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Sunday, March 15th, 2009
 How I come to be reading The Hobbit now: Sylvia and I are pretty close to finishing up The Amber Spyglass now; I was casting about for what book to read next and realized that His Dark Materials is reminding me in some key ways of Tolkien's trilogy. That made me think about how much I had loved The Hobbit as a kid -- if memory serves I loved it much more deeply than the trilogy, it seems like I read The Lord of the Rings less whole-heartedly, with an eye mostly toward keeping up with my D&D-enthusiast friends... Anways -- so I asked Sylvia if she would like to read this next, she said she would (unsurprising -- she's really getting into fantasy novels nowadays), and I thought I would look through it beforehand.
And I'm falling in love all over again. I had forgotten how attractively witty and cultured Tolkien's narrative voice is -- it reminds me a lot of Grahame's voice in The Wind in the Willows. I wonder if this is true of the trilogy as well -- I expect it is, and suddenly I'm looking forward to rereading those books, and thinking I might get a lot more out of them than I did back in my childhood.
posted morning of March 15th, 2009: 4 responses
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Friday, February 20th, 2009
Sylvia and I read Chapter 18 of The Amber Spyglass tonight, in which Lyra and Will enter the world of the dead; and I found myself utterly blown away by Pullman's creativity. There has been a lot to love about this series of books; but I think the transition here from the multiple universes of living reality to the world of the dead might be the single greatest bit of genius so far. It's believable and elegant and not kitsch, it seems like Dante writing science fiction. -- Wait no, that's not quite what I mean; I mean something more like "a great science fiction author writing the Inferno." Sylvia impressed me last night when we were reading about Mary Malone among the mulefa, by picking up on the fact that what Mary was building was going to be "the amber spyglass" -- she figured this out before I did.
posted evening of February 20th, 2009: 2 responses
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Sunday, February 15th, 2009
GarcÃa Lorca's poetry (in snippets) makes Sylvia giggle. We're sitting together, I'm skipping around reading some of his lines in Spanish while she looks at the Spanish and at the translation, identifying some words she knows (verde, caballo, negro...) and putting forth silly interpretations for the lines and groups of lines.
Con la sombra en la cintura
ella sueña en su baranda
verde carne, pelo verde,
con ojos de frÃa plata.
"But why would someone's eyes be cold?..." (Note: I just found a pretty sweet flamenco version of this poem, "Romance Sonambulo", on Spanish TV.)Los caballos negros son
Las herraduras son negras Leads to lots of talk about black horses.La aurora de Nueva York tiene
cuatro columnas de cieno
y un huracán de negras palomas
que chapotean las aguas podridas. "That means four of the five boroughs have mud, and one out of five has black doves and water -- birds from the other four have to go to that one to get water." (And wow! there are just a ton of GarcÃa Lorca-inspired performances on YouTube. Here is an Andalusian jazz ballet interpretation of "Aurora de Nueva York.") She is very taken with "cieno", which is translated in a subsequent poem as "slime", and here as "mud". "If they're talking about four boroughs, it means mud, if they talk about one it means slime."
 Also: La aurora de Nueva York gime
Por las inmensas escaleras
buscando entre las aristes
nardos de anguistia dibujada "That means four of the five boroughs have stairways. I want to be in the one with elevators."
posted morning of February 15th, 2009: Respond
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Yesterday I was talking with Ellen about Elizabeth Costello, how Elizabeth is herself a novelist and there is a lot of discussion of reading and writing in the book; Sylvia interjected, "It would be cool if there was a book that had someone reading the book that had someone reading the book that had..." Nice!  We talked about mirrors for a little while. And then, this morning we were looking at xkcd's Sierpinski Valentine, and checked out Wikipædia's article about Sierpinski Triangles (which has a nice animation) -- I asked Sylvia if she knew what infinity meant, she said "Yeah, like something that never ends." And she made reference back to the book she had been talking about yesterday -- I found it pretty exciting that she would make this connection.
And this is funny: apparently David Foster Wallace made the claim that Infinite Jest is structured like a Sierpinski triangle.
posted morning of February 15th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, February 8th, 2009
 Ellen uploaded a set of pictures of the Girl Scout troop at the Children's Aid office. (Click the picture for more.)
 Update: Ellen's write-up of the project is on Patch.com.
posted evening of February 8th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, February 7th, 2009
This morning we went over to the NJ Children's Aid and Family Services office in South Orange, for the culmination of a project Ellen has been working on with Sylvia's girl scout troop for a couple of months now, the Bright Red Bookcase. The girls collected children's books and painted a bookcase, and this morning we brought them over to the Children's Aid office along with some flyers about reading to children and signs encouraging kids to take a book home. The staff of the office were very happy to have the books on hand for their clientèle, and the girls were excited about the project. It was great being around all that enthusiasm for a little while! Ellen is writing the project up for Patch.com, I'll post some pictures when we upload them.
posted morning of February 7th, 2009: Respond
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Wednesday, January 28th, 2009
I commented at The Great Whatsit today that I was not finding the second and third books of the His Dark Materials series quite as  overwhelmingly great as I found the first. But as of the reading I did with Sylvia tonight -- chapter 2 of The Amber Spyglass -- I want to take that back, and just say the middle book is a lull between two masterpieces. The beauty of the narrative here is just enough to take my breath away. I am realizing that these books could be made into a truly fantastic series of movies if only the studios were not so attached to live action and CGI -- I think they are a perfect match for anime (or maybe I mean "for Studio Ghibli", which is about the sum total of my exposure to anime). Reading about Will talking to Balthamos and Baruch, especially the fight against Metatron, was bringing visions of Spirited Away flickering across my mind. Metatron is even a perfect name for an anime bad guy! I also noticed a couple of coincidences of imagery with Cien Años de Soledad, which I take as a very good sign -- I am absorbing enough of the book even without knowing the language well, for it to be on my mind when I'm not reading it. When the narrator noted that Will's knife could cut between worlds but could not "abolish distance within worlds," I immediately flashed on Melquíades' statement that "la ciencia ha eliminado las distancias"; and when Will's boots were sinking into the soft sand in the hot, humid new world, my mind jumped to "aquel paraíso de humedad y silencio,... donde las botas se hundían en pozos de aceite humeante..."
posted evening of January 28th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, January 25th, 2009
Tonight Sylvia and I started in on the final book of the His Dark Materials trilogy, The Amber Spyglass. Just at the outset I noticed Mrs. Coulter's monkey dæmon doing two things that I hadn't seen other characters' dæmons doing before this. One is eating; when the monkey is introduced on the second page, he is picking apart pinecones to get the sweet nuts. Dæmons have never been shown yet eating; I was sort of assuming that as spiritual beings (or as expressions of their humans' spirits) they did not need to. The other is acting as a sort of babelfish -- when Ama tries to speak to Mrs. Coulter in her own (unspecified but not fully understood by Coulter) language, Mrs. Coulter instead has Ama's dæmon speak to the monkey, and there is no linguistic barrier to this kind of communication. So, huh. These are two pretty big deals, especially the second, and I wonder why neither one has come up in the trilogy to date. The language thing would be one (incomplete) way of answering the question I asked earlier about communication in this world. But if dæmons can do that, why are there language barriers at all? Possibly (a) only the golden monkey can do this -- he has repeatedly been characterized as different from other dæmons -- or (b) only Mrs. Coulter knows that dæmons can do this.
posted evening of January 25th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, January 24th, 2009
Ok, this was pretty funny. Sylvia's slightly younger friend Jenny is staying over tonight; they are off in Sylvia's room getting ready for bed while Ellen and I sit in the next room over. Overheard:
Sylvia: You know how Obama's thing is "Yes we can"?
Jenny: Yeah...
Sylvia: Well, (singing) "Bob the Builder, can we fix it, Bob the Builder, yes we can!"
Jenny: (Gasp!) -- They're making fun of Obama!
I'm sure this joke has been made by a lot of people over the past year; it was hilarious to hear Sylvia and Jenny hitting on it for themselves. (And funny, of course, assuming I'm reading Jenny's reaction correctly, to think of the "Bob the Builder" theme song as being a take-off on the Obama campaign slogan.)
posted evening of January 24th, 2009: 2 responses
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Saturday, January 17th, 2009
Sylvia gets her moment in the spotlight! The News-Record photographer came into her school last week and took a few shots of her lunchtime knitting club -- here she is working with a couple of friends.
posted morning of January 17th, 2009: Respond
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