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Org!

January 25th, 2012 . Posted in Next to godliness | No Comments »
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I’ve decided to use this site to record my progress over the year at finally getting a lot of things organized, starting with actual material things. (And yes, the post title should be read as an exclamation of pain!)

I have no system for this. What I do have is a list of moratoriums (moratoria)? on bringing more of the following into the house for a while:

  • Food, other than sandwich and fresh meat-type food; my cabinets are full of things I haven’t managed to try/make yet
  • Skin-care products
  • Hair-styling products
  • Lotion: I get some of this from somewhere every year for Christmas and my birthday. Odds are I will never actually run out
  • Makeup
  • Stationery of any kind

I’m also trying to get my closet organized enough to make similar bans on, say, black T-shirts (there is already a ban on new jeans).

The idea will be to check in once a week or so with any progress. Don’t even get me started on the Shelf of Infinite Cocoa.

Words Fail You

February 23rd, 2010 . Posted in Bookishness | No Comments »
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This is simultaneously the thing I hate and love about horror stories of a certain era, in this case as spoken by a character in Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan.

She was sitting up in bed, and I listened to her as
she spoke in her beautiful voice, spoke of things which even now
I would not dare whisper in the blackest night, though I stood
in the midst of a wilderness.  You, Villiers, you may think you
know life, and London, and what goes on day and night in this
dreadful city; for all I can say you may have heard the talk of
the vilest, but I tell you you can have no conception of what I
know, not in your most fantastic, hideous dreams can you have
imaged forth the faintest shadow of what I have heard–and
seen. Yes, seen. I have seen the incredible, such horrors that
even I myself sometimes stop in the middle of the street and ask
whether it is possible for a man to behold such things and live.

The cheapest device in the proverbial book, the staple of early (and a lot of other) Lovecraft: The Unspeakable. But what on earth is it? In many of these tales, we are dealing with educated Englishmen who would certainly have the Greek and Latin to come to grips with what Plato thought about young boys, what horrors are perpetrated against women and children in war, and what sort of things Caligula got up to on his days off.  Popular fiction of the time had lots of bloodthirsty druids and opium fiends… so what’s so darned unspeakable?

I’m haunted by the paranoid idea that everyone who read that in 1894 knew exactly what Machen wasn’t saying, and that I don’t.