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Tuesday, October 16th, 2007
"Words are given us to understand each other, even if not completely," Fritz went on in great excitement. "And to write poetry." "Yes, that's so, Justen, but you mustn't ask too much of language. Language refers only to itself, it is not the key to anything higher. Language speaks, because speaking is its pleasure and it can do nothing else." "In that case, it might as well be nonsense," objected Karoline. "Why not? Nonsense is only another language."
Now I want to read some of Novalis' writing and see how (if) the sentiment Fitzgerald has him expressing here is played out in his poetry. I'm pretty sure I have a book of his work upstairs with the other remnants of my ill-remembered days spent studying German literature. The sentence, "Nonsense is only another language," seems interesting to me. On one hand it is obviously incorrect -- I think a root characteristic of language is, that it can "make sense", whereas clearly nonsense does not "make sense", not if it is doing its job properly. Meaningful nonsense is not nonsense in any fully realized sense of the word. (grin.) But, but, it is good fun to babble incoherently, recording the words and then poring over them trying to divine the meaning.
Michael Hofman uses this same phrase as the title for his NY Times review of The Blue Flower.
posted morning of October 16th, 2007: Respond
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Monday, October 15th, 2007
I'm interested in sweetening up the look of this blog by changing the fonts used, and wonder if anybody reading has advice about what fonts to use. Here is what I'd like to do: - The three sections of the blog -- left sidebar, body, and right sidebar -- should be distinguished from each other. My thinking was that the left sidebar should be a slightly smaller font size, and maybe the right also, and possibly a different named font. But I don't have a designer's eye of what named font looks good where.
- The headers should be a different font from the text, I was thinking they should be sans-serif.
That's pretty much it; I will check what wordpress stylesheets look like, since I tend to really like their presentation. I need to learn how to use css, which seems pretty easy but which I have been resisting up until now. Anyone got advice for me?
Update: Hmm... well that's something anyway. Plagiarized some styles from wordpress, added a couple of my own. Still not totally sure how this thing works.
posted evening of October 15th, 2007: Respond
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Beginning on page 207, Wendy Steiner's Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in 20th-Century Art features some discussion of the philosophy of being in The Blue Flower.
posted afternoon of October 15th, 2007: Respond
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Sunday, October 14th, 2007
Bob and I went over to Menzel Violins in Livingston today and listened to Eugene Chrysler's band. Great stuff -- Skip, playing the pedal steel, was just phenomenal, and the other musicians were excellent too. Unfortunately no fiddler was with them.
posted evening of October 14th, 2007: Respond
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We can sing beneath his window, "We know what is wrong with your system....There is no place in it, no place for love." I seem to have a poor memory for schools of thought. Like right now I am reading The Blue Flower, about the life of German Romantic poet Novalis; and I find that I can summon up only a very hazy memory of the history of German Romanticism, which I know I studied in two classes in college; and furthermore that I don't even really know what kind of thinking "Romanticism" is. (I think it must be similar to "Idealism" which I have a little bit of a handle on, but I'm not sure how they differ.*) I remember when I was 18, that my sort-of-mentor Jim Higgs told me I was a romantic thinker, and that I read some Romantics to try and grasp what he was telling me about myself. But if I ever was successful in that it has escaped me in the meantime. So probably I should school myself a bit in the meanings of terms, as I approach this book. The book seems like a lot of fun. I am liking the descriptions of Friedrich's family and school life, and nodding and smiling with recognition at certain passages -- notably the youthful Fritz's insistence that "the body is not flesh, but the same stuff as the soul," and later his statement to Schlegel that "the golden age would return, and that there was nothing evil in the world."
*Interestingly Novalis is the top hit that comes back from a Wiki search for "Romantic idealism"...
posted evening of October 14th, 2007: 3 responses
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Saturday, October 13th, 2007
Janis and Bob and I have been jamming together for about 4 years now; today we are playing our first actual gig! At the Meeker St. block party, starting in about an hour. Exciting, we have a set list and everything!
posted morning of October 13th, 2007: Respond
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Friday, October 12th, 2007
So in my log I see a bunch of requests today for GET blog/?k=<keyword> \'\'
and(char(94)+user+char(94))>0 and
\'\'\'\'=\'\'
where <keyword> is one of the keywords that links exist to on the site; and also I see that my script translated those requests to
<keyword> \\\'\\\'
and(char(94)+user+char(94))>0 and
\\\'\\\'\\\'\\\'=\\\'\\\' before passing them to the database. So the queries just returned empty sets instead of wreaking whatever havoc they might have wruck unescaped. Yay PHP! Yay careful programming!(Note: but while editing this post I realized there is a different kind of escaping that you have to do when you are writing to forms -- the < and > signs were translating to markup in my inputs. Funny I never ran into that problem on the old site, you wouldn't think it would be a PHP-vs.-ASP distinction.) Update: So what do I have to do to ban these guys from my site? I tried putting the following in my httpd.conf: <Directory (path to root of my site)>
order allow,deny
deny from (IP)
deny from (IP)
allow from all
</Directory>
and restarting the service, but that does not seem to have done it.Another Update: I think I got it: the Directory directive in apache2/sites-available/default is overriding the directive in httpd.conf because httpd.conf is included first. I think I just need to take the default directive out.
posted evening of October 12th, 2007: Respond
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Thursday, October 11th, 2007
Doris Lessing has won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. I've only read her The Golden Notebook (if memory serves), though I have some of her other books on my shelf. Christine recommends me to read the Children of Violence series.
posted afternoon of October 11th, 2007: Respond
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Wednesday, October 10th, 2007
Sylvia is really interested in transposing music. Today we were working on Andantino, she was playing it in in G, D, and A, moving back and forth -- we were only doing the first half of the song, which is all on two strings, so she was able to do this without moving out of first position. It's pretty neat to watch, like she just discovered you could do that -- I think influenced by watching me play violin tunes on the viola -- anyway it seems like it will be a really good way of building her musical ear.
posted evening of October 10th, 2007: Respond
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Tuesday, October 9th, 2007
OMG! Comet in Moominland is being produced in NYC! And Ellen is trying to get us tickets! Got my fingers crossed, that would be too much fun. ...And rats, it is sold out. Oh well, some other time I guess. (Kind of a nuisance for the Times to review the play at the end of its run rather than near the beginning...)
posted morning of October 9th, 2007: Respond
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