READIN

Monday, December 26th, 2005

🦋 A Drenched Hanukkah

It sure rained a lot yesterday. We drove through the pouring rain to Great Neck, to have dinner at my brother-in-law Kenny's house. Ellen had the great idea to invite Sylvia's friend Kaydi along, with two beneficial effects: Sylvia and Kaydi were not bored on the ride over there, which with rain and traffic took about an hour and a half; and Sylvia had a much better time at the dinner than she usually has at family events when there is nobody in her age range present.

posted morning of December 26th, 2005: Respond
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Saturday, December 24th, 2005

🦋 Happy Holidays

Have a good day tomorrow. It's getting hard to say "Merry Chrismas" in an un-self-conscious way, without a gently raised middle finger in the direction of Bill O'Reilly and his co-psychotics; still I wish you a Merry Christmas. And to all of my co-religionists, Happy Hanukkah. If any druids are reading, let me apologize for missing your solistice day, and I hope you enjoyed it. Mostly, everybody should enjoy their day off work, everybody that has a day off.

posted evening of December 24th, 2005: Respond

I've been reading The Shipping News by Annie Proulx, gotten far enough in to start forming an opinion of it. I tentatively like the short stories better but am thinking this book maybe just starts out slow, and if it stays on the trajectory it's on currently, it could end up being a really good book. -- I guess short stories don't have as much room to start out slow before grabbing you.

Why does it start out slow? It might be that Proulx is trying to show how Quoyle's whole life from his childhood until his wife's death has been spent in a fugue state, without any connection to the world around him. This would make sense to me but I don't think it quite worked -- I didn't have any connection to Quoyle in his fugue state. It might have worked better in first person.

Since the family's arrival in Newfoundland, the story has really picked up and the characters are seeming a lot more real to me. This is only about a quarter of the way in, so there's plenty of room for the book to redeem its opening. One gripe I have is, Quoyle has no first name. Seems to me like his aunt at least should address him by first name. (I'm not sure now that she has yet called him by name at all, maybe when she does this will be resolved.)

posted afternoon of December 24th, 2005: Respond
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🦋 Dream blogging

An odd blog tie-in in last night's dream.

We were in our back yard, and Wayne and Darcy had come over for breakfast. (Approximately; this is where my memory of the dream begins and there are some complexities I'm missing.) In the dream, they lived next door instead of across the street. We went with them to watch the dress rehearsal of a children's theater production, perhaps it was in the auditorium at South Orange Middle School. The first act of the show featured some alphabet-themed singing, with kids holding up letter signs. However they were not holding them up in order or waiting their turn -- I couldn't tell if this was an intentional part of the production. Sasha was playing a role, and Amy Scherber (my one-time employer) was directing. It gradually emerged that I was supposed to be doing something in the production but it was not clear exactly what. I did not have a script and there was some suggestion that my role was not in the script in any case.

As the second act began, Amy suggested that I should read as a voice-over, some of Kevin Drum's posts "from around the time he started writing posts about Jim Henley." This made sense to me (though it does not now) and I gamely started searching Kevin's archives for such posts. The woman seated next to me suggested I should search for woodworking-related posts -- again, not sure why; I remember looking at her laptop and noticing a large key where "Esc" should be, labeled "Sanskrit", and wondering about that.

posted morning of December 24th, 2005: Respond
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Thursday, December 22nd, 2005

🦋 Bad Dirt

Today and yesterday, I read Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2, by Annie Proulx. (A better verb than "read" might be "drank in" or "devoured".) What an amazing book -- Flannery O'Connor has some serious competition for my favorite author of short stories.

I got interested in reading Proulx from the story Brokeback Mountain, which I read last week prior to seeing the movie -- what struck me about that story was the fullness of characterization, and the palpable sense of time passing; I loved it and wanted to read more. So on my way to the movie theater I stopped at Montclair Book Center where I picked up Bad Dirt and Shipping News.

Bad Dirt mixes gravity and whimsy deftly, I particularly loved how The Wamsutter Wolf -- maybe the most moving story in the book -- is sandwiched in between The Contest and Summer of the Hot Tubs, both lighthearted, almost superficial stories. The characters are great -- the two I identified most closely with were probably Creel Zmundzinski (who opens and closes the book) and Buddy Millar (who is only in one story, The Wamsutter Wolf). But I got to know every character well and to feel for them.

posted evening of December 22nd, 2005: Respond
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🦋 Lies

Sylvia and I have finished The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and moved on to the second Narnia book, Prince Caspian. (We are reading them approximately in order of publication, rather than in chronological order as Lewis recommended -- see this Wikipaedia article for more info.) Sylvia is getting the plot tie-ins between the two books very strongly.

Tonight we read Chapter 4, in which the dwarf begins telling the children the story of how Prince Caspian came to learn of the history of Narnia. Early in the chapter, there is a confrontation between Caspian and his uncle King Miraz, with Miraz telling Caspian that the stories of Old Narnia are old wives' tales and lies. Sylvia was at first a bit perplexed; she knew the stories were accurate as the matched up with the previous book. She quickly figured out that Miraz was lying and each time he told Caspian not to believe in Old Narnia, she was quick to interject that he was wrong. That seemed to me like fun and like a fairly complex level of understanding the books.

posted evening of December 22nd, 2005: Respond
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🦋 It's a meme!

This one comes to me from Roy.

Four jobs you've had in your life: Programmer, office clerk, baker, prep cook.

Four movies you could watch over and over: The Lifeboat, The 39 Steps, Time Bandits, Brazil.

Four places you've lived: Brooklyn, Queens, Modesto, South Orange.

Four TV shows you love to watch: "Whose Line is it Anyway" reruns I think is the only show I "love to watch" right now. Three I usually enjoy: "The Simpsons" reruns, "The Daily Show", "The Andy Griffith Show" reruns.

Four places you've been on vacation: Lebanon, NH; Burlington, VT; Easton, PA; New Paltz, NY.

Four websites you visit daily: Unfogged, The Poor Man, Alicublog, Crooked Timber.

Four of your favorite foods: Chicken soup, leg of lamb, falafel, yoghurt.

Four places you'd rather be: Can't really figure out how to answer this.

posted morning of December 22nd, 2005: Respond

Wednesday, December 21st, 2005

So weird -- Liberty Mutual just had an advertisement on the tube, in which Eve is offered the apple by a serpent (whose head looked eerily like Karl Rove's) -- she threw the apple back at him, conked him in the head, and ran off with Adam. But Adam and Eve were both clothed! -- In primitive loinclouts to be sure; still does not fit in at all with the story line.

posted morning of December 21st, 2005: Respond

Sunday, December 18th, 2005

This afternoon I'm going to watch "Brokeback Mountain" -- I've been really looking forward to this movie ever since I saw the trailer, when we went to watch "Capote" 2 months ago or so. I am thinking that this movie coming out could signify a new moment in mainstream acceptance of male homosexuality; for at least half a century the homoerotic subtext of the American Old West mythology has been made explicit by people like Burroughs and Pynchon -- lots of really intelligent authors with big names and small readership. But it seems to me like this is the first time it is crossing over into mass culture. Frank Rich's op-ed piece today, on the movie and what it signifies for the culture, is well worth reading -- unfortunately it is "Times Select" so you will have to spring for a newspaper if you want to read it.

posted morning of December 18th, 2005: Respond
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Friday, December 16th, 2005

🦋 Deviations

I want to list briefly the things I believe I did wrong while on jury duty.

• The judge directed us not to deliberate over the evidence until all the testimony had been heard. I as-good-as-ignored this instruction, weighing the testimony as I heard it for believability and judging its implications with respect to other testimony I had heard. I am totally clueless, how I could avoid doing this.
• While I listened to each witness testifying, I was directing as much or nearly as much attention to the lawyer who was asking questions, as I was to the witness. I was trying to figure out with each question, what the attorney's intention was in asking that question, what effect or spin was sought. This was not counter to any specific instruction from the judge but it did not seem quite proper to me. OTOH the defense attorney was spinning like mad, and if I were not permitted to grok this I feel like I would be at a disadvantage in trying to adjudicate the truth or falsehood of what I was hearing.
• The judge instructed us furthermore, not to deliberate over the evidence while we were outside the courtroom. Again I did not pay attention, and mulled the case over in my head at home. As I noted in my previous post, I thought at home about my approach to the case; but also each day about what I was to make of the evidence I had heard so far.
• There were three counts we were to rule on: aggravated assault with intent to cause serious bodily harm, aggravated assault with intent to cause significant bodily harm, and aggravated assault with intent to cause bodily harm. (They are similar counts -- the second is less serious than the first, the third less serious than the second.) The judge's instruction was that we should find the defendant innocent or guilty of the first charge, and only if we found him innocent on the first should we rule on the second charge, and likewise for the third. All of us on the jury, and I was no exception, decided to rule just on whether he was guilty of "aggravated assault" and then make a decision about the magnitude of the offense. This seems to make more sense to me than the way we were instructed to rule, but that's why I am not a judge.*
• I felt from the beginning of deliberations that my prejudice was correct** and the defendant was guilty of assault. I tried to convince the other jurors of that, and several of them sided with me. But the three that I mentioned before seemed implacable. So prior to the second day of deliberation, I convinced myself that I could vote to acquit if that were the only way to reach a verdict. I justified this to myself by saying it would be better to acquit the defendant when I believed him guilty, than the opposite, and that he did not pose a danger to society free; but I believe the pattern of thinking I was engaging in might equally well have led me to vote to convict an innocent defendent in a different situation.

**This is such a quandary to me! I definitely formed a judgement within the first couple of hours of testimony, that the defendant was probably guilty -- I could think of a couple of bits of evidence that would change my mind but as the trial went on and it became apparent that none of them were going to be forthcoming, my judgement hardened. So what I am saying is, "All the evidence served to confirm my prejudice." But I have no way of proving that that I actually listened to the evidence and ruled fairly -- since I would have voted the same way had I totally ignored the evidence and gone with my gut response.

posted evening of December 16th, 2005: Respond
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