Number of days spent on a train: 3.5
Number of books finished: 5 (Beethoven’s Hair, Band of Brothers, Perma Red, Coraline, The Eyre Affair)
Scrabble games played: 6.5
Highest word score: 82 (STIFLED + 7 tile bonus, Grandma)
Total Scrabble score: 1883 to 1804, Grandma
Scrabble standings: 4 to 2.5, Felicity
Number of miles travelled by coach: 1507
Number of colds contracted: 1, Felicity
Number of states travelled through: 12 (Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York)
Number of provinces travelled through: 2 (Quebec, Ontario)
Number of hotels stayed in: 7 (6 on tour, 1 at the Portland Airport)
Number of Canadian territories I had never heard of: 1 (Nunavut, I’m very ashamed.)
Edit: Number of pictures taken: over 550 (I’ve got 539 raw, of which I like 230 or so, and I deleted scads on the trip.)

I’m sorry I’ve been so remiss in updating the site lately; many things have stayed on paper that long since should have been transferred to bits. And at least a while longer they shall stay ink; I am going on a trip.

My aunt passed away in the wee hours this morning, after years of brain cancer and complications. She was always a great traveler; a web search for her name turns up mostly comments on travelogue websites! Grandma and I have agreed that she will be with us in spirit on our trip to Eastern Canada, which the family would not hear of us postponing.

I never went on a trip with her, but from her stories and her personality (not to mention her web-comments), I can see what kind of traveler she was. Energetic, resourceful, and optimistic, she wrang the most joy, learning and beauty out of every moment she had and every place she saw. That is an excellent spirit, I think, to take with one on a journey; and it was an excellent spirit for a remarkable woman and a loving, determined life.

See you in June.

As all of you have doubtless gathered, I do love stories, whether true or wildly extrapolated; especially stories about language. I came across this in my audiobook, The Great Shame: and the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World yesterday. Since it is not the first time such a word-origin story has crossed my brain, I felt moved to share it; and there will be at least one more, some time.

In the late 19th century, there was an Irish activist, Michael Davitt, who believed that the first step towards Irish well-being, let alone Irish independence, should be casting off the system of landlordism. As you may know, for hundreds of years, very few Irishmen owned their land; most were tenants on land owned by wealthy men, many of whom didn’t even live in Ireland. Many tenants faced summary eviction from land on which they’d grown up if the weather was harsh or there was a bad crop. Rents were often extremely high, and there was little or no means of recourse for tenants.

Davitt’s views took hold, and eventually a group was formed that brought together people from all spectra of Irish political thought and action, the Irish Land League. The Land League was committed to nonviolence, and the president of the Land League, Charles Stewart Parnell, had this advice about its means of action (vetoing a suggestion from the audience that transgressors should be shot):

When a man takes a farm from which another has been evicted you must shun him on the roadside when you meet him – you must shun him in the streets of the town – you must shun him in the shop – you must shun him in the fairgreen and in the market place, and even in the place of worship, by leaving him alone, by putting him into a moral Coventry, by isolating him from the rest of his country as if he were the leper of old – you must show him your detestation of the crime he has committed. -September 19, 1880 Speech in Ennis, County Clare

As it happened, the first man upon whom this tactic was turned was not a man who took the place of an evicted tenant, but an evictor. The land agent of an absentee landlord, he not only refused a request from several tenants for a reduction in rents, but threw the impudent tenants out on their ears. When he tried to hire local labor to work the fields, no one would sign up; his stable workers stopped working and servants stopped serving. Store owners ignored him when he came to buy, and the postman apparently would not bring him his mail.

The man’s name? Captain Charles Cunningham…Boycott.

For more information about the Land League and its movers and shakers, consult the excellent articles at Wikipedia’s Land League entry. If the history of the Irish people and the Irish diaspora interests you, you may enjoy The Great Shame by Thomas Keneally.

I haven’t seen Brokeback Mountain...in general, I don’t go in for tearjerky romances too heavily. However, I do live in the World and sally hither and yon on the Web, and therefore I am familiar with the oft-quoted, oft-parodied “quit you” line.

Perhaps through the many Brokeback parodies, perhaps through the quoting, this once-archaic usage of ‘to quit’ for ‘to leave or depart from’ is gaining currency. Witness its appearance in Rolling Stone (“When asked if confirmation of her cheating would have been enough to make him quit her, Lachey hesitates.”)

I find this fascinating. Our language churns constantly, creating and destroying words at an astonishing rate — these days, sped along by the Intarnebs. How often, though, is one work, one song or movie, responsible not for inventing a word or innovating a new use for it, but for reviving an old use? I cannot at present think of another example, and therefore leave it as an exercise for the reader.

Night flows – windows onto pages
Surrounds space without noise
small as a hunting-black cat-eye

My sounds a small silence
my pen shaping the time
Slipping more readily
through these hours of dream

Yesterday, in course of conversation with herr wonko, I found myself sing-quoting, “There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done…” and I felt a sharp pang of hypocrisy. You see, I hate those lyrics. It’s an okay song and all, and all due credit for use of the Marseillaise (even if it has exactly nothing to do with the song) but the lyrics have always annoyed me.

There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done. Nothing you can sing that can’t be sung…. Nothing you can make that can’t be made.

I know, I know, they might mean something else, and coming from the mouths of artists “bigger than Jesus” perhaps it really should come off differently; but to me, it’s always seemed to say, “You aren’t really unique and special. If you don’t create something, that same thing will in due time be created by someone else.” Which is, of course, my problem with the whole thing (not the following, “But love still makes life worthwhile!”). I was raised in the strictest Cooperative Pre-school/Sesame Street tradition of creativity and individual uniqueness. By the age of 5, many carefully deployed books, programs, and parental compliments had brainwashed me to believe that I am, in fact, unique and special. But on a deeper level, I feel the premise of these lyrics, or my interpretation thereof, is wrong.

Let us say, by some miracle, that ten people in the world all imagine precisely the same thing. How many of them are actually going to create something from the idea? I think I’m being overly optimistic to guess three; and of those three, one will write a story, one will paint a watercolor, and one will pull out his guitar and start a song. The same idea finds different expression through different people, in different parts of the world. It adds to the richness of human accomplishment.

And the others? The seven non-starters? Perhaps they think imagination is childish, or, worst of all, they don’t believe enough in their idea or their gifts to try. They don’t have the sheer arrogance to perform that act of egotism and create. As acts of egotism go, there is none less objectionable and more fruitful than saying, “I can create something of worth and beauty.”

Give it a try. There’s more to life than love; all you need is a dream.

Various things I am prepping for Faerye Net (fiction, book lists) are taking far longer than expected; therefore, I fob you off with a peekshoor which I took yesterday.

This qualifies as content! Really!

I took an out-of-town friend up the Gorge today, and we wended our pilgrim way from fall to fall, taking away photos, misty blessings, and newly waving hairstyles. We were both struck, standing in the susurrating roar of Latourell (first fall we found), at the strange shape of the place. Factually, actually this place has been carved out by millennia of busy water; fingers shaping, wearing, prying. But in the presence and immediacy of the spring-swollen waters, it does not seem a prosaic thing of friction and time.

The walls curve, great massy things of mossy basalt, hewn large and rough from the earth. They tease at the eye, falling in towards the wraith of water. So also does it seem that light falls, and gravity; reality itself making soft obeisance. These do not seem like places which work themselves softly out of the world of physics; they seem like temples sprung to life to house these falling gods.

I have studied my geology, and I know these places; sheltered Latourell and welcoming Wahkeena, the majestic plunge of Multnomah; are merely small tributary waters showing their chisels are much less busy than those of the mighty Columbia. I know the softly curving walls did not appear in reverence, but slowly crumbled into being over long years of water’s caress and ice’s invasion. I know that water is just the dance of polar molecules, drawing life and death’s debris over the globe in accordance with laws of physics and chemistry. I know that my eye interprets its falling disarray according to its own confused fancy, and no matter what shapes it seems to have, the water has no spirit and no life. But I cannot stand in such a place, kissed by the chill of the falling water, and swear I know no magic. I cannot tell you I am not on holy ground.

I know they could conceivably pull it out. There are still seconds on the clock, but Battlestar Galactica is infuriatingly bad right now. I’m still working through a backlog of episodes, but the one I just saw was simply appalling; a paint-by-numbers genero-hostage-crisis…IN SPAAAAACE! A script full of holes and painful clichés, directed with the world’s worst “OMG fly-on-the-wall documentary style” camerawork and the patronizing idea that we can’t remember the villain’s motivations without seeing the goddamn flashback over and over again. Gee, fella, I can’t remember why Lee’s in the bar with this girl again, so mebbe you should wobble-shot her boobs to remind us what his motivation is. Cuz I r rilly dum.

I really, really hope they secure this shit. Because right now it’s like watching a show I love die gurgling, and the only thing I can say for it is that, well, it doesn’t have Kennedy in it.

Update: Goes without saying, I hope, that this was a joke. My ankle doesn’t seem to be broken, Qubit hasn’t bitten me, I have no intentions of having the site red and black forever, and Ryan isn’t running off with Loren…yet. Therefore, please forgive the horrible poetry :)

God, I hate the world. My ankle is turning so many lovely shades of rotting plum and bilious yellow that it’s next to certain it’s broken; the cat bit me on the face while I was lying on the couch in pain; and Ryan muttered something about Loren and thinking things over and went out for a long drive half an hour ago. I don’t have the energy to finish the fucking site overhaul, so live with it; it’s ugly and imperfect and human. Life is just a cruel joke, and the only thing that makes it feel worth living is poetry.

blackest damask
I hate you all
twisting sisters in the night rending
I hate you with a will
that breaks in any breeze