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Saturday, December 10th, 2005
Sylvia and I are off to watch the movie of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe this afternoon.
posted afternoon of December 10th, 2005: Respond
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Friday, December 9th, 2005
I have finished my first class in my Master's Degree program, "Operating Systems W4118". I did well in the class (that is, I did extremely well on the homeworks, middling well on the midterm, and crashed and burned on the final, and got an A- overall). I really liked the homeworks, which consisted of adding features to the Linux kernel code, and wished they would have been more in depth and more challenging. (This is not to say they were not challenging.) It seemed like I was learning more from the hands-on stuff in the homeworks, than from the lecture and readings, which seemed pretty cut and dried. This could also be why I did not do as well on the tests as on the homeworks. Hacking code is a core skill of mine and I enjoy it; but what I was thinking about getting better at by going to school, was more the rational analysis than the coding. So I do not think I approached this class in quite the right way. Something to think about while getting ready for next term, when I am planning to take "Network Systems W4119".
posted evening of December 9th, 2005: Respond
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Bedtime stories for the past week or so have been chapters of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Reading Chapter 11 tonight (in which the children and Mr. and Mrs. Beaver begin their journey to the Stone Table and meet Father Christmas), I realized the narrative is reminding me a lot of The Phantom Tollbooth. It struck me while Father Christmas was giving his presents to the children, that that was like Milo getting his presents from the Mathemagician and Azaz -- and thinking about it, I am sure Juster modeled his book in some respects on Narnia. I read all of the Narnia books when I was quite young, and possibly had some of them read to me; my memory of them is faint but I do remember liking them. I am reading to Sylvia from a very nice edition that we bought when we visited the Eric Carle Museum in Amherst, MA. A really great discussion of the Narnia books has been taking place over the last few days in the comments to this post on Unfogged.
posted evening of December 9th, 2005: Respond
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(I seem to be remembering more dreams these days.) Last night Nathaniel was planning a long-distance run from New York to Washington, D.C., in protest of the war. "Planning" is too strong, he just decided to do it; and I said I would accompany him. After a few blocks I got tired and said I would get my bike, then double back and ride along with him. When I returned he was also riding, an expensive Italian bike (maybe named Torrino, I'm not sure) that it turned out he had liberated from being parked on the sidewalk. I felt worried and tried to tell him I didn't support that sort of thing. The last image of the dream is me looking at the bike, which still has part of a U-Lock hanging off its front wheel.
posted morning of December 9th, 2005: Respond
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Wednesday, December 7th, 2005
Last night's dream involved charting a course for a day trip. I was pedantically explicating the route, with whiteboard and pointer, to Deedee and my nieces, who were not familiar with it. We were at home in New York City, on the Upper West Side. The plan was to drive first south and west, to a Canadian city, which was identified, but I cannot remember how, nor what we were going to do there. Then we would double back east into Toronto, where I would attend school; then east into Queens where we had some errands. There are a couple of levels of misnaming going on here. The most obvious (to me) is that New Jersey has been dubbed Canada, and Newark Toronto. Then there is the reversal of my day -- instead of living in the city west of Newark and commuting in to New York City for work and school, I am living on the Upper West Side (where my school is IRL). (I believe the unnamed Canadian city west of Toronto was a dream representation of South Orange.) Not sure what all this means but it seems kind of interesting.
posted morning of December 7th, 2005: Respond
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Sunday, December 4th, 2005
...I'm sick in bed with a cold. Hoping it clears up tonight because I've gotta go to work tomorrow -- I was out all last week sitting on a jury. That was a trying experience, which I would like to write up; but I am not going to until I can get to something more than "I went here, I did that, then this happened, and I had another thought" kind of stuff. I watched "The Squid and the Whale" last week and liked it a lot, and started reading Unamuno's "Abel Sanchez". Three fun dates coming up: on Thursday I have my final exam in Operating Systems; next Sunday the Pynchon-l folks are meeting up to watch a puppet theater production of Gogol's "The Nose"; the following Tuesday many commenters from Unfogged are meeting for drinks. All of this seems like stuff I could write about but the creative impulse does not seem to be there.
posted evening of December 4th, 2005: Respond
➳ More posts about Miguel de Unamuno
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Saturday, November 26th, 2005
Last night I was watching a Beatles movie -- I remember at the end of the movie/dream, when John was rushing about trying to produce a film, saying to Belle Waring, "What is this movie? It's better than Let It Be [by which I meant Magical Mystery Tour] but not as good as Help!" -- she agreed but did not know either. I felt aggravated at there being a whole nother Beatles movie about, which I knew nothing of. For part of the film I was onscreen, trying to inveigle my way into hanging out with the lads; my plan was to convince George that I was a friend of John's, and John that I was a friend of George's -- surely I lifted this from the plot of some old sitcom or buddy movie. George and Ringo were rather short, and John and Paul were taller. Everybody was at Coney Island or some similar place, where John was trying to put together a large conceptual art project. I do not remember its precise nature but it involved a lot of props -- scenery, costume jewelry, etc. I was in the process of bullshitting George about my acquaintance with John, when Jim Cross called me on my cell phone -- I pretended it was John and told him to "come on over here, I'm with your friends" (I had suddenly forgotten George and Ringo's names) -- come to think of it this particular sequence had a strong feeling of "I Love Lucy" to it. There was a short sub-dream after this one ended, in which I woke up and feverishly scribbled down the bit about John's conceptual art project on a tablet I kept on my bedside table for the purpose of recording dreams. Ellen woke up too and was reading over my shoulder -- my script was uncharacteristically sloppy and I was misspelling a lot of words. Lots of self-reference in this dream about movies and writing. Ellen said this morning, she thought we should rent "A Hard Day's Night". Update: We are watching "A Hard Day's Night" this evening, and I am surprised at how close the appearances of the Beatles in my dream were to this movie (except for Ringo, who looked more like the Ringo on the cover of Sergeant Pepper's, sans uniform). But: the dream Beatle whom I identified as George, was John; and vice versa, mutatis mutandis. Don't have much clue what this means. Sylvia, in response to the lyric "I know this love of mine, will never die, and I love her": "Sometime you'll die!"
posted morning of November 26th, 2005: Respond
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Friday, November 25th, 2005
Tonight we were driving home from Ellen's parents' place, and Sylvia wanted me to tell her a story. A Just-So story. Getting progressively more specific, she asked me to tell her "The Elephant's Child". Well I didn't really feel into that; but I started off, "In the high and far-off times... the Lion, o best beloved, had no mane." Sylvia immediately reacted -- that's not how it goes, it's an elephant -- but almost as immediately, she saw the possibilities, and she let me make up a story. It was a pretty lame one frankly, and not particularly long; no Kipling I. But as soon as the lion had gotten his mane, Sylvia asked to hear one about how the tiger got his stripes. I saw my opening and asked her to tell that story to me. And she did. It was mostly sound effects -- "In the high and flying times there was a tiger with no stripes. And he crashed into the lion and bang and whoosh and boom and he crashed and..." until he eventually crashed into the Mookoo, who had stripes, and they traded. For the rest of the drive home we were regaled with similar stories.
posted evening of November 25th, 2005: Respond
➳ More posts about Just-So Stories
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This morning I started reading Leslie Savan's Slam Dunks and No-Brainers: Language in Your Life, the Media, Business, Politics, and, Like, Whatever. Ms. Savan is in Ellen's writers' group, and she was signing books at Marshall School's (where Sylvia attends) Library Day. I was interested in the book because of a strongly negative review in the NY Times, by P.J. O'Rourke, who is not the first person I would have thought of to review a book on pop culture. (O'Rourke offers a quintessential lack of self-consciousness with such lines as: "I didn't learn any fresh ripostes, topical quashers or new verbal conveniences from 'Slam Dunks and No-Brainers' except 'What is the dilio?' I take this to mean 'What is transpiring here?' I tried it on my children. They looked at me blankly.")
posted morning of November 25th, 2005: Respond
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Thursday, November 24th, 2005
Hm. Well the bread could have come out better -- I should not try and do it on a schedule, like the plan this morning was to get it done before lunch. I did not let it proof long enough, and it is too dense. Toothsome though -- it is very good dipped in soup, which is what I had for lunch. Update: The loaf of bread which we gave to Michele was actually a lot better -- must have been something to do with variable heat in the oven. Still, they would have been better with a longer proof time.
posted afternoon of November 24th, 2005: Respond
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