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Thursday, December 29th, 2005
Today I finished The Shipping News; and also I read Roger Ebert's review of the movie based on this book. I must say Ebert captured the problems I had with the book pretty well, though I don't know if he read it. The characters in this book were not fully human, just collections of idiosyncrasies designed to highlight their author's cleverness. (And yet Proulx is such a good writer, the book still ends up being a fun read. I feel ungrateful, carping about its failings.)
posted evening of December 29th, 2005: Respond
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Tuesday, December 27th, 2005
We have read seven chapters of Prince Caspian; chapters 4 through 7 are a story-within-a-story, in which the dwarf Trumpkin tells the children how Caspian came to leave Miraz' castle and to be recognized as king by the old Narnians. Last night as we sat down to read chapter 7, I had almost forgotten that this was a digression, and was thinking of Trumpkin's story as the main story in the book. Sylvia however had not forgotten. She said she was bored with this story as I opened the book; I didn't quite get her meaning and asked if she wanted to stop reading about Narnia and find a different book. But that was not it -- after a little back and forth, searching for expressions, she let me know that she was tired of hearing the dwarf's story and wanted to get back to the main frame where the children were. So, we skipped 7 and read 8 last night. Funny, this was a little like The Princess Bride except in reverse -- Dad did not have it together enough to abridge the uninteresting portions of the book so young Sylvia took the task in hand herself.
posted morning of December 27th, 2005: Respond
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Monday, December 26th, 2005
For Hanukkah, my father sent us a book to read with Sylvia -- The Three Questions by Jon Muth, which is based on an aphorism a fable of the same name by Leo Tolstoy. A good story, and a good moral -- the questions are, "What is the most important time?", "Who is the most important person?", and "What is the right thing to do?" -- the answers are, "Now.", "The person you are with.", and "Do good toward the person you are with." This evening we read the book and the original story. Muth's book wins out because it has animals as characters, and lovely illustrations. (Sylvia's favorite animal character was Pushkin, the dog.) Here is an interview with Jon Muth. Update: Ugh -- apparently I have misused "aphorism" -- I understood it to mean "fable", but apparently it is only the moral of a fable.
posted evening of December 26th, 2005: Respond
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I had the day off! I spent part of the afternoon in a bar, reading The Shipping News. It is a well-crafted story -- I am laughing at the jokes and feeling sympathy for the characters. But this is where I think it compares poorly to the short stories -- I can see the craft in the story, see Proulx making transitions and nod to myself in appreciation of a skillful transition, laugh at a punchline and think the joke was told well. When reading the stories I was much less conscious of my identity as a reader.
posted evening of December 26th, 2005: Respond
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In 1997 (or thereabouts) I bought a pair of ice skates. Ellen had recently learned to drive and gotten a car, which made getting to a rink easy, and was excited to take up her childhood passtime; I had never skated before (and had always been a lousy roller-skater), but was game to pick it up -- 5 or 6 years of seeing people roller-blading merrily by had made me feel like learning. I didn't get very good at it over the course of the two or three winters I tried to; and eventually in the Wollman rink at Central Park, I fell down and hurt my knee badly enough to make me not want to try any longer. (This knee injury also played a major role in stopping me riding my bike, an activity that I had a lot more invested in.) So the last time I skated was, very roughly, in 1999. But I would give anything to have Sylvia grow up less physically timid and awkward than I did; so when Ellen suggested that we take Sylvia skating this winter I thought it sounded good. This morning I pulled my skates out of the garage and we drove on over to the South Mountain Arena. And it was alright. I skated around the rink several times without falling, and with getting a moderate speed going and the gliding that I like, instead of stepping/walking on my skates. I held Sylvia's hand going back and forth along the edge of the rink. Primarily I just felt pretty comfortable; when I am able to say that at the end of the day I have a sense of accomplishment. (This may speak more to my general level of comfort than to anything else.) Sylvia's first time on the ice went pretty well. She only wanted to stay out on the rink for short periods -- holding Ellen's hand and the wall, or my hand and the wall, or at one point my hand and Ellen's hand. She and I practiced falling down and getting up a few times. Her ankles seem pretty strong.
posted evening of December 26th, 2005: Respond
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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
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
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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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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
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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