anonymous omniscient observer

Lorem Ipsum

Wed, 16 Nov 2005 08:23:28 GMT

Here is where you can find the notes taken at the Wednesday Wanderings talks given by Harry Smith.

For comparison, here is a page from the Voynich Manuscript.

The Voynich Manuscript, so far as we know, does not mention chocolate.

To the lighthouse

Sun, 13 Nov 2005 08:16:24 GMT

Thia weekend Hugo and Josh stuck Bella with the bookstore for the whole day both days. "It won't be too busy," Hugo said. "Christmas shopping isn't really under way yet."

Bella tried to argue her way out of it, but she found that she was trying to tell them she wasn't comptenet to do the job, and that did not appeal to her. She suspected it might be true but she surely didn't want anybody else to think so. "It's just too much," she finally said. "I'm just a part-time lackey!"

"You already said you didn't have any other responsibilities this weekend," Josh said mildly. "I thought you might be able to use a few hours of golden time at this time of year."

"Golden time?"

"Double the hours," Josh said. "It's what we're paying you for the weekend."

"But it won't even put me over forty --" Bella stopped, realizing she was undermining herself again.

Hugo just blinked at her. Josh smirked.

"If you want extra time off next week, make a proposal," Hugo said.

"I just don't understand why you want me to work the whole weekend by myself. You guys never do that."

"We're going to the lighthouse," Josh said.

Every year the great light at Perdido Point was lit for two hours to celebrate its anniversary. Between times a rotating electric lantern marked the point, but on this night a Coast Guard captain climbed the two hundred steps to the top of the lighthouse and lit the five wicks that burned within the giant fresnel lens made of a myriad of precisely ground glass prisms. Hugo and Josh had made a ritual of it for several years. They came down early in the day and checked into a priovate room at the hostel there at the lighthouse, spending the rest of the day wandering around the coast like any tourist couple with fat pockets. They had the requisite delicacies: artichoke soup, artichoke bread, deep-fried artichokes, artichoke salad, and for a change, kiwi fruit tarts with b;ackberry ice cream. They rambled on small beaches and scrambled on low cliffs. They critiqued windsurfers and poked around in galleries. They bought a fern in a handthrown pot and a very cool-looking though uncomfortable chair made of bent twigs. And they went back to the hostel, bundled up, and stood under the lighthouse drinking coffee while the State Parks historian told flat jokes and thanked a dozen collective entities for their help in putting on the event and keeping the lighthouse open for visitors.

The sun went down. The surf washed and growled and roared.

Eighteen hundred hours rolled around.

The rotating electric light was, to use the official term, exterminated.

The lighthouse stood in rusty darkness, its great fresnel lens grey in the mirk, for several impossible minutes while Josh became more and more convinced that something had gone wrong and the light would not be lit and the point would not be marked, and the sky was dark and cloudy and --

The beams reached out over the land and the sea, touching down in twenty-four places, illuminating the universe from the serene crown of the lighthouse. The surf hushed, slapping and whispering.

The light began to turn. The beams touched down like the fingers of a great protective hand, marking the land and the shore and the sea as protected space, safe for man and beast. There was no music, but Josh and Hugo both felt as if they were listening to the music of the spheres.

It was just a lighthouse. They walked away, to see it from other vantages, and when they got out of the radius of the beams, they no longer seemed to be reaching down to the land and the water, but up into the cloud-inhabited sky, where the moon and a solitary star lived.

WHen they were chilled right through and the light was about to be switched back to its paltry modern version, they returned to the hostel and retired to their private room.

Meanwhile, back at the bookstore, Monkey wasn't at all sure he liked all these customers coming in and out. He was pretty sure that some few of them were precisely the miscreants he always worried about, but he wasn't sure which onees they were. And meanwhile, after he met them, each of the customers seemed to belong to a different category altogether -- the category of potential colleages, the sort of person who might have something interesting to eat in their pocket.

It was confusing, and Monkey did not like being confused.

That Newsletter

Fri, 11 Nov 2005 07:15:52 GMT

Hugo Banter was very enthusiastic about his newsletter, but in the course of everyday work pressures he did not always have a chance to sit down and make it happen. He had a philospohy that with this kind of advertising one had a license to be as cute as one could manage. an obligation to be corny. So he cribbed clipart from everywhere, made silly puns, gave frivolous nicknames to serious topics, and generally made a fool of himself. He had a not so secret desire to produce a newsletter ever week, but experience had proved that twice a month was mopre than he could manage.

Here is the newsletter in which he announced the return of Harry Smith. Notice that the picture of Harry Smith was at least twenty years out of date -- Hugo had been meaning to catch a current photograph of him, but Harry somehow had a way of being elsewhere whenever Hugo had the camera.

Meanwhile Josh made sure the serious readers had something to do too.

Bella was worried about the election. She wasn't sure she remembered correctly having re-registered at the new address (which she sometimes still caught herself referring to as "chain's place," though it already looked more like hers than his, since his only visible artifacts in the place were his bicycle and a ricidulous multicolored clay bong he never used if he could get someone else to provide theirs). She went down early to be sure she would have time to go across town to her old polling place if necessary, but there was her name, and they gave her the stack of cards with the local propositions and the state initiatives and the obscure city officials on it. And she voted, proud of the fact that she had been able to muster enough information about every proposition, inititiative, and cadidate, to have some kind of opinion and be able to vote.

Chain made light of the whole deal, but Bella noticed he voted. And then used the happy red white and blue "I voted" sticker to tape a note to the refrigerator.

There would be bke messengers all through the apartment again while Bella worked the Wednesday Wanderings.

(Chain was determined to make something useful happen this week, even if it meant breaking some heads)

Reservoirs

Thu, 20 Oct 2005 22:41:22 GMT

What the people of the City don't know about their own home town would fill the fire safety reservoirs in every neighborhood. The reservoirs themselves are secrets from most of the people who live here. Not just the subtle, hidden ones, under the hills at Moravia Heights and the Outer Waitsee: but even the ones that rise as regular as truncated pyramids from the level of the street, crowned with cyclone fence and warning signs. The people walk by them as blind to them as they are to the chittering parasites in the wires overhead. What's in those reservoirs, besides water -- that, the people of the city don't know, don't want to know, and wouldn't believe if you told them.
Fortunately, most of all that is benign, or at the worst, and best, utterly unimportant to them. The thing that sings to the water: the thing that slithers through plumes of purifying chemicals in search of manganese: the thing that punches falling precipitates and jumps up and down on scale as it forms on the cement lining of the reservoir: in now way are these mysterious things fearsome to man, nor amenible to his study.
My neighborhood is called the Santo. I am a creature of it, a creation of it, I belong to it, but I am not bound to it. I am at home in Moravia Heights, or the Waitsee, or in Salsipuedes: there are no more mysteries there or in any other neighborhood than there are in the Santo. But the Santo is what I know, and the Santo is where I stomp the ground.
The reservoir of the Santo is at the top of the hill at Refugee Park. Its sides are hidden by thickly grown old junipers three stories tall. The park is so steep that nobody climbs to the top except the workers charged with its maintenance, and they only do it when they can't lie or stall their way out of it.
The Refugee Park reservoir is more alive than most. Strange fish and frogs thrive there, and in August, a curious bloom of algae that can't be killed by the usual chemicals. I've seen a snake there, not indigenous, but somehow flung here from the stagnant cricks of the faraway Gulf of Mexico. It was eating a mudskipper, but of course mudskippers don't live in the cement-lined reservoir.
Down below, on Merced Avenue, there are people who are as marvelous as the bright-faceted snake that swims in the Refugee Park Reservoir. That's what I watch for. I have my projects among them, as a gardener has her projects among the vines that escape along her fences.
That's how I've been thinking of it lately. Not long ago I was thinking of it more in terms of a long, drawn-out war, vital to be won, with all the odds against me. That wasn't much fun. Nobody likes being defeated before they start out. So I don't think about the end. Only about these projects.
Bella was a project of mine. So was Chain. It was amusing when I discovered they could be induced to become projects of each other's as well. Monkey was not a project of mine but I watched him. Harry -- well, how can an elemental figure like Harry be a project, even for me? There's not enough time in the world.
The bookstore? That's Josh and Hugo's project. Neither of them were ever a project of mine. They never needed my intervention, for on, and for another, anything you might say or do with respect to them they'd be likely to take in the wrong way.

Tue, 15 Mar 2005 07:41:33 GMT

That first Wednesday evening with Harry was amusing, but also alarming. Hugo and Josh had somehow managed to stick Bella with the whole event, after it had been announced in the store's newsletter as "Harry's Wedneday Wanderings." Harry's evenings were perfect fodder for the newsletter. Because the blogging service that Hugo had subscribed them to did not allow merchandising, Hugo barely even mentioned books in the newsletter. The newsletter was skimpy, consisting of non-sales events, gossip about the publishing industry and the clients of the store, and occasional oddball philosophy. Harry provided quite a lot of all of that.

So Bella had to line up the chairs, drag the lectern up from the storeroom, clear half a table top set the lectern on, and get a coffee and cookies table set up out of the way of the books and still handy to the patrons. The lectern didn't want to stay in one place. It fell at least four times before Bella finally got it settled. And then, when the evening got under way, Harry refused to use it.

"I'm not a preacher," Harry said, leering lopsidedly. There were teeth missing, and a couple of steel ones. Not even gold, much less porcelain resin.

Bella didn't understand the topic of the discussion. But she did notice that Harry's chosen audience -- which exactly fitted into the chairs, with one old guy left over who said firmly that he didn't like to sit even when there was a chair available, because it hurt his sciatica to do it -- these people ate up everything Harry had to say, and delivered questions with straight faces that Bella would otherwise have thought were nonsense nursery rhymes. Harry cocked his head at each question, then drawled out a devastating rejection of each question, before going on, as far as Bella could tell, to discuss -- something probably entirely unrelated to the question just asked. But only probably, as Bella could not follow any of it.

It was a jolly crowd though. And fidgety. Not a one of them sat still during any part of the evening. They twitched and bubbled, clearly overstimulated, and several of them knitted, or crocheted, and two of them busily made origami figures while apparently foillowing the whole arcane conversation.

Nobody made mention of All Soul's Day, which had just passed.

Tue, 15 Mar 2005 07:26:35 GMT

Chain's real name was Charlie Dain. When Bella asked him where the name "Chain" came from, he was vague. She had gotten the idea that there was some incident, something involving violence and a bicycle chain.

The truth was much more prosaic. Many years before, when Chain was underage and bulling his way into the messenger gig, he'd been given the nickname because he'd gotten chain marks on his leg. That's all. It was because he was new at it, pushing too hard, and riding a bike that was too large for him. That had been years before, though. Chain was a senior bike messenger now. Most of the bike messengers were getting out of the scene after a few years. But Chain was less worn down by the work than most, probably because he didn't much buy into the rest of the messenger package -- the hard partying, bad self-care, lack of other interests. He was like any tradesman: took pride in his work, yes, and put in that extra bit, but he had a life off the wheel, and he was saving money. That was an accomplishment. It was hard to save money in the City. But he did. He didn't say what he was saving for. But it did have something to do with Bella.

Bella only saved money because she was with Chain. He had once suggested she was making enough to put aside twenty dollars or so a week, and she had started handing him three ten-dollar bills each week to stash for her. The first time she did this, he was puzzled. He frowned at the bills and asked her, "What are these for?"

"Savings," she said, almost gone again into the land of pattern and color, the place she properly lived whenever she didn't have to be somewhere else.

"Why did you give it to me?" Chain asked.

"Because you have a savings account," Bella said. "I don't."

"Don't you think you ought to have your own?" Chain asked.

"No, I think I shouldn't," she had said, with no further explanation. But Chain figured it out over the next few months. Bella was desperate to resist the encroachment of the practical world into her mental landscape. Faced with a pile of unwashed dishes, she would whimper, and it was even money whether she would fill the sink with bubbles or wander off to the room she called a studio, where she might stand, frozen, staring at half-finished works, or she might feverishly work for hours before emerging again, suaully not, in these cases, to return to the task of the dishes. Heading for the grocery store, she might forget halfway there on what errand she had originally embarked, and maybe she would, or maybe she wouldn't, be able to reconstruct it from the things in her pockets.

She didn't take all this as evidence of her noble creativity but of impending insanity. She would never admit it to Chain, but she had a feeling that if she organized her life so that she couldn't ruin it by being absent-minded, then she would not disintegrate too far. Chain figured this out, too. He thought that she'd go farther towards staying sane by doing the dishes without whimpering and by writing herself notes to keep from forgetting things. But there was no talking to her about it, because she'd worry about it, and apologize for all her lapses and some which Chain had not noticed and privately did not believe in.

Fri, 11 Mar 2005 18:26:49 GMT

Bella was, besides a bookstore employee, an artist. She called herself a "mixed-media putterer" and she had exhibited only at a cafe in the neighborhood and at an ice cream parlor near the park. At those two shows she had sold five pieces, which had been equal, in aggregate, to about two weeks' wages at the bookstore, which might be impressive except that it had taken her six months and a couple of hundred dollars of materials to make the pieces in that group. She wasn't thinking right now about making a living as an artist. But she hoped to do a whole lot better than that soon.

Lately Bella had been working on a series of pieces whose relationship to each other she did not know. As soon as Harry saw them, which he would soon, he would know exactly what the sequence was, and what she should do about it. For now, though, it was what occupied herself between Monkey's morning walk and the time to go downstairs, down the street half a block, and into the doors of the bookstore. Since Chain went to work before daylight, she was alone for a few hours in the day. She hated it, but she did appreciate the work she was getting done.

Chain had a notebook that he never let Bella see. He said it was just complaints about work, and he didn't want her to see it because it would piss her off and she would nag him to quit. Bella suspected it was poetry and hoped he'd do something with it. She was wrong -- Chain was lying about the content of his notebook, but he didn't write poetry.

Wed, 09 Mar 2005 06:59:19 GMT

Bella didn't think too much of Harry when she first met him. He had on his old junkie outfit and he was missing a tooth or two. He looked like a person who would smell bad, though he didn't.

Josh said, "Harry's going to be living in your building, Bella. That room in the back on the first floor." It was the only room left in the building. All the others had been combined into flats. The landlord was trying to figure out a way to market the flats as lofts, but so far they were just ad hoc apartments with plumbing in unexpected places and irregular patches of flooring.

"The same room as when he left," Hugo said with inexplicable satisfaction.

"That's some coincidence," Harry leered. "Not often a man leaves town for two years and his room's waiting for him like he never left it."

What Bella surmised is that for some reason Hugo and Josh had paid the rent on Harry's room for two years and Harry wasn't completely happy about it. Maybe he had expected to find himself a cheap apartment this time out.

Hugo Banter and Josh Billings were okay, as bosses went. They were pretty flexible about the odd break a person might have to take to go get birth control, and they even liked Monkey. Payday was sometimes late, but never by more than a day. Hugo cut the checks, and it seemed to Bella that he had given up trying to figure out her hours and total pay, because he gave her the same amount every week. That was all right with Bella after the initial bad moment because he actually paid her for more hours than she worked. Not that the wages were good. But it was clear that they weren't paying themselves much more.

Bella had been "doing" the children's book section for eleven months. Now Josh asked her to take up the art, craft, and music sections. He said she should work out how much more time it took and tell Hugo to adjust her pay accordingly. And then he asked her to ask her boyfriend Chain if he wanted to work a few hours in the store. Bella knew she wanted Chain to do it. If at all possible, she wanted him to take any job besides bike messenger. She didn't mind that it was a nowhere-leading job. She minded that every day he could get hit by a delivery truck and he had no insurance. But it was his choice, so she never said anything, not directly. She made grim jokes about accidents and their consequences. But Chain didn't mind. He made the same jokes himself all the time.

Hugo had a brilliant idea. Josh thought so. It was this: Every week Harry would give a little workshop about one of his many areas of expertise. People would come in to hear Harry, to talk to Harry, to ask him questions and maybe do a little project, and there'd be a stack of related books on a table and Bella would sell them the books. It would cost a little, in extra wages for Bella, and coffee and cookies, and a one-time investment in folding chairs, and money for Harry, but they were both pretty sure that the increased sales would more than make up for it. And they'd probably end up giving Harry the money anyway. He was very good at getting people to give him money.

This was all on Thursday night. The first one of these would be the following Wednesday, so Josh got to work on the bookstore newsletter.

Tue, 08 Mar 2005 05:23:36 GMT

Yesterday was one of those days when The City seems to be nearly empty. Bella and Chain were both disoriented by it for different reasons. Chain was all revved up for horrendous traffic down in the financial district and when he got to work it was a piece of cake. Bella had the opposite problem. She wandered in and out of the little stores and cafes looking for someone to talk to before her shift at the bookstore and found nobody.

Today was different. It was as if the denizens of The City had decided to adopt the Mardi Gras tradition right now. The streets were full of people. This filled Chain with righteous bike messenger rage, and disoriented Bella yet again. She is easy to disorient. But she functions best disoriented anyway.

Today was a special day all around. Josh and Hugo at the bookstore were excited because Harry was back and they could use him as a magnet to get the metaphysical types to come on down to the store in the evenings and listen to Harry bullshit them about the deep patterns of the universe, and then they'd buy a bunch of books depending on Harry's rap of the evening. Hugo had already felt Harry out and put in an order for books about quilting, string figures, and Ukrainian egg painting. Josh was trying to convince Harry to write a bit for the bookstore's online newsletter.

Harry was in his usual state -- dishevelled, preoccupied, mysterious, and full of crap.