Last night the lid was lifted off Minnesota. The wind began and has continued stark and bitter all the day. The temperature dropped steadily so that upon going out in the afternoon the outdoors that had been so friendly, where people lived and worked and played, was now savagely hostile. It is the straight wind driving all the warmth away, keen, relentless and indifferent.

The sky with which we had become so familiar having lived under it all our lives formerly was gone. The homogenous and indistinct grey left behind was holding none of our heat in. The heat rushed out and after it the malevolent winds sweep over the desolate ground. Our final extermination appears to be at hand, for we have become a fragment of earth that has been placed in the treasure house of ideas, where the Idea of the Arctic is usually stored.

Today’s blog is brought to you by the word erroneous, an awkward, gothic (in a latin way), evocative word whose bulk and wrinkles are full of possibilities and the rumor of whose coming is the sound of great misgivings.

Well! He had a new word. He couldn’t wait to try it out on Jones. Ha! Now there was a chap that deserved it.

And Jones obliged. Smith rubbed his chubby hands together and smirked.

“Ah, Jones?” he called. Jones turned slowly, his shoulders hunched.

“What?”

“That paper doesn’t go there, Jones. It goes on the other tray. You are so erroneous Jones.” Smith relished the word. “Erroneous is what you are, you know? Erroneous.”

“Erroneous now, wasn’t he some kind of famous poet?”

“Ah yes, the immortal Erroneous who wrote all those poems in the wrong meter.”

Jewish kids have it so hard, Aaron thought to himself. I wish I did not have to undergo latinization. I wish I could move away from Rome so they’d quit calling me Erroneous.

So they called the unanticipated child Erroneous. And little Erroneous grew up using his middle name, Lyotard. E. Lyotard Zmicknut was how he signed his name. He’d have rather been called E.L., but it never caught on.

However, when he became a space-pirate, he resumed the name his parents had always used: Erroneous. And all the shipping lanes of space lived in dread and apprehension.

Tom was sitting at the computer.

“Don’t you go buying boots on the computer,Tommy,” Dorcas yelled from the kitchen.

But Tom was feeling exceedingly ornery, more so than usual and with three cups of coffee. So he clicked on them, a size too big.

Oh Erroneous!

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to make frequent and gratuitous use of the word, Erroneous.

The Return of the Roaches – An Adumbration

In the year 2050 great orbiting power plants were constructed, one for each continent. The billionaires in Moscow send up a smaller private one. Then the scientists in the Chinese station had let the hardy cockroaches they were using escape and before the mistake was admitted and quarantines, all regularly inhabited orbiting stations were infested. So they were shot out of orbit toward the sun, all but the small one which was privately held and had no contact with the others.

Of the rest, all of them fell into the sun but one. This one managed to slingshot around the sun and became a meteoroid.

“Roaches Away!” Bricknevsky was heard to quip. He could afford to be jolly as he was receiving power in a steady beam. At least he could afford to be jolly for a while; it was not long before pirates figured out how to tap the orbiting power source.

And what do you think happened to the last power station, the meteoroid? One day strange activity was detected by the inter-solar patrol ships. It was an unidentified space ship. It was beaming strange things back; could it be first contact? In this dramatic way was the scene set for the Galactic Roach Wars.

In other science fiction news I heard R. Giuliani—the guy in drag on youTube, the transvestite running for president—yell at a crowd that we need to have a man on Mars by some date in the near future. I laughed out loud, but I don’t really know why I should still laugh at anything he says or attempts . . . or any of them.

But assuming a serious person had said it and not somebody running for president, why is it so important to have a man on Mars? The moon for that matter? Do you know they’re actually breeding roaches on the space station? It’s the Russians, of course. You know what is more weird than first contact being with a space-going tin can full of killer roaches? Current events.

I was riding to church tonight, looking at the city which was seen very nicely as conditions were unusually clear. I was also thinking about how a deacon had asked me in the morning how the writing was going and I told him I sent a poem in to the New Yorker. The actual conversation was interesting enough, but as I was riding along I took it along imaginary lines and ended up telling myself a pretty good joke.

So my wife, who had already been making fun of me for noticing the city, wanted to know what I was laughing about. At first I told her she probably would not understand. Then, as we were exiting the freeway I saw how I could explain it to her.

You have to know about the poem. It came about on Thursday morning when I kicked a piece of snow which had fallen off of a car. The thing clattered like a solid brick when I kicked it. As a result, the muse came on me pretty hard.

The conversation with the deacon had been about how the New Yorker audience would be high-brow, and I contended it was middle-brow at best, etc. He said their cartoons were unintelligible. In the imaginary part of this conversation he would have asked me what the poem was about, and I would have told him, and then he would have asked me how the poem went. Then I would have said:

Kick, kick,
Brick, brick.
I’m not
A beatnik.

And added, “You have to admit it is fraught with lyrical depths.”

My wife repeated it to me with tears in her eyes.

I probably should have added, in the imaginary conversation, “I know it will succeed. That’s poetry so deep neither you nor I who wrote it understand what it means.”

When I read my poem to my wife she wanted to know why I was writing second-grader poetry. That was not entirely inaccurate, but what really made the list of immortal sayings, having been subjected to a further poem, was:

“I see the muse is really with you tonight.”

I was coming out of a meeting at work. At work we have three different sites, and so we walk back and forth between them. As I said, I was coming out of a meeting so I was in one of the strange moods such events usually elicit from me, and my way led me past another place where the government has some sort of center for dealing with “challenged” people.

We sometimes listen to the challenged people shouting and crying out on the other side of the walls of my department. (We sometimes wonder if this government center is not somehow a branch of one of the many of our government’s surveillance and security operations, a little Gitmo for the local suspects.) They have a lot of vans in their parking lot most of the time, and among them I noticed a minivan with the logo of channel five.

So I went inside and casually remarked to a colleague that channel five was next door.

“Oh really?”

“Yeah, if you act like a retard and head over there, maybe you can get on TV.”

He thought it was the funniest thing I had ever told him.

I’d hate to just keep all this to myself since I have received it as a gift. So I pass it on. And may the muse be with you in potent doses, my friend.

The cold withdrew;
We went outside;
We saw blue shadows in the snow.
The slanting sun
Made winter glad
And earth, under a blanket low.

It has not been quite a year since we were in Ireland. Last year, having not quite been a year since going to Iceland, I found myself longing with a great yearning to return. This year I have suddenly found myself remembering and longing for Ireland. I got Frank McCourt’s memoir Angela’s Ashes. It was not the memoir itself that brought Limerick back, though that helped. It was the picture on the front of the book when I looked at it carefully. It was actually the bottom fourth of the picture, the curb and the street under it that somehow brought back the smell of Limerick and the feel of its air back with clarity. And then I was full of longing.

Ah Limerick, grubby city with long bridges over the Shannon, with the castle in the distance, the fleeting clouds, the spontaneous sunshine, the attentive and intelligent waiters, the expensive food, the teeming sidewalks and hectic traffic, the Georgian row-houses, the wrought iron, the Poles and the pale Irish, the locked churches, the small sea-harbor and the large pile of junk, the quays, the parks, and above it all the purple clouds and the green, washed hills!

Oh the city! I saw great Minneapolis lit up under the dark skies with thick clouds rising out of the midst thereof. Every time we drive by my heart leaps up, and now my wife has started making fun of me.

You know what’s wrong with most C(IT IS OUTRAGEOUS THAT THIS WORD PROCESSOR WILL NOT LEAVE MY CAPITALIZED D ALONE)Ds? They do not have enough yodeling. They may have merry clarinets, but a clarinet will not cut it no matter how sweet. No, my friend, one wants yodeling. One wants, above all, antiphonal yodeling, that high pinnacle of the art, but one only wants a few tracks with antiphonal yodeling. One does want all the rest of the tracks to have yodeling even if they combine it with a little German doggerel sung.

How I long for the day when I can play those intricacies on the accordion that must accompany good yodeling.

Speaking of glory, have you ever seen somebody smoking and reading a paperback? It looks like an interesting combination–paper has many uses. There are two people I work with, scruffy villains both, who smoke and read paperbacks outside in the cold. Odd that the paperbacks are coming out in these temperatures. Perhaps smoking warms people up.

In Europe they have to have really big notices on the cigarette boxes that basically say that if you smoke the contents of the box your death is certain (we saw these in Limerick of the dirty streets).

Death is pretty certain.

Speaking of death and harmful habits, I have been going through a really tough batch of pork rinds. It must have been a mean old pig.

Tonight the back of the cold is to be broken. We have enjoyed a prolonged season of arctic weather to make us reflect that some things are in deadly earnest. I need to be in deadly earnest about returning to Limerick. I have started agitating.

The only other thing I can think of that belongs in this collection is the poetry of Mervyn Peake. It can stir up wild longings in me with just a line. It is strangely intoxicating. I am in search of a collection of the poetry of Mervyn Peake, which, speaking of immortal longings, prompts me to think one of these days I will at last read Ulysses, considering I am probably going to require large doses of Ireland in the next few weeks. I have always been ambivalent about the reputation of Ulysses and have never yet read it.

I do not know if anybody ever read my article on Stanislaw Lem occasioned by the reading of Solaris, but I was rereading it and it struck me as complicated. I am not sure how long I sat around thinking my way into something that involved, especially over a work of Science Fiction, but for some reason I did.

At least I could with Lem. He was always sitting around thinking about things, Lem. I have the notion his thinking was of the more twisted up variety, rather baroque and full of twirls, winding tubes and elaborations in a stark and scientific way, like guts.

But if I review a clearer book then what I produce is clear. It has long been the case, as I have had occasion to observe it, that I tend to write in the style of what I have been reading. It was really great when I was reading Augustine, it was not so great when I was reading Edwards, it was terrible when I was reading the Third Wavers trying to traduce Edwards.

It would seem delight and clarity should go hand in hand. Perhaps what one enjoys one does not always enjoy with sparkling delight and sparkling drops of clarity. Perhaps one enjoys some things more laboriously and sticking close to the plain ground, like shoes.

I don’t know about yawl but some of the folks around here aint never been around fifteen below and they reckin it is cold enough for them. I reckin it is cold enough to light candles and whatnot . . . furnace, maybe . . . oven. It aint the south here.

Jumped a guy today, but in the end it didnt work. I reckin he needs a new battery. Always jumping people in the cold. Never jumped anybody above zero yet. This guy had cables alright, but they were sorry and cheap and unsuitable to convey juice between the battery for my V4 Cavalier (intelligent persons car) and his V8 Durango (never yet figgerd why anybody in their right mind wanted to drive a truck). So I get me out the ones I bought back in the day that I aint used and they conveyed the juice allright. Felt it going clean out of my car with a whoop of joy. If hed staid connected to the juice in my little battery hed have been ok. Didn’t work in the end, I heard, because his battery wasn’t still young enough. It may have got wiped out by all the juice leaping through that A #1 set of Good Samaritan guaranteed jumper cables I wasnt stingy enough to hold back on like some people I know. Maybe those people are burning dollar bills to keep warm today.

Aint no point cutting corners on essentials like jumping cables when what you need is some juice. What if its cold and yore impecunious and you need to get jumped? Yowl wisht you had.

Cables I got come with a plastic bag that zips up when yore done with them. Handy and useful is what I call that. Handy and useful. Some people aint even got a bag that zips up for their cables and all they got is a mess in their trunk. Some people youd think climbd into a garbage can evry time they went to drive somwhere. Probably aint even got adequet batteries, some of them, come to think of it. Oughta be a law against stingy people. Forchunetly theres people like me handy nearby with good will . . . and decent jumper cables a man aint gotta be ashamed of owning.

I like the cold especially if it lasts for a while. Today it was 2 degrees most of the day. This is ideal for the machines that heat our buildings. They have a really hard time dealing with fluctuating temperatures, but at steady temperatures they work well. Once it gets nice and cold and stays cold you can fall into a pattern of living that is adapted to it and extremely congenial. All you need is foresight.

I come home regularly to Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg variations. Sometimes it is other things but very frequently the Goldberg variations. Today I came home to The Art of Fuge with the volume turned up nicely. It is no small joy to me that my wife has learned to enjoy this stuff so well. Back in 1999 I had to ban WCTS from at least being perpetrated in our apartment when I was around. From there to the genuine enjoyment of Bach is a long but upward road.

She is into changing desktops nowadays. The other day it was something unappealing but recently more appealing: some mountains with low clouds. Not very good colors in that last one, but still an interesting landscape. Now the present one is rather curious. It shows the face of a brick building with three windows. In the windows, or emerging from them like ghosts, are three semi-nude female figures all devoid of arms. They are all white and grey, and I think they are supposed to be supernatural manifestations.

I’m awfully fond of my wife. Even though she tried to serve me a baked potato a few days back as a general rule I get better food than I deserve.

I have been working on a new idea to revitalize some old stuff. I am going to have space-going Incas in my great Science Fiction Opus Magnus. To that end I am going to have to master a bit of Quechua. First, however, a taste of the blurb:

New Cuzco, the remote capital of the intragalactic Incas is sending out a greater fleet than before. Instead of sending again a sullen Red (insert Quechua word for red here) fleet in greater numbers, the king orders out the Yana fleet. What can it mean if not despair and universal annihilation?

So I’m going to use this link quite a bit. Notice it has links to Inca legends. I was also trying to listen to Quechua radio but not very hard. If anybody knows of a good Quechua radio station that streams online, let me know.

By experience I have learned there are pork rinds, and there are pork rinds. When you get the right kind they are wonderful, full of a curiously transporting taste than which nothing on this earth is more wholesome. When they are right they are properly designated, at least by me, sabbath chips, the food of leisure.

But when they are less than right, when they appear to have been flayed not from a young, pink, healthy pig but from a mean and malnourished boar, then they are another thing entirely: the inferior rind of some deceased pig’s carcass. In the case of the sabbath chips, the spicy flavoring adds to the transporting experience. In the case of the inferior pork rind the spicy flavoring serves to mitigate the taste of an old pig and it helps to anchor the imagination which has a tendency drift to explanations.

One has to finish one bag before one is allowed to begin another, you see. Unfortunately the brand purchased for one varies in the quality of the contents from the sublime to the admittedly swinish. Nor are batches mixed, that I can tell. There is always a wonderful consistency to each bag whether it be inferior or superior.

I first ate the pork rind at a tender age. I remember a large, square and golden piece of what resembled fried dough: plain and sensational. My friends cried joyfully, “Chicharron! Chicharron! Mi tio nos trajo chicharron! Ay, vamos a comer chicharron!” What delight! I also remember a bottle of red stuff to splash on it, but I availed myself of none of it. I remember the large, hard flake from which pieces were broken off for all of us. “Quieren aji? Tu queres aji?” Some said that yes, some that no, and we all partook with joy.

It was hard to understand, when at last I began to understand, that this thing was actually the skin of a pig, flayed clear and fried to golden perfection. The world is full of wonders my friend, wonders many and various. That the porcine skin should hold such promise is surely one of the most curious wonders ever.