Home: "Behold! human beings living in a underground den"

Nervous prefaces should be expunged. It's elementary. At worst they're an ad misericordiam special plea, at best merely bad prose. But in the medium of the blog I think we will have to get used to them. There is a lot of nonsense out there and sometimes people realise when they're writing it. If you feel exasperated with mine, keep in mind I've already given you my one-page take on Hamlet. There are any number of indulgent existential whiners who couldn't write three coherent sentences on the man who beat them all to it.

This, then, is a nervous preface. This post is going to get a little weird, and I thought it would be best to explain beforehand, in the hopes that by the end the reader will think I'm a nervously clucking hen and the untoward sleeps breezily tonight. That would be ideal.

It's a certain special brand of weird. I've been putting it off. Today I was baking cookies, though, and remembered that once and not so long ago I posted my cookie recipe here. (Actually, I think it's at least half Grandmother's. Hi, Grandma.) So some curious things have shown up now and then. This is another cookie recipe.

So I've got some photos to show you. Here ends the nervous preface. There lie dragons.

* * * * *

Once and not so long ago a man packed his books and music and linens into eleven sturdy boxes and sent them off with a "Godspeed, sturdy boxes" to the other side of the world. They braved the road and the customs agent to arrive, eventually, safely, a little battered, with a little more packing tape than when they left, but whole. The man met them there and unpacked them with a "Thank you, brave boxes" and flattened them and put them under his bed. There they lay for a half-year, waiting for their time of glory.

And it came. They poured from the underworld and, armoured with the steel hide of duct tape, readied to once more take up their charge. And yet, and yet, they were too few: for in the intervening time the man had bought more books and more music and home appliances, and these things no longer fit into the eleven. "I need another box," the man said to his heart. "I have this one here spare, which someone sent to me and I kept safe; now they number twelve. And yet, and yet, they are still too few, and too small besides: my home appliances will not fit in a box a foot and a half on the diagonal."

So warned, he wondered where a youthful, bountiful box might bloom; but no one sold him boxes, not even the ineptly run local storage concern. Time passed and trees flowered -- until one morning something remarkable happened. The man awoke and stumbled from his home to break his fast; and there, on the side of the road beneath an arch, discarded haphazardly, unwanted, in a pile of refuse, lay a great bear of a box, two feet on a side! "This is it, my champion!" spoke the man to his heart. "A box of the proportions we desire. And yet, and yet -- is it possible -- could we -- might one just take it?" And he thought about it still. "Here it lies, on the side of the road in a pile of refuse," he mused. "Soon the garbageman will come and take it away. Look you here! No one wants it. Take it now!" And so ordered by himself, he obeyed, and took the box to his home. Now they numbered thirteen; and when the man returned not so much later from his breakfast the refuse all was gone.

	So these are the Thirteen. Umm, except that there is obviously an even number of them. I guess I had already packed one and it's hiding behind the camera. (Also, this file is called "room_0.jpg". Some people like to start counting from zero, but I'd better just confess. Apparently I started numbering my pictures from the last in the series and couldn't count. Well, at least it's not room_negative_1.) This is the south-east corner of the room. (You can see one of my speakers, and the subwoofer under a pillow -- that was to hide the bright green light at its back, which was clearly visible from where my head lay at night. To regain a little lost cred, that book on the table is called "Automorphic Forms and Representations.") This was an ideal place to put the boxes, with one minor drawback--
	--namely, that if you wake up in the dull, suffused glow of dawn, it looks for all the world like there's a two-metre-tall thug with a Darth Vader-esque head standing at the base of your bed. (Apparently I was so shocked by the recollection that I called this file room_2. Oy.) This parable, by the way, has a moral; it is: "On a long enough timeline, good things happen, just by chance." I seriously was thinking (as opposed to thinking seriously) about this problem for four weeks before I found that discarded "Dell" box. Special thanks to A.N. for ordering a laptop at the end of the year.
	So this the south-west corner. My desk and shelving. It's looking like there's space because I've already started taking books down at this stage. A certain party was encouraging me for some time to take pictures of my living space but I the unruly son was quite belated about it. By this stage it was "If not now, when?" and "It's cleaner than usual, and anyway I can blame any disarray on the fact that I'm moving. That's the ticket." So that answers your question, if your question was, "Why are we getting a tour (of some place he doesn't even live in anymore)?" Click through for a bigger version, my voyeurs -- I mean, concerned parties. Umm... ignore all the Amazon boxes. They send huge boxes for the smallest items, a manifest waste of space, I swear. Moving on, I want to introduce someone:
	Say "hello" to Professor Albert. In tiger form. (Wait... room_5? I give up. Seriously, this time I just changed my mind about the flow of my narrative.) This one is really its own punchline. (In truth, I think he's adorable in addition to hilarious.) You may recall there was recently a major anniversary in the physics world -- one hundred years for the "Annus Mirabilis," the year in which Einstein published a large number of revolutionary papers, including the original Special Relativity paper and the Nobel-prize-winning paper on the photoelectric effect. You may not recall there was recently a major anniversary for the Institute for Advanced Study -- seventy-five years since its inception. You may also not recall that recently there was the fiftieth anniversary of Einstein's death. (Ugh.) These were the same years. I do not recall for which the plush is commemorative.
	Let's zoom out a bit. This picture has nothing of especial interest (no, I do not normally make my bed, this is not in situ, it is staged), it just completes the tour and gives the reader a break before we press on. If you look closely back at my desk, you can see another figure, adjacent to Professor Albert, partially obscured by a bag of tea leaves. Now who could that be?
	It's -- my word -- it's Little Richard Wagner! You can even wind him up, and he plays a music-box version of "Ride of the Valkyries." Now this demands an explanation. Back in March, two-thirds of Party the Third (that's Mom and Bruce, if you're keeping track) were passing through the area and took me to the New York City Opera, where we saw a production of -- Don Giovanni, by Mozart. At the gift kiosk downstairs they had Little Mozart and Little Wagner, too. Since stormy petrel Little Wagner is clearly superior to, umm, stormy petrel Little Mozart, the rest is clear. He comes with a little tag identifying the queer fish that made him: a little shop called the Unemployed Philosopher's Guild. A branch of their merchandise is a little suspect ("indictmints"?) but if you stick to the non-political you can spend a few happy minutes exploring their stock. I'll mention two I especially enjoyed:
	"Nietzsche's Will to Power Bar," his name spelled correctly on most pages. "When your Wille zur macht is a flagging or you're just a little tired of transvaluating all values.... These bars, like other 'energy bars' are packed with protein, vitamins and chocolatey goodness. Whether you're philosophizing with a hammer, or just trying to get through your day, these will help." In case you were wondering, that's an hilarious bit of copy.
	"What Would Nietzsche Do?" I ask myself now and then. I also ask myself if this "100% cotton" shirt is Egyptian or some low-quality knockoff, because this is about one of two pieces of apparel with text other than "No bleach, tumble dry medium" I'd consider wearing. I'd feel very cheeky doing so.
	That brings us to this guy, who you can't even see on my desk in that picture. His name is Sha-naqba-umuru, and everything about him clearly demands an explanation. Where to start? Hum, let me ponder for a line or two. All right, where it came from: Last year Craig (the other third of Party the Third) visited Las Vegas (with Cindy and their friend, Ted) for a weekend. They brought back a little present, this "Excalibear," which is what passes for clever at the hotel they were staying at. (Try to guess what it was called.) Which leaves the name: Sha naqba umuru is ancient Sumerian (or possibly Akkadian) for "He who saw the Deep." (There's no chance the punctuation is correct -- there's an apostrophe in there somewhere-- and I don't have my book handy to check.) It's a name for Gilgamesh, king of Uruk. (Now that I think on it I'm not entirely certain to what "the Deep" refers, although it's evidently a really cool sobriquet.) Anyway, in context of our magical bear here, it refers to his position as a personification, an avatar if you will, of my Platonist mysticism. That wand he carries is not fabric, cardboard, and glue, but a fantastic relic, the Reifying Juju, which instantiates in the physical world things which existed theretofore only as perfect, Platonic abstractions. To put it in more down-to-Earth terms, the Reify is to the Platonist as the Force is to the Jedi.

Now don't I feel silly. That wasn't curious at all. You know, it's good to branch out a little. With so many varied people potentially reading, I worry about what people see. Falling silent -- driving the readers away -- solves it simply.

* * * * *

Update, the next morning. I changed the pictures so that they're now thumbnails (width 240) for slightly larger pics (width 320, except for the two "this is just a picture of my room" shots, which I think were 640) to correct the unreadable vertically-stretched text in the second column. (Well, that's just what bad planning gets you.) As a bonus for your forbearance, here's another picture of someone else's merchandise (which is, umm, maybe not for public use, now that I think of it, just like the other two):

"Here's Looking at Euclid"

That, by the way, is the diagram for the elegant and extremely useful Proposition I.1 of the Elements, "To construct an equilateral triangle on a given line segment AB." Snazzy, but a little on the nose, don't you think?

ambivalence, n.

So, they finally got around to writing Dune 7.

I know I should feel something, but I don't know what. Twenty years on, the end of Chapterhouse seems less and less disturbing. We kinda wonder what's with the two Face Dancers and the Enemy and whatnot, but really, we already know in our hearts, the gentle clues lurk between the words and letters, just like we know that the crisis has passed for the Bene Gesserit and left man better off. There's a universe of possibility, but a pregnant world is the natural condition of things. Do we really need that hack to continue to ply his work? Will I end up reading the damn'd book regardless, despite the risk inherent and the knowledge that I'll constantly be wondering whether this or that comes from the deceased man's notebooks or the diseased man's?

More questions our heart knows how to answer. But not in hardcover, damn it.