Announcement!

Meet my sister Nina. She is an editor at Modern Bridge, but she also sometimes writes for Bookslut, which is neat.

She was in Nepal (clearly), which is why she wasn't blogging earlier. But now she's back! And ready to take over the blogosphere.


UPDATE: The blog post earlier misstated Nina's role at Modern Bridge. She is an editor, apparently, not an intern. We regret the error. Correction appended.

Nepal: A typical vista

Above, a butchershop in Kathmandu. Not pictured: two streetdogs covered in sores which occasionally jumped up to lick the chicken bodies. The butcher didn't seem to mind.

I'll be blogging here, too. I probably won't pun.

Part 1 of 2

I had been told that in Dublin, the rain doesn’t get you wet. That’s not the case. When it rains in Dublin, you don’t have to carry an umbrella--true. But even if you do, you are guaranteed to get wet. See, the water falls so slowly that even with an umbrella up, you are bound to walk into the drops. The drops, though, they aren’t the drenching, Big Gulp-sized things we get here, not the kind of drops that will soak you in minutes. In America, we say, “It’s raining cats and dogs”; in Dublin, they say “It’s a soft day,” meaning, it’s gray and misty. Most days are soft days. You can get wet in Dublin, it just takes longer.

I had been there long enough. Studying at Trinity College for the year, I was in a rut—lonely, isolated. At the start of Moby-Dick, Ishmael says that he heads to sea whenever it is “a damp, drizzly November” in his soul. It was December in Dublin and it had been a damp, drizzly November in my soul since mid-October. It had also been raining since then. Since water was precisely the problem, I decided to take to the sky instead of the sea. I booked a cheap flight to Spain--I was going to fly into Madrid, travel down into the south of the country, and then fly back to Dublin.

After a week in Madrid with an American companion, we parted ways—he left back for America, I left on a bus for the south, to a little town outside of Granada. I had to take two buses to get to this town, the name of which I can’t remember. Once I got off the bus, I was picked up by a British ex-pat named Paul Hands, who drove me to his small farm—about half an hour away, isolated on the edge of a valley. In exchange for room and board, I was going to help him harvest olives. This had been arranged over the Internet, via email. Paul’s wife, Rachel, was the one with whom I’d been emailing. She signed all of her emails Love, Rachel.

I had plenty of free time at the farm. Paul—grizzled, about fifty—had an aching back and was a firm believer in the Spanish siesta. (It would eventually come out that Paul was an ex-pat less by choice than by necessity—he was some kind of felon in the UK, though it was never quite clear what kind. It seemed he’d come to Spain to mellow out. He was extremely friendly, felon or no.) Even with a two-hour siesta in the middle of the afternoon, I was usually done with work (chopping wood, digging holes, brushing olives off the trees) around 4:30. One evening, free to do whatever, I ventured off into the valley. I decided to bring my camera—the sun was setting, the light good. I took this photo:



When I saw it on a computer screen, I realized:



This was a painting I’d seen the week before, at El Prado in Madrid. It’s called The Dog and it’s by Francisco Goya. Goya was born in 1746 in a tiny town in the northeast of Spain, and he died in 1828. In 1792, he fell ill and became deaf--the lead in his paint may have been the cause. Either way, his paintings took a darker turn after that. The Dog was painted around 1820 (just a year after Herman Melville was born).

Both images—my snapshot and Goya’s painting—are marked by negative space, a looming emptiness, a sense of isolation. That dog is doomed to drown is some strange sea beneath a sky the color of sand—a taunt, to have the illusion of salvation everywhere above. That I would accidentally reproduce the image—in rural Spain, a few days before Christmas, depressed and confused and with no one I knew within thousands of miles—makes sense.

Wait, though, is that even a dog? Look: the nose is someone’s left hand at the end of an outstretched arm; ditto the ear for the right hand; in the middle, a head. Goya painted his most famous dark works on the walls of his home. Though I’ve been using the term “painting,” fresco is the word. All the frescoes were stripped from the walls, taken far from their home to hang in El Prado. None of the frescoes are easy to read—cracked and aged as they are. Here’s this, though, the top half of an etching, again by Goya:



It’s called “They Have Flown.” She is the same shape as the dog’s head. Maybe The Dog depicts no dog at all, but someone flailing, arms outstretched, trying to keep afloat—to try to fly out of all that wet. I wouldn’t blame them.

Moby-etc.

Fact: this is about right:

Is it any wonder, then, that you can't shake the visions of the yawning chasms ahead? Of course, you know what that disturbance in the water is. If fortune turns its unfeeling gaze toward us, we may reach the great albino beast before the day is through. As we secure the lanyards, look away if you must. But look not to a chocolate cake, nor to its carcinogenic icing, for this will but distract you from the perilous plight of the Pequod, whose lonely death rattle the mighty leviathan has already sounded.

Fact: two colons are also about right.

Moby-Dictionary

SALAMANDER
N.
1. a. A lizard-like animal supposed to live in, or to be able to endure, fire. Now only allusive.

b. Any tailed amphibian of the urodelous family Salamandridæ, or some closely allied family.
The land salamanders form the typical genus Salamandra; the water salamanders are the newts or tritons.

c. A figure of the mythical salamander used as an emblem.

2. transf. and fig. applied to persons, etc. with reference to sense 1a. a. gen.

b. A spirit supposed to live in fire.
See Paracelsus De Nymphis, Sylphis, Pygmæis, et Salamandris, etc., Wks. 1658 II. 388 seqq.

c. A woman who (ostensibly) lives chastely in the midst of temptations. Obs.

d. A soldier who exposes himself to fire in battle.

e. slang. A fire-eating juggler.

3. Applied to various articles used in fire or capable of withstanding great heat.

a. Asbestos. (Cf. salamander-stone; also F. salamandre pierreuse.)

b. An iron or poker used red-hot for lighting a pipe, igniting gunpowder, etc.

c. Metallurgy. ‘A mass of solidified material in a furnace hearth’ (Raymond); called also bear, horse, and sow.

d. Cookery. A circular iron plate which is heated and placed over a pudding or other dish to brown it.

e. Also (N. Amer.), a workman's brazier.

4. local U.S. A pouched rat or gopher, esp. Geomys pinetis.

5. A form of drinking a toast common among German students.
The full expression is einem einen salamander reiben

V.
a. intr. To live amidst fire, like the salamander.

b. trans. To submit to great heat.

c. Cookery. To brown by means of a salamander.


"For unless you own the whale, you are but a provincial and sentimentalist in Truth. But clear Truth is a thing for salamander giants only to encounter; how small the chances for the provincials then? What befel the weakling youth lifting the dread goddess's veil at Sais?"

The Last of Them

Will, not stopping:
The Alchemissy Elliott
If On a Winter's Night a Traveling Wilbury
The Qurandrew WK
Operation I-V.
Collective Soul Asylum on Vanilla Ice-T
Cat Steven's Cradle of Filth
Wu Tang Clan of the Cave Bear
Red Badge of Courage Against the Machine
He's Just Not That Into U2
Ziggy Marley & Me
The Heart is a Los Lonely Boys Hunter
Melissa Etheridge to Terabithia
Mariah Carious Incident of the Temple of the Dog in the Nighttime
The Republic Enemy
Abbasalom, Abbasalom!
Ub40 Can't Go Home Again
Where the Wild Thing R. Kelly
The Mary J. Bligedale Romance
Big Sur Mixalot
The Indionne Warwick in the Cupboard

To which I add:
Dr. Drecula
Frankenstaind
Tropic of Metallicancer
The Sisqohood of the Traveling Panteras
The Magic Mountain Goats
Megadeth in Venice
The Five Village People You Meatloaf in Heaven
The Savage Garden Detectives
Tegan & Sarator Resartus
Paula Cole of the Wild
A Portait of the Artist as a Young Marilyn Manson
Revolutiani Difrancoad
Puddleofmudd'n Head Wilson

And offer these revisions:
Gwar Bodies, Gwarselves
Rick James and They Might be Giant Peaches


And then Will and I decided to collaborate. We birthed these monsters:
Akonnecticut Damn Yankee in BB Kings of Leon's Courtney Love
The Cash Money Millionarrative of Right Said Frederick Dougless than Jake, an American Hifi
Audioslave, Written by She & Himself

At which point the game overheated and broke.

Can't Stop, Won't Stop

Will:

Beyond Good and Devo
Mastadon Quixote
The Wizard of Ozzy Osbourne
Jane Aerosmith
The Soundgarden and the Fury
Herbie Hancock and the Fountainheadhunters
The Catcher in the Rye-teous Brothers
Go Ask Alice Cooper
Things Fall Apartridge Family
The Girl With the Pearl Jam Earring
Lord Jim Croce
Crosby, Stills, Nash, and the Sorrows of Young Werther
Private Dashboard Confessional of a Justified Sinner
Romeo and Juliette and the Licks
Bury my Heart at Wounded Kneal Diamond
To Simon and Garfunkill a Mockingbird

DOUBLE OR NOTHING: 20,000 Human Leagues Under the C and C Music Factory
Tesla of The D'urbervillage People

TRIPLE OR NOTHING: Rick James and the Gentle Giant Peaches