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Wednesday, September 17th, 2003
Over at LanguageHat (among other places) I am used to seeing prescriptive* grammar trashed; and while I don't feel as strongly about it as some, I generally sympathize with the trashers -- from what I can understand of the argument, it seems more useful to start with the goal of describing language than of controlling it. (The gist of it: "prescriptive grammar" = grammar viewed as a set of rules for composition; "descriptive grammar" = grammar viewed as a description of how people use language.) Yesterday and today however, in the yeasty intersection of language and food, I found myself taking an unambiguously prescriptive stance. A little background -- there is in South Orange a small bakery that makes only bagels and muffins, and makes them both very very well. The hand-rolled bagels are, as is proper, boiled before they are baked; and they come out dense and chewy, with a thick crust -- in a word, "bagels". So when Ellen suggested last night that I should buy some bagels Sunday morning for the parents of Sylvia's friends, who will be coming to her birthday party, I naturally said "Okay, I can stop by the bagel shop on my way back from Kings", which is the supermarket where I will be picking up Sylvia's birthday cake; that, however, was not what Ellen had in mind. Ellen thought I should buy bagels from Kings while I was there. Bear in mind that the pastries sold by Kings under the name "bagels" are something quite different -- they are rolled and shaped by a machine, and baked in a steam-injected oven; and they come out soft, with little crust and less flavor. Ellen's argument in favor of these non-bagels was that many people prefer their bagels not to be chewy. I was in the end able to talk her out of it; but I have been fretting all day about her point. Is my anti-soft-bland-bagel stance just empty snobbery? Should the word "bagel" mean what it is used by the general population to mean, regardless of authenticity? My hunch is that the answer to both of these questions is "yes".
* I am to this day not sure if I should be talking about "prescriptive" or "proscriptive" grammar -- the former seems a little closer to the meaning of the phrase as I understand it. [Update: KF of Planned Obsolescence says my intuition was correct in this regard.]
posted evening of September 17th, 2003: Respond
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Monday, September 15th, 2003
Today I started the chapter entitled "The More he Thought About it, the Angrier he Got", in which Gary is introduced -- and as soon as I started it I felt a huge wave of disappointment. "So this is where it stops being a wonderful, insightful portrait and turns into a well-written, amusing, predictable parody of middle-class materialism and neurosis... Oh well, it was great while it lasted..." I plodded my way through about 10 pages and gradually stopped plodding -- 15 minutes later I had forgotten my complaint and was gripping the book like it was a life preserver -- Gary's character is on one level the subject of broad satire but (a) the satiric points are not the ones I expect (not all of them at any rate), and (b) Franzen is not using him to draw satire -- he is (another) fully human character in his own right*. I described the book to Gabe as "mind-blowing" and that is exactly what it is doing to me. Even without the eerie, radically imprecise parallels with my own life and family, I think The Corrections would be making me reconsider how I think about my life and how I go about my daily business.
 *This makes me think in a funny way of magical realism -- it is just marvelous to me that Franzen can lampoon Gary in such a way and yet keep him substantial, connected to the reality of the story.
posted evening of September 15th, 2003: Respond
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Sunday, September 14th, 2003
Yesterday I put the plywood shell onto the window seat and began the process of filling in molding around it. This consists mainly of: the baseboard, the sill, and the apron. I spent this morning working on the baseboard, and it looks pretty nice. Our house has large moldings; the baseboard around the seat is about 6" tall and is made up of at least 4 separate pieces of wood, which I will refer to as base, head, cap, and toe. (Some of these may actually be made up of more than one piece but I will assume not.) The base is a rectangular piece 1" deep and 4 3/8" tall, with a 1/4" bevel at the top. The head is a rectangular piece 3/4" deep and 7/8" tall which rides on top of the base -- the bevel in the base meets the depth of the head. The cap is a sort of teardrop-shaped piece about an inch tall; and the toe is a 3/4" quarter-round piece which makes the transition from the base to the floor. The first thing I did was to cut the base. The main work of this was planing the board I had, 1 3/16" thick, to 1" thickness; once I had that I had to figure out how to cope it to get the bevel to meet the bevels of the baseboard around the seat. Basically I did a straight cut 1/4" inside the end of the board that stopped 1/4" from the top, and then chopped an angle from the corner of the board to the end of the cut. It came out pretty well -- the coping is not perfect but it is well within the abilities of caulk and spackle to make it look just right. I attached this to the front of the seat with screws to hold it tight, and then nailed the head piece to it. (The head piece is the simplest, just a straight rectangular piece.) Next came the toe, which I am quite happy with. I had taken the toe pieces out from behind the seat and used these, which I had to cope to make them meet up properly. The last thing is going to be the cap, which I also took out from behind the seat -- I am a bit nervous about whether it is going to work though, as in the original baseboard the cap is attached to the head with a rabbett, which I mostly broke when I was prying the cap off. I am going to plane the base of the cap pieces off flush and see how it works.
posted evening of September 14th, 2003: Respond
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Friday, September 12th, 2003
More Corrections this morning -- what a mesmerizing book it is! It blows me away how Franzen can slip effortlessly from sincere (if mildly ironic) characterizations into full-on satire, without my even noticing it has happened until I'm back out of the satire -- and of course he uses many shadings of voice in between these two poles. Alfred and Enid anchor the story and their characters are drawn very sympathetically -- but at the same time you can see their failings -- Alfred's character in particular seems to me to be a successful drawing of the character that About Schmidt failed so miserably to present. Fewer than 100 pages in and I have already met 5 fully human, fully sympathetic characters! This is about as good as a novel can be by my own standards. I think I am going to start over from the beginning today or tomorrow with pencil in hand -- I am catching a lot of stuff worth underlining and commenting on but don't have any implement to do it with.
posted morning of September 12th, 2003: Respond
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Wednesday, September 10th, 2003
On the train this morning, I started reading The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen and loving it. And it serves well as a counterexample to my complaint about The Life of Pi -- from the first paragraph, the illusion is complete. I am inside their house, inside Alfred's senility, inside Enid's nervousness, inside Chip's discomfort. What does this betoken? Well, primarily excellent craftsmanship on Franzen's part, is what. And I just had the thought while writing the word inside, that maybe there is a tie-in to bicameral thinking and the nature of story-telling; but I am not up to getting into that right now. Anyway -- only 32 pages in but my hunch is that this is going to be a great book.
posted morning of September 10th, 2003: Respond
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Tuesday, September 9th, 2003
I sent a letter to the New York Times Magazine today; in case they do not print it, here it is with a link to the article I'm referencing. (Note, the link requires registration and will in any case only be good for a couple of weeks.) The Futile Pursuit of Happiness Dear Sirs: Jon Gertner's article on "affective forecasting" is nothing short of bizarre. His gee-whiz attitude throughout culminates near the end when he says, "After talking with both men, I found it hard not to wonder about my own predictions at every turn." This is the very essence of the reflective life which people have been trying for millennia to lead, with varying rates of success. I don't want to suggest that there is nothing of interest in Gilbert and Loewenstein's work; but Gertner's presentation of that work is founded on a problematic premise, that people believe the gratification of their immediate desires will lead to long-term happiness. I do not think this belief is as prevalent as Gertner would have us believe. If his recent experience while ogling the new car is truly the first time he has ever questioned the efficacy of such gratification, then I feel some pity for him for coming to it so late but hope he will make good use of his new self-knowledge. Regards,
Jeremy Osner
South Orange, NJ Here are links to some articles by Gilbert:
posted afternoon of September 9th, 2003: Respond
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Monday, September 8th, 2003
The lumberyard in Union is Jaeger Lumber, which looks like it will do the trick just fine. They have oak-veneer plywood, will cut it to size, and have 4/4" and 5/4" redwood, which will be totally ideal for the moldings. (I will buy the 1/4 round and 1/4 hollow at Home Depot though.)
posted morning of September 8th, 2003: Respond
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Sunday, September 7th, 2003
A very productive weekend... The window seat frame is installed; the seat would be on except I found out home depot does not carry the plywood I am looking for. There is a lumber yard in Union which I will try next Saturday. Mike R. came over Friday to help me with the baseboard and the electrical outlet, which I wanted to move to the front of the seat; but the baseboard proved impossible to remove from the wall. So I left it in place and put the frame in front of it. The molding has changed a lot; rather than a crown molding I have decided to use a window apron molding, which is more natural in the context and will fit in nicely with the window aprons behind the seat. I will be building it out of 6 pieces of wood and it may not be ready immediately. We had a really nice jam session this afternoon, playing about 8 songs which is about double what we normally get to, and they were a lot of fun. With Jim, I came up with a new arrangement of House of the Rising Sun which really sounds like a distinctively new sound for that song, riffing on Dylan's version but quite different. Sylvia came (of her own accord) and stayed for about two hours of jamming -- quite breathtaking to me since we were not changing our jam much at all to accomodate her in it. (Before it started, Greg saw a hawk eating a squirrel in the lower branches of a tree on the property 3 doors down from Bob's place, so we went down there to watch it for 15 minutes.) Afterwards we had a cookout, for which Sylvia came back to join us.
posted evening of September 7th, 2003: Respond
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Sunday, August 31st, 2003
Speaking of "firsts", here is Sylvia's first knock-knock joke (Composed this morning after Ellen told her the knock-knock joke whose punch-line is, "Can't elope without a boy!"): Knock-knock!
Who's there?
Watermelon.
Watermelon who?
Watermelon... Watermelon... Boy!
[general laughter]
posted morning of August 31st, 2003: Respond
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Thursday, August 28th, 2003
This is Sylvia's first composition: One little one goes in the room and turn, turn, turn
Two little ones go in the room and turn, turn, turn
Three little ones go in the room and turn, turn, turn
Four little ones go in the room and turn, turn, turn
Five little ones go in the room and turn, turn, turn
The melody is about what you'd expect it to be, sort of a take-off on "Ten little monkeys jumpin' on the bed".
posted evening of August 28th, 2003: Respond
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