|
Section 73 Entry 0001. Date: 2003 October 15 Wednesday
(diary)
(previous)
(top)
(bottom)
(next) (topics) (contents)
At just after 1630 today, an earthquake rocked through central Tokyo. I was in a building doing e-mail when the computer desk started to shake, as did the walls and the floor.
Everyone else in the room sat up and took notice, but I was the only person who dived under the desk. I get the impression most people don't think it cool to do this unless the ceiling starts to collapse - when the Big One finally takes us all by surprise, a lot of people are going to be killed by their dignity.
After I'd been shaken and stirred by the earthquake, I found myself feeling strangely seasick. I've had the experience of being made slightly dizzy by a minor tremor, but this was the first time that I'd ever felt a little nauseous.
This was the second appreciable earthquake I've experienced in central Tokyo since the recent major earthquake up in Hokkaido. It reminds me, yet again, that my earthquake preparations are still far from complete.
Section 73 Entry 0002. Date: 2003 October 16 Thursday.
(diary)
(previous)
(top)
(bottom)
(next) (topics) (contents)
I got some bad news today of a medical nature. The bad news is that apparently I am dead. This news reached me in an e-mail saying, in part:-
Did you know you are deceased? I discovered claims of your "untimely death" on a website today, forget which one
My next question is: well, how does this affect my tax status? Also, do I have to get up and go to work tomorrow morning?
...
[later:-]
God! This is worse than I thought! Not only am I dead, but apparently I have been dead for some time! I've just found a posting online which reads, in part:-
UNfortunately, Hugh Cook's work has become so enmeshed in probate and estate law, as well as a morass of international copyright snafus since Cook's untimely death, that they are near impossible to locate
If it's true that I have been dead for some time then I think the logical implication of this is that, at the very least, I should think about getting a stronger deodorant ....
Section 73 Entry 0003. Date: 2003 October 17 Friday.
(diary)
(previous)
(top)
(bottom)
(next) (topics) (contents)
Recently, someone drew my attention to a just-starting-up story/art/blog website and suggested I take a look. This site proved interesting because it made me aware of my own fossil nature.
The site is www.open-interfaces.org, and the webmaster, one Abbas S. Khan, is interested in, for example, "Dido, Delerium, Paul VanDyke, Garbage, X, Sonic Youth". Even though I can confidently identify these as music-producing entities, I don't remember ever having seen any of these names before.
(My own CD collecting ended three or four years ago when I bought a four-CD set of Rolling Stones songs ... I've simply cut music out of my life on the grounds that I'm too busy.)
On Abass's website, Noam Chomsky is denigrated "because he's been harping the same crap in a different packaging for the past fifty years" - probably a fair criticism. But Chomsky was younger (and me too) when I flicked through some of his political pages ... too many years ago now for me to remember exactly when. (Been there, done that, goodbye Chomsky.)
So I become conscious of my age ... and of how my reading pretty much stopped maybe ... well ... how many years ago? Twenty?
I was back at university not so many years ago, true, but then I was studying language (Japanese language and a little English linguistics) and the older regions of English literature (the age of Shakespeare, the Romantics and so forth.) (Finishing off, in my late thirties, a course of study begun when I was just seventeen years old.)
Of all the writers I read when I was at university, the only one who has been in my thoughts recently is Machiavelli, who (unless I am mistaken) has been dead for quite some time now. As to what's happened in the world in the last twenty years, I don't really know, apart from some stuff about computer chips getting faster.
I follow current affairs, of course, but one of the nice things about getting older is that current affairs never changes. It's always the same mix of wars, oppressions, murders, organized corruption and monumental political screw-ups. There's really nothing in a modern newspaper which would come as a surprise to, say, Jonathan Swift.
Getting back to the website, Abbas has a "Who inspires you?" list which includes people such as "Oscar DeHijeulos, Rahul Dravid, Mikhail Sholokov, Stainslaw Lem, Walter Simonson, Charles Vess, Lars Von Trier, Yoshikata Amano".
The only one of these people I can confidently place is Lem, who I identify (or misidentify) as a science fiction writer. As for the others, I don't really have a clue.
The fact that I can't identify most of the people on the list doesn't bother me. (I have no ambition to be an encyclopedia.) But what registers with me is that, if I were to put together a similar list, the very last book that kicked my brain cells out of their routine patterns would be one I read back in 1991, a book called Orientalism by Edward W. Said.
Since then, nothing.
Not only am I dead ....
(click for details)
.... but I am also fossilized.
The link to Abbas's website (a link to a sensibility entirely different from my own) is:-
www.open-interfaces.org
Section 73 Entry 0004. Date: 2003 October 18 Saturday.
(diary)
(previous)
(top)
(bottom)
(next) (topics) (contents)
George Bush came to town. I didn't get to meet him, but I had a dream about his visit. Oddly, George himself didn't play a role in the dream.
The dream was like this: I was outside, lying on some grass between a university hostel and some other building. Some members of George's entourage, who had been staying in the hostel, were straggling down a path toward the other building. They were being jeered at, in a good natured way, by some lazy people who were gathered on the grass.
This was all very relaxed, with no hint of tension.
The thing that caught my eye was the CIA guy who was one of George's bodyguards. (I believe that, in the real world, it is the Secret Service which provides the president's bodyguards. However, I regret to say that my dreams are not fact checked for accuracy.)
The odd thing about the CIA guy was his face. He was quite a big man with quite a big head, and his face was puffy and featureless, but for a deep circular indentation, as if someone had taken a can of baked beans and had shoved it into a globe of moist clay.
That was all he had by the way of features: a circular hole with a single eye lurking somewhere at the bottom of it.
Someone told me the CIA guy had been wounded in Afghanistan and that his face had been restructured, and he was being kept on in his job as a reward for his loyalty.
What strikes me now about the dream is the crassness of the factual error, having a CIA guy serve as a presidential bodyguard. There must be a potential market for fact-checking software for the dreaming mind ... of course, the necessary technology probably hasn't quite been developed yet ....
The other thing I note about the dream is that it's curiously devoid of insight or relevance. If I was cooking up a dream for a piece of fiction then I'd have to do better than that.
Speaking of dreams, today I've added a piece of dream poetry to the site:
Nightmare
(diary)
(previous)
(top)
(bottom)
(next) (topics) (contents)
|