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Linky lovelyness

For a long time I didn’t notice that my RSS feed for the excellent online arts journal qarrtsiluni was out of date. Now I’ve fixed it and am consuming its goodness in large gulps.

One of the contributors to the current theme, Making Sense, is the poet George Szirtes who has a massive and impressive web presence. I remember interviewing him when he won the TS Eliot award as part of my one-person campaign to infiltrate more (any) items about poetry into the “news”. He was a delight to talk to. It’s fantastic to see such a respected and renowned poet exploring all the possibilities the internet has to offer.

And if you want to join him at qarrtsiluni there is a week or so left before submissions to the current theme close.

Something else I’ve been remiss about is the Festival of the Trees. The current edition – number 16 already! – is up and about at trees, if you please under the title “Fade to Color (Seasons Change)“. Next month’s is going to be a special Halloween edition at Windywillow, so send in accounts of any Sleepy Hollow-like arboreal encounters (or digitally-recorded evidence thereof) following these instructions.

Finally small is, of course, beautiful. So I’ve made a mobile version of the blog called frizzyLogicette which can be found on all small mobile devices if you point their tiny perfect browsery-type things to http://winksite.com/rraw/frizzylogic.

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links for 2007-10-08

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Night

I dreamt of my brother last night. I don’t very often these days. Twenty-five years dead now, longer than he lived.

In the recent dreams he appears not much older than he was when he died. But that’s the thing. He didn’t actually die. He disappeared. It seems, in these dreams, that he didn’t want to be with us (the mad mother, distant father, malfunctional sister) and retired out of our sight, beyond our reach.

It’s not clear how I get to see him. Does one of his friends bring him to me? do I find out he’s still alive and seek him out? He hardly talks when we meet, distant and slightly ill-at-ease. Retired so far from contact he hardly knows how to communicate.

I try to persuade him to come back again to see my father whose pain still knows no bounds but even as I do so I know that I shall never see him again.

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Three very wise monkeys

wise monkeys

Keep watching, listening to and talking about Burma. From the Free Burma demo and rally held in London.

Of course it won’t do much good unless China, India and Thailand do something about it too, along with the pusillanimous and self-serving west. And the UN. So let’s keep campaigning for that to happen.

(Picture from my mobile because my camera’s broken and I went to the rally on the way to take it in to be mended. A month without it!)

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Progress in work

hat

The red light special hat (see previous progress entry for details) is coming along nicely, apart from my forgetting to check the length of the lining against the length of the body of the hat sufficiently regularly. I sailed past the point at which the two should have been knitted together and, utterly unprepared to unpick several rows of fair isle, will have to hem it in at the end.

The line up the middle of the pattern is one of the four “false seams” which are also the lines along which the decreases for the crown will be made.

In retrospect I should have ordered the colours differently – dark orange, pink and light orange. But one lives and learns.

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links for 2007-10-05

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links for 2007-10-04

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The single dimension of infinity

In Israel and in the Reform world, today is also Simchat Torah, the day of “rejoicing in the Torah,” when we read the very end of the Torah and then immediately cycle back around to the very beginning. Our central narrative is a kind of mobius strip, a continual spiral, which shifts in meaning each year as we change and grow.

Although the path is usually described as having eight steps, in essence there are only three, with each of those three broken down in groupings of three, three, and two sub-step. The three basic steps are ethical conduct, meditation, and transforming insight into the way things are. Rather than forming a stairway that leads to heaven, these three steps and their eight sub-steps are more like a Mobius Strip that endlessly leaves, travels, and arrives in the here and now. One can start anywhere on the path, or choose to follow any step at any time, or several or all of them all at once, and always arrive at the same place. The Noble Eightfold Path, as the path to the end of suffering is usually called, truly describes more of a place than a path, with the place being the present, a boundary-less orb without coordinates in which all things happen everywhere all the time.