Rural Old New York

Janice McIntire just sent me a link to a New York Times article about a man who has spent 30 years turning his 1-bedroom Manhattan apartment into a rustic cabin á la Abe Lincoln. Check out the amazing interactive tour, which allows you to see a panorama of both his living room and his kitchen. I took a couple of screen shots just to give you a taste (check out the computer in the kitchen, and don't forget you can look at the ceiling and floor).

The things one can do if one has enough time! Who says Steampunk is a recent development? It's been in the works a long time.


Thanks, Janice! (via Bettershelter)

Brief News

Okay, I'm still on hiatus for the moment, but I just wanted to say I'll be on two panels at the Nova Albion Steampunk Exhibition in Emeryville on Saturday, March 13th. Here's the info:

Saturday 1:00-2:45
STEAMPUNK GARB FOR LIFE ON A BUDGET
Jade Falcon, Ryan Galiotto, Jean Martin, Gail Carriger (M), Heather McDougal
Modifying and adapting everyday wear. Making steampunk gear out of found objects and clothing.

Saturday 4:30-5:45
STEAMPUNK TECHNOLOGY
Jon Sarriugarte, Patrick McKercher, Alexander Logan, Mark Anderson (M), Heather McDougal
Making and creating past inventions for the future. Discussing the maker mentality, why the rise of steampunk, why now?

Yeesh! I'm terrified. But it might be fun, if I keep the Mouth Editor on full speed ahead. It's not that I'm not smart, it's that I very often don't look it, so I have to watch my step. Expect a blog post on this kind of disconnect in March.

This Hiatus was a Good Thing, and I've been collecting ideas for posts. So see you soon - I'm looking forward to it!

Hiatus: Until March 20th 2010

Things have been a little chaotic here recently. In fact, the whole summer has been nuts. I am trying to build a house (and so far failing), finishing two novels, and sorting things in order to someday move into a smaller place; we were evacuated for the Lockheed fire in August and are just getting things back in order; and suddenly, I am realizing I need to really get some writing out there now that I've been published a little bit.

So I am taking a 6-month hiatus from the blog. I don't know what that will do to my readership, but it seems more fair to simply state when I'll be back, writing about things that are cool and interesting, than to simply fall away like I've been doing recently.

I'll hopefully collect weird bits during the coming six months and come back fresh and full of new things to talk about.

In the meantime, take care and feel free to use these pages as a source of inspiration for writing or art, a place to come to be reminded that the world is not a dull place, or just resource for finding out about something obscure which just might be here.

Please, feel free to email me at mcdougal dot heather at gmail dot com and let me know if there's anything you think I should be blogging about. And thanks to those who already have. I'm thinking about it, I promise.

I'll be back on March 20th, 2010.

Cheers,
Heather

Hubble: Deep Field

My friend Gwyan just sent me this and I actually can't find many words to describe the effect it had on me. There was a moment, and I will let you find that moment, when I caught my breath and actually became too emotional to speak. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. It is, quite literally, awesome.

MetaHaiku

"Cent mille milliards de poemes" (A hundred thousand billion poems), by Raymond Queneau

For a number of years I've been really interested in the possibilities of hypertext as a vehicle for really interesting and complex narrative. I diddled around with writing stories in hypertext, but was never satisfied with the result; they seemed to me either confusing or aimless or simply mechanistic, and at best I came up with something so voluminous that I couldn't possibly complete it in one lifetime.

I decided to try poetry instead.

Poetry has the virtue of being all about simplicity, about using as few words as you can to create complex images and ideas. It's about making little windows into reality, places where the world stops for a moment and you see, really see, something unexpected.

It's really a perfect place for hypertext, being spare and clear and often having a specific structure. And there is a long history of what is called combinatorial poetry, or combinatorial text - the creation of poems that can be changed around by the reader, usually based on some mechanism in the book form. I decided that I would try haiku, since the form is so fixed. This would a) allow me to work within a specified framework, so I didn't have to also create (and get tangled up in) my own system; and b) would keep the poems from wandering off on a tangent, keeping them simple and clear. I also decided I would specify the number of links so as to keep it as structured as a traditional haiku.

What I came up with, using the simplest tools I could, was an HTML frameset system in a set window size. The top frame held the top line, the middle frame held the middle line, and the bottom frame held - well, you get the picture. Then in each line I chose one word which would be emphasized, making that the link word. When the reader clicks on that link, the line changes, creating a new haiku. (more about my process here)

It's difficult to describe it, and I can't actually insert one here in the blog, so I suggest you try one. Here's my little MetaHaiku site, where you can see a few that I've written.

The thing I like about these is that it enlarges the tiny window of a haiku without compromising its essential qualities. By nature, haiku are traditionally supposed to describe a moment, and they are supposed to contain some clue about season, and they are supposed to speak only of small things - which of course capture something much larger. So when you make a haiku with hypertext, you are creating a series of moments, a progression of snapshots which move slightly through time, describing a longer moment than a regular two-dimensional haiku. It's not so much that they describe more as that they describe longer, and the reader can unveil the moment in a way that is pleasingly exploratory.

The haiku have five links on the top line, seven on the middle, and five on the bottom, echoing the syllabic line-structure. The experience is a lot like our experience of real moments - in other words, you can't go back. There is a starting haiku and and ending haiku, and any number of ways to get there. In the present structure, you have more than 175 ways to get from the beginning to the end, so the process is surprisingly repeatable.

What I've decided is that I'd really like to share these, and see if others are interested in writing some. What I'd really like to do is to find a simple way to do it, given that mine are done in a clunky and complicated way, and then broadcast the template for everyone to use. I'm working on having a friend make a Flash interface to simplify things, but in the meantime if anyone wants to know the more lame way I did it you can email me (look in the sidebar for the address) and I'll do my best to define it for you.

Vive la Interactif!

The Many Personalities We Live With

This is Garky. Garky spent almost a whole day sitting in chairs with Younger Daughter, shooting down the vampires in the trees, and generally sharing many other adventures before geting injured and requiring bandages. Now she lives in this vase.

You might mistake her for some kind of Sogetsu Ikebana*, but you would be mistaken. Despite my daughter's belief that she can hold vampires at bay, she is really an onion flower (don't tell Younger Daughter).

This is the same daughter who personifies such characters as Snitch, Miru, Grumpo, Cute-o, Wadro, Sicko, and Happo.

They all talk in a strange way, saying "You too nice to me" instead of "You're too nice to me".

Snitch likes to eat hair and fingers, because it thinks they are worms. You must keep these things away from it, or it will grab and eat them.

Miru likes to eat fresh skulls with brain juice, as well as having a fondness for the flavor of cactus, and always hugs its pillow. If it loses its pillow it gets really sad and goes and looks for it. If anyone steals its pillow, it bites them.

Grumpo complains all the time, about everything, including nice things. If you're nice to it, for example, it says you're nice to it too much.

Cuto is incredibly cute, but loves to bite off your limbs, and can go for ages and ages without food or water.

Wadro loves its hole. Its hole is any area of water (other than the ocean). If you go in its hole it drags you under and drowns you. When there is no water, Wadro cries, "Hole! Where hole!" in a piteous voice.

Sicko barfs on you.

Happo is always happy and okay with everything. Even if you beat on it or say mean things. Happo is the teflon of characters, to the detriment of itself and everyone else's sanity.

Characters appear when Elder Sister bings them into existence with her invisible magic wand.

The term "characters" is not to be confused with Annoying Little Character, a hand-creature who is incredibly annoying and cheerful, singing its Annoying Little Character song and dancing until someone slaps it, whereupon it lies down and gets sick for awhile. Only time passing can improve its health.

These are not the only characters who appear. When Elder Daughter was three she became intensely enamored of a butternut squash that my father had drawn a cartoon face on with a Sharpie. She called it her "heavy baby" and carried it everywhere, in the car and into bed. We had difficulty with the gales of mirth trying to get out, but we bore with it until it got so shrunken that it had to be disappeared, whereupon she spent several weeks looking for it.

I remember reading an interview with Frank Zappa many years ago in which he talked about following his son Ahmet (aged perhaps three at the time) around trying to catch the lyrics to a song he sang called Frogs With Dirty Little Lips. It fascinated him, he said, because it was such a great concept, and because the words changed all the time, and it drove him crazy. Now I find, looking it up, that he actually did put the song (or some momentary version of it) on his album Them or Us. I need not mention how much I love how Frank Zappa's mind worked. It is a secret, or used to be.

So I suppose, despite our poor housekeeping skills, my household has its interesting moments. At least the Characters don't argue with me much.

An example of Sogetsu

*More on Ikebana and Sogetsu: "the great difference between the Sogetsu School and [traditional] Ikebana lies in the belief that once all the rules are learned and the techniques mastered, there is an unbounded field for freer personal expression using varied materials, not just flowers." [wiki] Curiously, I think the same kind of thing could be said about play. And about storytelling. Or even, perhaps, things like manners and who you feel like being, at the moment.

Here also, some Sogetsu masters' work. And a little about the man who started it. I think I might do a photo post about it, sometime...

Summer Cleaning

Cleaning out the basement is meant to be a boring, thankless task. Fortunately for me, I seem to have been doing it for years, so now that I absolutely have to get rid of some stuff, I'm finding only the less junky stuff is really left to deal with. And so I find myself going through years of lovely stuff, things I had forgotten I own. Nice things. Things from my travels and other odd life-experiences...

George Carlin had a thing he used to do about "My stuff and your shit," but it seems to me this stuff is pretty interesting shit..

So I took some pictures.

But then, my thinking it's interesting is exactly the reason why it's in my basement.




This is one of those nesting Russian dolls, called a Matryoshka doll, but instead of those pretty girlie figures we get all the main Russian leaders, from Boris Yeltsin right back to a teeny-tiny little Ivan the Terrible.


They seem to be trying to educate us about some of the leaders, here...


Can't remember where I got these. Somewhere in Asia, during my rambles; they are opium tools, probably made for tourists, but then again, I'd bet they aren't too far off from the originals.


Glass soda bottles from a street vendor in Japan. You pay your money and the vendor bashes in the top, which is a little glass ball held in place purely by the pressure of the carbonation (see the picture below). Then you stand there and drink it, give the bottle back to the vendor, and go on your way. Needless to say, I wasn't a very good citizen, or I wouldn't have these.




The glass shell of a streetlight. Notice the interesting combination of Fresnel lens on the inner surface and wavy texture on the outside. The Fresnel lens focuses the light, and the wavy lines make it feel less like a spotlight. It's imprinted with the GE logo (see below).




A solid glass ball, about the size of a small grapefruit.


One of the few items left from my days blowing glass, probably my favorite.


Edward VIII coronation cup, horribly mended.


Everyone needs some good English stripey ceramicware!


A few of the many, many cups my father made for my wedding celebration...


...And my baby cup, also made by him.


Outside and...


...inside of a millivoltmeter, which seems to record its measurements on a soot-coated wheel marked with the hours.


A fan from a flea market in Japan. Anyone know what it says?


A very old, very beautiful, very well-loved double bridge pack of cards from the house of family in England.


And lastly, a child's toy from the same house (as are all the dolls in the bin at the top of the page).

This is only one afternoon's worth of finds. There is much more, like the things I unearthed last Friday: a set of opium weights, an opium pipe, a carving of a nasty little man from, I think, Irian Jaya (though I bought it in Kuching, on Borneo) who is clutching his penis and a knife, and who seems to have real teeth. A set of tiny old ninepins with beautiful wormholes in them. Some souvenir china from the Museum of Jurassic Technology. And on and on. I couldn't possibly put it all in my house, yet I have a hard time relinquishing it...