Here’s a report on my Adventure of almost a fortnight ago, sent out to friends and family and stored here for ready access:
The “AI Overview” of the term embuggerance, coughed up by google, is a good summary of the ambit of the term, and fits nicely with my thinking about the event described below and its consequences.
So in short:
On Saturday January 24th we were out to dinner with friends, well into the dessert course, when I experienced vertigo so sudden and arresting that I knew I couldn’t move and certainly wasn’t going to be able to get to the car, let alone drive. There happened to be an EMT person as a guest at the inn, and he asked all the right questions and summoned an ambulance, which took me to the nearby Pen Bay hospital ER, which led to 3 days as a guest in the hospital, and eventually to an MRI on Monday that found the cause to be an acute bilateral cerebellar infarction, basically a small stroke in the lizard brain. Such things are pretty rare, and not obviously karmic (that is, I didn’t earn or deserve it as far as I can see). It took about 24 hours before I could stand or navigate because of dizziness, but that passed gradually and by Tuesday morning I was mobile again. The CT scan at the ER showed no obvious cause, so they did the MRI on Monday which disclosed the small strokes.
So instead of the cataract surgery that I was scheduled for tomorrow, I’m at home and doing pretty much nothing for a while –reading, writing, watching videos, entirely mobile and needing no assistance to move around the house, unimpaired in physical and mental ways. Even stood on one leg while putting on socks this morning.
Of course Betsy and Kate get to do the household stuff like wood-hauling and venturing to the mailbox, and dealing with snow shoveling, and I’m periodically asked if there’s anything I need or want, but otherwise daily life is returned to normal. I don’t foresee any lifestyle changes as indicated or likely, but do vow to work more assiduously at curating collections and refining https://oook.info/lifebox.
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I seem to be back to pretty much normal now, I’m pleased to report, but enjoined to “take it easy”, which turns out to be quite pleasurable as a lifestyle.
After 3 weeks of use, a page of links to toothsome things for January 2025 is already pretty unwieldy, but at least it’s in chronological order, with dates for my encounters, and many of the entries have blockquoted extracts of their essence. The rationale is that something linked on that page seemed portentious or exemplary in some way, and so wanted to be at least maybe retrievable at some future time. What the page shows is Serendipities, showing how far I can wander in any given day via incoming traffic from Feedly and several subscriptions. Each link could easily become part of a Project…
The January 2025 collection of YouTube videos has sprawled even more messily, the main criterion for inclusion being a sense that I might want to find the video again. The gatheration could be sorted topically (music stuff of many kinds, art stuff, talk stuff…), but for the moment I’ve resorted to splitting the stream into Part A, Part B, and Part C. I suspect I’ll need another Part before the month is done.
I discovered this remarkable artist only yesterday, which says something about how isolated I am (he’s been around for several years, but active on TicToc [of which I’m not a follower] apparently in recent years. Here’s my collection of YouTube videos, the lyrics of which speak very eloquently to these parlous times.
The game of following the twists and turns of my attention is a personal delight, though perhaps following my Narrative of discoveries and divagations is not an activity that many would find amusing or useful … so this is self-indulgent and primarily for me, to try to capture the daily process. And why not blog it, just in case it might edify or inspire, and so I can find the bits and pieces again myself.
Today’s hypnopompic prompt [waking thought] was centered on the notion of the alter ego (the term said to have been coined by Cicero [‘second self; a trusted friend’]), perhaps touched off by recent explorations of surrealism, and an offshoot of 3 weeks of exploring dreams and dreaming, but a phenomenon of considerable long-running personal interest.
The centerpiece of the moment is Max Ernst, whom I knew had adopted an alter ego, whom he called Loplop, and represented as “Father Superior of the Birds” (the Wikipedia article is a good starting place)
Loplop first appeared in Ernst’s collage novels La Femme 100 Têtes and Une Semaine de Bonté in the role of a narrator and commentator, followed by a number of works into the mid 1930s, forming an informal series of collages, paintings, and mixed media works.
Loplop’s image was not a fixed character, but highly variable in appearance and seldom depicted in the same way twice. Typically (but not always), Loplop had the head of a bird, which could be highly abstracted, often a bird with a crest, comb, or wattle. The body was a square or rectangular space (a canvas, frame, easel, or wall), with the arms and legs being zoomorphic or geometric abstraction in form. Within the “body”, an image, a piece of Max Ernst’s art is presented (a collage, frottage, painting, etc.) which could be equal to, or function independently from the rest of the work.
I first encountered Max Ernst as the subject of a photograph by Frederick Sommer, seen ca. 1964 in Aperture, long before ‘surrealism’ became a subject for my detailed exploration.
Quite a few of Sommer’s photographs were enigmatic and weird enough to draw my attention 60 years ago, as an aspiring photographer on the ragged edges of the conventional, and the Max Ernst photograph seemed at first pretty transgressive of my notions of ‘normal’ portrait images.
So Max Ernst: here’s some of what I collected today, and am working over
from MoMA:
Beginning in the early 1930s, Loplop, or “the Bird Superior,” became one of Ernst’s favorite alter egos. Here his beak-like profile peers over the top of a large rectangular field, which resembles a canvas on an easel or a sandwich board, held up by a concealed body with two stubby feet. In place of a painting or commercial slogans or graphics, Ernst substituted carefully cutout photographs of members of the Surrealist group. His own face appears just slightly above and to the left of center, right next to Salvador Dalí. Such pictures of collective or group activity are a persistent theme in Surrealism.
(fromGallery label from Max Ernst: Beyond Painting, September 23, 2017-January 1, 2018)
…and I have La Femme 100 Têtes and Une Semaine de Bonté on order…
But what about the alter ego that I began with today? My fascination with such beings is based in my very own engagement with alter egos, the ‘Pogo’ that has followed me since 1953, and the ‘oook’ that joined the parade in the early 1990s (via Terry Pratchett’s Librarian). It’s not so much that either of those is me, as that I have identified with aspects of the characters for 70-odd and 30-odd years. It doesn’t seem to me that many of my acquaintances have similar relationships, and I’m curious about that. There are plenty of examples in literature (even Superman and Batman, whom I abhor…). And now with AI, anybody can have the wherewithal to design avatars and turn them loose in cyberspace … and of course there’s a TV series (Thanks, Fox…) Alter Ego, Avatars and Their Creators and ‘Legitimately nightmarish’: is Alter Ego the worst TV show of 2021? (Guardian). And there’s the 2009 film Avatar , which has spawned a franchise…
A long way from the playfulness of Max Ernst’s Loplop.
“Avatar” comes from the Sanskrit word avat&amacron;ra meaning ‘descent’. Within Hinduism, it means a manifestation of a deity in bodily form on earth, such as a divine teacher. For those of us who don’t practice Hinduism, it technically means “an incarnation, embodiment, or manifestation of a person or idea”. But in the West, because we mostly encounter avatars in the digital space, we generally define them as the little cartoon person you choose to represent yourself in video games, on social media, or in web forums.
And in the Metaverse?
Avatars are a digital expression of you, letting you freely express your identity, personality and appearance. Avatars are available across all first-party Meta experiences, including those in VR.
Has it really been a month since the last blog post? Of course lots of stuff in that time, books arriving and being wolfed down and at least partially digested, various end-of-year summings-up, and the plunge into 2022. Staying home, minimizing f2f encounters, watching It All Go Down.
Preparations for the weekly Convivium have supplanted blogging to some degree, and
tell the tale of my wandering attentions pretty well.
By way of paying attention to the world outside the many comforts of home, I’ve been following Heather Cox Richardson and Umair Haque, both sort of paywalled (or anyhow I’m not sure if hyperlinks to their posts on Substack and Medium are readily accessible), and both painting not-rosy pictures of what’s just around the corner.
…and I’ve revisited Joan Didion and Jorge Luis Borges profitably, and lately discovered Unflattening (Nick Sousanis) and The Secret To Superhuman Strength (Alison Bechdel), among (many) others.
…and then consult The Aleph (pdf), when you’re ready for the next thing… Hell of a ride. I’ve just ordered The Total Library : Non-Fiction, 1922-1986, so The Future Is Assured for the rest of January. And of course other things will appear, seemingly out of nowhere.
Once again I’ve got only a single blog posting for the month. The photostream records a succession of grill-watching evenings:
(Kate does the grilling, I having no genes for that activity. She includes kohlrabi and green beans and zucchini as regular grillage, and it seems possible that ALL garden produce can be grilled…)
Organizing projects in shop and Library Annex proceed:
I bought a couple of professional-grade book carts to facilitate the Library (re-)organization process:
…and it proceeds slowly, arranged by my own idiosyncratic and ever-morphing categories:
It’s been very pleasant to spend afternoons sitting here dipping in and out of a succession of rediscovered books.
In Convivium space, I spent quite a while thinking about the Future. On other frontiers, lots of books read, music played, videos watched, trash picked up. Quite content to be mostly At Home, going from thing to thing.
