Wyld Stallynz.

There was a heated debate over who'd get linking rights to the new radiohead cd. Alex got first dibs thanks to an unlikely blurb on NPR, but in honor of that gorgeous, sleepless sound, I'll offer this.

These are the moments.

Smack in the middle of my run, it decided to turn to fall.

Down from the door where it began.

Kept a running log of every vaguely literary place we passed on our ten day loop of the eastern seaboard. Found some (forced some) regional themes.

Headed south (Western PA, WV, NC): Ripley, Starbuck, Tesla Road, Amity, a few Lykan Buslines. Brutish, practical, no nonsense. Perhaps not surprising from the land of Hi-Tech corridors and the GITRDUN license plate.

Going east (Eastern PA, NYC area, Connecticut, Massachusettes): Ichabod Road, Hamlin (as in the Pied Piper of), Cheshire, Buckland Street (LOTR), Peter Pan Buslines. Charming and relatively fresh-faced in the realm of story. All bouncing off one another like so many pins and balls rumbling through the Hudson River hills.

Northward bound (New Hampshire, VT): Glastonbury, Boreas Road, Milton, Minerva. No messing around here. Between bear sign and the steely-eyed locals, there's clearly no room for whimsy. Only contracts signed with Old World gods will save you from being frozen out.

Back home: The Hyde Collection, Moreau (The Island of Doctor), Leatherstocking Region. We're New Yorkers. If we're dealing in fictions or folktales, we want them bound, packaged, and preferably in novel form. Nothing if not neat expediency. And don't forget the tight confederacy of NY city-states (Utica, Syracuse, Ithaca, Homer, Ilion, Rome). The perfect welcome back to the pen weilding, regimented traveller.

Fo Fum.

What's up, scanner? I thought we had a deal. You play nice with my lines and I don't grind your bones into meal.

The other side of the Seven Ravens. From where I sit, things are looking more sparrow than crow, but the metamorphosis isn't complete, and it's not quite October.

Crazy Grandma quote of the day.

She'd called the ambulance for what turned out to be vertigo, and phoned me afterwards to crow about her adventures. "Come tuck me in! I'm as tired as a pig in shit!".

I arrived to find her in the kitchen, grinning, berobed, and tucking away at an entire lemon meringue pie.

Me (panting, not a little sweaty): "--Grandma?"
Grandma (winking and gesturing with her spoon at the half-finished pie): "Want some Chinese food?"

And the fire with all the strength it hath.

"Ahead of her was a tremendous ryhthmic swirl of wind and flame, but it was wind and flame quite different from the cherumbim's; this was a dance, a dance ordered and graceful, and yet giving an impression of complete and utter freedom, of ineffable joy. As the dance progressed, the movement accelerated, and the pattern became clearer, closer, wind and fire moving together, and there was great joy, and song, melody soaring, gathering together as wind and fire united.
And then wind, flame, dance, song cohered in a great swirling, leaping, dancing, single sphere.
..."What was that?"
..."The birth of a star.""

--from A Wind in the Door,
Madeleine L'Engle (November 29, 1918-September 6, 2007)

Revelry.

Maybe not in the strictest sense, but spoonfuls can be quite enough. Spoonfuls of airy powdered-sugar fun.

And liters of body wash.

Because New Orleans stinks. Literally.

Perhaps it's the layers of heat--heat of a thousand categories. Or perhaps it's the irrepressible plant life left to rot and riot and rot again. Or the fluids produced by body and building--sweat and piss and beer and coffee and fourth-story runoff--travelling in milky rivulets down every street, over every stone, between unwary toes. But the smell has a presence, if not a name. And it clings to that fat insistent dance partner that is Southern summer.

A city of glorious excretion, but I fear it's never coming off.

As the crow flies, you fools.

Ravens everywhere yesterday. I spent the afternoon portioning off the sky to accommodate groups of seven. Sometimes--the auguries--they need a helping hand.

Sometimes not. Last night at Barnes&Noble, I'd seen myself off to the back aisles. Nothing so comforting as the serene ballroom progression from L's to M's in Sci-Fi/Fantasy. Le Guinn... McCaffrey... McKinley... and two-two-three, and three-two-three and bow. I blindly struck out a finger at the first spine, and withdrew--of all things--a retelling of The Seven Ravens.

Those odds? A little troubling.

M.F.E.O.

A: Come up and join me?
C: Thanks, but no.
A: Hmph. Then stop exhaling my way. Your breath is searing the upperairs.
C: And your arm is too short by at least an eighth.

rocks. just rocks.

I suddenly remembered my Charlemagne.

Different phases.

--where she paints her cheeks and hennas her hair, and slows her paces long enough so that darkness pools in her footprints. And she sends her pale hounds away and calls her red hounds to heel. And the bear is caught dangling in a net, while the scorpion falls beneath a dozen angry snouts. And she waits throughout, in a knit of shadows that stains her pale dress. And then bends, with her pack, to a hideous feast.

Thanks...

...for seeing an old baba into a new year.

Eau de Gerda.

Beginning to think that The Snow Queen is less about devotion than abduction? Well you'd be right. What is it occurs in the mind of a woman past a certain age that makes her frantic for the possession of bottled youth?

It's the strictures of fashion, isn't it? Raise those necklines, loosen those cinches. You'll find an immediate drop in the urge to distill the Essence from every rosy cheek. And a generation of Gerdas free to ramble while a gracefully aging Auntie Horde retires to fireside respectability.

Beside it the wreck of the Hesperus too.

Loose lips sink ships,
and curse pencils to repetition.

Brave (new) world.

What does it say about a person's work when he tries for innovation and ends up mulling around his roots? Not much, I suppose. Experimentation is nothing if not starting from the beginning.

A thunderous clap would have been nice, though--to herald The Tempest.

Proud Parent

This weekend witnessed the rebirth of jessicagadra.com. Alex sat grim-faced at his post, hands hovering over the myriad shining tools--and I paced the linoleum with loosened collar and wild eyes. There are still a few wrinkles to smooth, but the goal of updating has been achieved.

Check out the headers. The idea to use handwriting was an Alex original, and I think it was well done--softens the antiseptic bent, livens things up. Though I'm not convinced that the standard cast of fineline piggies and frogs really gels with my psychopathic script.

Hiccup.

Pay no mind to the stream of nearly-the-sames that is about to come. There's method behind it. Changes are being made in the matrix.

Wontcha come out tonight?

Cheers to the Birthday Gal!

You really DO always come back!

For those waiting: Sept. 21, 2007.

No one's interested in something you didn't do.

Shockingly, The Poetic Edda and The Gormenghast trio are providing weak creative ballast. Not that I wouldn't recommend them to the staunchest wordsmith in need of a nap, but not for the sketchbook are they. One operates on the most massive of scales while the other travels in an obsessively tight circuit, and I like my 'verses somewhere in the middle, preferably in a tame European countryside--hedgerows optional.

So, back to the Snow Queen, and more productive weekdays.