Hermenautic Circle blog

The young and the restless

A public service announcement...The Dylan Thomas Prize is offered by the University of Wales to a writer under 30 whose published book (it can be a novel, a collection of poems, a travel book, a play, etc. but I believe it needs to have been published ...

In the pipeline

The conundrum of light reading is that one always needs a good supply of it, but that the times when it would most be a balm (busy, stressful regular life) are also the times when one is least likely to have the attention to secure a sufficient supply,...

Kids aw hawd to ustan

CJ, like most kids his age, pronounces “r” as “w.” I was investigating this a bit and found the following interesting page which lists the various phonological shifts young kids undergo as they learn to speak. A lot of these are things CJ does and which I’d never consciously noticed! (e.g. “weak syllable deletion”, in [...]

A. More’s wonderful “Judy Get Down” single…

A. More’s wonderful “Judy Get Down” single came out March 13, 1980.

Room after room

My latest Astral Weeks column looks at a new anthology called Real Unreal: Best American Fantasy Volume 3, edited by Kevin Brockmeier, with stories by Stephen King, Ryan Boudinot, and others. A taste: Several pieces have fun with form. Lisa Goldstein's...

Experimental fictions of the Web: Your thoughts?

Dear discriminating readers: What are your thoughts about these attempts to tell fictional stories via unusual online means: 1. Sumedicina: “Data fiction project. Story telling with information graphics.” (Via Listenerd.) 2. Mr. Plimpton’s Revenge: “A Google Maps Essay, in Which George Plimpton Delivers My Belated and Well-Deserved Comeuppance.” (Actually, as the title indicates, a literary essay. Also via [...]

Ludus’s single “The Visit” came out March 13,…

Ludus’s single “The Visit” came out March 13, 1980.

“Geno” by Dexy’s Midnight Runners came out…

“Geno” by Dexy’s Midnight Runners came out March 13, 1980. Here’s a TV performance from right around then.

Working up a recipe for roast …

Working up a recipe for roast goat from Taillevent – calls for cameline sauce: a cinnamon base with ginger, cloves, mace, vinegar…

“Ya Gotta Be Kiddin’ Me”

Dude they’re letting me drink a glass of wine WHILE I WORK THE CASH REGISTER … aka “COME GET YOUR FREE MONEY” … just kidding, I’m a total pro on the ol’ “Cash-Reg” in fact I’m known in certain circles as “Cash-money Reggie,” because that kinda sounds like “Cash Register,” the machine I’m working while [...]

Chard

Just overheard a conversation about food. One of our customers has chard in the fridge. “With great power comes great responsibility.”

Winemageddon

Oh man it got busy there for a sec … didn’t even have time to talk to you on my liveblog. Now I’ve finally got a spare moment to say HELLO and GET YOUR ASS IN HERE AND BUY SOME OF THIS FINE WINE I’M SELLING

I Pressed The Wrong Button On The Cash Register And Everything Got Real Crazy For A Minute But Now We’re Good

“And that’s the news, folks.” DRINK THAT WINE

Guess What

Just sold some wine.

You Shoulda Been There

The Bangles came on the wine shop’s radio — “Eternal Flame” — and I sang along for a few seconds. Then I sold 7 bottles of wine in like one minute (not kidding). “It’s amazing, the things they can do with wine.”

Gamay

Gamay is one of the best kind of wines. It’s a red wine. They’re pouring a nice Gamay this evening. It came all the way from France to make you happy. I like Gamays. It’s light, almost like white wine, but it’s red. Amazing how that wine-stuff works. On the way over to the shop, I [...]

Where I’m Blogging From

Guess where I am? Here’s a hint: “Tannins.” Oh snap they just changed the music in the store to a new Pandora station, and guess what song it is? A classic: “Closer I Am To Fine” (or, “Closer! I Am Too Fine”) by the Gilmore Girls. LET’S DO THIS — YOU LOVE WINE I LOVE WINE [...]

“Take This Job and Write It”

From the upcoming New York Times Book Review, Jennifer Schuessler on work novels:With the arrival of postwar prosperity, the literature of working-class struggle gave way to the literature of middle-class disillusion. In novels like Sloan Wilson’s ...

Design guru joins the Obama administration

Edward Tufte, an emeritus professor of political science, statistics, and computer science at Yale and author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, has agreed to serve on the federal Recovery Independent Advisory Panel. The panel's job, as Tufte puts it on a brief note on his website, is to "track and explain $787 billion in recovery stimulus funds." He writes: I'm doing this because I like accountability and transparency, and I believe in public service. And it is the complete opposite of everything else I do. Maybe I'll learn something.

Empty Paris

Pruned posted an image the other day by artist Nicolas Moulin (more of whose work can be seen over at Vulgare). Looking into Moulin's work further, however, I came across another series he produced a little more than a decade ago called Vider Paris. Here, we see Paris transformed into an abandoned maze of lifeless streets. Every building is sealed shut behind a seamless, Berlin Wall-like concrete monolith.

[Images: From Vider Paris (1998-2001) by Nicolas Moulin, courtesy of Galerie Chez Valentin].

Vider Paris "is a series of computer-altered images of the streets of Paris," we read in a PDF portfolio of Moulin's work. "All traces of life are removed from the images: vegetal, urban furnishings, pedestrians, cars, etc." Further, "all the buildings are sealed with sheets of concrete up to the second ﬂoor."

[Images: From Vider Paris (1998-2001) by Nicolas Moulin, courtesy of Galerie Chez Valentin].

The effect is oddly exhilarating; whether because these images have the appearance of being stills pulled from a much longer video, or simply because of their haunting, Ballardian overtones, Moulin's vision of an empty Paris seems tailor-made for Hollywood art directors or even for someone sketching out ideas at Thunder Game Works.

A dream of apocalypse, twelve centuries from now, when you wander into the concretized canyons of a Paris with almost no signs of life, its skies grey, the barest trace of weeds growing up through cracks in rain-filled gutters. There are sounds of distant animals rustling, the city's rhomboid geometries now animated by unpredictable acoustic effects. You see smoke somewhere, but it could be miles away. Looking for clean water, and a place to sleep before the sun goes down, you walk onward into the city core.

(This is now the second post I've written from an airplane... flying somewhere over SW Nebraska).