Even now, I persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar.
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Sylvia
Sylvia is my daughter, the apple of my eye. These are some of the posts I've written about living with her and bringing her up.
READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
I've been teaching Sylvia to play chess -- in a very limited sense of the word "teaching" anyway; mostly just playing games with her every so often and winning, hoping she is picking up a bit on how I'm winning. I'm not much of a player, and don't know how I would go about explaining what is going on in the game.
Whenever I capture her Queen she gets really bent out of shape about it. Today we played and it was, according to her, "the first time you haven't been able to get my Queen -- you're always sneaking up on my Queen!"
Tonight 5 (or possibly 6) 7- and 8-year-old girls will be sleeping in our house, which is 3 (or as the case may be, 4) more children than we've had sleeping over here at once before. That's right, it's Sylvia's first sleep-over party! Fingers crossed for no major problems to occur, and for me and Ellen to be able to get some sleep of our own.
...Hmm, this is not promising: more than half of the girls, including our own little girl, are picky eaters.
...Well, dinner over -- some of them did not eat much but that doesn't seem to be affecting their spirits much. They've played out in the yard, they've done some crafts (origami), they've made bags of popcorn and sweets, and they're watching their movie ("Sherlock Hound vol. I").
...And, the girls are in bed. There was quite a lot of noise a little while ago and Ellen or I had to go in and give them some talkings-to. But the noise is lower now, I think they're on their way to sleep.
This morning Sylvia and I rode our bikes into town to buy bagels for breakfast, and back. I think that is the farthest Sylvia has riddden on her own so far! She was fine for most of it but had trouble with the (gradual, but long) hill up South Orange Ave. from the train station to the bagel shop.
Here is Sylvia baking muffins with her grandmother (2003). And Sylvia's other grandmother, at her birthday party last month.
...My sister, who is herself a mother, passes along a link to this narrative of Mother's Day History.
For your Mother's Day viewing pleasure, The Mothers:
posted morning of May 11th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Cycling
Sylvia and I get in the car, and Robyn Hitchcock is playing "Glass Hotel".
Sylvia: I have that guy's voice stuck in my head. Me: Me too! Sylvia: Because every time we go in your car, he's singing... about his wife and his dead wife and the rocking chair. I don't get that: if she's dead how could she be combing her hair?
...A little later "I Something You" starts playing.
Sylvia: How come he's saying "I haven't got a wife", if he had a wife and a dead wife? Me: Well the songs don't have to be about him, they could be stories he made up. Sylvia (laughing): "I something you", like he forgot what he was going to say!
posted evening of May 5th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Music
The Youth Orchestra of Essex County ended its spring term today with a concert at Daughters of Israel rest home, in West Orange. This was Sylvia's second semester playing with the orchestra and her fourth concert. It went very well, I thought -- the Overture Strings played "Ashokan Farewell" (which Sylvia and I are going to be performing together at the end of the month, when Gladney is holding a talent event at the Chinese Consulate) and Vivaldi's "Spring", and sounded very pretty. The Junior Symphony played a lovely piece which I thought was called "Slovenian Legend", but I'm not getting any hits for that. Maybe something else. And ECSO played the overture to "The Magic Flute", and sounded like professional musicians.
Sylvia sat by herself (I mean with other kids, separate from me) through the Junior and ECSO performances, and paid attention to the music. I kept an eye on her from the back of the room and felt good that she was into it.
Ellen and Sylvia are back home from their D.C. vacation -- they had a good trip and took plenty of pictures.
Sylvia was play-acting this afternoon and I found this snippet pretty amusing:
I'm an eagle!... I'm soaring... across the ground...
While she was away, Sylvia finished Further Adventures of the Great Brain, and got about halfway through Prince Caspian. (Odd combination, a little -- she has been really wrapped up in the Great Brain books lately, and she wanted to reread Caspian before the film comes out.) I'm so proud!
Sylvia and I went for a bike ride this evening -- she is doing really well at it, and I'm looking forward to the warmer weather when we can ride more frequently. Her seat has been set about 1½" - 2" lower than where it should be, so that she can comfortably stand on the ground while she's mounted, to give her more confidence. I had mentioned to her last time we rode, that I could raise it up a bit and she'd have more power in her legs -- as we were heading out tonight she asked me to do it. So I raised it about ¾" -- the difference is really noticeable. She's riding a lot faster, going up (slight) hills more easily, and not getting tired as fast. And she is still confident -- although she looked a little startled the first time she braked. I will raise it to the proper height next time we ride, hopefully within the next few days.
(Just after I posted this, I noticed that the photo at the top of the page shows Sylvia riding on the back of our tandem -- she's on her own bike nowadays. Ought to get some pictures of that in the photo album.)
Sylvia and her mom are using the computer to write an invitation to her upcoming sleep-over party. Sylvia: "Mom, could you spell something wrong? I want to do a spell-check!" ... "Dad, look! We're going to have 'lots of foon'!" This game is occupying her for a long time.
(Speaking of games: she's very taken with the physics simulations which Thoreau linked a little while back. Thanks, Thoreau! Among other cool details she noticed that you can make David's pants fall off if you aim the cannonball correctly. She's still trying to smash David but I suspect it is not part of the software.)
I bought a record at Starbucks! I feel so dirty! But listen, it's a really good record: Bob Dylan, Music That Matters to Me -- a mix of tracks Bob has put together as representative of what he's listening to these days. (In the excellent liner notes, he says, "Some people have favorite songs, but I have songs of the minute -- songs that I'm listening to right now. And if you ask me about one of those songs a year from now, I might not even remember who did it, but at the moment it's everything to me.... I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.")
The track list is just great. I think I've only ever heard 5 or fewer of the 16 tracks previously -- and many of the performers I had never heard of before today -- there is blues, country, reggae, Hawai'ian, jazz and more. And what really makes the record -- what makes me happy to have it and want to listen to it as a record, rather than as a collection of songs, is Dylan's commentary. The liner notes are a small booklet, with one long paragraph for each song, and they are frankly much better writing than I have oherwise seen from Dylan's pen. The way they are written gives you a sense you're listening to him speak, and he's in a really good, congenial mood, grinning and saying "Now listen to this one, it's gonna blow your mind!"
Listening to the first song, "Do Unto Others", is funny because the opening riff is exactly the same as "Back in the USSR" -- Dylan says he thinks John Lennon probably heard the recording at a party sometime and forgot about it -- Ellen asked Sylvia if she knew what the lyric "they say, do unto others/ what you would have them do unto you" means; Sylvia nodded and said, in a bored-little-girl tone, "Yeah, what goes around comes around...."
Full track listing below the fold, mainly because I could not find it online anywhere.
Look, Horton Hears a Who is not Dr. Seuss' best work. It has some nice moments, but if you spend any time thinking about it you quickly realize that 1, Horton is doing the Whos a massive disservice by interfering with their destiny and 2, the whole thing is pretty sappy.
But whatever, the pictures are great, the poetry is great, it's a fun book. A really good animated short could probably be made out of it. (My dream of a live-action production with no dialog, probably not something that would ever come to pass.) Expanding it into a feature film was a really bad idea, because it meant that the film-makers had to dwell at great length on the incoherencies of the plot and insert lots new poorly-fitting stuff as well. (The whole plot line about politics in Whoville was totally lame, even though it produced as a happy accident, one interesting moment where the idea that the Whos had to prove their existence to the outside world was inverted; also the plotline about the Mayor's relationship with his son -- lame and tacked-on, no relationship to the rest of the movie.)
So, Sylvia is having Kaydi over to spend the night -- as a prelude to they festivities we went over to the South Orange cinema. The girls loved the film and your kids probably will too, but try and get somebody else to take them. Or find a way of bringing some powerful intoxicants along, that would probably make the movie worth while. (OTOH, if you've got powerful intoxicants handy, there are much more interesting ways you could make use of them.) Some of the visuals, particularly the outdoor shots of Whoville, are lovely; though sad to say Horton and the kangaroo, the visual centerpieces of the film, are pretty uninteresting. The Rube Goldberg musical machine the mayor's son builds at the end is totally splendid.
posted evening of March 15th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about The Movies
I've been teaching Sylvia to play chess -- in a very limited sense of the word "teaching" anyway; mostly just playing games with her every so often and winning, hoping she is picking up a bit on how I'm winning. I'm not much of a player, and don't know how I would go about explaining what is going on in the game.
This morning Sylvia and I rode our bikes into town to buy bagels for breakfast, and back. I think that is the farthest Sylvia has riddden on her own so far! She was fine for most of it but had trouble with the (gradual, but long) hill up South Orange Ave. from the train station to the bagel shop.
last month.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden 
