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Thursday, December 15th, 2005
A few weeks ago I served on a jury, hearing an aggravated assault case in Newark. I have been wanting to write a narrative of the experience, this is a first stab at that. I was standing, 3 hours into our deliberations, banging on the table and yelling at juror #8 that he had to listen to what I was saying, instead of just mindlessly repeating his same refrain, which was essentially "He [the defendant], is not a criminal, so I cannot find him guilty." I was kind of on edge for the rest of the day, and yelled or almost-yelled at #8 once more that afternoon. That was not the proper way to go about juroring, I knew even as I was doing it and realized more clearly on my way to jury duty the following morning, to resume deliberations. I had been telling myself a story, during the testimony and closing statements, which pitted me against the sleazy defense lawyer; now that the testimony had ended I was transferring the antagonist role onto a group of 3 jurors, with #8 as their ringleader, who wanted to find the defendant innocent. When I listen to the above paragraph -- and when I understood that morning what I had been doing -- it makes me seem really unsympathetic and like somebody I would read about who is going about his jury duty from a prejudiced and ignorant standpoint. But wait! -- thing is, the defendant was guilty. And the defense lawyer was sleazy. I take the fact of our eventual guilty verdict as vindication of my thinking the defendant was guilty, if not of my attitude during testimony. And going back to my memory, I believe that I can separate out the prejudiced personal narrative from what I was actually hearing, and feel like the verdict was proper. On the second day of deliberations, things were a lot calmer. I apologized to #8, and he was gracious. I made what I think was my biggest contribution to the deliberations, which was to say: I think almost all of the events surrounding the punch, which were called into question by various bits of evidence, are extraneous -- if the punch was thrown in self defense, the defendant is not guilty of assault, and if it was not, then he is guilty of assault. I was able to get every other juror (including #8) to agree to that formulation, which meant that what we were deliberating about was brought into much clearer focus -- a lot of the tension of the first day had been caused by going around and around on the truth or falsehood of a lot of details which, because the evidence did not clearly support or refute, people were able to personalize and build narratives around. [That sentence is not clear and needs some editorial work.] Agreeing to my formulation made #8's notion that "he is not a criminal" recede a bit, so it was more about the facts in evidence. More later.
posted evening of December 15th, 2005: Respond
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Tuesday, December 13th, 2005
Microdream: As I arrive at work in the morning, an invisible claw closes around me and lifts me cradled into the air, where Ben Wolfson or a hologram of him is standing next to me and reading an announcement from my dentist, instructing me to remember to come to my appointment this morning (which I had forgotten). But the appointment is only minutes away and I, Country Doctor-like, do not see how I can possibly make it in time. I wake up thinking, "Oh crap, do I have a dentist appointment this morning?" But I do not; the dream must have had something to do with tonight's Unfogged meetup (where Ben will not be) -- not sure what though.
posted morning of December 13th, 2005: Respond
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Saturday, December 10th, 2005
We just got back from the movie -- it was both unexpectedly delightful, and disappointing. Nice how they adapted it to the screen -- I was really surprised and happy that there was no voice-over. But the dialogue was a bit weak, really -- that it was anachronistic was the least of its problems. A high percentage of lines in the script did not ring true as what that character would say at that moment; and a related problem was that the characters were not very well developed. I'm not sure whether to blame this on the writers or the actors, who were (with the exception of Georgie Henley as Lucy) not great. This is coming out sounding a little like a pan; but I enjoyed the movie. It had a lot of weaknesses but it communicated well the joy and immediacy that is in Lewis' books. And the problems with the script were mostly in the first half of the film -- in general the second half (starting about when the children get to Aslan's encampment) was much stronger, and the cast really came together and started convincing me. One niggling problem: I have always thought of the Pevensie children as younger than they were portrayed in this movie. Like I would have thought Lucy was about 4 or 5 and Peter no older than 13 -- the characters here were from 8 or so to 16 or so. And I'm not sure why they tied the movie in to the historical moment so strongly with the first scene, of the Pevensie family in their bomb shelter. It might be a good idea to do so but I think it would have required some development in the rest of the movie to ring true -- otherwise it just seems tacked on. (It knocked Sylvia for a bit of a loop; she thought we were watching a preview for a different movie until the scene about 5 minutes in, where the children come to the Professor's house.) The visual effects and animations were in general great -- Aslan in particular, breathtaking. The only exception was the bit where the children are on the breaking ice in the stream, which looked pretty cheesy to me. (And note: this is something that was not in the book, appears to have been added in just to show what cool tricks they could do with CGI. That seems to me like a mistake.)
posted evening of December 10th, 2005: Respond
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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
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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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