From W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz

Soon after darkness fell we were sitting on a promontory far above Andromeda Lodge, behind us the higher slopes and before us the immense darkness out at sea, and no sooner had Alphonso placed his incandescent lamp in a shallow hollow surrounded by heather and lit it than the moths, not one of which we had seen during our climb, came flying in as if from nowhere, describing thousands of arcs and spiral and loops, until like snowflakes they formed a silent storm around the light...

I do remember, said Austerlitz, that the two of us, Gerald and I, could not get over our amazement at the endless variety of these invertebrates, which are usually hidden from our sight, and that Alphonso let us simply gaze at their wonderful display for a long time...

China Marks, Dark Pocelains and Marbled Beauties, Scarce Silver-lines or Burnished Brass, Green Foresters and Green Adelas, White Plumes, Light Arches, Old Ladies and Ghost Moths...we counted dozens of them, so different in structure and appearance that neither Gerald or I could grasp it all. Some had collars and cloaks, like elegant gentlemen on their way to the opera, said Gerald; some had a plain basic hue but when they moved their wings, showed a fantastic lining underneath, with oblique and wavy lines, shadows, crescent markings and lighter patches, freckles, zigzag bands, fringes and veining and colors you could not have imagined, moss green shot with blue, fox brown, saffron, lime yellow, satiny white, and a metallic gleam as of powdered brass or gold...

in periods of drought, when no dew had fallen at night for a long time, it was apparently known for them to set out together in a kind of cloud in search of the nearest river or stream, where they drowned in large numbers as they tried to settle on the flowing water...

During the day, said Alphonso, they slept safely hidden under stones, or in cracks in the rock, in leaf litter on the ground or among foliage. Most of them are in a death-like state when you find them, and have to coax and quiver themselves back to life, crawling over the ground and jerkily moving their wings and legs before they are ready for flight...

The trails of light which they seem to leave behind them in all kinds of curlicues and streamers and spirals, and which Gerald in particular admired, did not really exist, explained Alphonso, but were merely phantom traces created by the sluggish reaction of the human eye, appearing to see a certain afterglow in the place from which the insect itself, shining for only the fraction of a second in the lamplight, had already gone...

When I get up early in the morning, I find them clinging to the wall, motionless. I believe, said Austerlitz, they know they have lost their way, since if you do not put them out again carefully they will stay where they are, never moving, until the last breath is out of their bodies, and indeed they will remain in the place where they came to grief even after death, held fast by the tiny claws that stiffened in their last agony, until a draft of air detaches them and blows them into a dusty corner.

Beam me up, Ricky!!!

I don't have $200k to spend on 4 gravity free minutes, Richard, but that space hotel you're planning? I'll be a bell-hop, chamber maid, cook, jazz singer, whatever, just take me along, OK? Please, Mr. Sir Branson?

Hair Savvy Prez

Franklin Pierce is ranked the 4th worst U.S. president of all time. I find that the sting of his failure, particularly painful for New Hampshire residents, is somewhat assuaged by his cutting-edge (heh heh) hair style.

If his leadership ability wasn't quite up to snuff, at least in the hair department he led the pack and for that, he deserves credit. The man was years ahead of his time! FDR, Lincoln? Great statemen, but their hair...!

I Magpie

Quoth She

"For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: 'It might have been!'" -John Greenleaf Whitter

Conversation Toppers

If life hands me opportunities to interject the following threads into actual conversations, I will consider myself blessed.

1. I just invented a new word, omniferretous. It means "ferrets everywhere!"

2. What I really want to know is, what is it with midgets? Why do they waddle? I just want to stare at them all day, don't you?

3. Did you know blue jays have a 900 peanut recall? They can remember where they stashed 900 peanuts. Squirrels have a 300 peanut recall. I'd bet you have about a 7 peanut recall.

4. Weasel is actually a term of endearment. Some cultures highly revered weasels. The Mesozoic culture, I think, or the Visigoths. I'm pretty sure Visigoths loved weasels.

5. When I was in high school we went to Horton Center, a retreat in the mountains. One day I was leaving the dining hall around 6 pm and I saw something just above the tree line. It was the shape of a human hovering in the air. I was so shaken up that I went to my cabin and didn't tell anyone. The next morning I was up early and this woman who I'd never seen was walking toward me. She stopped and said, "You saw him, didn't you?" "Who?" I asked. "The angel of death. You saw him too" and she walked away. Later I heard that a camper, an older man who was hiking had had a heart attack and died the previous day. The time it happened? 6:00 pm. Woo-oo-oo-oo...

6. This past Sunday a woman came to church who was obviously demon possessed. The pastor began praying that the demon would leave her. He laid his hand on her head and yelled "Expelliamus!" The man is a huge Harry Potter fan.

7. I have a question for you: how do you sell a deaf man a monkey?

8. Five seconds after the semi hit me I was reincarnated as a lemming. Unfortunately my herd was plummeting over the side of a cliff in Norway so, for the second time in 10 seconds I died.

9. You're in a lifeboat with three other people and someone has to go overboard to keep the boat afloat. There's a young mother, her child and an eighty year old man. The child's a leper, the mother's an albino and you're a paraplegic. What would you do?

Tornado Hits NH!

More pics

Rain Stream of Conscious

Ever since it started raining, approximately a year ago, no one has touched the watermelon in the fruit drawer or the lavender blueberry agua fresca I made. We all want to eat warm and warming things like beef stew and apple crisp. I took a slice of watermelon today just so it wouldn't feel neglected. When I lifted the cover of the Tupperware container the smell of summer wafted out and seemed out of place against the background of dark and damp rather than sun and heat.

But one thing I like about all this rain is fungus. Fungus hearts moisture. Of course, not all fungus is good. I've lost a few books to mold. Professional book restorer Richard Homer informed me that there's no way to get mold off of book pages. "It's pretty much a total loss", he said. Well, I made that quote up but that was the essence of what he said.

Anyhow, what I like about all this rain is mushrooms, but I used the word "fungus" because I like it better than "mushroom". Fungus has a round, fat little rolling sound. And any word that starts with "fun" has to be good. Sometimes I shorten the word to "shroom" but always self consciously, because I'm afraid I sound like a hippie, a druggie, or Nicole from high school who was the first person I knew who ate shrooms.

All she said about the experience, as I recall, was something about eating them with oil and that they tasted nasty. Actually, maybe Nicole wasn't the first person I knew who did shrooms. It might have been Laurie who went to Alvern High School. She said they had some agricultural program there, something about cow fields, and early in the morning you could find shrooms growing under cow plops--or cow pies, but I hate that expression--but they shriveled up in the heat of the sun so you had to go early.

Or am I mixing that conversation up with those two guys from driver's ed. who went to High Mowing School? High Mowing is the weirdest name for a school that I've ever heard and belies the fact that it was a leftist, commie experiment. I don't have any evidence to back that statement up, really, except what the kids told me about growing pot out in fields--or was that Laurie?--and that one of the teachers who I saw at the Palace Theatre, when JRHS went there for a performance and students from High Mowing were there too, one of the teachers was dressed like a hippie.

Also, the kid who told me about the shrooms (or pot) was named Axel or something German and he had one brother with a Japanese name and one with a Jewish name, which made me think that his parents were "different" and would be the type to send him to a leftist school.

Anyway, what I like about mushrooms is their huge variety of color, shape and size. Some look like dainty little parasols and some are monstrous growths, like the earth's organs are protruding above ground. And some grow in circles called "fairy rings". How can anyone not love that?

Whenever it rains and rains and rains like this I am reminded of the one episode of Ren & Stimpy that I saw (not even a whole episode, just a portion) where it rained beans for 40 days and 40 nights and God told Ren and/or Stimpy to build an ark made of weenies. I suppose that is sacrilegious, but I find that beans and weenies thing very, very funny.

Whenever I think of Ren & Stimpy, I am reminded of two boys in middle school, David and Dave who were completely obsessed with the Gumby and Pokey cartoon. One or both of them were talented artists and they drew cartoons all over their homework, book covers and notebooks.

David and Dave's pictures were really disturbing. They drew the characters doing violent things like burying hatchets in the heads of other cartoons. Always lots and lots of blood. The boys dressed in black, too, and talked enthusiastically about morbid things. But they were the only boys I was even remotely friends with in middle school. And they were faithful customers of my candy business (buying it at Osco, toting it around MVMS in a tackle box, reselling to students at a profit) before it was shut down by teachers.

Like me, David and Dave mucked around at the bottom of the social strata, watching the bright beings who flashed through the surface, trying to stay out of their way. Artistic, morbid cartoonists, dressed in black, they were way too different for middle school.

Which was strange, since little Dave (one was hulking, one wee) was the twin of Sara, who was voted most popular in 8th grade. Why in Heaven's name do middle schoolers vote on most popular, most good looking, etc? To etch the social hierarchy into stone? To save it for posterity?

At our camp in Maine, people write on the doors of the cupboards before they leave, telling about their stay. Someone wrote, "God hates Maine, all it does is rain" which, as a kid, I got a kick out of and repeated and sang until my dad told me that God doesn't hate any state. So that was that.

Oy vey, it's still raining.

Current mood: I want a banana

I Chingon Because I Care

Quoth She

You manky Scotch git! What's 'e do, nibble your bum?
-Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail

Reviewlet: The Bookseller of Kabul

Recently I was talking with someone about having read The Kiterunner and they said, "Oh, you've got to read The Bookseller of Kabul", another story about life in Afghanistan. After reading it, I realized that women had been almost entirely absent in The Kiterunner. I don't remember any female characters other than the main character's wife, who only figures in the last few chapters. The Bookseller of Kabul gives insight to how an Afghani author could write a book that is nearly devoid of women.

From illness specific to women who wear the burka to "honor killings", the author Asne Seierstad shows how, in Afghan society, the scale is tipped entirely in favor of men. To research to book, she lived with an Afgan family for three months. Interestingly, she never uses the pronoun "I", obscuring herself as she tells the family's story.

The miserable plight of Afghan women has added another dimension or facet to my knowledge of the Islamic religion. A religious system with some provision in it that allows women (or anyone, for that matter) to be treated with contempt, disregard, disrespect, etc., etc.--widespread, across the board--is a foil to the Christian faith and should be treated as anathema.

Some people probably argue that Afghan society, not Islam, is the problem and give evidence of moderate Islamic societies where women are treated with more equality. With this book as evidence, I'd say Afghan society IS Islam, the two cannot be seperated. Moderate Islamic practices are the result of Western influence, an entirely good thing.

Reviewlet: West with the Night

Beryl Markham was the first female pilot operating in British East Africa (Kenya) in the early 20th century. West With the Night, her memoir, is like a collection of snaphots taken of an independent, intrepid woman and the country she loved.

As a child she hunted boars with natives and was mauled by a lion. Her level of courage, wisdom and maturity at a young age is stunning. On her own at 19, she decided to use her knowledge of horses to train race horses. She eventually owned and operated a racing stable, overcoming or ignoring prejudice against women trainers.

She writes about the dangers of flying in a matter-of-fact way that I find inspiring. I also like she makes judgements about life and things that matter, saying "this is this way because..." I think that modern authors, influenced by relativism, are hesitant to make such statements. They don't want to take risks, but Beryl Markham does. And she's such a good writer that Hemingway said something like, she writes circles around the rest of us scribblers who claim to be writers.

Double rainbow