| THIS IS A READ-ONLY ARCHIVE FROM THE SORABJI.COM MESSAGE BOARDS (1995-2016). |
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some years ago, after Leslie Harpold died. i was looking at access_log files for a web site where the underground Scrabble site used to be. looking at that log file i noticed search engines were attempting to index one of those old scrabble URLs, which had not existed at that location for years. the scrabble URLs were woefully insecure by modern standards, but typical of mid-1990s web addresses which sometimes put passwords in the URL. for this reason i suggested using a throwaway password for Scrabble, since anyone walking past your computer could see it. the scrabble URLs looked something like this: /~sorabji//babel/boo/getpanel.pl? ID=abdvscah&PASSWORD=xiopxiop i was surprised to find that search engines were attempting to index the scrabble site, since there was no known public link to it. i searched Yahoo for "xiopxiop" (not the real password, i have no idea now what it was) and the only search result was a large text file sitting on one of Leslie's web sites. her sites remained online for a few years after she died. Leslie had noted her Scrabble URL (with the distinctive password) in this text file. this file was obviously not supposed to be on the public internet, but somehow it got indexed and made searchable by Yahoo and Google. the scrabble password was the least of the problems. the text file also had her checking account info and login/passwords for several web sites and services, ideas for domain names and web products, as well as pithy comments about other web sites and authors. it was like a diary, with random ideas and notes-to-self, which she seemed to have kept on her web site for convenience but which she most likely did not intend to make public. it took a little while to realize what i was looking at. it was eerie. i somewhat ruefully searched the document for my name, fearing she had nasty things to say about me, too, but i escaped that dagger. i don't remember how long i thought about it, but while trying to decide if i should contact someone from her family to take the page down the web site disappeared altogether. |
In the material world |
I THINK I found it back when Yahoo would have indexes of "cool personal pages" or something like that, and I found the page of a girl named Evany Thomas (no relation; she is now a comedy writer, IIRC?). She had a link section on her site that included Mark's page, and she was really funny and interesting so I trusted her referral judgment. I remember when the boards were still in comments-tree format. |
it was called "agatha frye's pies." there was a link to sorabji's forerunner "the place of general happiness." my handle here - droopy - was my online scrabble name. |
I was on a lot of email lists in the 90's because that was the only way to obtain bootlegs- which were taped on dual cassette boomboxes and passed from member to member in the post. I got a lot of packages back then- from europe and australia especially, which was impressive, considering that the price for these bootlegs was never more than two blank tapes. One to fill with music and send back, one blank tape as compensation for the postage. It always felt so special to listen to the dim crackly recordings of live shows where my favorite bands were absolutely on fire; and I couldn't pass up the opportunity, so I was on mailing lists for every musician who was in any way special to me. Did I mention I was on a lot of lists? I was on a LOT of lists- soul coughing, guided by voices, pavement, tool, neutral milk hotel, etc etc. I was a subscriber to a list for Jeff Buckley when he disappeared into the mississippi river. There was a week before they found him where we all sat a vigil in front of our computers, hoping beyond hope that he had bumped his head and would be found wandering around memphis as an amnesiac, or that he had decided to disappear into the night and give up on fame. When they found his body, the grief ignited something in the lot of us- it felt like losing so much more than just a musical idol. So, many members started traveling around the country (and in a few instances around the globe) to meet one another and ostensibly hold memorial services. I traveled to new york for one of those services and met a girl there who worked in HR and hooked me up with a job that, once I had a few years under my belt, eventually allowed me to work in NYC. And I wanted to go to nyc because i had some kind of weird hero worship thing going on with MT in those days and saw his life as some sort of spiritual roadmap to my own (this is where I include a disclaimer about being a somewhat melodramatic college student). I'm sure I read every word of every story he ever published on the old site, and the new old site; and even though much of it was miserable and lonely it was the first time someone else's life really resonated with me. Cliched, but i really did feel less alone when I read the stories, or when bedcam would keep me company while I crammed a semester's worth of work into 48 hours. (Not to mention that the message boards were an incredible diversion when they were at their most active) As I got older, my dependence turned to concern- for several years i was truly fucking worried that mt would never manage to pull through. These days, I'm not so concerned- it seems like the old man has got his shit under control and that life is going pretty well- so i don't stop by as much as I did. It's probably been a few years since I properly read one of his stories, or mobile entries and I have no idea if he still does 'the big picture.' But then again, it seems less important to him too I'm no longer scouring his writings, pictures and receipts for some indication that he's on the verge of chasing a bottle of pills down with a bottle of wine. While I'm typing this all out, I feel like i should mention that I've told the saga of mt's bucket of change literally dozens of times. It's so satisfying to tell, and people fucking love to talk about how much they hate and/or save their change; so it's either a rebuke to demonstrate what they could do with their change if they just saved it, or vindication of there change-hoarding tendencies. I wonder if anyone has ever told MT the story of his own change bucket after I relayed it to them... |
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the true hero. They keep him going and tell him shit. |
When I found sorabji.com, I was in college and didn't have a personal computer, so I had to read Mark's stories in the campus computer lab. They would make me laugh out loud, so I had to print them out and take them back to my dorm to read so I wouldn't disturb anyone. Now I can't find them on the main site. "An Open Letter to the Makers of Kool-Aid" and the story about Mark's friend from Oberlin (Peter?) were my favorites. He also wrote somewhere -- I think on WAYD -- about the personalities of all the musical scales. I'd like to find that again. |
most of the old stuff is under http://bbs.sorabji.com/tpogh/ (ugh, ugly) http://bbs.sorabji.com/whois/readthestories/1997- 2003.html and links to stuff from January 2004 to present are on the right of individual postings, like this: http://bbs.sorabji.com/1/2013/09/trash-can-miracle.html i don't know about pills and wine. i've moved on to vodka. |
the swamp between Texarkana Utah and that sassie mormon's undergarmets of god, then actually through the Un of Iowa wroters workshops and sarah there, a different sarah from our sarah here, and then through syrup.org and our sarah, somehow morphed over a few bales of cannabis lost in the Carribean sea floating by Heather and her Cuba, then here to MT's classical gas site. Must have been easier in the old days. Sarah made me do it. Then life as I knew unravelled in the sunset. |
Thank you for the links; I will have something to do at work today. Thanks also for the labor of digitizing the journal, The Etude, and allowing it to be accessed for free. What an amazing resource. A Bunch of Resolutions. The personalities of the scales. You called attributing states of mind to notes "poppycock," but they're there sometimes. Maybe not notes, but key signatures. Andrei Gavrilov playing Rachmaninoff's Elegie in E flat minor His performance is slaying me. Killing me dead on Christmas Eve. Typically you hear "elegy" and assume it will be quietly sad and wistful, but that piece is full of rage and agony. Feels like it could only have come from a Russian. |
Now I can't even remember how I found the boards, and this is going to bother me until I wake up in the middle of the night with an abrupt realisation. My first friends in the internet. |
I think it was a list of links on local alternative radio's website that got me here. Or maybe to the payphone project, but as a highschool girl I was a lot more interested in WAYD. Kinda funny... I was 17 or 18 when I first started posting, and now I'm a few weeks from 32. And I've never more than alluded to this place to anyone. There was also a link to a girl's diaryland page. It was password protected, but the password was included in the description, so I read about her exploits for two or three years. |
thundersnowing here...happy new year you sorabjite people |
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finally have my new computer up and running.... hooray for laptop and router talking to each other! i don't like checking sorabji on shared computers.... plus getting to the new messages page without a favorite is a pain. it's all fixed now. |
I saw that xkcd too and immediately thought of sorabji.com. Consequently, this place had been rolling around in the back of my head, even though I'm pretty sure more than a few new year's eves have passed since I last stopped by. It just makes sense that you are already sitting here talking about the same comic. I guess that's just what this place is, because even though I've never been the most connected person on here, there were times in my life when this was where I felt most connected. I hope you all have been doing well. Best wishes for the new year. |
I get the least/most connected thing too. Sometimes I feel like I have a giant tattoo on my forehead "KILLS SUBJECTS". |
hope you are all well. jack is still fat and gay and won't admit it. be awesome, all. |
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and seriously, someone from these innards wrote that xkcd. |
(there was no such thing as a blog.) i don't remember which. back then all the links rotated to other personal journal websites, so who knows. back then the internet was such a tiny world. i traveled quickly from wayd to these boards. i used to read the stories, and look at the big pictures, but only occasionally. for more yeas than i can count i checked the boards at least once daily. it's definitely my hideaway. . .. ... .... ..... .... ... .. . |
high school paper on Shakespearian tragic heroes. This thread htt p://sorabji.com/messages/649/4444.html showed up in some search. I was a little lost and had just read Hamlet. So I became Ophelia. It's funny, surprising, nostalgic, coming back here. I stayed up until the wee hours last night because I did a search and got caught up in re-reading the conversations my 18-20 year old self had within this community. I was trying to figure out the world, and who I was, by baring my inner anxieties along with my silliness to all of you who were older and wiser and more in the world. These pages were my connection to life outside of my high school existence and college campus, and played a significant part in my life. It seems like things have quieted down quite a bit. I wonder it it's just ebb and flow, or how much of it has to do with all of the other distractions of social media and virtual connectivity. Or whether we have found the communities we sought here to a greater degree in the people around us. Or maybe I've just caught a lull during the holiday season. I'm so glad to see that several of you still post here, though. Reading those old messages made me miss you. So maybe I'll come back and check in from time to time. |
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he was surprised when i made a distinction between these message boards and what i called "the sorabji part of sorabji.com," meaning the big pictures and ramblings and other stuff. he seemed to think they were all in the same realm but i do not. this part of the site has a life of its own, which is something like what i had in mind when i set it up. this place (these message boards) has always been important to me. it's where i came after my father's suicide, it's the first thing i restored after the server blowout of a few years ago, and it's the first thing i plan around when moving this web site to another server or hosting company. i don't think this place would ever go away as long as i'm around. someone has suggested i donate some or all of sorabji.com to archive.org. meh, idunno. like others, i do not mention this place to anyone any more, though i guess i talked about it more in earlier years. posting here feels like i'm cheating on something (but what?) and i only do it when no one else is around. needless to say, the www's landscape for this sort of thing has changed, but i'm happy that this place survives in its original form... unless by "original" you remember the bulleted-list format that used to be at http://bbs.sorabji.com/tpogh/clink/bbs/ . That old format used to be archived at the wayback machine but it's gone now. Maybe it's on a tape drive somewhere in my storage room... |
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since the last one, though. |
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I've had a number of name changes over the years... when I came back after a break I started posting as la and was mistaken for another.... cyst, if I remember correctly. Oh Hamlet. Which reminds me..... has anyone read MacBeth? |
though that a friend acted in. http://www.shakespeare- parodies.com/macbeth.html I forget how to embed links in text. I used to be able to do that. |
Alas, poor mark, no one (may have) knew (known) him well, at least his legend lived on in through and within the intoxicated piano scales and lithuanian inspired accordian stories of these boards, Anti's marraiges and patrick's babies, all of our divorces and the pexmobile bicycle races, sprinkled with irish faerie doctor dust (think river drum) and west coast fuck you you ass isms,(think Oakland and sweet heather) surrounded in scanned receipts and big pictures of city cemateries, mausoleums of such souls as may inhabit here, wrinkled pocket fuzz at droopy's favorite liquor dispensary, and meaningful payphone numbers at the base of the eiffiel tower (cuff the french)...Hi Ophelia...this sagacious rag and bone shop of the heart (bly, look it up) continues to prove my disconnection to the universe at large. Before marriage, we had loved each other in the starlight. (maupassant) |
paragraphs explain it all: "She loved him because it is natural for young ladies to love young men who say tender words to them." <a href="http: //books.google.com/books? id=6NhDAAAAYAAJ&lpg=PA204&ots=WyNuFwkuLs&dq=maupas sant%20forbidden%20fruit&pg=PA204&ci=223%2C565%2C6 06%2C655&source=bookclip"><img src="http:/ /books.google.com/books? id=6NhDAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA204&img=1&zoom=3&hl=en&sig=AC fU3U0PQ7xytaQ4UK242H5wQ68Cxp3abw&ci=223%2C565%2C60 6%2C655&edge=0"/></a> |
Back those many years ago my wife and I were getting some strange phone calls and I wanted away to find the payphone he was using. So many woes have come and gone since then. That was before my wife's MS. Back before my depression hit me hard. One again I too thank Mark for keeping it going. |
mildly interesting and I like knowing a little bit about my family. My mom grew up in a household that didn't talk about where they came from and half my dad's family came from Norway 100 years ago, but before that, nothing. So one time I started following a thread and it went back and back and the names started looking more and more important. And old. I stopped a couple generations after Maldred MacCrinian back in the 11th century. Maldred was the younger (half) brother of Duncan I of Scotland, the king assassinated by MacBeth in his lust for power. It was in the early days of kingships being hereditary in Scotland; MacBeth was their cousin. Maldred and Crinian had no claims to the throne (it was Duncan's mother who was a princess) and so they threw themselves into battle, avenging Duncan and supporting his sons. It's interesting to have some ties to a story, but if you can find records that go back that far someone thought it was important to record them. |
So were they the ones that came up with the idea of carrying trees and branches to hide behind when they attacked the castle? |
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back to 850 at Caernavon Castle in Scotland. My aunt says the german side came directly from germany in 1700-1800's; the irish side says we black irish (a derogatory term) came from olive skinned portugese sailors intermarrying with fair irish lassies after 1500. the swedish side of the family, says whatever, and drinks wine, thinking that before the coal mines in pennsylvania, they must have come from sweden. I still am disconnected from the universe. |
http://www.ireland-information.com/articles/blackirish.htm |
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"Debunked" seems a strong and misleading term; on the contrary your citation provides credence to the use of the term over centuries and in differing contexts. Nonetheless, I am still disconnected from the universe, en masse and in particular. I am still your friend too. |
term "black irish" used, but my grandmother told us that my father - who has dark hair and blue eyes - had the true "hibernian" coloring. suggesting that they came from the iberian peninsula. my grandfather was a member of the ancient order of hibernians. i looked it up just now, and found that the two words - hibernia and iberia - are actually unrelated and any similarity coincidental. not that my father would care. my family is either embarrassed or ashamed of his family history, and refuses to talk about it. |
you buddy. |
Unless you're talking about Eamon de Valera, in which case it is true. And we'd better still be friends, mister! Family legend is that the house in which my grandfather was raised, on King St. in Lower Manhattan, had at one time belonged to Aaron Burr. I don't think there's any illustrious person in my direct family line, though. |
early 20th century, mostly from the Umeå area. |
idea; i think i'm going to be swedish this month. except for the weekend after next, when i will be manouche. i don't know yet what i will be for february. are we still friends, spider? of course! |
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no one's really sure about that part. White, like most of you, as far as I can assume from your European heritage. I just (about an hour ago) had a really intense conversation about race with an old friend of mine. She uses her facebook page to post a lot of thought provoking and sometimes challenging articles that I read and learn from, with a general unifying theme of how white feminism is fucked up and how white people are either blatantly ignorant about race and white privilege or how their (our) attempts at being allies are misguided. I really appreciate all that she has to say, and how it challenges me. I also had recently been feeling frustrated that I felt like in everything she posted there were no examples of a white person making a statement or an action as an ally that was actually a positive contribution, and I brought this up in conversation. She responded, and I really respect her response, that it's not her job to find these stories or congratulate white people for doing the right thing (and that furthermore there may not be that many instances or examples out there). Which I get. As a result we had an intense and challenging conversation. Part of the upshot was that if white people want to have a dialogue about race, we can't expect black people to be our guides, we have to take it on and navigate it ourselves. This makes sense to me and I've been chewing this over. Curious what you all think. Why are white people so unlikely to bring up race except when in a room with someone of color? And what can white people accomplish through dialogue about race? |
race that's their problem. |
Also, people have a blindspot, where if they don't see something happening, and you say it happened, they won't believe you. I see a correlation with gender here. Just as an example, how many goddamned discussions have I had with men who don't believe women are catcalled as much as they are, because they don't see it? And then they feel compelled to chime in with their own stories of some time a homeless guy yelled at them or something, as if that's at all analogous to the consistent and pervasive street harassment that women deal with? And then in most cases in my experience, they flip the fuck out when we point out that they don't know what they're talking about, they don't know what we have experienced, they're telling us we're exaggerating or lying about our own experiences, and they should just be quiet for once and listen to what we're saying and understand that this happens more than they're aware of. So I see a direct analogy here with white people getting into conversations with black people about race. In my daily life, I hardly ever encounter anyone openly being racist or discriminatory toward black people, but I would be a giant idiot if I thought that because I don't see it, it must not happen. If I'm in a group with black people talking about their experiences with bigotry, I'm not going to say, "I know what you're talking about...some guy called me a cracker the other day, can you believe it?" as if that's on par with systemic discrimination. I'm not going to listen to black women talking about their struggles with their hair and chime in with, "I know what you mean, my hair gets so frizzy when it rains!" because I'm aware of the cultural issues involving black women's hair and my experience with my own hair is not the same. Even when I was a racial minority (when I lived on a reservation), the power balance was still tipped in my favor. One of the men I worked with told me not to walk in town after dark, but then added, "but everyone knows that if an Indian rapes a white girl, he's going down, so you'd probably be the safe." This alone tells me I don't know what it's like to a minority in a majority-white world. |
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walk in someone else's shoes. Like you, I reach for analogies within my experience to try and gain some perspective of what it is navigate the world from within in a disenfranchised group. At the same time, I recognize that white privilege is not the same as male privilege, is not the same as straight or cisgender privilege, is not the same as socioeconomic or linguistic or able-bodied privilege, and the list goes on. So there are real limits to how much we can "get it" by analogy. But to your point about wanting to turn the conversation to ourselves, I think that in some ways we need to turn the conversation to ourselves, to figure out the ways that we subconsciously play out the role of privilege, and to catch ourselves and each other when that happens, and I think my friend's point was that that part is our job. It doesn't have to mean interrupting someone else's dialogue, and it certainly can't take the place of listening to someone who is in a disenfranchised group speak to their perspective. Being quiet and listening definitely is a part of what we need to do too. But at some point the learning and reflection needs to show up in action or conversation, right? I don't necessarily mean a deliberate action or conversation, but a shift in the actions and conversations of daily life. Or something like that. That's the part I'm trying to figure out. All that any of us has to go on is what we have learned so far. And I get stumped with this a lot, so I figure I have a lot of learning to do. |
enjoy awkward and weird. If I ever make lots of money you're all invited on an all expense paid trip somewhere. |
Some of us are awkward and weird. At this point I guess it is possible I have met the most, unless y'all do it in secret. |
(long long ago) and Tom showed up at my work once (and then failed to meet me in downtown Portland another time) way way waaaaay back. Inside we're all awkward and weird and full of blood and guts. |
I am Irish, Scottish, English, French, German, Swiss. And, I'm still looking. I also know I am very distantly related to Robert Duvall. |
I have no respect for those that say I owe them simply because some of my ancestors owned a slave or two before 1850. I worked my butt off for what little I have. And, the only privilege I ever saw was when I got my first job emptying trash cans at a local department store because my father had a part time sales job there and it was a "family" type of business. Almost everyone there had a relative that worked for the store. I have known a lot of Black people personally in my life. The ones who have my respect worked for everything they had. And, none of them complained about being oppressed. |
You disgust me, but you probably already knew that. http ://www.nymbp.org/reference/WhitePrivilege.pdf yes even if you are poor Hard work and determination have already been proven by smart people to get you very little at all. You fucking moron. |
seriously consider privilege for years, but my eyes have opened little by little. That doesn't mean it doesn't impact all of our lives. I don't think it's about what you owe someone exactly. It's about working to create a level playing field, not because there has been a (much more dramatically) uneven field historically, but because there is still an uneven field today. The thing about privilege is that we don't always see it. If you haven't seen Peggy McIntosh's article comparing privilege to an invisible backpack, I think it does a good job explaining. You can find the whole thing but here's an excerpt: http://www.deanza.edu/faculty/lewisjulie/White%20Priviled ge%20U npacking%20the%20Invisible%20Knapsack.pdf |
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american indian, and treated differently until I corrected the error in assumption on the observer's part, and then I was treated ... how? like? WTF being of irish or German or swedish or lithuanian descent has nothing to do with race nor ethnicity, technically speaking. My good friend and colleague speaks worldwide about cultural sensitivity, primarily from her perspective of a multi- PhD'd tall athletic vegan religion (christian) feminist professor at a prestigious ivy league school, and she misses the mark repeatedly: culture by definition is about the culture (think petri dish) in which the child grows into an adult, i.e., family values regardless of color race ethnicity or descent. These are all variables, and not interchangeable. Hey mark every time I backspace or hit return with my cursor, I get pixelads opening in new windows. Just saying. Love you Heather and Spider, Anti and Droop, Semi and Agatha, and SarAH and la, blindswine, Tbone and Czarina (if you're lurking), those from down under and across the pond, and ... everyone (well most). I've met only two of you in the flesh, but I think I know so many without that meeting. And I value this place like a secret garden on a desert island in a universe far far away. Any body roasting green coffee beans? I did some today slow and low and the house smells so fine. |
on the top shelf, waiting for me to fill the house with smoke. A friend taught me to roast coffee. We both had breakups at the same time so for a while we'd get together every few weeks to drink beer and make pad thai. Our hugs are always awkward, because every time I remember how much he loves wool. Maybe I'll roast some tomorrow or Monday, and winnow the chaff in the sun. |
boards. I've been here off and on since the mid 90s. Moved, married, had kids, and divorced in that time. I don't always say much, but I keep coming back to check in on y'all. Never met anyone in person, played a few games of scrabble, or maybe backgammon along the way. |
converter, but the reviews pointed me toward a smaller, less expensive more efficient SR500 made in the US, and I like it. Used without the Kitchen hood running,(I have a big semi commercial job and use the roaster close to it usually) it still produces very little smoke even at a nine minute, two crack roast... It's the breasts against soft merino or alpaca wool that is meaningful. |
Our opinions may be disgusting to each other. But, that does not mean that I don't love you. Bleeding liberal that you are. |