READIN

Monday, July 28th, 2003

🦋 Seat height

More work on the window seat tonight, cutting out pieces for the rear half of the frame. I got a little worried when I was cutting the verticals, whether my planned seat height of 16" was adequate. Someone from WoodCentral thought it should be higher; and Bill from CJWA advised me to make the seat level with the window sill -- at 16" it is several inches below the window sill.

I went back upstairs and looked at the space again, and decided to stay with the planned height. Two free-standing chairs that are in the bay window now are 16" high, and it is very comfortable to sit on them. It also simplifies things a great deal not to have to worry about the window sill.

Before dinner, Sylvia was helping me in the wood shop. When I started sawing wood, I offered her to sit on a stool by the bench and watch, but she was not into it. "Can I have a little saw?" caught me a bit off guard -- I generally give her a small, non-dangerous copy of whatever tool I am using; but up till now that has not included tools with sharp edges. Looked around for a bit and then I realized, a mill file is exactly right: it has serrations, makes a rasping noise when you draw it across wood, and is not going to draw blood if you hold it wrong. So I gave it to Sylvia, and she had a good time sawing wood with it until we went up for supper.

posted evening of July 28th, 2003: Respond
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Sunday, July 27th, 2003

🦋 Story stick

Finally began work (in at least a nominal sense) on my window seat. I measured and cut two story sticks tonight, one for the front of the frame (about 95", square ends) and one for the back (about 48", mitered ends), and marked the alignment between them. I think in the end, using story sticks is actually aiming for a higher degree of precision than is needed in this project; and certainly higher than I am going to attain. There are all kinds of things to deal with along the lines of, the floor is not level, the walls are not square; so it would probably make more sense to just work direct from the tape measure. OTOH story sticks is a really useful technique, one that I am not yet totally familiar with; and I build few enough projects that it is good to practice techniques that I want to develop, even if they do not fit exactly to the current project

A "story stick" is just a scrap piece of wood cut to a particular dimension of your project; you use this stick to mark the dimension on the relevant pieces rather than measuring it out on each of them. This helps ensure that pieces which are meant to be sized alike really are, and generally guards against error. In addition, you can mark key points on the story stick, such as mortise locations, to be transfered to the work pieces.

The reason the sizes I give above are approximate, is that I marked and cut the sticks from the actual size of the bay window where the seat will be located, rather than with a tape measure.

posted evening of July 27th, 2003: Respond
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Saturday, July 26th, 2003

🦋 Projects

Here is an inventory of home improvement projects I want to work on:

• Window seat: which I have, ridiculously, still not begun working on; but today I bought some lumber for it and cleaned up my shop, so I have no excuses left...
• Paths in the front yard: I have the slate, I have the tools to cut it; I am hoping to do these paths in the third week of August, when I will be on vacation.
• Path next to the house: Really the same project as the above, I just don't think I have enough slate right now to do it. I want to see how the first path goes before I schedule the others.
• Backyard patio: Again, waiting to see how difficult this slate laying stuff really is.
• Stone at base of side porch: This is going to be pretty complex and I have not really planned yet how it should look.
• New steps for side porch
• Breakfast nook
• Bookcases for Ellen's office: Ellen is breathing down my neck on this so they may come before the breakfast nook.
• Bookcases for living room: I've had an idea for this since we moved here...
• Dining room table: Again, I've had a very clear picture of this kicking around my head for about nine months now.

posted evening of July 26th, 2003: Respond
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Wednesday, July 23rd, 2003

🦋 Translation

In regards to the LanguageHat post on translating Wittgenstein -- I posted in his comments a translation of a line of Rilke that I think is pretty good, and maybe better than the previous translations that have been made of that line -- it was not hard, I used what seems like a pretty obvious device that seems, however, not to have occurred to J.B. Leishman, A.J. Poulin, Steven Cohn, or William Gass. And also I had some interesting ideas about the line of Wittgenstein that is quoted. So this is where I get things out of order and say, "Hey, maybe I've finally found my calling! -- I will translate German literature!"

But wait... what I translated was a single line, or half a line, out of the rather large Duino Elegies -- a work which I have not yet been able to make my way through. Perhaps though, some future exists for me as a translator of epigrams.

I have had some fun over the years translating German stories and other stuff, with varying degrees of success. I would like to reproduce here my best effort thus far, coincidentally also a poem by Rilke:

Der Novembertag

Kalter Herbst vermag den Tag zu knebeln,
seine tausend Jubelstimmen schweigen;
hoch vom Domturm wimmern gar so eigen
Sterbeglocken in Novembernebeln.

Auf den nassen Daechern liegt verschlafen
weisses Dunstlicht; und mit kalten Haenden
greift der Sturm in des Kamines Waenden
eines Totenkarmens Schlussoktaven.

The November Day

Cold autumn can muzzle the day,
silence its thousand jubilating voices;
from the high cathedral tower whimper, so peculiar,
from the steeple whimper, so peculiar,
death bells in November's mist.

On the wet rooftops lies sleeping
a white fog; and with cold hands
the storm inside the chimney's walls strikes
a death-karma's closing octaves.

It loses meter and rhyme which are, yes, rather important in the original -- but I think it communicates Rilke's image and feeling quite well. And I'm happy about preserving much of the word order and separation by line of images. By the way: is anyone else reminded very strongly of the end of Prufrock? -- I refer to the catlike fog which curled around the roof and fell asleep, I think is how it goes.

Update: I changed "high cathedral tower" to "steeple" in response to an accurate observation by LanguageHat that the former was too long. The rhythm is a lot better now. Also I took out a "the" in the following line and replaced it with an "'s". LH does not like the inversion in "lies sleeping/ a white fog", but I do, it's staying in there.

Update 2:I realize a potential major problem with this translation is, I have no clear idea what "a death-karma's closing octaves" means. If you have any thoughts in this regard, please let me know.

posted evening of July 23rd, 2003: Respond
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🦋 Weird Coincidence

This morning I picked up Nuns and Soldiers by Iris Murdoch to read on the train. When I opened it, the first word on page 1 is "Wittgenstein" -- this after LanguageHat had linked yesterday to an essay on translating Wittgenstein by Marjorie Perloff, and quoted a statement (from Culture and Value) that I found most intriguing: "Ich glaube meine Stellung zur Philosophie dadurch zusammengefa�t zu haben, indem ich sagte: Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten." Hmm...

So what do I think of the book? This funny coincidence aside, it does not seem particularly promising at this early point, 15 or so pages in. I'll stick with it a few more days though to see if it picks up. What I read today reminded me a bit of Caleb Carr -- overly mannered, self-consciously cerebral -- but without the action.

posted morning of July 23rd, 2003: Respond
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Monday, July 21st, 2003

🦋 Unity, Duality

I opened The Birth of Tragedy to the first page of the main text (i.e. not counting the Critical Backward Glance or the Foreword to Wagner) and read the following first sentence:

Much will be gained for aesthetics once we have succeeded in apprehending directly — rather than merely ascertaining — that art owes its continuous evolution to the Apollonian-Dionysiac duality, even as the propagation of the species depends on the duality of the sexes, their constant conflicts and periodic acts of reconciliation. [emphasis added, except "ascertaining" is emphasized in the original]

Well that sentence sort of knocked me for a loop. I will confess before I start laying this on you, that what I have come up with bears a bit of a tenuous relationship to this particular book, and is probably more pertinent (if still not that solidly so) to Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. I am going to assume that you have read the latter, or have some knowledge of Jaynes' ideas.

What got me going is Nietzsche's formulation, "apprehending directly — rather than merely ascertaining" -- I have seen similar formulations before and never remarked on them -- the idea is pretty straightforward and familiar to me, and I would think to others as well. But look at the distinction -- what is implied is ('scuse me while I use my big words)¹ a dualistic epistemology. There are two ways of knowing, at "first hand" and at "second hand", and the two are not necessarily closely related or part of the same process. And this is where I want to bring in Jaynes' idea of the bicameral mind.

Ascertaining, "coming to know", is different from knowing because it involves the willful intervention of the conscious mind. If I did not treat my conscious mind as a separate entity, there would be no need for such a distinction. My thinking is that this conscious "other" is the modern vestige of the bicameral voice Jaynes wrote about -- and I believe this fits in with what Nietzsche is writing about as well; I will talk about that when I write about the text.

What interests me right now, is dualism. I have felt for a long time that there is something wrong with dualistic metaphysics, and something right about monistic metaphics; but have never been able to explain to myself the common-sensical appeal of dualism. That is to say, both dualism and monism have attractive features but they will not fit together in the same box. But now I am realizing I can combine a monistic metaphysics with a dualistic psychology and end up with an extremely coherent world-view. (Why I should want such a thing is left open to question.)

---

¹ I write about philosophy as a layman. Some concepts demand technical descriptions, which I use in the hope that I am not embarassing myself with misuse. Here are my understandings of terms I use here or plan to use in the near future:

dualism

This needs an entry of its own, or several; but basically I'm talking about a worldview which splits the universe into two types of being, usually along the lines of "mental" and "physical". Think of Plato's theory of forms as a good representative.

monism

The opposite of dualism, the idea that everything in the universe is in one category or something like that.

metaphysics

A statement or group of statements about what matter the universe is made up of.

psychology

A statement or group of statements about what constitutes the human mind.

epistemology

A statement or group of statements about how the human mind can come to understand the universe.

When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.

-- Humpty-Dumpty

posted evening of July 21st, 2003: Respond
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I read some more of The Birth of Tragedy this weekend and it prompted an almost unprecedented burst of note-taking -- the margins of the first 15 pages are now filled to overflowing. I am thinking a lot about dual and single worldviews -- how I find them attractive and how they are useful -- and intend to write a long post about it this evening.

posted morning of July 21st, 2003: Respond
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Friday, July 18th, 2003

Woo-hoo, Dr. Healy took my advice! -- well okay, I didn't actually recommend Absalom, Absalom -- but I did recommend Faulkner, and no one else did, so I'm going to take the credit...

In this regard, if you are interested in Faulkner, I think the most interesting thing I've written on this web site is my The Hamlet page -- written in the first incarnation of READIN, before it was a blog. I think I captured pretty well the process of coming to understand the meaning of the story.

posted afternoon of July 18th, 2003: Respond

Thursday, July 17th, 2003

Today I finished The Beginning of Spring -- I felt curiously moved by the interaction between Frank and Selwyn in the next-to-last chapter, "curiously" because I could not understand quite how I was reacting. I got a sort of adrenaline rush -- though the book is not by any stretch a thriller -- and I felt totally alienated from Selwyn, much more so than I had throughout the book. Not in a particularly condemnatory way, I just thought, This guy is not from my planet.

The last chapter is total disintegration -- almost like the final third of Gravity's Rainbow in microcosm. And the ending did feel a bit like a tease.

...

A little later I picked up The Birth of Tragedy and started reading Nietzsche's forward to Wagner and wow! realized that it was written in Selwyn's voice. I'm not sure what to make of this realization but there it is. The first few pages of the first chapter are inspiring me to get back up on my Jaynesian hobby horse -- but I will read a bit further before I decide to subject you to that. My favorite quote from these first few pages is,

...but nature itself, long alienated or subjugated, rises again to celebrate the reconciliation with her prodigal son, man.

-- which I like in large part because every time I read it, it seems to me like Janis Joplin is speaking, and giving a different intonation to the final two words than that intended by the translator. (Who is, by the way, Francis Golffing of Bennington College; date of the translation is 1956.)

...

I have the evening to myself, as Ellen and Sylvia are visiting Uncle Kenny on the east end of Long Island; I think I will walk to town and have a drink. I will be joining them tomorrow so no blogging this weekend. (Not that that is unusual or anything, but still.)

posted evening of July 17th, 2003: Respond
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I am nearly finished now with The Beginning of Spring -- I love these Fitzgerald books but they go by so fast! There is a bit of a mysterious feel to it like there is something under the surface that I am not quite getting -- I suspect is has something to do with Nellie's absense. Reference is made to her fairly often and yet she is not a character in the story, nor is it clear how important she is to any of the characters. There is no hint of approval or condemnation for her leaving -- very little even from the characters (who can be excused judgemental attitudes more easily than can the author), none at all from the author. And Selwyn's status is pretty opaque too -- he could be a parody but I don't really think so. I'm having trouble fitting these characters into the standard slots!

posted morning of July 17th, 2003: Respond
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