Marking time...

I'm noticing it's just about exactly one week before my departure for the Durango airport and my Kazakhstan gig.

By the way, seeing as how easily flights from Durango can become late, I do plan to arrive early enough to take an earlier flight and try to talk myself onto that airplane. Hopefully, the folks at United/Mesa won't consider that a "change" and charge me for it. Too, if the weather looks at all threatening, I might just try to convince Natalie to drive me up to Denver in my car, so that I for sure don't miss the flight to Frankfurt.

That's one of the reasons I like to travel a little in advance of the actual required dates. If my connection in Denver gets screwed (40 minutes to change planes), or if anything untoward happens along the way, I'll likely miss the charter flight to Kazakhstan on the 28th and will have to fly via the commercial airline (which, I am told, is not something to wish for). I also don't know how that might be reflected in my invoice, as paid travel time has never been a strong suit among my clients (or anybody else's clients, that I know of).

Anyway, my translation is done and gone; my plate is currently empty. I am chasing paper.

Cheers...

On the art of constrained writing...

Constrained writing -- I just ran across the term -- is apparently the name given to a genre that has to do has to do with the construction of a work of prose or poetry that obeys one or more artificially-imposed rules.

I've been aware of the existence of such works for some time, since before the start of my freelance writing career in the mid-80s. In fact, the second article I sold to a magazine -- and one I got paid for despite it never actually getting published -- had to do with writing a program that aided in a trial-and-error solution of a simple substitution cipher.

In the article, I deliberately made use of a "mystery cipher" that -- in the end -- had been written without the use of the letter 'e'. It's not hard to think of a grammatically valid string of words that lacks such a symbol. (The previous sentence is, ahem, an example. :^) My inspiration for such a constraint in my article was the novel Gadsby, written by one Ernest Vincent Wright in 1938 with, to say it another way, zero wear and tear on the 'e' key of his typewriter.

It turns out there is another such novel, La disparition, by George Perec, which is apparently still in print and available in an English translation -- A Void, by Gilbert Adair -- that also holds to the constraint!

I found this out while looking at a page containing a poem that weaves itself -- by imitating tone, story, and rhyme scheme -- into something that wants to step into the shoes of Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven, but with the ulterior goal of encoding the first 740 digits of pi!

An excerpt:

Poe, E.
Near a Raven

Midnights so dreary, tired and weary.
  Silently pondering volumes extolling all by-now obsolete lore.
During my rather long nap - the weirdest tap!
  An ominous vibrating sound disturbing my chamber's antedoor.
    "This", I whispered quietly, "I ignore".

Perfectly, the intellect remembers: the ghostly fires, a glittering ember.
  Inflamed by lightning's outbursts, windows cast penumbras upon this floor.
Sorrowful, as one mistreated, unhappy thoughts I heeded:
  That inimitable lesson in elegance - Lenore -
    Is delighting, exciting...nevermore.

Ominously, curtains parted (my serenity outsmarted),
 And fear overcame my being - the fear of "forevermore".
Fearful foreboding abided, selfish sentiment confided,
 As I said, "Methinks mysterious traveler knocks afore.
    A man is visiting, of age threescore."

Taking little time, briskly addressing something: "Sir," (robustly)
  "Tell what source originates clamorous noise afore?
Disturbing sleep unkindly, is it you a-tapping, so slyly?
  Why, devil incarnate!--" Here completely unveiled I my antedoor--
    Just darkness, I ascertained - nothing more.

This sure beats the pants off of:

How I want a drink -- alcoholic of course -- after the heavy chapters involving quantum mechanics.

But I digress... The key to deciphering pi is, of course, linked to the number of letters in each sequential word (punctuation doesn't count, i.e., "is it you a-tapping, so slyly?" is "2231725"), with the following variations: the number zero is encoded by a word 10 characters long, and a letter longer than 10 characters encodes two places (e.g., "ascertained" is "11").

The excerpt represents 157 places past the decimal point, by the way.

Cheers...

On the 60th anniversary of "the Bulge"...

From one veteran's recollection:

That evening we dined at the Gasthaus Zum Dom Stein, a lovely restaurant in Trier, Germany. During dinner Margot said "John, while we on the road outside Schönberg, you looked as if you were in a trance. Did it bother you that much?"  It did, for I was remembering the events of December 19, 1944. I was trying to recall what the area looked like then. I could see the soldiers on the battlefield. I could hear them calling for medics. I was sure I was near the woods where so many were killed. I could visualize Germans in white snow suits and camouflage. Because of the passing of time the forest looked different. The trees had grown, hiding the lightly covered slope I remembered. I was confused, uncertain and could not understand my emotions. I had to leave. I could not stay. In my anxiety I forgot to take pictures while standing at the foot of Linscheid Hill, southeast of Schönberg. Yet, during our three week journey I took over 600 photos, but none of the village of Schönberg or the battle area by the woods.

...

Some day I am going back to Schönberg. I now have more knowledge of the area and the battle.  I want to visit the Schnee Eifel. Then I want to take the roads to Halenfeld, Oberlascheid and Radscheid. Most important, I want to walk through the woods on Linscheid Hill. Maybe I can find that place in the woods, where I looked over the valley, listening to the cries of the wounded, the sounds of incoming artillery, and lived through Hell..........

An interesting account.

Cheers...