con sordino

Just in time for the Winter Olympics, here's the BBC's Top Gear firing a rocket-powered classic Mini down a ski jump. The video is ten minutes long, but trust me, the payoff at the end is sooooo worth it.

As of today, my new car is officially in the MINI ordering system and on its way to being built. I'll try not to bore you with all of the day-to-day minutiae, but thanks to the magic of the online tracking system there may be a few updates along the way.

Anyway, here's a look at my soon-to-be-born MINI as I configured it. Eugenics at work, baby!

It's a Cooper S (the faster 168hp supercharged version) Convertible, with lots of bells & whistles and chrome. It also has a Limited Slip Differential for extra auto-geek coolness and better handling in swervy situations.

People compare the handling to a go-kart, but my goal is to fly the thing as if it's a WWI airplane that just happens to be stuck to the ground. Go-go 7G turns!

The dealership was initially anticipating I might get it as soon as late February, but now it's looking close to mid-March.

The line forms here for top-down roadtrips. Warning: You must be taller than 32 inches to board this ride.

Apropos of nothing, I've spent a little chunk of my afternoon pondering an especially pretty little backwater of the English language, one in which there are no rules. Namely, the adjectival forms of proper names.

Consider the prevailing usage for these authors: Kafka / Kafkaesque, Hegel / Hegelian, Plato / Platonic, Homer / Homeric, Hemingway / Hemingwayesque, Byron / Byronic, Keats / Keatsian.

There are no rules. The only controlling factor seems to be euphony, which is an intriguingly subjective matter. Kafkaesque prevails, but that hasn't prevented people from using Kafkan or even Kafkian. Even Hemingwayian, which is practically impossible to pronounce, has been seen in print.

Certainly, there are notable trends, which seem mostly to be based on impulses toward euphony inherited from the multilingual parentage of English. "-Ian" seems to be the preferred default, and certain endings and suffixes become associated with their respective adjectival endings from the ancestral language, giving us common patterns like "-onic" and the frequent use of the French-derived "-esque" for words ending in vowel sounds (as so many French words do). Still, nothing is entirely firm: It's Homeric for Homer, but it's Mailerian for Mailer. Byronic for Byron, but Styronesque for Styron.

I find I'm rather fond of this little backwater. Anarchy prevails, and anything goes. In English, in which even the exceptions tend to get formalized into rules, that's a rare treat.

Yes, it's a pretty little place. Idyllic, you might say. Or is that idyllian? Idyllesque?

* * *

As a thought exercise for the comments, make your case for what you think is the best adjectival form of Van Matre.

(Bear in mind that it's pronounced "Van Mater" - which will come in ever so handy if I ever go into custom coach-building and specialize in transforming vans into stretch limousines)

Recently I've had an unhealthy tendency toward isolationism. Not as a political ideal, but as a personal strategy for coping with overwhelming stress.

Fortuitously, a number of completely unrelated recent events have inspired a new detente, one of which is this:  I've been digitally befriended by imomus.

If this is the effect, the cause is all too easy to deduce: I befriended imomus first, and he chose to reciprocate the gesture.

It transgresses an interesting boundary, though, because not only are we not in fact friends, we're not even acquainted.  But it has me thinking about the nature of friendship.

When I befriended imomus, it was a gesture of convenience.  The thought process went something like this: "I read my friends' journals daily.  I would like to read imomus's journal daily because it's thought-provoking and fun, and because I secretly like to pretend I am him, living in Berlin and wearing interesting outfits as I go to museums, make music, and probably have fabulous sex.  Therefore, I will befriend imomus."

What happened here?
1) The desire to emulate or incorporate some resonant aspect of a stranger
2) The attachment of a signifier - "friend" - to this desire, for the convenient purpose of making our social networks intersect, thereby increasing proximity to that longed-for resonance
3) The politesse of "good" society intervenes, and the signifier applied unilaterally is made bilateral, whether the resonance is bilateral or (more likely) not.

But most importantly...

4) The designation of imomus as a "friend" effectively makes him one.  He becomes privy to any private thoughts I may reserve for "friends only"; he gains access to my social network of other friends (should he choose to explore them by linking onward from me),etc. 

I have, in effect, made a friend.  And this process is not at all unique to Livejournal.  It is the way friendship works.

Even if imomus does not reciprocate by befriending me, I have already made him "my friend".  I have been intentionally vulnerable.

My many months of isolationism have sprung primarily from a not-entirely-logical desire to protect that vulnerability, which is an innate aspect of who I am, by avoiding its exercise.

Friends are made, and friendship is an inherently collaborative creative act.  In denying my vulnerability, I deny my own creativity.  I shut down those parts of me that make music, go to art museums, and have fabulous sex - all creative and collaborative acts in their own way.

And this is above all the most enlightening conclusion of my Stendhalian rambling (On Love is a smashing good read, by the way): Friendship is a medium for personal change. 

Friendship is a transgression.  It crosses lines, it infiltrates borders.  It resettles, it reinvents.

Like the modern-day Europe, we make our borders porous.  Permeable.  And the consequence is freedom: the freedom for the inhabitants of the nation that is my identity to travel, or even emigrate, to the nation that is yours, and vice versa. 

When I am vulnerable, when I am "making friends", I am open to the immigration of everything from Momus's predilection for wearing an eyepatch to Donna's unabashed fandom of Rick Astley.

I can be changed as a person.

It's a new day, and I can be the person I am.  And by befriending others, I can be the person I want to become.

Friend imomus, welcome to my country!

"I thank my daughters for joining their dad in his last campaign"

Last campaign--there's your silver lining.

Now, this is a meme I can thoroughly endorse.

"When you see this, post a bit of poetry in your own journal."

Herewith, a couple of poems for your enjoyment:

( Life Is Happy, My Friends )

September
(David Sylvian)

The sun shines high above
the sounds of laughter
The birds swoop down upon
the crosses of old grey churches
We say that we're in love
while secretly wishing for rain
Sipping coke and playing games

September's here
again
September's here
again

No war that has torture in it will ever be humankind's last war.

Well, it's about time I revived the old Livejournal, not that it was ever particularly lively to begin with. 

So, there's much news forthcoming on my recent trip to the Coachella music festival, but meanwhile here's a little meme to set the mood, by way of hangingfire :

On your current playlist, hit shuffle and pick the first twenty songs on the list (no matter how cheesy or embarrassing), and write down your favourite line of the song. Try to avoid putting the song title in the line. Then, have your friends comment and see if they know the songs.

So here's my 20, courtesy of a Party Shuffle on my work PC's copy of iTunes.  I'll give an actual prize to anyone who can be the first to name more than two of them.

1. that's not to say i don't have good times
but as for my days
i spend them waiting

2. There are doors that let you in and out
But never open
But they are trapdoors
That you can't come back from

3. As bad as bad becomes
It's not a part of you
And love is only sleeping
Wrapped in neglect

4. Should have said so much
Makes it harder
The more you love

5. I want the night to stretch us
There's plenty left to know

6. Arriving late, you clean the debris
And walked into the angry scene
It felt just like falling in love again

7. But when I remember those people and places
They were really too good in their way.

8. I'm a tiny little flash in a damaged universe
You know what makes it better only makes it worse

9. Will I still be soiled
When the dirt is off

10. New York's a go-go and everything tastes nice

11. Grape’s bitter, I’m no quitter
Revolutions come one by one

12. I'd paint a picture of my life upon your wall.
And use the colors that have made life seem small.

13. never wanted to feel this pain
never wanted to feel so sad
never wanted to feel this pain
today
today

14. To make your troubles go
Just keep on singing
All day long

(major bonus points for guessing the particular artist I'm listening to on #14)

15. I will not wait around to face my fortune
I will not wait around for something else
You are around me now
You can have anything that you want

16. Ticking years fly past, trailing half-remembered hymns,
He nailed his colours to the mast and now the ship is steering him

17. That smile on her face is starting to crack
While welding back the pieces of her shattered heart
That's scattered out here,
With the ghosts of her peers

18. We dance on motive's invisible causes
But won’t stop wondering
Won't ever stop wondering

19. And I promise not to cry anymore
All the reasons beat the crap out of me
Everyday when I wake up they are waiting
But I promised not to cry anymore
'Cause it's the same old plot these days

20. Even Marilyn Monroe was a man, but this tends to get overlooked by our
mother-fixated, overweight, sexist media.

It is, after all, a compulsion with me to use a blank space. Not necessarily to fill it, but to frame it, caption it, emboss it, doodle on it, compose on it, decompose it, or otherwise make it my own.

Still, there's a particular wealth of interest in the world outside my computer these days, so regularity will not be a watchword.

But when I have time for a quick flight, I'll be slipping on the goggles and skywriting here.

On with the news...

Everyone seems to still be doing quizzes in blog-land. I'm tired of pre-fab quizzes. So here's the latest on me, in the form of quizzes and answers I invented myself:

What kind of number are you?
Reciprocal
What kind of choral music are you?
Antiphonal
What is your current altitude?
Above 30,000 feet, flying in close formation
What kind of food are you?
An unbaked loaf of bread, still rising
According to the Emotional State Animal Anagram-O-Matic, you are a:
Vole

I'll end with a quote, which I thank hangingfire for introducing me to some years ago.

Imagine a Carthage sown with salt and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden?

Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water -- peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need of slaking. For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires.

To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it?

And here again is a foreshadowing -- the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.

Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries.

-- Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping