Exercise 4.1 from Steering the Craft

Bird’s liver, mashed with blood and ramp-juice: it wasn’t egg, but it should be wholesome and easy enough to swallow. Though he was clumsy with his right hand, Finn patiently spoon-fed the rank paste to Tant, who, in his feverish delirium, had begun to act half his proper age and was apt to spit out more than half of whatever went in his mouth. “Eat up, little one. At least it’s not more grasshopper.” And anyway, you don’t know what I had to go through to bring you this, he thought. Grasshoppers didn’t leave you with beak-gouges in your side, or dislocated shoulders. Hunting grasshoppers never involved climbing ridiculously tall trees, nor falling out of them clinging to blinded, maddened birds eight times your size. And even the biggest grasshopper was small enough to bring home without the aid of a litter – hadn’t he brought home five at once last summer?

Exercise 3.2 from Steering the Craft

Half an hour after closing my eyes, it became clear to me that I was, in fact, Dick Tracy, famous detective and star of the funny pages and, once (regrettably) the silver screen, which was odd as I’ve never really been a fan of Dick Tracy; the strip angers me, the horrible and often comically misguided little ‘crime-stoppers’ advice-nuggets in the opening panel infuriate me, and the worldview the strip presents, in which the bad are disfigured and the disfigured are the bad, is not so much medieval as prehistoric; nevertheless, I was Dick Tracy, and deeply conflicted about being Dick Tracy, famous detective and star of the funny pages and, once (regrettably) the silver screen – so conflicted, in fact, that I had abandoned my policeman’s duties and taken off to Paris, in hot but entirely unsanctioned pursuit of Mr. Ewan McGregor, being convinced of that well-known screen actor’s complicity in a far-reaching international criminal conspiracy of vague impact and intent, although I will readily confess to a dearth of specific evidence, and in fact when I did encounter Mr. McGregor in a small gazebo at the rear of an improbable Paris petting zoo (which featured, among other attractions: singing sheep, miniature pandas, carnivorous ducks with razor-sharp, scalloped bills, and giant orange kiwi birds), he was in the company of Clint Eastwood, that grizzled and concentrated specimen of 20th Century American Republican machismo, and was engaged in nothing more criminal than pressing his (assumedly unwelcome) affections on the older man, who bore it all with an air of quiet, stoic dignity, which led me to reconsider my assumptions about Mr. McGregor, for now all his actions which had once seemed so suspicious could be more readily ascribed to a bad case of unrequited man-love, and my jaunt to France was laid bare for what it was: a mere pretext for dereliction of a now unwelcome duty, a fool’s errand that had, it was apparent, left me adrift and bereft of purpose in an unfamiliar city filled, apparently, with carnivorous, scallop-billed ducks and who knew what other dangers, wandering down a garden path that led, as it happened, to Mr. Diet Smith, eccentric industrialist and purveyor of wrist-watch radios and other such gimcrack to the police, who stabbed me in the throat with a box-cutter, at which point, I trust you will understand, I awoke.

Exercise 3.1 from UKL’s ‘Stirring the Craft’

The bird flew from its nest. This was the moment. Finn silently uncovered his bark-shrouded hole. He gripped the thorn sword tightly. He was silent as he climbed. The bird might return at any moment. A woodlouse scuttled past, nearly toppling him. He swore under his breath. He needed that egg. His family needed it.

Hand over hand he climbed. Looking down was not an option. Three more lengths separated him from dinner. Then it was two lengths, then one. He peered over the nests edge. There they were – seven sky-blue eggs. It was enough to feed an army. But even one was far too heavy. If only the others would come!

‘If’s didn’t bring home any eggs. He vaulted the edge of the nest. His water-skin was empty. His thorn was sharp and fire-hardened. This had to work. He raised the thorn to the nearest egg.

But Finn never pierced the first hole. A rustling noise made him look up.

There was another bird. It was watching him, waiting. They’d used their own eggs as bait.

Exercise 2 from UKL’s “Steering the Craft”

He stepped across the edge and then it was too late for turning back too late to discover a path out of the precipitous dive and fall and tumble of it of the water reaching up white and green tongues to lick at first his shoulder then his arm and ear and then the whole of him engulfed in the splash and tumble and the sharp screed of pain as the rusty iron of the seawall the jagged edge of corrosion and decay tore at the meat of his right thigh in the thrash of the wave and the just then solid thump of the slime and weed as they lubricated the rock to which they clung and sped his general downwardness turning what might have been an end into the start of yet more water now billowing red in the faltering light where it was mixing with the profligacy of his blood in its nearly joyous leaping escape from the gash in his thigh that only now after long seconds began to knit itself to itself to itself and close itself flesh to flesh and he was down now in the silt the weed the muck that sucked at him and he was eyeless for a moment as the weeds wrapped his face and he was stunned and battered by light and rocks and walls and mud and his bruises fled as quickly as his wound and he tried to force his mouth to open to drink no breathe the cold and throbbing lake but the body was not fooled by his insistence and resisted for a full three thrumming minutes before it came to the end of its endurance and drew in what it knew to be death and found that everything the body knew was wrong.

Exercise 1 from UKL’s ‘Steering the Craft’

I can’t have the North Woods – the ducks, black lakes of pike, the crackling winter wild and ice-cold crystal needles of the pines. I can’t have the whitewhite reticence, the isolated strangeness, the solitary wisp of human kindness. I can’t have the forced air heat, Chihuahua sized mosquitoes, blackflies, bonfires, gridlessness. I can’t have the rifles and the venison, the violence of a land that wants me dead. I can’t have the islands and the isthmuses, the leaking sieve of glaciated ground, the population 374 sign.
But I want them.

Manager-man may anagram my name

I’ve had a short-list of anagrammed noms-de-plume for quite a while now (Zelda Aranchi; Zacharia Lend, Hazel Cardina, etc.) but I couldn’t resist seeing what the computer would come up with, so I ran Daniel Haracz through the old mixmaster and came up with the following favorites . . .

Arachnid Zeal

Cardinal Haze

A Czar Inhaled

I handle a Czar.

I ran, haze-clad.

And, finally,

Hi, Anal-Czar Ed!

The Project

Hi all,

Angeli invited me to play in y’all’s yard, so here goes.

For a while now, I’ve been throwing around a collection of ideas I think of as the Project (yeah, capital ‘P’). Mostly, the Project rises in my thoughts when I’m asked about my religious affiliation. What follows is a rough, short list of the statements of faith I think of when I think of faith – the beginning of my answer. Each statement on the list could be expanded to an essay, or a book, or a life’s work; I know it’s simplistic, but it’s a start.

The Project

1. Life creates forms.
2. Forms can outlast individual life.
3. Information is more resistant to entropy than matter.
4. The potential information content of the universe is infinite.
5. The heat-death of the universe is coming; what are you doing about it?
6. Sentience creates novel forms
7. Sentience is anti-entropic.
8. The unique potential of sentience lies in the creation of novel forms.
9. The creation of novel forms is dependent on maintenance of existing forms.
10. Destruction of existing forms is entropic.
11. Sacralization of existing forms is entropic.
12. Religion can be entropic.
13. Religion can be anti-entropic.
14. Noise is entropic.
15. Lies are pure noise.
16. Truthful communication is anti-entropic.
17. Communication implies, creates, and requires community.
18. Involuntary restriction of access to information is entropic.
19. Voluntary reduction of noise is anti-entropic.
20. Art is the creation of novel forms, and is therefore sacred.
21. Art is the preservation of existing forms and is therefore sacred.
22. Science is the creation of novel forms and is therefore sacred.
23. Science is the preservation of existing forms and is therefore sacred.
24. The future is sacred.
25. Entropy itself is anti-entropic in that it is essential to life and sentience.
26. A moral code can be derived from these statements.