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Friday, April 4th, 2008
Wednesday evening I will go into the city to see Robyn Hitchcock! I'm so excited! It is now just about exactly a year since my interest in Hitchcock was reawoken by Ms. Irene Trudel. In that year (in the year since I last saw him play) I've been listening to his music really heavily -- you probably already know this if you read the blog much. This time I am going to have a much fuller notion of what I'm listening to. Can't wait, can't wait. Also on the bill (and indeed, actually at the top of the bill) is Nick Lowe, about whom I know almost nothing at all, but from what I've been reading it sounds like he'll be a lot of fun too.
posted evening of April 4th, 2008: Respond
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I just heard Martin Scorsese give an interview to NPR about his new movie -- I was interested to learn the title is "Shine a Light", since that's one of my favorite Stones songs (and gets fairly little play); but Ellen thinks it is a different song with "shine a light" in the chorus.* I'm looking forward to the movie -- it is probably as close as I will ever get to seeing the Stones live; but Scorsese was kind of grating on my nerves as he described it. You know whose concert films I love? Jonathan Demme's, is whose. The focus is on the music and you get this pretty elemental, raw passion of artistry -- whereas Scorsese was making it sound kind of like his focus was on making the film and on the personalities involved. Hopefully I am misreading the interview, because I'd really love to see a film crystallizing the Stones' music.
 *Update: No, looking at the track list of the soundtrack album now, and "Shine a Light" is indeed present, and is the closing track! Sweet.
posted morning of April 4th, 2008: Respond
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Thursday, April third, 2008
 Per Mr. Fritz's request, a comparison of our bathroom floor plan before and after the remodeling project:
Only very roughly to scale. But the basic message communicated, that there is now a lot more open space in the bathroom through which to move, is an accurate one.
posted evening of April third, 2008: 4 responses
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Wednesday, April second, 2008
Could we get people to quit saying "I believe in evolution" and similar constructions? This sticks in my craw every time I read or hear it. Try "I accept the truth of evolution" or something like that -- saying we should "believe in" scientific doctrine is messy thinking. Sure I guess it's better than "I disbelieve in evolution" but still.
posted afternoon of April second, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, April first, 2008
 For the past few months, we've been in the process of renovating our 2nd floor bathroom -- workers in and out of the house, trucks driving up and delivering large heavy objects, paint odors and sawdust mixing with our air... It's finished now! And what an improvement -- the old bathroom just was not a well put-together room. Besides that the tiles were old and ugly and the fixtures falling apart, the layout was nonsensical. You pushed the door open into a narrow corridor next to the bathtub and at the end of the bathtub there was a little bit of space and then the toilet; the sink was placed so that you would always knock into the corner of it when you were going by there.
We rearranged the space pretty radically and as I said, I think it's a huge improvement. Before and after pictures are here. The design and the painting (which still has a little bit of touching up to be done) are my and Ellen's contributions, the other work was contracted out.
 Update: I posted a rough floor plan of the before and after layouts here.
posted evening of April first, 2008: 3 responses
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Darn... I can never come up with any good pranks or tricks. Still, there it is, today's the big day.
Google, OTOH, has no problems coming up with clever pranks. Also Scary-Go-Round is in rare form today -- not strictly an April Fools prank but this one is going to live in my consciousness for a while. "May I have two chocolate eggs?" "No you may have just one." ...And I'm not sure what's going on with Dinosaur Comix and xkcd and Questionable Content but I expect it is first-of-April-related. A-and rounding out the weirdness, Fafblog is back, bigger and better, but with a lot less green and purple. The Apostropher says it is not an April Fools joke, but how would he know?
posted morning of April first, 2008: Respond
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Monday, March 31st, 2008
"In like a lion, out like a lamb" is accurate for this year's third month, but the senses of the similes have been roughly altered: the beginning of March was golden with sun, and its end is grayish white and cloudy like a lamb's wool. Bleah, say I.
posted afternoon of March 31st, 2008: 3 responses
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Sunday, March 30th, 2008
Google Maps is just about the greatest thing ever. (Well ok, there are better things out there. But still.) I am over there now, figuring out what Galip's movements through Nişantaşı, Beyoğlu, Teşvikiye, and other Istanbul locations look like spatially. I can see how the Golden Horn separates these neighborhoods from central Istanbul, where are the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara in relation to the city, where the Atatürk and Galata bridges are; just great! It took a moment to see I was mistaken about Galip's walk in chapter 19 being through Nişantaşı; and looking back to the chapter I see he was walking near the Süleymaniye Mosque, which is in the center of the city, south of the Golden Horn; page 223 has him walking north, back towards Nişantaşı.
posted afternoon of March 30th, 2008: Respond
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Saturday, March 29th, 2008
How to enter the secret world of second meanings, how to break the code? He was standing on the threshold -- joyful and expectant -- but he had no idea how to cross it. Chapter 19 of The Black Book, "Signs of the City", seems in a way like the key to the story -- in a very meta- way, that is to say, being as Galip is spending this chapter discovering the "key" to the story he is pursuing, and thereby descending into paranoia. [Caveat lector: this is my understanding of the story at the moment, halfway through; certainly subject to revision.] I'm particularly interested in pages 213 - 219, Galip's hallucinatory walk through Nişantaşı central Istanbul, which culminates in his complete identification with Celâl. Read some extensive quotation and light analysis below the fold.
 As he walked across the bridge, gazing idly into the Sunday crowds, he was suddenly certain that he was on the verge of solving a riddle that had been vexing him for years without his even being aware of it. In some deep and dreamlike way he was also aware that this was an illusion, but he seemed able to hold the contradictory thoughts in his mind with ease. Throughout the book, there have been suggestions of a riddle for Galip to unlock -- on the most superficial level, he needs to figure out where Rüya is and where Celâl is. He's become convinced they're together, and the question Why? poses itself; also there are various paranoid threads running through the story about the history of Istanbul and the state of the modern world, and about Galip's family. Galip's relationship with Celâl parallels the reader's relationship with Pamuk. He stared at them for the first time, carefully reading their logos. For a moment it seemed to him that these were the words and letters that would lead him to the other world, the true world, and his heart leaped. ... All contained the key to the mystery, but what was the mystery? This is an intricate game: you can see that Galip is going insane; but you totally sympathize because you are feeling that the words you are reading are the ones that will lead you to the true world. You know Pamuk is hip to that and it's a joke you're sharing with him, but on some level you gotta wonder... Then you say "No, that's crazy" and turn the page. He surveyed the ramshackle shops lining the crooked pavements: These garden shears he saw before him, these star-spangled screwdrivers, NO PARKING signs, cans of tomato paste, these calendars you saw on the walls of cheap restaurants, this Byzantine aqueduct festooned with Plexiglas letters, the heavy padlocks hanging from the metal shop shutters -- they were all signs crying out to be read. Pamuk can imbue lists of objects with meaning like nobody else except maybe Pynchon. [Further: Maureen Freely in her afterword notes that "mesmerizing lists" are a characteristic of Turkish prose, and are difficult to translate successfully -- props to Ms. Freely for the job she does here, and maybe I should seek out more Turkish prose.] The list of objects Galip sees in front of the junk dealer on the next page, similarly great. Speaking of which, He named them all, enunciating each word with care, and studied them closely. It was not the objects that bewitched him, it was the order in which they'd been arranged. ... It reminded him of the vocabulary tests when he was studying English and French: sixteen familiar objects, waiting to be renamed in a new language. Galip wanted to call out the answers: Pipe, record, telephone, shoes, pliers....But they made no secret of their other meanings; that's what Galip found shocking. Galip's search for a riddle and an answer is coming to a head here as he begins to see meaning (and meaning directed at him) in everything he looks at. But when she reached the end of these vile translations, these same objects did transport Rüya and her detective to a new world, whereas all Galip could do was entertain the hope that he might one day see it. Again: playful flirtation with the idea of Galip as a frustrated reader looking for consummation in the text. Or: When he stepped onto Atatürk Bridge, Galip had resolved to look only at faces. Watching each face brighten at his gaze, he could almost see question marks bubbling from their heads -- the way they did in the Turkish versions of Spanish and Italian photo novels -- but they vanished in the air without leaving a trace. His walk ends after he crosses the second bridge (shades of Through the Looking Glass!); he is sitting in a coffeehouse when he finds his answer and his transformation is realized. After ordering tea from the boy, he took Celâl's column out of his coat pocket and began to read it again from the beginning. The letters, words, and sentences had not changed in any way, but as his eyes traveled over them, they suggested ideas that Galip had never before entertained; these were not Celâl's ideas but his own, though in some odd way he saw them reflected in the text.... He listed all his clues in tiny letters, and when he came to the end of the page, he thought, How easy that was! and then, Since I am now certain that Celâl and I think alike, I must study more faces! This certainty is Galip's ticket to the new world, the secret world of second meanings. It plays out in interesting ways for the rest of the chapter as his fantasy overlays the neighborhood he is moving in, after he returns to Nişantaşı.
↻...done
posted evening of March 29th, 2008: Respond
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Permit me to wax geeky for a moment: last night I added a new feature to the site, which involves dynamic loading of page elements. Fun! About half (a little less) of the size of this page (ie, roughly 20K bytes) is the blogroll, on the right-hand side of the page under the "Where to go from here" heading -- which you might not think to look at it, since most of the data is hidden when the page loads and only shown when you click on the category headings. This means that whenever a person or a robot downloads the page, 20K of data is sent that is probably not going to be displayed or used. I've been trying for a while to figure out how to only send it to people who are interested in it, i.e. not to robots or to one-time visitors who come here from a Google search for a book their class is reading, which together account for the great majority of page views. Last night I came up with a pretty seamless solution: I recently implemented a sticky blogroll, using cookies to ensure that once you have clicked a blogroll category header, the category will remain visible when you reload the page. So it's easy to check whether a user is a repeat visitor who has in the past looked at the blogroll -- since the blogroll is stored in a file on the server that gets read at load time, all I had to do was create a truncated version of that file (containing only data for the default visible categories) and include that instead if the relevant cookie was not set. But then when a new visitor decides s/he wants to look at the blogroll, and clicks on a category header, how is s/he going to get data? Well in the truncated blogroll file, the empty headers are linked to a Javascript function called load_full_links, which uses XMLHttpRequest to download the complete blogroll -- so the first time you click a category you will see about a 1-second delay. But then your cookie is set, so going forward the blogroll is loaded with the page. I think it's a pretty nice bit of design/programming and I'm looking forward to using a similar algorithm for other pieces of functionality.
Potential problems: - I have tested this with Firefox and Internet Explorer. I'm not sure how it will work with other browsers, and it will definitely not work in a browser where Javascript is disabled. This doesn't seem like a big deal to me but if it causes trouble for you, let me know and I'll try and come up with a solution.
- Search engines will no longer index most of my blogroll. This is, on one hand, good -- I have seen referrals from searches that hit an item on the blogroll, which generally seem like my page is not what the searcher was looking for -- and on the other hand, possibly not ideal -- Google and Technorati both pay a lot of attention to outgoing links.
posted morning of March 29th, 2008: Respond
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