The Doorway: a panfandom game

Who: Stephen Dedalus & Peggy Carter
When: Tuesday Night.
Where: Peggy's Room
What:Round Two Three Five Who's counting?
Rating: PG-13 - In progress in Gdocs. Will be updated.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
( Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. )

That's all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.

Fantine sold her front teeth for a gold napoleon a piece -- but I think I just lost a molar to his army.

[Filtered AGAINST Peggy Carter]

Who is Margaret Carter?

Who: Peggy Carter & Stephen Dedalus
When: Sunday.
Where: Potts Tower, Stephen's new digs. Grantaire's old trousers.
What: An unstoppable force is met by an immovable object: or worse and better at the same time.
Rating:PG-13. Finished.
( Margaret. )

Vidi aquam egredientem de templo a latere dextro. Alleluia (Altius aliquantulum) Et omnes ad quos pervenit aqua ista. Salvi facti sunt.

....So that gesture, not music not odour, would be a universal language, the gift of tongues rendering visible not the lay sense but the first entelechy, the structural rhythm. We have shrewridden Shakespeare and henpecked Socrates. Even the allwisest Stagyrite was bitted, bridled and mounted by a light of love. Anyway, who wants two gestures to illustrate a loaf and a jug? This movement illustrates the loaf and jug of bread or wine in Omar.

My centre of gravity is displaced. I have forgotten the trick. Let us sit down somewhere and discuss. Struggle for life is the law of existence but but human philirenists, notably the tsar and the king of England, have invented arbitration. But in here it is I must kill the priest and the king. I have no king myself for the moment. This is the age of patent medicines. A discussion is difficult down here. But this is the point. You die for your country. Suppose. Not that I wish it for you. But I say: Let my country die for me. Up to the present it has done so. I didn't want it to die. Damn death. Long live life!

[Howard Stark]

Howard, I got the book you bought me off Amazon on Friday and I've spent all weekend with it. It's been nice. But did you know -- In early editions, the words "shit", "fuck", and "cocksucker" were replaced with dashes, There are at least two copies of the first edition in which Hemingway re-inserted the censored text by hand, so as to provide a corrected text. One of these copies was presented to Maurice Coindreau; the other, to James Joyce.

Now it was a bit of a tradition for my mother and my sisters to make bairín breac for the season. (See also, James Joyce's Dubliners). It's a bit like a raisin bread, I think, but dense and sweeter. Heavy and thick with orange peel and other fruits if you can find, rum and tea and a nice bit of molasses. I used to sit in the kitchen and steal the raisins when I could, so my mother used to make me whistle if I insisted on sticking me nose about -- if I stopped whistling then she knew I was back into her ingredients.

There's a game we played, bit like the coins set in our pancakes on pancake Tuesday (still not sure if I like the pancakes here as much. At home we made them thin and ate them with lemon and brown sugar, not like they are here at all. Not that I have it in me to complain about maple syrup). Anyway, when the dough is made, a coin and a rag, a pea, a Virgin's medallion, a stick and a ring are all buried in. When the bread is sliced up -- it's what you get in your bit that's supposed to tell of the coming year for you: A coin means riches, a rag - poverty. The pea means you won't marry, the ring means you you will -- the Virgin means you're entering the priesthood, and the stick means unhappiness or disputes.

I've made two loafs (heavy on the rum, I think) if anyone wants to come about and test their fate.

[TW: Some Irish Anti-Catholic conversations between Stephen and Angel. Also Vampire-violence; Sororicide.]

I've found a cap.

I will dress as a Red Sock, and be despised in costume as I am any other day of the month.

And even if not having shaved for a week can't quite put me on par with Mr. Napoli, I have to say - never had I seen so many groups of men who make me feel almost handsome until I started watching baseball. God Bless America, indeed.

Has anyone carved a jack-o-lantern? And if so, did you roast the seeds?

[James Rogers]

If you have a camera, I swear to you I'll break it.

[Nick Fury 616]

You recall we were discussing price.

STEPHEN DEDALUS, for your consideration

Here, is, perhaps, a reminder from your old friend. A voice with both feet on the the ground no longer (if - indeed - it ever was), all too soon to fade: But I, all day, I heard an angel crying: / ‘Hurt not the trees.’

I don't trust peace, Stephen, and I don't trust people. Words, perhaps, and actions at the best and worst of times. Perhaps I trust Grantaire because his action and -- no, it is not the time to unpack our friend Grantaire.

Suppose one can trust the stars. Are they the same, you think, from Hugo to Joyce? From Woolf to here and back again? Suppose it is our world that expands and contracts whilst the rest of the universe remains the same.

And all we're doing - all we're ineffectively showcasing - is that we're a bunch of hand-wringing sons and daughters without a thought for the long game. But maybe I'm wrong -- first to admit fault, me. Maybe there's no long game.

The longer I'm here - the longer I establish attachments to people whose reality is my alternate and vice versa - the longer I suppose that the relationships made are even more precious and intimate than I should have made were time and space linear.

(Steve Rogers - if you're going to come back, it's the second star to the right, straight on til morning.)

But, people of Potts Tower, here's the heart of the heart of my advice to you:

Don't stop striving to instigate relationships with one another. Don't stop reaching out. Every day our hearts are breaking and we must band together if we're going to defeat the darkness which continues to come. If we don't defeat our demons

We're none of us really home anymore, not unless we're together.

Now that's my own attempt at a rallying speech and you'll not get another out of me. In the meantime, I'll be at the shooting range. You're welcome to stop by and try to out-shoot me. But I guarantee you'll fail.

Came across This photo today.

Pity I can't speak to her about it, she looks absolutely enthralled.

Speech after long silence; it is right,
All other lovers being estranged or dead,
Unfriendly lamplight hid under its shade,
The curtains drawn upon unfriendly night,
That we descant and yet again descant
Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song:
Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young
We loved each other and were ignorant.

Yeats.


Locative will still be published, under new editorship. (Mine)

benedicat tibi Dominus et custodiat te
ostendat Dominus faciem suam tibi et misereatur tui
convertat Dominus vultum suum ad te et det tibi pacem

There is a spider, an ex-pat of the kitchen who has taken up residence in my bedroom. Excommunicated, he was spared from death by a student's essay and an over turned wine glass. (We have wine glasses now, which, I think, is a sign that the company is regular enough we don't tell them to bring their own). I brought him here, through torrent seas, saved from starvation and potato blight to the land of dreams and opportunities. (Now I couldn't put him outside in this weather. Would be nothing short of drowning and as far as I can tell, that isn't right. But if you kill a spider when it is already raining, can it bring the rain?)

non ei placebit vecordia sua et sicut tela aranearum fiducia eius

He's spinning now. Hard at work in the corner. Making a home for himself where now a home he must make. Determination wrought with hunger and instinct. Such frail a life that weaves a future not knowing what sound or light or fly might come tomorrow.

Even though I claim - to the high heavens - that every day I feel a bit less antique and a bit more like a 21st century man, I have to admit that there are some times in which this world still manages to move the ground beneath my feet.

That's life, I suppose. As it's teaching us what we're meant to learn, namely: even though strange things happen, even though there are stranger things still to come and new gauntlets to run ... we've got to cling to one another and trudge on together.

In far less intangible news, I am sorely tempted to try a vegan diet. Has anyone tried this to much luck or positive effect?

In the past seven days, I've had a three-day weekend and a three-day week. Tuesday I lost somewhere between West 52nd and Bryant Park. I dedicate it to the workers. I have no real notion of what work entails, precisely, but as the only thing of value I possess is time (and never do a damned thing with any of it) I have to imagine it's better off in someone else's hands. I have nothing; I give all. I am the most generous and the least lavish. I'm a boy with a wooden shoe.

But not a very good boy with a wooden shoe, as I'd have much preferred to give them Saturday. I only slept through half of Saturday, and as far as I can tell it was the better half.

Soft voices of the dead
are whispering by the shore

Godspeed, Seamus Heaney. And good luck.

Sometimes I forget my father's dead. It's easy to do here. Just visiting, home still a snapshot from the last time we were all there at once. His smile and my mother's laugh, wet with wine and glowing in warm orange candlelight. And a wicked glint in my brother's eye and my sister's baby blonde curls just peeking over the table as he chased her.

And then I remember that no matter how much I practise, I will never open a door to them.

But I have learned to open doors to friends, so that's a small victory to be proud of. And it's all right to grieve and be happy at the same time.

The Assumption of the Virgin Mary, which has to do with her ascension into heaven, and nothing to do with her assumed virginity, now get your minds all out of the gutters, or perhaps it's mine I should be more worried about. But there it is, a reason to be in church on a Thursday.

And I think I shall take the day off work. A feat surprising difficult for a teacher during the summer as it requires me to find something meaningful and worthwhile that I will then decide not to do. Which, arguably, might be a full time job in itself. My flatmate certainly seems to think so

Now let's see. We've Juno and the Paycock, but if they're at all concerned about the authenticity of accents, I rather think I'm up the creek.

I think I might see what this Defacing Michael Jackson is all about, or perhaps I ought to look into something I already know -- King Lear has never steered me wrong..

... Or then, there is Marie Antoinette but that seems both a bit awkward and hardly acting, I should think.

Does anyone have any suggestions? For once, I think I could do with some advice.

I've been reading, which is pretty dangerous. And really, whenever I think about the way people moon and cry over "Romeo & Juliet" I don't get it. I see two people who got frakked over because of their parents' expectations. But you know who I like? This guy, Mercutio.

Romeo: I dreamt a dream tonight.
Mercutio: And so did I.
Romeo: Well, what was yours?
Mercutio: That dreamers often lie.

For all of the prophetic shit in my life, I think I can say pretty well that Mercutio speaks the truth. So, if anybody wants to take flying lessons from me once school starts be aware you're not going to get some milk-sap godsdamn baby. You're going to have to work for it.

But yeah. I'm going to teach some flying classes - pilot's license and the like - for now. It's safer with the b You know, though. I don't think I'll be able to keep my hands off a gun for too too long.