Brian Whitman bwhitman

Imagine this very elaborate scientific lie: that sound cannot travel through outer space. Well, but suppose it can. Suppose They don’t want us to know there is a medium there, what used to be called an “aether,” which can carry sound to every part of the Earth. The Soniferous Aether. For millions of years, the sun has been roaring, a giant, furnace, 93 million mile roar, so perfectly steady that generations of men have been born into it and passed out of it again, without ever hearing it. Unless it changed, how would anybody know?

Except that at night now and then, in some part of the dark hemisphere, because of eddies in the Soniferous Aether, there will come to pass a very shallow pocket of no-sound. For a few seconds, in a particular place, nearly every night somewhere in the World, sound-energy from Outside is shut off. The roaring of the sun stops. For its brief life, the point of sound-shadow may come to rest a thousand feet above a desert, between floors in an empty office building, or exactly around

Charles and Jacques were still talking to Hector Guimard, the former trombone player.

-- Yours is not a modern problem, Jacques said. The problem today is not angst but lack of angst.

-- Wait a minute, Jacques. Although I myself believe that there is nothing wrong with being a trombone player, I can understand Hector's feeling. I know a painter who feels the same way about being a painter. Every morning he gets up, brushes his teeth, and stands before the empty canvas. A terrible feeling of being de trop comes over him. So he goes to the corner and buys the Times, at the corner newsstand. He comes back home and reads the Times. During the period in which he's coupled with the Times he is all right. But soon the Times is exhausted. The empty canvas remains. So (usually) he makes a mark on it, some kind of mark that is not what he means. That is, any old mark, just to have something on the canvas. Then he is profoundly depressed because what is there is not what he meant. And it’s time for lunch.

Sleep

by Haruki Murakami

This is my seventeenth straight day without sleep.

I’m not talking about insomnia. I know what insomnia is. I had something like it in college―something like it because I’m not sure that what I had then was exactly the same as what people refer to as insomnia. I suppose a doctor could have told me. But I didn’t see a doctor. I knew it wouldn’t do any good. Not that I had any reason to think so. Call it woman’s intuition―I just felt they couldn’t help me. So I didn’t see a doctor, and I didn’t say anything to my parents or friends, because I knew that that was exactly what they would tell me to do.

Back then, my “something like insomnia” went on for a month. I never really got to sleep that entire time. I’d go to bed at night and say to myself, “All right now, time for some sleep.” That was all it took to wake me up. It was instantaneous - like a conditioned reflex. The harder I worked at sleeping, the wider awake I became. I tried alcohol, I tried sleeping pills, but they had abso

From the beginning we were prepared, we knew just what to do, for hadn’t we seen it all a hundred times?—the good people of the town going about their business, the suddenly interrupted TV programs, the faces in the crowd looking up, the little girl pointing in the air, the mouths opening, the dog yapping, the traffic stopped, the shopping bag falling to the sidewalk, and there, in the sky, coming closer . . . And so, when it finally happened, because it was bound to happen, we all knew it was only a matter of time, we felt, in the midst of our curiosity and terror, a certain calm, the calm of familiarity, we knew what was expected of us, at such a moment. The story broke a little after ten in the morning. The TV anchors looked exactly the way we knew they’d look, their faces urgent, their hair neat, their shoulders tense, they were filling us with alarm but also assuring us that everything was under control, for they, too, had been prepared for this, in a sense had been waiting for it, already they were look

"Yes," Mr. Phillips said, "ours is a city of churches all right." Cecelia nodded, following his pointing hand. Both sides of the street were solidly lined with churches, standing shoulder to shoulder in a variety of architectural styles. The Bethel Baptist stood next to the Holy Messiah Free Baptist, Saint Paul's Episcopal next to Grace Evangelical Covenant. Then came the First Christian Science, the Church of God, All Souls, Our Lady of Victory, the Society of Friends, The Assembly of God, and the Church of the Holy Apostles. The spires and steeples of the traditional buildings were jammed in next to the broad imaginative flights of the "contemporary" designs. "Everyone here takes a great interest in church matters," Mr. Phillips said.

Will I fit in, Cecelia wondered. She had come to Prester to open a branch office of a car-rental concern.

"I'm not especially religious," she said to Mr. Phillips, who was in the real-estate business.

"Not now," he answered.

"Not yet. But we have many fine young people her

Outside his window five-year-old Priscilla Hess, square and squat as a mailbox (red sweater, blue lumpy corduroy pants), looked around poignantly for someone to wipe her overflowing nose. There was a butterfly locked inside that mailbox, surely; would it ever escape? Or was the quality of mailboxes stuck to her forever, like her parents, like her name? The sky was sunny and blue. A filet of green Silly Putty disappeared into fat Priscilla Hess and he turned to greet his wife who was crawling through the door and her hands and knees.

"Yes?" he said. "What now?"

"I'm ugly," she said, sitting back on her haunches. "Our children are ugly."

"Nonsense," Brian said sharply. "They're wonderful children. Wonderful and beautiful. Other people's children are ugly, not our children. Now get up and go back out to the smokeroom. You're supposed to be curing a ham."

"The ham died," she said. "I couldn't cure it. I tried everything. You don't love me any more. The penicillin was stale. I'm ugly and so are the children.

	In the vault of the
	evening, every bird is a
	point of memory.

	It’s surprising how
	the fervor of time comes back,
	comes back without a

	body, or for no
	reason — that beauty, so brief

	[Dialer Defaults]
	Init1 = ATZ
	Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
	Phone = #777
	ISDN = 0
	Password = vzw
	Username = XXX-XXX-XXXX
	Modem = /dev/ttyUSB1
	Baud = 921600
	Stupid Mode = on

	<html><body>
	<h2>Pushpin Documentation</h2>
	<div class="entrytext">
	<p><a href="http://variogr.am/latest/?page_id=31">Back to Pushpin</a>.<br>
	<br><a href="http://groups.google.com/group/pushpin">Check out the Pushpin group if you’re having trouble.</a></p>
	<p><b>General Information / FAQs</b></p>
	<ul>
	<li><a href="http://variogr.am/latest/?page_id=32#i1">What is Pushpin? </a>
	</li>
	<li><a href="http://variogr.am/latest/?page_id=32#i2">Compatibility</a>

	#import "Recorder.h"

	// Derive the Buffer Size. I punt with the max buffer size.
	void DeriveBufferSize (
	AudioQueueRef audioQueue,
	AudioStreamBasicDescription ASBDescription,
	Float64 seconds,
	UInt32 *outBufferSize
	) {
	static const int maxBufferSize = 0x50000;