cantankerous and stubborn. It is hot and stormy in the summer, so they grumble irritably; in the winter it's so freezing that everyone thinks only of themselves, acting like icicles to others. The climate does that. And so they don't like anything; winter is too cold and summer too hot; if something is black, it is too black for them, and if something is white, it is too white for them; never in their life is anything just right. They are accustomed to this from this weather of theirs. Wait just a moment, you tricksters, I'll show you; I'll grant you a nice bit of summer, like by the seaside; I'll give you mild winters, with snow, naturally, a little bit of snow is a good thing, and comfortable summers with sun and plenty of moisture--it would be deviltry if I didn't alter it for you. If you were milder to yourselves, your weather would be nicer; but if you don't want to start yourselves, I will do it for you. Let the Lord God help you in the New Year!

If I awoke on New Year's Day as prime minister, I would wonder greatly at that and stoke my chin, at a loss. (Aha, I would say, I have to shave.) When after a while I got used to the miraculous change in my existence, I would stay in bed for a few more minutes, as I had done hitherto as an ordinary citizen, but I wouldn't go back to sleep. I would ponder. "My word, we have the anniversary of the republic to do this year. I know what; I'll call the ministries together and say: "Boys, last year we presided over the monument to Austria; this year we have to preside over the monument to the Republic. Look, we have to put things together somehow; left and right camps, it's for the birds; the republic, it's like--a circle; how can there be a left and right wing of a circle?" Then a number of other arguments would occur to me, but I would put those off until the ministries arrive; then I would get up, making sure--for luck in the new year--that I got up on the right foot.

If I awoke on New Year's Day as the Lord Mayor of the city of Prague, I would gaze a while into the far future and then I would say: "It seems to me that that that Čapek is right; they really should have started in with that green ring around Prague. When I imagine those beautiful lanes...and the clearings for the children...and little groves here and there...well then, let's get to it."

If I awoke on New Year's Day as a millionaire and a man of the ruling class, I would say: "It's already 'twenty-eight? God, how time flies! Ah well, this year I've got to do something with my money, got to set something up in memory of or establish something, as long as it's worthwhile. It's worth some thought, but the money will be there; we will take care of that.

If I awoke on New Year's Day as a twenty year-old, I'd turn over to the other side and keep sleeping; I'd have lots to think about after New Year's Eve.

If I awoke on New Year's Eve as my puppy, I would scratch myself a bit with my back leg (having some disorderly flea on the nape of my neck) and then I would say: "This year I won't anger my master any more, I will go outside nicely, I won't scatter bones on the stairs, I will keep clean, I won't sleep on the couch, I won't run through every row in the garden. For that I would receive a cube of sugar and be immeasurably overjoyed with life.

/1928/

Karel Čapek, Almanac (posthumous collection of short writings)

It has been brought to my attention...

that my earlier post's tone may have been a bit on the confusing side.

I wasn't originally thrilled with the horribleness of Simmons' offer, but had a series of good conversations with a number of people. I accepted but deferred to the fall of 2008. This opens up options to look around--one of my new goals may be URI's library program, with its regional New England tuition. Also, it probably behooves me greatly to volunteer at libraries and look at scholarships and that sort of thing.

So Boston not so much in the foreseeable future, and maybe not at all--but that's probably for the best.

As for the moving, I've moved across town and in with someone. We're here through the summer, and then we'll see where we get taken.

It's good that the first has finally come; the mania of writing and deciding and moving was uplifting, yet draining.

Punctuated equilibrium, punctuated thoughts

I will not be attending Simmons in the fall; I am deferring. Not that I've done that yet. Though it needs to be in their hands by the end of the week. (This is not a Bad Thing; it is money-related, and hopefully opens doors for me to go work in libraries and research my options and apply for scholarships. Hell, I got into one of the best programs in the country, so I still have that going for me.)

I am planning a garden. Radishes will abound. So will weeds, probably. We shall see if I start anything from seed. I should do it soon. Peppers, maybe?

After a month's hiatus, I started translating again. Thirty-eight days straight of productivity later, I have finished another first draft. (This probably has something to do with my blogging absence--I was scared of jinxing the streak) I am up to a novel, a novella, and two collections of short stories. 150,000 words, maybe, since November of 2004. I don't want to lose my short-term momentum. I guess the editing pen must come out again.

I'm on the negotiations committee at work for full-contact, full-contract negotiations. Preliminary meetings are a bitch.

Finnish? Better not ask. (Damn, those lessons are expensive--I've only taken two, and am having fun, but haven't the time to study vocabulary. Or haven't been making enough time.)

I'm moving at the end of the week, too.

As easy as yksi, kaksi, kolme...

It's been a positive week. Light travel (mainly to see kin), lots of sitting around writing (getting back into the translating thing, hope my first-quarter deadlines for Andrew's Czech studies can be met), lots of nice, relaxing time...

And I started my private Finnish lessons today, occasional semi-outrageous expense be damned.

Now I just wish there were a Finnish etymological dictionary within several hundred miles of here. Not that I have a tendency to get ahead of myself or anything.

Näkemiin,

"Dear Andrew,

It is my pleasure to inform you that the Admission Committee for the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College has admitted you to the master's degree program for fall 2007."

So there's that, at least. Also, I'm on vacation for a week, and there's two feet of snow on the ground. It's been quite the last few days.

Revitalized

Nuts to all that 2 am nonsense. I'm taking the Finnish lessons (we're working on scheduling), and though I spilled a drink in my bag, causing the cheap fountain pen ink to run an inch at the centerline on my first draft of "The Way to The Promised Land," I'm off to the coffeeshop now to begin reconstructive work.

Oh, plus, I did the Penguin Plunge again. Lessee if I can rustle up any pictures.

Not a good line of thought to be having at two in the morning...

"Anyway, I was reading this arcane edition of this rather arcane mediaeval book, and I looked up, and suddenly I realised that the literary world in which I was immersed bore no relation to the one around me. It wasn't just that it was old. If I'd been reading Hamlet there might have been one or two people in the carriage who could relate. Sometimes you see pretty UCL or Goldsmith's girls reading Eliot and the like. Vergil, Beowulf, Chaucer, fine. But Reynard the Fox? At that moment I felt trapped, as if in a bubble or cocoon. I was overcome with the utter irrelevance of my intellectual life."

Italics mine. From this VUnEx post.

Replace "Reynard the Fox" with "translations of Ladislav Fuks and musings about private introductory Finnish lessons" and we're where I am right now. I would try to be defiantly proud, but that would just seem to be more isolating.

Ach běda mi!

Quick question...

I sign up to take private Finnish lessons, even if they're somewhat expensive, right? I mean, money spent on education and all...

A short referát--Myši Natálie Mooshabrové

I am finally making more of a good-faith effort to read my collection of Fuks, both as a way to assimilate his oeuvre prepatory to future translation efforts and just as an attempt to keep myself in Czech input. I can stil read, and, from what I can tell by talking to myself, my spoken skills aren't going away as quickly as I might fear.

I've recently read 1970's Myši Natálie Mooshabrové, (Natálie Mooshabrová's Mice). It's a change of pace thematically for me, as there is no perspective on the encroaching Holocaust, (as in My Black-Haired Brothers, Burner of Corpses, The Way to the Promised Land, and parts of Death of a Guinea Pig). The sense of horror and alienation in a confusing and ill-defined world remains, however. We are placed somewhere in a great Czech-speaking city, a sort of alternate Prague, fleshed out only with a few almost-real placenames, in a world where flights to the moon are becoming commonplace. Even people's names add to the disorientation--the title character's long dead husband was called Medard Mooshaber and their children are Wezr and Nabule. The police drop in unannounced, every civil servant in the city is evidently independently preparing a Dies irae, strange things occur in the cemetery Natálie works in, seedy characters appear and dissapear, and the crowds in the streets gather for a reckoning and a long-practiced requiem. (I don't normally talk like this, do I?)

And this is about all anyone will get to read of it in English for some time, unless someone picks this up as a project before me, which I simultaneously would embrace and fear; it's a lengthy work, and a bit farther down on my translating list, after the novella I'm currently working on, and then his first novel, Mr. Theodor Munstock. I mean, it's not like there's just a Czech version; I've definitely found Hungarian and German translations, and there might be an Italian--I've seen it referenced by name, at any rate. Maybe 2009 or 2010, the way I've been going, for a second draft?

Follies of scheduling.

It must have seemed like a good idea six months ago when I was at the dentist's, scheduling this morning's appointments. 8 am on a Monday's perfect, right? It's not as if I knew i'd be taking a job which required me to work until nearly midnight.

Three hours' sleep? Severe wind chill advisory? A half-hour walk uphill? I am there. Ah, the things we do in the name of oral hygiene.

...pace Nate, but this...

...this is the real problem with Wikipedia.

Trash fiction alert!

In lieu of actual content, say, about how weird Little Children is, or about translation, or how much I seem to suck at cribbage, how about a list of Clive Cussler books and whether or not I have read them!

The Dirk Pitt Canon:

(X) The Mediterranean Caper
(X) Iceberg
(X) Raise the Titanic!
(X) Vixen 03
(X) Night Probe!
( ) Pacific Vortex
(X) Deep Six [I'd forgotten I'd read this]
(X) Cyclops [Ditto--though it involves a shootout on the moon!]
(X) Treasure
(X) Dragon
(X) Sahara
(X) Inca Gold
(X) Shock Wave
(X) Flood Tide
(X) Atlantis Found
(X) Valhalla Rising
(X) Trojan Odyssey
( ) Black Wind
( ) Treasure of Khan

Kurt Austin adventures (with Paul Kemprecos)
(X) Serpent
( ) Blue Gold
(X) Fire Ice
( ) White Death
( ) Lost City
( ) Polar Shift

I have read none of the Oregon Files adventures, of which there are three or four, nothing with Dirk Pitt, Jr. (the last two in the Dirk Pitt Canon--ew) and none of the nonfiction, though there's a copy of The Sea Hunters at North Country Books.

But I have a copy of Iceberg. [Edit: Which I have read! Outrageous. I only found this out after I logged off and went to fall asleep reading it.] It's funny that I've never gotten to Pacific Vortex, given that it's first in the chronology of the canon. Plus I have a copy in Czech. *shrugs*

Schedule Hacking

I've spent most of the last three months closing the store and getting to bed sometime between two and five in the morning. The work's OK, but it's wearing. I was up at 6:30 for the first time I can remember in a long while today; took a little walk just after sunrise, had a bit of coffee (I think I managed to quit that again, but we'll see) and some breakfast, and am enjoying puttering around in the early morning. Sure, I have to work in seven hours, but there should be time for some more accomplishment before my inevitable nap.

It's fun to play around with scheduling, given that a few months of sameness makes you think that's the only schedule you've ever had.

Now that's why they play the game.

I just watched Boise State blow an 28-10 lead and throw an interception returned for a TD with 1:25 to go to go down 35-28 against Oklahoma. Then on 4th and 18, they tied the game with a touchdown [and PAT] on the HOOK AND LADDER with seven sconds left, and after Oklahoma scored on the first play of OT, they drove for a touchdown, and then went for, and scored the game-winning two-point conversion on a STATUE OF LIBERTY PLAY. I swear I could see Bob Stoops bursting blood vessels; go mid-majors!

Glad I watched, and glad I got some translating done before I really started to pay attention to what was going on. This helps keep me in line with my scarcely-articulated resolutions.

[EDIT: Also, the Boise State running back just proposed to his girlfriend, his school's head cheerleader, on national TV after scoring that winning 2-point conversion. I mean, no pressure or anything, right?]

10...9...8...7...

Happy New Year, one and all. Mine was exceptional.

If This Isn't For You, Feel Free to Disregard It

a) Disambiguating Gemini:

Castor is on the side of Capella; Pollux is on the side of Procyon. Easy, no? Capella's the main star in Auriga, the Charioteer, that's way up high and we haven't really gotten to yet. Procyon's in the Little Dog, which looks even less like a dog than the Big Dog. (But both look way more like dogs than The Hunting Dogs look like a whole group of them, but that's another season's constellations.)

[I really shouldn't do my observations and attempts at astrophotography (cursèd low batteries) without shoes on, though. Woo for Alphard in Hydra, though. Next step: using the winter hexagon to locate things outside of the winter hexagon!]

b) My 'Complete Saki' lies, unfortunately.

Ah well. One can't have everything, even in massive omnibus editions. "A Shot in the Dark" and the Clovis story are about the only semi-spectacular ones, in that order.

"My tender one," said Mr. Kopfrkingl...

It was two years ago today that I sat down with a now-battered notebook, a work of Ladislav Fuks', my dictionaries, and a pen. Two hundred scribbled words later, I had started the process of turning his life's published work into English.

I had done some tentative scribblings earlier. I would also do but a [tentative/halting?] heavily-annotated chapter and a half of the work (rework later?) and then let it sit for almost six months, but since that was the try that ended up taking, and since I was thoughtful enough to put the date at the top, that's the anniversary I have.

I can't remember what got me started that day, and those first couple of pages have seen more heavy revision than others, but I now have a sixth or seventh draft of Burner of Corpses and am editing the second drafts of the short story collections Death of a Guinea Pig and My Black-Haired Brothers. I believe I've also got a first-draft first chapter of Mr. Theodor Mundstock sitting in a notebook upstairs as well. This time last year, I'd barely had a second or third draft of the first one; I'm fitfully picking up steam, it seems. The more the merrier.

Goals for Year Three? [Purely as it pertains to translating]. I'd like to have all three of the ones I'm done now in servicable form (read--fifth draft or more), with Mundstock and the novella The Way to the Promised Land at least transcribed from their [as-yet nonexistent] handwritten first drafts. There's enough to do that running out of things is the least of my worries.

I'm thankful for projects, and for all the people who've had a kind or kindly critical word to say along the way.

Only one way to move forward, though.

To work.

November rain?

Two-thirds of the month has gone by and I haven't listened to that song yet?

I must be happy.

I haven't listened to it even in jest?

I must be busy, too.

My sixteen-of-nineteen day span at work ends tomorrow, and then I'm skipping town to catch up with my roots for a Thanksgiving in the Slovak enclave in southwestern Massachusetts.

A je po říjnu...

Another month past. It has been brought to my attention that others don't necessary use the month as a basic unit of time insofar as conceptualizing projects or lenghty events, preferring weeks or seasons. It's the month through and through for me, regardless of such fripperies as details. March was Buster Keaton, April was housesitting and translating (right up to finishing a collection of short stories at noon on April 31st, as I redubbed the first of May) and September was mono. October...well, they don't all have to be categorized.

Have been academic of late, acquiring books on Old English vocabulary, the dawn of the Slavic languages, and an etymological dictionary of German, which means I can spend my time doing things like discovering case relics in English (whilom, the more the merrier), smiling confidently about my knowledge of Proto-Slavic morphology as reflected in Czech (my agricultural vocabulary is a bit lacking) and finally confirming over that nagging suspicion that the suffixes -heit and -(ig)keit were the same thing originally. And cognate to -hood.

In other wrds, I'm reasonably happy. What's more, I have an application in for immersion studies at Middlebury next fall, and hope to be working on masters applications before the month is out.

Halfway there...

I have been a fan of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers since...at least 1988, those being the earliest Topps cards I have. [well, at least the ones I got myself at the time. Yes, I still have a bunch of football cards. They're in a box in the closet somewhere.]

There was some long story here, involving years of fandom when they were terrible through to dressing up and going nuts when they won a Super Bowl, but I just saw the highlights of their 62-yard game-winning field goal, and there's not much else I can say.

I almost stopped picking them for the first time ever in my father's football pool last week, but thought better of it. Halfway back to .500, boys!

Initial squu-

I was reading through The Dain Curse on a car trip this weekend, and was struck by an unorthodox spelling Dashiell Hammett employs.

"My pants stuck disagreeably to my chilly legs. Water squunched in my torn shoes." (p.220 of "The Complete Five Novels," ch. 13 of the Curse)

I was immediately reminded of a line from the end of Thurber's The 13 Clocks, an all time favorite. "Hark stepped on something that squutched beneath his foot and flobbed against the wall." (p. 124)

Hitherto that word had stuck out and bothered me, occurring as it does on the last page, but as Thurber uses a lot of nonce words (flobbed, for instance, among many other joys) I had thought nothing more of it.

Now we've got ourselves a phenomenon. Upon doing a little research, I find "sqush" and "squush" to be variant forms of "squish" in my big Random House dictionary, and google gives a decent lot of results for "squunched." But this is something I had previously thought only a Thurber thing.

I can idly come up with a few attempts at explanation. Perhaps it's an attempt to render a lack of lip-rounding. I can get the same pronunciation of initial squu- in the second syllable of "sesquipedalian," indicating it may be an attempt to contrast the close-central-unrounded from the mid [i.e., the standard schwa]. Either that, or it's an attempt to avoid the orthographic assumptions of rounding that a double-O would imply .

It could also be a simple case of wanting to put a u after the obligatory qu- cluster. Or a simple visual expedient for dealing with onomatopoeia. How much "-quu-" do we get to deal with in English, after all? Is "squished," "squushed," and "squooshed" a minimal triplet for people?


As for the Hammett, I'm happy I kept Dain last. It wasn't bad, but I can see where he considered it his worst. I'm now re-re-reading Red Harvest for extra fun before I have to return the omnibus to the library. Then I may re-read my copy of The Glass Key.

Sarcophageal Synchronicity

I've talked about it before, but the Elmwood cemetery, halfway between my house and downtown, is in terrible shape. The city replaced the chain-link fence I used to run my hand along as a child during a gentrification project a few years ago, but from the first row things are going awry. Sinkholes, fallen stones, illegibility, weeds, odd lumps in the terrain...it's bizarre. Well, not really; it's an old cemetery, I suppose, and there've been maybe a dozen people interred there in the last fifty years. It's been niggling at me for most of my life in a very low-key way.

So I walk around there today on my walk from downtown, and decide to go back home and get my camera to come back and take a few pictures, wondering if there are such things as a cemetery manifest and if anyone else cares about this. Is reconstruction even possible? I see two women walking around with a binder, and it turns out less than twenty-four hours ago a story was printed about these two women and their decision to, well, clean up the cemetery.

I introduced myself and we chatted for a while about the sorry state of the cemetery, the city's $300,000 fence, and how the city doesn't want anyone to see the list of occupancy, as it were, because the paper is too fragile. So next spring and summer I may be trying to assist in the restoration of the Elmwood cemetery.

I'm glad it was a nice day.

Obsessive statistics

About 57,500 words transcribed in twenty days (21 calendar days). The short story collections "Death of a Guinea Pig" and "My Black-Haired Brothers" are 'complete,--or at least v.2.0 of each is, those being the first typed drafts.

There's a lot of work ahead, but there always is. I'm going to take a bike ride, enjoy a sunny fall day, eat an apple and walk around downtown for a while to unwind. It is my day off, after all.

Covered in Bees

So I was on my way into work today after noshing my way through our annual Harvest festival (insert gratuitous amounts cider, cheese, bread, &c.) and some guy I didn't recongize asked me three things.

1) If I had gone to Brown.

2) If I worked there.

3) Would I mind terribly much watching his bees?

This was an unexpected series of questions, except for the second, but it transpired he had seen me (and perhaps even engaged me in conversation about) the Brown intramural shirt I sometimes wear while I was working before, and was one of our honey vendors, displaying a hive. He had to go get his car while I watched thousands of bees behind glass three feet from my face, and the occasional outsider bees drawn to the sweet sweet scent pheromones within, or something.

He eventually returned to decamp with his bees, and in an interestingly heartfelt manner, gave me a copy of The New Starting Right With Bees, whose first chapter discusses how to capture a swarm of bees that wanders into one's vicinity. And I had thought it was ants or wasps.

251 Club!

So I missed the October 1 member meeting of the 251 Club due to using all my vacation/sick time for the latter, much to my great dismay. As with gardening and New Year's resolutions, though, there's always next year. Well, today Nörm and I made up for road trips missed with quite the epic number today.

A nice little nine-hour jaunt. Plainfield, Marshfield, Lyndon, Wheelock, Stannard. And those are just the towns I did new things in. Used bookstores, scenic walks, new restaurants, odd marble stones at the side of the road...Ate well, traveled well, the leaves are nice too. And I got six or seven new books, including some Dashiell Hammett.

New photos up too.

No Čapek today, unless I get inspired before bed. Too many new books make that unlikely.

The Educated Caterpillar

Ha! I'm going to become a butterfly? Old wives' tales, sir. Mere fantasies. Bedtime stories for children. It has been scientifically determined that there are only viscera in us caterpillars, and no wings. No colorful wings. One dies and that's that.

-Čapek, Fables II

I forgot I'd outstripped anything I had planned to put up, and I'm running out the door, but a promise is a promise.

Up to 39,000 words since noon two Tuesdays ago. I'll hit 40,000 in a two-week span.

A Mouthful of Burnt Foot

It may seem an odd thing to say, but the Čapek's been nothing but a sideshow for the last two weeks, a public display of the process I've been battling with on much greater terms elsewhere. I'd finished translating two collections of Fuks short stories between November and May, but had only made fiftul inroads into transcribing them. In the last two weeks (well, it's two weeks tomorrow at noon), as a convalescing project, I started transcribing. I've typed a little over 37,000 words since then, and probably have about half that to go. This is the largest typing project I've had in over a year, since I was transcribing Burner of Corpses, the novella I'm done [a third draft of].

The translation strategy I've cobbled together over the last two years involves a handwritten first draft that, while not hard-core literal, is strikingly literalistic in its sentence structure and word choice. Transcribing is essentially creating a second draft in which I give myself leeway to edit syntax and lexicon, before I print and start in on a hard copy with whatever friends I can round up to help.

I love my first drafts, since they're carefully dated, and, in some cases, the place I was working (a house I sat in April, the library, coffeeshops, my bedroom) is noted as well--making them little diaries of sorts. They're funny to go through. In some cases I've overwritten old stuff, I write on the dividing pages, my hadwriting shrinks as I try to fit collections into one book, writing on the back cover... The mistakes are fun too--sometimes I skip lines, or combine lines, or just plain write the wrong thing. Some I have to go back to the text to puzzle over...like the title of this post. Burnt food. It was burnt food.

It almost makes me glad to have been hideously ill; I'd been assiduously avoiding my Fuks all summer. I wish I could remember why.

I'll take another break in a bit and toss up more Čapek. It's a lovely exercise in working straight to the second draft, and it's a good way to diversify my Czech reading. Back to work.

Grasshopper, Child in the Garden, Cactus, Weed

Grasshopper

Brrr! Into the earth at once! Must dig into the good, most soil! Hey, a man picked me up! How disgustingly hot and dry he is! I can't take it, my stomach's coming up! Ughhh!

Child in the Garden

He's tearing off flower buds and sticking them in the gravel paths.

"Hey, what are you doing, you little garden-wrecker?"

"Plantin' flowers."

Cactus

I stab you and for all that you still brag what marvelous thorns I have?

Weed

I know, comrade rye: there is a conspiracy against me. When they mow the meadow it is only to wipe me out. They send the hail down on me; they try to burn me with the sun; they hire the moles and locusts to come after me. But I stand my ground. I know why they're after me. Oh, I could tell you a thing or two!

Čapek, Aesop 6,7,8,9/9

I just wish there was a better onomatopoeia for vomiting. The Czech has "Fí!"

This will get buried by Čapek, but...

"As we flew over the fluffy landscape of Greenland I thought how peaceful it would be for the engines to cut out and the airplane to glide silently to a belly landing on the snow. Two hours of quiet shivering, perhaps one final defiant beverage service, and the whole thing would be over. I couldn't think of a more ideal way to go, a planeload of us frozen in place watching that slow sunset."

Just a plug for Idle Words in the sidebar. Man, I loves me some Idle Words.

A Statesmanlike Act, Flowerpot

A Statesmanlike Act

The begonia in the flowerpot wasn't long for this world; in spite of all efforts on its behalf it was rotting underneath and withered on top, so much so that it was terrible to see. The gardener even threw it into the darkest corner of the cellar in a fit of pique. Then he forgot about it altogether, having more important things on his mind than a ruined begonia.

When he was looking for an empty flowerpot in the cellat fourteen days later, he found the begonia resurrected, once so tall but now thirsty as hell, and terribly desperate to live.

"How our gardeners understands his affairs," the other flowers whispered. "What worldly wisdom!"

Flowerpot

You're staring, right? Look how much I've grown since spring! Look at the foliage I've got! How redolently I bloom!

Čapek, Aesop 4,5/9

"Thirsty as hell" may be a bit strong, but it was the best I could think of. Eh. It's feisty.

Cat in the Garden, Ownership

Cat in the Garden

You willed an orderly lawn into shape out of arid wasteland, and bushes up out of bare twigs; you raised a housecat on your lap from a stray and spitting kitten. And now your tomcat glides like a serpent through the high grass and underbrush, its golden eyes shining, joyful tremors running through its glossy coat.

"Me? I am a wild beast in the forest primeval."

Ownership

I've long since held an affection for sparrows because they are merry and poor, because they are grey as old rags, dishevelled as tramps, carefree as children; chatty, satisfied with life and somehow entirely democratic; for this and other reasons I have always regarded them with affection as they eke out their little lives.

Begone, you worthless thing, beat it, you miserable sparrow, get lost, you wretched creature! Where is my cat, where is my cane, where is my gun? You mean to tell me, you little bandit, that you took my first cherry off my little tree?


Čapek, Aesop 2, 3/9

A few artistic liberties here, with "forest primeval" and "little tree" for "wild jungle" and "dwarf cultivar," respectfully.

Earwig

You wretched, worthless, ugly little monster, who nibbles away my tender seedlings and gobbles my scarcely-emerged sprouts, you who work your way into every corner of my house in your aimless and repulsive haste, hide under my blankets and swim in my drinking glass; you wriggling little beast, snapping at me with your pincers, I beg you--what on earth are you good for? What purpose do you serve? What contribution do you make? Is there any creature under the sun more worthless than you?

"I'm not useless, sir; I have accomplished something immeasurably useful during my lifetime."

And what exactly have you accomplished, Mr. Earwig?

"I had lots of children."

Karel Čapek, (who else?), Aesop the Gardener, 1/9


Apparently I've started another wee Čapek project. This should take me four or five days; some of these are one-liners. In a short life update, I've beaten the strep and mostly beaten the mono, I figure--at least, I'm only moderately more tired than seems usual. I'm back at work, and somehow our little garden plot is still producing cukes, carrots and peppers. No earwig problems for me, fortunately.

How to Grow Clouds

It takes a lot of work: it is necessary to weed very carefully, to toss out muck and small stones by hand, to kneel on the earth, bend over, dig about in the soil, water profusely, collect caterpillars, exterminate aphids, loosen the ground and serve the earth; when your back hurts from all this and you straighten up and look at the sky, you will have the prettiest clouds. Probatum est.

[the entirety of Philemon originally in Lidové noviny, 6 September 1925]

Clay

I spoke of clay, and a gardener became angry with me. Garden soil, he said, is no clay; it is earth, humus, a useful and living substance; whereas clay, we all know, is dead matter, marl, slag itself. I was ashamed of myself somewhat; the gardener was right. Why, then, did the Lord create man out of clay and not out of soil? It is not written that Adam was made out of humus. It is not said that the Creator made him out of fine leaf mold. He carefully set the humus and leaf mold aside for the Garden of Eden. We gardeners, therefore, do not fritter away the best soil on doubtful pursuits.

--Karel Čapek, Philemon (4/5)

I had fun with "marl" and "slag." Also leaf mold. Mmmm, leaf mold.

Weeds

I made a discovery: each plant has not only its own leaves and flowers, but a certain kind of root as well. You who don't mess around in the soil, laying waste to weeds, have no conception of the hidden wealth of roots. There are roots that are light, fleshy, sickly pale; or fat, arborescent, rich as a shock of hair; creeping, woody, swollen, tuberous, stubborn, brittle, strong as catgut, shallow and deep, plump and starvingly scrawny, rosy as living nerves and black as dry rot, hirsute and bald; I tell you, life under the ground is just as rich as above it.

--Karel Čapek, of course, Philemon part 3 of 5.

This is the least intentionally funny; but as the man wrote gardening treatises among other things, I'n inclined to smile along with him anyway--hell, it was excellent adjective practice. [N.B., I had originally rendered the adjective "brittle" as "crunchy." Fine on candy wrappers, but here...]

Succulents

Don't think I have a collection of them. I only have the four clay pots and some hens and chicks; but the vegetation involved suffices to astound me.

The first little cactus looks like it has a mind to grow itself a piece of raw mutton; it is red tending to violet, fat, and very comparable to a job terribly botched; this wonder of nature is, honestly put, a little loathsome.

The second cactus decided to adopt a shape that seems to have come out of a tinsmith's fantasy. It must be doing this intentionally; it looks like a some sort of manufactured good.

The third one is made up of pretty little fat purple and green sabers with a clear eye towards stylization; the whole thing, though, is speckled with some sort of tropical rash that looks like thick, white, mildewy pustules. It seems to not be contagious, at least.

You should see the fourth monster grow. This hair comes up first, a little star comes out of that, and a green tassel sprouts under the star. Finally the whole thing turns into this horned ball thickly set with prickly stars. I cannot begin to imagine what will happen next.

The strangest of all, though, are the ordinary hens and chicks. I set the first one down and ignored it; let it show me what it could do. Well, it does something interesting; wherever the fancy strikes it--in its armpit, round the back, on its head--it throws out a green leafy head. This breaks open, rolls into the clay, sends out a rootlet and grows like crazy.

I can't even imagine what I would do if a child started to grow in my armpit or on my breast or on the back of my neck. Some hens have twenty chicks on themselves; that's an outbreak of fertility; it is motherhood completely unleashed.

--from Philemon or On Gardening, Karel Čapek


The final verb has the sense of "all hell breaking loose, I get the sense, but am unsure how to render it further. Apparently hens and chicks (genus Sempervivum--I mean to get some for the side of the house) are more succinctly called houseleeks, but that's nothing I've ever heard, and I don't care to use it. Part of me assumes Čapek was actually basing these on real cacti, and I'm tempted to poke around some pictures looking for what these might be based on. My mother's got all the good cactus books, though.

Comments, again, are welcome. There's three parts left to Philemon; I hope to get to one a day through Tuesday.

Cabbage

I was so proud of it; it was full, lightly frosted, and curly-headed like a younger version of František Langer; but suddenly out of God knows where came the caterpillars of the white cabbage butterfly, which, should have gone and eaten some white cabbage over in Strašnice and left my Savoyards in peace if their name were accurate; they devoured everything down to a filigree of veins.

Before that disaster I had been inclined to reorder my system of values and deem cabbage as the queen of the flowers. Well, it's not true, the queen of the flowers remains the rose, by the obvious fact that it cannot be eaten.

Presumably man too must be distasteful, if he is to become the king of all creation.

--From Philemon, or On Gardening, by Karel Čapek.


I'm pleased with this, even if I had to wrestle a bit about the fact that Czech has two remarkably different words (zelí and kapusta) to refer to "regular" and Savoy cabbage, respectably. Well, with various modifiers zelí can also refer to red cabbage and kapusta can also reference Brussels sprouts, but...yeah. The brassicas are inbred and complicated. Čapek was growing kapusta, they were white zelí caterpillars, hence his frustration. I'm more concerned with the rambling in the first paragraph than anything.

I enjoyed throwing in "Savoyard," though, and in a lighter, shorter work of Čapek I feel no harm in doing so. Langer was a contemporary of his at the Lidové noviny, a newspaper where much of his shorter writings appeared.

[edit 8 pm. Some wording in the first, longest sentence (suddenly, laced, etc.); change to "deem" in the second. edit edit: changed my literalism at the end of the first para to "filigree of veins." I like that a lot better]

Ah, so it's strep too.

That would explain the four hours in the emergency room today; the 103-degree fever, the morphine, and the liters of IV fluid replenishment.

Am now on antibiotics too. And hopefully, finally, on the mend from the sickest I've ever been.

Ah, so it's mono, then. That would explain a few things.

Like the, uh,

um...

uh...

lethargy.

Yeah.

Joy. I've spent since Sunday in the grip of a feverish internsity.

Oh wait. Strike the "-ish intensity."

The Lips show was goood--it was their VT debut (according to them; Nate presumed they'd done in once-plus in the eighties and lost it in the drugs.) and they rocked the house. Light show, balloons, Martians and Santa Clauses in the wings--they even sang happy birthday. But not to me, since I spent the second half of the concert way back in the bleachers with my head in my hands.

It was vastly better than not going. But fuzzy-headedness, temperature swings, and massive muscle pain. I'm supposed to work the next three days and everyone else is sick too. Whee.

Doctor tomorrow, more later.

...wait, where'd this month, and by extension, the summer go?

Ah well. Shake-ups at work, good and bad, and shake-ups in life, good to middling.

Jelly-making tonight, seeing my Slovak brother over the weekend, some decompression time at my mother's next week, and then Nate's up for my birthday.

Life could be worse, ebbing growing season or no.

A

The box elder in my backyard (which is apparently also known as "Manitoba Maple," and is something I could conceivably tap for sap in the winter) is already starting to lose its leaves. Fall is coming, like it or not.

I just realized that I am the middle of two books at the moment:

I am reading Milton's Paradise Lost (easier than I thought to get in to), and I am also reading The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists: A Novel to a friend.

Roughly equivalent, no?

Man, a frustrating day (malfunctioning chainsaws--not enough wood to split) but tonight?

We found a swimming hole about a hundred yards from my mother's house whose existence I had never even suspected in the last two dozen years. It wasn't on our property, but no one was there. It was very cold and very refreshing.

From there? Potato gun firings, tasty kebabs with garden onions and peppers, a brilliant night sky, sugar on some god-damned snow (kept since February in the freezer!( the Milky Way and some shooting stars.

Tomorrow I take home hundreds of lupine seeds, some hay to cover the lawn I'm about to reseed, and a plan to come back up here in three weeks.

Beers and a kebab tonight. (Sidenote: we have kebabs in Burlington? A Bosnian on a street cart who lived ten years in Munich? Side-sidenote: I was speaking German tonight?) But tha's beers and kebabs with a guy I've known since September of 1988. We talked about National Geographic and his dinosaur erasers then, I'm told. But it's nice having beers with someone you've known for three-quarters of your life.

Here's to old friends.

Each of the last four days (in addition to two the week before) I have spent at least an hour outside, attempting to stem the tide of six, seven, eight years of neglect in the backyard of my youth. Washing the patio table and chairs (a bit belatedly for a series of yard parties), and setting to work yanking out weeds. First the milkweeds, creeping into the lawn itself, then the more mundane stuff--vast stands of what I dubbed crapweed, a plant with a stainy orange sap and swarms of white fliy/moth things that seemed to be breeding on it.

Then we found a saw, and set to on the various creepy-climbies, the lilac canes, the sadly neglected forsythias, and the spreading trees. Our pile has grown. The trash littering the yard has also abated or been organized--one of the two dilapidated barrel planters ahs been broken down and its soil redistributed, the railroad signs are stacked against the garage, the hose wound, and the birdfeeders hung up as of yet unstocked. And--what is more--there is now division. Six score bricks, some lying around, some already set in odd patterns on the lawn have been extracted and redug into a series of simple, clean lines around the perimeter. The effect a simple brick boundary can have is astonishing.

The are no more tarps covering piles of furniture (oh, last summer--how I do not miss thee) There are no more creepers pulling at said tarps. THere are no longer a half-dozen trees quietly growing in the back forty. The crapweed flies we have seen languishing in a half-dozen spiders' webs. Instead of the biomass-laden slag heap that happened to be behind our house--is a yard.

Is it perfect? Hardly. The fence needs replacing (which is why I've done precious little in the way of actual gradening) and the garage will too at some point. The lawn, now cleaned, mowed, and raked, now seems threadbare, and in places contains more non-grass than grass. But we have grass seed. And the progress is tangible.

Anything, in any event, that redirects my blogging away from the awful day I had at work cannot be lauded too highly.

Garden party!

I ducked out of work about forty-five minutes early, stocked up, and my garden buddy and I held a little garden party down at the Intervale, under the structure near our plot where we had previously hidden from lightning.

We picked some greens and some cucumbers and laid out a spread. Pimm's cups and raspberry-laced champagne were there for the offering, and it was a lovely summer's day. The peppers are coming along nicely, and we're making plans to make a hot pepper jelly in a few weeks.

After a lovely breakfast (maple yogurt with blueberries and more of my mother's raspberry jam) and some local apples(!) (well, from Dummerston) for lunch, I did a lot of cheating today...but much of that cheating was while trying a new activity in the evening--three of us got together and made sixteen jars of blueberry jelly. Sure, the refined sugar is a stretch, but we might try honey with the next batch--and whoa, did it smell and taste good.

Three jars, my allotment (my labor was the only thing I contributed_ are jelling on my counter. One for me, one for my mother, and one for my brother, should he want one when he comes a-visiting from Slovakia.

More salads, wayyyy more blueberries than normal, and a lot of fun experimentation. It's a good month so far. Now, if I can only get my bike re-assembled.

No, I haven't given up coffee, or cumin, or cayenne. But sitting here with a Vermont-brewed beer and a handful of loccal blueberries is nice, too. As was having people over two nights in a row over the weekend for stir-fries, salads, and roasted vegetables, containing not only local things, but some local things that we had grown ourselves.

Vermont-grown food is a good thing to rally around, not to mention tasty as hell. I haven't even defrosted my Québec wheat bread or broken into the Addison county chèvre yet.

Open question: if you could have an army of insect minions, and had to choose between the broad categories of "Ants" and "Wasps," which would you choose? [Edit: "Scorpions!" is both the right answer, and wrong. They're not insects, let alone "Ants" or "Wasps."]

I made up a sheet of pros and cons at work today (both had the pro of "relentless") and engaged in lively debate all day.

EDIT: The lists! (my apologies for lame faux-table)

Wasps:
Pros: Death from Above
Stinging
Repeated stinging
Terror-Inducing
Stylish color pattern
Relentless

Cons: Not scorpions
Easily disrupted by smoke
Nests highly flammable
Noisy

Ants:
Pros: Death from Below
Per-capita strength
Numbers
Mighty jaws
Silent
Relentless

Cons: Not scorpions
With few exceptions, not airborne

"Mr. Earbrass sits on the opposite side of the study from his desk, gathering courage for the worst part of all in the undertaking of a novel, i.e., making a clean copy of the MS. Not only is it repulsive to the eye and hand, with its tattered edges, stains, rumpled patches, scratchings-out and scribblings, but its contents are, by this time, boring ot the point of madness. A freshly-filled inkwell, new pheasant-feather pens, and two reams of the most expensive cream laid paper are negligible inducements for emabrking on such a loatsome proceeding."

Edward Gorey, The Unstrung Harp.

So I'm back transcribing. This is what it feels like, sort of. But funnier and with nice drawings. I'm also memorizing The Gashlycrumb Tinies in my spare time.

Oh God, there's a new Pynchon novel coming out in December. Almost a thousand pages long.

I've really got to get around to Mason & DIxon.

While musing on possible analogues of the 251 Club and roaming about on-line, I came upon a Wikipedia listing of locations within New Hampshire.

So I counted them.

13 cities, 221 townships, and 25 unicorporated places.

I propose the formation of a 259 Club as a partner organization to the 251 Club here in Vermont. I may not be the first to do so, to be sure, but would welcome like-minded individuals. Certainly this would foster some cross-Connecticut wandering.

And I do not presume to propose any organization to supersede both clubs for those who wished to try their hand at both, but my incarnation of the 259 Club would recognize its own Plus members and 510ers who wanted to see what the fuss was all about on both sides of the river, so to speak.

[possibly cc:d to Vermont LIfe, Yankee Magazine, and whatever else I can think of]
[EDIT: pending confirmation of my math, of course]

It is a troublesome thing to kill a large centipede on your dining room wall.

It is a more troublseome thing to fail at killing one. I won't be going into the kitchen again for a while.

251 Club! 251 Club!

Shortly put, it's an informal organization (postal mail! mimeographed newsletters) dedicated to, in one fashion or another, visiting all 251 towns and cities (mostly towns) in Vermont, whether doing something interesting, visitng the post office for postmarks, or just driving through.

Today was to have been my second day off in a row, but for the first time since the late winter, I had to work on a Monday. At 6:30. On like four hours sleep. But I started making crazy plans. Would I like to go to the beach right after work? Probably. I think it was the hottest day of the year so far today. How about a road trip later? I and one of my managers had found out we were both inot the 251 Club, and so those plans were off and running.

I got off work at 2:30, I and another co-worker made a surgical strike to North Beach, and I hustled back to work to buy provisions. We hit the road got out of town, and did two--maybe three--towns today in some interesting capacity.

Moretown: We got off the interstate in Waterbury and drove south into Moretown. We got lost trying to find the imporessive-sounding intersection of Moretown Corners, stopped for roadside lemonade, and then disaster struck: We found out we had a flat tire, and I dropped my camera through a hole in my pocket onto Vermont Route 100b (pronounced "lube.") The camera snapped back together (it seemed to not work at first but the battery contact was just jarred out of alignement), we changed the tire for the donut spare, and didn't flip out. We limped back north to a fun swimming hole on the Mad River and waded (in our lack of foresight, we had neither bathing costumes nor towels) and drove north into...

Middlesex: We stopped briefly in an abandoned gas station where I pantomimed filling up a rubber chicken. ANd I got a blurry picture of the town garage. Partial credit. We limped on to...

Waterbury: We stopped for dinner at Arvad's purely based on the name and strolled through downtown Waterbury a bit. Then home.

I'm beat. WIll publish pictures at some point. It's fun to be back in the saddle.

Bought a new bike frame, which is good, as the crumple zone in the front of mine is...well, crumpling. Slowly. It hasn't imploded on me yet, but...let's just say that next week I'll be all about tearing one bike down and rebuilding anew.

Which may provide me with something to ride to farmers markets during August. I'm thinking of trying the Green Mountain Localvore challenge (here for a feature story) Basically, I would be trying to provide all of my calories during the month of August from within a hundred-mile radius of my home. Or completely within Vermont. (there are a number of ways to play)

In its harder-core implementations, this is hard to do. From the Seven Days article:

"The definition of "local" varies slightly from group to group. Some localvore challenges allow participants to consume locally produced foods even if they don't contain 100 percent indigenous ingredients, such as Vermont-brewed beers and Vermont-roasted coffees. Others allow "wild card" exemptions for harder-to-find items, such as cooking oils and certain grains.

The Champlain Valley Localvores, whose challenge runs throughout the month of August, are taking a more hard-core approach. They've agreed only to a "modern Marco Polo" exception, which permits any spices the 13th-century explorer would have had on hand, such as salt and pepper, as well as modern leavening agents, such as baking powder, baking soda and yeast."

I'd probably take exemptions for three things that I can think of--coffee, ginger, and cayenne. And maybe cumin. But I need to do some thought, dispose of some decidely non-local food in the meantime--and look for a source of wheat and oats.

Not the best chip possible by Zidane (he allllmost got too much of it) but that dooesn't matter. It was a lovely idea, and beautiful to watch.

Allez les Bleus!

edit: interesting way for his career to (possibly) end, though. I wonder what he heard that got him to lay the smack down.

The sage of spite is sprawling, and the last of the radishes are in, along with some baby carrots.

My astronomy has suffered lately, what with the massive amounts of both overcast skies and mosquitoes, but so it goes.

I'm plodding ahead on the AMSCO, and trying to find reasonable ways to get Latin texts without that nice-looking, well-meaning, but utterly useless Loeb dual language editions. Or the esthetically displeasing online sources.

It is also my Friday at work, for which I am thankful.

It's been an eventful last forty-eight hours.

We arrived at a tenative wage agreement Friday after eleven hours of negotiations. I went home and went to bed, worked the next day, then ended up at a "Cops and Robbers" party thrown by a co-worker who was leaving town. Exhuasted but willing to play along, I bought razor blades at work, trimmed my moustache down into something that I felt looked fairly 19th-century villain (pencil-thin, and fairly ugly), painted a monocle on to my face, and went as a jewel thief.

I got home at about sunrise, I think, woke up on my couch at two in the afternoon, threw a bunch of stuff in the car I have for the week, and drove up to my mother's in the country. We're installing a firepit in the yard for the Fourth of July tomorrow, I'm getting some lupine seeds for my yard, I get to see my dog again, and I arrived just in time to go to a concert on the town common.

So I'm in small-town Vermont to relax for the weekend after a brutal week at work, and what do we see? Experimental electric violin. (I loved it, having listened to a bunch of Sigur Ros on the way up. EDIT: Oh, Here they are. They were wearing locally-made tie-dyed T-shirts with their names on, though, and are a lot more fun than the publicity photo indicates.) They used their stringed instruments as drums somehow, performed some Brazilian jazz music originally arranged for the piano, and finished the evening with a half-salsa, half-hula number that included parrot samples. Not, I think, what everyone was thinking. But it was a great time, it's nice to see my mother at her home, and though I've only been up for nine hours, it's time to go to bed.

Negotiating with managament in an exercise in exasperation and frustration. But if I weren't on the team, I wouldn't have the illusion of control. Still, I wouldn't give up my participation in this for the world--it's very informative.

And our radishes are much bigger.

No strike/no lockout clause expires at midnight on the 30th--wheeeee! We've got a long way to go.

I almost got struck by lightning yesterday while weeding around my radishes.

I had some. They are, in fact, delicious.

There was a freakish beauty in dashing to and then huddling under an open-air shed while a fantastic line of storms came rolling through, I must admit.

My father got me a 1960s-era linguistics textbook called "The Science of Language" some weeks back, and after summarily ignoring it for some time, I've leafed through it and am now glad I did. More recent advances in the field aside, it's very much an intro linguistics book in the modern trasition, complete with humorous footnotes.

"5. It has been humorously observed that one might gain the reputation of speaking fluent and elegant German by simply learning to say correctly a few expressions like, ach so? wie Schade! Ja, Ja, natürlich, and ausgezeichnet, and at every pause throwing in whichever one seems most appropriate." (182)

Wow, such have been my experiences with German. And Polish and Bulgarian, come to think of it.

I've been using the post-vacation vacation time thoughtfully provided by my employers to get a lot done in terms of organizing and streamlining my life (and my life I mean papers) Also, I'm trying to vacuum my room for probably the first time this calendar year. At least. But it doesn't look dirty...

A short list of my haul in Czech books, with reading notes.

1958 Czechoslovak press editions of:

Karel Čapek, Povídky z jedné a z druhé kapsy (Tales From One/the Other Pocket) {read on planes/in Dulles on the way back}
Karel Čapek, R.U.R., Bílá Nemoc, Matka (R.U.R., The White Plague, Mother)
Karel Čapek, Kalendař, Záhradníkův rok (Almanac, The Gardener's Year) {started in Dulles}
Karel Čapek, Hovory s T. G. Masarykem (Talks with T.G. Masaryk) {started on some train or other}

recent printings of:
Ladislav Fuks, Vévodkyně a kuchařka (The Duchess and the Cook) {last of the Odeon Fuks prinitngs, I think--I have all seven}
Michael Viewigh, Vybijená (Dodgeball) {read in Brno}

Also, since I've gotten back, I've been catching up on some reading--I read a draft of an old paper of Nick's entitled "The Valuation and Evaluation of Writing," bits of an old Czech textbook on historical linguistics, "The Shining," and have started in on my bilingual Old French/French "Song of Roland." My French is refreshingly still present, ast least passively, and the Old French is useful as reference for trickier words, believe it or not.

And two more points, the biggest of all:

It's a sunny day.
And two days ago I found out about a Flaming Lips show in Burlington in September...on my birthday...and I just bought two tickets.

So I'm walking down a busy street in Prague, looking for some building or other...I think it was Národní třida, and I look up at oncoming pedestrian traffic. And there's this guy walking towards me...grinning. A bit too widely for normal fun, not widely enough for insanity. As he walks, he's taking the top off a shoebox, and putting it on the bottom of the box. There's a pair of shoes in there.

Without really breaking his expression or his stride, and right as we're passing each other, he stuffs the shoebox into a trash can and walks on.

That was one of the odder things that happened to me in Europe. Forgiveness of the few people I've mentioned this to in advance; I say this by way of saying the first wave of photos are in.

Tram. Bus. Airport. Plane. Airport. Translatlantic flight. Aiport (Seven-hour layover in Dulles.) Plane. Airport. Home.

Bed, in about five minutes.

Prague, Brno, and Bratislava are still lovely, more on which (with pics!) later.

It's been an oddly full last couple of days, shatteringly me nicely out of a bum week with too much rain (like eight days straight) and too much drinking. (ditto)

Two days ago I worked, then biked in the pouring rain (wearing nothing but cotton) down to the bus station, where I met an old advisee of mine (ah, my days as a freshman advisor) in town on a layover on the way to Montreal. It was good to catch up, and nice to have a visitor, even in miserable weather. Then a bike ride home, more pouring rain. This is when I discovered that when I went over the handlebars Sunday night, hyperextending my arms a bit and scraping my hands, (don't ask--but it wasn't bad) that I broke my shifter and am stuck in seventh of eight gears. Hill climbing's less fun, but my calves are going to be ripped.

Yesterday, I worked (opened, starting at 6:30), then biked down to the Intervale community gardens in the pouring rain to meet someone with whom I was supposed to be sharing their plot in exchange for some seed money and sweat equity. She was there, the floodplain was still a comfortable distance off, and we did some digging, some planting and some planning. Then I hustled up the hill to meet my father and go to a graduation party for a friend of the family's which involved a keg of Bud Light. I relaxed in the evening, because

Today I was up at 5:50 again, opening the store, and then bought some pepper plants and biked back down to the Intervale (this is down a big hill) in the pouring rain to garden some more. As we were gardening, the rain stopped and the sun came out. It was glorious, and my new babies are safely in the soil. Then I hustled back up the hill to make a dinner party an ex-co-worker of mine was throwing called "PorkLoaf2006." It was a massive feast that belied the name. The asapragus and pie were fantastic, and I ended up talking to some guy who had spent six months in Russia filming gay porn. (An odd mix of people, this.) Them I biked across town to the co-op, picked up some more plants for my co-gardener, dropped them off, and then met up with another old, old friend who's in town for the week. She watched me fold laundry as we watched bizarre Christian informercials and a swimming-with-the-dolphins documentary.

And then I actually started to pack in earnest. Or plan it, anyway. Which I need to do. Because I'm going out for coffee tomorrow morning, then working eight hours (training), then going out with some co-workers who were away all weekend, and then at nine in the morning on Wednesday I have to be at the airport.

But I'm cataloging this instead, because it's been a fun last couple of days, things have flowed together quite nicely (thank you, bike!), and I'll want to remember this later.

Next stop Prague!

Went on a mini-bender over the weekend, got bizarrely introspective, got really into the book of Job for a while, which is odd at the bars...

I'm better now. Especially since I had today and yesterday off, and it was nice enough to get some biking and some sun in.

Two weeks from now, I'll be over the Atlantic.

Some nights the world seems to conspire about how little I belong here, no matter how much I do.

Solicitous people in bars asking after my height in ways that dozens of people haev asked before.

OK, so, I find out this one person is a barrista at a coffee shop I frequent--and then it gets mentioned that I am a source of wonderment to the staff due to the fact that I order Lapsang Souchong without pretense, and without being a fifteen year-old Goth. (I blame Nick for this. Not for the not-being-a-Goth thing, mind.)

And then, I'm walking home drunk from the bars, past the location of a bar my parents met in, and some locals ask me if I have a car. "No." is the extent of my response, as I turn the corner, a hundred yards (less, even!) from the house in which I was raised.
The immediate response: "You German or something?"
Me: I was raised right over there, man."

He laughed and disappeared with his friends. But even in the Old North End of my childhood, I'm still a foreigner? Seems kind of harsh. Guess I'll just switch back to Czech for a while.

Well.

I have a "Hill-Sachs lesion," which sounds cooler than "upper humeral fracture" any day, and about a third of my left glenoid labrum has come loose from the shoulder blade, and has attempted to heal itself slightly farther out than is optimal for shoulder capsule function. (In another case of funny name, this is a SLAP tear). So I have the option for elective arthroscopic surgery, which will involve countersinking sugar pegs(!) around the rim of my glenoid cavity and somehow tying the cartilage back down where it should be, while debriding the bone/cartilage itself a bit to encourage bleeding and subsequent (reinforcing) scar tissue.

This is apparently routine.

Apparently, no matter how tight the labrum, if there's a notch in the bone it can unlock itself, so to speak, if the bone that fits into the socket is, say, notched. Or lesioned, say. In a Hill-Sachs fashion. The fix for this apparently involves taking a piece of a dead man's humerus and screwing it into place on top of the damaged site. This, needless to say, cannot be done arthroscopically. Fortunately, my Hill-Sachs lesion is tiny, and the first option has an excellent chance of sufficing. But, the surgeon helpfully added, I could get the first and then if I needed it, they could always come back later and put cadaver bone onto my shattered upper arm. Imagine my joy.

So a month in a sling and six months total recovery time? I haven't said yes yet. But it's not like I do much in the winters...