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Tuesday, January 27th, 2009
As long as I'm posting some nice visuals:
Hermano Cerdo links today to Olivier Kugler's site -- I'd never heard of Kugler but I'm a fan now. The image above is from Kugler's travel diary documenting a (circuitous) trip from the Shetlands to Cuba; and there's a whole lot of other stuff too.
posted evening of January 27th, 2009: Respond
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A spectacular view, from Maui:
 Daily astronomy pictures from NASA. (Thanks for the link, Dad!)
posted evening of January 27th, 2009: Respond
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Finalists for 3%'s 2008 awards are announced today for fiction and poetry. The fiction list includes a couple of books that are on my reading list, nice; and I'm glad to see Death with Interruptions did not make the list -- it seemed out of place on the long list. Interesting stuff in poetry too.
posted morning of January 27th, 2009: Respond
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Monday, January 26th, 2009
David Goldblatt writes in last Sunday's Times an account of picking up the pieces after his widowed father was stabbed to death in 2001. The paperwork first arrived in plastic sacks, and putting it into some kind of order had helped. It felt like an act of salvage. That was the easy bit; then it stopped helping. My partner, Sarah, said: "Are you sure you want to open the boxes? You know what happens when you open the boxes... and... I just wonder if it's helping any more."
Goldblatt's story of sorting and reading through his father's papers is really gripping and gave me a feeling of intimacy with both the father and the son. Well worth the reading. (Link via the Apostropher.)
posted evening of January 26th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, January 25th, 2009
Tonight Sylvia and I started in on the final book of the His Dark Materials trilogy, The Amber Spyglass. Just at the outset I noticed Mrs. Coulter's monkey dæmon doing two things that I hadn't seen other characters' dæmons doing before this. One is eating; when the monkey is introduced on the second page, he is picking apart pinecones to get the sweet nuts. Dæmons have never been shown yet eating; I was sort of assuming that as spiritual beings (or as expressions of their humans' spirits) they did not need to. The other is acting as a sort of babelfish -- when Ama tries to speak to Mrs. Coulter in her own (unspecified but not fully understood by Coulter) language, Mrs. Coulter instead has Ama's dæmon speak to the monkey, and there is no linguistic barrier to this kind of communication. So, huh. These are two pretty big deals, especially the second, and I wonder why neither one has come up in the trilogy to date. The language thing would be one (incomplete) way of answering the question I asked earlier about communication in this world. But if dæmons can do that, why are there language barriers at all? Possibly (a) only the golden monkey can do this -- he has repeatedly been characterized as different from other dæmons -- or (b) only Mrs. Coulter knows that dæmons can do this.
posted evening of January 25th, 2009: Respond
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 Happy Year of the Ox, everybody! We're going to spend the afternoon at the local FCC party.
 Update: Ellen took pictures of the party -- they're at the READIN family album.
posted morning of January 25th, 2009: 1 response
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At emol.com there is a site dedicated to Cien Años de Soledad -- it is a Flash application so  I can't link to pages inside it; but if you click "Entrar" and watch the lovely video of mariposas amarillas, and then click "Fragmentos", several recorded readings of passages from the book are available, along with the text being read. Following each reading is some discussion of the passage; I am not understanding Spanish well enough yet to follow that.
 Another useful page is Macondo at The Modern Word -- a huge trove of links and information about the author and his works.
posted morning of January 25th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, January 24th, 2009
Edmond Caldwell responds with some very thoughtful commentary to my post on Baroque fiction. I was happy, and a little surprised, to see that what I have in mind and am venturing to express as "Baroque" is broadly similar to what he was thinking about when he used the term last month.
The only place where I might depart from you've written is in the idea that this entails a canceling out individual "free-will" (if I'm even correct that that is what you're saying; forgive me if I've got it wrong), because I think that's still looking at the situation through the old humanist lens (in which it's an either/or question, one either has self-originating "free will" or one is subject to iron determinism, like a puppet). I think the baroque sentence is more dialectical than this; that human agency is deeply or even thoroughly conditioned means perhaps not that it doesn't exist but that it is more collective than we thought. This is a good point and makes me realize that I wasn't thinking clearly this morning when I tried writing about the fatalism in Of Love and Other Demons. Of course there is not a binary distinction between "human actors possessed of free will" on the one hand and "pre-programmed robots" on the other -- there is a pretty broad spectrum of how self-directed a character's actions can seem. (And of course I am getting uncomfortable talking on and on about characters with or without free choice, without acknowldeging that there is an author behind them making the decisions...) I really liked Mr. Caldwell's idea (if I'm understanding him right) that the individual characters in this type of novel can be seen as being subsumed in a kind of collective consciousness which is directing their actions.
posted evening of January 24th, 2009: 2 responses
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 MacMurray is just the perfect actor for playing Walter Neff in Double Indemnity. His is the voice I've been hearing all this time whenever I read Chandler. This movie is such a gem! I'm really happy now because I've been operating for a while under the misconception that I had seen all the important movies of film noir -- but I had never even heard of this one, which seems to be an absolutely critical piece of the genre.  So presumably there's more stuff out there for me to discover. Nice!
Lots of other great things about this film. The interplay between the different actors absolutely sparkles. It took me a little while to get used to the dialogue, for it not to sound stilted, but once I could get past that it was a lot of fun to follow the twists and turns of what people are saying and what they mean.
posted evening of January 24th, 2009: 2 responses
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Ok, this was pretty funny. Sylvia's slightly younger friend Jenny is staying over tonight; they are off in Sylvia's room getting ready for bed while Ellen and I sit in the next room over. Overheard:
Sylvia: You know how Obama's thing is "Yes we can"?
Jenny: Yeah...
Sylvia: Well, (singing) "Bob the Builder, can we fix it, Bob the Builder, yes we can!"
Jenny: (Gasp!) -- They're making fun of Obama!
I'm sure this joke has been made by a lot of people over the past year; it was hilarious to hear Sylvia and Jenny hitting on it for themselves. (And funny, of course, assuming I'm reading Jenny's reaction correctly, to think of the "Bob the Builder" theme song as being a take-off on the Obama campaign slogan.)
posted evening of January 24th, 2009: 2 responses
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At The Architectural Dance Society, 2fs posts a new song, 