I thought of this song when I was reading The Kekulé Problem the other day. In it, McCarthy recalls,

I suggested once in conversation at the Santa Fe Institute that language had acted very much like a parasitic invasion and David Krakauer—our president—said that the same idea had occurred to him. Which pleased me a good deal because David is very smart.

Allegedly, the virus quote originated in William Burroughs’ The Ticket That Exploded, although I could not locate the verbiage in a search of the text. McCarthy doesn’t deal with Burroughs though. He’s rather discussing relationships between language and the subconscious, and language and humanity.

…once you have language everything else follows pretty quickly. The simple understanding that one thing can be another thing is at the root of all things of our doing.

The Open Culture essay on The Kekulé Problem quotes GK Chesterton: “Art is the signature of man.” Art, like language, is symbolic representation and metaphor. One thing being another. I’d also say it’s a mirror, in that what we see in it is determined by what we bring to it, and so it shows us ourselves.

I read Kekulé hoping it would help me grapple with The Passenger. The jacket flap explains it as a “novel of morality and science, the legacy of sin, and the madness that is human consciousness.” On the surface, it appears to be two interleaved tales, one of a young woman’s hallucinations and suicide, and one of her brother working as a salvage diver in New Orleans. But it’s something more as well. There’s a scene at a funeral where the protagonist muses on the scientists who built the bomb and the aesthetics of horror, with this sentence:

I just had to make a triple troll quote out of that. #MakeArtDammit! I attributed it to Hemingway and used a photo of Ellroy, contrasting the quote to their deceptively simple prose and economy of language.

Anderson’s song connects back to the book with serendipitous lyrics:

Paradise
Is exactly like
Where you are right now
Only much much (It’s a shipwreck,)
Better. (It’s a job.)

The job involves a shipwreck and a sunken plane. I don’t think paradise enters into it, although it appears to be what they like doing. Finding these connections is something I like doing. And it gives me impetus to blog a bit, and maybe get that book club thing going with Jim again.

“Singin’ la la la la la la la la”

To start with, I cannot figure out why this image is as small as it is. The picture is of me barely holding up my giant teddy bear Toast, who I’ve had for years now and gives wonderful hugs. I went out with Toast to my friend’s work at a school to surprise her and the kids she helps to teach. I couldn’t carry him around with me too much he’s taller than me and is a bit heavy for me, but everyone who got to meet him seemed to have a great time interacting with him. After we left, I took him back to my old home where my parents live and we all got to spend some time together. In hindsight I really should’ve picked a much smaller toy to bring around, as taking pictures and setting up compositions was a nightmare in and of itself. I love him but I won’t be doing this again anytime soon.

Found my old laptop and I thought it’d make for some interesting color shifts, and sure enough it really did! The image got pixelated thanks to Grafx2 for some reason I’ve yet to figure out, but besides my annoyances with it I like how it turned out! I’m a sucker for warm color schemes, and I couldn’t resist having a purple to orange gradient on something so special to me as my old laptop. Very sentimental and a rather sweet assignment.

This one gave me a lot of trouble in all honesty. I really wish I started this one sooner because I kept reselecting images based on their complexity and the colors I wanted to pop. I settled on this handsome noodle because of their striking colors, although separating the colors of the hands from the snake was a challenge. I used my main art program Grafx2 (main usage is for pixel art) to sort the color palette by lightness and hue, then picked out the colors I didn’t want and gray-scaled them. The program is free and is lacking in comparison to other pixel art programs, but I’m quite fond of it myself.

My family has never been big on taking pictures, much less printing them out, so I had to get a bit creative on this one. I have this little collection of post cards I got on a yard sale that feature some gorgeous scenes from all over the United States, and thought it’d look really cool to try and line up the postcards to the scenes they depict. I firstly had to pick a postcard, and that was honestly pretty difficult! With so many options I simply decided to randomly grab a handful, counted them up and randomly picked a number one through six. With that out of the way, I then got to googling around for the scene I wanted, the firefall of Yosemite park. It was somewhat surprising to see one of the first results be the exact postcard I was holding, but after some careful pickings I found a background that fit really well with my card. Angling the card against my computer at the right distance was a bit tricky and my phone refused to focus properly, but overall I really enjoyed this activity!