“remixes”
39 posts under this tag.
The text below was when I fell in love with China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station. I wasn’t sure for many pages, never one to care much for fantasy. But this, this is what fantasy should be.
Reading the book, as many things else, got interrupted by the exile, but I’ve been possessed downloading ebooks lately and I just found a great HTML version of the book. Let the reading recommence!
Isaac and Lin sat naked on either side of the bare wooden table. Isaac was conscious of their pose, seeing them as a third person might. It would make a beautiful, strange print, he thought. An attic room, dust-motes in the light from the small window, books and paper and paints neatly stacked by cheap wooden furniture. A dark-skinned man, big and nude and detumescing, gripping a knife and fork, unnaturally still, sitting opposite a khepri, her slight woman’s body in shadow, her chitinous head in silhouette.
They ignored their food and stared at each other for a moment. Lin signed at him: Good morning, lover. Then she began to eat, still looking at him.
It was when she ate that Lin was most alien, and their shared meals were a challenge and an affirmation.As he watched her, Isaac felt the familiar trill of emotion: disgust immediately stamped out, pride at the stamping out, guilty desire.
Light glinted in Lin’s compound eyes. Her headlegs quivered. She picked up half a tomato and gripped it with her mandibles. She lowered her hands while her inner mouthparts picked at the food her outer jaw held steady.
Isaac watched the huge iridescent scarab that was his lover’s head devour her breakfast.
He watched her swallow, saw her throat bob where the pale insectile underbelly segued smoothly into her human neck … not that she would have accepted that description. Humans have khepri bodies, legs, hands; and the heads of shaved gibbons, she had once told him.
He smiled and dangled his fried pork in front of him, curled his tongue around it, wiped his greasy fingers on the table. He smiled at her. She undulated her headlegs at him and signed, My monster.
I am a pervert, thought Isaac, and so is she.
Sarah Manguso wrote a short memoir on her 9 years with a strange, terrible, Guillain Barre -ish disease: The Two Kinds of Decay. There’s something about her style—short paragraphs, understatement, detachment—that compels me, and though on occasion she can be clumsy with metaphors, she can write fragments of simple, unexpected poignancy:
I waited seven years to forget just enough—so that when I tried to remember, I could do it thoroughly. There are only a few things to remember now, and the lost things are absolutely, comfortingly gone.
I studied math in college because I didn’t believe it. Never could understand how or why someone would come up with the stuff we were being teached. Thanks to some innate verbal ability and motherly discipline, I was thankfully “good” at it though, good enough to realize that what we were “learning” was nothing but mindless regurgitation.
Just that, an emotion. Often sudden, arbitrary, and against our (as opposed to our gene’s) best interest. Not a revelation nor the distillation of reason nor its conclusion—whence this fancy that reason leads somewhere? “Gut feeling” is, you guessed it, nothing but a feeling. Just as we have unique emotions about concrete things—say, lust—, we have unique emotions about abstract ideas and statements—say, certainty. Emotions, concrete or abstract, are enzymes, catalysts: they shortcircuit dillydallying, they trigger action. Ruminating all day without acting makes as little evolutionary sense as ogling all day without fucking. Hence lust, hence certainty.
That, in a nutshell, is On Being Certain’s premise, and though I have but skimmed it in one of my epic B & N skimming marathons, I was certain of its truth the moment I read it.
Blaise Pascal famously commented in a letter that it was long because he didn’t have the time to make it shorter. Another possibility comes to mind, perhaps more appropriate for our era of small pieces loosely joined, of fragmentation of the units of content (think email, IM, posts, tweets, minute-long YouTube videos, individual iTune songs, Wikipedia articles…): he didn’t have the time to split it into many short letters.
This has to be one of the best sex interfaces ever. Breathtaking:
So all these animals, having left the sea, solved the problems of moving around and breathing air in their own differing ways. But there was another difficulty, mating. In the sea, animals need only release their eggs and sperm and the water mixed the two together. On dry land that couldn’t happen, even for the most moisture-loving of creatures. An individual slug carries both male and female organs. But even then, that was of no help. Each had to both give and receive. Somehow or other, pairs of individuals had to get together and the ways the have evolved in which to do so are quite extraordinary. Indeed, some of them are almost beyond imagining.
The leopard slug, you might think, has the simplest of habits. Maybe, but not when it comes to mating. When an individual is looking for a partner it give its trail of slime a special taste that advertises the fact. Another, if it feels the same way, will detect the invitation and start to follow. The pursuer, to confirm that it’s there and it’s ready to mate, gives the pursued a nibble. The leader heads upwards. An overhand is what’s neeeded. The underside of a branch will do very nicely. The two start to circle one another more and more closely until they entwine. For an hour or so they continue to wind themselves around one another. Then, suddenly, the pair releases their hold on the branch and start to slide downwards on a rope of mucus.
Now, in midair, they move to the next stage in their pairing. Each everts its male organ from just behind its head. These grow longer and longer. Then they, too, begin to entwine. They fan out to form a translucent, flower-like globe. And now, at last, sperm passes from one slug to another. The transfer is complete. Each has been fertilized.
Finally, their strange, balletic relationship comes to an end… with a bump.
A Spanish version of Mika’s Billy Brown. Apologies beforehand, I just have this hobby of translating songs—if the mood strikes one day I may even hurt your ears with my French version of Gloria Trevi’s Hoy me ire de casa
Update 15/January/2007:
Billy Brown
Oh Billy Brown had lived an ordinary life.
Two kids, a dog, and a cautionary wife.
While it was all going according to plan
Then Billy Brown fell in love with another man.
He met his lover almost every single day
Making excuses for his dodgy holiday
(Unto religion that he said and duty found
They didn’t know his faith was earthly bound)
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Juan Alazan
Oh Juan Alazan vivia una vida primorosa
Dos ninhos, un perro y una esposa fastidiosa
Aun cuando todo iba yendo acorde al plan
Juan Alazan se enamoro de otro galan.
De ver su amante ningun dia se perdia
Haciendo excusas por tan locas correrias
En cierta religion nueva y extranha.
Lo que no sabian es que su fe era mundana.
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Brown…Oh Billy Brown.
Don’t let the stars get you down.
Don’t let the waves let you drown.
Brown…Oh Billy Brown.
Gonna pick you up like a paper cup.
Gonna shake the water out of every nook.
Oh Billy Brown.
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Juan… oh Juan Alazan
No te dejes por tus estrellas tumbar
No te dejes por las olas ahogar
Juan… oh Juan Alazan
Habra que desdoblarse como carton
Habra que sacudirse el agua de cada rincon.
Oh Juan Alazan.
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Oh Billy Brown needed a place, somewhere to go.
He found an island off the coast of Mexico
Leaving his lover and his family behind.
Oh Billy Brown needed to find some peace of mind.
And on his journey and his travels on the way,
He met a girlie who was brave enough to say,
When they made love he shared the burden of his mind.
Oh Billy Brown you are a victim of the times.
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Oh Juan Alazan tenia que huir a cualquier sitio.
Encontro una isla costa de Puerto Rico,
Dejando su amante y su familia por detras..
Oh Juan Alazan solo buscaba paz mental.
En aventuras en su larga travesia,
Conocio una chica que valiente le decia,
Cuando hacian el amor y el desahogaba sentimientos,
“Oh Juan Alazan eres una victima de los tiempos.”
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Brown…Oh Billy Brown.
Don’t let the stars get you down.
Don’t let the waves let you drown.
Brown…Oh Billy Brown.
Gonna pick you up like a paper cup.
Gonna shake the water out of every nook.
Oh Billy Brown.
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Juan… oh Juan Alazan
No te dejes por tus estrellas tumbar
No te dejes por las olas ahogar
Juan… oh Juan Alazan
Habra que desdoblarse como carton
Habra que sacudirse el agua de cada rincon.
Oh Juan Alazan.
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[...]
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[...]
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Brown…Oh Billy Brown.
Gonna pick you up like a paper cup.
Gonna shake the water out of every nook.
Oh Billy Brown.
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Juan… oh Juan Alazan
Habra que desdoblarse como carton
Habra que sacudirse el agua de cada rincon.
Oh Juan Alazan.
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Oh Billy Brown had lived an ordinary life.
Two kids, a dog, and a cautionary wife.
While it was all going according to plan
Then Billy Brown fell in love with another man
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Oh Juan Alazan vivia una vida primorosa
Dos ninhos, un perro y una esposa fastidiosa
Aun cuando todo iba yendo acorde al plan
Juan Alazan se enamoro de otro galan.
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Terry Rodgers paints entrancing glimpses at raw hedonism—modern, American, urban, Grey’s-Anatomy diverse, indolent, excessive, impudent. Set in sumptuous, soap-operatic locales, youth and beauty are squandered in complex orgies of many bodies and many layers. Epicurean pigs, lotus eaters, Klimtian nymphs, frozen in their idle shuffle for our ogling. Though the paintings are in a way surprisingly chaste—nudes showing nothing that the Greeks didn’t sculpt—what both beguiles and offends is that insolent, apathic wallowing in excess—no one ever smiles, this isn’t about happiness, it’s about pleasure. (Via nudonation.)
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