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Monday, April 19th, 2004
I started a new book today; Flags in the Dust, by William Faulkner. It is the director's cut of his third novel, Sartoris, with over 40 minutes of previously unreleased Yoknatawpha footage. I opened to page 1 and was almost instantly swept away by the lushness of Faulkner's imagery -- beautiful! I was seeing the scene inside my head like a movie privately screened, hearing the words like a bicameral narration. And as I read I would slip into and out of this state -- slip into it when I come across a particularly nice image, out of it when I realize I am not really understanding what is going on and I have to back up a paragraph or two to figure out where the story is. This is a common experience for me when I am reading a good book. Some good books, e.g. House of Sand and Fog, I am in the "cinematic" mode most of the way through, rarely losing the thread. Some good books, e.g. Gravity's Rainbow the first 3 times I read it (well, the fourth time as well to be truthful), interruptions are much more frequent -- there is a lot more complexity and intricacy to the narrative. Both are enjoyable reading experiences; I would venture to say I'm more likely to reread the second type of book. I am glad to be reading Faulkner again, he is a favorite of mine and I haven't read anything by him for a few years.
posted evening of April 19th, 2004: Respond
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Scott McCloud has finished Morning Improv #25, Whose Mind is it Anyway? -- It is just fantastic, by far the most complex and touching story he has written in improv format. Go read it! Set aside a little time to do so -- it is 9 pages long and there is a lot of visual detail to get your mind around.
posted afternoon of April 19th, 2004: Respond
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Friday, April 16th, 2004
Looks like the weather will be excellent here -- lots of sun and warm. I am going to spend an hour or two tailgating before the CRAFTS auction tomorrow morning, then come back home and take Sylvia to her first-ever soccer practice. Sunday will be our first cook-out of the season, Ellen's family is coming over and it is her mother's birthday. The tulips should be opening up today or tomorrow.
posted afternoon of April 16th, 2004: Respond
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Wednesday, April 14th, 2004
I have not blogged about woodworking for a long time because, well, I have not been doing any of it. But I am hoping to change that. A couple of nights this week I was in the basement, working on Ellen's bookcase -- she has given me a deadline of September to finish it or she buys one, and I believe I can do it. Also I got the garage cleaned out and have made some stabs towards planning the workbenches I want to build in there. In other home improvement news, Ellen is repainting the sitting room and boy, does it look good! (This is the room where I built in my windowseat, and it has looked funny unpainted ever since.) The color scheme is: sage green walls, bone white trim and doors and ceiling. There is a lot of trim in the room, doing it all took nearly two weeks (of quite intermittent painting). The walls and ceiling are going a lot faster. When she finishes I will put the final bit of molding on the windowseat (a cove between the top of the seat and the wall behind it) and put shades on the windows, and the room will get more use than it had in the past -- our plan is to have that be our general room for congregating in the evenings, instead of our bedroom.
posted evening of April 14th, 2004: Respond
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Saturday, April 10th, 2004
How different is a well-drawn character from a successful caricature? My impulse is to say, very different; that they are two totally separate things with almost nothing in common. But I'd like to put forth the conjecture that there is actually very little separating the two, that there is a good deal of cross-over between them and only a fine line separating them. (It should go without saying that there is virtually no difference between a poorly-drawn character and an unsuccessful caricature; indeed "caricature" is often used as a pejorative way of describing poorly-drawn characters.) I was watching "Hannah and Her Sisters" on the T.V. tonight when I started thinking about this. My a priori take on this is that a "character" is something you identify with and feel sympathy for, where a "caricature" is something you mock and feel superior to. Watching Michael Caine's character thinking about having betrayed his wife, and how to get out of it, I felt both sympathy and scorn, superiority and identity. And again, when I was watching Woody Allen's character thinking about his remoteness from the world, and again, when I was watching Hannah help her sister shop for a dress. So: characters, caricatures -- thinking a little more clearly now I realize that I have had this epiphany many times already, I may even have written about it when I was reading The Corrections. But there it is. I also am wondering whether "Hannah and Her Sisters" might be my favorite Woody Allen film. I think the chances are very good that it is but I do not have any of the other candidates clearly enough in mind to say for sure.
posted evening of April 10th, 2004: Respond
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Thursday, April 8th, 2004
Nice... an extra day of rest, Good Friday. I will work with Ellen to make some progress in painting our sitting room.
posted afternoon of April 8th, 2004: Respond
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Wednesday, April 7th, 2004
More on the Broonzy records -- I took disk A over to Bob's house last night and the four of us worked out a pretty fun version of "Pig Meat Strut". It is easy to play and we sounded pretty good, except too slow and not enough variation.
posted afternoon of April 7th, 2004: Respond
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Tuesday, April 6th, 2004
In this dream I simultaneously am watching a movie (or something like a movie) and am a character, or several characters, in it. The dream-cinematography is shot from a God's-eye point of view, looking down from on high, with quick cuts to shots from the point of view of the characters. We see a village on the banks of the Colorado River -- middle-class American suburbia of the late 20th Century. One night everyone goes to sleep... When I wake up, groggy, I can't quite tell what it is that seems different -- everything's changed somehow. Everyone in town feels the same way but no-one can quite remember where we are or what we're supposed to be doing. For instance it seems like there is supposed to be a lot of water somewhere; everything's so dry. A professor at the local college works out that we have all been asleep for a billion years, and slept through major geological change; the river that was once there has been covered over by hundreds of feet of sedimentary accretion. (The physical town, instead of being buried, has somehow floated on top of the sediment, and has not deteriorated.) My house, it turns out, is directly above the old river and will have to be destroyed in order to dig down to the river bed -- I feel some resentment and "why me?" My wife is running a load of laundry (the machines are located, oddly enough, on the third floor) and I notice a bulge running across the floor -- still groggy I wonder idly if this is something to do with the geological changes; suddenly shocked into awareness I realize that the drainpipe is clogged and our plumbing is going to burst from the strain on it. Will I be too late to fix things? This is the cliff-hanger ending.
posted morning of April 6th, 2004: Respond
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Monday, April 5th, 2004
Looking through the blues discs at Borders this afternoon -- hmm, I'd like to have this, yes, this one too... when I notice a 5-cd box set of Big Bill Broonzy. Wow -- Broonzy holds a sort of mystical allure to me -- my old teacher Eric Frandssen once played me a video tape of Broonzy finger-picking and it was one of the most wonderful things I've watched. I have a late recording of him but it does not capture the real blues genius -- but this was recordings from 1927-35 and would surely be what I'm looking for. So I looked at the price tag and it is marked at $29 -- how weird -- all of the other discs are $11 or $12 per, these 5 are going for $6 apiece. I double-check to see if this is damaged goods or something but it looks alright. Must be fate! We listened to Disc 1 in the car this evening and yes indeed, it was everything I wanted it to be. I am going to start right in on trying to learn Broonzy's picking style. More to follow. Update: That price was not an anomaly, either! Here it is on Amazon for $26, with free shipping! You should absolutely buy this record.
posted evening of April 5th, 2004: Respond
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Fitful sleep last night with scattered images. I was at work when everybody left the building to participate in a funeral procession for a friend of one of the traders. It was huge, masses of people marching through the streets; one of the people I was with yelled to one of the others that he thought our group was creating too much of a stir in the procession which it had been late to join -- the response was "But he was a Tiger!" -- I took this to mean that he had been from Detroit or had gone to school there -- this was accepted as valid reasoning. The march seemed to have no destination; we were walking down a freeway which I identified as CA rte. 99 in the foothills of the coast range -- I decided that I would walk as far as the peak of the next hill and then turn back. By the time I got there the rest of the procession had melted away and it was evening, I was looking back over the long vista of the Central Valley. I was at Hoboken and noticed my train had a baggage car in front of the engine, quite unusual as (a) the trains are usually just passenger cars and (b) the baggage car was open shelves. I was carrying Sylvia's Clifford doll and Hello Kitty doll plus some suitcases and decided to leave the stuffed animals in the baggage car. Then walked down to where I was going to sit and put my suitcases down there. I then thought to ask the conductor whether I would be able to get at the baggage car when the train stopped in South Orange; could not find a conductor so I walked up to the engine and asked the engineer, who shook his head mournfully. So I picked up the stuffed animals and was walking back to my seat when I noticed a cop following me. I started running -- at this moment the train pulled out of the station and I jumped toward it, holding on to a rod projecting from the side -- the cop did likewise and we had an exciting chase scene but I can't really remember much of it. I was looking in the window of a new general store and noticed a box of old tools for sale -- the (quite fat) owner was standing near me and I asked if the store was opening soon; he said not for another month at least but if I wanted to go in and look around that would be alright. So I went in -- the store was quite full of people for one that was not yet open -- I saw a really nice old set of weights but decided it was too bulky and I was too far from home, to spend any time actually debating whether to buy it or not. I found the tool box and looked through it -- not much there except an interesting brace and bit. There was some pretty weird looking machinery behind it but again, too much effort involved in transporting it for me to spend any time on it. I asked the owner if I could buy that brace -- a lot of the people in this store were making transactions so I think his saying it was not yet open was purely pro forma -- and he said it was 50¢. Then I got involved with trying to get it shipped to me, can't figure out why I would have needed this, and trying to find a box of the right size.
posted morning of April 5th, 2004: Respond
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