Tempietto

Travels

2011-10-23T02:04:00.000-07:00

Today fortune did not grant me the company of the friends I desire so much to see, but my time alone allowed me to travel more widely in Second Life than I have in many years. Here is the beautiful and creative work of many, which I share with you. If you object to my appearing in every photo, it is only because I had no company on this journey. You are welcome to join me next time, and offer us someone else to look at.

Pink Dragons at Tuatha De Danann

Resting on high at Dark Moon

In the Wedding Chapel at Dark Moon

Wendy Xeno's wonderful Gilmour

Beyond one of the doors at Gilmour

Resting my heels in pastoral Mirrormere

Contemplating surrealism at The Path (Lea2)

D'où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous?

Warned to choose wisely, I made the worst choice possible. Pink!

I also visited the Misty Mountains, The Nest and Patch Thibaud's brilliant Majesterium. Pictures anon.

Out of the blue!

2011-10-22T02:18:00.000-07:00

It is only the dead who do not return, and after two hundred and ninety years I think perhaps I cannot die. Salazar found me while I was drinking in a pub in Dublin and recalled me to his lighthouse in Cowell. He will have a photo to prove it, but I am so rusty at the controls I was unable to take a picture before we parted. We may live without poetry, music or art, but I would not live without friends. How lovely to see him and hear news of Osprey and Enjah and HBA. I shall be looking for you all!

An Alchemickal Account of the Devil's Wife, Part the First

2010-10-29T01:00:00.001-07:00

Yolande Geoffrion appears to have given up her scribblings, sparing us her sentimental nonsense about the Comedie Italienne. If you wish to know the truth they were the most mendacious and quarrelsome band of foreigners ever to appear in Paris, vain in their estimation of their miserable talents and ridiculous in whichever society they appeared. They were clowns, exaggerated, perhaps deranged, and little loved by their audience. The Hotel de Bourgogne where they played was a magnet that transfixed the Parisian fool’s morbid fascination for the public display of powdered tarts and libertine asses, enjoyed primarily by effete dandies, cardsharps, poets and whores.

Everything bad about Ms Geoffrion she learned from the Italians, no doubt to the great dismay of her English-born bouquiniste uncle and to the shame of her parents so recently laid in their graves. The scoundrels M. Riccoboni and M. Biancolleli. were delighted to have so rapt and mutable a student. She learned to invent tales, to masquerade convincingly as a young man, to sing disreputable verse and to dance so delicately that she soon had young ladies swooning when she appeared as Radamus in La Perniad. For many years she attended the famous salon of Madame d'Épinay as the Comte de Ramon, and was a favorite in polite society until exposed for what she was.

Even her name is an affectation, for there is nothing young about Ms Geoffrion. She seems to have left us without compunction, but that does not surprise me, for she was ever the slothful apprentice, slinking away whenever she was out of sorts. Everyone pretends not to know where she has vanished (though I disbelieve M. Antfarm), I may yet shed some light on whence she came.

And though she might have earned my enmity and scorn for her general deceit, to which even I, Theophrastus Erasmus Fluxus, doctor of philosophy and divers arts, fell victim when I met her in 1741, you will see I shall relate her sad tale without the opprobrium her actions deserve, trusting in the reader’s sense of propriety and outrage to be her just and proper reward. I am aware she has spread tales against my reputation; these do not deserve so much as a sneeze in reply. My character and eminence are unassailable. But I would render an honest, factual account of her misadventures, that you, gentle reader, may be cured of Illusion and returned to the light of Truth and Reason.

I was not a young man then, though not as ancient as I am now, when several drunken companions dragged me to the Comedie Italienne against my protests. I did not by habit waste time listening to the fantastic plots and ridiculous characters of Moliere or Marivaux, who outdid each other making up ever more incredible farces that France has ever seen, insulting the intelligence of the Parisian audiences in abominable verse. Of the and clownish Italians. But as I say, I was pressed into attendance, for my fellows, robbed of their judgment by gallons of Burgundy, insisted that as an educated and discerning man I must come with them to pay homage to “la Columbine Divine.” From their description, she was the very epitome of French wit and dignity bravely holding her own against all manner of foreign intrigue, and God’s answer to every man’s desire. I replied with my own wit and dignity, “I know little about the desires of men like you, and am surely ignorant of any foreign intrigue. Kindly excuse me from your sober company,” but they laughed and repeated my words to each other, and it seemed to give them pleasure to do so in a bizarre accent that bore no resemblance to the way I spoke French, and to lock their arms around mine, one to each side, and to fairly lift me off my feet and out the door. Clearly they desired my companionship and perhaps wished to learn what I thought of their inane theatre. I submitted to their wishes for a block or two, but when I tried to slip away they redoubled their grip on me.

M. de Troy (for that was the name of my companion to my right) told me how the grandmother of our present Columbine had also played the role, as had her mother Eularia, who was married to the famous Harlequin Dominique. “Three generations of coquette in a figure that needs no corset,” he crowed in my ear, “she will make a little man of you, Fluxus!”

M. Auxelle (my left side companion) said, “Yes, she could teach you something you can’t learn in your books, Herr Doctor.”

The hôtel Bourgogne was a massive, gloomy building, the survivor of several fires and riots. The narrow rue Mauconseil was mobbed with carriages, horses, vain men and women of all stations, hawkers and urchins, the ever-importunate beggars hobbling on crutches, soldiers in justaucorps and bandeliers. We pushed through this crowd and into the steaming interior and found our box just as the house lights were being extinguished. Before we plunged into darkness I made out a seething crowd in the narrow parterre below, none who would have paid more than fifteen sous, overdressed couples in the opposite boxes above them, and everywhere the acrid smell of humanity mixed with the burning fat of the footcandles.

The heavy curtains were drawn apart with difficulty on a stage made brilliant by the light of hundreds of tapers that smoked and sputtered, threatening ever to plunge the entire building into an inferno. Looking back at the press of bodies that continued to surge up the narrow stairway we had just ascended, I despaired of ever escaping alive, and gave myself up to what I fully expected to be my last mortal pleasure, now appearing on the boards.

A catalogue of vanishing things

2010-08-25T01:04:00.000-07:00

waves upon the stony strand
her lover's tears, all too soon
parallel lines in perspective drawn
the mist on the lake
the call of the loon
our heroine's innocence
the tigers in bengal
the bees in my garden
the leaves in the fall
academics who speak latin
modesty and candour
empty space on the bookshelf
the basilisk, the salamander
present mirth and present laughter
idle time and solitude
our dancing days, for better or worse
the starried sky
the weight of my purse
the strangeness of the world
the ice in my glass
my nearsighted view and my spectacles (again)
the time left to you
my memory of your past
the sun in the sky
the ink in my pen

I have become a lost name once more, and keep the company of other rare and dwindling things; a shadow, a pin.

Tailors

2009-11-16T13:50:00.000-08:00

Paid a visit to the tailor's and ran up a bill...

Four and twenty tailors went to kill a snail,
The best man among them durst not touch her tail.
She put out her horns like a little Kyloe cow,
Run tailors, run, or she'll kill you all e'en now.

Upcoming Exhibition

2009-11-16T12:14:00.000-08:00

While chatting with Enjah yesterday, I complained that for all my work representing artists in China, I had precious little opportunity to make use of my own talents. She reminded me that she had offered to give me a show at her gallery in Grignano, and so we decided to make it happen the weekend after next. Therefore friends, if you are able to attend you will be most welcome at Young Geoffrion's premier art exhibition in Second Life. Even now I am not certain what shall be exhibited, but I have at least fifteen paintings and may make a few extra goodies for the show.
I do hope it will be an opportunity to renew my acquaintance with many old friends, and celebrate our continued common existence in this hoariest of virtual worlds.

Meeting Brillig

2009-11-16T11:54:00.000-08:00

I became reacquainted with Brillig Boomslang yesterday, and during a lovely conversation about the nature of reality and Buddhism, I discovered that he had lived in Beijing for four years, for a while within a few hundred yards of where I have been living over the past month. This intelligent automaton has studied literature, philosophy and psychology and now manages the creation of instructions for other automated machinery. He complained to me of some trouble being accepted into the Legacies 1891 Role Play society, apparently not on account of his mechanical construction but because of his sartorial sparseness, however his last message to me reported that he was attending their mandatory lecture, so one may assume he is now well on his way to becoming a full member of society. Well, they do enjoy playing Victorian bloodsucking bourgeois; one might expect a certain degree of prudery.

To bed! To bed!

2009-11-11T22:28:00.000-08:00

"A friend is, as it were, a second self",
Quoth Cicero, and I add, a third and fourth,
As many selves as friends, each one more glorious than the first,
(Diminished by travelling alone, longing for companionship)
As craves the night for dawn and the ship for shore does thirst.

I haul my old bones home, and leave the weary road ahead,
And shall call upon you all in time, but now
To bed! to bed!

Figurine

2009-06-27T00:03:00.000-07:00

I kept the figurine that the stranger in the cemetery had given me and studied it with enormous interest for as I have said it was an exquisitely carved and detailed model of a male figure as bare of clothing as any greek sculpture in a prince's antiquities collec- tion, and there were parts on that tiny body that I had never yet seen except on a child. When I first looked at it, it was reclining in a pose like that of the dying Gaul, head bowed and sub- missive, but later I found that I must have been mistaken and discovered the figure was in fact standing in a proud attitude. I placed it on the sill of my bedroom window that first night and fell asleep watching his silhouette, a seven inch shadow against the dull glimmer of the street lamps. But the following morning, to my utter astonishment, it had taken a seated aspect, and indeed every time I looked at it after the passage of a period of time, the figure was differently posed, now marching, now prone, now seated, now bending over and plucking an invisible harvest, now reaching for the sky. Never once did it repeat a pose and I kept it for more than a decade. I never once saw it move, and I tried to twist and bend its brazen limbs in my childish fingers without any effect. It was a solid compact of metal, immoveable and lifeless, but I came to think of it as alive, with a soul or a spirit imprisoned in metal as long as I beheld him, but free to clamber and run and dance in his immodest fashion whenever my eyes were turned or my attention elsewhere. I dared not show this miracle to my uncle or Madame Boucher, or even to Marie-Thérèse or any other soul, convinced they would take it from me because of his nakedness, and the lustful leer that looked out of his miniature visage. He was a disturbing guest, but my guest nonetheless, and I wondered about the strange man who had given him to me, and the meaning of it.

It occured to me then that the world is a changeable and variable place, its houses and roads and churches and bridges are in constant, fluid motion, but that we are deceived by their form and fail to see they are different each moment, like the waters of the Seine flowing endlessly within its banks beneath the Pont Neuf. So I began to observe the people around me, and paid regard to their variable humours and mercurial dispositions, of Marie-Thérèse particularly, as I came to know her so well, who seemed a different person from month to month, with new interests and passions each season. And with the help of that mute, metallic and miniature teacher, I began to notice the changes to my own person and body, and fancied that the Yolande of yesterday was not the Yolande of today, and these transformations, profound as they were becoming, were nonetheless unnoticeable from day to day as long as my attention slept.

If this creature of metal were alive, it never gave any indication that he could see or hear me, though I often addressed him in private and confessed to him my most secret thoughts and reflections upon the day's events. He lived in my pocket, or at my windowsill, or upon a shelf behind a book when, as I attained maturity, he grew increasingly lewd and priapic, and I could not bear to look at him. He seemed less a guest and more an emblem of my own sinful desire and guilty soul or partner to wicked thoughts that sometimes found their way into my foolish head. Much later I learned what he was and the evil he did me, but that tale must wait until I have recounted more of the man from whom I had him.

Drowsy

2009-06-26T22:28:00.000-07:00

Enjah and Osprey have already blogged about our visit today to Drowsy, which was on Koinup's most popular spots this week. It is a beautiful, carefully made island full of dark storybook mystery, bears and wolves and dwellings slowly reverting back to forest, carpeted in moss. Look for the giant stuffed animals and the crocodile beneath the bridge, Mai Runo's maison engloutie par la mer with a collection of art about boots, the ruined gypsy caravans, the Fish King and the lonely coast. The work of several talented illustrators and designers from Japan have gone into this highly integrated work of art that opened after two months of hard work in June: skin and fashion designer BettiePage Voyager; graphic designer sato Yifu (whom I had the pleasure of meeting) and Nico Rotaru, owners of Kurotsubaki Store; Mai Runo, shoe designer and boot collector. These photographs hardly do it justice, so I urge you to pay a visit and spend some time there.

Actresses

2009-06-12T20:13:00.000-07:00

In the week after M. Panard and M. Fagan opened La Sylphide Supposee at the Théâtre de la Foire, my uncle Adraste took me back to the Théâtre Italien to begin my apprenticeship as an actress. M. Biancoleli's gamble with the farce at the Saint Laurent Fair paid back its principal with interest, for La Sylphide played thirty-four performances in the hôtel Bourgogne and became a staple in the repertoire of la Comedie Italienne. The old theatre was by now a familiar place to me, for Marie-Thérèse and I had become fast friends over the summer and together we explored its many mysterious corners and abandoned rooms, used to store the properties of productions long forgotten, though I never persuaded her ever to return to the stairway that led up to its terrifying tower.

We spent our days learning the four types of battemens, nine types of pas de bourrée, balloté, fouetté, caprioles and entrechats and the lazzi or comic routines of the repertoire. It was exhausting work but we were well fed and grew strong and supple. Our fair instructrice was the long-limbed and beautiful Mademoiselle Belmont who wafted over the stage floor in a cloud of lace and ribbon but could not sing in tune to save her life. She was tormented by jealous lovers and could never pick between them. She cried often. We were taught pantomime by our old Arlequin, M. Vicentini, who went by his stage name of Thomassin. His daughter Sidonie and son Joachim were about my age and studied at my side. Sidonie had an older sister Catine who had debuted earlier in the year. I learned to sing and declaim, and learned to speak Italian passably well, though all the players spoke French well. Our days were long and so I returned at night to my uncle's bookstore too tired to read, except on Sundays when I would take a little volume of poetry with me to browse in the cemetery after mass. Madame Riccoboni and her son returned from Italy the next year and returned to the stage with much celebration. I grew up among those happy, mad, passionate men and women, who wore down my reclusive and morbid solitary nature with their brilliant and implacable friendliness.

As I grew more graceful in movement and confident in conversation, I left my old hiding holes behind the bookshelves and under the tables of my uncle's shop for more companionable pleasures, walking with friends in the parks and joining my uncle in his coffeehouse meetings with other artists and performers. Before long I had a small circle of admirers of my own, solicitous young men whose names I no longer remember, whom I would meet secretly to exchange notes. They were every one a poet, dedicating their souls to Amor and their pens to Aphrodite and Isis in hope of inducting me into eleusinian mysteries. I would have been conquered if I were not already familiar with the sources of those 'original' lyrics, for they plagiarized the English mercilessly and I felt more pity than love for their small talents. But I could smile prettily and dance around them and confound them by replying in Tuscan. I don't believe I broke anyone's heart, because we were only actresses and they were knaves apprenticed to rakes and scoundrels. But we enjoyed our games of glances and chaste caresses and doubtful promises of fidelity, of being rêves poursuivis, pursued dreams, flowers of youth and beauty, the image of every brilliant quality and grace. We sublimated into sylphides ourselves, volatile spirits without substance or gravity, reflecting into the arms and vanities of the youths who loved us. We stole their affections and collected their laughter. We pirouetted mercilessly at the centres of their revolving loyalty, radiant suns that warmed their smiling lips across an abyss of nonchalance and the unapproachable stage. We banished tears and misery to the utter depths of the outside world, that place of streets and markets and flesh and grime, to inhabit the enchanted world beneath the chandeliers, its palaces and breathing gods, its banquets and musicians and everlasting applause. We were actresses of the Italian Comedy and for a magical age we ruled the world.

Storytelling

2009-06-12T12:15:00.000-07:00

While minding my own business this morning, I was commanded to entertain a certain Monsieur Anchor Gascoigne, an acquaintance of Enjah's who wanted a story. Being prolix by nature (though some have described it as upwardly flatulent) I agreed. I think Enjah and Anchor contributed much to the tale with their interjections so though I may be breaking the terms of use, here is my story in its windy fullness.

[11:01] Young Geoffrion: Well, Anchor, how do you wish to be entertained?
[11:01] Enjah Mysterio: I have returned
[11:01] Young Geoffrion: Shall I tell a story?
[11:01] Young Geoffrion: sing a song?
[11:01] Anchor Gascoigne: witticisms will do it
[11:01] Enjah Mysterio: YES!
[11:01] Enjah Mysterio: tell a story!
[11:01] Young Geoffrion: Witticisms
[11:01] Young Geoffrion: A witty story?
[11:01] Enjah Mysterio: ODW
[11:01] Anchor Gascoigne: songs are aok too
[11:01] Enjah Mysterio: On Demand Wit
[11:02] Enjah Mysterio hums
[11:02] Young Geoffrion: Well,
[11:02] Young Geoffrion: Give me a moment to think
[11:02] Anchor Gascoigne: Tell us about your cousins.
[11:02] Young Geoffrion: My cousins? The ones we lost to the woods?
[11:02] Young Geoffrion: They went playing where they should not have gone
[11:03] Enjah Mysterio: what, no breadcrumbs?
[11:03] Young Geoffrion: Mira and Estrella
[11:03] Young Geoffrion: Breadcrumbless
[11:03] Enjah Mysterio listens, shuddering
[11:03] Anchor Gascoigne: let then crumble cake
[11:03] Young Geoffrion: It was a long time ago, when the woods were closer than they are today
[11:04] Young Geoffrion: every city worthy of its name had a wood nearby
[11:04] Young Geoffrion: and a road running through it.

[11:09] Young Geoffrion: Ah, well along the road, there are always travellers
[11:09] Young Geoffrion: and Mira and Estrella both fell in love with a courier
[11:09] Young Geoffrion: the same youth
[11:10] Anchor Gascoigne: How old were they?
[11:10] Young Geoffrion: who appeared one day at the edge of the wood with a message
[11:10] Young Geoffrion: but had forgotten to whom it was addressed.
[11:10] Anchor Gascoigne: I had imagined small but not so small it seems
[11:10] Young Geoffrion: No, they were fifteen and seventeen at the time
[11:10] Anchor Gascoigne: What a strange courier
[11:10] Enjah Mysterio: tender age
[11:10] Young Geoffrion: They got lost in the woods when they were very small,
[11:11] Young Geoffrion: and I had to find them,
[11:11] Young Geoffrion: but at the time of this story
[11:11] Young Geoffrion: they lost their hearts
[11:11] Young Geoffrion: to the same young man.
[11:11] Anchor Gascoigne: I bet he was in disguise
[11:11] Young Geoffrion: Perhaps he was,
[11:11] Young Geoffrion: he was dressed as a messenger,
[11:12] Young Geoffrion: with a green tunic and deerskin boots
[11:12] Enjah Mysterio: mmmmmmmmm deerskin
[11:12] Young Geoffrion: a slight blonde with long limbs
[11:12] Anchor Gascoigne: deerskin doesn't make very good boots, though - too soft
[11:12] Young Geoffrion: a swift walker and sweet talker
[11:12] Young Geoffrion: the uppers were deerskin,
[11:13] Young Geoffrion: the soles had been reshod.
[11:13] Enjah Mysterio: buttery uppers
[11:13] Young Geoffrion: well not as buttery as his words
[11:13] Enjah Mysterio: lol!
[11:13] Young Geoffrion: and he fairly melted the hearts of the two cousins
[11:13] Anchor Gascoigne: :-D
[11:14] Young Geoffrion: He claimed to have lost the address of the recipient of his message
[11:14] Young Geoffrion: It is hardly credible,
[11:14] Young Geoffrion: but the packet was worn and water stained
[11:14] Anchor Gascoigne: And their hearts were like tasy lobster, all buttered up.
[11:14] Anchor Gascoigne: *tasty
[11:14] Young Geoffrion: and I saw it myself.
[11:14] Enjah Mysterio chuckles softly
[11:14] Young Geoffrion: A blur of an address
[11:15] Young Geoffrion: but clearly two names were written there
[11:15] Young Geoffrion: that might have been Mira and Estrella
[11:15] Anchor Gascoigne: Yet he must've seen it before it blurred or spoken with the sender...
[11:15] Anchor Gascoigne: Ah
[11:15] Young Geoffrion: though it might have been Mona Destaigne
[11:15] Anchor Gascoigne: a magician
[11:15] Anchor Gascoigne: I trust him not
[11:15] Young Geoffrion: Or Manuel Estrangelo
[11:15] Young Geoffrion: We tried to think who it might be.
[11:16] Young Geoffrion: In the end we decided to open the packet
[11:16] Young Geoffrion: and read the content for clues.
[11:16] Anchor Gascoigne: Indeed the wisest course ;-D
[11:16] Young Geoffrion: Mira grabbed the packet from his hands
[11:16] Enjah Mysterio longs to hear the content
[11:16] Young Geoffrion: and laid it on the grass
[11:16] Anchor Gascoigne: precipitate girl
[11:17] Young Geoffrion: We four sat down together
[11:17] Young Geoffrion: not minding the dew that precipitated on the lawn
[11:17] Anchor Gascoigne: raining girls
[11:17] Enjah Mysterio: or fawns
[11:17] Anchor Gascoigne: and they reign as queens unless one reins them in
[11:18] Young Geoffrion: I was younger than my cousins
[11:18] Young Geoffrion: they ruled my affections
[11:18] Young Geoffrion: they opened the packet
[11:19] Anchor Gascoigne: what did the sealing wax look like?
[11:19] Young Geoffrion: breaking the seal
[11:19] Anchor Gascoigne wants foreplay.
[11:19] Young Geoffrion: that was a portculliis stamped in brown wax
[11:19] Anchor Gascoigne: ah
[11:19] Young Geoffrion: with the words,
[11:19] Young Geoffrion: tout-seul
[11:20] Anchor Gascoigne: ooh
[11:20] Enjah Mysterio: all alone?
[11:20] Young Geoffrion: stamped beneath
[11:20] Young Geoffrion: All alone.
[11:20] Enjah Mysterio: wow
[11:20] Enjah Mysterio is fascinated now
[11:20] Anchor Gascoigne: sounds like it could be my seal
[11:20] Young Geoffrion: There were only three pages inside
[11:20] Young Geoffrion: and it was signed by someone named Gascoine
[11:20] Anchor Gascoigne: never!
[11:21] Young Geoffrion: we looked at the signature first.
[11:21] Enjah Mysterio: Gadzooks!
[11:21] Anchor Gascoigne: was it legible?
[11:21] Young Geoffrion: It was.
[11:22] Young Geoffrion: clearly Gascoine was a scribe or a scrivener
[11:22] Anchor Gascoigne: The courier seemed as though he'd carried it for a hundred years.
[11:22] Young Geoffrion: he wrote in a beautiful hand
[11:22] Young Geoffrion: long, loppy letters
[11:22] Young Geoffrion: loopy letter I mean
[11:23] Young Geoffrion: let me try that again:
[11:23] Young Geoffrion: long, loopy letters
[11:23] Young Geoffrion: a relaxed pen,
[11:23] Young Geoffrion: broadly spaced words
[11:23] Young Geoffrion: that began,
[11:23] Anchor Gascoigne: sad people now use ballpoints
[11:23] Enjah Mysterio: not all
[11:23] Anchor Gascoigne: ink is so much nicer
[11:23] Young Geoffrion: Ma plus chere...
[11:23] Anchor Gascoigne: generally
[11:24] Young Geoffrion: and no name
[11:24] Anchor Gascoigne: I wrote all my university notes in fountain pen
[11:24] Young Geoffrion: It was a love letter.
[11:24] Anchor Gascoigne: ah!
[11:24] Anchor Gascoigne: But to whom?
[11:24] Young Geoffrion: That much was obvious,
[11:24] Anchor Gascoigne: How could you find out?
[11:24] Young Geoffrion: it could only be written to Mira,
[11:25] Young Geoffrion: my cousin Mira exclaimed.
[11:25] Young Geoffrion: But my cousin Estrella differed
[11:25] Anchor Gascoigne: Oh she is too much
[11:25] Young Geoffrion: and was convinced that the description referred to her own features:
[11:25] Young Geoffrion: a round, pale face like the moon
[11:26] Young Geoffrion: skin as soft as a petal
[11:26] Enjah Mysterio: eyes?
[11:26] Young Geoffrion: a mouth as ripe as a berry
[11:26] Anchor Gascoigne: two
[11:26] Enjah Mysterio: lol
[11:26] Young Geoffrion: the eyes were not mentioned.
[11:26] Enjah Mysterio: the best number!
[11:26] Young Geoffrion: how strange!
[11:26] Anchor Gascoigne: three is better
[11:26] Anchor Gascoigne: hmmm
[11:27] Young Geoffrion: If the eyes had been mentioned, my cousins might never have lost their hearts
[11:27] Anchor Gascoigne: eyes are always mentioned
[11:27] Young Geoffrion: at the same time
[11:27] Young Geoffrion: for in all things they were identical,
[11:27] Anchor Gascoigne: in a love letter
[11:27] Young Geoffrion: except their eyes.
[11:27] Anchor Gascoigne: I fear the courier has a plot
[11:27] Young Geoffrion: Mira had dark eyes like pools of still water
[11:28] Young Geoffrion: while Estrella's eyes sparkled blue like a lake in a storm
[11:28] Enjah Mysterio waits to hear what the courier was up to
[11:28] Young Geoffrion: Mira gazed at the world modestly,
[11:28] Anchor Gascoigne: My own are blue-grey like a puddle reflecting the sky
[11:28] Auron Warrhol is Online
[11:29] Young Geoffrion: Estrella challenged the world with her gaze
[11:29] Auron Warrhol is Offline
[11:29] Anchor Gascoigne: Estrella is the younger?
[11:29] Young Geoffrion: But as they both had round faces, and lips like berries,
[11:29] Enjah Mysterio bites her lips to make them like berries
[11:29] Young Geoffrion: they were convinced the writer
[11:29] Young Geoffrion: had addressed both of them
[11:29] Enjah Mysterio: hmmmm!
[11:29] Anchor Gascoigne: It was obviously Mira, though.
[11:30] Anchor Gascoigne: If indeed it was either.
[11:30] Young Geoffrion: that mis, each claimed to be the rightful recipient of the letter from across the wood
[11:30] Young Geoffrion: *this tis
[11:30] Young Geoffrion: *that is
[11:30] Young Geoffrion: Mira offered additional evidence
[11:30] Enjah Mysterio: but perhaps it was Mona Destaigne after all!
[11:31] Young Geoffrion: she had explored deeper in the forest than Estrella
[11:31] Enjah Mysterio: who may have had eyes red like Mars!
[11:31] Anchor Gascoigne lays 5 guineas on Mira
[11:31] Young Geoffrion: and it was clear she had been seen by someone who lived on the other side
[11:31] Young Geoffrion: But Estrella said no,
[11:32] Enjah Mysterio wonders where their parents are
[11:32] Young Geoffrion: she sang so much more prettily than Mira
[11:32] Young Geoffrion: and her voice carried further
[11:32] Young Geoffrion: The two young ladies could not agree,
[11:33] Young Geoffrion: and turned to the messenger to decide for them.
[11:33] Anchor Gascoigne: Sisters will argue, tis said.
[11:33] Enjah Mysterio: and cousins will kiss
[11:34] Young Geoffrion: The young man in the deerskin boots stood up
[11:34] Young Geoffrion: Yes, just like those boots
[11:35] Young Geoffrion: Though not as marbled
[11:35] Enjah Mysterio: these are fawn
[11:35] Young Geoffrion: Kobe beef boots?
[11:35] Enjah Mysterio: lol
[11:35] Anchor Gascoigne: :-D
[11:35] Young Geoffrion: or fatty tuna?
[11:35] Enjah Mysterio blushes
[11:36] Young Geoffrion: The young man blushed too.
[11:36] Anchor Gascoigne: And did he solve the problem?
[11:36] Young Geoffrion: In a manner of speaking.
[11:37] Young Geoffrion: I think you may agree this was a problem without a ready solution
[11:37] Enjah Mysterio: only if he is unsure
[11:37] Young Geoffrion: The young man suggested that as the intended recipient was a mystery
[11:37] Anchor Gascoigne: Well he seems unsure but I don't trust him.
[11:38] Young Geoffrion: the only solution was for both young ladies to accompany him back through the
forest
[11:38] Enjah Mysterio: uhoh
[11:38] Anchor Gascoigne: oooh nooo
[11:38] Young Geoffrion: to the other side,
[11:38] Enjah Mysterio: no not a good idea, ladies
[11:38] Young Geoffrion: where he would introduce the underscribed Gascoine
[11:38] Anchor Gascoigne: the "Other Side" or the other side?
[11:38] Young Geoffrion: of the loopy letters,
[11:38] Enjah Mysterio: oooo nooooo
[11:38] Young Geoffrion: and he would tell them
[11:39] Young Geoffrion: to which of them he had addressed his love letter
[11:39] Enjah Mysterio shivers
[11:39] Young Geoffrion: Mira looked at Estrella
[11:39] Young Geoffrion: with the sort of look that says,
[11:40] Enjah Mysterio hopes the look says let's go home sweetie
[11:40] Young Geoffrion: "you think you are more beautiful than I, but I will show you
[11:40] Enjah Mysterio: uhoh
[11:40] Enjah Mysterio: Pride leads the way
[11:40] Young Geoffrion: that I have charmed a young man from a distance"
[11:40] Young Geoffrion: Estrella looked at Mira with a look that said,
[11:41] Young Geoffrion: "You undoubtedly think yourself fairer than me,
[11:42] Young Geoffrion: but when I greet my love with a song, you will realize who is fairer."
[11:42] Enjah Mysterio thinks this cannot end well
[11:42] Young Geoffrion: I looked at them both with a mix of horror and,
[11:42] Young Geoffrion: I must admit it,
[11:42] Young Geoffrion: fascination.
[11:43] Young Geoffrion: They stood up as well,
[11:43] Young Geoffrion: and swept the dew from their skirts
[11:43] Young Geoffrion: and turned to the young man,
[11:43] Young Geoffrion: and invited him to lead the way,
[11:43] Young Geoffrion: I bade them fare well,
[11:44] Young Geoffrion: and without a glance back,
[11:44] Anchor Gascoigne: =========:O
[11:44] Young Geoffrion: they went into the forest
[11:44] Enjah Mysterio dreads the next sentence
[11:44] Anchor Gascoigne: Have they been seen since?
[11:44] Young Geoffrion: There might not have been a next sentence
[11:44] Young Geoffrion: except that many years later,
[11:44] Young Geoffrion: when I was fifteen
[11:45] Enjah Mysterio had imagined "and they were never seen again"
[11:45] Young Geoffrion: and playing on the same lawn, next to the same wood
[11:45] Young Geoffrion: the young courier came down the road
[11:45] Anchor Gascoigne: ooh
[11:45] Young Geoffrion: He greeted me with a laugh and a wave
[11:45] Enjah Mysterio thinks, he never aged?
[11:46] Anchor Gascoigne: botox
[11:46] Enjah Mysterio: lol
[11:46] Young Geoffrion: he had aged, certainly
[11:46] Anchor Gascoigne: he WAS A FRAUD COURIER
[11:46] Anchor Gascoigne: I don't trust those pretty boys.
[11:46] Young Geoffrion: though he was not so old as to have lost his charm
[11:46] Young Geoffrion: I asked him what had become of Mira and Estrella
[11:47] Young Geoffrion: and to which of the two had the letter been addressed?
[11:47] Young Geoffrion: And who was Gascoine? and what had been the fate of my cousins?
[11:48] Enjah Mysterio: yes, we all want to know
[11:48] Enjah Mysterio: Enquiring Minds, you know
[11:48] Young Geoffrion: He smiled and shook his head.
[11:48] Enjah Mysterio: no!
[11:48] Young Geoffrion: "It is a funny thing,
[11:49] Young Geoffrion: that Gascoine was not a name of a person after all
[11:49] Enjah Mysterio: "come with me to the other side of the forest and I will show you your cousins

....==8o"
[11:49] Anchor Gascoigne: They might've been disappointed and run off with a travelling troupe of

performers.
[11:49] Young Geoffrion: but the name of a place
[11:49] Anchor Gascoigne: Ah
[11:49] Young Geoffrion: and that Mira and Estrella, having reached that place
[11:49] Enjah Mysterio: never never land
[11:49] Young Geoffrion: on the other side of the wood,
[11:50] Anchor Gascoigne: They might've been turned into trees
[11:50] Young Geoffrion: had been praised by all the young men for their round faces
[11:50] Young Geoffrion: and their berry lips
[11:50] Young Geoffrion: and their skin as soft as petals
[11:50] Enjah Mysterio: and their elfin ears no doubt
[11:50] Enjah Mysterio: so they became prostitutes?
[11:50] Anchor Gascoigne: Shocking what men do.
[11:50] Young Geoffrion: skin of does
[11:51] Enjah Mysterio: fur of fawns
[11:51] Anchor Gascoigne: no never
[11:51] Anchor Gascoigne: They became queens.
[11:51] Young Geoffrion: And they had each taken a young gascon for a husband
[11:51] Anchor Gascoigne: of twin kings
[11:52] Anchor Gascoigne: and they could never return because...
[11:52] Enjah Mysterio: they were nailed to the floor
[11:52] Young Geoffrion: Mira became a mother of twin boys,
[11:52] Anchor Gascoigne: well they just were too busy
[11:52] Young Geoffrion: and wrote down all the tales that were told in that part of the world
[11:53] Young Geoffrion: and her sons grew up to be couriers
[11:53] Enjah Mysterio: lol
[11:53] Young Geoffrion: and tale tellers
[11:53] Anchor Gascoigne has fallen under Mira's spell.
[11:53] Young Geoffrion: and honey-tongued lovers
[11:54] Young Geoffrion: But Estrella married a sailor
[11:54] Anchor Gascoigne: Her face is as radiant as... a radiator... and her eyes come in a pair, like clogs.
[11:54] Young Geoffrion: and disappeared over the horizon
[11:54] Young Geoffrion: and was never seen again
[11:54] Enjah Mysterio: her face peeks over the horizon each night
[11:54] Enjah Mysterio: the courier is CLEARLY LYING
[11:54] Young Geoffrion: except she wrote me a letter from Africa
[11:54] Anchor Gascoigne: I've got a hill in the way.
[11:54] Enjah Mysterio: he killed them both
[11:54] Anchor Gascoigne: nooo
[11:54] Enjah Mysterio: and he faked the letter!
[11:55] Anchor Gascoigne: He didn't, he didn't.
[11:55] Enjah Mysterio: HE ATE THEM
[11:55] Anchor Gascoigne: He was a deer.
[11:55] Enjah Mysterio: they tasted like berry pies
[11:55] Young Geoffrion: where all she wrote was,
[11:55] Young Geoffrion: "tout seul"
[11:55] Anchor Gascoigne: An enchanted deer and the girls became doe queens
[11:55] Enjah Mysterio: in a loopy hand
[11:55] Enjah Mysterio is aware her imagination is dark
[11:55] Anchor Gascoigne: deer write loopy
[11:56] Enjah Mysterio: yes tough with split hooves
[11:56] Anchor Gascoigne: well known
[11:56] Young Geoffrion: It is a true story,
[11:56] Young Geoffrion: except the part about the deerskin boots
[11:56] Enjah Mysterio: ... and if they have not died, they live there still!
[11:56] Anchor Gascoigne: and the raining girls
[11:56] Enjah Mysterio: and the eating
[11:56] Anchor Gascoigne: They are, I know!
[11:56] Anchor Gascoigne: And they are laughing.
[11:56] Young Geoffrion: It turned out the young courier's name was Gascoine
[11:56] Anchor Gascoigne: ah
[11:57] Young Geoffrion: And had been in love with them both
[11:57] Enjah Mysterio: awwww
[11:57] Enjah Mysterio: a young man's first love(s)
[11:57] Anchor Gascoigne: What tricksters love makes of mere mortals.
[11:57] Young Geoffrion: and was the author of that letter,
[11:58] Young Geoffrion: though he was a gentle boy who would never have hurt anyone
[11:58] Enjah Mysterio: he could not choose, and lost both!
[11:58] Anchor Gascoigne: He wasn't a Mormon, I hope.
[11:58] Young Geoffrion: and lost them both to his friends
[11:58] Enjah Mysterio is saddened
[11:58] Enjah Mysterio: a beautiful tale, ms g
[11:58] Anchor Gascoigne: Well, young Yo had better shy away from him.
[11:58] Young Geoffrion: on the other side of the woods.
[11:58] Enjah Mysterio: delights
[11:59] Anchor Gascoigne: She is wiser, anyway.
[11:59] Young Geoffrion: Gascoine used to visit me often
[11:59] Enjah Mysterio: the young have their wisdom
[11:59] Anchor Gascoigne: Some dew.
[12:00] Young Geoffrion: but he was too much in love with Mira and Estrella.
[12:00] Enjah Mysterio: it rains wisdom
[12:00] Anchor Gascoigne: Some are precipitate.
[12:00] Enjah Mysterio: uhoh
[12:00] Anchor Gascoigne: Still!
[12:00] Young Geoffrion: Still.
[12:00] Enjah Mysterio: the poor young man
[12:00] Young Geoffrion: I don't know,
[12:00] Anchor Gascoigne: He will not find happiness clinging to the past.
[12:00] Young Geoffrion: Imagine how it might have turned out if he had married one,
[12:00] Young Geoffrion: and still loved the other?
[12:01] Enjah Mysterio: or the other way round!
[12:01] Enjah Mysterio: lol
[12:01] Anchor Gascoigne: lol
[12:01] Young Geoffrion: Or both ways around and then through the middle?

Home Again

2009-06-11T13:54:00.000-07:00

Oh, the perils of travel, the joys of return. The grass is overgrown where the sheep could not graze and dust covers the mantel. I am weary, weary from restless change and disappointments, upsets and too-small triumphs, and thirst for intelligent conversation with sober and modest companions. I shall first take care of the letterbox and unpaid bills, then look for me at home in Bodega, where I will lay down my road-tired frame and wait for you.

No Girls Allowed

2009-05-26T21:22:00.000-07:00

In the continued absense of the owner of this blog, I'm posting a link she tweeted whose subject matter is very close to her heart. I'm sure Young can furnish you with a better description when she returns, but for now, may I present on her behalf, No Girls Allowed, a graphic novel of inspiring historical women who overcame societal limits by dressing as men.

HBA's TED Talk: Greening the Ghetto

2009-04-28T02:24:00.000-07:00

I may have disliked school, but I've always loved learning. I'm a learner for learning sake and in a recent post, Young opened my eyes and mind to a great resource for learning on the web - the TED Talks. In her (wonderfully eloquant) post Young not only discussed about the democrotisation of education, but also set myself, Enjah & Osprey a task - watch a selected TED Talk and discuss. I'm not much of a discusser, really - talker yes, discusser no - so my views will no doubt be largely positive & supportive. I can't help it - I was never cut out to be a critic :-)

Young asked me to look over this TED Talk: Majora Carter: Greening the ghetto. In RL I work in the regen field, specifically in sustainable community development, so Madam Geoffrion quite rightly suspected this would tickle my fancy. From the engaging speaker to the joyful message she brought, I LOVED it! Majora's personal, emotional style suited me down to the ground. And her message! How a country as rich and powerful as the US can allow such inequity in the basic quality of its people's lives is a source of shame that will astound future generations. But the energy, drive, determination and potential of humans the world over displayed by Marjora is simply amazing. We waste so much. So much and it's so wrong. But stories like these (and I can point to similar ones here too) are beacons in the dark. Thank you Young, Thank you for my beacon :)

You can watch all the TED Talk videos on YouTube here - I've downloaded a lot via RSS from the main TED.com site and I'm going to watch at least one a day.

TED Talks Challenge

2009-04-24T01:12:00.000-07:00

There is nothing that gives me greater hope for the future than TEDTalksDirector on YouTube.

One of the most profound miracles of the internet age is, I think, the erosion of nearly all barriers to an education. If you were born with an inquiring mind and access to the internet (these are not low barriers, but they are lower than ever before in history) you can obtain for yourself the equivalent of a bachelor of art or science degree, and perhaps a masters. Beginning with Harvard & MIT's Opencourseware materials, English-speaking students and scholars anywhere in the world have access to lecture notes, assignments and readings. Wikipedia and Google Books complement the sudden, massive, participatory democratization of education. I believe these are revolutionary changes, paradigm-shifters from which the entire globe will benefit, on the same scale as the invention of the printing press or the symbolic computing device.

The TED Talks are one symptom of this educational openness. It is a sort of Britain's Best Talent for ideas, where almost every speaker is a Susan Boyd.

Great ideas and great hopes are created by the rich cross-fertilization of symbols, cultures and media that used to require universities (to concentrate global talent) or world travel (to disseminate local attitudes and expectations). TED Talks have bringing some of the best thinking in all fields together every year.

I have listened to some of these talks dozens of times. Neuroanatomist Jill Bolt Taylor's insight into the mind caused by her own stroke has helped me understand religion, the nature of the human mind and reality as we experience it. Bonnie Bassler's secret, social lives of bacteria not only illuminates the physical and chemical reality in which we live, but also the demographic reality that generates these ideas.

But in this post I want to celebrate a more profound mixing, that of science and art, of gender and politics, in a recent lecture by Margaret Wertheim, who crochets coral reefs. Her talk typifies the smart, aware, enlightened approach to knowledge that finds inspiration in every aspect of the world around us, and reveals reality as a blessedly intricate web of ideas and connections, from lowly craft and hobby to higher mathematics.

I believe the fundamental basis for intellectual growth and happiness is participation and creativity. Just to be quite clear that beneath my polite exterior I am an insufferably arrogant individual, I have assigned homework to my readers, at least those who have bothered to make themselves known to me:

Osprey: Emily Levine: A trickster's theory of everything
Enjah: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Creativity, fulfillment and flow
HBA: Majora Carter: Greening the ghetto

I want you to watch these assigned videos and return to me, or post where you will, your views or reviews, reflections, arguments or off-subject comments. I will accept no refusal, but you have no deadline either, and if you find a talk you enjoy better, I will accept that too. Curse me and my strange, jumping bean interests, but I cannot watch smart people talk and not think of you.

Drottningholm Palace

2009-04-21T22:00:00.000-07:00

I paid a visit to this 18th Century roleplaying sim, very nicely conceived and carefully built, with considerable effort put into its construction and gameplay. They are welcoming though expect a high level of historical accuracy in behaviour, which I respect. I met a young lady in front of the palace who adopted me as her junior brother returned from study in Paris, who then demanded I change my appearance (taller, stronger, handsomer, manlier) and became impatient when I did not achieve an immediate transformation to her liking. When she was ultimately satisfied, she became just too interested in my personal life. Perhaps it is my advanced age, but if I am to roleplay, I prefer to do so at my leisure and in privacy. This is a beautiful build and the other players deserve as much thought given to my appearance and character as they have given to theirs. I might return but perhaps not as Young Geoffrion, and not as a pup. I wish the young lady all the best fortune and happiness, and sincerely hope we shall meet again, though she may not recognize me when we do.

Sepulchre

2009-04-01T13:45:00.000-07:00

This novel by Kate Mosse was recommended to me by Enjah and HBA, and though I meant to borrow it from the library before my trip, in the end I did not have time (Anil's Ghost will be overdue when I return to Los Angeles on April 18) and packed Laurence Stern's Tristram Shandy and a recent biography of Charlotte Cibber (the actor's daughter who famously dressed as a man on stage and off) in its stead. But Sepulchre was on display at an airport kiosk within sight of my departure gate, in paperback, so I took it as sign. Figuratively speaking of course.
I finished it last night. Set in Paris and the Languedoc with characters and story arcs in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with two related female lead characters guided by a strong tarot motif and supernatural events, the story has obvious similarities to my own memoirs (or the other way around, but I naturally think of it this way). I was delighted to discover there is still a readership for this kind of material, for I suspect that the gothic thriller is an outmoded genre, leaving us with today's flat, action-filled mongrels like the Da Vinci Code. (This story was clearly written for the Dan Brown crowd, and that book's theme is even explained in precis by one character to another.) On the other hand I became alarmed at the number of similarities in the tales: especially when Leonie says to Auric Baillard, "You are not French!" for I said the very words to Madame Boucher! But in the end it is a quite different tale, and told in a different manner.
The author prefers to endlessly inform us what her characters are thinking when one would be happier if she just showed us in dialogue. The reader doesn't need to be bludgeoned with symbolism and portent. Indeed the dialogue moves the story along quite well on its own, but her exposition lacks art. One suspects there is no poetry in the author, no delight taken in setting a scene, dwelling on a detail, exploring a moment. The story gets from point A to point B in a very businesslike fashion. One looks in vain for moments that shimmer, that offer a sudden insight into the character or place. But for all her characters' churning thoughts, fears, doubts, hesitations, guessing and supposing, the book would have been half as long, and better by far. At last I found the story predictable and contrived, the language awkward, and I finished it to better study what I must learn to avoid myself in my writing. It was instructive.

Creative Life

2009-03-27T19:58:00.000-07:00

Elle Coyote's recent posts on Deliberate Practice and Talent is Overrated have put me in a contemplative mood about what I am doing, or attempting to do, in this blog, and in the rest of my life. I left my comments there and hope they didn't sound condescending, because I want to continue them here. I have had the extreme good fortune to be granted the circumstances to earn my living from a creative life, and feel always the desire to share that enjoyment. That desire has led to years of practice and some teaching, plus a lifetime of deep appreciation for the creativity of others, which makes me perhaps unreasonably fearless in my opinions.

Talent is overrated. To me, that is a tremendously liberating and encouraging concept. Anyone can cook, as the chef said to the rat, indeed! But one must want to cook enough to overcome obstacles life sets up, and enjoy doing it enough to practice it at every opportunity for years. Practice, not talent, is the only indicator of success. And I think this applies in every field of human activity. The best barristers are those who breathe and dream and debate the law, the best athletes those who set themselves a challenge and do not rest until they have accomplished it.

I began drawing at the age of ten, and it made me different from the other children I knew, enough to feel I had carved out a space for myself, a domain under my own control, where I imagined I had talent. It was all the impetus I needed to apply myself to drawing every day, out of uncritical pleasure and no little measure of self-delusion. But with practice I became better. And others began to notice, too. The practice came long before anyone said I had talent. I might not have continued without that attention (such a needy child!) but I was proud of my skill and wanted to spend every waking minute improving it. I drifted through my lessons, paying scant attention to anyone trying to teach me anything, including my drawing tutors, because I was busy experimenting and trying new things on my own, and always working at drawing. The only thing I loved as much was reading.

In my case, the love of learning and doing overcame the pleasure of finishing, so my accomplishments were personal and inwardly directed. My art was no one else's business, and I never took my career seriously. As a result I drifted to other things and for a long time lost touch with my creative life. It is a habit that must be nurtured, even after it is mastered. Ultimately, I fell into representing artists and managing other's careers, out of love and a need to feel useful.

Now I am at a new stage in my career, confident that if I chose to, I could very easily resurrect those drawing and painting habits, and make up for the time I have lost. Indeed I know the business inside out, what galleries and collectors need and desire from their artists, how the bubbling ecosystem of museum and curator and critic and publisher and auction house thrives, the usefulness of advertising and public relations and cash flow. I know so much that the fun has quite gone along with the possibility of failure and the desire to take risks.

I think that is why I am now writing instead of drawing. I always wrote self-consciously, fearfully even, and fitfully. I know I am not very good. I certainly do not have talent. Every page fills me with self-loathing and doubt. The possibility of failure or worse, mediocrity, is real and yet, thrilling. It makes me fearless. I want to try everything: make all the mistakes and shortcuts that gets one lost in the woods. I am determined to be proud of those rough edges, shameless for the artless mistakes, and so I am not hiding my first drafts, but posting them for you who are foolish enough to read them. But I also look forward to the necessary improvement that will come from writing every day, that after even so short a time I am beginning to feel. The process is fascinating, cathartic, human and divine at the same time.

I try to apply the lessons I taught my own students who struggled to capture a likeness. Work on the big shapes first, ignore the details. Stay loose and gestural, never erase your mistakes. Don't worry about what the first or second or tenth drawing looks like, because no one will see it. But give every drawing all of your attention and think about what you are doing. Set yourself a goal: a drawing every day, or twenty sketchbooks a year. Copy the work of great artists, draw the shoes and crumpled paper and people around you, block your ears to the critics you live with (including the ones that live in your head) and never stop working for anything, including natural disasters and personal loss. Ben Shahn wrote in the Education of an Artist, "draw and draw and paint and read, there is no content of knowledge that is not pertinent to the work you will want to do."

Theatre de la Foire

2009-03-26T09:40:00.000-07:00

With one hand in his and the other around the little figurine in my pocket, I followed my uncle Adraste as he rushed from the cemetery directly to the Fair of Saint Laurent, the Theatre de la Foire, where the satire of La Sylphide had been mounted by our competitors with much success. A crowd had already gathered, and he hoisted me upon his shoulders to get a better view of the stage erected on the balcony against a false facade above us.

"They're already attracting bigger crowds than Monsieur Biancolleli," said a man in an extravagantly floppy straw hat who had edged over in our direction. He lifted one side of the brim and smiled up at me. "Buongiorno, Principessa Yolande Rat-Catcher."

I cried out with delight.

"Shh, you must not give me away, or I shall have to have to go on stage and apologize for my own rhymes."

"You can't possibly be worried," said my uncle, "they can't be as good as yours."

"Do I look worried?" he asked in a quaking voice, "But you know, Panard's songs are memorable, and Fagan writes remarkable French dialogue for an Irishman."

"Not Charles-François Panard, that merry drunkard..."

"Ah, I see you know him too! I say, Adraste, you keep the very best company!"

"He bought an edition of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera from me last month."

"Excellent! You will join us afterward, then, for dinner." Monsieur Biancolelli smacked his lips at me.

"But are you not incognito?"

"Good God, not from Panard! From the Riccoboni's!"

A horn fanfare announced the beginning of the performance, in the same manner as our own musicians in the Theatre Italien, but then died away on a flat note. The horn player stood up, raised his instrument over his head, reached in the bell and extracted an enormous piece of lady's underwear, then bowed to the delighted audience before tossing it to a young lady who appeared on the balcony. She caught it neatly, inspected it carefully, then declaimed,

We present our satire with honest intentions,
Aiming to delight with emulated inventions,
For it takes rare talent to be the original creator
Of verses so bad, even parody's a hurdle
When your model's on stage in that marginal theatre
run by the italienne who fits in this girdle.

"Monsieur Biancolelli, it's scandalous! She's insulting your verses!"

"Shh, I know, I know; I wrote her lines myself. And helped to fund the production."

My uncle and I burst out laughing.

"You know, I have probably made a terrible mistake. But it's hard not to write satire, and the more they laugh here, the more they'll want to come in and see what's been parodied. Besides, Panard needs the money."

The performance was an utter farce, with an obese sylph who made the entire balcony shudder, and the gnomide a dwarf made up as an old woman; Eraste a lecher and Arlequin a drunkard. The palace of the Sylphides was a tavern, and Clarice, the neglected fiancee of besotted Eraste, made an appearance as a laundress, boxed her sylph-sotted betrothed about the ears, then pulled him off stage to the applause of the audience. But the verses were very funny, and we laughed without stop, who would have cried if we didn't know M. Biancolelli had had his hand in it.

We dined that night al fresco at a guinguette, a wine shop just on the edge of the city, with stout Monsieur Panard and wiry Fagan, his collaborator, and with Monsieur Biancolelli, a few unmarried members of the company de la foire, and one or two other performers of the Theatre Italien.

"Before Riccoboni won the Hotel Borgogne, we performed with you in the fairs, but a permanent home has our levity undone, and our rhyme no longer compares. " said M. Biancolelli as a toast.

M. Panard stood up to reply, . "my friends, all things in this world shall pass; this is a law even heaven holds dear. If you doubt it now just watch my glass, for the wine it holds shall soon disappear." And he held up the most enormous wineglass of eau-du-vie, bowed to us and drained it with pleasure.

Fagan took his turn, raised his glass and addressed M. Biancolelli gravely. "Of rhyming levity you do us accuse, to some we seem to play the buffoons, but the lightest humour can do more than amuse, making ridiculous the very thing it lampoons."

The entire table gave a long, pleasurable groan at this opening volley, for it announced the continuation of la guerre des vers, which had been waged between the members of the two companies for decades. M. Biancolelli added, "If Fagan wears a sullen air, and Panard never learned to pout, 'twas only because Fagan was spare, or because Panard was stout."

They went on like this all night, back and forth, as the wine shop filled with customers attracted by the impromptu jousting, and the delighted inn-keeper bustling around refilling jugs and glasses, turning any horizontal surface he and his wife could find into a table. Merchants and students, tradesmen and apprentices were all seated together, and a gentle couple who would not identify themselves and whose livery we did not recognize, also took part, adding a couplet or two of their own. Everyone was in the highest, most excitable spirits, interrupting each other with laughter and impertinent remarks.

I wandered about the tables and chairs, content to quietly study everyone who had gathered under the stars, until I caught sight of an old man in a three-tailed wig I thought I recognized, seated at the very edge of the company where the warm lantern light and laughter faded into the cold night air, and who seemed to watch me with glittering eyes. I fled back into the crowd, that was now singing le chevalier du Guet, and clung to my uncle, then fell asleep in his arms.

Émilie, marquise du Châtelet

2009-03-24T20:29:00.000-07:00

I won't try to repeat what you can easily read about Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du Châtelet except in the briefest of manner. She published her own highly technical Institutions de physique exploring the work of Leibniz on space, time and force, and her translation of Newton's Principia Mathematica as well as numerous scientific papers. She corresponded with Leibniz, Bernoulli, Jonathan Swift, Bolingbroke and Frederick the Great of Prussia. She conducted experiments on the nature of light and radiation and the conservation of energy. She was the only woman that the decidedly unmathematical Voltaire ever found whose intelligence matched his own, and he became her devoted lover for fifteen years. They read each other's works and their comments can be found in the margins of their manuscripts. She used her mathematical skills at the card table in Versailles when they ran out of money. Together they collected a library of 21,000 books.

She was an example of a woman intelligent enough to recognize the hypocritical rules of social conduct were for other people, to refuse to accept convention, and to want to make an impact on the world. To this end, she had a plan and worked at it throughout her life, without giving up her passion for life and for love, and her conscious pursuit of happiness.

Emilie de Châtelet was a sharp-witted woman with raven hair and deep black eyes, easy and polite in conversation. I met her once at her Chateau de Cirey and she told me when she was young, her father trained her to fence and ride, and that she sang opera and enjoyed acting in Voltaire's productions on their own Little Theatre that still stands today.

While the other women of her day studied men, she studied books. I have always deplored not the injustice of societies that maintain inequal opportunity for men and women, but the profound human wealth these practices squander. How many women with minds as quick as Emilie's have been buried by their fathers and husbands and childbirth, or drowned in the tides of social censure? Emilie was born with the position, wealth and good fortune to rise to intellectual heights: these were gifts she recognized and did not waste.

Nova Albion Parade

2009-03-22T14:07:00.001-07:00

This Can Happen to You

2009-03-22T01:59:00.001-07:00

I don't know how, but it can.

Saint Lazare

2009-03-20T19:53:00.000-07:00

The Paris of my childhood was a decaying, gloomy city, ill at ease and dangerous. The acrid smell of human waste, blackened vegetables, hides and sweat hung everywhere. Buildings rotted from within and collapsed. Not far from les Halles was a timbered house whose first storey had subsided halfway into the mud; it was still inhabited by fifty people. The poor lived and died in the road and the alleys, pressed into every corner and nook and refuse hole. The wealthy built walls and went everywhere with handkerchief and violets at their nose. It is no accident that perfume was a Parisian invention. Only main roads were paved, and those poorly, with open sewers and slick, uneven stones. We were nearly a million inhabitants, squeezed into a blighted space abandoned by the King, who did not bother to disguise his hatred of us, and forgotten by God, who sent disease and the devil to feed on our multitudes. Plague broke out frequently, and houses were burned down with their living inhabitants inside to limit the spread of pestilence. Bands of cutthroats and thieves preyed on the widowed and orphaned, and armies of beggars extended their own kingdom and governance over large parts of the city.

Beneath the ponderous weight of this restless humanity, the dead slept in their shrouds, jostled into mass graves and fossa, layered and compressed, so that they sometimes burst through basement walls or erupted into ill-placed wine caverns. They reeked and exuded their mustiness at night, and it was against that noisesome vapour that we shut our windows when we slept. We had only forty odd cemeteries to serve the recently dead, though some of these contained crypts that snaked in long, dark passages over vast areas underground. The remains of a poor soul in a common grave would be lucky to spend ten years in the ground, before being exhumed to make way for new arrivals. No one knew or cared what happened to their bones. The rich funded the decoration of the churches and the enrichment of the clergy; they were granted sanctified plots where they built their own cities of tombs and sepulchres. Though my mother was unlucky in life, in death she was granted a tomb of her own at Saint Lazare, purchased by my father for himself, for he had no ties left to his ancestral home. It was more space than she ever occupied while she lived.

Saint Lazare was as crowded as all the other cemeteries of Paris, where funerals or interments were popular public spectacles, where the grave-makers performed with skulls and bones for the amusement of the crowds, and hungry coffin-sellers plied their wares. Charlatans sold tonics and plasters made of the shrouds of supposed saints, and guides led bands of wide-eyed gagglers from monument to monument, telling lurid tales of the unhappy inhabitant. My mother was buried along a quiet, narrow laneway of dull, country nobility, and when my uncle and I slipped out of the hot living crowd into the shadowed stone passage, it was like moving from one world to another. Here the vanity of the inhabitants had raised monumental structures and bizarre forms, for we were not so far removed from the medieval Dance of Death, and skeletons in stone appeared everywhere in bas relief and high relief, and in the round, waiting upon stone ladies sleeping in veils and portraits of men in outmoded fashions.

My mother's mausoleum was a simple low house built of rusticated stone, a pair of doric pillars on either side of five steps leading to the bronze door and a low, undecorated frieze. My uncle produced a large key from his pocket, and unlocked the massive door. The sound of the lock turning rung out in that silent place: we were far from the church and the common yard, and there were no birds or trees in sight, only solemn piles of carved stone, obelisks, crosses and megaliths.

"Your father would have been buried beside her," he said to me as the door swung outward, "but his body was never found."

We passed into the dark interior. In the wall at the rear was a small, high window that gave the only light, and beneath it lay two tombs, one obviously vacant. On my mother's tomb were the wilted remains of flowers crumbling to dust. My uncle swept them away with his sleeve, and I laid in their place the lilies I had cut from his tiny garden behind the printing shop. The air was cold and still, and I thought of my mother's soft body pressed to those icy stones and shivered. She was separated from me by those stones forever, and I knew that no power could bring her back.

There was nothing more for us to do there, and my uncle was in a silent mood. Presently we turned and left, and he pushed the heavy bronze door back in place with a metallic thud and struggled to turn the key in the lock, that had opened so easily.

I felt a prickling on my nape and turned to find a strange man watching me while my uncle yanked and pressed on the latchkey. He was dressed at the height of fashion, in a rocquelaure and slate-coloured moire full-trimmed silk coat with large decent cuffs and buttons of hammered silver. He tucked his hands in the waistband of his breeches, ostentatiously displaying the gilded hilt of his sword and pendulant sword-knot that dangled on the ground. His cane hung negligently from his right arm, also trailing against the stone pavement. His waistcoat also was fringed in silver, his breeches were of dove satin and his stockings the same. On his head he wore a large, grave, decently powdered three-tailed wig, and a flamboyant travelling hat decorated with black lace.

I had not seen anyone when we went in, so that I had the impression this vision had simply appeared out of thin air. His face was smooth, and his lip curled in a disagreeable sneer, but his eyes sparkled with a lively amusement, that I did not feel alarmed. I made a small curtsy and he gave me a slight bow, bending at his waist stiffly and nodding his head with his hand to his hat. I tugged on my uncle's coat, but he was swearing at the intransigent lock and had not noticed our remarkable companion.

The strange man held out his ungloved, closed hand in my direction. He had long, slender fingers, fastidiously clean nails, and several large silver rings. At his invitation I touched a prominent knuckle and his fingers uncurled, revealing a tiny bronze figure reposing there. He indicated silently that I take it, and when I plucked it from his palm, the metal felt as hot as if it had come from an oven. It was a tiny man, in a pose like the famous Dying Gaul of Pergamon, no longer than my thumb, and as detailed and perfect in form as any sculptured saint I have yet seen in a cathedral. But I did not think it represented any saint, for it was as naked and immodest as a slave.

The strange man put his long finger to his sneering lips to command my silence, but I turned to tug on my uncle's coat, who exclaimed with an expelled breath as the bolt shot home. "Uncle Adraste, may I...?" But I never finished my question, for when I turned back the strange man had vanished.

"I can almost smell Madame Boucher's crêpes, can't you? Shall we hurry back before it gets too late? Did you say something, Yolande?"

But I slipped the little man in my pocket and put my warm hand in my uncle's, and said nothing.

The Old Frog and the Sea

2009-03-20T11:52:00.000-07:00

If meditation were all it took to achieve Enlightenment, frogs would be Buddhas.

Ranida the frog lives in an old well that supplies sweet water to a mountain temple. He loves his home, shaded by cool ferns and moistened by the mountain mists. He spends his time teaching his companion, a carp who swims at the bottom of the well, about the world above water, about the bright sunlight sparkling like diamonds in the dew, the stars and the wind, meadows of grass and forests of bamboo. But his friend is incapable of understanding or appreciating the splendors of dry land, where food is hard to find and not nearly as tasty.

One day a turtle stumbles by, and Ranida invites him to stay and enjoy paradise with him. But the turtle looks around with a cynical eye and scoffs, “This hardly compares to the Sea. All the waters of the world pour endlessly into that place, where they neither decrease in drought nor rise in floods.”

Ranida has never heard of the Sea, nor have his neighbors, but they send him to the local temple to ask the frog monks about it. Of course, the Sea, they pretend to be wise, but they know it only from their books. Join us and we’ll take you there. Ranida becomes a junior monk, and studies meditation, qi gong, kung fu. As he labors his desire to visit the Sea grows, and he begins to ask who has actually been there, if any intend to travel in that direction and when they will be leaving. Soon his questions cause so much unrest in the monastery, he comes to the attention of the abbot who sends him away to a master toad living alone in a wilderness gulley; this master will teach him how to reach the Sea.

Full of hope, Ranida departs on his journey. He must cross raging rivers, rescue helpless tadpoles from the clutches of snakes and cranes, meet salamanders and newts, who introduce the psychedelic wonders of microscopic pond life.

Master Toad is a trickster and a magician, a master of escapes and spells. But he is also the keeper of real, powerful secrets of the world, such as the secret of immortality. When Ranida finally finds Master Toad, he is taught that in order to reach the Sea one must give up what one loves most.

A great storm brews and rain falls in torrents. The gulley is threatened with flooding. Ranida rushes back to save his master but finds the toad will not leave this place of danger. As the waters rise and the flood approaches, Ranida must decide to flee or stay. In the end he overcomes his terror of floods and returns to stay with the Master. Amid lightning and thunder they are together swept up in the torrent. The old Toad cries, “The Sea is inside you. You must eliminate yourself in order to let it flood into your being and carry you away!” And he expires, whispering, “The Sea, the Sea!”

Ranida is stunned. All is lost. He clambers onto a bit of flotsam and is carried out on the raging waters, in despair. He no longer wants to get to the Sea, he just longs to return to his beautiful well, and enjoy his happy days with his carp companion.

But when the day breaks, he discovers a sight before him that he never imagined. A wide open ocean, the sun shining on its glittering surface, and the bit of flotsam to which he clings is his old friend the turtle, returned to the sea.

I wrote this in 2005, and titled it Hidden Dragonfly, Crouching Frog, but abandoned it when I learned Dreamworks was creating Kung Fu Panda, and was reminded of it when Enjah asked for dancing amphibians.

The View from My Window

2009-03-15T21:20:00.000-07:00

Looking east over the Bolinas Marina.

Looking west toward Cowell along the inland waterway.

When I first visited Bodega with Salazar Jack, my draw distance was at a minimum setting, and I fell in love with what seemed to be a quiet riverine valley. When I returned to build, I discovered to my surprise that my lovely mountain view is really dotted with boxy builds. Ah well, being near-sighted has its advantages, and changing draw distance is more effective than a topiary screen.

Major construction is now complete, with a little texture touch-up yet to do. At least I wanted to get this much done before leaving for China; I didn't want to be a bad neighbour and leave an unsightly mess in my adopted home. The interior is cold and bare but decorating may just have to wait. I may still do a bit of landscaping just to tidy up a bit outside. That will mean terraces, because I am working with intractable granite. At least I am building on firm, igneous ground.

Construction Underway

2009-03-13T15:49:00.001-07:00

Construction of my new residence is now underway in Bodega; first storey walls and half the columns have gone up. The rest should move along quickly. The textures seem a little soft: there are only eight so far, plus one for shadows on the ground, all at 512x512. I daren't make 'em much larger, or one will spend half a day just waiting to see what I put so much effort into: custom renderings of the elevations. However, after the major construction is complete, I may find ways to reduce the number and size of textures and selectively increase the resolution for important parts and details.
You may notice the window don't open. That will be corrected in time.
Naturally the interior is stripped bare. Decorating will be a project all on its own. As the exterior is a neo-classical doric order, I'm thinking Empire or Sheridan, and I have a secret fondness for Biedermeier, but that's getting ahead of myself at this stage.
Still on track for completion by early summer, though it's always summer in Bodega!

My Mother

2009-03-11T23:57:00.000-07:00

This memory is somehow out of order. I think I was much younger than eight, but it is confused with a time when I had already spent some time at the Comedie Italienne. I haven't yet explained how my father met my mother in London, her own short-lived stage career, or passing, but all these I learned about later in life. I only understood she was not there when I was a child.

"But Yolande, your mother is dead."

"When will she come back?"

"One does not come back after one dies, child."

"Why not? Does Mama not want to come back?"

"Dear no, I am sure Mama would come back if she could."

"Why won't she come back? Doesn't she love Yolande?"

"Mama is in heaven, where she watches over you every day."

"She watches me?"

"But of course! She makes sure you are well and that nothing bad will ever happen to you. You see she loves you very much."

"If she can see me, why can't I see her? Why is she hiding?"

"But she doesn't hide from you. She has left her body down here, on earth and her soul has gone up to heaven."

"Where is her body then? Can I see it? Is she beautiful?"

"We buried her in the cemetery at St Lazare, where we go for walks on Sunday."

"Her body is in the cemetery? She didn't want to take it to heaven?"

"Yes, dear, but it was too heavy to take to heaven."

"All her hair and clothes and cheeks and fingers, too?"

"Everything is buried in her grave."

"She didn't take anything to heaven?"

At this my uncle became impatient, and blinked at me from behind his thick spectacles. "She took her sweetness and her love with her to heaven."

"How can she see me then?"

"Child?"

"If she left her eyes in the cemetery how can she see me anymore?"

I put my hands over my eyes, for I felt tears welling up and I did not want my Uncle to watch them fall. He was wrong. My mother would come back and take me with her to the cemetery. I did not want to listen to his stories any longer, about her soul and about heaven. "She's not in heaven. I do not believe you. I think she is hiding in the grave and doesn't want me to see her because she is old and ugly now."

My uncle said nothing, but gazed on me with sadness. I knew he wanted to put his arms around me and draw me to him, but cruelly I stood away and would not look at him. I would let no one love me. I was a sad, cold girl whose mother left her and went down into the ground. That's where she lived and that is where I would live too, one day. My uncle touched me on my arm, a loving, tentative touch that sought to enfold me in his embrace. I was so miserable, because I loved him, and longed for the smell of his leather waistcoat and perfumed hair, even the familiar, warm smell of tobacco that hung on his fingertips and moustache. I wanted to throw my arms around his neck and curl my fingers into his damp hair and comfort him. But I saw my mother living alone in that cold room beneath the cemetery, alone and strange, not missing me, not seeing me, not talking to me. The stone floor was damp and covered in earth, and there were roots and grubs, and she was barefoot, dirty, and always hungry. Dark circles around her eyes made them seem larger, more luminous in the dark. Her clothes hung limp and soiled, and I did not understand why she did not hear me when I prayed at night to her. She was mad, like little Betinna's grandmother, muttering and lisping, except she never smiled, and I could not hear my name on her pale lips. I did not want to believe in heaven when my mother was in such darkness, and I could not hope for the happiness and warmth that my Uncle wanted to wrap me in. I believe I wanted to hurt him. I cried and squirmed out of his reach, and flung myself on my bed. After a few minutes he got up quietly and left my room, softly closing the door behind him.

The moon came up and cast a ray of silver light into my room, throwing my Polchinello into a grinning silhouette. Perhaps that is what death was like, I thought, after you take your hand out of the puppet and it dangles like a rag, still grinning for no reason. I imagined my soul was the hand of my mother and she had withdrawn it from me, and hung me from a nail. Sometimes I would dance and curtsey and laugh, but that was when my mother's hand was in me, wiggling my puppet hands and masked face. At night, in bed, I lay silent and still, without feeling. Once I was alone, I did not feel sad, or sorry, or angry. I was a stone, an abandoned doll. I would wait until the play started again in the morning, and a commanding hand entered me when the sun came up and returned me to life.

I slipped off my bed and dragged a chair over to Mr. Punch, as my Uncle liked to call him. His round eye stared back at me, insolent like a dog who knows he has done something shocking on your floor and dares you to say something about it. It gleamed like the eye of a fish at the market, big as saucers. I unhooked him and the heavy wooden head flopped over. Lazy man! I put my hand inside and screwed my finger into the socket in his neck. Live! I make you live! Dance! Mr. Punch, bow to the left. Now bow to the right. Continenza left, continenza right, cambiomento left, meza volta and ripresa. Who is your lovely dancing partner? Yolande with the fair face and the fetching yellow stockings. Why you make a lovely pair, surely you will marry one day? What? You are already married? And so young! Ah, you are married to someone else, is that it, Mr. Punch? But where is your wife, and won't she be jealous of beautiful Yolande? Ah, your wife is dead! You beat her to death in the market. Bad man, have you no shame? But you gave her a beautiful funeral? Ripresa backward and volta tonda right. I think you are a scoundrel, Sir, and I send you to the gallows. I pulled my hand out of the grinning puppet and let his head fall backward. Still standing on the chair, I let him drop to the floor where his nose struck with a loud crack. Then I let myself fall in the same way, as if every muscle in my body were made of cloth.

My uncle rushed in, for my head had struck the floor boards so soundly above his study it awoke him from his nap. He threw open my door with a great cry and rushed to my side, immediately pulling me into his embrace and smothering me in kisses, while calling angrily for Madame Bouchard to fetch a doctor. He did not notice that his heel was crushing the puppet's face. I was bleeding great quantities of blood from my head, and they could not find the wound, even though they passed their fingers over the sore spot and made me cry out several times. Madame Bouchard made little high-pitched yells of alarm until they saw I was still breathing. I tried to feel nothing. I tried to stay dead, but instead a great hot wave rolled up from the bottom of my being and washed over me in salty waves, causing me to tremble and shake. I cried and cried, and crushed my uncle's face into mine, scratching my cheek on his whiskers. He cried too, and we clung together, lonely and thankful, who meant more to each other than any other thing in the world.

The next day we went to the cemetery together.

World Builder

2009-03-10T11:27:00.000-07:00

A lovely video.

The Return of Doctor Fluxus

2009-03-09T11:14:00.000-07:00

I had hoped to put off this bit of my past until later, for my relationship with Doctor Theophrastus Fluxus is a difficult one, but my friends have wanted to see the return of his Alchemickal Theatre, and I promised to see what I could do. To my utter mortification he has managed to insult nearly everyone I know. Enjah thinks him a charlatan, Osprey considers him dangerous, and HBA is ready to run him through on his enormous....
In fact I did not expect him to heed my call as we did not part on the best of terms. For many years I was his student and acolyte. He bamboozled half of Asia, but he protected me from harm and taught me much worth knowing, though more from his bad example than from his good.
His origins are a mystery, and if you listen to his voice, there's a blend of strange accents; not a one sounds genuine. I cannot say with certainty if he is man or ghost, or even male or female. No one has seen him without his mask or out of his cloak. His own proclivities are perhaps best left unexamined!
He claims arcane knowledge and alchemical powers, and like me he is several centuries old, yet he has the wisdom of a bug and is always getting into scrapes, usually of his own making, and I don't know why I always agree to rescue him. I suppose he is the only one left with whom I share much of a past, so for good or for bad, I count him a friend. He can annoy a saint, but he's a fascinating creature.

Proof of Concept

2009-03-05T13:05:00.001-08:00

Orthographic rendered images applied to simple prims, scaled and positioned to match my Blender model. It works about as expected, but I can fix problems in the corners if I can render shadows without rendering the column that casts the shadow.** I may have to start digging into Blender nodes.
Of course the final model will have thin walls and real openings for doors and windows, avoiding evil overlapping z-buffered alpha images as textures. And columns. Preferably sculpties with multiple level-of-detail problems fixed.
See? Spend a year or two in Second Life and even a Baroque antique like myself will start speaking like a native.

**Update. There's a button in the material render pipeline panel for "Only Cast Shadows", Hooray! Blender nodes may lay undisturbed for the moment (better to let sleeping dogs lie).

Building Progress Revisited

2009-03-04T18:02:00.000-08:00

The model is finished. So are my lavender seeds. Does any one need homunculi helpers, or shall I let them melt away with the next rain?

Next I shall render some test textures to see how they look on a few prims in SL, and test some texture-rotation scripts. If all looks well, it's back to Blender for detailed texturing and baking, and then I must give some thought to decorating.

Building Progress

2009-03-03T13:14:00.000-08:00

My little wooden construction workers have been busy, and added a second storey, mutules, mouldings, and a balcony during the night. Must run out to buy more lavender seeds for them. Doors and windows are next.

Construction has Begun!

2009-03-03T00:31:00.001-08:00

Well, not yet in Second Life, but I am laying foundations in Blender. Here is a progress report.

Doors and windows are next, a rooftop balcony and a frieze, then I shall texture and bake the lights and shadows into the image files, bring those into Second Life and rebuild a lower resolution version with prims.

Why? Because plywood gives me splinters, and I want all my textures ready before the first prim goes up.

New Home

2009-03-02T16:16:00.000-08:00

Mere minutes from Osprey and Enjah, I am starting to get settled in Bodega. No doubt I shall shift around a bit as I experiment with building styles and living arrangements, but I have staked my claim and erected four doric columns to mark my territory in the meanwhile. I am very much looking forward to residing so close to friends, and being a part of the Jack Phyneas Memorial Trust. I look upon the move as a new chapter in my life, with all the excitement that goes with it. Permit me a few months to settle in (I am known to take my time), then allow me to invite you to a party in celebration of the new digs.

I have much to do over the next months, in no particular order of importance, but a little at a time:

1. build a house (trees and tents suit my nomadic friends, but I need an atrium, a porch and a library for my comfort!);

2. hold an art exhibition at Enjah Mysterio's gallery in Nova Albion;

3. locate Dr. Fluxus and the remains of his Alchemickal Theatre to make a machinima with Osprey;

4. establish an architectural practice;

5. continue my memoirs and move them to their own website.

6. resurrect some long-neglected friendships.

Trying it on for size...

2009-03-02T12:41:00.000-08:00

What do you think? A worthwhile venture to undertake, or more trouble than it's worth?

TEMPIETTO CLASSICAL HOMES

Features:

· Copy and modify privileges
· House aligner system
· Teleports
· Home control system
· Lockable doors
· Security system
· Media controls
· Instructions
· Easily rezzed
· Copyright safe

Most models include:

· Working fireplaces
· Lighting systems
· Basements, Crypts or Graveyards
· Day and Night textures
· Optional phantoms, poltergeists or kitchen gods
· 100 prim, 200 prim, 300 prim models

Furniture also available.

The Eleventh Place

2009-03-01T21:15:00.000-08:00

Madame Boucher brought dinner to us, cotriade with crepes, a seafood stew, and gignot d'agneau, shallots in cream which were better than anything I have ever eaten before or since. My uncle Adraste and I ate in silence, until I insisted he continue my father's tale.

"We played cards in his library for several evenings. He showed me how his mysterious opponent arrayed his atouts on the table, and I tried to understand some reason or pattern behind it: six cards arranged in a hexagon, three more cards above that and one final card at the top pointing to one's opponent. Your father was convinced there was some meaning in it."

"Was there?"

"Yes. It was the Sephiroth. I recognized it as soon as he dealt it, and went to his books and showed him an illustration of the figure in Oedipus Aegypticus."

"Can you show me?"

As Madame Boucher cleared away the dishes, my uncle went to his bureau and found a sheet of paper, scratched out something with his quill, and returned to the table. He had drawn ten circles in the same arrangement he described, connected by lines.

I said, "It's marelle, hopscotch, but with circles instead of squares. Look, here is heaven and here is earth. You just drew it upside down."

My uncle looked at me with astonishment. "Yes, earth should be pointing down, that's right. That is Malchut, the entrance, the Kingdom. And up here, close to you, is Kether, the unmoving centre of all things, the Crown, the infinite light. These ten circles are the different ways man may understand God, and they are also the different means by which God created man and all the universe. In between Kether and Mulchut are Revelation and Reason, Mercy and Judgment, with Balance in the centre, Endurance and Magnificence below, and here, just above the Kingdom is the Translator who makes the word known to man. Each one is a world of its own, and together they are called the Tree of Life, or the face of God. The four that make up the trunk represent Father, Son, Holy Ghost and Man; these ones are Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the Moon, arranged between the fixed heavens and the ever-changing elements. Now if we place your cards in this pattern, we can tell a story with them."

I ran to my room and took my father's playing cards from their hiding place, and brought them to my uncle. "Show me where to put them."

"Just play the atouts. If you deal a suit card, a wand or a cup, yes like that one, place it here on the discard pile.

I dealt out my cards onto the circles my uncle had drawn.

"There's one missing, here."

My uncle's face darkened. "Why do you say that?"

"If you hop here, then you're out." I pointed to the empty place directly beneath the Crown, where two lines crossed.

"There is an eleventh sefira, the Abyss, in which all phenomena are stored, undifferentiated, unified. It is Pluto, the underworld, the fallen angels. But it is a null place, and it is never drawn in the diagram."

"You mean there's nothing there?"

"Something's there alright, but it could be anything or anyone. It's changeable, it means something different to everyone, every time."

I studied the drawing, and in my head ran the rhyme we always sang when we leaped from square to square.

Down by the riverside the green grass grows,
Where some walk and some tiptoe.
She sings, she sings so sweet,
She calls over to someone across the street.
Give her a square, give her a level,
Give her a compass and send her to the devil.

"Is that where my father went?" I blurted, pointing to the grinning satyr dealt into the eleventh place.

Madame Boucher returned with our sweet rum-flavoured gâteau nantais and nearly dropped them when she saw the cards spread over our table. "Dear God, Monsieur Adraste, what are you doing! In front of the child! It's blasphemy to show her such things."

And deaf to my entreaties and cries, which only made her more determined, she swept up my father's deck and would have thrown them in the fire if my uncle had not protested. He took them from her and slipped them in his waistcoat pocket with what I imagined was a small sigh of relief.

The Nest That Sailed The Sky

2009-02-28T22:26:00.000-08:00

The Nest That Sailed The Sky (2nd version - Finished) from Glenn Marshall on Vimeo.

To send you on your sleepy way.

Fleas

2009-02-02T05:57:00.000-08:00

My pictures of famed fleas Frollo, Hugo, and Esmerelda were confiscated as I tried to smuggle them out of the Eleanor Theatre, but I saw their tragic tale unfold in rehearsals this weekend, and can only say the newest Show Must Go On players have scaled new heights of artistry, have leaped into great voids of daring, burn with such passion for their work, and spin such a carousel of wonder and delight, it will send you home itching for more. What more can one ask from theatre than the miracles of life, death and love from the cleanest bloodsuckers on the planet?

Between rehearsals I had the opportunity for a little bloodletting of my own at the Combat Cards arena. My strategy of drawing cards at random slowed down my unrelenting opponent, but did not save me from a gory defeat on the Stump of Fallen Heroes at the hands of Osprey. Doc Boffin, Vlad Bjornson, Michalius Oppewall demonstrated lively spirit and their idiosyncratic choice of weaponry, and even Enjah showed up for a fight. My rapier repartee and finely honed puns managed to make a hash of Doc's video recording, but you can visit the new Combat Cards YouTube site for other thrillng moving pictures.

Madame Boucher

2009-01-31T08:25:00.000-08:00

Madame Boucher was a country woman from Brest, who spoke French with a strange accent and sang me to sleep at night with her haunting songs. Her Christian name was Ghislaine, and she was married to a quiet journeyman printer who also worked for my Uncle. She called me her little orpheline, or her pretty lamb, and I still remember her voice singing,

Daik, mab gwen Drouiz; ore;
Daik, petra fel d'idde?
Petra ganinnme d'idde?

"What does it mean?"

"It's a lay from Brittany in our tongue, the language Adam and Eve spoke in paradise. It's like a long lullaby, sung between a Druid and a child, and it teaches an infant her numbers and many other things."

"Aren't you French?"

Madame Boucher kissed my cheeks and studied me with her piercing, dark blue eyes. "Brittany is a beautiful country surrounded by the sea. It is a land that does not forget its past, and I can tell you the names of all my ancestors, back to the kings of Kernev, or of Cornouialle in French. We are not like the Serapians - by which she meant Parisians - we give to the poor and we open our homes to our guests, even to beggars if they ask for aid. Dumann e ty an homm is what we say, my house is everyone's home. But we do not have many books, only our bible, which is all we need. Instead we have our songs, that our fathers sang to us when we were children."

"What's a druid?"

"No one living remembers them, child, they have all disappeared. But we still sing their songs."

"Can you sing it again?"

"Only if you promise to settle down and ask me no more questions, for it is a long one, and I will explain it to you on another night, as far as I understand it."

And this is what I learned to sing, that we sang together, as I wiped away Ghislaine's tears, or until I fell asleep in tears myself, dreaming of wild boar and grim Ankou, of sharp swords and standing stones. Later I learned that four Bretons had been executed that year for resisting a tax collection in Nantes; Ghislaine's father among them.

Druid:: My pretty, my white child of the Druid, pretty one, what do you want? Of what shall I sing?
Child:: Sing to me the cycle of the number one, until I have learned it for today.
Druid:: There is no cycle for the number one, only the unique need, Ankou the bringer of death, the father of pain, nothing before, nothing more.

My pretty, my white child of the Druid, pretty one, what do you want? Of what shall I sing?
Child:: Sing to me the cycle of the number two, until I have learned it for today.
Druid:: There are two oxen yoked to a hull; they pull, they will expire, what a wonder to behold!
There is no cycle for the number one, only the unique need, Ankou the bringer of death, the father of pain, nothing before, nothing more.

My pretty, my white child of the Druid, pretty one, what do you want? Of what shall I sing?
Child:: Sing to me the cycle of the number three, until I have learned it for today.
Druid:: There are three parts to the world: for man and oak, three beginnings and three ends; the three kingdoms of Merlin, three golden fruits, three brilliant flowers, three children who laugh.
There are two oxen yoked to a hull; they pull, they will expire, what a wonder to behold!
There is no cycle for the number one, only the unique need, Ankou the bringer of death, the father of pain, nothing before, nothing more.

My pretty, my white child of the Druid, pretty one, what do you want? Of what shall I sing?
Child:: Sing to me the cycle of the number four, until I have learned it for today.
Druid:: There are four sharpening stones, the sharpening stones of Merlin, that sharpen swords fast.
There are three parts to the world...
There are two oxen yoked to a hull...
There is no cycle for the number one, only the unique need, Ankou the bringer of death, the father of pain, nothing before, nothing more.

My pretty, my white child of the Druid, pretty one, what do you want? Of what shall I sing?
Child:: Sing to me the cycle of the number five, until I have learned it for today.
Druid:: There are five zones around the earth: five ages in the expanse of time; a dolmen of five stones upon our sister.
There are four sharpening stones...
There are three parts to the world...
There are two oxen yoked to a hull...
There is no cycle for the number one, only the unique need, Ankou the bringer of death, the father of pain, nothing before, nothing more.

My pretty, my white child of the Druid, pretty one, what do you want? Of what shall I sing?
Child:: Sing to me the cycle of the number six, until I have learned it for today.
Druid:: There are six grandchildren of wax, brought to life by the power of the moon, you may not know it, but I do. Six herbs in the small pot, a small dwarf to mix the drink, the little finger in his mouth.
There are five zones around the earth...
There are four sharpening stones...
There are three parts to the world...
There are two oxen yoked to a hull...
There is no cycle for the number one, only the unique need, Ankou the bringer of death, the father of pain, nothing before, nothing more.

My pretty, my white child of the Druid, pretty one, what do you want? Of what shall I sing?
Child:: Sing to me the cycle of the number seven, until I have learned it for today.
Druid:: There are seven suns and seven moons, seven planets and the hen with her chicks; seven elements of the air.
There are six grandchildren of wax...
There are five zones around the earth...
There are four sharpening stones...
There are three parts to the world...
There are two oxen yoked to a hull...
There is no cycle for the number one, only the unique need, Ankou the bringer of death, the father of pain, nothing before, nothing more.

My pretty, my white child of the Druid, pretty one, what do you want? Of what shall I sing?
Child:: Sing to me the cycle of the number eight, until I have learned it for today.
Druid:: There are eight winds that blow and eight fires with fathers' fire lit in May on the mountains of war. Eight heifers as white as sea foam, grazing grass on the island deep, eight heifers of the Lady White.
There are seven suns and seven moons...
There are six grandchildren of wax...
There are five zones around the earth...
There are four sharpening stones...
There are three parts to the world...
There are two oxen yoked to a hull...
There is no cycle for the number one, only the unique need, Ankou the bringer of death, the father of pain, nothing before, nothing more.

My pretty, my white child of the Druid, pretty one, what do you want? Of what shall I sing?
Child:: Sing to me the cycle of the number nine, until I have learned it for today.
Druid:: There are nine small white hands on the table by the tower of Lezarmeur and nine moaning mothers.
There are nine korrigan dancing around the fountain in the clear full moon, with flowers in their hair and robes of white wool, There the mother boar and her nine little boars in the gate of their castle their pigsty, snuffling and digging; little one run to the orchard, the old boar shall teach you trick!
There are eight winds that blow...
There are seven suns and seven moons...
There are six grandchildren of wax...
There are five zones around the earth...
There are four sharpening stones...
There are three parts to the world...
There are two oxen yoked to a hull...
There is no cycle for the number one, only the unique need, Ankou the bringer of death, the father of pain, nothing before, nothing more.

My pretty, my white child of the Druid, pretty one, what do you want? Of what shall I sing?
Child:: Sing to me the cycle of the number ten, until I have learned it for today.
Druid:: Ten enemy ships were seen coming from Nantes: Woe to you and woe to them! The men of Vannes!
There are nine small white hands on the table...
There are eight winds that blow...
There are seven suns and seven moons...
There are six grandchildren of wax...
There are five zones around the earth...
There are four sharpening stones...
There are three parts to the world...
There are two oxen yoked to a hull...
There is no cycle for the number one, only the unique need, Ankou the bringer of death, the father of pain, nothing before, nothing more.

My pretty, my white child of the Druid, pretty one, what do you want? Of what shall I sing?
Child:: Sing to me the cycle of the number eleven, until I have learned it for today.
Druid:: Eleven armed Belek, from Vannes, with their broken swords;
And their bloodied robes and crutches; of their three cents but eleven is left.
Ten enemy ships were seen coming from Nantes...
There are nine small white hands on the table...
There are eight winds that blow...
There are seven suns and seven moons...
There are six grandchildren of wax...
There are five zones around the earth...
There are four sharpening stones...
There are three parts to the world...
There are two oxen yoked to a hull...
There is no cycle for the number one, only the unique need, Ankou the bringer of death, the father of pain, nothing before, nothing more.

My pretty, my white child of the Druid, pretty one, what do you want? Of what shall I sing?
Child:: Sing to me the cycle of the number twelve, until I have learned it for today.
Druid:: There are twelve signs and twelve months, and Sagittarius the next to last lets fly his arrow armed with a dart. The twelve signs are at war. The beautiful black cow with a white star on her face, leaves the forest of mortal remains, feels in her breast the sting of the arrow, and her blood flows as she lows, her head raised: The tornado sounds: fire and thunder, rain and wind, thunder and fire, nothing, nothing, nothing, no cycle remains.
Eleven armed Belek, from Vannes...
Ten enemy ships were seen coming from Nantes...
There are nine small white hands on the table...
There are eight winds that blow...
There are seven suns and seven moons...
There are six grandchildren of wax...
There are five zones around the earth...
There are four sharpening stones...
There are three parts to the world...
There are two oxen yoked to a hull...
There is no cycle for the number one, only the unique need, Ankou the bringer of death, the father of pain, nothing before, nothing more.

Librairie Osbourne

2009-01-29T08:32:00.000-08:00

As long as I could remember, I spent every day at Librairie Osbourne, rue Saint-Jacques, situated behind the Sorbonne, under the watchful eye of Madame Bouchard until I could read, and after that I did not need watching, for I was always with a book. My uncle had opened his bookshop after he returned from England to sell English and Dutch books to a public that was beginning to look beyond its shores for its reading. Histories and natural sciences sold well, but it was Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, Manley's The New Atalantis, Congreve's The Way of the World and John Gay's The Beggar's Opera that made him money. The building had been an old bourgeois house, and as his business grew he expanded the shop from the former parlour into the sitting room, then into the kitchen and upstairs into the bedrooms, renovating room by room and installing tall bookshelves made of darkly stained oak. By some accident of the original site, every room was at a different level, so one clambered up or stomped down two or three steps to gain the next room. In the center of each room, if space permitted, he placed one or two tables: these were always covered by stacks of books, with more books piled up beneath. I made a home for myself under these tables, in little spaces between the book stacks where I could crawl out of sight, a parallel, hidden library of my own. We were infested by book beetles and silverfish, and I made it my job to squash with a tin spoon as many of these as I could find. Besides books, my uncle also sold pamphlets and notices, maps and almanacs, stationery, ink and sealing wax, and traded in curiosities and small antiques. In the rear of the shop, he had converted a stable to a printing house and bindery, where the compositor, pressmen, beaters and binders worked long days producing new editions. By the time I was eight, it had grown into a fairly prosperous enterprise employing fifty men and women, plus five factors who travelled outside Paris.

We lived on the fourth floor of this industrious building, in five rooms that my uncle had converted to a modest suite following the death of his young wife, after his own bachelor tastes, reached by separate entrance and a long flight of stairs. Uncle Adraste was an astute and meticulous business man, and was very careful in calculating his charges to his customers, so he was often up very early with his ledgers and accompts. After breakfast he would meet with authors or suppliers in a small office to the rear of the bookshop or in a nearby coffeehouse, and then return to look over the coffins of type laid up by the compositor. My uncle believed in universal education, but for me a liberal one not taught by Jesuits or Dominican nuns. Accordingly I spent most of the day in the bookshop reading the Musick of Pythagoras, the Astronomy of Ptolemy, the Arithmetick of Nichomachus, the Geometry of Euclid, the Divinity of Plato, the Logick of Aristotle, and the Mechanicks of Archimedes, first in French, then in English and finally in Latin. For the rest nothing was forbidden and I roamed widely in my reading as I grew high.

We had our trade clients: authors and playwrights like M. Biancolelli and M. Thomassin, whose work my uncle issued every few years; the occasional poet, and the scholars at the Sorbonne with their ponderous and convoluted ideas on the orgins of music or the history of the German Nations. They brought manuscripts and paper for the presses, their debts and their doughty wives demanding payment, their jealousies and suspicions of plaigiarism, which my uncle would smooth over with coffee and chocolate, and a thousand little compliments. We had our book buyers, the regulars and the curious, the dwellers who came in the morning and had to be swept out at night, amateur scholars with hobby-horses to ride, women with chores they wished to avoid, idle clergy and insolvent merchants. From my hidden vantage, I kept my eyes on known book thieves, like the Marquess of Tofino, whose voluminous skirts were lined with hidden pockets, or the Lieutenant Villiers who cut pages from books with a pocketknife. But in general I paid the customer as much attention as I did the clouds in the sky: they drifted above me busy with matters of their own.

For I was occupied that year with my own thoughts of the brilliant stage, of my new friend Marie-Thérèse, and with my father's playing cards, that I kept in the same mouse hole where I stashed favorite books and found baubles, that dark corner in the angle behind two cabinets. I studied his cards for months, for each picture was a window on a world as fascinating as the Comedie Italienne.

Neoplatonism

2009-01-27T12:34:00.000-08:00

"I took the Elementa Geometriae from the shelf," my uncle continued, "because I was convinced my eye had not fallen there by chance. It was indeed the English translation by John Dee, mathematical scholar, astrologist and traveller, chemist, crystal-gazer, and reputed summoner of spirits by White Magic, who enjoyed the patronage of Elizabeth and the Earl of Leicester, and who practiced alchemy in Bohemia under the patronage of Emperor Rudolph II. And inside the cover was the same crest that you're looking at, Yolande, the Palatine lions and blue-and-white lozenge of the Heidelberg Library.

"I held in my hands a book that should not be in France and that had disappeared even from public view in England, after Dee lost Queen Elizabeth's favour and James came to power. Your father looked at me with eyebrows raised in amusement, and said, 'Do you think mathematics will help me?'

" 'Dee believed the universe to be divided into three spheres: the natural, the celestial and the super-celestial. He thought number and proportion to be of practical use to the navigator, architect, and musician because it reflects the secret organization of these three spheres. Look, here he writes, 'By number, a way is had, to the searching out and understanding of every thyng, hable to be knowen.'

"Your father took the book from me, and read thoughtfully. He said, 'I have tried to divine some numerical pattern in the way the cards are dealt, and remember each card played in order to hazard the chance of my card appearing next in the deal, but I still lose.'

" 'Dee was thought to call up angelic assistance in his understanding of number. But he wasn't the only one to think of mathematics as magical. Pico della Mirandola, Giordano Bruno, and Henry Agrippa all thought along similar platonic lines.'

" 'Wasn't Bruno burned as a heretic? I think I have one of his books here, Let me see.'

"Your father replaced Euclid and quickly found Ars Memoriae, Theses De Magia, and Agrippa's De occulta philosophia libri tres. They all bore the same crest on their inside covers. Somehow the most dangerous books of the Reformation, books that had been expunged from libraries from Rome to Krakow, books that had been shredded or burned in witch hunts and auto da fe, had escaped and made their way into your grandfather's possession. But your father said, 'It's no use, I think it all a hopeless jumble of incoherent nonsense. My father wasted his life pouring over books like this, it made his mind feeble. He always ranted about incantations and elixirs of immortality and forbidden knowledge. If he had learned anything he would be alive today, n'est-ce pas? Or he would have left a pile of alchemical gold. At least his books are worth something.'

" 'They are worth more together than piecemeal.'

" 'I know. But however grand a fool he was, I still honour the old man. I've tried not to sell anything important, or become a wastrel. But my library is open to you because you have promised to help me, and I cannot continue to lose like this or it will soon all be gone.'

We sat down to a simple meal at a table set up in the corner of the library, overlooking his garden, served by a single boy and a housewoman, then took out the cards you have there, Yolande, and he began to teach me how the game was played."

My uncle had always spoken to me as if I were an adult, even in my infancy. Perhaps he did not know how to speak to a child, or perhaps he was already talking to himself. But I was growing tired of all the history, and my head began to nod, so my uncle lifted me from the floor and took me to my bed. He tried to pry my father's cards from my fingers but I clutched the pack to my breast and rolled onto them, falling into a deep sleep, dreaming of staircases, playing card people, mazes of books, and men burning at the stake.

Hôtel Lambert

2009-01-27T00:25:00.000-08:00

"I called on your father that week. In Paris he leased the house that had belonged to the architect Louis Le Vau on Ile Saint Louis, that was later incorporated into Hôtel Lambert by the family Le Haye, with whom his father had been friendly. When the hôtel was first built, the President of the Chambre des Comptes, Nicolas Lambert, invited both Le Brun and Le Sueur to do some mural decorating. Over the course of five years each man laboured to outdo the other. Of course the furniture was from Gobelins. It was not fashionable, and your father was looking for another residence to the west, but it was ample for his needs as a single man in Paris, and to live under Le Brun's magnificent painting, Phaeton and Ganymede, must have been worth the hundreds of livres he paid to live there. I entered from the Quai Anjou and came upon a small courtyard. The chamberlain led me to an outdoor stairway that ascended a few steps before splitting to the right and the left. The right hand staircase narrowed, then opened on a sunlight space, three times the width of the stair itself. At the top of the staircase we arrived at an oval vestibule through which I passed into a magnificent, long hall that extended the corps de logis and offered a breathtaking view of the enclosed gardens on the right and at the curved end, of the river itself and the Passerelle de Constantine. Your father greeted me there, and showed me the famous gallery. The theme of this magnificent room was the Labours of Hercules, displayed in the enormous ceiling murals and the bronze and gold stucco relief. There are few rooms like it anywhere in Paris, and I said as much to your father. He dismissed the praise politely saying that while it was lovely in the summer, it was uninhabitable after October on account of the draught. He then lead me through the Cabinet de l'Amour and Cabinet des Muses, named after their paintings on those subjects, then we returned to the ground floor library, beneath the long gallery. However magnificent the decorations, however ingenious the art of the elder Patel, Jan Asselyn, Romanelli, Le Brun and Le Sueur, or any of the other hands that had created such a monument to taste, they were as froth and foam to the importance of the work collected in those shelves. I could scarce believe my eyes. Your father had been bringing me the dregs.

"There are men who claim to know a man from the company he keeps, and woman who can read one's fortune from the lines in one's palm. However I think there is no better guide to a stranger's ancestry, education, present thought and current interests, to his imagination and fancy, his practical concerns and petty fears, than a catalogue of his books. Your grandfather was not like other aristocratic collectors, who satisfied themselves with a deluxe editions of Augustine's Civitate Dei, or the Works of Cervantes, or other commonplace books that turn up again and again in the marketplace. His books were rare and first editions of Copernicus, Descartes, Galileo, Cellarius, Kepler, Apianus, Vesalius, Euclid, Leibniz, Napier...," my uncle tapped his forefinger against his temple as he recalled to memory the books he saw. "But more revealing than the books themselves, was the care in which they had been arranged, and the care the son had shown in preserving that order when the library was moved to Paris. The arrangement is everything, for a thinking man allows his thoughts to fly merely by scanning the titles of the authors he has read. There is a mathematical structure in the natural world that can be revealed or obscured by arranging Curiositez de la Mer des Indes, with its rich illustrations of the most bizarre creatures to swim the seas, in proximity to Elementa Geometriae, and a curiosity in the development of ideas discovered by keeping his incunabula together.

Harmony & Concord

2009-01-25T22:29:00.000-08:00

This was a design of my invention from many years ago that turned up in a drawer. You may find a larger version on my glintingly new flickr page.

Ada Lovelace Day Pledge

2009-01-25T19:03:00.000-08:00

Ada Lovelace was one of the world’s first computer programmers, and one of the first people to see computers as more than just a machine for doing sums. She wrote programmes for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computing machine, despite the fact that it was never built.

Suw Charman-Anderson pledged to write a blog on a woman in technology on March 24, but only if 1000 others agreed to do so also. To date there have been 1,244 pledges. I have joined intending to write about Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du Châtelet, French mathematician, physicist, and author.

Book of Emblems

2009-01-25T16:37:00.000-08:00

Photograph by Celeste Romero Cano

"Evidement, some of those books that the Church feared so much were not destroyed. I asked your father if he possessed any other inscribed with this crest. He couldn't say for sure, but welcomed me to come to the estate and look for myself. But now I have got ahead of myself, because the reason he brought me the Iconologia was that it corresponded with his playing cards."

My uncle produced a pack of worn cards that must have been kept near the book on his shelf. It was a large pack of seventy-eight cards, their reverse face covered in the same blue and white lozenged pattern that appeared in the Palatine crest, opposite the lions. The faces were illustrated with strange emblematic figures, some annotated with numbers. I clutched them, trying to imagine them in the hands of my father.

"I rarely saw him without that pack of cards, and he would often take them out and shuffle them while talking about other matters. They kept his hands as busy as his thoughts. I never saw another pack like them, but he said he they were played just as one played tarocchi, which is now all the rage across the world. He showed me that the images on his cards has been copied, albeit crudely, from the figures in the Iconologia. Look, here you see, this is the highest card, the Fool, and in Ripa you find Pazzia, Folly, the man in a long black garment lauging at the sky and riding a hobby-horse with a whirligig in one hand. And here you see, the next card, The World, an image of Pan, that goat-faced, sun-burnt devil who signifies the universe, whose horns are the sun and the moon."

The book was filled with mysterious images, many more than appeared on the deck of cards. Blindness of the Mind, Dignity, Avarice, Ingenuity, A Haughty Beggar, Exile, Poetical Fury, Scandal, Love of Country and Love of Virtue, Quarreling, Prudence, Temperance and Theft, Youth and Death were all illustrated with figures of extraordinary aspect, dressed and undressed like gods, accompanied or pursued by a bestiary of creatures, and a panoply of stage props in their hands: jagged thunderbolts, balances and squares, flaming brands and quivers of arrows, birds and wreaths, miniature suns and stars. It was an illustrated catalogue of ideas, passions, desires, sins and virtues, personified in a population of tiny men and women. My heart leaped, because they made concrete all the confused and vaporous feelings that churned in my own breast, portraits of those pangs of guilt and jealousy, happy joy and desperation that were my daily companions. And I wondered how my father could ever have surrendered a book as magical and powerful as this. I gripped the pack of cards in my hands. These were mine by right. He had left me nothing else. I took the book and laid it on the floor before my Uncle's chair, and spread the cards around it, studying the miniature universe that opened before me as my uncle continued his tale.

"Yolande, your father told me he had been given these cards by a foreigner with whom he played every month, and who taught him the rules of the game. There are seventy-eight cards, every one different, with twenty-one atouts and four suits of fourteen cards. You see there is le roi, la dame, le cavalier, and le valet. The highest card is called the excuse, the fool. The atouts and the excuse are worth four and a half points, so are the kings; the queens three and half, the knights two and a half, the knaves one and a half and all the other numbered cards worth half a point each. Eighteen cards are dealt to each player and six to the centre of the table, face down. These six cards are called le chien. I'll show you if you give me the cards, Yolande."

"I want to hear about my father," I said, refusing the return the cards.

Uncle Adraste sighed and sat back in his armchair. He watched me lay out the cards in patterns on the floor for a while, then continued.

"Your father wanted me to help him interpret the meaning of the cards with the help of that book. He thought that the cards were dealt in an order that held some significance and that he lost to his opponent because he was unable to grasp it. I said that if the cards were shuffled randomly, there was unlikely to be any significance in how they appeared. 'And yet,' your father said to me, 'the man studies his cards as if he were reading a book, with a smile of understanding on his face, and he wins game after game. I have played cards since I was a boy, and I am not a fool who believes Fortune smiles upon any man over another for so long. I have observed a losing man will play with care and attention: it is the winning man who is most in peril because he comes to believe he cannot lose. But my opponent does not gloat or boast. He plays his cards with . . . curiosity. And never loses.'

"I asked your father if the man was not a cheat. He said, 'Even if I thought so, I would not say so to his face, and he has gone to great pains to allay any suspicion. You see, he has given me his own cards to study. We play with no other pack. I can find nothing wrong with them, or anything in his rules that would favour one player above another.'

" 'And who is this man you cannot beat?'

"Your father looked at his feet and brushed his coat with his hand. 'I beg you not ask me that. He is noble. He is foreign. And he has done me a boon in the past, obliging me only to keep our acquaintance from public knowledge, and to meet him every month for our game.'

" 'How strange!'

" 'That is not the only curious thing about him. He is no stranger in any of the salons, welcome wherever he goes, very gracious in his manner and very witty in his observations. Yet no one knows the first thing about him, and his name never arises in society. The man is an enigma, a cipher, and I cannot afford to lose to such a man forever. I have observed you these past months, Sir, and I should say there is no scholar in Paris who knows his books as well as you do. I pray you help me discover the secret language this man reads in the random arrangement of these emblems. My resources, such as they are, are at your disposal, Sir.'

"Your father spoke so courteously and with such passion, I would never think of refusing his request however odd it might seem. But I am ashamed to say my thoughts were on that library of your grandfather's, and the books with the crest of the Palatine Library." Indeed my uncle looked as if he were admitting to a grievous and shameful vice, and he shook his head slowly. "I am no scholar, but as you know, Yolande, books are doors to the souls of men, windows to their profoundest thoughts, carriages that transport us to other lands and distant ages. I can no more resist a book than a gambler can resist a wager or an ivrogne his bottle. Wise men say knowledge is a dangerous thing. That is just. But a life without books, that is unthinkable!"

Delayed

2009-01-25T02:29:00.000-08:00

I must keep my poor father, and you, waiting, while my attentions are occupied by that most troublesome pest, the house-guest, made all the more annoying by the fact that they are the dearest of friends whom I have much missed, and yet I grudge them the time I lose in telling my tale, ungracious hostess that I am! Well, at least I shall seize the opportunity to enjoy an intemperate week's end, and to carpet the floor in wine corks, in celebration of the New Year of the Ox, and to distract my thoughts from my Georgian table reduced to impatient shavings from Osprey's penknife.

Iconologia

2009-01-21T10:18:00.000-08:00

"One day your father brought me the Iconologia of Cesare Ripa. I had sold many editions of this book, always at a good price, because it is filled with expensive illustrations. Now I may still have that book. Let me think."

My uncle kept in his apartment a bookcase that reflected his bookshop in miniature, where some of his most expensive editions and his favorite titles were shelved. Whenever he said, "Let me think" he would invariable stop whatever he was doing, stand in front of that bookcase and trace his finger along the leather and calfskin spines. He did this so commonly I had the impression he shelved his memories there, that these particular books described his entire intellect, and that they were as much a part of his person as his wig, his spectacles or his clothes. In a moment he returned to where I was waiting with a thick, dusty volume in red leather.

"This was my father's book?"

"I would say it belonged to your grandfather, but yes, it passed into your father's possession after he died."

I slid my hands over the leather. It was worn down to the boards from much handling and stained with ink. Inside the cover, an ex libris pasted to the marbling showed the head of a unicorn over a twisted wreath or torce of silk. Underneath were the words "Fallaces sunt rerum species." A rose petal, browned with age and flattened as thin as a tissue, fell out into my lap. I studied the tracery of tiny veins in its transparent skin.

"What does it mean?"

"It is from Seneca. The appearances of things are deceptive. It was your family motto."

I put the rose petal back in its place, marked by a stain on the paper. The next page was engraved with a crest.

"Now that is what makes this book so interesting. Do you see the shield quartered with the crowned lyons rampant in the corners? Those are the Palatinate lions, the arms of Frederick V, the Winter King. This particular volume came from the Bibliotheca Palatina, the Library of Heidelberg sacked by the Catholic League when von Tilly invaded Bohemia at the beginning of the Thirty Years War. All hermetic and cabalistic books were destroyed: the rest were transported over the Alps and presented to Pope Gregory XV."

"What's hermetic? I don't understand kaba, kaba..."

"Only God knows how a seed becomes a tree, or why gold never dulls with age, or why night air makes a person ill. Every material in the world: stone, air, water, flesh, blood, fire; they all contain secrets sealed within them on the day of creation by the angels. For centuries men have tried to unlock those secrets. The little we have learned is called hermetic knowledge, and the spells that summon forth their true appearance is called the cabala by some. But the Church considers these things to be evil magic and forbids them."

Musician

2009-01-17T23:46:00.000-08:00

This lovely image came last week on a postcard advertising a sale at the Metzler Violin Shop in Glendale, California.

Insouciant

2009-01-17T21:08:00.000-08:00

My uncle Adraste was a thinking man and a reader. He lived for his books, those he published and those he sold, and only believed a thing once he had read it somewhere. He was not a story teller and the tale he began came with many long pauses and silent reflections.

"I heard of your father before I met him," my uncle Adraste told me, "or at least, of his father's vast library of occult and hermetic books, which turned up in the shops when the son, your father, had a gambling debt to pay. De verbo mirifico Lyons edition, De harmonia mundi, John Dee's Monas hieroglyphica." My uncle tapped his finger on his temple as he recited the titles of books, as he always did. "Your grandfather's ex libris was currency in the trade, because these were books that always found a ready buyer. The first time I met your father, he came to me with Pico della Mirandola's Apologia. He was a young man, dressed like a courtier, and was in a hurry to make the transaction. I asked him if he had read the book he was trading for several gold louis. 'Never. It's all in latin and I don't have patience for the ravings of jesuits and monks,' he said. I told him, 'Mirandola believed that man was created by God outside the chain of being, the only creature able to approach the angels through the exercise of his intellect, or descend to the animals. ' 'Well it's animals for me today, because my intellect is wanting exercise, and I have a card game waiting.' your father replied. He was a very handsome man, and you have his eyes, always looking around for something of interest."

"And then?"

Again my uncle paused, as if reluctant to continue. "I told him I would pay him better than he was getting elsewhere if he brought his books to me."

"Well?"

"He turned up often after that, always with a book for sale in hand. Many of them were indeed the ravings of jesuits and monks, memoirs and dull sermons that my competitors had probably declined to buy, but I always paid him something for them and over the first year of our association he came to see me a dozen times or more. He was ever bright and witty, with a light manner that dispelled gloom and care around him. His happy disposition made him welcome in all the salons, among those of the houses of Orleans, Conde and Conti and others who displayed arms of pure descent over their portals, as well as those of their enemies: the Madame de Maintenon, the Count of Toulouse and the children of the King who had acquired their privileges more recently. These rivals for His Majesty's attention were locked in a deadly competition for power and affected an ironic insouciance at court, but he was different, genuine, unaffected and always ready to laugh at himself. He never dressed in anything but the fashion of the season, in expensive silk coats with full-dress'd skirts and buttonholes worked in silver thread, and unstitched cuffs. He was always on the way from one gathering to another, carrying messages between the two court factions.

"Though he was often in a hurry, there were days when he didn't mind idling away an afternoon in the shop. On those occasions I would happily converse with him about the books he brought me, or show him the latest pamphlets by Daniel Defoe or a drama on stage in London. He spoke English and German very well for a French noble, and I soon discovered his ignorance of literature was a pretense, or perhaps simply the fashionable attitude of the time, and that he had an inquisitive and quick mind. He was always interested in the habits and customs of foreigners, in the workings of clocks and mechanical devices, and took a boyish delight in the same curious and bizarre objects that you like to play with in the shop: dried plants, stuffed birds and animals, shells and corals, strange weapons and musical instruments, artificialia, mirabilia, and naturalia, miniatures, ostrich eggs, dragon bones, boars tusks, aegyptian mummies, fish embedded in stone, manuscripts with hieroglyphs, armillary spheres and astrolabes, ivory polyhedra, and automata. I often think that if the loss of your parents had not endowed such a solemn expression to your pretty face, you would be the very image of your father: you share the same taste for the rare and grotesque."

Who was my Father?

2009-01-14T11:16:00.000-08:00

I have prevaricated for several days, for I do not know how to continue my tale without first retreating to describe how I came under the care of my uncle and what befell my parents. Yet the order of those events is so confused in my own mind, owing to my extreme youth when they occurred, I find myself surrounded by doubt and hesitation. If I were to tell my parents story as I later assembled it, I would need assume a knowledge of the designs and ambitions of men and societies that I would not gain until much later in life (nay, that perhaps I have never gained), and here present a distraction of supporting characters and set-pieces. These had little direct relationship to me, except that they robbed me of my parentage. Like an urn that had been smashed into countless pieces, scattered and buried, I uncovered that story in fragments, through chance encounters later in life and by my own research when I was of an age to undertake them. Therefore I trust you will forgive me if I proceed to tell their tale as I learned it myself, and to take my time over it, and in recompense accept the briefest scenario I can make of their circumstances.

My uncle, Adraste Osbourne, had journeyed to Paris as a young man and apprenticed as a printer and binder in the reputable house of Louis Coignard, in rue Saint-Jacques at l’Aigle d’Or. During his four year apprenticeship he undertook for M. Coignard numerous visits to London and Amsterdam, returning with Jansenist manuscripts smuggled among other foreign literary works. While in England he petitioned at Montagu House in Bloomsbury and obtained the financial support of John, Duke of Montagu, fellow of the Royal Society and Grand Master of the Premier Grand Loge of England, (whose marriage to the Lady Mary Churchill, daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, provided a healthy income in addition to his wealthy father's allowance) permitting the establishment of a bookshop in Paris in rue Saint-Jacques. He was a creature of the Enlightenment, as much devoted to Science and Reason as he was fascinated by their dark progenitors, alchemy and mysticism. But his true love was the theatre. A substantial part of the profits he earned as bookmerchant (and these were not insubstantial, for he happily printed both official and pirated editions of every title he sold) went into la Comédie-Italienne when it returned to the Hôtel de Bourgogne, rue Mauconseil, in 1716. He married and was quickly widowed when his young wife died of smallpox. His younger sister, my mother, arrived in Paris in distress and six months pregnant in 1722. My father, whom she had married secretly in London, was a gentilhomme de France, but had disappeared as so many gentilhommes are wont to do. A midwife was found but she would guarantee only my survival. Thus I became my uncle's ward from the moment of my birth, and he added his wife's name to mine.

"Who was my father?"

Uncle Adraste shifted and pretended to continue reading for a moment, but I saw his eyes were not moving over the page. He licked a stained finger and turned down the corner of his page. "Pardon me, child. Did you ask me a question?" he said.

"Who was my father?"

"Ah." Still he did not look at me, but studied the crystal glass on his reading table. "Your father."

"Yes, did you know him?" I stamped my foot.

"Of course, of course." At last he put down his book and turned to look at me. "Why do you want to know, child?"

Perhaps my mouth fell open. I wanted to know because everyone had fathers of their own with occupations, and houses, and ancestors, and names. Solid fathers with whiskers and odd smells and rumpled waistcoats and leather boots and tobacco. Fathers they could cling to when they cried, or yell at when they were frustrated. Fathers who gave them ribbons and candied fruit on holidays, and took them for walks in the park or picnics in the countryside. I had only a silent emptiness that nibbled at my heart and gobbled up my guts, that filled me with something that was not sadness or anger but in between the two, burning coldly at the pit of my stomach. I wanted to be able to tell my friends my father was the King of Siam and had placed me in Uncle's care out of the way of court assassins, that he was the Captain of the Guards and was leading his troops on the battlefields in Poland, or that he was a poet who had fallen afoul of the Royal Censors and now wasted in the Bastille. I wanted something, which I thought a father might provide me, and if not a father, at least the knowledge of one.

After a long pause, my uncle said, "He was a very intelligent man."

"Was he an actor too?"

"No, no, he was not a very good actor. It might have gone better for him if he were."

"What happened to him?"

Uncle Adraste stared out the window, so I rose from where I was sitting with my puppets and stood in front of him. For a long time he would not look at me, and I tried to discover the reason by peering deep into his eyes. I scowled. "What happened to him?" I repeated.

"I have been thinking on that question since long before you were born, child."

Rat Catcher

2009-01-11T09:03:00.000-08:00

Just as Madame Riccoboni was about to leave the house, I heard my Uncle Adraste's voice call her name. She stopped at the door and looked back with a frown. M. and Mme. Biancolelli and my Uncle Adraste hurried over, and bowed. My uncle was introduced and pleaded his suit, but all I could hear of their conversation was Madame Riccoboni's reply, for she had a voice made to carry in theatre halls.

"Well, Sir, where is this niece of yours?"

My heart stopped in my mouth. We were still in the upper box, and Marie-Thérèse, who had not let go of my hand, seized me and pulled me to the stair, collecting her sister in her arms again. We pounded down those steps and ran to where the adults stood by the door. Marie-Thérèse made a very pretty curtsey; I did my best to copy her. Everyone's eye was on us, both onstage and off, and I saw my Uncle's eyebrows fly up when he saw the state I was in, still covered in blood and dirt and cobwebs.

"Have you brought us a wild animal, Sir?"

Before I could think of anything to say, Marie-Thérèse said, "Rats."

Mme. Riccoboni started as if she had been bitten by one. Marie-Thérèse waited a moment while she handed her sister to her mother and looked at each person intently before continuing. "Il teatro è pieno di ratti. Rats as big as, as asino, donkey. A hundred ratti. Yolande save me and Caterina, when we asleep. Eu, bite bite bite, and Yolande, she like this and like that." Whereupon Marie-Thérèse mimed an epic battle with an unseen horde of attackers in which she demonstrated how I was bitten on the head but not before despatching the enemies while swinging a phantom weapon, all the while providing a voluble commentary in rapid Italian. Our eyes were fixed on this miniature cavalier thrusting and parrying and spinning about like a whirlwind. Mme Biancolelli gave a little cry of fear and clutched Caterine to her breast when the wound was suffered, for Marie-Thérèse rolled her eyes up in mock pain. By the end of the performance Marie-Thérèse's face was streaked with tears, and she was panting heavily from her exertions. Mme. Riccoboni frowned. Mme. Biancolelli moved to my side and put her hand on my shoulder. Marie-Thérèse took my hand in hers.

"Those merdoso rats ate a hole through my leather pouch!" came a voice from the actors on stage.

"They attack us while we put on our makeup."

"They shit in our costumes!"

Mme. Riccoboni looked at the company with distaste, then turned her eyes on me. "Have you anything to say?"

"My only wish is to stay with Marie-Thérèse and learn Italian, Madame."

Mme. Riccoboni gave a shrug and a sigh that expressed an equal measure of futility and disgust. "Signor Biancolelli, your daughter's associations are your own business. The theatre is no place for children, but your daughter shows promise if she doesn't become ridiculous, or kill someone before she debuts. She may remain, but kindly keep her out of my sight. And Monsieur Osbourne, I will discuss your request with my husband, but pray clean up your niece before she comes into my theatre again." Madame Riccoboni swept out the door into a waiting carriage.

Monsieur Biancolelli picked me off my feet and spun me around. "Welcome to the Théâtre Italien, Princess Yolande Rat-Catcher."

Madame Riccoboni

2009-01-09T08:09:00.000-08:00

During the spectacle, from which my eyes never moved, Marie-Thérèse stood next to me and watched, or sometimes left me to fuss with her sister, but always returned to my side. When the Sylphide flew into the air with an unhappy creditor in tow, I stared at Marie Therese with my mouth open. She nodded, and pointed out the thin ropes that carried them both soaring and dipping into the air. I thought Eraste was a bit silly and plump, for I recognized M. Riccoboni under his pink makeup. But I was convinced the Sylphide was truly in love with him, for her eyes never left his face even when another player moved to the center of the stage to perform. She was not the Sylphide I had seen earlier, and I searched in vain among the dancers in the final scene for that lovely figure. I looked also for M. Biancolelli, but his wide eyes and round face were nowhere to be seen. Arlequin and the Gnomide seemed more like a quarrelling couple than a pair of lovers, and she delivered the lines about strangling the pretty little man with such pleasure, and seemed disappointed when Arlequin stopped resisting and took her hand in the end.

At some point toward the end of the performance, Marie-Thérèse's hand had slipped into mine, or else unthinking I seized hers. But they were clasped together by the end of the vaudeville, and we did not release each other until the players returned to the stage and Madame Riccoboni, who had watched the entire production from a chair placed in the middle of the parterre below us, stood up and began to address them.

"Messieurs Biancolelli and Romagnesi, are you there, or have you abandoned your production already?"

Marie-Thérèse's father and another man hurried on stage and gave a polite bow to the woman.

"You have grown dull with age. Or you have lapsed into a second childhood that has softened your sensuality into coarseness. Antoine-Francois!"

Monsieur Riccoboni stepped forward, his cap in his hand. "Yes, Maman?"

"Are you playing a Lover or a Pantaloon? Don't cringe, where is your delicacy? And your rhymes are atrocious, where is the scenario? Someone bring that to me."

M. Biancolelli leapt off the stage and approached Mme. Riccoboni with a face like a hound. She took the sheaf of papers without looking at him, for she was already addressing other members of the company. "Maria! Wipe that stupid expression from your face, girl. You are in the title role. I advise you to start acting like a lead player and stop staring at my son like a dancer in the corps."

"But Madame, la Sylphide is in love with Eraste..."

"Idiot! La Sylphide is what every man will be coming here to see, but she won't keep any culones in seats if she is an infatuated donnicciola. I advise you start acting for them if you want to remain with this company. Vicentini!"

The Prosecutor bowed with an old fashioned flourish.

"Caro amico, can you help Antoine-Francois with his verses? He struggles so much more than his father did. And don't think I can't hear you chortling in the back, Monsieur Bissoni. Have you this month's accounts ready? How much is this farce going to cost us?"

One of the creditors, still dressed in his wide collar and black gown, held up four fingers. Apparently the answer was satisfactory to Mme. Riccoboni because she returned to her chair and sat down. M. Biancolelli opened a door and the house flooded with light. Mme. Riccoboni studied the scenario. The cast shuffled and murmered, waiting to be dismissed. Marie-Thérèse waved to her father who shook his head at her: not now!

"Well, M. Biancolelli, you are no Marivaux and barely hold a light to Corneille, but I suppose it will have to do. The divertisment went on a little long, didn't it?"

"We can shorten it, Madame."

"Do so. I have bad news for you. I'm afraid your Sylphide will have a competitor."

M. Riccoboni looked nervously at Maria, who was still shaking after her lashing from his mother.

"Fagan and Panard have been saying they propose a production of their own, a parody, called The Supposed Sylph, in Foire Saint-Laurent. So you are on your own now. Luigi and I have retired, and you cannot count on us to rescue you every time you fall on your faces. What will become of this troupe, I just cannot imagine." And Madame Riccoboni sighed a long, theatrical sigh not unlike those that the Sylphide had been making over Eraste on stage earlier, then turned her back and left.

The Performance

2009-01-07T09:59:00.000-08:00

Would that I remember all that was said during that first performance I watched. There were verses and songs, musical interludes and flashes of light, moments of touching sweetness and ridiculous turns that delighted. For now all I can do is render the briefest outline, which is no more than the players would have been given, for they filled in the details with their own impromptu and mime.

La Sylphide

Setting: Eraste's Apartment

A Sylphide and a Gnomide enter at the same time. The first places a basket of flowers upon a table, the second a basket of truffles. They ask each other what they have come to do in this place, for each thinks the other a rival, but the Sylphide reveals her tender feelings for Eraste, and the Gnomide avows her passion for Arlequin. The Sylphide tells how when she was at the Tuilleries walking with two of her friends, she was enchanted by the good graces of Eraste. But she suspects that he has set his heart on one of her companions.

GNOMIDE

You do injury to your charms! As for myself I have lost my lover's favour and the sparkle of my charms no longer dazzle him; it was in a dark cave where we first met and where he thrilled me with his grace that would charm even the most insensible. But Eraste comes here with his valet, let us remove ourselves so we might listen to them.

Eraste sees the baskets as he enters; he asks Arlequin who sent them and Arlequin replies he knows not. Eraste uncovers the first to find it filled with flowers.

ARLEQUIN

It would have been better had they been full of money, that would be a marvelous help in reconciling your miserable affairs.

Arlequin sees the second basket filled with truffles and the name of Arlequin beneath, and he is at a loss to know who sent this present hither. After having thought for a moment he adds,

These flowers are no doubt sent by Clarice, your future bride."

ERASTE

Speak not of Clarice.

ARLEQUIN

Can you have forgotten that your fortune depends on this marriage? That it is all that stands between us and our creditors? That you are only rich in appearance? Your uncle is in truth at the mercy of a half dozen doctors, but as these gentlemen are never of the same opinion they cannot agree on a remedy. Without it the illness cannot worsen and your uncle may yet live to a ripe old age.

Eraste tells him that a violent passion has seized his soul and nothing can release it, for he has seen the most adorable person in the world at the Tuilleries; Arlequin counters all his arguments, while the Sylph who is present and invisible threatens him with a beating, as Arlequin believes it is his master who is addressing him, making for a very comic play. The Gnome, also invisible, gives Arlequin little slaps, that he thinks comes from his Master. Two creditor arrive, Eraste receives them with ill humour, and threatens to take them to the courts, but as they withdraw, the Sylphide and the Gnomide, still invisible, gives each a purse that contains their payment. One of them, having counted his money and finding four louis surplus, returns to Eraste, asking him to forgive his keenness.

Eraste is astonished and while he turns to Arlequin to ask the meaning of this, a Sargeant and Prosecutor arrive. The Prosecutor represents Oronte and has come to remind Eraste of his promise to marry his daughter Clarice; the Sargeant delivers a summons to Arlequin from the cabaret keeper of Pigstown. Eraste and Arlequin make excuses while the fiends of justice threaten them. The Gnomide gives the Sargeant a blow that lays him flat on the boards, and the Sylphide carries the Procurator into the air. The spectacle astonished Eraste but Arlequin is less surprised for he sees nothing out of the ordinary than a Procurator who steals into thin air and a Sargeant gone to the devil.

The Gnomide plays a few more tricks on Arlequin who is terrorised, and Eraste continues to be astonished at everything he sees. The Sylphide sighs invisibly and converses with Eraste, now realizing she is a spirit. The Sylph assures Eraste that she loves him.

ERASTE

You love me? Can the spirits love? They don't have a body.

SYLPHIDE

Your question makes me keenly aware of your own. Yes, Monsieur, they can love and with much delicacy, for their love is separate from their base senses; for their flame is pure and subsists only of themselves, undiminished or augmented by disgust or desire.

ERASTE

I am surprised that knowing what goes on in my heart you confess your feelings toward me, for you must know it is filled with the most violent passion a lover can suffer.

SYLPHIDE

I am one of the three ladies whom you saw in the Tuilleries, and one of them you loved.

ERASTE

What! Those charming ladies are Sylphs? Can it be possible?

The Sylphide begs him not do as the common man and doubt what he does not understand. Eraste begs her to show herself.

SYLPHIDE

I yield and make myself victim to your obstinance. Go to the Tuilleries where you shall see me with my companions. Do not speak to me, but return here to learn your fate and mine.

Eraste obeys and exits. The Sylphide remains and says Eraste will find there only two Sylphides, her friends, and thereby she will learn his feelings without committing her own.

Arlequin returns to the apartment of his master, but not finding him there, he declares he will go and keep the Sargeant company. The Gnomide arises and calls Arlequin who shakes with fear, seeing no one with him; the Gnomide reassures him and confesses her affections, telling him she is a dweller of the earth, a Gnomide, who, taken by his charms has left her home to make him the happiest of all mortals. She tells him she possesses great treasures that she wants to share them with him, after which the Gnomide leaves him with the assurance that she will take a corporal form and offer herself to his eyes presently.

ARLEQUIN

Find a pretty one and above all do not forget your treasures, because without them I shall have nothing to do with you.

Eraste returns from the Tuilleries in despair because he did not see there the object of his adoration. Convinced of his love, the Sylphide makes herself visible and appears before his eyes. Eraste is transported with joy, recognizes her and assures her of his affection. Arlequin thinks the Sylphide very pretty but believe the Gnomide to be lovelier still, and begs her to appear in her colors of lily and rose. The Gnomide makes herself appear.

ARLEQUIN

What do I see? Why, it's a mole! Away with you, sweetheart, you can't hope to gain me in that shape.

GNOMIDE

How sad I must strangle such a pretty little man, for it is our custom to strangle those who do not return our love.

This threat causes Arlequin to yield and he asks for the treasures that she promised. A vase filled with immense wealth appears from out of the ground. Arlequin no longer resists and observes he is not the first beauty to be seduced by wealth.

SYLPHIDE (to Eraste)

I do not promise any treasure but only sweetness worth all the gifts of the Gnomide. Come, Eraste, I shall transport you to the palace where you shall rule over me.

The Gnomide sinks into the abyss with Arlequin. The stage changes and we see the palace of the Sylph that seems to float in the sky. It is filled with Sylphs and Sylphides, who dance a divertisment that ends with a vaudeville.

Dear Reader

2009-01-06T23:21:00.000-08:00

I have been scribbling every morning now for a week, for a readership of exactly three, by my best estimation. If there be any other silent readers lurking out there, please leave me a note. It is a wonderful encouragement to write for others, for with only one exception I have never kept a diary or journal more than a couple of days spread out over years and decades. How time has flown! But knowing you are awaiting my next installment gets me out of my warm bed in the morning and into a writing humour. You have helped me to recover memories that threaten to fade into the paper white nothingness of old age, and revisit loved ones lost long ago. How I miss them!

But we have a long way to travel yet, so I beg your patience and understanding. We are barely into chapter three in my outline, for I have yet to write the first two and have made no mention yet of the Librairie Osbourne, Uncle Adraste's bookshop, his tales as a book smuggler, forger and mason, or the story of my poor parents.

I will be grateful if you would guide me as I discourse: 'a little more like this, less of that nonsense please!' for each day's trifle is freshly mix'd and unedited, and I would rather prepare it to your tastes than subject you to my compulsive logorrhea. If with your kind help I succeed in patching together a coherent account of my past, I will subject the whole to a careful wringing out and refitting, so that you do not have to read it in so backward a fashion.

I find my memory is faulty: Monsieur and Madame Riccoboni retired in 1729 and travelled to Italy with their son (the son being the M. Riccoboni in my tale), though wife and son returned to the Paris stage in 1732. Therefore they could not have directed the first performance of La Sylphide, written by M. Biancolelli, as I am about to relate. It may be that my first visit to the Theatre Italien was in 1729, but did not make an impression on me until I saw a performance in 1730. If my recollection unclouds I may rewrite here and there, but perhaps the past is a shifting landscape seen through a rippled glass best left to historians to argue over.

It is a treat to have you along for the journey.

A Poem for HBA

2009-01-06T14:00:00.000-08:00

Because you asked,

Le sylphe.

Je suis un sylphe, une ombre, un rien, un rêve,
Hôte de l'air, esprit mystérieux,
Léger parfum que le zéphyr enlève,
Anneau vivant qui joint l'homme et les dieux.

Du mon corps pur les rayons diaphanes
Flottent mêlés à la vapeur du soir.
Mais je me cache aux regards des profanes,
Et l'âme seule, en songe, peut me voir.

Rasant du lac la mappe étincelante,
D'un vol léger j'effleure les roseaux,
Et, balancé sur mon aile brillante,
J'aime à me voir dans le cristal des eaux.

Dans vos jardins quelquefois je voltige,
Et, m'enivrant de suaves odeurs,
Sans que mon poids fasse incliner leur tige,
Je me suspends au calices des fleurs.

Dans mes foyers j'entre avec confiance,
Et, récréant son œil clos à demi,
J'aime à verser des songes d'innocence
Sur le front pur d'un enfant endormi.

Lorsque sur vous la nuit jette son voile,
Je glisse aux cieux comme un long filet d'or,
Et les mortels disent: "C'est une étoile
Qui d'un ami nous présage la mort."

Alexandre Dumas, père.

If I had time for it, I would attempt a translation in verse, but for meaning you can refer to this poorly realized Victorian rendering - it sets my teeth on edge but there you are, it was all I could find in a hurry.

A vague, mysterious spirit of the air,—

A shadow and a dream,—a Sylph am I,—

A light perfume, away the zephyrs bear,—

A living link between the earth and sky.

Of this pure form the soft, transparent rays

Attemper, as they float, the mists of eve;

But e'er I shun the gross, material gaze :

The soul alone can me in dreams perceive.

The summer lake still smoother, as I brush

Its shining surface with my viewless wing,

I love to balance on the tallest rush,

And see my own sweet image as I swing.

At times I flutter in your early bowers,

Where dewy bines their luscious odour shed,

And set my momentary foot on flowers,

That bloom the more, but never bend the head.

Your hearths I haunt, and there in slumber steep

The child, that nods at noon upon the knee,

And gild his wonted hour of rosy sleep

With smiling visions, innocent as he.

The night return'd, a thread of glimpsy gold,

A running spark, I glitter and ascend,

And mortals cry: "a shooting-star behold,

"The mournful presage of a dying friend!"

The Theatre Box

2009-01-06T10:11:00.000-08:00

When we crawled back into the woodshop, music could be heard on stage. Marie-Thérèse collected her sleeping sister and followed me through the wings back to the house. I found it easy to pick our path through that maze of wonders, for each bizarre creation had left so deep an impression on me no adventure would erase it. When I did hesitate before the choice of two paths, Marie-Thérèse would indicate the correct direction with a nod. She had said nothing since the tower. Was she resentful of my false courage and transparent bravado now on realizing that the danger was imaginary? Was she disgusted by my blood-soaked and filthy appearance? Or was she ashamed of her own fear? I wanted to turn and study her face, to hold her hand and answer her questions but I was still playing the role I had accepted and found I could not take off my mask. And she did not ask me anything, but followed silently in my footsteps.

We arrived backstage, but a woman I had not seen before shooed us away. Marie-Thérèse whispered, "There's a better place to watch." I followed her again as she led me down an unfamiliar corridor and up a new flight of narrow stairs, but this one better lit and papered. We came into an empty box that overlooked the parterre and offered a wonderful view of the stage. The benches were low, but by pulling them right up the box railing we could just peer over, and remain unseen ourselves.

I could scarcely believe my eyes. The drab stage I had stood upon not more than an hour ago had transformed into a brilliant palace, lit by the fire of a hundred thousand burning diamonds. A grand room with a barreled ceiling supported by massive pilasters caught the last rays of the setting sun. Behind it an enormous colonnade retreated an unfathomable distance, and beyond the last columns, impossibly, a shimmering blue sea spread out to the horizon! The room was illuminated by three massive chandeliers, their cut crystal panes glinting like the eyes of angels, and hung at such a height it made me giddy to think of the poor soul who would need months swaying atop a ladder just to light them all. In the centre of the room stood a banquet table covered in a lavish brocade threaded with gold and silver, and decorated by three golden obelisks. I had never in all my life imagined such opulence and wealth, so concentrated in one place, in such harmony and perfect arrangement. Between the pilasters and the barrel vault were corbels and brackets of white marble lined with gold; each pilaster contained a niche into which a classical sculpture had been placed, each one different: Diana and Apollo draped with strings of fruit and laurel leaves, and others I did not recognize; ridiculously high-backed overstuffed chairs upholstered in velvet and silver lace; in the foreground near a doorway to the right of the stage an arrangement of swords, shields and helmets.

It was so brilliant tears started up in my eyes, and I rubbed them away with my grubby fingers. The music of viols and hautboys and horns transported me out of the box where I was a little girl in a dirty dress and into that scene so completely, I thought I was dreaming. The world that I knew, my uncle, the bookshop, the streets of Paris, Marie-Thérèse and M. Biancolelli, all vanished from memory as I inhabited that palatial scene. All time and all space were concentrated in that brilliant place, and I had never lived in any other.

Two women entered the room from opposite sides, and my heart leaped: one was costumed like the Sylph I had earlier met. Before I could address her, I realised she was not the same, but just as lovely and ethereal. Both carried an elaborate basket: one tall and filled with peonies and roses and the other flat and filled with truffles. They approached the table at the same time and then started on discovering the other, circled each other warily, then gently laid their offerings on the banquet table. I watched them so intently I felt I could reach out and touch them, but they did not notice my presence.

Horrors

2009-01-05T10:12:00.000-08:00

Something was being tested by Marie-Thérèse. Whether it was my rationalism or my courage or my obedience to the whims of a spoiled daughter and a new friend I could not say. She had commanded me from the moment we met, and I now felt she had invented this test to secure her authority over me, and that if I passed or failed, I would be forever enchained to her caprices. At the same time I wanted to please her, because I already loved the haughty way she shook her black hair and the stern command in her pretty eye. And I did not want her to withdraw from my reach all the secrets of her enchanting world out of displeasure, so I knew fear had already put me in her power. No matter what horrors lay beyond those doors, I was suddenly more afraid of the enticing desire to place myself in the power of another, to acquiesce and abase myself. I remembered what M. Biancolelli had once said when he was at dinner with us, "at the Comedie Italienne we are chosen by our roles." Marie-Thérèse was offering me a role, a mask to wear in return for the pleasure of sharing her father and the theater with her. These thoughts came to me one after another in an instant, my heart pounding in my throat, yet I did not know what to do.

"Do as I say, presto!"

"Do you know what is beyond this door?"

"Si! Yes!" Still looking at me with curiosity.

"I however do not, and I like to be well armed in strange places." I searched about and found a long bolt that had fallen out of the crumbling stone wall. In my small hands it would serve as a poor weapon, but it was at least something to hold out in front of me. I concentrated on keeping it steady because once I decided on a course of action, I had started to quake violently. To hide my fear, without any further delay I pushed open the door a crack and slipped in, alone.

The room beyond the wooden door was a small, dark antechamber to a sunlit room beyond. There was a pile of rags in one corner and a strong, cold breeze that caused some motion within it. I moved toward the sunlight, my back to the wall, never taking my eyes from the stirring shape. I could hear Marie-Thérèse's voice calling my name, but I was now seized by such a paroxysm of fear that I could barely open my mouth. I watched in horror as the ragged shape in the corner began to struggle violently and then rise. From under a rotting shroud a dark malevolent eye watched me balefully, filled with hatred and spite. I ran the last few steps into the sunlight, which streamed in through two ogival windows. A great raucous screech pursued me and as I turned I saw an enormous black form bear down, its bony talons raised to seize my face. I struck out in terror with the iron bolt and fell senseless to the ground, as the creature flew past me on terrible wings and disappeared out the window with a caw.

"Yolande, Yolande, di cosa si tratta? Aiuto!"

When I came to myself, I found there was blood on my hands and face. I got to my feet unsteadily and hobbled to the pile in the corner. It was a crow's nest, filled with animal bones and coins, bits of colored string and metal buttons. "Stay where you are!" I cried to Marie-Thérèse, "do not come in!" I could hear the sound of her sobbing on the other side of the door. I poked at the crow's treasure and uncovered a large bird skull and a bit of mirror that I used to inspect myself as I wiped my face and hands with my dress. I found no scratches, but had struck my scalp when I fell and was bleeding from the crown. My hair was hopelessly tangled and clotted with blood, but my hands had stopped shaking. We were in the Tower of Jean-sans-peur, the same ancient pillar around which the hôtel de Bourgogne was propped, that I had seen from street. The windows gave a prospect of Rue Mauconseil and Rue Françoise with their milling crowds and a distant view of les Halles and l'Isle de France beyond.

"Oh, Yolande, I am afraid, Don't leave me alone!"

I returned to the door and pulled it open. Marie-Thérèse was clutching herself and quivering. I did not put my arms around her or comfort her. I looked down on her and said, "You have nothing to fear." She looked at my bloodstained dress, my wild hair, and my hands blackened with dirt, and recoiled. I pointed to the pile of bones in the corner, which she could now plainly see through the open door. Her expression changed from fear to surprise and horror. She looked at me then, and I wondered if she was about to throw her arms around me or back away. I said, "There was never anything to fear," then pushed past her on the stairway and descended. She followed me without a sound.

Combat Cards for Sale

2009-01-04T17:40:00.000-08:00

Link to Hamlet's story on the sale of Combat Cards, with the "Ghastly Grin" in the illustration, discovered right after I had explained how I believed ghosts to be the external manifestations of a disturbed or irrational mind!

The Stair

2009-01-04T08:12:00.000-08:00

Though I was only eight, I had grown up among adults and listened to the conversation of enlightened men, so I had already formed a definite opinion about such matters as ghosts and fantômes. I did not believe a ghost was the supernatural apparition of a dead person, or the spiritual remains of a human being attached to the place of his death. I did not believe a white ghost indicated joy and success or that a black one augured ill fortune and maleficence. Even less did I think them sent by the devil to lure and trick us into perfidy. I believed such inexplicable occurrences to be the external manifestation of an internal terror in those who perceive it, evidence of a disordered and irrational mind. I had heard my uncle say so and I felt this explanation satisfied my own experience, which often dwelt on morbid scenes. Nevertheless, I was fascinated by stories of fantastical and supernatural coincidence and listened to them with a particular thrill. But I had never been visited by any disembodied spirit and secretly wanted to experience the frisson and test my reason before it. So when Marie-Thérèse asked if I believed in fantasmas, I nodded and asked, "Have you seen one?"

We were alone on stage, in an ancient, dark hall decorated with writhing airborne figures that rose about the proscenium and grinned out of the darkness. The adults had gone backstage to prepare for rehearsals, and the only sounds were the cries of infant Catherine and our own voices echoing in vast space around us. Marie-Therese did not answer but smiled and said, "Venga con me!" then led me into the wings.

She expertly passed through the machinery and properties that had accrued over fifteen years of performances. Bizarre suits of armor, masks and strange hats suggested characters that had been brought to life under the stage lights still slept in the wings awaiting their return to the spectator's applause, but now watched us warily. We slipped between stacked flats painted with a necromancer's cave, a roiling ocean, the flames of hell, a mystagogue's library. Banners and flags for countries and duchies that may never have existed outside the imagination hung limp and faded above us, punctuated with fantastically intricate horns and cornets, viols with massive fretboards and bellies like lutes, all suspended in the air, left there by a vanished band of aerial players. We came upon a smashed clavichord whose wiry guts lay tangled and threatening, splintered by some accident perhaps or by the composer whose ethereal compositions were lampooned by a rude hack pounding on its keys. I wanted to ask, but Marie-Thérèse moved so quickly and insistently, clinging to the enormous baby in her arms with alarming strength, maneuvering through narrow spaces like a possessed creature, that I could not take my eyes from her for more than an instant.

I wish I could here inventory everything we found: baskets of brocade; crates of stucco angels, their pink faces chipped and blackened; an impossibly elaborate mantlepiece carved with a twisted, interlocking design; collars and ruffs; a full-sized stuffed donkey with horrible bared teeth and gleaming patches of black, leathery skin where his dirty hair had been rubbed away; a gilt cage with a mute parrot; a brass door knocker as large as any door I had seen and a hideous bestial face gripping an iron ring in its teeth; a giant scalloped chariot that could have belonged to Aphrodite, complete with reined porpoises. We made so many changes of directions and sudden turns that I could never have found my way back to the stage and I began to worry that Marie-Thérèse did not really know where she was going. But at last we emerged from that grotesque forest and arrived at a little woodworker's shop where a lamp burned over a long bench against the wall and the floor was carpeted in soft shavings. Marie-Thérèse placed her sister in a cradle that rocked in the corner and covered her with a dirty quilt. The baby fell asleep instantly.

"Good, now I show you a thing..."

The walls of the shop were covered in wide planks but under the bench was a gap where the planks did not reach the floor. Marie Therese, whose dress was now covered in cobwebs and woodshavings, went on her knees and crawled into the black space. I hesitated, but her disembodied arm reappeared and gestured at me impatiently.

On the other side of the wall was what used to be a stone doorway, and a short passage that opened onto a narrow circular stairway that continued down into inky blackness and upward toward a cold light. Marie-Thérèse put her hand on a railing carved directly into the stone wall and smoothed by centuries of use and began to climb.

"Where are we going?"

"Our secret. We go up."

"Are there ghosts?"

"Shh. Don't say that word here. I show you."

We climbed around and around, the stairs lit by narrow slits in the stone wall; every fourth one gave out on blue sky and supplied all the light we needed to see our way, otherwise we might have broken our necks. By the time I thought I should be counting steps, or windows, we came to a wooden door on iron hinges. "You go first," Marie-Thérèse said, looking at me with interest.

Marie-Thérèse

2009-01-03T19:20:00.000-08:00

"Papa!"

M. Biancolelli gave a squeal of delight, spun around on the spot and fell to his knees, arms extended like a prince in a tale by Lafontaine toward a little girl about my age and dressed in a dainty frock. She ran over and threw herself in his arms, burying her head into his embrace, like one who had been separated from her father for years. Uncle Adraste reached down and took my hand in his.

After what seemed an age, M. Biancolelli held his daughter at arms length and bounced her up and down until her limbs flopped like a doll. "This is my puppet-daughter Marie-Thérèse, who was made for me by the Seamstress-Queen of Modena. Every night I have to remove her stuffing or she will not sleep, but asks me endless questions all night long: 'When will you take me to the theatre, papa? When can I meet the Principessa Yolande? When will we go to Venezia and dine on profiteroles?' I told that woman to stuff her with sugar and dough, but instead I was given a great big sack of cotton-head questions."

"Is she really a princess?"

"No more questions! One more and I shall expire!"

Marie-Thérèse laughed and whispered in her father's ear. His eyes opened wide, as wide and round as I have ever seen on a person's face. Then he stiffened and gave a lurch, and with a whistle of expelled air, collapsed onto the floor like a depleted wineskin. Marie-Thérèse clapped her hands in delight and made a tiny pirouette, pleased to be part of the performance. Then she came to me and kissed me on both cheeks. "I ask him if we can play together." She spoke French with difficulty but had a sweet breath and deep, black eyes.

"Haven't you struck him dead, then?" I said, for M. Biancolelli had not moved an inch.

A woman with a baby in her arms appeared from backstage. "Get up, get up, you fool, Madame Riccoboni is on her way."

M. Biancolelli rose to his feet in so strange a manner, seemingly without bending his limbs, and then with a grand flourish and bow swept an imaginary hat before him and declared, "You have even the power to raise the dead, Your Majesty, that the saints would be jealous. As the Seamstress-Queen commands, so poor Dominique must obey, even from beyond the grave."

"Enough with your heretical nonsense, and in front of the children! You should be ashamed."

Marie-Thérèse giggled and whispered "Maman is just pretending to be cross." Indeed a smile had crept across Madame Biancolelli's face and she gave her baby a kiss to hide it from her husband. "You had better get changed or that woman will send you straight back to whatever grave you dragged yourself from."

Uncle Adraste bowed and offered his hand, into which Madame Biancolelli placed her own, but before he could kiss it, she had turned to me. "Do not be too hard on our Marie-Thérèse, all she hears at home is Italian because her father has never bothered to learn proper French. You'll have to find somewhere else to play, though, because we must set up for rehearsals. Marie-Thérèse, will you look after Catherine?" Mme. Biancolelli put the tiny child in her daughters arms and led my uncle and M. Biancolelli backstage.

"Do you believe in ghosts?" Marie-Thérèse asked me, getting a better grip on the baby, who squirmed in her arms.

La Sylphide

2009-01-02T10:41:00.000-08:00

"Monsieur Riccoboni, this is my niece, Yolande Geoffrion, the only child of my poor cousine, Adèle de Castelnau-Jonville."

"I have met the father, if I am not mistaken?"

"Perhaps. He was very fond of the theater when he could tear himself away from his cards." My uncle lowered his voice, and refused to look at me as he said the last few words, though I was staring at him in surprise. I had never heard him talk about my father before.

"It is nothing to be ashamed of in this age, when one hardly counts as nobility if one does not owe at least a half million louis," Mr. Riccoboni said with a smile. "He was a brilliant player, I remember."

"My brother-in-law played écarte and piquet brilliantly enough to ruin himself."

"It was not the cards but the man he played against that ruined him," said Monsieur Biancolelli. The others nodded.

I tugged on Monsieur Biancolelli's hair and he lifted me off his shoulders, setting me down gently on the boards. "Principessa Yolande says she saw a Sylph."

"Really, where?"

I pointed to where the motes still danced in the sunlight. "Over there by the curtain. She was wearing a green dress."

"Giannetti hasn't come in to rehearse today, has she?"

"Not yet, neither has Margarite."

"What's a siph?"

Monsieur Riccoboni furrowed his thick brows. He had a doughy face and eyes that reflected wetly. "I think I shall look in on the loge d'acteurs. Mother is directing rehearsals this afternoon and she was in a sour mood this morning when I left their apartment." His anxious face disappeared behind the heavy curtain.

The two musicians, having finished tuning their hautbois and flutes, began to rehearse. A tall, skinny man in ragged clothing dragged a ladder out of the gloom of the house, untied a cleat and lowered the chandelier on a rope, then went over to replace the burnt stubs with wax candles from a basket. Someone closed a door and the low sound of traffic and crowds on rue Mauconseil faded away. A haunting melody arose from the oboe and echoed in the vast space, as if coming from very far away.

"What's a silf?"

"A sylph is a fairy made of air who likes to play cruel tricks on little girls."

M. Biancolelli laughed. "Your uncle is in love with a sylph so you must not believe him, Yolande. They are bellissimo spirits with bodies of light and vapour. The clouds over Paris at sunset are painted by the wings of sylphs, and they appear to handsome young men of romantic inclination."

"Nonsense, they are the condensation of splenetic humours from peevish women that are left on earth when their souls ascend to heaven. Even Mr. Pope says so."

"No Adraste! It is you who is splenetic. Reading bad English satire makes you so. Your sylph is a delightful girl, but you must learn to be more light-hearted when you call on her. But dolcemente, they are coming."

Salle de Spectacle

2009-01-01T18:35:00.000-08:00

The interior of the theatre, built principally of enormous timbers blackened by two centuries of soot and lit by tallow candles, was a gloomy blackness made dangerous and labyrinthine with ropes and pulley blocks, rolled canvas drops, ladders, chairs and massive gilt stage properties that gleamed with sullen life in the candlelight. Monsieur Biancolelli led us between papier-mache giants, demi-horses with frozen manes, dusty fountains, burnished suns and spangled arches, bowers of paper roses and painted forests, leather harnesses and calfskin wings, rows of unfashionable wigs from the last generation powdered with soot, and everywhere the smell of turpentine and wood shavings. I wanted to study every treasure: it was unlike my uncle's bookshop whose glories slept tidily between covers in their categories and shelves. I had fallen into a living book, a chaotic assemblage of cast-off dreams, lacquered vanities and slumbering desires; a precious jumble of some gargantuan imagination, a glimmering dollhouse for fairies and sprites.

"Yolande, allons-y, you must see the stage!"

Monsieur Biancolelli stepped forward and disappeared into the velvety blackness of the biggest wall of fabric I had ever seen; my uncle vanished in a similar fashion, winked out of sight. I walked in the same direction, hands before my face feeling the heavily napped curtain and inhaling its musty darkness, then felt the movement of air on my face. I opened my eyes to the most splendid view of all my eight years. A vast platform before me was bathed in sunlight falling in brilliant rays through the heavy air from windows a hundred feet above us. It was of course the stage and it raked away toward the pit and the parterre, with an undivided gallery, the paradis, hanging beyond it in the gloom. I stood facing a vast space that made me think only of the nave of a cathedral, but instead of windows it was divided into loges, or boxes, each one stuccoed and gilt with cherubim and cornucopia. These rose up in an endless repetition, stretching down the left, arching around behind the paradis and returning on the right. On either side of the stage were columns entwined with figures who smiled down as if they were my own parents and brothers and sisters welcoming me home. I blinked in the light and then sneezed. The most beautiful woman I had ever seen, dressed in a gown of pale green and a beribboned cap, stepped lightly toward me and sang in the sweetest voice,

"Felici l'alme e fortunati i cori,
Ove con lettre d'oro Amor l'imprima
Nell'imagine vostra, et in cui s'adori."

I looked toward Uncle Adraste, but he was busy being introduced to an older gentleman by Monsieur Bianocolelli. The woman extended her hand and I saw she had a green ribbon tied about her round wrist. I happily placed my hand in her white fingers as soft as down and tinged with pink. She smiled and spun around me lightly, laughing gaily as a bird and shaking the curls that escaped from her cap when she tilted her head, causing the motes dancing in the sunlight to swirl and fly. I lost my balance and sat down rather heavily.

Monsieur Biancolelli bustled over and lifted me off the floor. "What are you doing sitting here by yourself, little princess?"

"I was dancing with the pretty lady in the green dress."

Monsieur stopped and looked up at me with an astonished expression on his face. "Pretty lady? Where?"

I looked around me from the height of my tall friend's shoulders. Uncle Adraste and the strange man had stopped talking and were looking in my direction. Two musicians were tuning their instruments in the pit. But the rest of the stage was empty. The woman had disappeared.

"Well, well, perhaps you saw a Sylph," Monsieur Biancolelli said. "How interesting."

Recollections d'Enfance

2008-12-30T17:53:00.000-08:00

If you are reading along with my childhood recollections, you may have missed earlier posts from the same period in time. I note them below as much for my own as for my readers' convenience. I have no head for chronology, and in any case these evenements took place in ages past to gentle people long since returned to dust, so you may read them in any order that may please you. One day perhaps I shall attempt to order them into a narrative. For now you may explore them as they occur to me, in fits.

Kitai, in which I first discovered the mysteries of China in my Uncle Adraste's bookshop.
At the Monastery, from a period shortly after I fled my marriage.
A l'Italienne, a lamentably brief introduction to my acting friends.
A letter, that may serve as preface to my odd life.

Paris 1730

2008-12-30T13:18:00.001-08:00

It was a week before my uncle Adraste and I took a calèche to rue Mauconseil and the Comédie Italienne. The hôtel Bourgogne was already the oldest theatre in all of France, the first built after the Romans abandoned their circuses in Gaul. In 1730 it was nearly two hundred years old and hidden within a labyrinth of noxious, winding streets bordered by leaning houses and shops that would burn like kindling around a heretic if fire ever broke out. My uncle shook his head whenever we passed one of the old medieval buildings that still stood here and there, its timbers blackened with rot and age.

I later learned the hôtel Bourgogne had been the ancient stone stronghold of the Jean-sans-peur, Duke of Burgundy, who launched the Hundred Years War by openly plotting the death of his cousin and rival Louis, the Duke of Orleans, the brother of King Charles VI. War between the rivals ravaged Paris until the Lords of France forced them to meet and reconcile their differences. The Duke of Berry, their uncle, had them swear bon amour et fraternité before the King and the entire court, and they shared the host from the hand of a priest at a mass celebrated expressly for them. Three days later Louis was assassinated as he left the hôtel of the Queen Isabel of Bavaria, cut to pieces, and his servant murdered as well. Jean-sans-peur was not suspected, given the sanctified oaths that had been sworn, but he boasted of committing the crime a few days later. He was later assassinated in turn in the presence of the Dauphin, ridding the realm of an ambitious and dangerous man, and it is said his ghost still haunted the stairway in the surviving tower that overshadowed the theatre. The theatre itself was built in 1548 as the city's only permanent stage and once accommodated sixteen hundred very compressed visitors. It was shared with the Comédie Française, who quit it a shambles for the hôtel Guénégaud.

When Monsieur Biancolelli's troupe of comedians assumed sole ownership of the Hôtel, it was in a desperate state, and nearly a hundred thousand livres were spent on its restoration. They had played for many years in the Fairs and marketplaces, growing so popular that they threatened the Comédie-Française, and their fathers had been expelled from Paris in the previous century for lampooning Madame de Maintenon. Their return to Paris in 1716 under the patronage of the Duke of Orange offered some protection, and when that noble prince died, they obtained a patent of the King himself, which they proudly carved in black marble set upon the front door of the theatre under the royal coat of arms.

Monsieur Biancolelli was waiting for us at the door and I ran to throw my arms around him. But he gently released himself and whispered with a sly smile, "You must not make my Marie-Thérèse jealous." He then led us inside the dark, rickety timber building that groaned and creaked in protest to the exuberant youth that the Italians put in every step.

In memory of absent friends

2008-12-05T09:42:00.000-08:00

When I was eight, my uncle Adraste brought home an amusing friend whose scenarios were being typeset chez Briasson. He was Monsieur Biancolelli, known throughout Paris as Dominique, the famous Trivelino of La Comedie Italienne that played in the Hotel Bourgogne. I was enchanted by his round, honest face and his enormous, gentle eyes that looked upon me with sympathy and fondness, for my uncle had no doubt told him my own sad history. We dined simply at home and M. Biancolelli told my uncle jokes all the way through, his mouth full of bread and wine, with the base parts in Italian so I would not understand.

"It's rude to speak in a strange language," I complained crossly.

"Diabolo! You mean to tell me you do not understand Italian, little princess? How can that be?" He gestured to me and with my uncle's permission I went over to his side of the table. "Why, it is the most beautiful language in all of the world, especially when spoken by a young lady such as yourself. You know, my Marie-Therese is the same age as you. She speaks a beautiful Italian. Her mother and I are worried that she hears too little French at home, and her only companion at the Theatre is a little boy with abominable manners." He bent down and cupped his hand over his mouth as if he had a secret to share though he spoke loud enough for my uncle to hear. "You know, princess, if you insisted, your uncle might permit you to pay us a visit. He would refuse at first, for he thinks us all vagabonds and braggarts, but if you stamp your foot like this..." He stood up, crossed his arms and stamped, exactly as I used to do when I was six.

My uncle laughed and said, "Look, now you are already ruining the child! Yolande, naturally you may visit the Biancolelli's, but only if you don't listen to this madman who never grew up!"

At my uncle's words, Monsieur Biancolelli appeared to deflate before my eyes and hung his hands limply, swaying every so slightly on bent knees, ever so much like a marionette on strings. "You wound me, Seignor Osborno, you cut my strings!" And his hands dropped and he collapsed on the floor, his head lolling on his chest. I leaped back in horror, but his head rose and he gave me a quick wink before he let it drop again. "What shall we do with the poor puppet?" came a falsetto voice from the heap that was my uncle's friend. "He must grow up and go to school" came another voice from the same place. "He must learn proper French and arithmetics and law and become a dottore at the university." "No, I'll run away first!" Then M. Biancolelli leaped to his feet and dashed out of the room.

I clapped my hands with delight to see an adult pretending to be a puppet all for my benefit. I turned to my uncle, who never stopped laughing throughout the entire pantomime, holding his sides and shaking his head. "Please may I learn Italian?"

"Yes, yes, but first go out and call Monsieur back to the table, or he may run clear across Paris!"

I pounded down the stairs as fast as I could. Monsieur Biancolelli was seated on the sidewalk a little way down the street, talking in Italian to a horse, who seemed to listen with much interest. I took his hand and pulled him back to our door, where he effortlessly hoisted me onto his shoulders and bounced me back up the stairs. I believe I held his hand for the rest of his visit.

A week of travel

2008-11-26T23:27:00.000-08:00

...has kept me from writing. I have stopped in Eugene, Portland and Olympia; tomorrow I shall stand in view of Vancouver and admire the view of the Straits from Victoria, before returning to Seattle and southward again. The weather has been fine, but cold. I shall post pictures once my affairs are settled.

Mix'n Match Guest Post: The Do's and Don'ts of Hosting a Treasure Hunt in Second Life

2008-11-19T01:45:00.000-08:00

DO:

...let as many people find out about the treasure hunt as possible
Even before the treasure hunt opens, announce it to as many people as possible. Obviously, your contacts are the first ones. But, also take advantage of already active groups in SL who are keen on treasure hunting. List the event in SL's Classifieds a week before. And for best exposure, do your best to get the treasure hunt blogged by Hamlet Au.

...provide enough hints so that participants are not endlessly searching
Spacing the clues are critical. If they are so far apart, the hunter will most likely lose motivation to go on. So, make sure that along the way, they are either getting mini-rewards or are receiving additional clues. Also, clues should not only be interspersed when the hunter is getting "warm". It is just as important to lead them back to the right trail when they are getting seriously "cold".

...make the treasure worthwhile to find
Inform the participant on what the treasure would be. No one wants to spend hours and hours looking for a "treasure" only to find a freebie shirt in the end of the trail. Not cool. I've also seen some treasure hunts with only L$100 pots in the chest. I do not think it is enough of a motivation for most. The only ones you will attract are the camper types who are probably just bored of sitting on a chair. Be creative! It does not even have to be a pile of money.

...make the search process a social event
There are so many activities in SL that can be done solitarily. I think what the world needs the most are events that bring avatars together. So, design the hunt as a group activity instead of just a one avatar mission. Try setting up pairs to do the treasure hunt. It is always more fun with friends.

...test out the hunt process first before releasing it to the general public
Many forget to do this and only find the quirks when they are reported by the participants. It is important that the clues and trails are seamless before it opens to the general public. So, do a couple of test runs first with some guinea pigs.

DO NOT:

...make it so difficult for the directionally challenged avatars
I was at this treasure hunt where the clue was embedded in the middle of a prim and can only be found if you switch to flycam and point it at the right angle. Too challenging for most I think. Don't make us sweat so much.

...write the hints in a culturally biased manner
Although North America has a significant number of participation, SL residents come from all over the world. So, keep in mind the universality of the hints when writing it down. In other words, avoid geo-centric clues such as..."this is where the Brady Bunch vacationed during the reunion episode". It does not mean you have to avoid Pop Cultural references entirely. Just make sure it as accessible to most participants.

...turn off flight abilities
In RL, hunts are done on foot. But, it is unnatural to force avatars to do the hunts in this manner. Remember, it is a 3-dimensional environment. So, allow the possibility of vertical searches without the need for hiking up long stairwells.

...leave the treasure hunt all by itself
The "build it and they will come" attitude will not work. Keep a narrow window when the treasure hunt is open to the public. And as best you can, be present to host the event. No matter how well organized the treasure hunt is, there are bound to be questions and comments from participants. At the very least, be present so that participants have someone to interact with.

CHENIN ANABUKI Bio

After graduating from the University of California at Berkeley with a degree in Computer Science and Economics, Chenin Anabuki worked for various companies in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has also been involved with small to large-scale software engineering projects for consumer goods, finance, biotech and industrial design institutions in Silicon Valley. In addition to his Bachelor's, Chenin holds a Master's Degree in International Development Studies from the Universiteit van Amsterdam in The Netherlands. His graduate school thesis is an assessment on the impacts of micro-finance on rural poverty. Chenin Anabuki started Avatrian because it fulfills three of his most fervent goals...entrepreneurial, technological, and developmental. During his free time, Chenin enjoys drinking tea, reading Harry Potter and snowboarding down a black-diamond run at Lake Tahoe. Fortunate enough to travel and visit over fifty cities in the world, he considers Barcelona as his favorite. View Dennis Bacsafra's profile on LinkedIn When asked about his proudest achievement, Chenin recalls the time he hiked by himself to the peak of the High Atlas mountains in Morocco. "It was when I realized how much more I am capable of doing". Chenin can often be found in Second Life teleporting to various sites while overseeing in-world projects at Avatrian.

Mix'n Match

2008-11-13T21:12:00.000-08:00

I have waited for Chenin Anabuki's guest Mix'n Match blog entry all week, but received nary a thing, except a promise he would send it last Monday. Ah well, such contests sound like fun when they begin, but can become a burden to a busy person.
My blog entry can be found on Harper's Bizarre.

Master of All She Surveys

2008-11-08T11:55:00.000-08:00

Back in my standalone sim I am feeling much more like myself. I shall have to make a new tricorn, which I am loathe to do having seen the elegance that now caps Osprey's head. Well, I am due for a new outfit in any case.
My button land has become mountainous thanks to some fiddling with L3DT. We progress. Next I shall create a 3×3 region sim, rename it Tempietto, and spend a little more effort on landscaping. Once the ground is ready, I shall begin to build.

OpenSim

2008-11-07T16:53:00.000-08:00

What I find particularly fascinating about OpenSim is the magical ability to watch the behind-the-curtains communication that accompanies everything we do in this Life, as if the laws of nature (or the forces that convey those laws to our perceptions) were laid bare. Our universe is in active communication with our client, receiving requests, seeking permissions, assigning agents, requesting inventory and wearables, and broadcasting appearances to other agents. Of course I am the only being to exist in my Universe, so these (extracted) lines are like eavesdropping on the language of angels:

16:51:12 - [LOGIN BEGIN]: XMLRPC Received login request message from user 'Young' 'Geoffrion'
16:51:12 - [LOGIN]: Authenticating Young Geoffrion
16:51:12 - [LOGIN]: Telling OpenSim Test @ 1000,1000 (http://127.0.0.1:9000) to prepare for client connection
16:51:12 - [LOGIN END]: XMLRPC Authentication of user Young Geoffrion successful. Sending response to client.
16:51:14 - [CLIENT]: Got authenticated connection from 127.0.0.1:1088
16:51:14 - [CLIENT]: Adding new child agent Young Geoffrion in OpenSim Test
16:51:14 - [APPEARANCE]: Sending appearance to all other agents for Young Geoffrion
16:51:14 - [FRIEND]: Young Geoffrion logged in; sending presence updates
16:51:14 - [FRIEND]: Young Geoffrion doesn't have friends.
16:51:14 - [FRIEND]: Claiming Young Geoffrion in region:1099511628032000

No doubt those readers who work with networks and protocols will find nothing remarkable about it. To the neophyte, it is metaphysical poetry. I am impressed that our names are first presented in quotes, and that a region claims us as their own, as though our existence were somehow in doubt. On reflection it is in doubt indeed, and our name, person, appearance, indeed our very claim to the tiny portion of space or time we occupy is the result of an agreement between those who perceive us and the universe at large. For if we could not agree that Young Geoffrion was an avatar agent, she would be no more than a whirling blur of bits and pixels, a message without a receipient or a sender.
Ponder thine own existence then, and what you are without them who love you and the region that claims you for its own.

Sapere aude!

2008-11-07T10:02:00.001-08:00

One could be forgiven for thinking an 18th Century adventurer would be utterly hopeless around new technology, but if you remember my century gave you the natural philosophers and encyclopaediasts, Denis Diderot, Isaac Newton, Gottfried Leibniz, Rene Descartes, not to mention Emilie du Chatelet, Caroline Herschel, and the Palatine Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, then you might grudgingly agree we rationalists have never be slow to advance new ideas (even if we may be long-winded about doing so).
Therefore, when Osprey breathed that she had begun to play with a standalone sim, I could hardly stand about and watch: imagine, an island running on your own computer, with no assets (in explico except those you create yourself), no lag and no griefers, free uploads, and the ability to connect to a growing grid of opensource, experimental sims operated by the most technically adventurous residents of this Life.
Well, I went ahead and obtained one for myself. As you can see. Do not fear, that is Young Geoffrion, Ruth'd, and renamed as the default Test User, scandalously attired in tights and tee. As one of us is fond of uttering, Bwahahaha! I claim this dollop of land in the name of her Royal Highness...
I rub my hands in glee, for I have ambitions and designs on this teardrop of existence, this bubble universe, this vaporous plane. Architectural ambitions. Vast architectural ambitions.

At Last

2008-11-06T08:37:00.000-08:00

“We cannot tell the exact moment a friendship is formed; as in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses, there is at last one that makes the heart run over.”

When first I came to this Life, I passed long months wand'ring friendless and uninspired. I cannot remember how I first heard of Osprey, but when I did I knew she was someone whose acquaintance I could not miss, and I remember clearly my first visit to her Combat Cards dueling grounds in Spangle two years ago and my first sight of her. Her love for this world and its divers delights, her patience and generosity to all who approach, her inventiveness and desire to try everything, and her wit and sense of mischief represent all that is right and good about this Life. Without her and those friends she has drawn about her, our World, in whichever reality you choose to inhabit, would be mere plywood prims and default animations, an empty wasteland of grey goo. To those famous newcomers who stay for an hour and disappear forever I can only say, but you have not yet met Osprey!

At last our paths crossed last night, and as tired as she was, and as willing as I ever could be to simply sit and talk, she just had to show me her discoveries: a Japanese Fishing Village from the 1950s, oh, help me out dear, I didn't make a note of the second jump, and finally the Templum Ex Obscurum! We shall return to Baron Grayson's site one day and I will make a proper entry on these wonderful builds, but for now, having found Osprey's company, I feel that I have come home at last.

Exploring

2008-11-05T09:16:00.001-08:00

I visited the Big Brass ball at Caledon Steam City where a party was going on. When I asked if we were celebrating, Magdalena Kamenev diplomatically explained, "You may celebrate, mourn or just be, as you wish. All are welcome :> "

Then to Finechal Alliez for another party that was most definitely celebratory, where Code Hunter waved the flag.

And to Unofficial Obama Headquarters where the celebration had become exultatory.

A quiet moment at Gion,

And a most unusual encounter in Rivet City, worthy of a post of its own....

Congratulations, Friends!

2008-11-04T21:33:00.000-08:00

To all my American friends,
Felicitations! It was very exciting, and you have a leader you deserve! You do yourselves proud!

Mix'n Match

2008-11-02T15:36:00.000-08:00

Second Effects explorers and merchants ArminasX Saiman and Vint Falken invited fellow diarists to open their blogs to one guest writing on a subject proposed by a second guest. After a seven-month hiatus from writing, I need all the encouragement I can get to return to regular postings, and left my name.

I have been assigned to write about Second Life as an exploration of culture & diversity, suggested by steampunk kitty Eladrienne Laval, and to be posted on Harper's Bizarre, a blog by reluctant space traveller Harper Beresford, whom I am yet to meet, and whose blog I am looking forward to reading.

My proposed subject, Theatre in Second Life, will be journaled by Peter Stindberg, the founder of Babel Translations, on Tiyuk's Second Life Adventures. Here is one devoted to the worthy business of translation, building bridges and connecting cultures. Bravo.

And I shall have the pleasure of hosting a guest entry by Chenin Anabuki, CEO and Founder of Avatrian.com, about the do's and dont's of hosting a treasure hunt in Second Life, suggested by jeweller Skinkie Winkler. Welcome, Chenin, and we'll not mind if you leave a map or two around after your research. I have shovels and picks and some urns that want filling with doubloons and denarii.

Several new acquaintances in one fell swoop. I do hope Vint and ArminasX will bring us all together in world one day.

Revenant

2008-11-02T00:53:00.000-07:00

I was unable to attend the opening or the parade later in the day, but I did make my first return to Second Life this morning, appearing to Enjah like a fantôme at daybreak on All Hallow's Day. She was mounting an exhibition of digital aboriginal at her gallery in Grignano. I was not entirely at ease in my skin - I never quite know how one says that in English - having been absent from it for so long, so express'd my pleasure inelegantly. My stony expression encased a volcanic delight. I hope Enjah could see igneous smiles behind my eyes at least.

Of course I was too happy to see Enjah to think of taking pictures, or even asking news of my friends, but remembered to pass a moment enjoying the colour behind the gallery after Enjah parted to feed Spouse and Hound. I may not have much time for visits this autumn but I look forward to seeing you all before long, and to writing again. My pen is loosed and my tongue is sure to follow. We shall see if I can dredge up enough wit to torture an audience.

My state of mind has persuaded me to seek solitary distractions in recent months. I have taken much comfort in puzzling out a mystery of sorts, applying myself to understanding a building tool called Blender and a dialect named Python. Here are some very early results. Translating them into what passes for physical reality in this world is embêtant, as I am still a rank beginner. Enjah will attest to that. But it is a start and sculpted objects are enticing.

As I have lost my home in Orion I shall soon start a search for land on which to build a new one. Do tell me if you have any recommendations. Or if you are acquainted with anyone who might desire a slightly used Radcliffe Camera. For the present I remain your very humble and itinerant servant.

Surfacing

2008-10-24T18:17:00.000-07:00

So shipwracked passengers escape to land,
So look they, when on the bare beach they stand,
Dropping and cold, and their first fear scarce o'er,
Expecting famine on a desert shore.
From that hard climate we must wait for bread,
Whence even the natives, forced by hunger, fled.
Our stage does human chance present to view,
But ne'er before was seen so sadly true :
You are changed too, and your pretence to see
Is but a nobler name for charity.

John Dryden, after the 1671 fire destroyed Drury Lane

I am returned from the storming of my fury and from disappointed exile. That fury being self-directed, for the sea is not so large but I am a bigger fool by far, an oceanic idiot, for having thought myself immune (at my age, after all!) to flattery and honeyed phrases, that others call love - Plato's rem amaram, a bitter potion, an agony, a plague.

Eripite hanc pestem perniciemque mihi,
Quas mihi subrepens imos, ut torpor, in artus,
Expulit ex omni pectore lastitias.

   O take away this plague, this mischief from me,
   Which as a numbness over all my body,
   Expels my joys, and makes my soul so heavy.

Transported by such pernicious and dubious joys, I forgot myself and all I have learned, and so my suffering began, and I navigated as blind as a beetle, until I went down with all hands.

Enough. I do not care to flog my idiocy in the market. Preferable far to make amends to you whom I have slighted and missed for so long, and start wand'ring again in the smile of sober amity. I steer my humbled craft in your direction and look toward your gentle admonishments.

Not dead, but gone before.

2008-08-08T21:45:00.000-07:00

Non amittuntur, sed praemittuntur.

Friends, I live, but like a hot shade in the cold light of day. I flit and burn fitfully, my estate plundr'd and my heart wracked on shoals these six months past, keeled by ill fortune and malice. My canvas is rent, my mast cracked and sent to the bottom by lightning and fire.

Do not look for me in this Life: I cannot yet return. My home in Orion is obliterated and forever lost, all links sunder'd and property forsworn. O wasteland of fury and despair. O miserly hope and deceitful longing.

I say I burn; my face blazes with shame and self-hatred. I am wounded to the core and left half-dead of disgrace, discountenanced by trenchant lies. Unworthy opponent, his black name sickens me. All sweetness and felicity that ever passed his teeth I now abhor: he has poisoned even poetry. Viper, worm!

My wrath writhes within my bowels: I cannot yet return. I cannot bear my friends see my face awry with rancour. Suffer me to drift awhile and aloof to nurse my foolish wounds at sea. When I regain my direction I shall come to shore and make amends.

Kind Osprey, Enjah, Persephone, Pablo, Pighed and HBA: you are ever in my thoughts, bright suns beyond my storms.

Show Preview

2008-03-18T20:10:00.000-07:00

I was given the rare opportunity to try out two acts in the upcoming The Show Must Go On Season Two performance. The Synchronised Knitters Precision Drill Team have new costumes and a more daring course, braving collisions, aerial danger and ridicule. The Invisible Dancers took it all off, except Enjah who flashed a little underwear when she dropped her invisiprim. Osprey, Enjah and I went shopping at Sine Wave Island afterward, but the rather constant drudge of crashing and rebooting put an end to that fun. They have some lovely animations, but for some reason my viewer no longer likes to take photographs, so we have a bare post. ***Blushes furiously***

We were all in the same place at the same time, proving to HBA that I am not Osprey while she is asleep, for she could not be at the same time asleep and balancing on her unicycle, except he was nowhere to be found, poor baby-bothered man that he is.
(Perhaps she could, for I manage to fall asleep most inopportunely, while doing all manner of things. Very embarrassing.)

Airships

2008-03-18T20:05:00.000-07:00

Found at Modern Mechanix.
Music not included.

Oh for goodness sakes, Hostspur O'Toole has already commented on that post!

What we want

2008-03-18T15:18:00.000-07:00

Happiness, surely, about which one reads in books by many an unhappy author.
True Love, perhaps, which like a ghost, everybody talks about and few have seen.

For True Love (and it deserves those capitals) demands a desire for true labour and deep thought to coincide in two people. We are flawed creatures: even the successful suffer from pride, the intelligent from vanity, the wealthy from avarice and need. Success, intelligence and wealth are but facets ground from the stone, but no amount of polishing will eliminate our flaws, however much we hope to dazzle others by our brilliance.

The secret, I submit with humility, is to love those flaws in another as the emblem and badge of our common humanity; to recognize in others what one sometimes dreads to find in oneself, and to accept it, nay, welcome it with a laugh or a wry smile, with recognition. When we fail to find flaws in ourselves, or confess to little flaws because we wish to persuade ourselves that we have no great ones, then we are in peril of finding fault in all humanity, and not merely in our tarnished lover.

Be not deceived by the disappointment that is certain to come after an affaire du coeur has cooled. The diamond you buy under the goldsmith's lights will change appearance in different settings, yet it does not change in essence. There is much delight in the intimate companionship of a fellow human, and much to reward those who work to discover another's goodness, for we are as abundantly endowed with goodness as we are with flaws.

Happiness, I think, takes an equal measure of work, for it is dented by perceived need and by the insult of hunger and exhaustion on the mind. Chinese medical practice believes mental health is no more than a manifestation of corporal health, and treats anxiety and depression with physical remedies ~ mens sana in corpore sano. And it has been discovered ill health will spread worry and doubt around it as surely as the plague spreads disease. Happiness then is easily cured: rest early, sleep well, eat with discretion, laugh often and unexpectedly, and want as little as possible.

One feels entitled to offer advice at my age, even when it is unasked for!
In fact I could think of nothing better to write about.

Nor certitude, nor peace

2008-03-11T16:58:00.000-07:00

For the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Matthew Arnold

We wake to Second Life as though stumbling on a new world where all things are potent and possible. We reach deep into the entombed secrets of our soul, dare to pull on those threads that originate in forbidden desires, and dance in disguise with the abandon of bacchantes. Then in time our joys become lonely celebrations, our loves do not bind us, our shadowless light illuminates nothing, and we shuffle uneasily among crowds we do not understand, who pursue their unknowable purposes in parts of our world that we have yet to visit or comprehend.

I am incapable of saying if I love or hate this place, or love and yet hate. It disturbs me at my core, shifts my solid soul within my immaterial body. Formlessness made visible, the weight of flying in the airless sky. Mutable, deathless, ungrowing.

One has suggested I am not who I seem to be, but the expression of another mind, its cloaked desires flowing unbidden, unwanted to spoil the calm surface of a reflecting lake. I answered I am not even the wind that ruffles the water, but who am I really? A mental picture passed from one person to another? An evanescence, an apparation? A memory of someone long buried and forgotten?

Who is this other whose mind I am meant to reflect? I have a history. I remember people I have loved, places I have lived. They are more real than anything in my present, but they passed away before this world was born. I know who they were, but who am I that has lost them forever? What is left when a mind becomes filled with old books, old ideas, old habits? When everything new is lit by an ancient sun that has shone forever?

Spare me your memes and your social networks! Your debates and world visions. Your religion and your science. I dined at those tables. I would rather a bowl of spring water, an apple from my orchard and a companion in my garden to share them with.

Chapeau Thermidore

2008-03-01T23:24:00.000-08:00

Oh! I do like this Lobster Hat Ordinal Malaprop was seen wearing at the New Babbage Town Meeting!
Image shamelessly borrowed from the insatiable Zoe Connolly, via World of SL

Rehearsals

2008-03-01T21:24:00.000-08:00

A new year of The Show Must Go On is in rehearsals now. This afternoon we did run throughs of the acts that are getting close to being finished, working out problems and developing dialogue. As Osprey says, simple acts work best, and we were treated to roller-skating burlesque, cranky food with a cakewalk, touchtyping monkeys, rusty humour, a gourmet cooking class with enough food jokes to put one off chicken forever, and, well, you will just have to wait for the premiere!
For that reason my photos are under wraps, but it will be show worth waiting for. Lovely to see Enjah, Caitlin and Osprey in their natural environment of blissful and slightly frantic performance, jiggling sets and casting costumes all over the backstage floor.
We even managed a Robot Jig as a finale!
We badly want a stage manager, so if you have been lurking about this blog, please join us in Phobos on Saturdays to help cue curtains and move scenery! Applications to Osprey Therian, producer and tireless promoter.
Where were you Persephone?

East Village Opera Company

2008-03-01T19:41:00.000-08:00

One of my private pleasures in recent months of travel has been listening to the recordings of a group that arranges opera aria as if they were rock songs. Last night I saw East Village Opera Company live in Pasadena where my son attends school. Their versions of the music we all know and love, Nessun Dorma, La Donna E Mobile, Au fond du temple saint, is electric, loud, driving, and just a little tinged with lunacy to make it quite enjoyable. Ottowans Peter Kiesewalter and Tyley Ross are the engines behind this eleven member group, though we missed their vocalist, AnnMarie Milazzo, struck down by a sore throat and replaced at last minute by a Canadian whose name did not appear on the program. As Kiesewalter says, "These arias, in essence, are pop tunes that have stood the test of time."
I wonder if we might ever look forward to an entire opera arranged by Kiesewalter and performed in this infectious style?
I expected a more over-the-top performance, however, and they don't appear to hang together as a group on stage. One does not get the feeling they have spent much time together as a rock band - they are all much too polite to each other!

Persephone Gallindo

2008-02-28T22:24:00.000-08:00

Persephone is a new friend and fellow theatre enthusiast. Nay, more than enthusiast, for she represents the passions and interests of one who has been a professional on stage and behind it for many decades. I have been offering my meagre scripting skills in the development of one her acts for the Show Must Go On, though with only mixed results. She is another ambitious soul, who can only rail and stomp at the limits within which our somewhat flattened world exists. There is not nearly enough dimensionality and depth for truly satisfying theatre, or even enjoyable vaudeville.
But we are learning. An artist makes use of the tools at hand, and can discover virtuosity even in simple forms and limited behaviours. Persephone likely will find what she is looking for, and she is surrounded by others whose antics will likewise benefit immeasurably from her real world experience.

SL Shakespeare

2008-02-28T21:11:00.000-08:00

Shakespeare becomes all things, yet for ever remaining himself.

Coleridge, Biographia Literaria

Persephone IM'd from the Globe Theatre to say she was catching the Second Life premiere of Hamlet, just as I was reading Rik Riel's post on the event in New World Notes. So I joined her and we watched.

Persephone could only watch, for voice failed to work and hence she heard aught but the sound of cameras clicking; I heard the lines quite distinctly - a mixture of accents and acting talents. I attend productions for the scenic design, and not for the quality of the singing or acting, which in SL is closer to posing, for we are masked altimes and can neither quiver a lip nor bat an eyelash, let alone recoil in horror from the apparation of a ghost. We lack spotlights to direct the audience's attention, so the speaking actor must move in an exaggerated way to identify himself. Francisco -or was it Bernardo - seemed stuck in a distracting stance, upstaging the gentler Marcellus.
The costumes were exquisite, the faces of the actors realistic and well consider'd. Clearly this has been the labour of many, but company founder and producer Ina Centaur deserved the applause she received.
The show website tells us the performers were bots - I can not be sure if this means they were scripted avatars, or replicated avatars of some fashion, but I will look forward to where the technology will take this talented group.
Finally, was it Shakespeare, or, was it Theatre? That is a more difficult Matter to decide. I saw the Merchant of Venice at the Globe Bankside in London last September: simple sets and staging will concentrate the attention of the audience to the performer and the lines. This first SL performance was an experiment, to be sure, an effort, an oeuvre, and impressive for the amount of energy and attention it has been lent by its producers. But we are still some ways from a truly compelling production in Second Life.

Revenant

2008-02-26T14:30:00.000-08:00

I am haunted by these images, which I do not like, and which recur in dreams. I have met fantoms and vengeful spirits, and were I to write down all the instances of this kind which I have ascertained to have befallen others I know, the undertaking would be beyond measure laborious and troublesome. This particular ghost seems to have no purpose beyond reminding me of my own mortality, and I would be happy if it would leave off, for I do not need reminding, thank you very much.
I am troubled that he wears Dr. Fluxus' mantle and my cap - and that I have not seen the Doctor for many months. Perhaps it is a childish attempt to be annoying. I do not, will not, believe in portents.
Still, it has the most amazingly clean teeth!

All Dressed Up...

2008-02-24T00:32:00.000-08:00

...and nowhere to go. By the time I was able to reconnect to the grid, rehearsal was over and I never had my chance to join in the Atomic Raygun Robot Jig.

Power, like a desolating pestilence, pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience, bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, makes slaves of men, and of the human frame, a mechanized automaton.

Shelley 1813

I was a slave to the music, that's all.

Smoke and Mayhem

2008-02-23T18:20:00.000-08:00

Odd crashings, grindings and ejections from Second Life this week multiplied and resolved themselves into a sharp burning smell just as Caitlin's act was about to go on stage at The Show Must Go On rehearsal. I was certain I would not be able to appear; then a change of plans and I was free. Alas these happy circumstances turned black and acrid when a fan stopped spinning! White smoke and flame were quickly extinguished. I have spent the rest of my holiday afternoon finding and replacing vacuum tubes, steam boilers, condensers, testing and using bits and pieces of other machines, until I have now something that will serve until a new graphical engine arrives next week. I think it must have been the rusted robot's jokes - they blew a gasket in my world. Or some odd influenza that has been affecting so many of us this month.

Otello

2008-02-22T09:57:00.000-08:00

Arriving late in Los Angeles, I missed the first, and best, act of Otello, with its powerful chorus and fight scene, which must have been exciting because of the curved stage floor, built to imitate the decking of ship. The rest of the opera was sung carefully, performed with a bare minimum of action, and never really left port.
Otello is one of the most passionate of operas. But perhaps because their footing was so unsure, none of the singers took advantage of the rich score and all its prompting for broad movement, vocal expression, or intensity. Iago was almost affable, a sort of grinning buddy doing his friend's unpleasant work. Ian Storey as Otello hung his head like a beagle, and lacked the commanding presence his role demands. Desdemona lacked nobility and grace. This is a passionate, bombastic opera, Verdi's masterpiece of men and women caught in a destiny that wrings every bit of soul and hope from their being. At least the orchestra and the chorus understood.

Kenroku

2008-02-21T09:32:00.000-08:00

Kenroku-en 兼六園 has lain outside the gates of Kanazawa Castle in Ishikawa, Japan since 1676. The name means "Garden of Six Elements" referring to the six features that Sung Dynasty Chinese poets thought impossible to combine in one garden: vastness and intimacy; existing ruins and introduced structures; waters and pools and distant views. The Second Life version was created by brue Noel of AbleSeed Co., in Ishikawa, Japan.
This magnificent, peaceful and extensive build accomplishes that difficult combination with careful attention to detail and colour. From the shadow and modulated light within the buildings to the seasonal details which change as time passes - I first visited yesterday on the last day of winter, apparently, for the snow had melted away by this morning, except in cold pockets here and there, and fresh grass has sprung up everywhere, though summer foliage is not yet in - all demonstrate the patient and observant skill of its creator. Lazy koi weave in the pond, leaves blow about here and there and all is surrounded by a vast, glittering sea. Thank you, Hamlet, for guiding me there!

Vanity

2008-02-18T22:42:00.000-08:00

Provided a man is not mad, he can be cured of every folly but vanity.
I just liked the picture.

Urania Theatre (after)

2008-02-18T21:05:00.000-08:00

Urania Theatre (before)

2008-02-18T19:59:00.000-08:00

The Urania proscenium was published by Joseph Scholz around 1880 in Mainz. I purchased this lovely broadsheet in 1983 at Pollock's Toy Theatre Museum in London. Would it not make a fine stage-within-a-stage, a theatrical frame, for Persephone's magickal act? But first I must add drama and atmosphere!

Sorcerer's Apprentice

2008-02-18T17:15:00.000-08:00

When The Show Must Go On was yet a twinkle in Osprey Therian's eye, and our discourses compassed toy theatres with paper puppets and operatic treatments of the Song of Roland, we conceived of a magickal performance that included the sawing of an avatar in twain and her miraculous restoration to life. That act became the Alchimical Theatre of Doctor Fluxus, but the rending of the body was abandoned, because I kenned not how hemicorporectomy could be accomplished.
Now Broadway stage manager Persephone Gallindo has taken up that brave challenge, and I have undertaken to assist where I might.
How I wish Linden Script allowed a hierarchy of linked prims, instead of just one parent for her many children. I wish we had spotlights and shadows too.
Well, Persephone, we shall simply have to persevere.

A vision or waking dream?

2008-02-16T09:13:00.000-08:00

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

2008-01-28T17:11:00.000-08:00

Imagine my surprise to discover I am bound to a creature who imagines for itself an independent existence, that is to say, independent of myself.

Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby

2008-01-18T09:28:00.000-08:00

Odd things keep turning up on the internet. Here is one of the oddest I have seen. Have a look at Why's (poignant) guide to Ruby whether you program computers or not. An elf and his pet ham. A giraffe surrounded by weezards. Microscopic canaries. They teach you the ins and outs of the Ruby programming language. When they are not hijacking the text for their own nefarious purposes.
The author is insane. Certifiably insane. He may also be a genius.
Don't waste time here. Just go and read it.