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Sunday, March 14th, 2010
I went to see Alice in Wonderland with Sylvia this afternoon. (That is to say, "Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland in 3-D"...) I was kind of expecting not to like it, based on a general inbred aversion to commercializing the classics and on a negative review I had read in the NY Times; but it won me over, mostly. Burton really succeeded in completely imagining the world of the movie, with gorgeous photography and animation; the world of Carroll's books was present but Burton was not tied in to imitating it, and there was a reason given in the screenplay for why this was so -- the world of the books was assumed as part of the background of the world of the movie. (I also really enjoyed the use of 3-D in this film, maybe moreso than any other 3-D movie I've been to so far.) I had a hard time getting fully inside the movie, but I'm blaming my own blinders for that rather than the director's vision -- I set out trying to find fault, and spent too much of my time internally carping about how it was not that way in the book, instead of letting myself go. (And to be sure, the adaptation of the elements of Carroll's plot to a Narnia-style battle between forces of good and evil is heavy-handed, there's no getting around that -- part of the letting myself go that I did intermittently was laughing at the sillyness of this, so that I could get into it.) Sylvia was not doing this kind of nit-picking, and she paid it what seems to me like the ultimate compliment on our way out of the theater, that you could really tell Burton had read the book before he made the movie.
posted afternoon of March 14th, 2010: Respond
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Saturday, March 13th, 2010
Pictures from our trip to DC at the end of February, specifically from our visit to the National Zoo. Wallaby, emu, pony, anemones, urchin, pandas (both Giant and Red), monkeys and apes, large reptiles, and an utterly stunning giant salamander.
posted afternoon of March 13th, 2010: Respond
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 At work, I've been involved in a project to support the full Unicode character set in a more-than-cursory way*, getting to understand wide characters and utf-8 much more fully than I ever did before; and finally I am thinking I want to encode READIN in utf-8. All this time it has been in ISO-8859-1, which works ok as long as I escape unsupported Unicode characters; but it seems like time to get with the program.
My question is, what's the easiest way to convert my data? A lot of posts have got characters like äöüæ... which are going to show up as garbage if I just change the encoding of the blog. I was thinking I would use mysqldump and use iconv to convert the data. But somehow the output from mysqldump is already encoded with utf8. Does this mean I can just rebuild the database from this output and I'll be good to go? I'm a little confused why mysqldump is not respecting the encoding in the database...
 Well, restoring from the output of mysql-dump does not have the desired effect; characters that were ISO-8859-1 in the original db, that were UTF-8 in the dump, are converted back to ISO-8859-1 in the restore. After further investigation, it seems like my original idea will work: although it looks to me like iconv is essentially double-encoding the characters that were transformed to utf-8 by mysqldump, when I load them back into mysql I get utf-8 characters. Not totally comfortable with this yet...
* (Previously our support for Unicode had consisted of walking through utf-8 strings looking for high-order characters we recognized, and flattening them to 7-bit ASCII.)
posted morning of March 13th, 2010: Respond
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Thursday, March 11th, 2010
It contributes something to a reading of Middlesex, to ask how well Cal knows the stories he is telling. Much of the book is told in something similar to a third-person omniscient voice, scenes where Cal simply couldn't know the things he is telling, and the obvious conclusion is that he's making them up, embroidering details into his scant family history. Occasionally he cops to this, saying e.g. "...And now I have to enter Father Mike's head, I'm afraid. I feel myself being sucked in and I can't resist." (What a great idea it is to make Father Mike be the scam artist.) Other times the embellishments are just presented as part of the story. Cal's desire for an integral back-story to his life, a history without holes, makes a really compelling framework for the book.
posted evening of March 11th, 2010: Respond
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Monday, March 8th, 2010
In the long, slow third part of Middlesex, there is a strong sense of building towards a climax. Calliope was born at the beginning of the third part; and the narrative arc is moving deliberately toward her coming of age and becoming Cal -- as she grows the the tension is increasing constantly. There's some tension between the narrated character of young Callie -- who does not know what's going to happen -- and the narrator himself, who has told us well in advance what is happening. I'm waiting with bated breath to find out how it happens. A comparison that's flickered across my mind a couple of times is to the character of Oskar in The Tin Drum -- I don't remember how clearly Oskar-the-narrator laid this out, but it seems to be understood that young Oskar is clairvoyant, that he knows from the beginning about how his life is going to play out.
posted evening of March 8th, 2010: Respond
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Sunday, March 7th, 2010
I've recommended Middlesex to a couple of people over the past week -- but every time I have done so I have not been able to come up with the right frame. I've been talking up little bits of the book -- the portrait of mid-20th C. Detroit; the vividness of the historical episodes; the mapping of Cal's family's history -- but what I really dig about this novel is the fulness of it, the way it all fits together. I like all the pieces by themselves, but the whole is much more than its parts. (And Cal him/herself might be a good proxy for the totality of the book; but I've been unsure how much to talk about Cal's situation for fear of spoiling a good yarn.) The chapter about the race riots is an instance of this -- I'm loving the aspect of the chapter which is vivid and informational, this is a lot of new historical details for me, but what really seals the deal for me is the way this data is woven in to the lives of the characters, the way this is part of the story.
 (The chapter about the riots opens with Cal's father sleeping with a gun under the pillow, and a reference to Chekhov's line about a gun in the first scene -- but what is sticking out for me right now is the insurance policies in the first scene. The detail a few chapters back about Lefty having over-insured the diner, and told his son to keep the policies, made me think the place will burn down; and the riots seemed like they would be a good place for that to happen. So I'm scratching my head, wondering what the insurance is for...) Aha! Nevermind -- I wrote that last paragraph before I got to the end of the chapter.
posted afternoon of March 7th, 2010: 1 response
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Saturday, March 6th, 2010
Here are some tapes from today's practice -- I'm trying to really hold my focus in the song and pay attention to what I'm doing, and I think it's coming through a bit. At the end of "Bill Cheetham" I lose it. "The Road to Lisdoonvarna" I think is currently my very favorite song.
posted afternoon of March 6th, 2010: 2 responses
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Mo Menzel snapped a great photo of me while I was playing "The Irish Washerwoman" last night. Thanks, Mo! 
I've been hunching over lately when I'm playing violin -- not sure why but this posture seems to make it easier to keep my focus inside the song. (Also I am going back and forth between holding the bow nearer the frog, and choking up on it like this -- and between holding my pinkie against the wood -- which I tend to think I ought to do -- and out in the air like this, which seems to happen pretty regularly when I don't pay attention to the finger.)
posted afternoon of March 6th, 2010: Respond
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Thursday, March 4th, 2010
Mixed results at the open mic today -- I played two songs, first one was very successful, the second was a mess. I felt pretty upset and brought down about the second one and as I was mulling it over I came to realize that having a solid bowing pattern is a really important part of knowing a song... The successful song, my "Road to Lisdoonvarna"/"Drowsy Maggie" medley, when I was practicing it this afternoon I hit on a bowing pattern that I could stick with and that really drives the song along -- the rhythmic motion of my arm complements the tapping of my foot. I have always had a pretty clear sense of where I'm going with this song but the bowing just wrapped everything up very nicely. With the other song contrariwise, "Irish Washerwoman"/"The Swallowtail Jig", while I know the song very well, I can never seem to decide just what I should be doing with my bow. And it shows -- sometimes I will practice the song and have it sound great, other times not so much. While I was mulling I got a little distracted from listening to people's performances, and my eyes were wandering among the shop's wares -- I was really taken by the minor variations in shape between every pair of violins on the shelf there -- in length, width, depth of body, proportion of the length given over to the "C" in the middle of the body, how concave the "C" is and how prominently its top and bottom jut out... One violin there has completely smooth sides, an hourglass figure, which I've never seen before. I fantasized about playing some of the more unusual specimens, and my attention slowly came back to the music.
posted evening of March 4th, 2010: Respond
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Wednesday, March third, 2010
I started reading Middlesex last night, with a vague expectation that I was not really going to like it very much. I'm not sure why -- I must have read a dismissive review back when it came out, and internalized that. As it turns out, the book is (so far) excellent. I have been riveted to (Eugenides' imagining of) Cal's imagining of the sack of Smyrna, and his grandparents' flight, and their lives in mid-20th-C. Michigan. Have not quite gotten to the point yet of identifying with the grandparents but they are certainly well-crafted characters; I am identifying very closely with Cal him/herself. The vivid quality of the descriptions of widely disparate times and places is stunning.
posted evening of March third, 2010: Respond
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