READIN

Wednesday, November 19th, 2003

🦋 Woo-hoo!

The server came back to life half an hour ago, my mailbox is full, mostly of spam...

Actually it's a bit less spam than I would expect to get in 3 days so I may have lost some messages. (How's that for a metric?) If you sent me anything and I persist in not responding, I may not have gotten it.

posted afternoon of November 19th, 2003: Respond

Monday, November 17th, 2003

E-mail server is down for the nonce, so if you have written me and got no response fear not; I will hopefully get the message within a day or two when things are working again. I'll post a note here when it is back on line.

posted evening of November 17th, 2003: Respond

I finished The English Passengers tonight -- what a dark book it is! I was moved to think about the meaning of the word "earnest" this afternoon, when I said to myself that this book was not (pejorative sneer) earnest in the way that The Life of Pi and The Corrections were -- this thought floated through my head complete with the sneer despite the fact that I had greatly enjoyed both those books, especially the latter -- what did I mean?

Kneale does not make such a point of evincing sympathy for his characters as does Franzen -- and indeed, few of the portrayals are sympathetic -- I would say the only ones that are, were Tim Renshaw, Captain Kewley and Peevay, and all with a great deal of ambiguity. So the sympathetic characterizations which I found so compelling in The Corrections -- and which were present in The Life of Pi as well -- are not a feature here. This is probably what I meant to get at with my pejorative use of the word "earnest"; the word is not very well used then, as Kneale is certainly earnest in his scorn for his characters.

posted evening of November 17th, 2003: Respond
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Wednesday, November 12th, 2003

🦋 A book I'm looking for

I am going to throw this out into the æther and see if any help comes my way...

When I was young, I read a book that I loved and reread several times. I have forgotten the author's name (I believe he was French) and the title. Here is all I know for sure about the book:

• It was set in the Neolithic era. The characters were a family of cavemen who did things like discovering fire, inventing written language, etc.
• The narrator's uncle was named Vanya.
• On the cover of the book (a paperback) was a print of Picasso's The Minotaur.

posted afternoon of November 12th, 2003: Respond
➳ More posts about The Evolution Man

Tuesday, November 11th, 2003

My first genuinely weird Google hit came in today: fish blog education. Hope you found what you were looking for, matey!

posted afternoon of November 11th, 2003: Respond

Sunday, November 9th, 2003

Oh well, never did hook up with Tim. It was very nice seeing Bill and Kathy. If you're passing through DC, let me recommend you go to the Hirschorn Museum -- they have some excellent exhibits, and the fountain in the courtyard is quite spectacular on a sunny day. Sylvia's and my favorite exhibit was a room full of paper that you could walk through or lie down in.

posted evening of November 9th, 2003: Respond

Saturday, November 8th, 2003

We're in Washington, DC today visiting Arielle. Later on I'm hoping to meet up with Tim Dunlop, and tomorrow with Bill and Kathy. Ellen and Sylvia are back at our hotel taking a nap and I went for a walk and found a nice coffee house called Soho at Dunlop Circle. Lunch today was decent Malaysian, not that exciting but tasty, and Sylvia was really enthusiastic about the Prawn Mee. (Which she would not have been if it had been a really good Prawn Mee, i.e. extremely spicy.)

posted evening of November 8th, 2003: Respond

Thursday, November 6th, 2003

🦋 Shop organization

Hey, did I mention I've been working on organizing my shop space in the basement, for a couple of weeks now? It's going really well -- I'm just about in shape to start working on the bookcase. What I have done: I built a lumber rack, and stacked most of my lumber on it; built a shelf with separate compartments for my carving tools; built a fixture for hanging my clamps; cleaned off most counter surfaces; and went a bit of the way towards organizing the big closet where I keep hardware. The last thing is going to be building a rack for clamping up panels and holding them even while the glue dries, which is necessary for the bookcase project. I have a pretty simple design in mind and will be building it next week.

posted evening of November 6th, 2003: Respond
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I am zipping right through The English Passengers, nearly halfway now, and enjoying it. A geographical issue is bothering me -- if the voyage begins at London and has as its ultimate destination Van Diemen's Land, why would they be going to Jamaica and then to Africa? It seems to me that the logical route would be to head directly south around the Cape of Good Hope and across the Indian Ocean; a side trip to Jamaica means you have to cross and recross the Atlantic.

The narrative style of the book -- each chapter is told from the point-of-view of a different character -- encourages me to go back to my reading of The Corrections, where I kept noticing how many different characters I felt sympathy for; I would expect something similar to happen here. But it does not, or not exactly -- I do sympathize with several of the characters; but the book is very broadly comic and much of it is caricature.

posted evening of November 6th, 2003: Respond
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Tuesday, November 4th, 2003

I got home last night to find a package had come for me in the mail -- how exciting! It is from Gary; I opened it up and found he had sent me a new book, with a note to the effect that he thinks I will enjoy it. (And a wonderfully cool bookmark, a snapshot of the Xyris crew from '94, the first year I was working there.)

The book is The English Passengers, by Matthew Kneale. I started reading it this morning on the train and got hooked into it right away -- it has all the characteristics of a book I would like. The language is playful and erudite. The setting is 19th-Century Man, England, Wales, Australia, and Tasmania and it looks like I will get an introduction to some new history that I did not know, plus a little Manx dialect.

I want to write a bit about comparisons to other books that are coming up as I read -- but I think I will wait a bit and see how these comparisons develop, before I commit them to "paper".

posted morning of November 4th, 2003: Respond

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