Unsorted thoughts.

Who ever thought the Big Dipper looked like a giant spoon was the most unimaginative of stargazers.  If anything it looks like a giant question mark in the cosmos.  Recently I saw it rising in the northeast, hooking slowly over the horizon, looming evermore overheard, a slowly rising crescendo of cosmic uncertainty.  Or maybe it's an interrobang -- ‽

It recalls, to me, pseudomorphically Thomas Cole's Oxbow -- though his was asking a different question entirely.  I should look up different cultures and their imaginings of the ursa major -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursa_Major

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Lately I've been feeling the anxious urge to read a dictionary.  I wonder if anyone else gets this feeling.  I know Robert DeMaria surely does -- surely one feels only more anxious once you finish reading it.  I wonder which one I'll shoot at next.
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I should apply for Triple Canopy and attempt to enact my dedications book.  Youth fiction has to be full of excellent dedications. Sci Fi has to have a rich compendium of dedications.  What I am talking about here is a database of dedications.  None of the boring ones -- the boring ones ("to my mom" "to my adoring husband" "thanks for putting up with me") can be cataloged as a statistic: i.e., 95% of all dedications are total boring drivel, saccharine redundancy befitting the speeches professional athletes give after winning a championship. Who cares about a precise statistic anyway? Let's just say it: 99% of dedications are totally boring. But then again... so are 99% of most things written! The collection of dedications I have so far are in completely different genres.. there needs to be a good categorization.

What is the point of the dedication exactly: the theory of dedicating.  OED: "3.a. To inscribe or address (a book, engraving, piece of music, etc.) to a patron or friend, as a compliment, mark of honour, regard,"

It is a moment of humility (turned funny / ironic by the lack of it often) written, ideally, at the end of such a project, at which someone acknowledges a single figure or source without which the book wouldn't have been possible.  It's the acknowledgement (but it is not the acknowledgements: I regard that as an entirely separate genre of writing) that everything ever written or made is built on the creation of something previous; the ol' Sagan adage: "to make an apple pie from scratch one must create the universe" -- in this way one could see the research and focus on dedications as one way of tracing influence.

The American literature category seems to be a good one.  It could actually be a useful resource to have such a database available.

American children's literature could be a sub category of that.  This is really a matter of going through the shelves.  19th century books have probably already been scanned and the work can be done online.  20th century might require a lot of just flipping through teh shelves and photographing.



[return to this..]

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I need to get better at teamwork, that is, sharing ideas and working together with others to enact them.  Otherwise they all just die in my head.
Color pianos. Playing images.