Houch

Trvial

Finally, after a semester and half's worth of effort, my Tuesday Night Two Stick trivia claim has achieved victory.

January 31, 2006.

"Sit on My Facebook"

Champions.

(http://www.myspace.com/twosticktuesdaytrivia)

Why I Write

A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow;

But born, alas, in an evil time,
I missed that pleasant haven,
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.

And later still the times were good,
We were so easy to please,
We rocked our troubled thoughts to sleep
On the bosoms of the trees.

All ignorant we dared to own
The joys we now dissemble;
The greenfinch on the apple bough
Could make my enemies tremble.

But girl's bellies and apricots,
Roach in a shaded stream,
Horses, ducks in flight at dawn,
All these are a dream.

It is forbidden to dream again;
We maim our joys or hide them:
Horses are made of chromium steel
And little fat men shall ride them.

I am the worm who never turned,
The eunuch without a harem;
Between the priest and the commissar
I walk like Eugene Aram;

And the commissar is telling my fortune
While the radio plays,
But the priest has promised an Austin Seven,
For Duggie always pays.

I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And woke to find it true;
I wasn't born for an age like this;
Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?

- G.O.

Country Boys

Tonight and tomorrow evening on PBS at 8 PM CST. Watch it. It's like a David Gordon Green movie, but real...

Frontline

Best of 2005

MUSIC

10. Spoon - Gimme Fiction

9. Mugison - Mugimama, or Is This Monkey Music

8. White Stripes - Get Behind Me Satan

7. Okkervil River - Black Sheep Boy

6. Iron and Wine - Woman King

5. Sigur Ros - Takk

4. MIA - Arular

3. The Decemberists - Picaresque

2. My Morning Jacket - Z

1. Sufjan Stevens - Illinois

Overrated: Wolf Parade - Apologies to the Queen Mary

Still so many albums, I've yet to hear. For the podcasting inclined, the year-end countdown on this show (All Songs Considered) has many, many good, new things to me.

FILM
(I've seen such a regrettably small number of this year's release, I hesitate to even list...)

5. Broken Flowers

4. Good Night and Good Luck

3. Capote

2. The Constant Gardener

1. Syriana

Overrated: Crash

TVP

I just checked out 16 books from the J.D. Williams Library with subtitles like: "How we remember, forget and reconstruct the past," and "David Halberstam, the Buddhist crisis, and U.S. policy in Vietnam." My left hand is involuntarily shaking from cradling their spines while I jogged from PN2867.A89 to DS559.T87, so as not to get locked in for the weekend. I need to write a thesis...but the past two and a half days have essentially been sacrificed on the altar of 24 - Season Four DVD. A bit more back-slapping and self-referential than previous seasons, but the same antihero tendencies from the most intense television character ever, Jack Bauer.

In the meantime, there's two cans of Vienna sausages across the entry hall on top of the kitchen counter. My neighbor and friend (I prefer neighbor because it seems more real) Will left them there. Done with law exams, on his way home to Athens, he asked me to feed his stray cat, Todd Van Poppel.

----

W: So, I've been trying to get the cat to sleep with me for the past few nights.

P: Oh, yeh? How's that going for you?

W: Terribly, it won't stay in the bed with me.

P: Well, it is a stray cat.

W: I know, but I'm thinking that it needs a name.

P: What are you thinking?

W: Todd Van Poppel. And I could call him TVP for short. (pause). Do you know who I'm talking about?

P: Vaguely.

W: 1991 Oakland A's rookie pitcher.

P: Yeh, I had his card.

W: He was the first baseball player to go straight from high school to the big leagues, and he did nothing. There was all this hype around him and nothing. I've always taken an interest in Todd Van Poppel. It's this sad human interest tale.

P: Are you sure you want to shove all that embodied disappointment onto this cat?

W: You are right, maybe I should call him Jim Abbott.

----

As it turns out, you see, TVP is not a stray cat. In fact, far from it. He or she (determining feline gender is something neither I nor Will can do) has an owner. Not only that, but we are certain that at least two other residents in our apartment building feed TVP, assuming the cat is indeed a stray. To me, that makes my role as sausage slicer and cat feeder all the more urgent.

I've not only gained a cat that will sometimes dart onto my sofa, deposit dander, and cause my eyes to water for the next three days, but I've also gained a friend, my own Kramer. Take last Friday night for instance, Will is at the movie theater, watching "Syriana" with myself and a few others. So you know, "Syriana" is entirely about Middle Eastern oil and big business. In the middle of a climatic last scene where Clooney's character is driving a jeep in the desert to meet up with some Arab princes, Will leans over and says, "Man, I thought they were in Arizona the whole time." Then, two days ago, a few hours before a six-hour torts exam, Will walks in. "I haven't studied today. I can't. I've been listening to Iron Maiden all day. I wonder what it's like to be so confrontational."

Pandora's Box

Even though this thing uses the internet, it's actually better than the internet:

www.pandora.com

It's out of the Music Genome Project, which has catalogued endless amounts of music on a number of ranking points. It ranks melody, syncopation, rhythm, etc. It's a bunch of musicologists pulling apart songs. So, Pandora is a free radio station that builds radio stations for you based on song/artist preferences.

Always Low Prices

So, I just broke a two-year boycott of Wal-Mart to purchase the recently released season four DVD of television's 24, my own personal cocaine. Unbridled hero worship, ethical quandaries, that incessant ticking and Kiefer Sutherland's perpetual 5 o'clock shadow. I feel dirty.

The possibility of watching Jack Bauer fend off a fictional terrorist plot is enough to cleanse the dirt, the filth, the muck of my own personal failure. I should note, however, that this does not make up for that late night in Paris when I just had to have a McFlurry, therefore breaking another yearlong boycott of McDonald's.

Hamshanks in Jesusland

This is what happens when you turn to Wikipedia to look up some stuff for tomorrow's final. I didn't know most of these even existed:

Offensive terms for citizens of the United States

Amerloque � also French slang

americanata � something that is in bad taste, vulgar (literally, a typically American thing). Italian (with cognate words in other European languages).

Americant � pun on Americans' perceived laziness.

Americunt � employed mainly by UK citizens, this refers to American tourists.

Amer (????) � Russian, mild. The stress is on the first syllable.

Amerikos (????????) ; Russian, more offensive than "amer", but still mild. The stress is on the last syllable.

Amerikanaki ; Greek, literally, "little American". Mildly offensive, used to convey image of ignorance or naivete.

Ami� German nickname, rarely used offensively ("Ami go home!"), more common to express disapproval nowadays

Bushkrieger - a German pun on Buschkrieger meaning 'bush warrior'

Bushmen � sometimes used in Poland, meaning both "men of G. W. Bush" and men living in forests

Cowboy � considered patronizing and mockery by Europeans, but many Americans are not offended. (The implication, for those who use the word in derogatory sense, is that Americans are tough and primitively vitalistic.)

gavacho (or gabacho) � Used in Mexico. For origin, see under "Offensive terms for the French"

Gringo � Foreigner.

Hamshank � rhyming slang = Yank.)

Jesusland an Internet meme satirizing the 2004 United States Presidential election. See Jesusland Map.

Ka?boj � derived from "cowboy" and the word "ka?" meaning "solid byproduct of digestion" in Polish language

'murrican or Merrican � caricature of the way some Americans pronounce the word "American".

pig � A derogatory term used to stereotype Americans as obese and fat as that of a "pig."

pindos (??????) � Russian, more offensive than "amerikos", but mild all the same. The stress is on the last syllable. Allegedly, the use of this term to refer to Americans originated in Yugoslavia during the war of 2000-2001, and was imported to Russian in the course of "brotherhood of slavonic peoples" media campaign of that time.

Ricain � French slang (shortening of the usual am�ricain)

Round eye burger muncher � primarily used in the video game Starcraft on Battle.net by Korean players generally followed by an Anime Style emoticon

Septic/seppo � British and Australian term for Americans (rhyming slang for septic tank = Yank.) Originated from WW2 (U.S. soldiers became known for stealing the girlfriends of English men); A septic tank is used in rural areas for storage and decomposition of human waste

Yank � short for Yankees; Yanqui in Spanish, jenki in Hungarian, jenkki in Finnish; usually would not be considered offensive by an American (unless a Southerner), nor is it always intended offensively.Most commonly used in Latin America to refer to American tourist.

Americows, because americans are supposedly fat.

The medium is the message

John Milbank: It�s because the medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan put it, who not accidentally was a Catholic. And obviously I�m not saying this is true of all of the American Protestant tradition, it�s obviously not. And you know the very greatest thinkers like Jonathan Edwards did just the opposite, they made aesthetics the heart of what they were thinking about. But when the culture of the mega-church and the very anti-urban culture, people who really prefer to live in a kind of no-man�s land of shopping malls and that sort of thing; they�re suspicious of downtown because it�s too corrupt and they�re happy all the time with banal restaurants, fast food, very bland kind of architecture�and to my mind this betrays the Gospel, because I think how we treat space and time is central; the whole business of sacred time and sacred landscape is essential. And one of the things I�ve noticed strongly in America is that, I believe, up to the middle of the 20th century America was a sacred landscape in that I think it had its own quite austere but very beautiful aesthetic in its modes of building and things. And that very rapidly in the last part of the 20th century the rows of strip malls and this sort of thing has produced the most incredible uglification of the landscape; and in my mind I see this as spiritual deterioration�profound deterioration�and it seems to me that the kind of religion that is at ease with that is a very strange kind of religion, because it�s not really thinking about how we are trustees of God�s land and that the beauty of the creation is the divine call to us�that the divine demands from us an adequate response.

http://www.theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=76&cview=1#cmt

Please, no

Lost in the Cosmos

And even to consider which is the more absurd state of affairs, the manifest absurdity of your predicament:lost in the Cosmos and no news of how you got into such a fix or how to get out--or the even more preposterous eventuality that news did come from the God of the Cosmos, who took pity on your ridiculous plight and entered the space and time of your insignificant planet to tell you something.

The difference between a non-suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o'clock on an ordinary morning:

The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest.

The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he doesn't have to.

- Walker Percy

Silver slippers

"I'm not only concerned about streets flowing with milk and honey. I'm also concered with about the fact that about two-thirds of the peoples of this world go to bed hungry at night. And I will never be content until all of God's children have the basic necessities of life. It's wonderful to talk about the "New Jerusalem." But one day we will have to start talking about the New Atlanta, the New Chicago, the New New York, the New America. And I submit to you this morning, that any preacher who isn't concerned about this, isn't preaching the true gospel. It's a nice thing to talk about long white robes over yonder, but I want some clothes to wear right down here. It's all right to talk about silver slippers in another world, but I want some shoes to wear through the snow of Chicago."
- MLK, Selma: 1968

Literary Capital

Just stumbled upon this doing some research for my thesis. Thought it was interesting, though cannot determine if it is consequential or not. Lousy excuse for an update? Perhaps.

This city, so gorgeous from a distance, so unlovely up close, remains a foreign land in American literature. The novelist Ward Just works the terrain in near-solitude.

''The first Washington novel was Mark Twain's 'The Gilded Age,' '' Mr. Just noted recently. ''Four years later comes Henry Adams's 'Democracy.' '' And that was more than 100 years ago.

''Those were the last two writers in the canon who have ever visited Washington, D.C.,'' Mr. Just said. ''Not Melville. Not Fitzgerald. Not Hemingway. Not Faulkner. Not James. Not Wharton. It's peculiar. ''Compare that to Berlin, London, Paris. All of the great French, British, German writers dealt with their capital and its politics. We have no equivalent in the United States. There have been more novels of consequence written about southern Mississippi than Washington, and that's not counting Faulkner.''

Maybe this is because Washington is more like Brasilia or Canberra than London or Rome: an artificial capital conjured from the swamp. Or maybe it is because Washington itself has a tin ear. Its most famous writers are reporters, people who struggle to compose simple declarative sentences summing up Byzantine complexities.

Imaging Summer

So, the only thing that can revive this blog is a picture post. Let's see what happens. Perhaps I'll start updating more. Perhaps I will not.

But anyway, I never properly documented what I did this summer. So, take a peek, thanks to eClaire.

As you can see, space was infinitely abundant, especially in the midst of the Great CD Cleanup of 2k5.

Cleanliness was another big deal. We didn't call it the "intern"-ment camp for nothing.

At least we honor our gods.

But that didn't keep us from setting sail with Captain Morgan on a really cheap shaved ice machine.

Eventually we set sail for Bonnaroo and its primordial hippie confines.

The blurry man on the right is named Jay Sweet. Perhaps the craziest person I've ever met. Just ask him about he and ?uestlove's adopted Eastern European love child.

Yes, so myself and What We All Want raise the real reasons we worked internships.

The head of custodial engineering has no patience for a trapeze artist.

Praying for angels to save me from that demon.

Our intern family portrait.

There's running, but no hiding

I've been negligent of my weblogging duties all summer. I attribute it to a lack of time, but, you know, let's be honest with each other, most of that time I claim to be busy, I'm hitting refresh on my mail program or checking Pitchfork to see if an eighth daily update might have been posted.

None of this was ever more apparent to me than today while answering the customer service phone at Paste today. I take care of the simple change of address call before the customer asks, "Is this Palmer Houchins?" Yep. "I check your blog ever day." Now, this wasn't a complete stranger, or even a stranger at all, (I know you are out there, Brian).

There's some sensation in that feeling, though, that is very akin to that whole going to high school naked cliche dream. I mean, you think you know who is reading what you write. Granted, I am conscious of those random visitors who, according my monitoring software, came to the blog in their quest for "fort bening" or "dwarf porn" (as if I am speaking to The Dude, I think little people is the preferred nomenclature).

---------

Anyway, I made a drive into North Georgia across to Sand Mountain for my great-grandmother's 96th birthday this past weekend. I jotted down two of the better

Near the Alabama-Georgia border, I saw a mid-sized Methodist church with a marquee that read:

JESUS NEEDS A WITNESS, NOT A LAWYER.

If anyone has any interpretations on that one, I'm game.

Also, at the foot of the mountain in Fort Payne, there is a tiny Assemblies of God church. It's equally small sign read:

SIZZLING HOT SUMMER SERMONS HAPPENING HERE NOW

They've got the Holy Ghost and alliteration.