READIN

Friday, August 19th, 2005

🦋 Family Day

As of tomorrow, Ellen nd Sylvia and I have been a family for 4 years. We adopted Sylvia from the Shanghai Children's Welfare Institute on August 20, 2001. We are celebrating with a day in the city, going to Central Park and to Lincoln Center. (Also it's Ellen's birthday soon, so it's a celebratory time of year for us.)

posted morning of August 19th, 2005: Respond
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Wednesday, August 17th, 2005

🦋 In my life

Today is Wednesday, the 17th of August. Next week, and the week following, I will be on vacation; we three are going to stay in Italy where we have never been before. Then I will come back home and register for classes at Columbia, where I start my Master's Degree program this fall semester.

posted evening of August 17th, 2005: Respond

(Sniff also was the one to talk to the astronomer in Chapter VI, in an impressively grown-up way. I had not remembered him growing up at all. -- And in the next book, he will again be babyish.)

posted evening of August 17th, 2005: Respond
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Tuesday, August 16th, 2005

For bedtime stories now, we are reading Comet in Moominland, by Tove Jansson. Sylvia is really loving it, which does my heart good as the Moomin books are some of my favorites. (Previously we have read together chapters here and there from a few of the books, but this is the first one we are taking on as a complete story.)

Tonight while we were reading Chapter IV, we came across one of my favorite moments involving the small animal Sniff, immediately after he escapes from the dragon whose garnets he was trying to steal:

Sniff was sobbing on the ground.

"It's all over now," said Snufkin. "Don't cry anymore, Sniff."

"The garnets," Sniff moaned. "I didn't get a single one."

Snufkin sat down beside him and said kindly, "I know. But that's how it is when you start wanting to have things. Now, I just look at them, and when I go away I carry them in my head. Then my hands are always free, because I don't have to carry a suitcase."

"The garnets would have gone in the rucksack," said Sniff miserably. "You don't need hands for that. It's not the same thing at all just looking at them. I want to touch them and know they're mine."

This exchange is kind of a set piece in children's stories, I can't give an example but you see it quite a bit. But I think nowhere else is it done as neatly and touchingly. It reads to my ear as if Jansson knows it is a set piece and is playing with it a bit, but she is also sincerely getting her point across.

What Jansson does particularly well (and what I think authors who present this exchange often fail in) is show how miserable Sniff is about not having gotten the garnets. His line, "the garnets would have gone in the rucksack -- you don't need hands for that", is just perfect. He's heard the line Snufkin is passing him before, and he's not buying it.

posted evening of August 16th, 2005: Respond
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🦋 Hooked

At 32nd St. this morning I walked past a woman wearing a black t-shirt with a large colorful cross and the legend, "I'm Hooked on Jesus" -- as I walked to work, I thought variously of a little kid wearing a t-shirt with appropriate graphic that says "I'm Hooked on Phonics" (presumably included with the instructional kit his parents bought); a clueless 20-year-old hipster wearing a t-shirt that says "I'm Hooked on Junk"... then William Burroughs wandering around Hell's Kitchen 50 years ago with an anachronistic t-shirt that just says "HORSE" in big black letters...

(The clueles hipster was not supposed to actually use heroin, he was trying to make some kind of ironic statement.) (Did I mention I'm not too fond of message t-shirts?)

Did Burroughs call heroin "Horse"? I mainly remember him just calling it "Junk" but he used other names too. I was also thinking of an image of 80-year-old Burroughs in his bedroom in Kansas, visited by a visionary pegasus.

posted afternoon of August 16th, 2005: Respond
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Wednesday, August 10th, 2005

🦋 Random Thought

A story about a monarch who goes to work writing jingles on Madison Ave., called "The Emperor's New Ditty".

posted morning of August 10th, 2005: Respond

Tuesday, August 9th, 2005

🦋 Further thought on Melville's

The story "Benito Cereno" would make a really excellent movie, and I would cast Johnny Depp as Captain Cereno, and John Cleese as Captain Delano. (Note -- I have never seen "Pirates of the Caribbean" and don't really wish to; but I think Depp's alienated persona would be a perfect match here.)

Update, several days later: Come to think of it, why not check in IMDB and see if it's already been done? Benito Cereno was filmed in 1968, before Depp had embarked on his acting career and before Cleese had broken out of absurd comedy; so neither one of them stars in it. Oh well. Indeed no one I've ever heard of; and it is in a foreign language, too. Would like to see it sometime though.

posted afternoon of August 9th, 2005: Respond
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Monday, August 8th, 2005

🦋 The Man Who Lives Here is Loony

A date! A parents' night out without Sylvia! We are meeting Deedee tonight at the Cornelia Street Cafe to watch a play about her father, "The Man Who Lives Here is Loony" by R. B. Morris, who I come to find out is an accomplished country musician. Sylvia is going with her grandparents to watch Charlie and the Chocolate Factory again. We will have dinner beforehand, at Le Gigot.

posted afternoon of August 8th, 2005: Respond

Sunday, August 7th, 2005

🦋 Random Thought

martial arts and marshmallows
make up my dreamtime
(and the fabric of my days)

posted afternoon of August 7th, 2005: Respond

Tuesday, August second, 2005

While we were in Hillsdale a few weeks ago I bought a collection of Melville's short stories, called "The Piazza Tales". -- I bought it principally because it contains "Bartleby", which I've always been interested in reading. So I read that story immediately. (I read it sitting on the grounds of Olana while Ellen toured the residence.) Good, funny,... This morning I picked the book up and read the title story, "The Piazza", on my way in to work. I am wondering if these stories were originally published as a collection, and if the narrator's journey from his piazza to the mountain and back is meant as a metaphor for telling a story.

posted evening of August second, 2005: Respond

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