Andrushka

Then we sat on the sand for some time and observed How the oceans that cover this world were perturbed By the tides from the orbiting moon overhead "How relaxing the sound of the waves is," you said. I began to expound upon tidal effects When you told me to stop, looking somewhat perplexed So I did not explain why the sunset turned red And we watched the occurrence in silence instead.

Posted by Scott at 10/31/2005 02:55:00 PM | Permalink | Comments

I'm still figuring out all the settings on my camera and how best to post the pictures. With the amount of blur I keep getting, it's pretty obvious I'm not meant to be a surgeon. Anyway, I think it will work best for me to give you the link to a gallery instead of posting photos here and using up your bandwidth everytime you check the blog for updates. So, if you're interested, you can see the pictures I took for Serhiy's mom or a gallery in-progress of other people (right now it just has Tanya and me).

Posted by Scott at 10/30/2005 02:38:00 PM | Permalink | Comments

I think I actually enjoy editing the blog template more than I like posting. And regarding the subject of the template, I'd like feedback on what works and what doesn't. How about the link colors? Is it too hard knowing where links are after they turn dark green? It the purple too bright? Do you like links underlined or not? How about the bullets? I'm seriously thinking of nixing them. Maybe I'll replace them with Wizards. That's a joke. Ha ha. Sigh. I wish you would have laughed. Then there's commenting--someone has given you a jumping off place and you can run with it. Earlier I kind of went off on a tangent about the possible etymology of Indian Summer over at Mrs. Krovoza's blog. It was probably uncalled for, but fun. To state the obvious though, it doesn't really matter what someone says in their comments; they're terribly affirming just to see that someone's interacting with your words. Blogs are all about seeing and being seen (performance) but unfortunately, you can't actually see the audience to get primary feedback and have to rely on a trickle of comments. Anyway, yesterday I got my new camera. I love it. It fits in the hand perfectly and the pictures seem to be pretty good. Even better, it works well in low-light situations, such as gymnasiums and my apartment. I shot Serhiy for his mother today (as opposed to shooting him for Daniel which would require an altogether different instrument)and I'll probably post a couple of those shots this weekend. So, this may return to the original purpose of photoblogging.

Posted by Scott at 10/29/2005 12:29:00 AM | Permalink | Comments

Watching The Daily Show tonight, I was fascinated by the segment on Hufu™, a new tofu meat analog. The stated goal of its invention was to let anthropology students experience cannibalism legally. That's right. Hufu™ is human-flavored tofu. How did they do product testing? Did they just make it taste like chicken? (Actually, it's supposed to be more like a sweet beef.) I'd love to see a Folger's Crystals™-style commercial for Hufu™: "We secretly switched these Cannibals' meal of ceremonially-sacrificed human flesh with our own textured vegetable protein to see if they notice . . ." But I digress. Recently, Serhiy asked me about my opinion on cannibalism. He brings these topics up out of left field fairly consistently and I'm becoming used to it. He had been reading a Russian news source about a restaurant in China that serves aborted fetuses. Since Russian reporters are incapable of being critical of their own society, they like to criticize other societies. It was a fnord article. Even worse, it is a hoax that feeds on virulent orientalism (links: 1,2). For that matter, "cannibalism always turns out to have been suppressed shortly before the observer's arrival, or is imputed by his informants to other people" (Bitterli 9), which makes me suspect any report of it. The falsehood that inspired the question does not, however, negate the question. I, being a materialist and existentialist, said, "Waste not, want not." My feeling is that it's better to be useful in death than taking up space in a medical waste dump or a cemetery (and don't even get me started about how irrational the American cemetery system is). Serhiy brought up the compelling comeback, "but they're human." Not anymore. Now they are CHON like any other biological matter. I've seen Soylent Green. I disagreed with their society, but being useful after death is fine. Fight Club's use of human fat to make soap was disgusting to watch (and even more so to read about when you realize the first batch of soap used Marla's mother)—but I've got no problem with the concept itself. I think lard is disgusting too, no matter how Ukrainians dress it. To bring it out of the realm of fiction, I can't understand why anyone objects to stem cell research. Just let me add the important caveat that the person must be dead already and this postmortem utility did not facilitate the death in anyway. Even if you believe in the existence of an ethereal, non-corporal soul (unlike us materialist Adventists) I still don't understand the objection to postmortem utilization of humans. I mean, in that cosmogony, the body is nothing without the soul. Mainstream Christianity emphasizes the sinfulness and dirtiness of the flesh but somehow after death it's supposed to be sacred? How can people hold so many conflicting beliefs at one time? (Douglas Adam's Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency discusses this phenomenon in depth.) Personally, I want to be used as fertilizer, and though Brett has decided not to farm, I hope he's still up to his promise to disc me under in a field. I don't understand why people who eat pigs or dogs, animals with genomes remarkably similar to humans and therefore efficient disease vectors, would have problems with human flesh. When Serhiy asked me if I would ever eat a person, the answer was a simple negative. Why? Well, it's certainly not because I think corpses should enjoy involate sanctity. It's simply because I'm vegetarian and even if I weren't, I would follow the Biblical clean and unclean guidelines. But now with Hufu™, maybe I'll get the chance to experience human meat analogue. I don't think I want to pay for such expensive veggie food right now, but if you're interested, you can order some and find some traditional human-based recipes.

Posted by Scott at 10/28/2005 01:49:00 AM | Permalink | Comments

Water If I were called in To construct a religion I should make use of water. Going to church Would entail a fording To dry, different clothes; My litany would employ Images of sousing, A furious devout drench, And I should raise in the east A glass of water Where any-angled light Would congregate endlessly. (Philip Larkin) In my poetry class (853, taught by Hilda Raz), I'm doing a project focussing on water, especially on its chemical and spiritual aspects. Doing some background reading, I came across this poem. Oh Philip Larkin, why do you taunt me with your talent? For contrast, here is the first poem that I wrote for the project. It's been workshopped, but like nearly all of my own writing, I think it could be improved (feel free to leave comments). Cohesion/Tension: H2-O...H-O-H...O-H2 The drop starts slowly and gathers condensed steam. Darkly red, it traces the curve of jaw until gravity overcomes cohesion and pulls blood into water to blossom like fire and dissipate. In the pool I see myself; foam around the mouth, stubble still in patches, another drop forming just above the lip. The second drop follows the same path to chaos. And the breath of god fluttered the face of the waters, in mayim he saw his reflection— piss, semen, blood. Positive and negative, the poles of waters called to each other. Water pulls its world downward, forms a skin of tension broken by the flower of blood. Ashes to ashes, some say, dust to dust. And water? What man convinced me of my solidity? My own face flutters in the water, I patch the leak with a shred of tissue and try to restore the fiction. (Scott Cushman) I was reading about Apam Napat (Aryan god, “Son of the Waters”) and Enki/Ea (Sumerian god of water) and thinking about the role of water in the Genesis creation account. A little research into a language I have not studied (Hebrew) revealed that the word Genesis uses for water, mayim, can also mean urine, blood, or semen. Somehow this conflation of water with bodily fluids clicked in my mind with the idea of cohesion, the attraction of two identical molecules, such as the negative pole of a water molecule being attracted to the positive pole of a second water molecule. As the surface molecules are pulled downward by their attraction to the water molecules below them (unlike the molecules in the middle which are attracted equally in all directions), they create surface tension, the skin-like layer on the surface of a liquid. (An alert reader may have noticed that where I used cohesion in line 4, I should have said adhesion because the blood was clinging to a dissimilar substance—the response to this is that my point was flesh, blood, and water are the same: mayim). These two narratives of water, one theological and the other chemical, mingled in my mind in a way I felt was poetic, or at least as poetic as the wave theory of light must have seemed to Shelley when he wrote Prometheus Unbound. But like Shelley, I knew I needed a frame to make these ideas accessible. And that’s where the image of shaving comes in; it easily flows into thoughts of water and blood mixing and is a fairly regular and universal experience in a society obsessed with hair removal. One could say I went about writing completely backwards, starting with the lesson and ending with an image.

Posted by Scott at 10/26/2005 12:51:00 PM | Permalink | Comments

Well, apparently absolutely everyone is blogging, so I'll try to be better at it. For now, let me give you all a "game" to try. I love doing this. Go to an album hosting site with a search feature (Webshots is my recommendation because it has the best search engine and the largest user base, but Flickr and pBase work too). Type in a search phrase like Lincoln Nebraska or Adventist or towel and see what comes up. Webshots allows for boolian operators, so a search like Lincoln (NE OR Nebraska OR Neb OR Nebr) helps you get a more complete listing if you are obsessive compulsive. (Since I am well versed in this feature, you can guess about my own level of obsession.) It is endlessly fascinating what is associated with certain words. For example, towel will lead you to photos of people's monogrammed towels, towels folded like origami, and people of various makes and models wearing towels. It entertains me, perhaps it will entertain you too.

Posted by Scott at 10/26/2005 02:33:00 AM | Permalink | Comments