The cycle repeats itself. I get a cold sore on my upper lip. So as to not irritate it, I stop shaving in that spot. To make it less obvious, I grow a beard. The beard is itchy, irritating, and distracting, so I get rid of it after a week.
It'll be about a week tomorrow, and the sore has dried up a lot.
Sometime in college was my one genuine attempt to grow one. There was no gross backstory behind it. Still lost its charm after not too long.
The insurance company Progressive has a new (within the last couple of years) line of advertisements for their home insurance. The tagline is "We can't stop you from becoming your parents, but..." The idea is that young homeowners--do such creatures actually exist?--then start to engage in old people behavior if a sixty-odd mentor isn't around to discourage them. These behaviors pretty much boil down to talking. To anyone, under any circumstances. Apparently it's cringe and boomer to make any kind of outreach.
As an actual introvert, it bothers me when people choose to become blunt parodies of introverts. I certainly don't want to see it encouraged.
I went on a quick jaunt to Stop & Shop today. While going through the route that I walk to get there, I heard a telltale cawing. Sure enough, the upper branches and roofs have crows flitting about on them.
This is something I like about autumn. These smart yet somehow humble birds show up in force again. You don't see or hear them as much in summer. This is in part because they break up into smaller groups in summertime and are busy raising their chicks. Crows are altricial, meaning there's a high parental investment in the young. We're altricial too, of course. So are domestic dogs and cats, but that's not so true of wolves and wildcats, so in their case it may be more our influence.
From the book Escher on Escher: Exploring the Infinite, this is an excerpt from M. C. Escher's acceptance speech for the Culture Prize of the City of Hilversum in 1965.
Bach's music may provide an occasion to say a few words about my work. I had better not expound on the affinity I seem to have discovered between the canon in polyphonic music and the regular division of a plane into figures with identical forms, no matter how striking it is to me that the Baroque composers have performed manipulations with sounds similar to the ones I love to do with visual images.
Allow me to say only that Father Bach has been a strong inspiration to me, and that many a print reached definite form in my mind while I was listening to the lucid, logical language he speaks, while I was drinking the clear wine he pours.
It is sometimes easy to forget that Escher made his prints in the twentieth century. Personally, I'm occasionally surprised to remember that he was still alive when I was born. His work doesn't belong to any of the tendencies associated with modernism. For instance, while his art can have a strange and eerie quality, it's entirely different from the deliberate illogic of surrealism.
So hearing him praise the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and cite it as an inspiration for his own work? Yes, of course. Escher was in a lot of ways a man of the Baroque, and he knew it. But he would have had something to add in any time he was born.
We're in the middle of another two-to-three day rain spree. It'll top off our reservoir, which is good. From the forecasts it seems likely to end the balmy period we've been having this week and make things more autumnal.
It started last night, while I was asleep. I woke up sometime in the dark AM hours to thunder and lightning. Understand, the thunder and lightning aren't what woke me up. My bladder did that. But then I noticed the flashes and the rumble.
It was actually kind of pleasant. Overall this was just a couple of minutes before I got back in bed and went back to sleep. But there was a certain emphasis. In hazy semiconsciousness, seeing things in a new light.
Fredric Brown might best be remembered for "Arena", a man-vs-alien tale that's been adapted into an episode of Star Trek and a bunch of other things, officially and otherwise. He was prolific in both science fiction and mystery.
The Fabulous Clipjoint is one of his mystery novels, the first in a series. In it, young Ed Hunter's printer father is murdered in an alley. Ed teams up with his carney uncle Am (short for Ambrose) to bring the murderer to justice. Along the way, he drinks alcohol for the first time, fends off his sexually precocious younger stepsister, and falls in love with both a hard luck gold digger and the trombone.
So yeah, Brown basically invented Tom Waits.
