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As noted elsewhere, I went to the beach for a while. It was lovely. C and I periodically discuss moving out to the coast when we’re older, and it’s definitely appealing. Portland sometimes seems like an unhappy medium to me between a dramatic urban environment like New York and a dramatic natural environment like you find along the Pacific here or in the ancestral homeland.

Unsurprisingly, my aspiration to get through The Past Regained in short order trailed off pretty dramatically. I have gotten to the crux of the biscuit (cookie/whatever) as discussed in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” and it’s pretty cool. In another Proust/Benjamin connection that I hadn’t been aware of before, one section of reflection concludes “the task of the writer is the task of the translator.” He also mounts what is, as far as I know, history’s first attack on hipsters, wherein he bitches about people who listen to music primarily to gush about how much they love it in an attempt to appear sensitive and artistic.

I have been doing a lot of writing. Some of this has been your standard hand-on-forehead diary fare, but I’ve also been trying to do a better job of keeping my random thoughts in some kind of repository, mostly so I can see if any of their threads intersect or if I’m going through certain topics at an interval cycle that prevents new instances from building on old ones. I’d say that this latter project is too new to know if it’s effective, but it does seem as if it’s clearing internal clutter, which is always nice.

The plot summary for the film adaptation of Never Let Me Go (one of the two best novels of the current millennium) provided here is either designed to avoid spoiling the hook, or an indicator that the film will be a colossal fuckup. Cross your fingers.

When I left Hampshire and skittered off to London, I packed a bunch of things into boxes to ship to my mother. As is basically inevitable when one does anything besides languish in the bosom of one’s family immediately after college, I never saw most of the contents of those boxes ever again.

One of things things that went into those boxes was my copy of the James album Wah Wah. I was heavy into Pulp at the time (I had finished my div 3 with no coffee and very little booze by basically listening to This Is Hardcore 7 or 8 times per day), and I think that I may have considered James to not have enough “fourths and ninths,” my glib way to describe the haute-pop style of Jarvis and co. I didn’t want that kind of space-cadetery any more.

After periodically being made aware of the absence and deciding it would be too much of a pain to get in the cardboard packaging over the years, I finally got a new copy in the mail today. It’s pretty heady stuff. The kind of thing that you get from miles of tape and a deck of oblique strategies. Glad to have it back.

A lonesome cone on a rooftop.

A cool sign from the inner Southeast.

I sent pictures to Temboo for a staff bio page. They chose another one, but this one was the coolest.

Some cool clouds from the back yard last night.

And here is the latest addition to the list of things I never thought I would own.

I make it out into the world.

So after being basically illiterate for months on end I decided to try out Gene Wolfe. The Book of the Long Sun is totally great, and I’m looking forward to reading other work. Like all foo-ologies, there were some problems near the end where keeping up the overall development of the arc required a bit of excess, but man have I ever read a lot worse.

Building on this, I have redoubled my attack on The Past Regained and I’m tentatively hoping to get through it by the end of the month. Best like plans of walruses and antelopes and all that, but you never know. Helping to sustain this optimism is the fact that Paris’s social life carrying on under the searchlights set up against air raids is intrinsically surreal in a way that allows the dreamy-Marcel-voice to invade the real world, which is pretty agreeable.

Space Battleship Yamato live action movie is looking pretty rad.

Something reminded me recently of how annoying I find the “information science” definition of ontology. For one thing, there is already a word (taxonomy) for this process of putting everything in order, and furthermore it’s a word that describes an epistemological process, so ontology don’t really enter into it. During my grumbling, however, I remembered that people would abuse “ontology” in a similar way at Hampshire to describe a theorist or philosopher’s overall understanding of the universe. The point of this coinage was basically to avoid attributing a cosmology (which was what people meant when they used the word in this way) to thinkers who were too contemporary for such tomfoolery. This made the whole thing feel a bit whimsical, so now I don’t mind the abuse of language as much.

(Here’s what does still annoy me: in computer terms, “synchronous” and “asynchronous” mean the exact opposite of what they do in real life.)

Toilet repair:

Kernel building:

The toilet repair was successful. I got the kernel to boot but it wouldn’t let me log in.

Work has been incredibly grueling lately, because I’m supposed to be exercising functionality that has problems that fall between people’s object domains. Basically, there’s a systems-level problem deep within code that somebody else is writing, so nobody has a very clear picture of what the hell is going on. For my part, I’ve been turning Amazon EC2 instances on and off a lot which, let me tell you, is pretty satisfying.

Part of the whole turning things on and off process is making sure the EC2 instances is making sure their domain names are all in a line, which is good because the recaptcha phrases at dnspark.net are basically the only thing keeping my head from exploding. Small miracles &c.

Speaking of complaining, I have finally reached the ultimate volume of Proust’s Masterwork and am almost ready to participate in a seaside summarizing contest while on holiday. I picked it up at St. Mark’s Books when I was in NY a couple weeks ago, which I found kind of appropriate, as I have purchased my copies of all but one of the previous volumes there. The Fugitive finished strong, and this one is starting well, so I have high hopes. There’s a lot of explicit discussion of memory here. We’ll see if it’s cool enough to displace the dream-talk of volume 3 as my justification for slogging through the crap parts.