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Books,
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Blog
- Hits: 219
To the locker and 18 boxes of books left, mostly I'm guessing. They're piled in my hall and the apartment is unliveable. It has been since inspection.
This will be the end of them; and my desk is full and my countertop unmanageable. There are piles of the books they rejected - for reasons I'll speculate upon later, and books that I doubt that I have read and so my "to read" pile grows daily. I'm allowed, if I time it right, up to three trips to the bookstore a week, but all that hinges on knowing what clerks are working when. Fortunately I have a good relation with the Sunday clerk and get a schedule for the week.
In the rummaging through them I found my Violet Ray Wand and 2 (2!) Yashica Large Format (120mm) cameras; which is one too many but can I bear to sell the other? I will play with them both a bit first and then decide.
Things that are still missing - well, 3 volumes of Casanova, Nabakov's "Pale Fire", the Singing Bowls, a art-deco or nouveau crystal inkwell, canvas stretchers, perhaps already here in the boxes in the hall...
The locker will have to be kept, unfortunately, there's too many art supplies and things that will not fit in the apartment. But - it gets easier to navigate. The rest of the contents - furniture, still to be sold, large pieces now just in the way; the Apothecary and Hope Chest, boxes of CD's and children's toys and a ton of other random stuff, mostly "Mixed Media", my umbrella term for stuff I mean to do something with but haven't gotten around to and am realizing if I don't get a move on I never will...
And - in the hunt for things I already own I find the insane repetition of objects and books. Like the 2 Yashica Cameras. Or the half-dozen Pentax/Nikon/Other 35 mm cameras and lenses, or the 2 copies of "The Enormous Room" by EE Cummings, or "20 Love Poems" by Pablo Neruda, "Hesiod & Theogines", others - bought, packed up, bought again, packed up again, and now, finally to the bookstore. And some, bought because they on occasion can be hard to find and I proselytize books, books like "Lolita" and "Les Liasons Dangereuse", only people no longer read and I'm like that earnest bearded prophet of old selling a religion that's given way before the digital revolution...
Then there's the books they rejected. An antiquarian volume titled "British Battles on Land and Sea", with engravings, a fine volume to make your games of "Battleship" interesting with kids, mine loved it; especially when they won and I fell over and yelled "Kiss me Hardy!!!", there's "Song of the Sky" by Guy Murchie, perhaps not a "Great Book" but competent, lyrical, poetic...
That pile grows as well, some are damaged, too damaged to sell, others out of fashion (all my reading basically) - Thomas Wolfe, Books on Magic (That in some bookstores would be under lock and key, here - no interest). Some I take personally, others not so much, some definitely great but I'm thwarted again by the repetition, again; I have brought them 2 copies already they don't need another, not right now, still others water damaged by a leaky roof in the locker, others? Well, who knows. They have joined the "Mixed Media" pile and I have my work cut out for me...
I have been compiling a list, all the books I have read (and kept, which is a long ways from all the books I read but I am a bit fussy), and - when done, soon I hope, will create a digital library for the world to share, for the AI version of myself to digest and reconstitute in the not-so-distant future; to appear and haunt my children and grand-children...
The Partial Lunar Eclipse
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Images
- Hits: 94
A whole barrage of pictures, none of which were perfect or even good, the AI on my phone wouldn't correct for an eclipsed moon, and 100X Zoom is hard to steady.
Nonetheless a screenshot of all the images looks pretty good!
Tics and Twitches
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: People
- Hits: 180
I'm on 4, waiting for the elevator. And I can hear her swearing and cussing up a storm, she's pissed off, somebody's catching hell and the elevator's rising and she's getting louder and louder, then the door opens and she's alone...
She sees me, looks down, ashamed, scuttles past...
***
I'm pretty much out of groceries, there's nothing in the fridge I can find to eat. And it's a few days to payday. I grab a rock and head over to the neighbours, rattling it in the pot, I'm going to make Stone Soup and I'm hoping maybe she has some things I can add to it, only she isn't home and the broth, well, it's pretty much water and I'm pretty sure this is not how the story's supposed to go...
***
She comes over to raid the fridge, lets herself in, ignores me in the chair while she helps herself to blueberries and ice cream, grabs a Pellegrino, goes back to the fridge for more berries and ice cream, she can't help herself...
***
Making dinner, pasta, I've been paid and the stone's gone back into the stone pile. Run into neighbour, dinner's a Ground Elk bolognese, invite her over. After dinner she sits, she's obliged, she feels she needs to keep me company, manners and all can't eat and run only she doesn’t; she sits and gambles on her phone, then breaks to rifle the bookshelf, grabs a stack to “borrow”; she begins reading Pablo Neruda’s “100 Love Sonnets”; her face is a mirror to her internal emotions, she's smiling, lips pursing, tight, then the edges lift, then she's sad, disturbed, she's furrowing her brow; she’s filled with all manner of twitches and tics.
I scroll my phone a bit, then excuse myself to go for a cigarette and she gets the hint, checks herself out…
The Internet's Darkest Rabbit Hole
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Ideas & Questions
- Hits: 143
This is a curious tale about an AI Influencer who goes by the name of A. Egon Cholakian, who posts inane and misleading videos online, and then leads to a mysterious former Chiropractor Igor Danilo who has styled himself a new Jesus, built a cult, created a following via the "Creative Society" and "AllatRa", has compounds in the Ukraine filled with both pro-Putin and pro-Trump propaganda...
This is the real purpose of AI - to "influence" and further dumb-down an already ignorant public.
It is a fairly deep and dark rabbit hole, and while I'm grateful for the information (basically, we live in an era where all conspiracies are coming true...) - I find the delivery of it, in the standard YouTube podcast format of a little-too-long-in-the drama and suspense department, a little bit - ...
Well, if this is what it takes to bring in the viewers I guess that's it, personally I don’t want for the entertainment, merely the understanding.
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