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Friday, September 12th, 2003
More Corrections this morning -- what a mesmerizing book it is! It blows me away how Franzen can slip effortlessly from sincere (if mildly ironic) characterizations into full-on satire, without my even noticing it has happened until I'm back out of the satire -- and of course he uses many shadings of voice in between these two poles. Alfred and Enid anchor the story and their characters are drawn very sympathetically -- but at the same time you can see their failings -- Alfred's character in particular seems to me to be a successful drawing of the character that About Schmidt failed so miserably to present. Fewer than 100 pages in and I have already met 5 fully human, fully sympathetic characters! This is about as good as a novel can be by my own standards. I think I am going to start over from the beginning today or tomorrow with pencil in hand -- I am catching a lot of stuff worth underlining and commenting on but don't have any implement to do it with.
posted morning of September 12th, 2003: Respond
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Wednesday, September 10th, 2003
On the train this morning, I started reading The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen and loving it. And it serves well as a counterexample to my complaint about The Life of Pi -- from the first paragraph, the illusion is complete. I am inside their house, inside Alfred's senility, inside Enid's nervousness, inside Chip's discomfort. What does this betoken? Well, primarily excellent craftsmanship on Franzen's part, is what. And I just had the thought while writing the word inside, that maybe there is a tie-in to bicameral thinking and the nature of story-telling; but I am not up to getting into that right now. Anyway -- only 32 pages in but my hunch is that this is going to be a great book.
posted morning of September 10th, 2003: Respond
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Tuesday, September 9th, 2003
I sent a letter to the New York Times Magazine today; in case they do not print it, here it is with a link to the article I'm referencing. (Note, the link requires registration and will in any case only be good for a couple of weeks.) The Futile Pursuit of Happiness Dear Sirs: Jon Gertner's article on "affective forecasting" is nothing short of bizarre. His gee-whiz attitude throughout culminates near the end when he says, "After talking with both men, I found it hard not to wonder about my own predictions at every turn." This is the very essence of the reflective life which people have been trying for millennia to lead, with varying rates of success. I don't want to suggest that there is nothing of interest in Gilbert and Loewenstein's work; but Gertner's presentation of that work is founded on a problematic premise, that people believe the gratification of their immediate desires will lead to long-term happiness. I do not think this belief is as prevalent as Gertner would have us believe. If his recent experience while ogling the new car is truly the first time he has ever questioned the efficacy of such gratification, then I feel some pity for him for coming to it so late but hope he will make good use of his new self-knowledge. Regards,
Jeremy Osner
South Orange, NJ Here are links to some articles by Gilbert:
posted afternoon of September 9th, 2003: Respond
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Monday, September 8th, 2003
The lumberyard in Union is Jaeger Lumber, which looks like it will do the trick just fine. They have oak-veneer plywood, will cut it to size, and have 4/4" and 5/4" redwood, which will be totally ideal for the moldings. (I will buy the 1/4 round and 1/4 hollow at Home Depot though.)
posted morning of September 8th, 2003: Respond
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Sunday, September 7th, 2003
A very productive weekend... The window seat frame is installed; the seat would be on except I found out home depot does not carry the plywood I am looking for. There is a lumber yard in Union which I will try next Saturday. Mike R. came over Friday to help me with the baseboard and the electrical outlet, which I wanted to move to the front of the seat; but the baseboard proved impossible to remove from the wall. So I left it in place and put the frame in front of it. The molding has changed a lot; rather than a crown molding I have decided to use a window apron molding, which is more natural in the context and will fit in nicely with the window aprons behind the seat. I will be building it out of 6 pieces of wood and it may not be ready immediately. We had a really nice jam session this afternoon, playing about 8 songs which is about double what we normally get to, and they were a lot of fun. With Jim, I came up with a new arrangement of House of the Rising Sun which really sounds like a distinctively new sound for that song, riffing on Dylan's version but quite different. Sylvia came (of her own accord) and stayed for about two hours of jamming -- quite breathtaking to me since we were not changing our jam much at all to accomodate her in it. (Before it started, Greg saw a hawk eating a squirrel in the lower branches of a tree on the property 3 doors down from Bob's place, so we went down there to watch it for 15 minutes.) Afterwards we had a cookout, for which Sylvia came back to join us.
posted evening of September 7th, 2003: Respond
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Sunday, August 31st, 2003
Speaking of "firsts", here is Sylvia's first knock-knock joke (Composed this morning after Ellen told her the knock-knock joke whose punch-line is, "Can't elope without a boy!"): Knock-knock!
Who's there?
Watermelon.
Watermelon who?
Watermelon... Watermelon... Boy!
[general laughter]
posted morning of August 31st, 2003: Respond
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Thursday, August 28th, 2003
This is Sylvia's first composition: One little one goes in the room and turn, turn, turn
Two little ones go in the room and turn, turn, turn
Three little ones go in the room and turn, turn, turn
Four little ones go in the room and turn, turn, turn
Five little ones go in the room and turn, turn, turn
The melody is about what you'd expect it to be, sort of a take-off on "Ten little monkeys jumpin' on the bed".
posted evening of August 28th, 2003: Respond
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I finished The Life of Pi this afternoon (pity me, for I must return to work tomorrow...), it is a lot of fun to read. Different degrees of truth and fiction are woven together seamlessly, and you move with the narrators in and out of dream and fantasy. But Martel never loses himself in the book, I never got rid of the conscious apprehension that I was being told a story. In a way this seems a little picky; Martel went to some lengths after all to say that everything in the book is a story being told -- so why should I complain about him successfully communicating his point? But that seems like kind of a cheap way out for Martel -- the best thing that can happen in fiction (I think) and maybe also the most difficult, is for the story to emerge as a separate reality, seemingly independant of the narrative voice. That might have happened briefly in the middle of this book, in the early days of Pi's ordeal at sea -- but it was not sustained. If Martel is saying, as I think he might be, that he is trying to demonstrate that any authorial absense must be illusory -- well, that seems to me like an easy way out. It's a pretty obvious point that has been made by writers going back at least two or three hundred years; but the best of them have been able to make the point without destroying the illusion locally. (I'm not exactly sure who I'm thinking of here but I don't think it would be too hard to find examples. Some bits of Gravity's Rainbow would qualify.) Anyways... That's my only real criticism of this book and it is not a big problem. I'd recommend it highly.
posted evening of August 28th, 2003: Respond
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Last night we made a bit of progress in our quest to get Sylvia listening to real music (as opposed to the weak, silly jingles on the "children's music" CD's people give us...) Sylvia asked to listen to one of these; but I sought to redirect her attention to the "Janis's band music" mix discs that Doug recorded for us. She was pretty interested by the fact that each disc had a different color box, and asked to listen to "the green one" (disc 4). So we listened to a couple of Animals tunes before she lost interest in that and asked for "the blue one" (disc 5) -- which is alright by me, it is my favorite of them. And wow! I popped it in the stereo, skipped past "Moondance" and "Wild Thing" and started right in with The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and Sylvia went wild! She started dancing right away, with a big grin. The mood lasted for nearly half an hour, about six songs or so. She started to fade on "The Wait", song #3, but Ellen brought her back by clapping to the rhythm, and then she heard the chorus -- "Take a load off, Annie" -- and started singing along. We all danced together in a circle for a couple of tunes, and then hit "Honky Tonk Hardwood Floor" which was the high point of the evening for jumping around and laughing. "Ugly and Slouchy", which came on next, was apparently a riding song; after a few bars Sylvia got on her rocking horse and stayed there through the song -- nice because it gave Mom and Dad an opportunity to retire to the armchair and rocking chair. By then it was about time for bed and Sylvia's energy level began to fade, so we headed upstairs for the night. I'm looking forward to playing that disc some more, and maybe find some more rockabilly to listen to together. We had some luck with Buddy Holly a few months ago until Sylvia lost interest -- I think if we have several records to listen to she will not get bored as fast though.
posted morning of August 28th, 2003: Respond
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Monday, August 25th, 2003
Today was spent digging. My back is sore, so are my legs, and my arms have very little energy left in them. I dug up the entire path in my front yard, about 25' X 1' X 8", and filled it with sand and started laying the stones in it. I had been planning to cut the stones to shape; but that turns out to be very difficult, so I am instead just hunting for stones of roughly the shape I need and using them as is. The beginning of the path looks pretty good, after several tries with different stones.
posted evening of August 25th, 2003: Respond
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