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by Hugh Cook |
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Section 112 Entry 0001. Date: 2004 May 13 Thursday.
(diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) My big excitement today was that I found time to get out the shears and cut the grass on our pocket-handkerchief lawn, something I haven't done for about eighteen months. Normal everyday life: cutting the grass, putting on my necktie, heading off to work, opening the daily newspaper on the train, and - hey, what's this? - a beheading. Well, that's now normal life, right? Part of the brave new reality that's been inflicted upon us ever since planetary sanity collapsed back in 2001. The beheading ... well, to my surprise, the International Herald Tribune had three frames from the Nick Berg beheading video (on page four of today's edition, as published in Japan.) In the third frame, the victim is a bit of a blur, a confusion of black and white smudged onto the newsprint. Falling to one side. That's all I want to see of the beheading video, thank you. I noticed a little bit on the Internet about all the American politicians who went to see the extra prison scandal photos. Ted Kennedy, it seems, decided he didn't need to see. I gather that everyone else decided that they needed to. Section 112 Entry 0002. Date: 2004 May 14 Friday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) Not yet quite mid-May, but already the Tokyo-Yokohama area is starting to get uncomfortably hot. Under gray skies, misty gray smog. The heat, the smog and the end-of-week fatigue conspire to leave me flat. I found some more random words in a spam message, looking suggestive:-
There's a poem in there somewhere, but I'm too tired to extract it. Looking on the Internet, I find that any number of people have found these spam text strings before me. "Spam becomes art as junk mail inspires poets," says one webpage title. (I was slow to find spam's secret and not-so-secret poetic potentials because I usually just delete all my spam unread.) Some people, it seems, have treated chunks of spam text as found poetry in its own right, which I suppose is fair enough ... but I find myself automatically wanting to go to work on the raw material and work it into something more quasi-coherent. earlier spam poetry diary entry on this blog Later:- A poem, extracted:- |
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I am Rigel the Fifteenth, Born to destroy you. Your thesis cannot deny me. I am the incarnate professional, An angel of death. I do this for a living. Suck your thematic wafer, It will not help. Drink down your weatherbeaten distillate, It will not help. I am the pianist of simultaneity, The centrifuge of desuetude. I am white light and destruction. And mad, I admit it, I have accepted your needle. A truce, not a peace treaty. In the stonewall workplace of my heart The silky applause of your smiles Giveth no joy, is rejected. I am Obsession. Cankerworms turning in meltwater. The exploding sun will be my letterhead. The low north will surrender The smoke of its ashes, Obeisant. |
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Section 112 Entry 0003. Date: 2004 May 18 Tuesday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) A couple of strange things happened, odd incidents of the kind that can nourish fiction. The first was on Sunday. Scene: a rainy railway platform in Gunma prefecture. A Japanese man was sitting alone in the little waiting room on the platform. The sliding door was open. The guy was fooling with his cellphone. Suddenly, the cellphone came skittering out of the door and crash-landed on the platform. The guy hastily retrieved it. What happened? Demonically possessed cellphone? I have no idea. The other incident was last night. I came home, and let myself in. The house was in darkness. I walked into the house and heard something keeping pace with me. Making an odd kind of sound somewhere between tapping and scraping. I stopped. The sound stopped. I started. The sound started. I looked around. Nothing there. Then I felt around. And discovered - An umbrella. A loop hanging from my backpack had snagged an umbrella from the umbrella stand in the foyer, and the snagged umbrella had been dragged along behind me, tapping and scraping its way across the floor. Section 112 Entry 0004. Date: 2004 May 24 Monday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) At a little over one month of age, my daughter has devised a method to communicate the fact that she has had enough to drink, thank you very much. Her tongue comes poking out beside the teat of the bottle that is stuck in her mouth (bottle feeding, in this case, being used to supplement the natural source.) And, if you don't take the hint, and continue with the milk input, then there will be consequences. Today's contribution to the wisdom of the world: if you don't find it amusing to be vomited over on occasion, then don't get into the new baby business. Section 112 Entry 0005. Date: 2004 May 26 Wednesday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) At roughly five weeks of age, my baby daughter has developed at least one clear communicative strategy and, what's more, is showing a definite anticipation of future events. Earlier, her demand for food was an unbroken scream. Then she modified her approach: try a whimper, then try a low-volume scream, and only escalate beyond that if necessary. Now her approach has got more sophisticated: scream then stop. Look around. Is anything happening? Is the Magic Food Source looming near? If yes, wait. If no, scream again. More loudly, this time. As for her anticipation of the future, that relates to breast feeding. The norm is five minutes on each breast. And, as the five-minute mark approaches, her hand will clamp down on the cornucopian Source of the World's Best Food, laying claim to it - clearly, the intention is that "Nobody's going to take this away from me." (Currently, however, baby Cornucopia does not have the muscle to back up the claim.) It seems that somewhere in Cornucopia's baby mind, there is a clock that ticks away five minutes, and that she gets an internal warning just before the alloted time expires. (Subjectively, I understand this kind of clock. I have my own, which often wakes me up just before my alarm clock goes off in the morning. But, in such a young baby, the demonstrated knowledge of the future seems quite remarkable.) Speechwise, she's got as far as "Muur," a cooing sound which doesn't (yet) seem to mean anything. I've heard about babies babbling, but, evidently, we're not at the babbling stage yet - this sound arrives by itself as a solitary verbal incident. A while back, I read a book which said that babies should sleep on their backs. And I thought, "Well, you can put a baby down on its back, but what's to stop it just turning over?" What I hadn't realized (I think I knew it at some level but had failed to properly internalize the knowledge) is that a very young baby is physically incapable of turning over. Incapable of turning over, Cornucopia kicks and struggles, and sometimes her entire body shakes with fist-waving energy, and I am reminded of the movie made from the H.G. Wells novel "The Island of Doctor Moreau," in which humans imprisoned in lumpish animal shapes struggle (and a futile struggle it is) to break free from the imprisoning flesh, to break free to humanity. Watching this, I'm revising my notions of the abilities of babies. I'm moving in the direction of thinking that their sheer lack of muscle causes us to massively underestimate them. Fast forward a hundred years, and I'm sure that babies born in the world's centers of excellence will, pretty much from birth, be hooked up to virtual bodies (or robotic bodies, take your pick) which are fully capable of motion. Supplied with the required muscular strength, Baby will be able to roll over from day one, and will (perhaps) discover walking (or, at least, crawling) inside of a week. The vast acceleration in mental development that this will mean (I figure that it is the weak body which is holding back the mind) will mean that, by the age of, say, three, Baby will be ready for productive real-world tasks, such as basic war fighting, for example. |
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Three-year-old entity accused of mismanaging military prison pleads innocent, claims orders came direct from president (mental age seven.)
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Parenthetically, all through the "new baby" experience, I've been reminded of how thoroughly science fiction has colonized my imagination. That stronger-than-peristaltic motion beneath the skin, that living creature moving within a human body - doesn't that irresistibly take us in the direction of Alien?
Still. Here we are. A human family. Doing totally normal things like sharing the morning sunlight together. And the wider world, as presently constituted, looks, from this perspective, to be so garishly cartoonish, so extravagantly deranged in its witless violence, that I can't think of a single intelligent comment to make about it. |
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