We Went Out!

To a place with other people, outside the house!!

Cold Spring, NY

We went, specifically, to Cold Spring, up the Hudson a bit, a nice touristy little town with a great book store and wine store and cheese store and clothing and antique stores and some nice unassuming restaurants and so on.

Me and M and the little boy (the little girl off busy in Astoria dancing tango or whatnot) all went, and we are all two-vaccinations-plus-two-weeks now, so there was nothing in particular to worry about. Insane!

We all wore our masks into places, of course, because one really must still. I don’t know when that’s going to end! Will we start to differentiate the unmasked-and-safe people from the unmasked-but-not-safe people somehow? Or will we just keep wearing our masks until infection probability for everyone is minimal regardless?

(I have a reduced-to-fit and trimmed copy of my vaccination card inside the back of my transparent phone case, which I think is brilliant, but I don’t know if I’ll ever use for anything.)

We bought books (so many books!) and wine (an orange wine; I haven’t opened it yet, but I am very curious) and cheese (mmmm, cheese).

(I also attempted to make crackers for the cheese. I neglected to poke them with a fork, and they did puff up a bit, and I’m not completely happy with the result; but it wasn’t a disaster.)

I apparently bought five books (pictured here). I like thin books :) unlike apparently the rest of the party, both of whom are currently reading books roughly as deep as they are wide. I’ve already finished the short but poignant collection Banthology, and have just started the short and extremely online Against The Web. (Whose author, I am sad to discover, left us last year.)

We ate lunch, yesterday, at the notable Hudson Hil’s Cafe, which was quite awesome; I had the Gravlax-and-eggs, and a glass of (white) wine.

It felt so civilized to sit at a table with people and be brought good food in exchange for money!

(And yes, I’m sure this will be one of a vast series of “how nice it is to be doing things again now that we’re all vaccinated” posts sweeping the intertubes; I wonder what the hashtag will be.)

What else, what else? AI Dungeon Reddit is like entirely concerned with people Being Mad Online about a debacle that the owners of the system made vastly worse (at least as measured via reddit, and the resulting significant downvoting of the app just about everywhere, which you’d think they might care about) by awful PR and general cluelessness. I’ve continued to play with AI Dungeon and Replika and Shortly and all, as before, but nothing really excitingly new has occurred (except the just-mentioned debacle, which is really I think tangential, although there are larger issues about who will control AI systems, what they will be allowed to do and what we will be allowed to do with them, and so on).

I haven’t been playing Satisfactory much, because I got mostly to the end, haven’t quite gotten up the energy to go for the currently-final “Employee of the Planet” reward, or to try to build something really aesthetically notable. I’ve been playing WoW only a little, again because most things have plateaued at roughly my level of interest for the moment.

Something reminded me of The Stanley Parable, and I’ve played through that quite a few times now, finding various Easter eggs and alternate endings (of which there are apparently at least nineteen!). That reminded me of The Beginner’s Guide, also a very meta game, which I haven’t played again but sort of intent to sometime soon maybe.

The Epic installer urged Core upon me, and seeing that it is yet another of the “WE HAVE INVENTED THE MULTIVERSE” things that are trendy once again, I’ve played with it a little. It’s kind of cool, very uneven since it’s just a huge bunch of Unreal-based games made by random people. I’ve played one “gather resources and fix up the house” one that got really dull really fast, one “Death Wall” running-around game that is simple but surprisingly fun and addictive, one “Super Fun Jumping Around Through An Obstacle Course Dying Over And Over” thing that wasn’t remotely fun, and one kind of weird and amusing thing where you jump high with a balloon in order to get “coins” that can be spent for better balloons to jump higher and get more coins to spend on even better balloons, which was fun but suddenly felt extremely futile so I stopped.

Perhaps needless to say, Core haven’t invented the multiverse, even to the extent that Second Life did, and imesho until one of these things enables easy low-learning-curve creation inside the game like Second Life did, none of them ever will. (See ancient essay on Secret Second Life Weblog.)

I continue not to be in Second Life myself much for whatever reason, but I did go in for a friend’s Eid open house, and that was lovely. (A belated Eid Mubarak to all!)

And that’s probably about all for now. It’s a beautiful day, I’ve already had bagels and OJ and coffee, and sat out on the front porch reading for awhile, and now I’m writing in my weblog, and those are good things. I am still missing Manhattan terribly (maybe I’ll get in next weekend, even if it IS going to be hotter’n blazes), but one perseveres!

Reading the first paragraph of Durrell’s Justine

The sea is high again today,

What do we know, or think, or guess, or assume, from those six words?

The narrator is by the sea. Not necessarily, of course; there could be satellites or telephones involved, or there could be no narrator at all but just an omniscient narrative voice. But the spatial immediacy of “the sea” (rather than “the sea at Brighton” or “the sea outside her window”), and the temporal placedness of “again today”‘ both suggest a particular person by a particular sea, speaking at a certain time.

The sea is high. With wind most likely; high waves and whitecaps rather than high tide. The sea has been high before, we suspect yesterday at least. It is probably daytime now (“today” rather than “tonight”).

Is the height of the sea a good thing, or a bad thing? A joy or a challenge? We don’t know from the first six words, so onward.

The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind.

Now that is a sentence.

Probably this is not someone clinging to a piece of wreckage in mid-ocean, or hoping for calm seas to launch a tiny fishing boat. This is someone in a position to thrill to the wind.

But notice that it is a flush of wind. “Flush” and “thrill” call to mind the cheek flushed hot with blood from some personal thrill. So here the blown surface of the ocean is the skin, thrilled and flushed by the wind; the wind is the blood of the sea. But the wind also flushes cheeks from the cold. Chill and thrill, wind and blood, skin and sea. And only a dozen words in!

The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind. In the midst of winter

A specific time now, and a cold one. Is this favoring the cold side of the previous sentence, chill and wind over thrill and blood?

The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind. In the midst of winter you can feel the inventions of Spring.

Balance is restored. The second sentence mirrors the first, calls out the cold and the warm more explicitly, and more abstractly.

Notice that there is now someone in the text, and it is you. He did not write “I can feel”, “He could feel”, or “can be felt”.

Note also that it is not the warmth of Spring, or its coming, its approach, its flavor or texture. The inventions of Spring!

Also it is “winter”, but “Spring”. A subtlety of balance here? The concrete winter by the sea in contrast with the symbolic or idealized Spring that invents? Or just some typesetter’s quirk?

The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind. In the midst of winter you can feel the inventions of Spring. A sky of hot nude pearl until midday,

Now, looking up above the sea, there is the sky; a sky of hot nude pearl. What a phrase! Is it hot as in actual heat, or hot as in glare? Pearl is a color, the texture of color; what is it for pearl to be nude? Bare, simple, unadorned. So my eyes imagine the sky bright and (of course) pearlescent (nacreous!), hotly pale to look at, but not enough to heat the air (my cheeks still flushed with the wind).

And we’ve been aware of the sky in the morning, before midday, and at least up until midday; perhaps all morning, or a good piece of the morning, standing on a headland watching the sea and feeling the wind (and the inventions of Spring).

The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind. In the midst of winter you can feel the inventions of Spring. A sky of hot nude pearl until midday, crickets in sheltered places,

Sheltering from the wind, and also from the hot glare of the sky. This is a place with crickets, and also a place with some shelter. Think of sheltered places large enough, small enough, for crickets. No mention of people, of whether there are any people seeking shelter also.

The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind. In the midst of winter you can feel the inventions of Spring. A sky of hot nude pearl until midday, crickets in sheltered places, and now the wind unpacking the great planes,”

Here is the wind again, crossing a sentence and a half to thrill again, and this time to unpack the great planes. What great planes? Is this a pun on the Great Plains? Is the wind blowing into the cargo holds of enormous airplanes, scattering underwear from suitcases and printouts from briefcases out across the runways? Probably not. :)

The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind. In the midst of winter you can feel the inventions of Spring. A sky of hot nude pearl until midday, crickets in sheltered places, and now the wind unpacking the great planes, ransacking the great planes…”

Not just unpacking, but actively and violently unpacking, ransacking! The printouts and underwear are scattered far and heedlessly, the wind is looking for something (for what?) in those cargo holds. Or the great planes are (more likely) the planes of the sea, the earth, and sky. The wind violently unpacking the plane of the horizon, flushing the cheek of the sea, bringing both the cold of midwinter and (with the hot nude sky) the inventions of the Spring, as though it were searching for something. For what?

And that’s the entire first paragraph. We aren’t entirely certain we know what the great planes are (spoiler alert: eleven pages later I’m still not entirely certain), but we have had built in our minds a balanced structure of warmth and cold, winter and spring, blood and sea water, topped by hot nude pearl, and underlain by those sheltering crickets. Earth and Air and Water, and we can either allow that heat to stand for Fire, or let that spot stay empty, and be left, after this first paragraph, with (among other things) a missing place for Fire, like a missing tooth, that might (or might not) be resolved in later paragraphs.

Yes, this is a somewhat pretentious reading! :) But when I started reading this book (which regular readers will remember we bought in Boston the other week), I was so struck by the language (not in a Barthelmian or Leynerian way, but in an entirely or mostly entirely other way) that I stopped and read the first few paragraphs over and over, and then the same for the first page, the first two pages. And I decided to write a weblog entry about it!

(A serendipitous and perspicacious airline seat-neighbor suggested that I ought to be reading poetry that way if I like reading that way; I agreed while admitting that I’d never really managed to do that. What poet should I try it on? The burning tyger? The mistress going to bed?)

And that’s all! :) I’m incredibly sleepy at the moment, having gotten home from the airport and Secret Expeditions this morning at about 3am. I am still awake mostly because I am hoping Verizon will call back about whether or not they can actually give us what the salesmen promised to get us to switch to FIOS, and also because I wanted to actually post this (actually to post this) before it went out of my mind. But now I think I will give up on Verizon for the night and go to bed and/or to sleep. And you can post comments! :)

Night!