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Wednesday, September 24th, 2003
Added a new page to our family album:
posted evening of September 24th, 2003: Respond
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I found a discussion in Slate of Franzen's rejection of the proffered Oprah Winfrey seal of approval for The Corrections. (That link will take you to part I of the discussion; part II is here.) Snobbery comes up a lot in the discussion in various contexts, and I suddenly think, yeah, a lot of what this book is about is snobbery. I don't have anything more concrete than that right now but will be looking over the discussion some more and try to come up with something. A key statement, from Slate associate editor Eliza Truitt: "I think it's a mistake to translate the sympathy one feels for Enid as a reader to a lack of snobbery on the part of the author." Update: The final bit of the discussion comes from Jodi Kantor, who writes what I would if I were perceptive enough to formulate my thoughts properly, starting with: "The Corrections is a veritable opera of aspiration and snobbery." Read her whole post; there is no direct link but go to Part II and scroll down to her name.
posted evening of September 24th, 2003: Respond
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I finished The Corrections this morning and am a bit sorry it's over. In the second half of the book -- mainly the chapters "At Sea" and "The Generator" -- I was simultaneously enjoying the read and feeling a bit disappointed at Franzen for losing the greatness that the earlier chapters had. But in the final two chapters he was able to pull it together and get back on track. The great thing in this book is the characters. The portion of the book that is less than great is the part where the characters are neglected in favor of telling a story -- a funny story and interesting, but not beautiful and moving in the way that the rest of the book is.
posted morning of September 24th, 2003: Respond
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Monday, September 22nd, 2003
I was reminded a bit of The Life of Pi by this depressing news item from AP (which I saw at the Whiskey Bar): BAGHDAD, Iraq - A U.S. soldier shot and killed a tiger at the Baghdad zoo after it bit another soldier who had reached through the bars of its cage to feed it, a zoo security guard said Saturday. The soldiers had been drinking beer when they entered the zoo Thursday night after it closed, said the guard, Zuhair Abdul-Majeed. "He was drunk," Abdul-Majeed said of the bitten soldier. After the man was bit, the other American shot the tiger three times in the head and killed it, Abdul-Majeed told The Associated Press. Billmon thinks it makes a fine metaphor for the US intervention in Iraq, and I am inclined to agree with him.
posted afternoon of September 22nd, 2003: Respond
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Sunday, September 21st, 2003
sylvia is helping me write this post -- the first she has helped with; and she typed all the letters of her name in the first word of the post. Today was Sylvia's birthday party, with a Clifford theme. All of her friends from her playgroup came, plus some cousins and other assorted friends. Clifford came to say hi to the kids and take pictures together -- this was Sylvia's birthday present from Ellen's friend Shelley. As I was driving Gary and Suzie to the train station after the party, I reflected that it was about the most ambitious party Ellen and I have ever thrown, at least since our wedding. A good time was had by all and the weather was beautiful. More typing from Sylvia: big reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeedddddddddddddddddddddddddd dddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddooooooooooooooooooooofgg (Sylvia digs the autorepeat feature of the computer's keyboard.)
posted evening of September 21st, 2003: Respond
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Thursday, September 18th, 2003
Another note about authenticity of baked goods -- Ellen bought a loaf of bread at the Whole Foods in Millburn that was sold as "ciabatta" but in fact bore only a very slight resemblance to that style of bread. I am however having a hard time getting worked up about this, because it was a very good loaf of bread -- probably the best I have had from any bakery within a half-hour drive of my house. Still, I wish they would have called it by a different name -- "peasant bread" might work.
posted morning of September 18th, 2003: Respond
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Wednesday, September 17th, 2003
Over at LanguageHat (among other places) I am used to seeing prescriptive* grammar trashed; and while I don't feel as strongly about it as some, I generally sympathize with the trashers -- from what I can understand of the argument, it seems more useful to start with the goal of describing language than of controlling it. (The gist of it: "prescriptive grammar" = grammar viewed as a set of rules for composition; "descriptive grammar" = grammar viewed as a description of how people use language.) Yesterday and today however, in the yeasty intersection of language and food, I found myself taking an unambiguously prescriptive stance. A little background -- there is in South Orange a small bakery that makes only bagels and muffins, and makes them both very very well. The hand-rolled bagels are, as is proper, boiled before they are baked; and they come out dense and chewy, with a thick crust -- in a word, "bagels". So when Ellen suggested last night that I should buy some bagels Sunday morning for the parents of Sylvia's friends, who will be coming to her birthday party, I naturally said "Okay, I can stop by the bagel shop on my way back from Kings", which is the supermarket where I will be picking up Sylvia's birthday cake; that, however, was not what Ellen had in mind. Ellen thought I should buy bagels from Kings while I was there. Bear in mind that the pastries sold by Kings under the name "bagels" are something quite different -- they are rolled and shaped by a machine, and baked in a steam-injected oven; and they come out soft, with little crust and less flavor. Ellen's argument in favor of these non-bagels was that many people prefer their bagels not to be chewy. I was in the end able to talk her out of it; but I have been fretting all day about her point. Is my anti-soft-bland-bagel stance just empty snobbery? Should the word "bagel" mean what it is used by the general population to mean, regardless of authenticity? My hunch is that the answer to both of these questions is "yes".
* I am to this day not sure if I should be talking about "prescriptive" or "proscriptive" grammar -- the former seems a little closer to the meaning of the phrase as I understand it. [Update: KF of Planned Obsolescence says my intuition was correct in this regard.]
posted evening of September 17th, 2003: Respond
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Monday, September 15th, 2003
Today I started the chapter entitled "The More he Thought About it, the Angrier he Got", in which Gary is introduced -- and as soon as I started it I felt a huge wave of disappointment. "So this is where it stops being a wonderful, insightful portrait and turns into a well-written, amusing, predictable parody of middle-class materialism and neurosis... Oh well, it was great while it lasted..." I plodded my way through about 10 pages and gradually stopped plodding -- 15 minutes later I had forgotten my complaint and was gripping the book like it was a life preserver -- Gary's character is on one level the subject of broad satire but (a) the satiric points are not the ones I expect (not all of them at any rate), and (b) Franzen is not using him to draw satire -- he is (another) fully human character in his own right*. I described the book to Gabe as "mind-blowing" and that is exactly what it is doing to me. Even without the eerie, radically imprecise parallels with my own life and family, I think The Corrections would be making me reconsider how I think about my life and how I go about my daily business.
 *This makes me think in a funny way of magical realism -- it is just marvelous to me that Franzen can lampoon Gary in such a way and yet keep him substantial, connected to the reality of the story.
posted evening of September 15th, 2003: Respond
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Sunday, September 14th, 2003
Yesterday I put the plywood shell onto the window seat and began the process of filling in molding around it. This consists mainly of: the baseboard, the sill, and the apron. I spent this morning working on the baseboard, and it looks pretty nice. Our house has large moldings; the baseboard around the seat is about 6" tall and is made up of at least 4 separate pieces of wood, which I will refer to as base, head, cap, and toe. (Some of these may actually be made up of more than one piece but I will assume not.) The base is a rectangular piece 1" deep and 4 3/8" tall, with a 1/4" bevel at the top. The head is a rectangular piece 3/4" deep and 7/8" tall which rides on top of the base -- the bevel in the base meets the depth of the head. The cap is a sort of teardrop-shaped piece about an inch tall; and the toe is a 3/4" quarter-round piece which makes the transition from the base to the floor. The first thing I did was to cut the base. The main work of this was planing the board I had, 1 3/16" thick, to 1" thickness; once I had that I had to figure out how to cope it to get the bevel to meet the bevels of the baseboard around the seat. Basically I did a straight cut 1/4" inside the end of the board that stopped 1/4" from the top, and then chopped an angle from the corner of the board to the end of the cut. It came out pretty well -- the coping is not perfect but it is well within the abilities of caulk and spackle to make it look just right. I attached this to the front of the seat with screws to hold it tight, and then nailed the head piece to it. (The head piece is the simplest, just a straight rectangular piece.) Next came the toe, which I am quite happy with. I had taken the toe pieces out from behind the seat and used these, which I had to cope to make them meet up properly. The last thing is going to be the cap, which I also took out from behind the seat -- I am a bit nervous about whether it is going to work though, as in the original baseboard the cap is attached to the head with a rabbett, which I mostly broke when I was prying the cap off. I am going to plane the base of the cap pieces off flush and see how it works.
posted evening of September 14th, 2003: Respond
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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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