READIN

Sunday, March 6th, 2005

🦋 Notes on Listening to Heaney's Beowulf in the Car

• I bought the CD thinking it would be fun to listen to on long car trips. The dual obstacle turns out to be Ellen and Sylvia, who aren't into it. Hmm... but this morning for the first time (and admittedly on a short trip) I convinced Sylvia at least that it would be good listening because it is a Fairy Tale, which genre she enjoys. Who knows how long this will last.
• Sylvia noticed midway in to the first book that elves were among the characters, something Beowulf has in common with the Fairy Tales CD she likes to listen to. (They don't, however, "talk in funny voices.")
• I noticed while listening that the poem was written by a Christian; he calls the Danes "heathenish" and says they did not yet know "the Lord most high, ruler of heaven" (I think is how he phrases it). For some reason I had always thought the poem was from before Christianity was introduced to the British isles, I guess because the events it describes took place before Christianity. Also because I thought writing came along with Christianity* and that the poem was an oral legend, so pre-writing.

  But I can try and make some sense of this -- could be that the oral legend predates British Christianity and it was written down (and maybe expanded on) by somebody afterwards. Kinda like with the legend of Troy and Homer. I want to find out if there is any record of the identity of the person who wrote it down, and what his dates were, and his position in life. Time to read more closely the introduction to Heaney's translation, which I just skimmed at the time I read the book but which I seem to recall being pretty long, it will probably contain the info I'm looking for.

Update: we took a longer trip this afternoon going to a friend's birthday party, and I was actually able to listen to the whole Book I, a bit more than an hour. Sylvia lost interest about 2/3 of the way through (around the point of the story-within-a-story about the war between Hrothgar and Finn the Frisian); but she did not demand different music, just started making up a conversation between two stuffed animals that were on hand.

Another Update: I realized I have been talking about "Book I" when I actually mean "Disc I". The epic is divided into 2 CD's. I thought based on an unclear memory of reading it, that that corresponded to a division in the text; but apparently not.

posted afternoon of March 6th, 2005: Respond
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Tuesday, March first, 2005

🦋 Bedtime Stories

Tonight we had a double-header of Chapter 19 of The Phantom Tollbooth and The Red Balloon by Albert Lamorisse. Sylvia really surprised me while we were reading Chapter 19 (in which Rhyme and Reason return to the kingdom of Wisdom) by remembering who Officer Shrift is -- a character who has not appeared since the first quarter of the book, and then only very briefly. This reinforces to me that she is experiencing the story primarily through the characters, though I'm not sure just what to make of that.

I was glad to read The Red Balloon -- it is one of my favorites and I've suggested it a few times before, this is the first time she took me up on it. It makes a very nice bedtime story, particularly in the cold of winter.

posted evening of March first, 2005: Respond
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Thursday, February 24th, 2005

🦋 Movie Night

Our latest movie is "The Muppet Movie". Sylvia had a cold this week so we rented it for her to watch with Ellen during the day on Wednesday; but they did not get to it, so Sylvia and I ended up watching it over the course of Wednesday evening and this evening. (Also I watched it in full Tuesday night after Sylvia was in bed -- did I mention this is one of my favorite films ever?) Great, great, great. Great soundtrack, great caricature, great cameos (the best IMO is Orson Welles but all are excellent), great plot! Sylvia said after the end of the movie, "Let's get this one again sometime." I could not agree more.

posted evening of February 24th, 2005: Respond
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Monday, February 21st, 2005

The Phantom Tollbooth -- last night and tonight we read Chapter 12, "The Valley of Sound". More synaesthesia in this chapter; it reminded me again a bit of Fantasia, but moreso of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" -- the Soundkeeper struck me as very reminiscent of Willie Wonka, with her cloistered and volatile persona, and the sound laboratory would have fit right into Wonka's factory.

posted evening of February 21st, 2005: Respond
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Sunday, February 20th, 2005

🦋 Dream blogging

Been a while since I did one of these...

In my dream last night, there was a small fad amongst the educated bloggers, to come up with words with a high number and variety of shades of meaning, and then to write a snarky post exploiting the variance... I think this stemmed from the debate between Katherine and Rilkefan at Obsidian Wings, over whether the Bush administration's lies merit the term "lies" or not. Anyways, I was reading a post on one of the language mavens' blogs, introducing a new twist -- his idea was to pick a word with many shades of meaning, and write rhyming definitions for all of those meanings. (He cheated a bit by ending all of his definitions with a participle, naturally they all rhymed.) He also used some interesting invented words in the definitions but I am not sure whether this was part of the game or part of the dream-reality.

Meanwhile Tom Tomorrow was writing a narrative comic strip about his being given a mansion by the widow of a wealthy industrialist -- the mansion was in the town of Tomorrow, California, in the Sierra foothills. I entered into the strip's reality and added a storyline in which my mother was ballooning in the foothills and landed by the Tomorrow mansion. Scooby-doo-esque adventures ensued (with a bit of a darker edge) but I don't remember any of the details.

posted morning of February 20th, 2005: Respond
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Friday, February 18th, 2005

The Phantom Tollbooth -- tonight we read Chapter 11, "Dynne and Dischord", or rather we read about half of it and Sylvia fell asleep. Funny that Juster worked in two consecutive "Fantasia" references -- the end of Chapter 10 referred (so think I) to the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor segment of the film, and the beginning of Chapter 11 referred (less arguably) to the The Sorcerer's Apprentice segment.

posted evening of February 18th, 2005: Respond
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Thursday, February 17th, 2005

The Phantom Tollbooth -- we read Chapter 10 tonight, "The Symphony of Color". It has nice resonances with two other books, "The Philharmonic Gets Dressed", which we read for bedtime story fairly often, and "Zin Zin Zin! A Violin!", which we read less frequently; and with Fantasia, which we watched a few weeks ago -- this last I suspect may have been Juster's source for the chapter, some of his imagery reminded me very strongly of the film.

posted evening of February 17th, 2005: Respond

🦋 User Interface feature

When you have a list box that gets items added to it on a continuing basis over the course of a program, it is nice for the list box to scroll downwards as items are added, so the most recent one is always visible. Except when the user is involved in reading some older items -- then this behavior is very annoying. Here is a solution, as implemented in an MFC application -- pretty easy to translate to C/C++* -- other languages, you're on your own:

int GetVisibleCount(CListBox &lb)
{
    CRect rct;
    lb.GetWindowRect(&rct);
    int iHgt = lb.GetItemHeight(0);
    return (rct.bottom - rct.top) / iHgt;
}

    // handler for a custom "Add Item" message
LRESULT CMyDlg::OnAddItem(WPARAM wp, LPARAM lp)
{
    const char *msg   = (const char *) lp;

    int iTop = m_lbRealtimeStatus.GetTopIndex();

    m_lbStatus.AddString(msg);
        // "static" because I am never resizing the 
        // lb -- if you are you will need to calc 
        // this every time.
    static visibleCount = GetVisibleCount(m_lbStatus);
		
    if (iTop == m_lbStatus.GetCount() - 1 - visibleCount)
        m_lbStatus.SetTopIndex(iTop + 1);
    return 0L;
}

So what I am doing is, every time I add an item, I check what the current topmost visible index of the list box is -- if it is not equal to the number of items in the list box less the number of visible items, then I do not scroll. (Note that this calculation doesn't work when there are fewer items in the list box than the max number that will fit on the screen; but that does not matter because there is no need to scroll anyways in that situation.)

* That is to say, C or C++ where you are not using MFC classes.

posted afternoon of February 17th, 2005: Respond
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Wednesday, February 16th, 2005

The Phantom Tollbooth -- we read Chapter 9 tonight -- Sylvia is really enjoying the characters though I'm not sure how much of the plot she is getting. Details which captivate her: the sisters named Rhyme and Reason, which are not proper names like Sylvia or Emily; the dog mistakenly named Tock even though the sound he makes is tick-tick-tick; the box given by King Azaz to Milo, which contains all the words that will ever be used -- this last reminds me a bit of Borges' Library of Babel and I wonder whether Juster had that in mind.

posted evening of February 16th, 2005: Respond

Friday, February 11th, 2005

The Phantom Tollbooth: Tonight we will read Chapter 6, the story of Rhyme and Reason as told by Faintly Macabre. Sylvia is maintaining interest in the story and remembers the characters and situations from day to day.

posted afternoon of February 11th, 2005: Respond

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