sleight-of-words

updates and upshots

2012-01-18T15:06:00.000+01:00

AsI am so often wont to do, I’ve let time sidle and slip by whilst I’ve entirely forgottenabout blogging (let alone about that whole obligation as Official Diplomat tothe Ocelots); this is in part because D and I have been traveling towardsauthor readings and warm jazz, and in part because I am lackadaisical(etymology: coined from Sterne’s TristramShandy, “lackadaisy”,meaning “alas! lack-a-day!”), and in part because Ihave been very cold in these Colorado snowdrifts, and it hurts to type. But I can affirm it’s been an exciting fewweeks, both in literary and adventuresome terms. A summation:

Igive here many thanks to Between The Covers bookstore in Telluride (and itsskillful and kind managers, Daiva and Bobbie, and Hilary and Jon), where weheld an absolutely lovely Logodædaly reading upon December 29^th—such excellentcompany with all the guests who braved the frosts to attend and listen to, yes,a recitation of the dictionary. Including—mostthrillingly, and utterly unexpectedly, musician Peter Yarrow (quoting myself: “wow!You mean Peter Yarrow Peter Yarrow iscoming???”) , whom I was honored and delighted to meet.

A treasure of an evening!

Thenceforth,following a venturesome New Years’ (I gambled for the first time! Blackjack, like they play in the movies!),David and I hit the road once again, through the forlorn plains and dusky oaksof Texas (I saw 3 eagles, a cat, 2 hawks, and a coyote named Frank who is arace car driver), and into the incomparable streets of New Orleans. I will say with utter confidence that apartfrom the luculent and translucent mirrors of alternate dimensions, there’s noplace in the world like this city. I can’tcook gumbo or play the clarinet, but this is a place to which I always want toreturn. That said, I’ll make a few enthusedrecommendations:

Fora perfect place to stay in the Bywater district, please see the BywaterB&B, a gorgous house sprinkled with unbelievable folk art, and managed bythe skilled Pamela Davis-Noland, herself the author of Coffee-Colored Dreams…

Formusic to make you feel that you’ve always had the happy blues, check outThursday nights at Vaughan’s Lounge with the illustrious Kermit Ruffins…

Forsongs that surpass whimsy and make you believe in the sheer power of objects inhuman hands, the work and play of Washboard Chaz…

Andfor a band that takes you from Dixieland to Paraguay and to the Balkans, theexuberant sound of the Panorama Jazz Band…

Andnow here we are—two days before David and I depart for Hungary once more(apparently, it’s raining and thirty-two degrees in Pécs, a fact which makes mebitter), and then, following two weeks of brief wine-racking and nestlingdesperately in our little home, it’s off to Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam fortwo months…! I shall endeavor to blogmore often, which is an utterly shaky but well-intended promise, and may I be plagued by evil kittens should I neglect it.

This really happened.

Sweetness upon the solstice

2011-12-22T15:13:00.000+01:00

Inthe snow-glazed lull between book readings (I haven’t maintained a normal humanbody temperature for three weeks), whilst I’ve been attempting to bake pitasand wrap gifts (I’m getting my brother a zeppelin), Logodædaly has received some pleasurable compliments, which Ithought I’d share here so that the book has a present too…

Forone, ForeWord Reviews has given us a bitof praise, as may be viewed here…

Andwe’ve made the list of Denver’s bestselling books! #9 in the nonfiction roster! And though Logodædaly is far more fiction than fact, we’re honored, and as afriend of mine pointed out ,”number nine” is pretty significant in the Beatles’White Album, which has to be a goodthing.

Ifanybody can figure out how to make homemade pitas have the nice balloon-eypocket, please let me know…

Things happen all the time!

2011-12-20T15:31:00.001+01:00

Now,partially out of sheer busyness (the long, long days wherein David and I droveto Seattle, Portland, and back again, through the cowpoke loneliness of Wyomingto those Oregon mists which cause one to disbelieve in solid matter) (and additionalreadings here in Fort Collins and in Denver, whew!) and partially out ofimmense laziness, I haven’t updated for a time, but things have been pleasantindeed.

Forone, I’ve got to thank Reading Frenzy and all those who attended last Tuesday’sevent, as well as writers Evan P. Schneider and Melissa Reeser, for sharingtheir unique talents that evening; it was a warm and glowing night amidst thezany zines and rustling literature, and I’m so grateful to have readthere.

Andupon another note, much gratitude to New Belgium Brewery and the guests ofFriday’s Matter Journal release partyat which I read, and to the other writers who offered up their own skilledwords that night. For those fans ofliterary magazines and all their multifarious gems within, check out Matter and Wolverine Farm…

Andthen, upon Saturday—LEON Gallery in Denver, a new space of luminous walls andeven brighter artwork and even brighter hosts, provided a marvelous venue foranother reading from myself and the gifted contributors to Wolverine Farm—it wasa splendiferous evening with much merriment and sincere intellect, and I can’tforget that photograph of the man with the violin.

Fornow, though, I’ve got an interlude of a break until a Telluride reading on the 29^th(more information to come!), which leaves me some good time to fumble withwrapping paper, peruse some new philosophical papers I’m most interested in rightnow, and attempt to bake pitas with the real pocket and everything.

the Northwest Passage

2011-12-13T15:35:00.002+01:00

As for the past three days David and I have been in Seattle, carousing irresponsibly with my best childhood friend, the inimitable museologist and comedienne Emily Bailey, and her sweet fiance John (with a side trip ducking up to Canada, a misty land to which we'd never been), I haven't posted in a while - but I shall today, since tonight I'll be at a literary event at Reading Frenzy Bookstore in Portland, Oregon, alongside authors Melissa Reeser and Evan P Schneider (both of them talented as calligraphy and an honor to read with). So I'd like to invite anybody in the northwest area to attend, should it fit schedules and whims, and in the meantime, wish all my blessings upon you and the mossy woods and the perpetual, perpetual rain!

readings & roads, gratitude and gumballs, alliteration and anvils

2011-12-09T00:20:00.001+01:00

WhenI was a kid (image: tie-dyed shirt and leaves tangled in ridiculous bowlhaircut), and my family would pile into the car to the tunes of songs aboutheroic or menacing cats, taking a trip to Denver, the glorious site of pilgrimagewas always the Tattered Cover Bookstore, paradise in labyrinthine form—those volumesstacked in allure upon the stairs and the shelves all weighty with so many,many, many things which needed to beread…. Thusly, I was honored by theirhosting of Sherise and I at last night’s Logodædalyreading, a lovely evening amidst the pages—and I send them all mygratitude, and moreover thanks to all those who attended our literary escapade!

Andin approximately 11 hours—that being 3am, a most luculent and spooky time—Davidand I shall be crawling out of the bed, desperately clinging to our coffees andcigarettes, before hitting the northwest road towards the next Logodædaly event at Reading Frenzy in Portland, Oregon, 7pm upon Tuesday, December 13th... one hopes we shall encounter many other mysterious travelers, coyotes, candy shops and disguised deposed royalty along the way.

an upcoming reading, and thanks for the last one!

2011-12-06T17:24:00.001+01:00

ThoughI should have written this two days ago (my excuse: yes, I was a weeeee bithungover), a report on the Logodædaly releaseparty: splendid! I had a wonderful time,in spite of my prior weeks of sheer terror at the thought of the reading. Naw, it went just fine, and I’ve got to thankCranknstein’s Bar for lending us their (lovely) space, and moreover express mygratitude to everybody who attended—fabulous to see you all, new friends andold. I'll post photographs, as soon as they're available and I am not too lazy.

(note:I do apologize for the entire incident with the meringue pies and the lemurs. They will not be invited to any of ourparties again.)

ButI do invite all those who’d care to join us to tomorrow’s reading at Denver’sLoDo Tattered Cover Bookstore, at 7:30 pm! As I’ve always worshipped their labyrinthine shelves and the ease ofbecoming lost amidst the stacks, I’m quite honored and excited. Explore the link to their site and detailsupon the reading, and for those of you who are interested, I hope to see youthere!

(nolemurs, I promise.)

today?!?!

2011-12-02T14:43:00.001+01:00

Giventhat today(!) marks the release of Logodædaly,its own little papery birthday party—7 pm at Cranknstein Bar, 215A N. Collegein Fort Collins—and my first reading (I’m actually utterly terrified), I feel I ought createsome Ultimate Blog Post, like the last statements of deep-sea divers before submersion(“cold!”) or departing astronauts (“how do I go to the bathroom in space??”).

And the only thing I can really express nowis gratitude—to Todd Simmons of Wolverine Farm Publishing, a wizard of theartistry which makes the spine of all real books; to Sherise Talbott, whose characterand whose art are bright faerie-bright, to David for all the support, therationality and heart and adventures of everyday life, to my family for the storytellingof love, and to all the friends who’ve helped me more than I can type. And to chance, which felt whimsical andrearranged some particles to make today.

Apartfrom my sincere sentimentality, though, I again want to invite anybody andeverybody to Logodædaly’s releaseparty, and I’m grateful for this too!

A cordial invitation

2011-11-26T20:57:00.001+01:00

Mostexcellent news (like every time something batty is discovered in quantumphysics): the new Logodædaly releaseparty and opening reading date has been named! A formal invitation:

But,for those whose computers crankily refuse to load images, the shindig shall beat 7 pm on Friday, December 2^ndat Cranknstein’s Bar, 215A North College Avenue in Fort Collins. I’m quite excited, myself, and I’m very muchhoping to see many people, felines, and professional swordfighters there.

Therewill be books, drinks, reading, and whoopee cushions!

Items of Newness!

2011-11-22T21:45:00.001+01:00

Whilstthe release party following Logodædaly’salmost-here publication has been delayed, some interesting tidbits haveoccurred: I have purchased new socks, discovered a lost continent (I shall nameit “Spoon”), and, perhaps more importantly, my book has received this review from the San Francisco/Sacramento City Book Review, for which I feel immensely grateful and honored.

BecauseI have no photographs of my socks I’ve posted it here. News on the party to come!

postponement doesn't really rhyme with many other words, does it?

2011-11-19T21:29:00.001+01:00

So,as one last apologetic announcement, the original date for Logodædaly’s release party has been changed – it shan’t be today,but more likely at the beginning of December (when the elves emerge from theirdens, you know). I must admit I’m a bitdisappointed, to be sure, but in lieu of the party I suppose I’ll assist Davidin the preparation of Burmese fish soup, and perhaps work on building mycollection of 19^th-century sugar packets. More news to come, though, when the new partydate is set!

Ch-ch-ch-changes of plans

2011-11-16T15:57:00.001+01:00

Foranybody who reads this blog and might have been planning upon attending theSaturday the 19^th release party and opening reading for my book, Logodædaly, I’m sorry to say that due tounforeseen errors at our printing company, the event will have to be delayedfor approximately a week. But moreupdates to come when precise new dates are set!

Upcoming Reading Tour Dates!

2011-11-10T13:58:00.001+01:00

Much of the time, future engagements and occasions in my life tend to remain rather nebulous, so that I end up using a divining rod or prognostication through the interpretation of the behavior of mice (seriously, people did that, and the antiquated English word for it is myomancy). However, definite dates are at last being set for the Logodædaly reading tour, as I shall post here:

- Saturday, November 19^th: Opening Reading & Release Party: Matter Bookstore & the Bean Cycle, 8pm (Fort Collins, CO)

- Wednesday, December 7^th: Tattered Cover Bookstore, LoDo location, 7:30pm (Denver)

- Tuesday, December 13^th: Reading Frenzy Bookstore, 7pm (Portland, Oregon)

- Saturday, December 17^th: Leon Gallery (Denver)

Further upcoming readings to be posted soon!

And, for those who may be interested in shopping or large rivers, Logodædaly is now available for pre-order on Amazon!

You can buy anything on the internet. I’m going to treat myself to a pet kinkajou and David Bowie’s used makeup.

Cat-O'-Lantern

2011-11-06T23:43:00.006+01:00

In spite of my repeated vows to maintain a blog without the month-long vacuum between prattling entries (I seriously took a solemn oath and sacrificed a small goat), once again I’ve let calendars and data slide by. Enough so that David and I have actually made our appearance upon another continent of aspens and cowgirls—that is, we’ve arrived in Colorado for the sweetness of a visit to our families and to enjoy (while simultaneously retching with anxiety) at the publication and national reading tour of my book, Logodædaly, officially released (much like a manticore) upon November 17^th. There’ll be a jolly good release party at Fort Collins’ Bean Cycle Coffeehouse and Matter Bookstore, as well, to which I have invited Sir Isaac Newton and the world’s only card-playing lemur.

Apart from happy activities such as marathon nature documentaries watched with mi familia (the oceans are most excellent), the presence of artichokes, practicing good-stuff-to-say-in-front-of-people-at-a-reading, and the brief flourish of Colorado autumn before a bloated snowstorm demolished all the flushed leaves, I found myself quite diverted by my first all-out American Halloween (best holiday ever) in four years. I appreciate Halloween for its flamboyant interweaving of jubilance and death, sugar and cobwebs, and damned if I wasn’t going to participate.

Thusly, I shall proudly present my Enchanted Pumpkin:

I can furthermore attest that my Cat-O’-Lantern truly did come alive at approximately 10:57 PM, though in the grand feline tradition, it promptly fell asleep and extinguished its own candle with whiskered snores.

And I couldn’t let Halloween slip past me without donning a costume—or rather, revealing my true identity.

That’s right. I am Zorro. I simply can’t bear to hide it anymore. Never mind that my hat is made of $1 foam and my mustache is terribly itchy—nonetheless, it is I who liberates the haciendas from tyrannical governors and saves villages from bandits with firecracker guns. Indeed, upon Halloween night I reclaimed a wealth of sweets from the wicked Candy Bowl, and showered it upon the wandering peasants, all of whom were dressed as puppies and princesses and a diminutive dragon.

Farming content, fertilizing with hogwash

2011-10-08T14:38:00.006+02:00

Recently read at the blog of Oxford University Press:

“A new source of empty text is content farms, internet sweatshops where part-timers generate prose whose sole purpose is to use keywords that attract the attention of search engines. The goal of content farms is not to get relevant text in front of you, but to get you to view the paid advertising in which the otherwise meaningless words are nested.”

Now, as a devotee of language (enough to make my own dictionary, being of the opinion that the world requires many, many more involving stories about snakes) and as a writer, I naturally find this interesting. And I suppose I had best participate in a growing form of cultural discourse—the construction, or demolition, of utterly meaningless text. Surely there’s a certain glamour to sentences which make no pretense of significance at all, like a corrupt and brazen ghost laughing in the mirror. Trying to be resourceful, I supposed I might be able to supply assiduous inquirers with some Statistically Improbable Phrases, which one might find only upon my little ol' site. Search terms include:

Human-platypus hybrids

Winged onion

Turtle wearing necktie

Lampshade stuck on leg help

Arsenic cupcake frosting

Bears French-kissing

Fred Astaire dance with sledgehammer

Baking porcupine right temperature

Space laser kit for sale

Giraffe bite medical treatment

English-Swedish translation “sorry about the explosion”

How not to use a fork

I haven't got any advertisements, though. So in case somebody is in search of an unusual image, here is a picture I drew of the statistically improbable Walrus Who is Also a Wizard.

Thank you very much for your time.

Balloonacy

2011-09-08T18:09:00.003+02:00

I haven’t posted anything here for a week or so, but I’ve got a superb excuse. I’ve been conducting a meticulous experiment of immense scientific significance, the results of which shall soon be printed in the Journal of Romance and Mateotechny, volume 13, issue 97. Of late, much research has been devoted to the effects of aquatic environments upon ghosts (conclusion: they decidedly do not possess gills, those delicate respiratory accordions, but they do luminesce in their terrifying intellectual discussions with the nihilist hagfishes), but little regard has been paid to the reaction of specters to aerial environments.

Hence I elected to procure for myself a willing spirit (with a quill plucked from a poetic mynah bird, it signed a legal waiver which has indeed been notarized) and embarked upon a test: to launch, via the marvelous elemental levity of helium, a silken hot-air balloon into the seductress skies. With my volunteer ghoul (who was the ethereal revenant of a court jester, circa 1543, jingling as it drifted with multihued shimmers around the laboratory) encased comfortably in a wicker basket, I released aforementioned balloon at approximately 177 mph, towards the occidental pain of the evening star. We had quite a bit of success at first, and my notes most meticulously indicate that ghosts can withstand hurricane winds up to category 4, create rainbows through the refractions of their unreal wrists, and conduct lightning quite well.

But it was somewhere in the indigo mesosphere, amidst the shreds of lost notions and the noctilucent clouds, at which point the experiment went somewhat awry, when my impudent phantom followed its own ideas; to be precise, the erstwhile jester with its nonexistent bells inhaled the balloon’s fuel.

Oh, certainly, the ghost itself found this hilarious, chattering up there in that unmistakable, shrill, miniaturized voice which comes with a lungful of helium. Subsequently, the balloon (which is shaped like a cat’s caricatured tinfoil head) descended and caused several panicked UFO reports and a minor fire, and that specter so resplendent with the spectrum in a bath of solar ions, drifted away like attention, up and up and further, horrible up.

I can still hear it up there, giggling madly and belching aurorae, in that stupid helium squeak.

on faces and books

2011-08-30T18:16:00.001+02:00

Though (like 27% of humanoid and also avian creatures on this planet) a member of Facebook for personal matters like teasing people or making inane and wry comments about cleaning the house, I nonetheless hadn’t the foggiest idea about the fact that one can create a Facebook page about a career, writing or cheese-mongering or what-have-you. Until David informed me as such – so I can proudly announce that now I’ve got a Writer’s Page, which has my name on it and everything! And if you fan me, I will personally bake you cupcakes replete with frosting (only no flowers, because I don’t know how to do that). It’s here:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Erzs%C3%A9bet-Gilbert/202111339851678

For sheer visual interest, here is a picture I took of an evil Italian ice cream cone:

On fresh nationalities, and some wacky Google Translate errors

2011-08-27T14:22:00.005+02:00

As is quite thrilling for me, in mid-September I’m scheduled to earn my Hungarian citizenship after three years of churchbells and wine living here with my beloved dual-passport spouse. That is, if (there forever remains an if, dancing about in the ballrooms of dire possibility and flinging the dot of its i at one’s face) I succeed in my citizenship exam. Despite the fact that out of rabbity anxiety I wept on the staircase of the registration office, it ought not to be too bad.

Fifteen questions, multiple choice, but nonetheless I’m assiduously studying: history (consider the early Magyars riding like mirages out of the Asiatic plains, pursuing eagles and pale stags), national symbols (we have a flag!), art (the Baroque era was quite a glamorous one for plump cherubim, politics (we’re in NATO and I get to vote), and my responsibilities as a citizen (taxes, always taxes). My Magyarul skills are conversational, but there remain great swathes of vocabulary I have yet to learn, because I seldom refer to “international trade-related alliances” or “medieval condemnation cells” in chats with the neighbors. Plus, the grammar reminds me of melting clocks. So I turn at times to Google Translate for help.

Now, I think Google’s magnificent. They simply invent so much cool stuff, and keep improving it. But it would seem that writing the algorithm for Hungarian-English translation is a bit of a tricky task. So, on some occasions when I’ve sought the aid of Google Translate, I’ve ended up with tidbits such as:

On government: “everyone has the right to complain if you are convinced the state violated the rights of the Constitution, which provides a donkey.” Thanks, Mr. President!

On literature: “the poet opens up his mother and shows the actual earthquake!” Gross, dude.

On culture: “as a moral to the reader, the legends of the saints are told in the great works of cake.” I’ll take my virtues with vanilla frosting, please.

On liberty: “the freedom of expression is when there’s Library, but restrict her daughter from harming the reputation of jars.” But jars are stupid.

On finance: “the other parts of taxes to the state government are the sweet talk arranged by the clerk.” Ooh la la.

I even get life advice: “Be a good and little fish.” Okay.

And because I should like my blog entries to contain an interesting image of some sort, here is a picture of a cat who is ready for dinner:

On statues, or, the Philosopher

2011-08-14T17:48:00.003+02:00

Here’s a spontaneous microfiction, after a photograph I snapped in Florence during our motorcycle trip a few weeks ago, a stature upon a church whose name I never learnt.

It is not uncommon for such a thing to take place in numerous cities upon varying, vagrant magnetic nodes, particularly those in which the pigeons tend to harmonize with the chance piano sonatas seeping over a windowsill, or where the people are prone to arson and dream in foreign tongues. In some cities, it is the statues of the gargoyles who awaken, in those hours when the night floods as translucent ink. Unfurling their wicked, vespertinian rock wings, they soar and skitter through the gables, seeking glass in order to scrutinize their own exemplary monstrousness. In others, the carved angels standing melancholic guard upon ringing spires stir and herald the hymns of witching starlight with an alarum of marble trumpets, waking too the cherubs burping water lilies in the fountains.

But here, it is the sculpture of the Philosopher who in arcane darkness rises with a minute groan and stretches his granite toes, sneezing as he brushes the soot from his flawlessly rippling robe. Painfully he lowers himself from his comfortable niche, taking as always a slight, stiff bow to the lachrymose alleyway dog who sleeps upon the corner. Muttering to himself—one catches lowly the words syllogism and Corinthian scallywags—the Philosopher plods to the awful loneliness of the empty marketplace, sampling the luxury of a discarded plum (though unable to swallow, as he is solid stone), and in the piazzas echoing with troubadours’ cries he stops to fiddle with his sandal, which has shabbily eroded over these tempestuous centuries.

It is due to the Philosopher that even the insomniac shoemakers, the masked burglars, even the lovers sauntering with ostentatious, intoxicated romance beneath the forlorn moon will not venture out past dark. For the Philosopher finds you, no matter how heavily his artistical tread, and detains you as any fine, aged cheese or professor shall, with a gravelly lecture upon the nature of ethics when one is dealing with fish, or the aesthetic of the teaspoon, or why if logic is P , then Q, but not fiddles. Don’t leave, he tells you. I haven’t yet mentioned the metaphysical status of real crumpets if they are prepared by an imaginary chef.

let's play with pictures and prose, shall we?

2011-08-09T10:49:00.000+02:00

As I promised to do so and shouldn't want to be a liar, I've got to post something, and have resolved to begin the endeavor of crafting fictions out of some particular facts in life, or making factual tales out of the fiction which happens all the time. So, as this past spring David and I spent five weeks in Indonesia, I thought I’d extract an image from those travels, and see if I couldn’t make something of it:

A photograph I took upon our recent trip to Indonesia: a particularly impudent cat stealing offerings from a sidewalk shrine (in Bali, such supplications of food and flowers are ubiquitously left to satiate evil spirits and call upon the good)

Nobody said that you could do that, Cat! Now have you called forth the spirits from their subtle world existing woven and wound into the weft of our own; now the wicked shades arrive with their vengeance unappeased, flashing their teeth like the light shattered upon the surface of the disturbed and storm-stricken sea. Now the good ghosts weep and wail and withdraw their blessings from the bougainvillea sprawling languid over our doors. Greedy Cat! Bad Cat! But what a beautiful Cat, now, floating curiously over the papayas and smoky threads of spiced incense, mewing spells and bristling whiskers of majesty. Good Cat, Powerful Cat, indeed.

This blog actually exists

2011-08-08T06:45:00.000+02:00

So, should you be one of those who read my blog (thanks, Mom) or actually look at the dates marked upon blog entries, you might notice that for nearly an entire year I haven’t posted a thing – my various reasons being three months spent in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Colorado, and Qatar, sheer laziness, and three weeks spent motorcycling in Italy and Sardinia – but, given that it’s three months until my book with all its impudent formatting errors and characters straying off the page is to be published (November 5^th, 2011, to be precise), I have come to suppose it would be good to start this miniature shebang up again. Hence, here I lay a solemn promise (to myself) to begin posting and babbling once again, perhaps something regarding Phnom Penh, or Vesuvius, or else the cries of wild doves and their talents at thieving cheese (quite skilled, actually). Yea, but I shall post more!

The 2010 Golden Scoop European Ice Cream Tour

2010-09-26T16:35:00.001+02:00

Because I am quite easily distracted by bright colors, and David and I find ourselves busily drowning in the must of this autumn's winemaking, I've neglected to blog about the remainder of our trans-Mediterranean motorcycle trip. So I've incorporated what diarizing I can into this, the 2010 Golden Scoop European Ice Cream Tour, a review of those desserts enjoyed upon the road. (Thanks to David for his brilliant photography, more of which is available here).

The ice cream sundae of Austria

—a Sound-of-Music sundae, subalpine and snowmelt sundae—has an inevitable specialness, being the first of the trip, but is endowed too with its own immense merit: simply a Hot Fudge Sundae, as is iconic in all soda shops of cinema. Of Northern texture (more a solid than a cream), its possesses a slow melting process, though one must bear in mind that such structural integrity must be a delicate balance between leisure and numbness (too swift a melting, and one cannot savor, but too slow and one cannot discern taste). Note also the layered crème cookie and swirled croquettes, which forever add a burst of delectable geometric texture. Acquired on a patio beneath a yellow church clocktower, it combines with age-old skill a French vanilla ice cream of strong and authentic flavor, not too sweet, with turrets of whipped cream and treacherously warm fudge; the syrup is the star of this particular concoction, but overall the experience is one of culinary synchrony.

Flavor: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥○○○

Complexity: ♥♥♥♥♥○○○○○

Presentation: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥○○○

Texture: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥○○○

Authenticity: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥○○○

Decadence: ♥♥♥♥○○○○○○

Happiness: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥○○○

------

Lichtenstein, while hardly what one would stereotypically consider an immortal ice cream destination, provides an utterly blissful sundae; incorporated in this sundae experience (inevitably, for every critic carries her own burden of personal tales swaying objectivity) is the sheer relief experienced in stumbling into the “Hotel Dancing” after nine hours’ riding through legendary, icy rain. Nonetheless, even the sunniest of circumstances this creation would be a supreme one. A “four-banger” (in official terminology) of Vanilla, Tiramisu, Stracciatella, and Banana ice creams, it presents superlative complexity and excellent sweetness. Each flavor, moreover, incorporates real chunks of personality: vanilla chips, streaks of coffee, chocolate shavings and frozen banana, each of which constitutes a continual surprise. Texturally, it takes the Northern rather than gelato route, but melts at a more gelato-type speed. Artificiality is present in the Banana, but hardly detracts; Vanilla, while not French, is refreshing; Tiramisu possesses more coffee than marscapone tones, and Stracciatella (vanilla with shavings of chocolate and cherry) lives as the failsafe deliciousness it is. Presentation is a delight, with mountainous whipped cream and elfin sprinkles, and finest of all the childish pleasure of an ornamental paper bumblebee.

Flavor: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥○

Complexity: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

Presentation: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

Texture: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥○○

Authenticity: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥○

Decadence: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥○

Happiness: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

-----

Switzerland really ought to incorporate three regional subcategories

between its German-, French-, and Italian-influenced sectors, but as per availability this review shall focus upon the Italianate. Purchased at a roadside restaurant on Alpine slopes, the ice cream is presented within the conic form: waffle cone, most awesome. Flavor: Crème Brulée, which I have never seen offered at any other venue; said flavor is augmented immensely by the presence of crystallized sugar swirled throughout. In accordance with location, the cream itself is of gelato-texture, extremely smooth. Presentation in cone form is simple and neither impressive nor displeasing, though the bottom is prone to leaks and thus necessitates a quick consumption. This, however, is not a problem.

Flavor: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥○○

Complexity: ♥♥♥○○○○○○○

Presentation: ♥♥♥○○○○○○○

Texture: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥○○

Authenticity: ♥♥♥♥○○○○○○

Decadence: ♥♥♥○○○○○○○

Happiness: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥○○○

-----

Note: In the course of the Golden Scoop Mediterranean Ice Cream Tour of 2010, I have come to the conclusion that Italianate gelato belongs in its own subcategory, or supercategory, within the world of ice cream. Both, naturally, possess their virtues: “Northern” or “boreal” ice cream is of a firmer consistency, far airier, and structurally amenable to making an actual sundae. Gelato, meanwhile, is of a smoother texture still reminiscent of sweet milk, and in its great creaminess lends itself far more to an ice cream cone. Gelato parlours, one notes, offer a whimsical diversity of flavors often lacking in standard ice cream. But selecting a favorite between the two cannot, I believe, be categorical, but based upon circumstance. Circumstances which came up repeatedly in many different forms.

The Tour’s first Italian Gelato, purchased from a parlour in a twilit, musical alleyway of the seaside town of Noli

proved a fabulous ciao! upon our first jaunt into the country. Technically, I suppose, this experience should count as the first and second Italian ice cream, as being slightly tipsy and overly enthused I opted for two cones. This being, after all, an international quest, I chose (pointing and mumbling in nincompoop Italian to the friendly vendor) the ambiguous, unknown labels of “Sacher” and “Crème Castellano”, in order to see what I might see (or taste). Sacher was in fact a chocolate swirled with marmalade, a generous scoop in a precariously small waffle cone, and in the gelato tradition is exceedingly velvety. Not too sweet (it’s a delicate balance), but given a fascinating accent and sophisticated tone from the orange jam. Crème Castellano remains, since that evening and unto today, a delicious enigma, as even with the magic cheat of the search engine I have been unable to determine what-it-is. What is that? Is that caramel? Some kind of burnt sugar—not quite crème brulee, no. Could have vanilla extract… Subsequent research has led to two hints: Castellano is the Iberian name for the Spanish language itself, and also an Italian surname. (Interestingly, consider the infamous mob boss, “Big Paul” Castellano, a racketeer later assassinated). Perhaps this is a rendition of a Spanish custard, or otherwise some morally dubious treat of the mafia. At any rate it’s exceedingly sweet and criminally yummy.

*Since I indulged in two separate cones within one twenty-minute time period, I will simply average out the two scores, which I hope is fair.

Flavor: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥○○

Complexity: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥○○○

Presentation: ♥♥♥♥○○○○○○

Texture: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥○○○

Authenticity: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥○○

Decadence: ♥♥♥♥♥♥○○○○

Happiness: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥○

-----

Now, everybody knows that Monaco represents flamboyant gambling, yachts crafted of diamond and melted white limousines, movie stars and really expensive stuff. However, I must say that this self-portrayed extravagance does not quite carry over into the ice cream realm. Not that I am complaining, as the experience was quite pleasant (David and I sitting upon an unnaturally tidy and bustling dock, observing the sailboats with their exotic names), but for five euros, one expects a little bit more than one small scoop of vanilla and one of chocolate bunged into a glass bowl. And I will admit that in an environment of gourmet lifestyle, the flavors possess a genuine potency: one can taste indeed the real vanilla pods and cocoa beans, which does indeed render the tiny portion more tragic still.

Flavor: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥○○

Complexity: ♥○○○○○○○○○

Presentation: ♥○○○○○○○○○

Texture: ♥♥♥♥○○○○○○

Authenticity: ♥♥♥♥♥♥○○○○

Decadence: ♥○○○○○○○○○

Happiness: ♥♥♥○○○○○○○

-----

The first ice cream of the Tour’s leg through France was gained beneath a humming church and an enormous elm in a square in Aix-en-Provence, an altogether charming old city. The dessert, moreover, is devastating, in the good way. Selected rather tentatively, experimentally from a Francophone menu, the “Coupe Belle Hèlene” can be termed officially a Baroque Sundae: overwhelmingly aesthetic, indeed, voluptuous, layered with chocolate-vanilla-whipped cream (repeat) and culminating a wafer croquette, a fan of three pear wedges, a raspberry and an ambiguous, tart paper-skinned fruit which Hungarians call a “ground cherry”. Who knows, but it’s fabulous. Creamy, creative, complicated, and whatever other raving alliteration one can come up with.

Flavor: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥○

Complexity: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

Presentation: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

Texture: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥○○

Authenticity: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥○

Decadence: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

Happiness: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

Interlude: Aix-in-Provence also hides a gourmet sweet shop, La Cure Gourmande, which was essentially a gravitational singularity of epicurean sugar sucking in all stars, hydrogen, children, and me.

The proverbial kid-in-candy-store does not begin to describe the feeling upon seeing architectural stacks of cookies, chocolate and strawberry and orange and ginger and hazelnut and something else with chocolate inside… Thusly the ecstatic glee, and later the tummyache.

(I swear I am not shoplifting here)

-----

Naturally, we come to French ice cream Part Deux, around noontime at a hidden café in Ille-sur-Têt in southwest France, a village of deceptive alleys and chapels in the summer-blanched plains. Now, I hadn’t expected a multifarious treat, only something merciful in the heat of a black jacket in August wind, but (while David stirred his plate of Catalan vegetables and insisted it to be superior) this was just quite nice. Classically simple, an unprepossessing portion of white chocolate (chocolat blanc) in the firmer, smooth northern style, but garnished with whipped cream rosettes, one blackberry, one raspberry, and fresh mint lending subtle notes of variety. Sometimes, one simply needs a timeless, unfussy, friendly bowl.

Flavor: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥○

Complexity: ♥♥♥♥♥♥○○○○

Presentation: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥○○○

Texture: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥○○○

Authenticity: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥○○

Decadence: ♥♥♥♥○○○○○○

Happiness: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥○

-----

Wending and winding and whooping, the Tour ascends into the Pyrenees, over dire gorges and alongside villages precariously clustered upon their idyllic cliffs, and we arrive in the itsy-bitsy nation of Andorra.

A wintertide ski destination, it’s quiet now, and in a near-deserted hotel with lacy eaves comes the ice cream. This, unlike any I’ve had before, is a Geologic Sundae—or not quite a sundae, but rather some sort of globular geode coated in a crunchy toffee-chocolate shell in the midst of a syrup scribble, and the necessary frill of whipped cream. The ice cream itself is substantial, and ambiguously rich between vanilla and some other sweetness, and embedded within (to exemplify the geologic analogy) is a jewel of caramel. Andorra—who knew?

Flavor: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥○

Complexity: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

Presentation: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥○

Texture: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥○

Authenticity: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥○

Decadence: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥○

Happiness: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

-----

Now, having experienced one ice cream of Basque country, I’d hoped to find a similar level of quality in the desserts of Spain. They get their groundwater out of the Pyrenees, don’t they? We were hardly disappointed by the vastness of sky over sweltering plains, the stands of wise pines and the castle turret overlooking every-single-hamlet (even the most miniscule village possessed its ruined palace), and in the town of Jaca loved the ancient stelliform fortress with deer (yes, deer)

now dwelling in the drained and formidable moat. But ice cream: not so magnificent. The “Vanilla Enigma,” which boasted quite a grandiose picture in the menu, proved to be a teensy dish of hardened cream with a tablespoon of strawberry jam (the answer to the Sphinx’s wry riddle, I suppose) within. Now, in all fairness the flavor had a minimalist purity, and the jam within definitely proved the best part, but I couldn’t help but feel a bit cheated, like discovering that one’s archenemies are no more than windmills, then discovering that said windmills are no more than small table lamps.

Flavor: ♥♥♥♥♥♥○○○○

Complexity: ♥♥♥♥♥○○○○○

Presentation: ♥♥○○○○○○○○

Texture: ♥♥♥○○○○○○○

Authenticity: ♥♥○○○○○○○○

Decadence: ♥○○○○○○○○○

Happiness: ♥♥♥♥○○○○○○

Consolation Prize: Spain has, as far as I can tell, mastered the realm of the confectionary. Not only these delicate little chocolate cups of marvelous innards, but moreover, and this is a mindblowing stroke of hedonist genius: a cone of chocolate filled with frosting. Frosting.

I think faeries eat this for supper.

-----

French ice cream, next round: in southern France, at Chateau de L’Hoste (a centuries-old manor converted into a bed and breakfast, and an indulgence David and I allowed ourselves after 400 kilometers and absolutely no mood to stake a tent); the fountain is aware of its own picturesque spill, and one fantasizes over the waltzes and bacchanals of aristocrats living out a pre-Enlightenment dream.

And the ice cream lives up to the standards of a barony. This, in official terms, is a Symphonic Sundae. This would be a lumpet of chocolate ice cream (solid style, rich), adorned with a dainty and edible (I think) flower, accompanied with a bowl of sugared strawberries and the mysterious tart “ground cherry”. The multitude of flavors harmonize, if you will, in contrapuntal, but most ostentatious of all is the platter, which features a plume of strawberry syrup and a chocolate musical bar. I’m not certain of the tune, but I might hypothesize the “Ode to Joy”.

Flavor: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

Complexity: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

Presentation: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

Texture: ♥♥♥♥♥♥○○○○

Authenticity: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥○

Decadence: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

Happiness: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

-----

Note: Between slumbers in Portofino, glorious Florence, and idyllic Umbria, many, many cones of gelato from marshmallow to caramel to straciatella were happily consumed and smeared upon the face, but unfortunately, these possess no photographic record.

Now, I would not consider the 2010 Golden Scoop Tour to be complete without a holy treat; that is, an ice cream from the Vatican. Come on—the number one tourist destination in the world must surely offer some kind of gelato, and isn’t there a psalm about chocolate chips somewhere in there? In the Vatican, David and I discover that indeed the papacy houses a wealth of treasures, corridors of maps and the mosaics of broken myths, Greco-roman nudes with their sinful wee-wees hidden beneath a fig leaf.

But alas, we note, the Sistine cosmos rises above a churning mass of cameras and more people than I’ve ever seen in a single structure, and one cannot move without encountering an elbow. There has to be ice cream here. And there is—of a sort. The sort of dessert sold from the bottom of a freezer, mass-produced and shipped from a factory somewhere in the secular world. Flavor: coffee (are saints allowed to have caffeine?). Texture: rather icy, rather than cream. Arrangement: plastic cup. Not precisely the ice cream of the angels, and, amidst souvenir stalls and ten thousand tour groups, we discover that the Vatican’s desserts, like its chapels themselves, are all too worldly.

Flavor: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥○○

Complexity: ♥♥♥♥♥○○○○○

Presentation: ♥♥♥♥♥○○○○○

Texture: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥○○○

Authenticity: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥○

Decadence: ♥♥♥♥♥○○○○○

Happiness: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥○

-----

Finally, cruising its way up the ankle of Italy’s iconic fashion boot, the Tour stops in the gilded mountaintop nation of San Marino, which is apparently known for its royalty and motorcycle races (in spite of the fact that it consists of a tiny walled town atop a coastal peak. I find, however, that the country’s most princely aspect is that of its epical view

across shimmering field and far sea, and yes, in its ice cream. From a generous vendor we learn that in San Marino, one gets two scoops for the same price as one (aw!); the chosen vessel is in the grand gelato tradition of the cone. The flavor selected is “Créma”, which is ambiguously luxuriant with swirls of caramel and brown sugar, and a luscious vanilla predominant. A simple summery snack, but quite well-designed for the tongue, and so in spite of its utter lack of political clout, the tour finds San Marino to be a noble place.

Flavor: ♥♥○○○○○○○○

Complexity: ♥○○○○○○○○○

Presentation: ○○○○○○○○○○

Texture: ○○○○○○○○○○

Authenticity: ○○○○○○○○○○

Decadence: ○○○○○○○○○○

Happiness: ♥♥♥♥♥○○○○○

-----

And so to what nation can the 2010 Golden Scoop Ice Cream Tour award its Grand Prize? In all official seriousness, the jury is still at odds upon this count, and is busy with lingering tummyaches. The Vatican was probably crappiest (expert terminology). France perhaps takes the supreme cake (which is ice cream, not cake) for quantity of quality experiences and sheer virtuoso creativity, while Andorra has its place for uniqueness, Lichtenstein for jubilance, and Italy for classicism. Perhaps, one supposes, a second tour is in order in order to confirm a verdict.

Note: Much gratitude goes to David, who claims he doesn’t like ice cream (“it’s too cold”) but nonetheless accompanied me from stand to scattered stand, and obliged with his skilled photographs and didn’t make too much fun of me.

Automata and autostrada and autodidactics

2010-08-28T08:27:00.001+02:00

(first and foremost, I must state that the following travel images are those of the inimitable David Rozgonyi, and if one should care to see more great photography and writing one ought visit his own blog, too...)

As I am experiencing it, the beginning of any particular travelogue or composition or script is a somewhat haphazard thing to select; thus, In the beginning, there was Slovenia. That is, David and I began our Motorcycle Odyssey (ground control, anyone? anyone?) with a morning leg through the hills of Slovenia, sighing up and down in shades of emerald and dotted farmhouses and somewhat chilly in autostrada winds. One really cannot laud well enough David’s flair in driving, particularly considering the burden

of rudimentary clothes, camping supplies, rain gear, and crucial books (the motorcycle’s name, by the by, is Ripley, a la The Talented Mr. and the unbeatable heroine of Alien. I can’t think of a finer pilot, nor would I want to, and I know well David has a great deal of fun with it, too. My Mommy worries that we haven’t got enough safety equipment and pillows strapped to our elbows, but David’s really the best security and adventurer, too.

I must admit that a certain part of myself was preparing for concussion, at the very least, since in spite of my knowledge of centrifugal force my entire organism rebels against leaning curves above seventy kilometers per hour.

At any rate, in the beginning, there was Slovenia, and lo, it was pretty good, and unto the rises of Austria hence did we go. My experience with the nation hadn’t extended much farther than Julie Andrews and the nerve-wracking ferris wheel in The Third Man, but I found it to be a complicitly picturesque place: there were the cottages with their gingerbread eaves and geranium windowboxes, the rooftops bearing the stalwart and humble braces prepared for the snowdrifts of December, and over the villages with their lifetimes of churchtower and skipping-rope rises the dire peak of Grimming, whose dark hollow holds the court of the sinister elfin King.

It’s a lovely little place to spend a first night, in the village of Bad Mittens—oh, wait, it’s called Bad Mitterndorf, but I shall remember it in my own way.

As in my way I enjoy dragging David to sites which I associate with academic subjects, we’re just south of Salzburg the next day, at the palace of Schloss Hellbrunn.

You see, ‘twas in 1613 that Markus Sittikus, the Prince and Archbishop (a distinguished title, to be sure) built this mansion of summer recreation with certain devices in mind: that is, by dotting the grounds with prankster devices powered by the water in motion

permitting him to seat his aristocratic guests with their whipped-cream cravats upon chairs which would spurt water upon the arse on his own whim. How congenial. But moreover, there are the hydraulic automata—a metropolis of miniature carpenters, knights, and dancing bears whose blood is river

monsters with aquatic tongues

and the sanctified violence of martyrs’ scenes and morality plays enacted by minute robots.

Now, with my compulsion of the scholarly dilettante, I am convinced that the European early modern interest in automata combined the nobles’ practice of the collection of curiosities—and the general Renaissance fascination with novelties-leading-to-discovery (like the moons of Jupiter and birds from the far continents of America) was a link to the later conception of the body-as-machine which guided a plethora of advances in medicine and biology, as well as some rather reprehensible practices and philosophies both dubious and enthralling. Sorry for the nerdy aside, but I love this stuff.

So did this guy, I guess.

Yet it’s in Hellbrunn’s Birdsong Grotto that I find the greatest enchantment; stepping over yet another trick fountain designed to soak a duchess’ silken shoes, one drifts into a sub-castle cave wherein hidden mechanisms of ripple and flow create the mournful warbles of birds amidst skeletal stone—and an image isn’t possible here, only the promise that such a place really exists.

Moreover, though, I recommend a jaunt over to David’s blog to check out more fabulous images, movies, and tales! Further travelogues to follow here, regarding various mountains, cities, wildlife and scientific obsessions…

a marvelous thing to read

2010-08-22T09:38:00.000+02:00

Oh, good gracious, but I have much to report in the way of travelogues - tales of terrible rainfall, ice cream and Pyrenees, militant deer and the absolute minute marvel of the telescope of Galileo Galilei - but, as I am rather sluggish in composing such diaries, I am quite fortunate to have an even better tidbit to offer up:

I therefore provide a link to my dearest David Rozgonyi's piece "Ta Delphinas" published recently upon the Lost Girls World website, which is an intellectually delectable and poetically transportational and generally enchanting piece of literary work. Enjoy!

we're leaving already? but I haven't washed my face!

2010-08-04T06:56:00.001+02:00

Considering one purpose of the blog - this being (apart from the abstract theorization that cats nap to excess because in dreams they are capable of transdimensional travel) the blathering updates of what-somebody-is-doing today - I suppose I ought say that in approximately twenty minutes, according to the churchbell singing about morning and holy water beyond our windowpane, David and I are leaving upon a motorcycle trip along the Mediterranean, traversing ten countries (this including several quasi-existent micronations such as San Marino, the Royal Order of Malta, and the Kingdom of Tape) and seeking out monuments of science, literature, and random, swift-forgotten idea. Whilst David will take his virtuoso photographs and traveler's wandering notes, my personal goals consist of

a) sampling ice cream in each individual nation we traverse (and seriously, does the Vatican sell it? and is it communion-wafer-flavored? and

b) a personal, long-cherished, idealized and shimmering pilgrimage to see the telescope of Galileo Galilei in Florence, and kneel before the gravesite where he and his daughter, Maria Celeste, lie buried.

For visual interest, here is the emblem of the Lincean Society, the scientifically prescient order of the Lynx to which Galileo belonged (which is also tattooed on me):

and here is a picture of a cat with (like me) ice cream upon its face.

I write about the moon too much (seriously, all the time)

2010-07-30T10:58:00.000+02:00

Li Bai, the Poet Transcendent, Scholar of the Blue Lotus, writing amidst the warrior silk and the automatons of China’s Tang Dynasty, writes that the rabbit in the moon pounds the medicine in vain. Centuries of translators, scientists, and aeronauts in ludicrous balloons all assumed this to be merely a lyrical conceit (like the assertion that clocks tick and tock, when nobody has ever heard that grandfathers’ ghoulish tock), or another interpretation of how craters appear to forlorn lovers in the terrestrial sphere.

But let us not permit fact to interfere with bony fingers in lustrous history. All lovers know the existence of lunacy, for the moon bounces on the brows of all sweethearts and all sweethearts tend to behave in a harebrained way. And all poets (as is dictated by something of a universal law) love to write about the moon. Perhaps one may blame this upon universal gravitation, though an equation has yet to be derived which may explain why some verses possess the enthralling power of revivification by way of adjectives, and others are rather tiresome and provoke mild migraines. Nonetheless, the lustrous vowel of the moon wields its might over all bards and beasts upon a wakeful earth—lunacy is inspiration spelled backwards by a lunatic—as the Poet Transcendent well knew.

In order to travel to the moon, one must first set aside the blue willow goblet of tea, and with a wizardly walking staff ascend the mountain (finest of all should that peak resemble a slumbering animal, dreaming of temples in mist). From here, writes the Poet Transcendent, one’s hand could pluck the stars, and I dare not speak in a loud voice, fearing to disturb the people in the heavens. Rising up and up into the clarified air, there will come a moment of clamor amidst the frantic migrating terns, and then a time of breathlessness as one pushes through the membranes of the upper atmosphere.

One will touch down (or up, as the case may be) upon the moon with an inaudible thud and a puff of powdered sugar, and rub one’s eyes, for the moon beneath one’s feet seems bright to an excess. The earth appears as a swollen, opalescent cocoon, and one can see the tiny dragon-kites drifting across the Tropic of Capricorn. Initially, given the absence of color in the vacuum and the terrible piercing of the stars, one might experience the bruise of loneliness; the autumn moon is bright, says the Poet Transcendent, and we think of each other—when will we meet? But never fear (or else begin to fear more and more), for the poet upon the moon is not alone at all.

They are skittish, at first, and will wait in their burrows with noses twitching until the craters seem safe once again, and then with trembling cotton tails they emerge. Standing there with radiant dust on one’s robes and a crown of meteors, one startles at a soft patter behind this stone, that boulder, in that gulch of basalt, and against the irrefutable black of the lunar horizon there appear the points of vigilant ears.

And there come the rabbits of the Sea of Tranquility. Evolution, in its tendency towards ingenuity, has endowed them with the skill of camouflage: white as milk and paper and the satellite, they remain almost imperceptible apart from the flash of motion when restlessly they hop (ten feet high, as gravity become quite puny on the moon) and the glitter of little pink eyes. There goes a pleasantly fattened rabbit buck, and there a doe assiduously digging herself an armchair, and upon the plain the infants (quite literally, dust bunnies) whimper over stories of the Great Bear. What has seemed before a body of stone, solid and agleam, what seemed before the mouth of a deity or the door into an alternate cosmos of unalloyed pearls, has forever been a structure of warrens like the mind’s own labyrinths, thumping with the patter of celestial paws.

Self-conscious and enthralled and terrified of memory, one will inscribe notes into the ground’s grit and dirty shine, chronicling the excavations and panics of the lunar rabbits’ life. The rabbits begin to sniff one another, with the curiosity of instinct and the lewdness of the mating season (springtimes being quite malleable upon the moon, and therefore fornication being a pleasurably constant event). One tries not to stare at the spasms, the little animal laughs.

Nonetheless, says the Poet Transcendent, in the middle of this nocturne, I remember the snapped willow—what person would not start to think of home? One returns to the planet where predators prowl and scratch themselves—one brief journey betwixt heaven and earth! the Poet writes—drifting with twinkling distraction through orbits and fog to land, gently, amidst the cherry trees humming their way into heartrending pink bloom. And infused with earthshine, reeking of comets, one begins a crazed phase of creation, a prolific anthology of sonnets and strange rhymes all regarding the moon which every lunatic loves, inspiration spreading (as they say) like rabbits do.

canicular days, or, where are the weeds coming from???

2010-07-18T14:31:00.000+02:00

I’m terrified of botany; I really am. Now that the tyrant rains of an anomalous June have ceased, and Pécs has slipped languorously into the summer’s Dog Days—these being, I would note, provoked by the feral influence of Sirius, the Dog Star

Canis Stella, rendering all we vulnerable earthlings prone to insanity and spittle—we’re swathed in heat, and under the omnipotent sun things are finally abloom. Luscious now are the tentacles of the grapevines with the embryonic wine, and honeyed are the ripening apricots, velveteen the grass and lecherous the early cherries and hopeful the wispy stalks of corn.

Look! A little frog, who we must name Lenny or Aristotle. Oh! my love, I exclaim, look, tomatoes springing up where we didn’t even sow any! Dozens of volunteer tomato plants! What a harvest it’ll be. You’re makin’ salsa.

But maniac the weeds. I’m serious: if for but a moment either David or I chance to innocently turn our heads—let alone return to the city for a few days—we look back upon a hooligan mob of masked weeds bullying the garden and looting the rich earth and writing leafy curse words in the dirt.

Now, I am forever one to rhapsodize and wax lushly poetic over the wondrous powers of the world-people-have-not-made, the intricate arts of ecosystems and the random awesomeness of evolutionary mechanisms (bioluminescence being my pet obsession). But even I am taken aback—petrified, aghast—at the sheer speed of weed growth. I understand the processes of photosynthesis, chlorophyll, seed-scatterings and root systems like bloodlines in the dark, but this is excessive. How are they growing so fast? I begin to suspect that in spite of thermodynamics, weeds are in fact capable of generating their own matter out of nothingness and frustration. They’re creeping towards the door right now, I’m certain of it, and I have seen that film with the carnivorous alien plant singing along with lovely Motown girls. It wants blood.

So I’m out there

with my warrior trowel and Excalibur hoe, while David patrols the vineyard with a lawnmower. I find a certain belligerent meditation in the process of weeding, in spite of the occasional nighttime guilt over how many prides of dandelions I’ve devastated. Pull and uproot, pant and dig, sweat and grass stain and sand in the eyes. And with every patch of whatever-its-name-is (weeds being notorious for disguise and camouflage) I clear, we can see the vegetables emerging with such generosity; past the psychopathic crabgrass, the carrots point to their own secret selves and the jalepenos do their best to imagine the equator.

Oh, and those volunteer tomatoes, so rich with promise? As a neighboring farmer kindly informs us, those are in fact weeds whose pollen is so noxious as to incur a fine from the government if permitted to spread unchecked.

Clever move, Nature. Clever indeed.

But look! I’ve finished

and an astronomic squash blossom unfolds next to an instantaneously appearing clump of bindweed.

Space is full of rubbish, and so am I

2010-07-03T09:02:00.000+02:00

NewScientist: The War on Space Junk

It isn’t only the debris of various human satellites—the titanium sheathes that have peeled in a reptilian manner from a spaceship, the lost lonesome bolts, the telecommunication dishes reeling with obsolescence—all in an orbital jumble between the oceanic earth and its pearl of a moon. No, when I was a sublunary janitor, the mess consisted of far more. One must bear in mind that this was some time ago, when I wasn’t so arthritic and seeking gainful employment in the out-of-doors, and there were still tyrannosaurs bawling in Pangaea’s shimmering savannahs, and the terrestrial ancestors of blue whales plodding amidst the gargantuan ferns and making up trite stories about pirates.

Really, each morning and each epoch I was quite astonished at the sheer clutter of space. There truly was just so much crap. I’d arrive with my broomstick, or rather astraddle it, and a somewhat unreliable vacuum in one hand and a living sponge in the other. There would be first, say, a frying pan floating past me languidly and bumping against an emptied can of lemon-lime soda, and then a scuffed briefcase full of old underwear and then a banana peel. A cracked lightbulb, a rubber glove, a newspaper whose headlines spoke of a rather comical political scandal and the Red Menace (which, at the time, referred to the enormous influxes of immigrant butterflies). Everybody says they recycle, but it’s just affectation. And my work would begin.

One tries, one really tries, to show a stalwart face and patiently undertake whatever task might be one’s charge, but all that junk grew quite tiresome after a while. It was disgusting; nobody wants to gather other people’s sacks of dogshit, or rancid joghurt cups, salty used socks or the fetid old cigarettes of ten thousand casual chats now drifting in the void. Sometimes I actually saw a wooly mammoth or a dour vampire just toss away the wrapper of a chocolate bar; somebody else has to pick that up, you know. And try scrubbing away red wine in near-null gravity; those stains never come out. But baking soda does prove effective on almost everything.

Not that there wasn’t the occasional nifty item spinning somewhere over the Tropic of Capricorn. I once found Volume C of a disordered encyclopedia (my favorite page being 1919, chemistry and catabibazon), a floral ottoman, and an unopened bottle of lavender perfume. As any student can attest, dumpster diving can be quite profitable, even should that diving be the plunge out of the upper atmosphere and towards Andromeda. But then I’d have to move on to the wads of tinfoil bright as inspiration in the earthshine, and then the nasty prophylactic, and then the styrofoam popcorn which grows even flimsier when it weighs nothing at all.

Oh, even the teardrop moon pitied me, and the asteroids commiserated with catastrophe, for misery loves meteors and company. Even after I gave my two centuries’ notice and stormed away after spitting on my employer (who, in retrospect, didn’t really deserve it), even the I kept the lovely featherduster, and sometimes still I shake it to release a puff of that stardust I gathered with such care. But when I was a janitor in space, what truly drove me mad was all this untidiness right in the face of gravitational law—for gravity and all its mathematical ornaments are simply so neat and tidy, so immaculate, so spic and span and elegant.

I did it again, or, spectrey

2010-06-24T07:06:00.000+02:00

Perusing the Oxford English Dictionary (like ya do) once again, I discovered this nonce-word which seemed quite dandy to me, and wrote another fiction because it was pointless and fun.

spectrey, noun. A place of specters.

Should the visitor care to look to the left, there will be apparent a decidedly spooky artifact of some six hundred years ago, once a dour alchemist and now a sulfurous poltergeist with an interest in chemistry. Indeed! One cannot deny that among all musaeums, our spectrey holds the most profuse and multicolored host of spirits, from deceased ballerinas twirling on imaginary toes to the eerie purrs of the mummified ghostcats.

Turning our gaze this way, madame, past the broken column, I do believe you shall be most pleased to examine one “Catriona”, a peculiar apparition found trilling and playing cats’-cradle with spiderwebs beside her grave on the dusky moors. This side of the velvet ropes, please.

And fear not, dear boy, for that ghoul from whom you shrink is merely a departed philosopher, with toga now reduced to transparent asbestos but still speaking of invisible things. Here is the duchess, here her beloved wolfhound with spittle and yet no tongue; here is a knight of immense courage and dubious morality, now no more than a filmy suit of armor with a sword like an April breeze. Note the hooting of the aspiring banshee, whilst of high distinction is the specimen Lemures mneumia, as may be identified through its terrified, lunar, omniscient eyes.

Madame! please do not use your umbrella to hit the specters. One must display an air of deference, a slight bow and a clear, academic interest in the ghosts, lest out of mutiny or boredom, curiosity or spite, realize they may drift through walls, and our spectrey’s grand inventory escapes to scatter itself over the waking earth.

Boo!

Felis imperius, canis metropolis

2010-06-17T05:58:00.001+02:00

In the grand human enterprise of binary divisions—like the separation of salt from pepper, true from false, rain against candy or hats versus snakes—I have speculated that there are certain places which are Cat Cities, and others which are of the Dog. This was amply demonstrated during our recent foray through chunks of the former Yugoslavia with my Mommy and stepfather (the fifth such trip for David and I, operating with that amiably tyrannical need to force a loved one to try-my-favorite-everything).

Now, over a few years, I’ve seen Pécs “go to the dogs”, to employ a bit of mind-numbing cliché; that is, it’s more of a canine town, with a preponderance of dachshunds waddling beneath their owners and the aristocratic cornices, as well as a rapidly escalating population of very small dogs resembling fluffy wisps of asbestos with pinkened tongues.

There’s Béla, of course, the inconstant itinerant cat who occasionally sulks upon our garden wall and disappears, but for the most part we’re introducing Mom and Bob to a dogs’ domain.

But crammed into a rental car approximately the size of a 1.4 liter gumdrop, we four depart from the antagonistic and unseasonal rains of southern Hungary (what? the worst in 120 years?!)

and down along the storks’ haunts of Croatia, through the emerald dramas of Bosnian mountains and into Sarajevo.

Sarajevo—we’re drawn back to the pale cobbles, the stands of silver-bellisimma skirts, the mosques with their incomparable light and incidental beads and intangible songs—a city where the roses burst over wrought iron and whose streets bear mortar scars common as roses and the memory of red.

There’s forever a paradox here, smiling as my mother barters for gifts for her cousins and gasps at the beauty of the young girls even as we are aware that while my brothers were toddlers with markers and apple juice all over their cheeks the children of this city struggled to survive blockade, starvation, unceasing bullets and bombs flaring terror beyond the long-broken windowpane.

But Sarajevo is a Cat City, with its gateways guarded by feline hosts who leave one eye forever open to watch the tourists and the sightseeing moon, kittens sneezing outside the madrasas and escaping into their secret attics of static electricity, naptimes, string theory.

Together we speculate—what happened to all the pets, twenty years ago, when the city lay under the flares and bloodied dreams of an incomprehensible siege? With broken limbs and families lost, who gave spoilt milk to the cats? In the silence and solemnity of the museum, one photograph portrays a dog of martyred eyes missing a begging leg. But now, upon walls speckled with shrapnel wounds, the cats’ fearfully comic and hilariously angelic graffiti smiles upon the wall.

And after five visits, each touched with oleander and ink and the banal iridescence of mussels’ shells, David and I know full well that Kotor, Montenegro, is itself entirely a Cat Town—the dogs have no bite here. After seven hundred years and the passage of kingdoms and Venetian ships of blown glass, the intricate archiwebs of the shining marble alleyways and hectic rooftops and random chapels of the old walled city represent now the bastions of a feline realm. So the four of us can take a chance left turn and duck beneath a ballet of laundry strung from windowsill to floral windowsill, and there’s a cat! and under the mountainous candlesticks of a seafood café, there are three more!

and before the shrine of a maritime saint there’s a terrible herd of them.

Fortunately we are amenable enough to obeying those flickering tails and complying to the tyrannical mew which demands a dinner scrap; we and the cats know what they could do.

Cats-2 and Dogs-1, and we drive north along the Croatian shore, where the stones are lunar and the waters excruciating and the strawberries inappropriate, finally arriving at a coastal village whose name we don’t know for five hours: Ražnavac. And what’s happening? the creaking passage of an old black-veiled widow with a wide grin of absent teeth, a parade of choirgirls so glamorous with identical ruby sashes at their waists. Bob laughs at the battle of little boys over a bicycle, chokes upon a wicked fishbone. We sleep (as is my fantasy) above an ice cream parlor, and gather shells on and uneventful beach.

But it’s in the morning that we’re conquered, devastated, by the scampering of a beast so horrible that the day’s first dialogue consists largely of curses.

The annals of animal history, no doubt, will not give credence to my testimony, because the puppy who rollicked like nursery rhyme across the courtyard possessed such a level of sheer disgusting cuteness as to be entirely unphotographable. Something like a cherub sculpted of cookie dough, I decide, as David proclaims it to be made of sausages and Mom and Bob simply cradle it just as it would like. And then, cruelly, it has to pant, flop upon its back, wag a stubby tail and whimper; no mercy. It’s been a Dog Town all along, but perhaps we ought have known (technically speaking, it is Dalmatia, after all), and onwards goeth empire.

thermometers as weaponry, or, why even the rain won't ruin my mood

2010-06-01T08:57:00.000+02:00

My continual enmity for the world of temperature (why must it be around all the freaking time?) continues, as beyond the windows where their secretive shutters and panes clear as integrity (for David washed the windows) the rain patters inanely in the rhythm requisite for melancholic love songs or the sinister rituals of frogs; fetching a half dozen extravagant pastries of jam and cheese and spiral swirls from the bakery down the street, I have to shield my own umbrella lest it turn inside out and into the wing of a bat, sweeping me towards the Caspian Sea on own of these icy updrafts. But it's worth it - because aforementioned baked goods are breakfast for my Mommy and my stepfather, currently dreaming away the residue of a transatlantic flight. They're here! Mom with her artistic craftiness surpassing the best flamboyance of a Mexican calendar, and Bob with his off-the-beaten-path jests and encyclopedic knowledge of jazz. But dammit, temperature, must you be cold just in time for their vacation? Still, my mood is blatantly and tritely and pleasurably sunny - there's no meteorology that'll sour these days - whilst David and I plot wet walks through the old town, visits to catacombs, mayhaps a trans-peninsular road trip... There has to be a place where there isn't a temperature, but rather a seaside or the extralunary song of a mosque. Not cold.

I told you they existed!

2010-05-28T08:42:00.000+02:00

Many ages ago, in the era of Washington (by which I mean my freshman year of university in Olympia), I wandered through the corridors and columns and the rains' chambers of a temperate rainforest. On occasion I touched the moss with its miniature white blooms, or the ten thousand fingers of an enormous fern, or the orange toadstools with their endless mischief and mystery. Every smelled of damp decay, or of the nearby, unseen sea. And then I saw it -

Indeed, a tiny body, no larger than my foot, clad all in gray garb, with human hands spread around it. I stopped, and for five minutes of paralysis spoke to myself, or to the giant slugs.

It has human hands, I murmured. I knew it! I knew gnomes existed, and they said it was only a myth, but I knew it all along! And now I've found one, a real gnome, deceased.

Oh, wait. It's a dead mole.

Anyhow:

Moles! We have moles at our vineyard! They upturned my wildflowers and a naive infant cucumber. But David informs me they eat the malignant grubs which otherwise might swarm us, so I suppose I ought be grateful.

Nugae-mania, or, so I was looking at the dictionary the other day

2010-05-17T12:00:00.000+02:00

In spite of the fact that I'm pausing in the midst of two travel essays and a novel chapter in order to do this, I've been feeling druther nostalgic for the writing of my dictionary-thingy ('cause Logodaedaly is sort of in between a trifle and a lexicon). Put simply, it was a blast to write. And because my favorite online browsing is secretly scanning the digitized Oxford English Dictionary, I happened to find this word, which amused me. So here's a homeless little fiction to match.

nugae-mania, noun. Devotion to trifling things.

When I knew Priscilla - and, mind you, this was ages before the iridescent explosion of the dragonflies and the era of the orchestras, so very long ago - she was quite wealthy, as wealth goes. One mightn't have known it from the mere gossamer to which her slippers had worn, and perhaps tossed a coin at her little palace of discarded fruit crates. But in truth Priscilla was immensely well-heeled. She possessed one hundred and thirteen thimbles, two of which were genuine silver, and a salt shaker still holding one glittering, ethereal grain. I recall how both she and her old matchboxes still smelled of sulfur, though within she kept bits of dried lavender, and in her only scrap of vanity she wore a miniscule comb of mother-of-pearl bundled in black hair; this, she said, was the most costly of all her artifacts. Forever it seemed to me that Priscilla walked under the envelopment of a hidden, imperceptible museum: here the toy dog, here the green snail's shell, here a copper bell which chimed in a precise echo of a wren's evening cry. I remember how she played with her used, ruby-stained corks, and metal objects rusted past all identity. Of all things I liked best her collection of moths' corpses, tessellated and dusty and infinitely frail. And though Priscilla was covetous, she pressed one into my palm; her fingers were strangely too small for her hands, strangely too silken for prolonged touch.

It will be a souvenir, she told me. Otherwise, you shan't remember me. I haven't done anything important at all.

(this may mark the resurgence of another obsessive-compulsive literary activity for me)

my blog feels glamorous

2010-05-14T11:43:00.001+02:00

Ha! Oh, with what pride have I entirely gussied up and generally revamped my blog... I feel the satisfaction one must experience after giving a makeover to the fugly, amiable hunchback of Notre Dame.

One can put gold glitter on pretty much anything

2010-05-07T12:52:00.000+02:00

I haven’t blogged for quite some time (seriously, where did April go?), aye, due to an adept combination of laziness and diligence; that is, David and I have spent the majority of our days out at the vineyard, at the industrious work oft attributed to bees (there are bees in the vineyard, too!). So, we've been much occupied with:

sowing (with fervent desire for artichokes, Brussels sprouts, and catnip):

digging (we've got a lot of dirt):

renovating (by way of paint, fresh flooring, and vacuuming up more spiders):

interior décor (for the comfortable aesthete):

and writing (for a vineyard is a most inspiring place for literary work).

In addition, however, I’ve indulged my deep-rooted compulsion for utterly useless demi-artistic activities, and made a plethora of… things. Furniture, or pictures, or stuff-which-hasn’t-got-a-purpose.

having painted the dire old Soviet cabinetry with various lianas and spooky old Soviet woodcuts:

and painting, collaging, generally sprucing up a dilapidated shelf unit:

plus having crafted a frame for the sapphiric work of Marc Chagall out of old sticks:

then, painting the eyes of the Buddha to watch over our bedroom door:

and pasted a cardinal in the belly of a tin angel:

and having collaged the image of a kiss, for all vineyards ought to have a touch of romance:

and of course, because we all need one of these just in case of emergency, I’ve painted a dish with a lobster and a snake and a flying fish:

Oh, wait! The piece de resistance - the throne of the composting toilet (a sawdusted system designed according to David's massively clever plan) which upon which I have pasted the impertinent faces of two dozen cats:

(I possess a complex psychology regarding felines, which is difficult to explain in linguistic terms; basically, I love them and want to hold them so badly I also want to smoosh them)

Plus, we have a gnome named Bartholomew.

Object lessons, or, various things found working in a vineyard (because there's lots to do)

2010-04-04T08:22:00.000+02:00

yeah, we're that cool

A spoon, I suppose upon tired and contented retrospect, is quite a natural thing to discover in a garden (unlike a toaster), as easily it facilitates the ritual feasts of people who eat dirt in order to satiate a submerged desire for gritty minerals and the potent, lustful stimulants to be found in decayed seeds; I oughtn’t to have been so surprised when David and I unearthed one in our own vineyard’s vegetable plot, between the chrysanthemums and the weird pneumatic sort of bulb-plant-things we haven’t yet identified. But I haven’t yet had the time to do something artistically inane with it, as the garden itself requires extensive hoeing and tilling and the excavation of furrows between which we’ll grow any number of crops we decide might be worth dousing in Indian spice. It’s hard work, for me, as at 5’2” it’s acrobatic to stretch six feet in the effort to break up the dirt clods, but at the afternoon’s end I’m utterly filthy and satisfied.

‘Twas in the vineyard I discovered the bug all a-shimmer and lovely, an iridescent orange fit for the discotheque; unfortunately, as David recognized, that’s a sort of aphid particularly adept at devouring grapevines, and he smooshed it before any opportunity of photograph. And it’s out here where David’s been digging and digging, the way dwarves do in misty mountains high, transplanting grape stems (it’s like transplanting sticks with the potential for alcohol and jam), and out here he’s pacing and pacing with a backpack charmingly evocative of Ghostbusters (an awesome flick) as he sprays away all ghoulish pests with metaphysical fungicide. And out here he’s been pruning, and pruning

and pruning, because in defiance of all lush intuition, in order to nurture the vines one must hack them back to tragicomic amputee stumps—and no sooner does he cut back a row than our sage neighbor, Laci-Bacsi

arrives on slow wise uncontestable feet to inform him he hasn’t cut enough.

And of course I discovered cobwebs in the bedroom of our little cottage with its tiled porch and attic of cluttered mystery. Only I didn’t expect that many cobwebs. I mean lots of cobwebs. I don’t think you understand. You’re picturing many cobwebs, but I assure you, you don’t get it. Nonetheless, with the belligerence of mild obsessive-compulsiveness, I’ve resolved that I shall vacuum (a task I hate, because it’s noisy), cleanse, cement-fixative-ize, and paint this room unto decorative and livable overthrow. But there are a lot of cobwebs. After a number of literal entanglements, near-death experiences standing upon chairs, curses, brushstrokes, and accidental hairpaintings, however, I can now state that the room’s residential ass is officially whooped.

It’s in the other room, however, that David and I find the particular cabinet which in spite of a vague glamour of mildew nonetheless offers swingy doors and a mystically handy interior which must, must, must be painted. There’s a cobweb in there, too. Of course. But the exterior, I’ve elected, is in dire need of absurd and ostentatious coats of glitter (alias the poor man’s magic) and collage: as to whether the theme will be fine art, surrealist paintings, old Hungarians or sultry ladies, I haven’t yet decided. It’s yellow for this piece, as per the demands of diurnal art, but cool blue for what David has christened the “altar table” (that is, a low bookshelf) and the grubby table, multihued shelves, and red for the chair whose destiny lies in our toilet routines. As a side effect I myself am streaked like a modern art stereotype in chemical colors which likely cause mutations of flesh and style.

I can’t yet determine the identity of the sacs I find in one of the barrels hunkered in the front garden with its decadent moss and nascent blooms and prima donna birdsong—these tiny gossamer pouches buried in the darkness beneath the miniature onions. I shouldn’t like to assign only nastiness to the entomological or arachnid or infernal world, but these things truly are sinister. Dissection by way of a shovel blade reveals within a collection of dirt, and something brittle and vaguely gold with all the evil treasure of the subterranean world.

And from the attic, whilst I’m assiduously streaking furniture and myself with paint, David whoops to find—well, we believe it once functioned as a watering trough for horses, or goats, or possibly a griffin, but following his discovery and his craftwork, it’s become our homespun or homewelded sink, handy for washing dishes and livestock ‘neath the cherry trees.

Moreover, there, behind the oh-so-creatively titled Red Shed, home of aesthetically pleasing tools and more cobwebs, in a baffling assemblage

of metal, sticks, and oil drums filled with dubiously functional sand, I find a key—oh, just a little thing, cryptic, delicately reminiscent of fairytales, though we have yet to discover its companion door and the peephole vision of whatever prismatic, gossamer, venomous and dirty world lies beyond.

Things I learned on my vacation

2010-03-17T07:15:00.000+01:00

Among many items which I have neglected, forgotten tasks which later resurface in all sorts of pesky ways—this being a phenomenon most common to laundry and that weird spot in the kitchen’s corner wherein something wicked upward grows—I realized it’s been quite an age since I’ve last “blogged” (which is now a verb, like “to lampshade”). It’s been a continent, in fact. But aren’t I a wiser person for it?

1. Mice can walk through solid objects.

*My family’s house is quite a cozy place with a spectrum of kitschy artifacts and Art Deco warmth, but they have indeed fallen victim to an infestation of amiably sneaky mice. I, for one, shan’t sponsor any mousetrap campaigns. As far as I can tell, mice possess the spectral ability to pass through walls, tile, countertops, the center of the earth, and probably through dreams, all in a peeping search for peanut butter.

2. I 2. 1702, a man named George Psalmanazar (who may or may not have been Dutch) emerged amidst the intellectual circles of Europe, claiming himself (a tidy man of blond hair, fluent in Latin) to be a nobleman hailing from the exotic Asian isle of Formosa (where the people ate arboreal serpents and each other, practiced polygamy, and dwelt in subterranean domes). With their own mystifying alphabet

which only Psalmanazar could read.

*Because English-language libraries are like toy stores, with bookworms.

3 . 3. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow lost his wife when her dress caught fire from a dropped candlestick.

*A fact of which I had been unaware, taught to me by my acing-literature-class younger brother—the long-lost ventures of the heart, that send no answers back again.

4. 4. The African rainbow lizard Agama agama lionotus leaps directly upwards from boulders and into a tropic sky in order to catch gnats, which it consumes in the manner of popcorn.

*Because cable TV nature documentaries and other mental clutter are addictive. And awesome.

5. The malicious nasty smell of burning hair emerges when the sulfur present in keratin is heated to produce various nitrogen and oxygen sulfides.

*I learnt this at approximately 5 AM, Mountain Standard Time, smoking in the snow upon my mother- and father-in-law’s back deck, with the moon an incredulous witness and somewhere the cackle of a bat. Faulty depth perception brought that lighter just a little too close to my bangs, I suppose, which went up in quite a volcanic burst of flame. But far better, always, was it to stand with David and his parents in the clarity of afternoon, and enjoy our respective cigarettes while discussing the Hungarian word for equation, or literature I haven’t actually read, or what we shall do tonight.

6. 6. A careful manipulation of International Standard Time Zones enables one to gaze into the future. Where it is nighttime.

*Time zones are also coextensive (like the free sachets of pretzels) with the terrible familiar ache of missing our families

as in a spooky contravention of biology we fly over landmasses and green seas on our way home to Hungary—now here, and sending daily loving telephone calls to fantastical mommies and siblings, and all the while a-toil in the vineyard—

but more episodes to come upon this my oh-so-overlooked blog, including the organisms currently dwelling upon our dining room table and the various things one must light on fire at a vineyard in spring…

On rarities, or, where we are now

2009-12-28T18:12:00.000+01:00

Things here are so exotic. You can’t get this stuff every day, after all. I understand the traveler possesses a certain impulse to romanticize the destination and imbue it with whatever character fits her particular artistical worldview at the time, but wow! there are simply so many outlandish things to see.

For example, the artichoke…Which, in the long chronicle of relations betwixt Homo sapiens and the vegetal world, represents quite the diplomatic oddity. In all sincerity, what Bronze Age gourmand looked at this cantankerous and cruelly spined thing and thought yep, that’s just the pointy object I’ve been hankering to eat!

But oh, my goodness, the artichoke is a rarity I’ve never seen and often craved in Hungary, and here it is, there upon the table with its guarded, peerless heart.

And of course one cannot disregard the landscape, which displays the peculiar phenomena of “height” upon the one side, a jawbone of peaks mumbling about December storms and high altitudes, and a phenomenal “flatness” upon the one side, just the image of distance itself sighing on and on and on into the horizontal farmlands of the east.

It’s interesting, this place.

And dammit if English isn’t everywhere, which means that if I stumble in public I must mute my various vulgar curses involving bodily functions. I’ve noticed that the ubiquity of my native tongue is in fact a rather bewildering thing, like the sudden discovery of a My Little Pony who witnessed one’s entire childhood. While I’m fairly conversational in Hungarian, at least until the topic turns from gardens or weather and towards the structure of lampshades, now I comprehend each and every rudely demanding highway sign, and can correct its grammar because Enjoy Are Chilly isn’t right. There’s a spookiness to realizing I understand the discussions of all passersby, and a compulsive tendency to listen in to private exchanges of chores or romance, the way sorcerers must feel on the day they suddenly know the language of dust motes.

Correlatively and addictively, English libraries!

Being in the hollows of any library gives me a sort of grandiloquent high which probably shouldn’t be legal for children, but here I can read any given tome I choose to pluck simply because it contains words like obscene or Saturn—at last I’ve got a history of lunar literature preceding 1750, and an obscure German novel I recall somebody claiming to be quite good.

SUVs. They’re so big! One doesn’t often see the Ford Onslaught rumbling through Pécs, and I have a feeling some sport utility vehicles have been perhaps wisely prepared so that suburbanites will be the ones most certain to escape the coming zombie apocalypse

at least until the gas station attendants take up flesh-eating too.

Pumas. Admittedly, I haven’t yet seen one prowling around, drooling with Egyptian dreams and snatching hapless joggers at foolhardy dusks, but I know they’re out there. As these don’t dwell in Hungary, I had better remember to be careful of the sneaky felines

and of the infamous nocturnal Vamplions, too, which I swear exist.

Pimpin’ Purple. Classy, right? But in fact this is my chosen color of hair dye, sold solely in tattoo parlours, which was the autograph of my own poor dried-up tresses for several years—including the September day I met David—a hue he has given me for the rainbowed holidays. I don’t believe violet has much to do with prostitution in Hungary. But I get it now!

Raspberry jam. Not that we haven’t got raspberry jam in Hungary (málna lekvar). I’m fairly sure it’s not hard to obtain anywhere, and may constitute a primordial plasma forged some one million years after the Big Bang. But this jam is in a jar with twinkles on the side, and the pectin pools with prismatic charm below actual jewels of fruit, and it has just the proper amount of sugar and tastes better than all other preserves because my Mommy made it herself.

And thusly mi familia, a csaladam, my family—

who reside here, here in America where there are mountain lions, English infomercials for Mr. T’s magic cooking machine, cowboy prairies and the people I love so much, who in spite of saguaro cacti and NASA are the very best thing about North America, where David and I will be staying for the next two snowstormed months…

Game over, man, game over

2009-12-02T13:45:00.000+01:00

Shoot! I realized the other day. By ‘other day’, naturally, I refer to a point in time which may or may not actually be Monday or else didn’t actually happen. In any case, shoot! I thought. I haven’t written in my blog for almost a month, which makes me a combination of inconsequential and irresponsible.

guess which childhood dancer is me screwing around

An enumeration of all the things which have preoccupied me this November include many thrilling-or-banal events, including my own writing, rain, the singsong raking of our orchard and a bonfire with tears in the smoke, about a dozen books, two episodes of a volcanically upset tummy (eww) and the immensely exciting prospect of my mother- and father-in-law buying a house here in Pécs (just down the street, which means David and I can come see them daily! and I can use the big bathtub to play with paper boats). Ah, the slippage of time. Spooky, huh?

Like the Mayans knew. After all, their lore has become a part of turn-of-this-millennium popular culture: the world will end in 2012, we’re told, and there’s even a film about it (though when I think of its star, John Cusack, I just remember that ‘80’s teen movie where he sees the Claymation hamburger dance).

The annihilation of the globe, soon to come

(You are so not getting out of this one)

on the winter solstice of 2012. This is going to mark the conclusion of a 5,125-year cycle of being, culmination of a cosmic age. After all, don’t be a conquistador—the Mayans possessed sophisticated astronomy, and charted solar zeniths and the contrary motions of Mars. I know there are theories out there about the crisscrossing of the sun with galactic arms

and groupies of the occult have lots of things to say about Aquarius, crystals, and cantankerous jackalheaded gods. I fancy there are a few cabins housing preapolcalyptic crazies with long underwear and shotguns. Above us gather the tornadoes with their glowering, spiraling tongues, and plate tectonics and the planets are aligning towards doom. In spite of the nuts in the loony pajamas, however, I do have a great respect for the skilled and numinous science of the sanctified Mayan calendar.

But maybe we’re missing it. Maybe it isn’t that the world will end in 2012, and we’ll be lying on the hoods of our trucks in the violet desert, watching the rings of Saturn turn somersaults while buildings collapse and dogs mate happily with sphinxian cats and there’s a distinct scent of oleander and uranium in the air. Maybe it’s that the world is going to begin. The past 4.5 billion years, you see, have simply been the prelude to the earth.

But on the winter solstice of 2012, everything will finally commence. In the world, you see, the evolution of plants will unfurl in tulip-fashion into its most terrifying form, involving botanical mobility and transparent petals and open eyes, for we do not yet know all that petals can do. Logic will begin to behave according to newborn laws, and syllogisms, principles of given-that and therefore will being to make sense in terms of if blue, then teaspoon. We shan’t have to worry about silly things like circles having circumference, or sound being something heard by the ears, because when the world gets going that’s just not how it goes. Wait until you see what happens to kisses.

like in a painting, you'll say, except paintings are going to be outside the frames

At the beginning of the world, things will be otherwise.

Or maybe I’m full of baloney. Bologna. On the winter solstice of 2012, ten thousand mystics may simply imbibe herbal tea and talk about quartz and beads and higher consciousness, and the arctic mice may peep with their fear of the day-long dark, and somebody makes breakfast and somewhere a star explodes, and in the far antipodes the sun will not set, graced by the pinprick of the morning and the evening star, and somebody’s going to wake up and say oh my, thank goodness, it was only a dream.

What’s the matter with the mill?

2009-11-06T19:22:00.000+01:00

Well, I had a little corn, I put it in a sack - brought it to the mill and come right back…

Approximately 5:43 AM, when the sky has the sort of subtle darkness which is only an intimation of a pale dawn to come, and I’m blearily beginning a day’s writing with a ritualistic clove cigarette (bad things will happen if I don’t observe this sacrament and set the volume to a prime number), adjectives regarding Einstein (batty?), and eighty year-old blues—and that’s Memphis Minnie, mournfully crooning over the busted mill in with a delicate twang, she herself and her lover Kansas Joe strumming their guitars like rainfall on the fields of the Great Depression.

Hey, I think, dramatically mouthing the words for the Audience Of The Invisible (like ya do). I so could do that. I could play the guitar. Or the banjo. I so totally could do that.

What's the matter with the mill? It done broke down…

Which is how with David’s encouragement (because I believe in fairies and a secret lunar language spoken by the moths, but he’s the sweetest one who always believes in me) I’ve ended up here, on the antique cartographical carpet with my legs crossed as once we did in first grade music class (xylophone solo, thank you very much), a guitar cradled in my lap.

I so can do this. I’m fairly sure that were I to search online I could find a tabbycat with at least a ukulele, so I must have a chance. But I shan’t make pretenses, either—this is sort of hard! Not in the crafting-a-lifesize-map-of-Brazil sort of way, but in the I-had-better-practice way. And what about the virtuosos, with their priceless autographs and lustrously blistered thumbs—how do they do it so fast? Apart from a teenage foray into the standup string bass (oh, for the utter cool of pizzicato jazz), I have little experience with the architecture of music; much of what I know of octaves has been derived from reading old books about Pythagoras (who in the structure of harmony found the mathematics of the universe itself, and inscrutably also believed eating beans to be a sin).

But now I’m learning chords—as of now I believe I favor E minor, as it is melancholy and requires but two mournful fingers—and the scales of does and rays and the blues…or I’m very much trying. In spite of my love for the jazz groove of “I’ve Got Rhythm,” and Gene Kelly tapdancing in the gay Paree of Hollywood’s golden days

—well, “I got music, I got starlight, I got my man”, but I have not got rhythm, yet.

What's the matter with the mill? It done broke down… What’s the matter with the mill? I can't get no grinding, tell me what's the matter with the mill…

I like my guitar, its voluptuous curves and hollow heart, and I think that in honor of my pioneering maestro muse (who also toured with the Ringling Brothers and wore bangles of real silver dollars), I shall call it Minnie.

And learn to play “What’s the Matter With the Mill,” though mayhap it shall take me eighty years.

Excuse me, but I was told there would be poop, or, witchcraft, or, vine-tending

2009-10-27T09:20:00.000+01:00

I may be alone, or at least neurologically skewed, in wishing that I was handling a pail of fecal matter. But fertilizing our vineyard on its way to November somnolence, I find myself rather peeved that unlike my preconceptions we use chemicals, not fresh manure still redolent of a cow’s tasty snack. It’s simply that shoveling poop seemed somehow more authentic, as if stinkiness amounts to a sort of peasanty baptism. Now I suppose I’ll be forced to compensate by wearing a babushka, which I don’t entirely mind. Really, our chemical fertilizer is just pale pebbles of some sort of numinous unknown substance, reminiscent of something. Wait, that’s it! kitty litter!

The way to do it, we’ve learnt, is simply to sprinkle the pellets in a circle around those crones’ roots, in a halo appearing so radiant and anomalous against damp soil and moss with the properties of neon. The loops make me think of nothing so much as witchcraft, some tenuous boundary drawn between our days and the world of ghouls just past our sight; I ought to know some sort of spooky chant. I suppose it’s fitting, as we do approach the gauze cobwebs of All Hallows’ Eve. Admittedly, I wish Halloween had a more prominent place here in Hungary, because everybody likes free sugar, and my Mom always makes the best costumes ever, even a wizard’s cap.

But hauling a pleasantly aged pail of pebbles and a scoop like a prospector’s pan, I move methodically down the ten rows growing gold and biblioform with fall, past indignant spiders and the shriveled grieving heads of a few bundles of forgotten grapes; occasionally I look back to scrutinize the spellwork of glowing circles I’ve left behind. I haven’t got a bucket of poo or candy, but I creep along, casting stones widdershins. Hunched at the roots like this, I realize I’ll probably have a crooked back tonight, and tangled hair, and I shall need a broomstick to clear the walk.

Windfall, or, Radio Grape, or, how we came upon much more fruit

2009-10-22T17:33:00.000+02:00

There are some types of good fortune both exuberant and slightly embarrassing, like the time I caught a leprechaun under a glass and accidentally left the little emerald scamp in a cupboard until three weeks later I discovered no more than a shamrock mummy. Impulsive and effusively farsighted and magnificently lucky…David and I sort of own a vineyard now. Okay, we actually do.

On occasion, I’ve heard, quite valuable gold meteors will fall from the sky, as well as scrumptious and dangerous pineapples, but rarely is one showered with old men. Nonetheless, taking a spectator’s motorcycle tour through the hills outside the village of Pellérd, some twelve kilometers outside of Pécs in the last revenants of summer air, David and I came upon a man moving slow down a dirt road

bearing a wiseman’s cane. And, it turns out (as eventualities are wont to do) that this particular vineyard—yes, there, across the way—belongs to him, and it’s for sale. His name is Anti-Bacsi, and he’s quite willing to offer a tour.

And that night we’re at home in the autumnal garden, me watching a pigeon think about itself upon the eaves. What do you think? Oh, baby, it’s tempting. It’s such a good deal… the price of a car and I can’t even drive…. Could we do it? We tell Laci-Bacsi, vineyard sage, about the property, the price, the five rows of grapes and the twenty-six laden trees—igen! csinalyal. he tells us. Yes! do it.

And with what still seems to me the swiftest whirl of papers and gracious family meetings, we have a vineyard…

more than a vineyard

The requisite rows of grapes, white and red and wizardly, and also plums, droll little apples, vegetables which-are-good-for-you and bulbous pears…a cottage! oh, and we could put shrines up on those shelves, and the wine cellar

is Poe’s case of the willies, and it comes with all the viticultural equipment we need…

Oh my gosh! Oh, goodness and gracious and me…

Look at the old radio! It picks up cities!

Anti-Bacsi…do you want that old radio? I’m sure it doesn’t work, but—

doesn't work?! and Anti-Bacsi leaps to plug in that sketchy cord—to the subsequent universal speech of static sound—it tunes into the European metropoli as they were seventy years ago…

but I’m sure that with a certain twirl of dial and a tinfoil hat, with how fortunate we truly are we could find a program, a classic show, an on-air drama in the aureate wind—

Take the show on Radio Copenhagen, in which my fingers smell of the delicious wretchedness of rotten fruit, having picked up the last artifacts of our orchard’s harvest and dumped it into the heap of future compost, and I’m attempting witchflight now with an inefficient old rake, amassing piles of leaves for possible play and snacking occasionally on a few overripe pears. And with a fade through the merry melancholy of ragtime violin, hit Radio Athens

where David laughs from somewhere in our rows of grapes, back and forth and hoeing and plowing the trenches which we’ll soon fill with benevolent manure, in a fecal blessing for next year’s wine. The cheery advertisement for a miracle shaving cream, and Radio Munich plays softly in the attic

becobwebbed and dry with the afternoon sliding through the tile roof, illuminating the knuckles of an amiable ghost. Or twist to Radio Paris, and behind the strains of dirty mandolinists upon the Seine there’s the woodstove with its jaws of ash and the infinite potential

of artisan breads I don''t actually know how to make without danger of fire. Radio Prague—the new neighbors waving from between the apples in their bruised heaps—and Radio Sofia, where we stand with hands on hips to survey the host of furniture and random trinkets left to us, the owl figurine with wise and empty eyes, the ambiguous identity of a stone animal, and somebody has broken the pearly wrist of the little porcelain nude. And what in the world are we going to do with the miniature sculpture of a drunkard? With complementary shot glasses. But I insist the sentient garden gnome goes on prominent display.

And Radio Budapest, with the dry and tender voice of Anti-Bacsi’s wife, Juli-Neni, pressing the ceramic garden of an heirloom urn into my hands, though I plead to refuse. It was my mother’s, she explains, and our wedding gift. Thank you, and thank you, koszonem. I'm grateful for everything, and I believe I will hear music in the vines.

I like stuff, or, a short story I wrote

2009-10-13T18:30:00.000+02:00

Feeling rather under the proverbial weather (preternaturally cold with a chance of headache and nausea) this morning, I accomplished little in the way of working on my novel, but I did manage to write a short story, which provides a minor sense of accomplishment in lieu of cleaning the toilet. Slate.com has advertised a contest - for others who are interested, here be the link :http://www.slate.com/id/2231262/ - asking for 500 word short stories regarding a given worthless object. This:

And here's the tale I wrote to match:

Simply put, Melvin is a dapper man. He is spick and span and almost swanky, in his own inimitable way, and he will admit to being a bit of a hunk. Melvin is the sweetheart of a thousand beauties so frenzied in love’s savage and saccharine appetite as to arrive in armies simply to kiss his cheeks. And Melvin’s summertime picnics in the park are all the rage for all his gals. It must be said, nonetheless, that however promiscuous he may be Melvin truly adores them all, each petite lover with her ruby skin and excruciating mouth and infinitely delicate legs, and he is devoted to their pleasure and the feel of their creep over his chest, arm, their peck upon his cleft chin. A beau this popular must have his vanity, never to disappoint a single ladylove, and so Melvin enjoys a meticulous toilette routine. First his suit—the pants fashionably tight and silk conveniently thin—and each day a fresh dandelion tucked into the pocket at his throbbing breast. With a flourish of sticky pomade he molds his hair into a pompadour, though he will wear no shoes; he would not wish to crush a lover’s tarantella toe. This done, he will devote an hour to his extended shave, and a man such as Melvin needs no barber. After mustard, relish, mint chutney and caviar, even nectar in its dreamy indolence, he has found that of all probable shaving creams barbeque sauce is easily the best. He dips his brush into the pot with an artist’s secretive precision, and smears all the stubble of his body with the sauce, a hint of onion and pepper, tomato and chile del amor. And avoiding a single bloody nick—for love has its bite, Melvin knows—he shears away each troublesome hair. But never, never will he wash away the sauce: this is the secret of Melvin’s allure. His loves await, and now so utterly polished Melvin strolls into the park with a picnic basket of hedonistic jelly sandwiches in his hand, humming jazz serenades. Aware that his darlings already crawl frantic towards his embrace, he lays himself down splayed in the long grass, and sighs with a kind of subterranean and epicurean bliss. And his girls arrive in hordes, scuttling into every crevice of his body and the gourmet bowl of his bellybutton, ravenous for passion’s barbeque shaving sauce. But he does not believe they could possibly think of him as only a piece of meat. Passion is the spice of the endless honeymoon, he murmurs in ecstasy, and lets himself become the feast, for Melvin is the lover of the ants.

On squashiness and incomprehensibility, or, winemaking, phase three

2009-10-05T19:09:00.000+02:00

I could build a house with that! In all sincerity this does seem quite architecturally feasible, possibly even incorporating Corinthian columns (obviously the best kind) and basilicas: the densely packed remnants of our grape harvest have formed a log of solid fruit which appears to offer a sort of fruity adobe of fairly trustworthy structural integrity. Like so:

Though David compares it also to a wheel of cheese, which also seems quite apt and at the very least vegan-friendly. Utilizing a lovingly aged press we’ve squashed our grapes

and cruelly extracted their luxuriant juice, a hue of rather carnal crimson already on the staggering way to fermentation, so that leaning over the barrel I gain a not-unpleasant high. O my, but that butterfly’s so pretty I think I’ll cry.

But we’re not done with fumes, not yet. I get to learn every day! and I just want to find stuff out, hence the excellent mineral Fact of the Day: one utilizes sulfur to liberate wine from rank odors and evil microbes and thereby prevent spoilage. And the use of sulfur was officially permitted in viniculture by Prussian royal decree, though the process would be fascinating enough

with Laci-Bacsi igniting a little wing of sulfur paper and dipping it into our future-wine’s present-vessel, there in that cellar like the inner ribcage of Edgar Allen Poe. And now, there doth it lie

whilst we must wait—

and educate ourselves.

For in spite of the geographic factoid that the vicinity of Pécs is one of the noblest wine areas of Hungary—Villany, with its famous reds and processions of cellar doors inviting bats and tasters—and in spite of our own nascent enterprise of do-it-your-own-tipsy-self, I know only a glistening little drop of anything about the art of oenology. Not which liquid colors possess more valuable wavelengths—I tend to default to that which possesses some hint of purple, or all of the snooty terminological poetry. There are odes to aging in oak barrels, as I understand it, and verses about wine with legs or full body, which seems to caress the edge of erotica. Probably I ought to acquaint myself with a dictionary. So, apparently a fine chardonnay ought to taste buttery (one can learn anything on the internet, and since it’s hyperscript it has to be true, right?), while the initial impact of a first sip is its attack (rather scary), and a flinty taste “describes an evaluation indicating a young white made from cool-region grapes under cold fermentation characterized by high acidity and a filling mouthfeel” (oh, for goodness’ sake).

On that squishy feeling, or, our first steps into viniculture

2009-09-26T14:48:00.000+02:00

Pah! I would have scoffed, a year ago when I was but a blushing maid of twenty-three, so naïve in the ways of the world—pah! I would have told you, had you suggested that I would come to enjoy red wine. But now, aye, I am an older (i.e. one step closer to looking like Yoda) and a wiser (i.e. having rather recently learnt what a “Blackberry” device is, and it has nothing to do with pies) lass, I must admit I’ve developed an enthusiastic taste for it; moreover, in a turn as astonishing as those spontaneous materializations of badgers under chairs, David and I are actually in the process of making our own red wine.

David had agreed—we like the thought of red wine, we would affirm to one another, as it seems so urbane and is juicy with some sort of substance which benefits the left ventricle or the consistency of snot or whatever the Sunday newspaper chooses to extol. Red wine seemed to me something a baron might sip whilst combing burrs from his ermine muff

or else a deeply sophisticated ritual belonging to one of our favorite authors—Hemingway, David's read, enjoyed a bottle for breakfast

(eschewing toast for toasted, as one might say), and though I don’t know any specific factoids regarding the matter I can imagine my dear Jean Genet sipping from some stolen decanter in a Parisian slum or from a starstruck rooftop in his lover’s Moroccan medina. Anyhow, we appreciated the notion, but it didn’t seem to be our cup of tea. I mean wine. I’m mixing beverages here, which in itself leads to another figure of wandering speech…

Winemaking. ‘Twas that of which I spoke.

Step One: Pickiness

This feels wholesome, I repeat to David, not even complaining about the intimacy of the sweat in my ribs or the intricate language of scratches up my arms. Oooh! That’s a good one.

We’re picking our grapes—o, goodness, this is what satyrs do!—Kék Zwiegelt, we learn, which (according to the authoritative vinophilia of the internet) is a red grape variety developed in Austria in 1922 (Austria! That’s where they make Alps and schnitzel!) and combines the bite and fruity character of Blaufränkisch and the body of St. Laurent. Gross.

Not truthfully, as when we pluck a few, or

a chokable load, it’s divinely honeyed and already practicing the raisin’s lunchbox tendency towards fermentation. Istvan, the ancestral vineyard’s heir and master with his wiseman’s beard and antiquated scale, leads us down the rows of whorled vines. Our neighbor—the inimitable and generous Laci-Bacsi

the miner who carries tales of subterranean fires, the brutality of the Soviet regime, and hiding within a car in Croatia whilst inebriated, which led to a hapless soldier imbibing his urine (I shan’t elaborate)—helps us along

showing us the sweetest bundles to heap in a dozen plastic pails; his moustachioed dachshund, Betyar (meaning rascal) obligingly eats the leavings.

Do you like the Zweigelt wine? we ask Istvan.

I don’t drink, he tells us.

Step Two: Mushiness

Apparently, the proportions of sugar involved in a draught of wine determine its alcohol content, which means that if a likewise phenomenon occurs in everyday life I am a sot. In addition, however, I am not precisely certain as to the affect of a high fruit-to-bug ratio, but I note the hapless wasp disappearing like sleepwalkers’ thoughts into the mashed grapes.

Don’t stick your hands in the grinder, David warns. It’ll smash them like you wouldn’t believe.

But I waaaaant to! Not really, though I do savor the hale and sunny feel of taking turns at the wheel

crushing the poor frail grapeskins into a lovely prewine morass. And I will say this: if one has ever treasured some fantasy of sinking fingers into the disemboweled guts of a vegetal beast, dipping arms-deep into pulverized grapes and with a haphazard system extracting every possible stem

(because stems=bitterness, which is not good for the soul, and no-stems=dry wine, which is good for the tongue) is supreme. We’re imperiled by the miniature geysers of barrel-cleansing

blessed with woodfire ash, sinful in advance with embryonic inebriation, beatified by haloes of honeybees.

More to come, but like David and I ourselves, the nascent wine must mature and sunsimmer through whatever phases a grape must undergo (the wild teenage years, the inevitable crisis of no-longer-appropriate-to-wear-hot-pants), so steps three and four must wait. During said aging interim, David shall become a coot who remembers when young people knew what-was-what, and I a wrinkly crone with many illogical stories about the King of Bohemia, whilst the fruit grows treacherous and seductive and effervescent with the wayward wings of intoxicated insects.

September 21st, or, how aye, I hath sinn'd against mine blog

2009-08-25T18:22:00.000+02:00

In the interest of historical, physical, ontological study, one must note the fact that this blog entry is postdated; egregiously postdated, with the sort of anachronism that induces so much wincing among watchmakers as to cause their faces to explode. But I do possess a tremendously valid excuse, namely, that I am lazy, easily distracted by shiny items such as tinfoil, and have also at last perfected time travel. I shan’t go into the details of how I have done so—save to hint that the process requires scissors, 1 ¾ cups of apple juice, and a fairy.

Thusly, one must understand that I am in fact posting this entry from weeks upon weeks in the misty past with its fungus and amnesia, though in accordance with the laws of physics and stuff-I-resolved-to-accomplish-today, I must return now to the present

boom!

and it’s now (ah, Monday, September 21^st, anniversary of Benedict Arnold’s treason and the first publication of The Hobbit), you see, and David and I are here, home in Pécs, amidst the lethal chestnuts tumbling maliciously from the garden’s enormous tree (this is not a joke; the chestnuts are like rocks with spikes on them), amidst neighbors with armfuls of pears, my beloved tomes of bread recipes and thunderheads of flour, the books whispering their seductions and winsome trickeries, amidst the Hungarian autumn rendering the students a-chatter and the cobblestones gold, amidst writing and ice cream and laundry and all the myriad distractions and pleasures and inanities which have distracted me for an entire eon from adding anything at all to my blog.

(I promise to offer more in the next few days, detailing adventures with pirates upon holy islands, meteorology, the beauty of vineyards and the perils of their profits, unicorns, literature, crumpets, and other such epics)

An Ode plucked from the Renaissance Gourmand

2009-08-24T16:10:00.000+02:00

Thou seest the Fig amidst the leaves—

Its Sap of Milk and em’rald sheaves—

How might such Fruit seduce us so

With sorcerers’ juice and seeds aglow?

We sink unto sots much woozled by bites

Aye, the Bonbons of Botanie’s most sinfull nights

And condemn not the Fig’s Testicular charm

Nor slap the Harvester’s long-stretch’d arm

For a Glad Tummie-ache be Glutton’s disc’pline

And Sweet Taste doth redeem the Epicurean sin.

~ Lady Smokva, circa 1573

(note one: not actually a real live ode. But figs are officially The Favorite Fruit, and are available for free in the trees surrounding our campsite.)

(note two: please note David’s ingenious contraption, the Fig-Hook

a most worthy, nay, the most worthy employment of his fisherman’s rod, which permits him to fetch the loftiest and plumpest of fruit from the tiptops of the trees, and which earns him the official title of Figgerman.)

(note three: 1 fig + 1 wedge-of-bread + pinch of salt = Figwich)

On shooting stars and stick insects

2009-08-20T19:20:00.000+02:00

How would they explain it? David asks. From these haphazard angles—the two of us sprawled upon the packed earth and parched grass of the ants’ summer and the olives abandoned—I cannot see him, but even in the night I feel the tangible residue of sun as I hold his hand. Seriously, he says, I can understand how you might imagine the stars embedded in a celestial sphere, but how would an ancient explain those?

Because it isn’t one of those nights in which the sky holds back a breath made visible as luminosity, but a gasping, if belated night of the Perseid meteor shower, and we’ve borne commonplace and still extraordinary earthbound witness.

My problem, or my pleasure, is the constant, fervent conflict between an assiduous attention and adoration of scientific fact and my own desperate need for metaphor. The star as asterisk to a universal afterword, the marginalia of terrestrial civilizations and belladonna, a kiss as the variable in a nonsensical equation. I am remembering the existence of a comet and marveling at the very idea that our planet should pass by cosmic chance through its wake, and that comet’s coterie of icy, dirty debris strikes the upper atmosphere and happens to appear in a form so apt to be called a shooting star.

And were I a Paleolith, painting cinnabar huntresses on a cavern wall and slumbering to the wails of sabretooths, or a Greek scholar speculating upon the connection between memory and the morning star, I could concoct an entire astronomy of nonsense verse. The larger meteors—like that one, there, did you see? David gasps—are a sudden bloodletting of orange, scattering sparks before their vanishing, and others are bright and momentary veins, or incisions of the dark into a flesh of light beyond, or arrowshot, or the tears of tungsten, or flutesong or messages or birds escaping being—

I can’t cease in analogy, can’t control my own stumbles into the sense of profundity. Think about it, I tell David. Of how vast it all is, and the very fact that stars exist at all. Stars exist, and if I truly contemplate it I feel that sort of beatitude that verges on mortal peril; I think of shards of stone and the ethereal skin of an arbitrary planet, and I don’t know what to do.

But

Exploring the poetical science and logical absurdities of language, in search of entries for my first book (the ersatz fabulistic dictionary, Logodaedely (the info’s in my about me section, along with other blatherings) I did unearth out of meteoric dust the word phasma, with its forgotten and bizarre connotations:

phasma

('fazmə) [Latin phasma, spectre, apparition (later adopted as genus name), Greek phasma, ϕάσμα, spectre, apparition, phantom (from phainô, ϕάίνειν, to show or appear)]

1. the appearance of anything fantastic, such as a meteor, or, 2. an apparition or phantom, or, 3. a “walking stick” insect of the genus Phasmitidae, known for their ability to mimic twigs; these insects may possess spines or a terrible smell, and in large numbers may devastate oak trees.

(1837 S. GALLIEN. Advanced theories of the new astronomy, and its perils, anniversary edition) p 282 And the meteors—what are we to think of them? Be they the great Deer, in those howling forests of the night, as it flees from the glimmering Wolf? Or be it a dragon’s fart? Or emissions from the crossbow of a cosmic Huntsman? We discard such fancies in favor of the phasma. For we know the legions of walking twigs that appear in the nests of the craters, advancing upon us in ravenous formation to impersonate and despoil our forests—we can catch their foul scent, surely the perfume that belongs to the stars alone, and their false thorns puncture our filmy palms. But it is the way of all creatures to assault one another’s homelands, rendering it unrecognizable through their own rustling presence. We can rarely distinguish the devious insects devouring those trees which we ourselves so adore and exploit, but do not all things resemble other things? So do our theoreticians thus begin to pursue the luminous flora and fauna whose scatterings make up the forms of other galaxies, in search of the origins of mimicry.

Seriously, who invents words like that?

Moonshine, or, on memory’s images and moving pictures too

2009-08-16T18:22:00.000+02:00

Madness, memory, and Myanmar, or, recalling our wedding

As David recorded in his most recent blog post (just in case: http://davidrozgonyi.blogspot.com ) in the conversational time travel of late last night, while a sailboat with ballerina sails and galactic lanterns blazed over its own reflection in the bay, we spoke with a fellow traveler (please see below for details, as he has been an excellent campground neighbor) about theatre and his comedic experiences on Spanish farms and the blur of Bangkok and our own journeys; through reminiscence we awakened the memories of our wedding in the hallowed blue of a Buddhist monastery in Myanmar. David’s already narrated the ceremony in his own entry, so I shan’t reiterate, but I think now of that time (two years and eight months and twenty days ago) and thought I would include a few of those flickering images of my own.

(except the photographic pictures are entirely those of David's expertise, though the prattling memoranda are mine)

The first day in Yangon

with all its madman traffic orbiting the temples and the artistry of urban disintegration and the ostentatious cockroach in the shower and the culture shock I assiduously concealed from my unflinchingly wayfaring love—but the old woman selling magic oranges in a night market, who suddenly clasps my hand when I am lost, alone, and smiles to me with a kindness like aurora, like water, like earthshine—the lane of bookmakers we wandered down with held hands, the ink’s honest and heady and murky scent from miniature printing presses, the paperbacks arrayed across broken concrete—the cat and mouse and crocodile upon the golden feet of an enormous reclining Buddha

at an early dusk—the gunshot of our bus’ engine breaking down and the chaotic hammering which provided a numinous instant fix—a gecko gaping with absurd balleyes from the ceiling over our bed—the advice offered by tin signs upon an inn’s stair, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and much effort bears fruit of success—platters of peppercorns with their omnipresence in eyes and nose, and bowls of ruby centipedes for inexplicable sale—the flawless tessellations of a dead moth David finds and gives to me at the improbable shrine of Kyaktio

a boulder precisely in the form of a holy beggar’s skull and lifted from the bottom of the sea and coated in the gold leaf of thousands of worshipping pilgrims—the jade sheen of a rubber ball we buy for a band of children whose soccerball is on the rapid path to deflation

and the lunar face of the monk who marries us—his counsel to speak kind words to one another, for sweet words are like honey—

the spiraled suns of my wedding skirt and the sudden, lovely friend kneeling to knot it about my waist—her pet mouse suspended from the ceiling in a shoebox—the brutality of a twenty-one hour northward bus ride through cosmic dark one day beyond our marriage, and how David stands to beg a stop for me at midnight when I believe my bladder will burst—a tinkling miniature boat of silver and faith at the paramount, fantabulous, incomparable Buddhist stupa of Shwedagon, hoisted up a rope with a berth of written prayers—the noose of a trap meant for wildcats with their clairvoyant ears, upon the exhausting trail into the Myanmar hills—the weight of blankets upon us in the home of a village family, the daughters

who scamper with us and win the game of tag—David’s finger indicating the first and only firefly I have yet seen—the papaya we share on a barge down the aorta of the Irrawaddy River—the nauseatingly cute puppy who scampers out of a weaver’s shop with fluff and ears flopping so adorable as to reach the point of terror—the iridescent drove of dragonflies circling our heads at a clifftop temple—the anime action figure a pigtailed little girl gives to me, peeping between the seats of a long-distance bus—the wickedness of a jacaranda’s thorns in the palm of the hand as we step into an abandoned stupa, one of ghostly thousands constellated in the dead city of Bagan

—the weeping of bats around a secret stair

the Barbie dolls and matchbooks and mangoes arrayed across an altar to the thirty-one nat spirits

who dwell just beneath the surface of this hot, sweet, swift material world—David’s rapidly decaying shorts, which he still—you were born upon a Wednesday under Mercury and the Tusked Elephant, an astrologer with robes of green and a numinous book tells me, and to David, you are Monday and the Tiger and the Moon, and how I think instantly of how the moon might go on the wane and the tides ebb towards luminescent fish and yet its romance is forever waxing and gravity is physical law, and love makes lunacy.

On the virtues of staying up late, or, our excellent neighbor and his art

Here’s the thing about me and David: we’re so not cool. As is indicated by my utter lack of knowledge as to the current state of fashion, though I suspect it is largely continuing down a swift track towards complete nudity, and our inability to stay up past 9 PM if it is not a special occasion or an auspicious arrangement of Venus and Mars. I mean it; we get sleepy, sort of like when kids or kittens tucker themselves out. It takes something particularly valuable to keep us up, and our current campground neighbor, Ben, managed to provide this last night—11 o’clock, which I hear is how late teenagers stay awake. There we were, discussing our disparate journeys, the virtues of Montenegro and vices of erroneous guidebooks, while David and I provided him with the gourmet snack of hard-boiled egg yolks and CocoPops ceral bars (I told you they were good!).

I ought not to steal all of his own travel tales—I will mention that one can find human feces in plastic bowls beneath beds on Spanish farms, and that scuba diving in Kotor Bay is no good with a cold—but when not on the road Ben is an actor and scriptwriter in Seattle, and in the interests of informing readers of quite phenomenal talent, I’ll provide a link to his immensely clever short film (writer, director, and actor), Man Talk:

http://www.cromagnonpictures.com/?p=14

It's the farce of a banal office workday, but reimagined to become a mesmerizing bit of clever wordplay, sly social criticism beneath sharp-as-stab-by-corporate-stapler acting. Enjoy! David and I most definitely did, enough so that we were chuckling together in bed at 11:01.

note: David and I have been in a running competition with Ben in the unearthing of vivid and archaic words for nonsense. I haven’t been keeping score, but…

balderdash
claptrap
fiddlesticks
baloney
rubbish
pish posh
jibber jabber
flummery
twaddle
fiddle faddle
eyewash
jiggery-pokery
moonshine

Any further suggestions are much appreciated, because David and I really, really, want to win.

On Montenegrin chefs, or, our friend Danilo

2009-08-12T11:47:00.000+02:00

I have decided I shall call him Danilo. As he does not speak our language and lack his own high, lengthy vowels, I know not what other names Danilo might bear in the dawn of the cicadas or the yellow subsiding of the dusk - other campers have given him their own terms of endearment: hello there, Tiger.

But Danilo has taste. Perhaps it comes from having lived half his adventuresome life in a campground, though I’m not sure. He visits us most typically in the evening, pattering up the bus with steps quiet as ideas in the drowsy mind, laughing or begging with tiny little words, a bit of a charmer, really; his hair is dusky and dappled and meticulously clean. Disregarding social propriety or vagrant ants he will loll across our rug, keenly listening to our desultory conversations with dragons’ moons in his eyes. In the afternoons he is the happy mirror of the sun, occasionally leaping atop a caravan to watch a young couple making custard or a naked child cavorting with a discarded carnival mask.

But Danilo has taste. It would seem he can find the alchemical magic of the gourmet even in our scraps, which we give to him at his solemn, silent request. The remnant sauce of piquant squid, replete with ink, the oil left rippling numinous in a can of Turkish grape leaves, crumbs of bread with peasant sorcery (which he scorns), the gilded tails of fried fish and joghurt, his apparent favorite. I can only imagine what delectable recipes Danilo concocts out of our leftovers, what crafty dishes of tentacle and olive, fin and curdled milk, though David and I are not so keen to try. Admittedly, Danilo is a cat, and the culinary arts of the felines remain known only to he.