December 22, 2001, 12:19 a.m.

In which we dream of bugs and buggery

back & forth

Happy solstice, everybody!

Current Beverage: Jack Daniel's on rocks. It's like college ... but it's not.
Current Music: Canonic Variations on Vom Himmel Hoch da komm ich her, J S Bach, played by the mighty Gustav Leonhardt.
Current Project: The beginnings of an entry on the harpsichord at Wikipedia. For people not already familiar with the Wikipedia, it's the perfect post-modern 1911 Britannica. If any are you are confused by my association of "amateur encyclopaedism" and "fun", please leave now.
Current Ailment(s): Sore feet and a stuffy nose. Current Beverage is of inestimable succor on both counts.

Tonight I closed P**t's with CNZ and the delightful Ms. M. CNZ has passed the bar of the best kind of masculinity, in his incantation of several bars of Please, please, please let me get what I want during a particularly miserable and lightless segment of the day. He also molested me to the strains of the last movement of Tschaikovsky's Path�tique Symphony. Nice lad. Pity he's obsessed with some girl and her nasty, abusive boyfriend. [Said "molestation", ut clarificatur, occured while the store was writhing with customers: I was putting the pastries in order when he attacked me from behind with a full-contact bear hug. So, nothing especially racy to report, I suppose, but it was pleasant anyway. My sexually-active evil twin would have been able to snog him tonight, I should think, but he's never taught me his secret. So as I climb into my empty bed ... oh, well: enough said. --ed.]

Last night was extra-super fun, since I went with CC, ECG, AS, and the dread SP to see Lord of the Rings. It's good. Just go see it and have fun, for gods' sake. The gentleman who plays Legolas, the appealingly-named Orlando Bloom, is worth the price of admission (those of you who can spot the pun in the previous sentence know me far too well and get a free coffee). His parents were obviously reading too much modernist literature and he is to be commended for that fact alone. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Whilst you're at elvish.org, do check out the Elvish poetry on the site. Dude, I love what people do with their brains.

* * * * *

The Holder of the world turned out to be disappointing in the end, alas. It ought to have been about three times as long, but Mukherjee obviously had a deadline to meet and cobbled together the rest of the plot gracefully but rather mirthlessly. Individually, like Frederick the Apprentice Pirate might say, I loved all the ideas in the last third of the book, but collectively I must dismiss them all as badly-executed. Few things on this earth are as sad to me as the prospect of a superb idea inexpertly set forth; it means they really can't be done again properly for at least a few hundred years. On the other hand, books with such prominent seams are excellent inspiration, and my own book about British Colonialism, the Divers Sorts of Indians, and Womanly Duties is slated to publish in 2003. Which doesn't give me much time to research and write it.

Evocation time: I once had a dream, while still employed at Pr*ssm*n & Kr*sk*l, wherein SS, KK's partner, worked for the East India Company. We were sitting under white canopies on a wet, grassy slope with a considerable crowd of people; from time to time, a Vapor-colored VW beetle came along and drove a few people from the crowd away. This was the second part of the dream; the first part of the dream concerned being in the palace of a Thai princess and consipiring with her to sneak her boyfriend in and out of an amateur production of Messiah. It involved plashing through candle-lit cisterns under the palace and gaudy hot-pink silk robes for everyone. There was a brief interlude between the two halves of the dream when I dreamt I looked in the mirror. My face was upside-down on my head, and I had two horrible white tentacles in my mouth which I could use to clean my teeth with.

I did go to high-school with a not-too-high-up Thai princess, CN. She carpooled with me and my date, a mere Thai aristocrat (and noted fag-hag) CS. CN was very small, very attractive, and very bad-ass, being the first girl I knew who smoked. CN and I hung around during one of our free periods senior year with FF, whose mother was a professional costume designer with pink hair. FF had the richest, most berniniesque eyebrows ever, and lashes like black silk curtains blown by the breeze. My mother actually forbade me sleep over at his house one night during the play, thereby sparing me the trouble of having close friendships with men for a good five years.