cities and memory

i had a dream that a girl really, really liked me, and i discovered a new cheat for street fighter 2 turbo.

i had a dream about log too, that was decidely more erotic than the one about the girl, but unlike andy's famous 'eminem' dream i was still straight and didn't enjoy it.

so what's wrong with me? it shouldn't be like this. i want a dream where i have sex with a woman and really like it. is that too much to ask? what do i have to do to get this (aside from having sex in the real world)? porn doesn't help - one just ends up dreaming of watching porn (er, so i've heard). i wish people like alan moore would stop going on about how great sex is.

i really feel that every book i've read recently has given me a better understanding of reality. the very tight threesome of 'godel escher bach', 'chance and necessity' and 'mind hacks' cross over and enhance each other so well. if only i could remember all this stuff when i'm trying to tell people that truth matters (another book i have to read). now i'm reading 'the axemaker's gift', which sits very well on the shelf next to 'power & greed' (a gift from rach), both of which, as pop/psycho histories of culture, pretty much do what they say in the title. i've only just got up to the first cities in axemaker, and fortunately danny just happened to send italo calvino's stunning 'invisible cities' to my mum. the two go so well together - it's impossible for me to read about the founding of uruk, the city of gilgamesh, without reading the beautiful, timeless cities imagined by calvino (annoyingly, calvino is another one who goes on about sex as if it's something normal people do). i need the flavour as well as the ingredients list. because that's how these cities must have seemed to the rural types, when the only way to get news was to have it filtered through every farmhand between here and there, of course people believed in legends. i'm fascinated by the ancient world in this respect, it must have seemed physically different.

does anyone wonder what happened to animal man after grant morrison finished with him? sequart has the answer. i was a little disappointed with the last couple of books. maybe i read them too quickly. the whole thing was very book of job-like, i thought; i suppose i'll have to read bohm (what a fascinating life)'s 'unfolding meaning' which was frequently alluded to and probably what morrison was actually trying to say, via the dc universe's 'crisis on infinite earths'.

last night i fell asleep watching ripping yarns, with my duvet over me and pansy on my lap. i woke a couple of minutes later at the sound of michael palin shouting something about frogs being in danger. the only memory i had of the series, which is still very funny in a 'take one tiny part of monty python and make a whole series of it' way, was the end of one episode, where the camera pulls back as a mother stands in the atrium of her country manor, her entire family lying dead around her. something about the pathos of it has truly stayed with me my whole life, i don't know why. i was talking to my father about a cartoon i saw in wizzer and chips (possibly, it could have been buster) as a youngster that i've always remembered; a man standing in front of a telly, his head tilted back 90 degrees with the hilt of a sword coming just out of his mouth. a man on the telly was saying "...and next week, we'll tell you how to take it out." interestingly, mitri remembered the same joke architecture with a different situation and said he'd always remembered it. however, i can't remember why we talking about this.