Tenses and Discomforts

Monday morning, I woke from a strange dream, and immediately e-mailed two people:

Just had a dream I was erasing old mp3 files. There was a ub40 album, but it was actually good. It was called Tenses and Disclmforts(?)....[sic]

Just woke from dream. I was erasing old mp3s from laptop, including a Ub40 ep -- only five songs but they were each pretty long.... As I listened I was surprised at how decent it was. The title was Tenses and Discomforts --- not a bad fake uk reggae title!

*

I'm reminded of the time (ca. 1992) that I dreamt of 44 nonexistent Van Morrison albums...

Woke up briefly to write this down on a nearby Post-it

"It's written primarily in Tatonia, a fearless language no one can understand."

Emo rats Had Rain, Cans

On the Fourth of July, William Poundstone—a sort of Edgar Cayce for our time—had this dream:

Everyone was talking about the clever new website that takes Ann Coulter's words and subjects them to the Tom Phillips A Humument treatment — producing random phrases of great wit and poetry.

"In the morning," he writes, "I realized that this idea (though stupid) was easily realized."

Putting dream into action, he has started a new blog, "Ann Coulter: Human Document," where he submits the conservative pundit's column to a Phillipsian process to come up with brave new meanings. Here's a small sample:

Beans and ancestors

[Typed out this morning to Levi Stahl, after finishing Richard Stark's partly-Buffalo-set The Outfit, luxuriously reading late into the night]

Just woke up from a dream in which a letter from Roberto Bolaño (to one of his translators) mentions Buffalo....The letter appears in the latest Triple Canopy.* The translator's letter mentions Buffalo and Niagara Falls, saying, "Of course, since you had only been in the country two days, I can't expect you to have visited either of these places," and mentions how nice it was to have him over for dinner. [He had apparently been in the U.S. recently, for the first time.]

Bolaño's letter is a marvel. He begins by saying, "Believe it or not, I had to travel to Buffalo as soon as I arrived, and had the opportunity to visit the famous Falls," and mentions a few local details that make it clear he did make the trip. Then he digresses on the wonderful dinner salad she prepared, writing that, curiously enough, every ingredient in the salad had some connection to a place in his life. The beans were from Venezuela, as were some of his ancestors; he lived for a time in Mexico, where the cheese was from, etc.




_______
*I must have been thinking of this.

Dream guide

I.

A runnicle is an image left over from dream left in the mind at waking, an image or fact with no narrative content or context.
This information is itself a runnicle, I wake with it, and hurry to write it down to share this runnicle with the dream community.
—Robert Kelly, Annandale Dream Gazette (via Levi)


II.

In another dream, a teeming red brick slum in some forgotten corner of Los Angeles, separated from the main part by a zone where it was always winter, I met a young man who was also dreaming, and had come to the same place. I knew I was dreaming and he affirmed that he did as well. We chatted for some time - in the dream every word was distinct, and the conversation flowed, but in the morning I could remember only the barest gist of it.

—Dzyd Bess's dad, International Rooms


III.

My new thing is to read without knowing the author or title of what I'm reading. Trying to reproduce the feeling of a dream.

IV.

[...]I was talking about
our dream life—our subconscious—but a friend said
that she thought I'd meant the New York subway system,
ha ha. Nonetheless, I give to the neurobiologists
this first identification of a mechanism, somewhere in the brain,
I call "the turnstile." It allows our passage
into the depths. And what's the morning
—what's the clear new start—if not our exiting
back into this life through the same round gate?
—Albert Goldbarth, from "The Initial Published Discovery" (in The Kitchen Sink)

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for April 29, 2008

I.
"Even more frustrating for the farm is that the 26 sons and daughters who have made it to the track this year have become terrific racehorses, capturing six stakes races and putting their reluctant father near the top of Japan’s leading sire list." —NYT

(Via Jenny D.)

II.
Dream: I had the brilliant idea to write a nonfiction book in which I would go through the 20th century year by year and give a curious fact for each. First up was 1901; my section focused on a tavern owner and an insane patron who kept revealing secrets of McKinley's assassination. I found all this information in a book of letters, and then realized that published correspondence was a great source for nuggets like that. Subsequently I lost myself in a volume of Arnold Palmer's letters, a facsimile edition. His letters were exuberant, funny, and often scrawled on scraps of legal paper. The one letter that I can remember involved winning a year's supply of dog food and being very happy about it. This was well before he had found any fame as a golfer.

III.
Cinema Talk: "The only major blog hand-coded in HTML"! David Rees has two succinct movie reviews up (Forbidden Kingdom and Forgetting Sarah Marshall)...TDM (Team Dizzies Member) Rob on 99 River Street (check out the tag line!)...Shadowplay: "The detective sergeant has no name. He works for a superior known only as The Voice....How The Dead Live is sensational and I immediately wanted to film it. One problem — I wanted to film it with Stanley (PERFORMANCE) Meadows in 1965, twenty years before it was written, two years before I was born."

Phrase from a dream, ca. two nights ago

"yammering malleable amoebas"

I was convinced of the greatness of the phrase and that I would not forget it when I woke up.

(Tip of the hat to Bill.)