READIN

Sunday, August 8th, 2004

The saga of repairing my patio continues...

The story so far: when we moved into this house it had a broken-up, uneven bluestone patio in the back yard, and I thought I would like to learn how to fix it, make it flat and even. Ellen's cousin Danny came over and offered to donate some slate flagstones he had in his side yard toward the cause. (At that point I thought the patio was made of slate.) After getting them home I realized they would not work in the back yard, and decided instead to build a walkway/garden border in the front yard. I did that last summer -- it came out really well (or at least "really well for a first masonry project by someone who didn't have much of a clue") and I had some slate left over. This spring I extended the walkway back past the side of our house, next to the garage. And I was ready to start on the patio itself!

So two weeks ago I drove down to Brick, NJ, where there is Bedrock Stone, excellent stone yard that I recommend wholeheartedly. Bought a pallette of 1 1/2" rectangular bluestone and a pallette of broken bluestone pieces; and on the way home I stopped at Maplewood Garden Supply to get 3 cubic yards of bluestone dust. (Note: the dump truck which brought the dust would not have been able to get into our back yard, were it not for the new gate I built. Nice feeling.) That stuff has been sitting in our driveway for the past 2 weeks; and when my father came to town this weekend, I asked if he'd like to help me work on the patio. He was game, and we completed the work I was hoping to get done -- namely, the narrow part of the patio (4' X 27') that runs from the driveway to the main patio. This part had previously been extremely broken up -- hence the new flag stones -- and repaired in patches with slate. We put in a layer of dust to even the ground beneath it, and laid in new stones, and built a low border from the broken stone pieces. The old flag stones that I could salvage are stacked in the driveway, waiting to be used in extending the main part of the patio back into the yard a little ways, which may happen as soon as this fall. First I need to get to evening up the main part of the patio, where the stones are mostly whole or else cleanly broken, so I will be able to use the existing stones. (This is good because they are 1" thick and thus possible for me to lift without a second person.) That will be happening at the end of the month, if all goes according to plan.

posted evening of August 8th, 2004: Respond
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Friday, August 6th, 2004

Have not blogged about this yet but I've been reading an excellent book, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg. Hogg is a 19th-C. Scot who uses the religious and political strife of late 17th-C. Scotland to paint a disturbing picture of the human soul afflicted by zealotry. Essentially the story of an ardent Calvinist who takes the doctrine of Predestination a bit farther than it is useful... Rather more relevant to our own troubled times than I would prefer.

posted morning of August 6th, 2004: Respond
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Sunday, August first, 2004

🦋 Thingumy and Bob

As Sylvia was looking through Finn Family Moomintroll last week, asking me who the characters in each of the pictures were, she became enchanted with Thingumy and Bob, two diminutive characters who hold hands. I don't know whether it's mainly because of their names, which she finds highly amusing and loves to repeat, or the pictures -- the two taken together make these her new favorite characters. We've taken to reading Chapter VI together, which starts off with a picture of the Hemulen offering them a saucerful of milk -- at first she tried reading it to herself, coming up with: "There is a first time for everything. It was Thingumy and Bob's first time going to the doctor." and so on, I didn't catch the details of their doctor visit -- she modeled this story on on of her favorite Berenstein Bears books.

But later she asked me to read the story; I was thrilled and a little surprised to see that it held her attention all the way through the end of the chapter (which must run 10 or 12 pages), though with 2 short pieces snipped out à la The Princess Bride. I had the book along with me yesterday when we rode on the train to Coney Island and this morning coming back, nearly 4 hours in all, and we must have read it through 5 or 6 times, enough for her to know what is coming next in the plot and what the characters are going to say.

The trip to Coney Island was our first-ever overnight trip without Mom, and it was a lot of fun. We stayed over at Ed's apartment in Park Slope; I got to meet Ed's girlfriend Sonia, and lent him Tales from Moominvalley. Sylvia got her fill of rides -- various metal animals that would go up and down in circles, and we rode the Tilt-a-Whirl together -- and had a good time at the aquarium.

posted evening of August first, 2004: Respond
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Wednesday, July 28th, 2004

🦋 Kidblogging

Last week we went to the NJ State Aquarium in Camden, with Sylvia's friend Kimberlee and her parents (who were part of our travel group to China). Here are some pictures of the girls hamming it up on the aquarium grounds.

posted evening of July 28th, 2004: Respond
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Tuesday, July 27th, 2004

This morning on the train I was reading Tales from Moominvalley, by Tove Jansson. This book is marvelous! I do not think I will give it to Sylvia though, until she is at least 6 or 7 -- the stories are a little dark and require, I think, some sophistication to really understand them -- as I say this I realize it may be true also of the other Moomintroll books; but as I was reading Finn Family Moomintroll, I was thinking "Sylvia would really like this once she's able to take in so many words"; not so much with this book.

Here is a Moomintroll home page, though I see it has not been updated in several years. And most of its links appear to be out of date. Alas! I will keep looking.

posted morning of July 27th, 2004: Respond
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Monday, July 26th, 2004

🦋 Children's stories

I have been reading some children's stories. A few nights ago Sylvia was interested in hearing Babar the King for a bedtime story, which she had never heard before. So I tried it out and was surprised that it held her attention all the way through; it is wordier than most of of her books, and has more unfamiliar words. The next day, she was still talking about the characters in the story. Great, I thought -- let's go to the bookstore and get more Babar books! We went to the Montclair Book Center and picked up Babar's Little Girl, and ever since, whenever I read her a story during the day or at bedtime, she requests one or both of the Babar books.

Some notes about them, in no real order:

• I did not know this when I went to the bookstore but it turns out you should check the author before you buy a Babar book: The Story of Babar, the Little Elephant, Babar's Travels, Babar the King, and Babar and Father Christmas, and maybe some others are by Jean de Brunhoff. But many more are by Laurent de Brunhoff, whom I take to be Jean's son, and not his equal as a writer. That said, Sylvia does like Laurent's Babar's Little Girl a whole lot.
• In Babar the King, the tense switches around in confusing ways. In one paragraph "Babar proclaims", in the next, "the elephants cheered." I can't figure out why this is, it must be some vagary of translation.* This is not the case in Babar's Little Girl, which I am thinking might have been written in English, as it does not have any translation credit.
• Sylvia knows how to read the words, "Babar the king".
• I love the names of the minor characters! I get a kick out of saying "Hatchibombatar." (He is the street cleaner in Celestville.)

On the same bookstore trip, I picked up Finn Family Moomintroll and Tales from Moominvalley, by Tove Jansson (another series with excellent character names). I have fond memories of these books from childhood and am looking forward to introducing Sylvia to them, not quite yet but soon. Today on the train to and from work, I read Finn Family Moomintroll.

The British version of Jean de Brunhoff's Histoire de Babar is a striking example of the transition from the present to the past tense in the translation of children's texts into English. With reference to theories of narrative time, this paper invites speculation on the impact of such a tense shift on the present-tense qualities of the original, on the performance of a shared reading by child and adult and, finally, on the relevance of the young child's developing understanding of the role of tense in narrative.

posted evening of July 26th, 2004: Respond
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Friday, July 23rd, 2004

🦋 Dithering

So I'm at a bit of a loss about what to do with this essay I've been talking about writing. I finished reading "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life" this morning and, while I enjoyed it, it did not end up being about what I suspected it would be, when I started. At this point I think a critical essay comparing it with The Myth of the Eternal Return would not really be worth writing or reading.

So as I am contemplating, this evening, writing a post in which I abandon the idea of writing this piece, I open my e-mailbox and find therein a note from Randolph, in which he says he thinks I am close to "one of the great philosophical questions of our time" -- well with that kind of positive feedback how can I give up? This makes it seem like I should instead of criticizing Nietzsche, imitate him, and unabashedly write an essay about my idea of history. Do I dare? I must admit it seems a bit intimidating; particularly since I'm not sure what is this idea struggling to be had. So... I will continue to think about it and hopefully to write about it, and in time I hope to figure out what I am wanting to say.

posted evening of July 23rd, 2004: Respond
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Thursday, July 15th, 2004

More on the Referrers feature -- it is quite unsatisfactory in its present state and needs a good deal of tweaking. This will happen when I get around to it -- no sooner and no later!

posted afternoon of July 15th, 2004: Respond

Monday, July 12th, 2004

🦋 On the Bus

A first time for everything: here is a guest post from my darling Ellen.

It could have been a line of people waiting to catch the jitney to Amagansett or, the Express bus to work. Except it was early Saturday morning at Eighth Ave. and 34th Street when Jeremy, Sylvia, our almost-four-year-old, and I got on line for the three buses heading towards Pennsylvania. We were filled with a sense of purpose quite different than that of our daily routine. The neatly-attired crowd stood, amidst a strong scent of sun screen, with New York Times, cell phone, paperback and coffee in hand. We were joining hundreds of others in a coalition called America Votes, boarding buses to "hit the ground" with potential voters in swing states. We were going to meet them face to face, to survey and discover what issues mattered to them most in the upcoming election and to register voters.

Pa., with the fifth highest number of electoral votes, went to Al Gore by a mere 5,000 votes in the last election, so getting people to turn-out this November is crucial. Although our group was billed as non-partisan, and indeed, were specifically told not to engage in political debates with the people we canvassed -- it was clear that the bus was solidly Democratic. A high level of sophisticated and sardonic political repartee was on-going -- everything from the recent Republican ads trashing John Edwards to Donald Rumsfeld and his calculated terrorist threat announcements. Sitting to my right was a psychologist couple who had been heavily involved in counseling 9/11 survivors. Coincidentally, behind me was another psychologist who had done similar work. Behind the psychologists were two actors, meeting for the first time on the bus -- perfect partners for the canvassing to come. In the back of the bus was a retired couple from Stony Brook. Later on my seat buddy was a Stuyvesant H.S. graduate named Kayla, just completing her first year as a theatre major at SUNY Binghampton. I picked her brain about her early theatre experiences (Shakespeare in the Park was important) and her activism -- her first demonstration was as a baby in arms with her parents in Washington, DC for the plight of Soviet Jewry. My most recent experience on a political bus ride was the 25th Anniversary of Freedom Summer, fifteen years ago, when I rode for 30 hours to Nashua, Mississippi, making stops at pivotal landmarks of the Civil Rights movement. Kayla told me, as did many others that day, "it's never too early" to introduce a child topolitical activism.

Indeed, Sylvia was the youngest person on the bus, though it was nice to see some older children with parents, too. There were a number of couples in their late 60's and early 70's, though a majority of the crowd appeared to fall somewhere between the 30's and 50's. At the various rest stops during the inevitable wait for everyone to get back on the bus, I enjoyed asking people, "Why are you here?" almost as much as people seemed to enjoy being asked. It boiled down to this: people wanting to "do something," and feeling they could not sit this one out.

At the snack table set up at a union hall where we picked up our clip boards, survey sheets, and voter registration forms, Sylvia was introduced to ginger ale and "cheese noodles" as she called them. She also got to experience walking up to the doors of total strangers, knocking, and listening, as her parents, in upbeat voices said, "Hi. We're here to find out what issues are important to you in the coming election..." And she got to watch the sometimes baffled faces of respondents. The area where we were dropped off, Hatboro, Pa. is registered 75% Republican. Our particular segment was a retirement community in what had been military housing in the 60's: attached, single level tract housing, clusters of impatiens planted along narrow connecting paths, American flags waving in front of most small screened in porches. We wove along the paths from one closely-connected courtyard to another, working between 12:30 and 4 PM on a day when the sun beat down at 90 plus degrees. Jeremy in his black shiny work shoes, tie, and cordoroy pants, Sylvia, who refused to wear her straw hat because it wasn't the "flowery one", and me, with my heavy socks and sneakers made up a sweaty crew.

We kept track of the number of doors we knocked on (about 50), and the responses we got -- both positive and negative. We were not met with as much friendliness as some of our busmates who later reported that they were invited in to people's homes, offered water, and thanked. However, we did get a number of our survey forms filled out -- homeland security and health issues figured largely on this groups' minds -- although one woman said very deliberately, not homeland security, and crossed it off the list. We didn't succeed in getting anyone to register... this was not a crowd that was going to decide to vote if they didn't already. We stopped to catch some shade once while Sylvia pumped her legs on a creaky swing hanging from a rusted playset behind the compound, and then again, at a grassy median in front of a factory.

As we headed back to our pick-up area, I followed an overgrown path into what seemed to be a grove of tiki's. A heavily tattoed man in his mid-forties, glistening with sweat, was carving the outline of a face into a black walnut tree trunk with a chain saw."I just think 'em up and do 'em," he said. He stopped to fill out a survey form, and unlike everyone else, gave his phone number to receive information about the issues he had checked off.

Our caravan of buses succeeded in getting 2,000 people to consider the issues, and 100 people to register. A festive mood prevailed as we headed back to New York. Jesse, a spirited organizer who had trained us on the way out, (and turned 23 this very day) said we had done an awesome job. I asked what people planned to do next. Everyone knew about the Move-on.org cell phone banking in Central Park the following day. I said, "I'm going to do phone banking -- but not tomorrow!" There was laughter, and a general feeling of exhausted comraderie. Then one of the actors said he and a group of twelve friends were making calls the next day!

On the ride home, Sylvia pretended to do door to door canvassing with a tiny plastic tiger, a miniature purple velvet poodle, and a plastic cow that I had stuffed into my pocketbook. She made up a couple of knock-knock jokes -- with some voter registration lingo thrown in. After seven hours on the bus with one meltdown going and another coming back, Sylvia elicited (and gratefully accepted) the following food offerings from three grandmas: butterscotch candies, a stack of gingerbread cookies wrapped in aluminum foil, and a bag of cherries.

America Votes and People for the American Way are doing weekend bustrips to swing states all the way 'til the election. Please think about signing on. For information, if you are in New York try the PFAW office, (212) 420-0440, or you can go to the America Votes homepage for a full list of participating organizations.

posted evening of July 12th, 2004: Respond

Hmm.. I see that displaying referrals from search engines in the way that I am doing it, is having a negative side effect of causing the engines to catalog the link text I am showing, and direct searchers to the wrong place. I will turn that feature off tonight. Too bad, I got a kick out of seeing what people were searching for -- but far be it from me to make people's Google experience more frustrating than need be. Update: Done.

posted evening of July 12th, 2004: Respond

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