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Sunday, November 18th, 2007
It has happened to all of us: one day, one ordinary day when we imagine we're making our routine rounds in the world with ticket stubs and tobacco shreds in our pockets, our heads full of news items, traffic noise, troublesome monologues, we suddenly realize we are already someplace else, that we are not actually where our feet have taken us.
-- The New Life
My reaction to this line is sort of characteristic of how I've been reading The New Life -- I'm reading along sort of lacksadaisically, thinking about different things without focus,* and then I stumble on something like this that just blows me away. What I take away from this reading may be a disjointed collection of beautiful quotes.
*I'm trying to reconcile this with my reaction to the opening passage and have not quite figured out how to yet... The whole opening couple of pages was a moment of genius but I haven't quite figured out how to read the book as a whole yet.
posted afternoon of November 18th, 2007: Respond
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Saturday, November 17th, 2007
The latest mix tape from the Apostropher is online! Good stuff. And once again, totally new territory for me.
posted evening of November 17th, 2007: Respond
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Janis gave me a copy of Before the Flood a while ago and I just recently spent some time really listening to it; and I gotta say I think it is not such a great album. That surprised me because I've been listening more and more to The Band lately and really loving their sound, and especially loving The Basement Tapes -- so I was expecting and hoping for that kind of sound. Instead this record sounds like weak Dylan. Guess they couldn't get it back together.
posted evening of November 17th, 2007: Respond
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Tonight, Sylvia started to pick up on the class thing in Harriet the Spy -- first noticing that Ole Golly is not Harriet's parent, and asking me to explain about nannies; then when Harriet was talking to their cook Sylvia said "They're rich, right?" And that came up again when one of Harriet's classmates was dropped off by a limosine. -- It seems like it's a pretty obviously major feature of the book, and kudos to Sylvia for picking up on it, but I'm wondering a little why my memory of the book would include none of this -- it's all just a fun story of Harriet running around spying on people and then having some trouble when she gets discovered. Was I dense? Hmm...
posted evening of November 17th, 2007: Respond
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Continuing our Almodóvar festival -- we watched The Flower of my Secret tonight. A really beautiful, sensual movie. I guess I don't think it's on the level of Volver and All About my Mother, quite, though it does anticipate both of them.
posted evening of November 17th, 2007: Respond
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Reading this book is a puzzle -- every time I set it down & then pick it back up I am having to start from the beginning, reciting the words like poetry trying to burn them into my consciousness, "trying to find my path" into the book. -- Because I am trying to understand the transition from narrator reading, p. 1-7, to narrator with his mother on p 8 and outside on p 9 ff.
posted evening of November 17th, 2007: Respond
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Friday, November 16th, 2007
Tonight for bedtime stories, Sylvia and I started on Harriet the Spy, by Louise Fitzhugh. Looks interesting! -- I read this book, probably twice or three times, when I was 9 or 10 years old; I remember really liking it but not too much about it. For instance I had totally forgotten the class differentials in the book -- perhaps I just didn't understand them as a kid -- but already in the first few pages we are seeing what an important role class will play, as wealthy Harriet is brought out to Far Rockaway to meet her nanny's mother and she and Sport seem totally alien to the situation.
posted evening of November 16th, 2007: Respond
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Thursday, November 15th, 2007
Check out the opening passage of Pamuk's The New Life. I am going to quote it at length a bit because it's blowing my mind:
I read a book one day and my whole life was changed. Even on the first page I was so affected by the book's intensity I felt my body sever itself and pull away from the chair where I sat reading the book that lay before me on the table. But even though I felt my body dissociating, my entire being remained so concertedly at the table that the book worked its influence not only on my soul but on every aspect of my identity. It was such a powerful influence that the light surging from the pages illumined my face; its incandescence dazzled my intellect but also endowed it with brilliant lucidity. This was the kind of light within which I could recast myself; I could lose my way in this light; I already sensed in the light the shadows of an existence I had yet to know and embrace...
So it was that as I read my point of view was transformed by the book, and the book was transformed by my point of view. My dazzled eyes could no longer distinguish the world that existed within the book from the book that existed within the world... I began to understand that everything the book had initially whispered to me, then pounded into me, and eventually forced on me relentlessly had always been present, there, lying deep in my soul.
This is making me think -- I had already been thinking, based on some essays in Other Colors -- that Pamuk reads books the same way I do. (Irony alert -- that is just a rephrasing of what Pamuk is saying I should say -- but I'm sticking with it.) This passage that I'm quoting is what I wanted to say before about identifying with a text. (Well I should hasten to add -- I've never experienced it quite as intensely as the narrator is doing here -- but the idea's the same.) I'm not actually sure if I'm going to keep on reading this book right now -- but it is a really nice piece of information to have on hand.
posted evening of November 15th, 2007: Respond
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Miriam passed the bar exam!
posted morning of November 15th, 2007: Respond
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Wednesday, November 14th, 2007
So I'm coming up on 900 posts on this blog, in the past 4½ years. (And some number of "posts" in the previous 3½, when the site was something proto-blog-like, but there is not any easy way of counting them.) Here is how the activity breaks down year by year:
+--------------+----------+
| year(posted) | count(*) |
+--------------+----------+
| 2003 | 184 |
| 2004 | 175 |
| 2005 | 160 |
| 2006 | 135 |
| 2007 | 232 |
+--------------+----------+(Remembering that 2003 was not a full year for the purposes of this discussion) -- it seems like this last year is about the most active since I started blogging -- this becomes particularly noticeable when you consider that I posted very little in the first few months of this year. -- Indeed October '07 has half again as much activity as the next-most-active month, which is August '07; four of the ten most-active months are in 2007. This has been the latest installment of obsessing over meaningless statistics; tune in next month for popular Google search referrals.
posted evening of November 14th, 2007: Respond
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