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Tuesday, August 18th, 2009
 Last night, Sylvia and I watched Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea -- very nice. You can see threads from earlier Ghibli movies in it -- Fujimoto is a lot like Howl, and the fish that he uses to retrieve Ponyo are like the gelatinous creatures who serve the Witch of the Waste -- and as Sylvia pointed out, the grumpy old lady at the retirement home is more than a little reminiscent of Sophie. Sosuke's mom made me think of Kiki grown up. (Also, maybe oddly, Ponyo's mother reminded me of the floating dream-giantess from Waltz with Bashir.) The movie is a visual tour de force in a class with Spirited Away, though I did not think the script was quite on that level of greatness; also there were some audio bits that will stick with me. HAM!
posted evening of August 18th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, June 6th, 2009
Well: today, Ellen and I have been married for 16 years. Our marriage can get its driver's license now! Happy Anniversary, Ellen! An interesting thing about this year is, right now it's almost precisely 8 years that Sylvia has been in our family; so this is a tipping point: from now on, more than half of our time as a married couple will be as parents.
posted morning of June 6th, 2009: 5 responses
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Sunday, May third, 2009
Sylvia checked out an old back issue of National Geographic Kids from the library because it has an article about Harry Potter; she walked into the room saying "Hobbits look like monkeys!" (not rabbits...) The magazine has an article about Homo Floresiensis, with an artist's rendering of "what real-life hobbits looked like." <grin>...
posted afternoon of May third, 2009: Respond
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Thursday, April 23rd, 2009
I am having a lot of fun with listening to Sylvia coming up with ways that Bilbo and the dwarves could get out of their scrapes -- if they tell Smaug there are fifteen gallons of gold in Hobbiton, then he will fly there and they will be able to get his treasure away (and the hobbits of the Shire will be safe because Smaug "can't smell hobbits"); or Bilbo could loan the ring to Thorin and Thorin would creep down into Smaug's lair and say something that caused the dragon to freak out and run around in circles, until he bumped his head and was out of commission... She's particularly interested in the ring, coming up with ways it could be used to make the entire party invisible. If it's big enough, two of them could put their pinkies together and squeeze it on. (I have myself been wondering how the ring comes to be the right size for Bilbo's halfling fingers.) Bilbo could go to each of their cells in the elf-king's dungeon as the door was being opened to give them food, and toss them the ring, and they could slip out in a flash. She asked a question tonight that plagues me every time Bilbo or Frodo puts on the ring: do the objects he is holding also turn invisible? I don't see any very consistent approach to this question in the texts -- obviously the ring-wearer's clothing becomes invisible, and any paraphernalia in his pocketses; but at one point there was a reference to Frodo swordfighting while wearing the ring, and the sword was said to be visible*. I am not sure what the rule is, or if it's just a matter of the needs of the story-teller at each particular juncture.
 * (And if I'm remembering right, the sword became invisible once more when he slipped it into its sheath -- how does this make sense?)
posted evening of April 23rd, 2009: 2 responses
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Sunday, April 12th, 2009
We're back in New Jersey; the trip is over, we're back in one piece. This morning (Easter Morning)  dawned bright and clear (and a little chilly), and we took the metro in to DC for one more look at the mall. We walked down to the tidal basin to look at cherry blossoms -- but yesterday's rain had brought most of them down. Walked around the perimeter of the basin and took some photos of the Jefferson Memorial (which I had pretty much forgotten even existed -- the sun shining on its marble dome took my breath away), and then up to the WWII Veterans' Memorial. I was kind of lost in thought as we walked through it and then along the reflecting pool to the Lincoln Memorial, though perhaps not the correct sort of thought -- I was wondering about what my response should be to these national memorials. I love to look at them and to linger over their lines and surfaces, but they don't  generally call to my mind the thing memorialized -- my response is æsthetic, not emotional or patriotic. The Lincoln Memorial seized hold of my eye from all the way down the length of the reflecting pool and would not let go -- the way it was framed in the bright blue sky was just intensely beautiful; walking along that path, watching it get slowly bigger, then up the steps and into the room itself, pretty awe-inspiring. I had my closest to what I'm thinking of as an appropriate "memorial" response when Sylvia and I were standing inside, reading the text of Lincoln's second inaugural address.  (And also, perhaps, a little later when we were walking by the White House, and I found myself thinking of Nixon.) Sylvia turns out to be pretty good at taking pictures of monuments; the one of the Jefferson Memorial above is hers, and so is this one looking up at Lincoln. Lots more pictures at the Family Album. The "inappropriate response" thing hit me the hardest, I think, at the Vietnam War Veterans' Memorial -- I was noticing and eating up the geometry of the thing, the sheen of the marble and the way it reflected the paths and the people and the flowers people had left, rather than reflecting on the memory of that war -- a war which is very close to being within my first-hand memory, though not quite there. Ellen got a beautiful photo of some chrysanthemums that a visiting middle school class had left in a soldier's memory:
posted evening of April 12th, 2009: 1 response
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Saturday, April 11th, 2009
Today, we went to the mall, and the museums. The weather was damp and grey; we spent all morning in the Museum of American History, then had lunch and split up. Ellen went to the Hirschhorn; Sylvia and I spent a couple of hours in the Museum of Natural History, then went to buy a scoop of ice cream and play cards together. (Sylvia is getting better at cassino, beat me at one game.)
The American History museum has a great deal of stuff to see. I really liked the "Art of the Letter" exhibit on illustration, and the science exhibit seemed like it had potential but by that time Sylvia was getting restless and we did not really spend enough time on it to get it. Julia Child's kitchen is great. At the Museum of Natural History, the skeletons and taxidermy are of course the main draw, but I was surprised to see what a nice small insectarium they have.
Now we're back at the hotel, and the sun has come back out. We're going to go take Pixie for her walk along the river. Hope everybody's holiday weekend is going well.
Update: so, we walked not only down to the river but across a little pedestrian bridge we had not known about to Theodore Roosevelt Island, a little bit of wilderness in the middle of the Potomac; and then we walked up this big elevated pathway called Freedom Park. (Funny thing: when we got to the other end of the pathway we found the gate there was locked and we couldn't get out; we found our way out by circling around, and then we saw the sign for "Freedom Park" on the outside of the gate -- Sylvia said, "Funny it's called Freedom Park when we were locked in," which was the exact thing I had been thinking.) I'm enjoying finding our way around Arlington and D.C.
posted afternoon of April 11th, 2009: Respond
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Thursday, April 9th, 2009
The 14th, untitled poem in The Romantic Dogs is only three lines: I dreamt of frozen detectives in the great
refrigerator of Los Angeles
in the great refrigerator of Mexico City.
This introduces a series of five poems about "lost detectives" and "frozen detectives" and "crushed detectives" -- they moan desperately, they stare at their open palms, they are "intent on keeping their eyes open/ in the middle of the dream." These poems -- which are all about dreams -- make me think of Raymond Chandler; there is no stylistic similarity to speak of but I read "detectives" and "Los Angeles" and that is where my mind goes -- and they make me want to read Bolaño's novel The Savage Detectives to find out what his dream-detectives do when they are fleshed out into characters...The fourth poem in this sequence, "The Frozen Detectives," has another painting reference in it: I dreamt of detectives lost
In the convex mirror of the Arnolfinis:
Our generation, our perspectives,
Our models of Fear. I had to look this up -- turns out to be a painting I've seen many times and read a bit about at some point lost to my memory, "The Betrothal of the Arnolfinis," by Jan van Eyck:
An amazing, incredible picture; I don't have much to say about it here but that mirror seems like a fine place for dream-detectives to get lost. Anyway Sylvia was looking over my shoulder as I looked this up and she immediately recognized it as appearing in her book Dog's Night, which is the story of the dogs in all the paintings in an art gallery getting loose after hours one night -- it's a fine book and I recommend it if you are looking for a present for a young kid -- as I recall it's best suited for about a five- or six-year-old.
posted evening of April 9th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, April 5th, 2009
In tonight's reading (Bilbo and company are captured by, escape from, and are recaptured by the goblins who live under the Misty Mountains), Sylvia happened on the question of how tall are Hobbits -- I know Tolkien lays out somewhere in this book their approximate dimensions, but I've forgotten what they are now -- my rule of thumb has been thinking that dwarves  are about Sylvia's height, hobbits about a foot shorter. Sylvia hazarded some guesses and I told her what I thought. Toward the end of the reading, as we were hearing about how Bilbo was better off making his way through the goblins' cave than someone like you or I would be, because hobbits are used to tunneling, when Sylvia asserted that hobbits should look like rabbits. --"But I think they are shaped more like people, just shorter." --"But it's ugly if they look like people. I think they look like rabbits." Hm, well, interesting... and shows that she hasn't got exposed to the cartoon image of Bilbo that is fixed in my head. So we finished the reading, and as I was saying goodnight I asked her what about dwarves, do they look like people or like rabbits? -- And got in response a long, elaborate description of a cartoon dwarf à la Snow White. I'm finding this kind of funny -- a word gets fixed in our heads with the cartoon we watch describing it.
 Update: This is kind of funny -- the eagle that carries Bilbo from the ærie to the Carrock, also says he thinks the hobbit looks like a rabbit. "Don't pinch!" said his eagle, "You need not be frightened like a rabbit, even if you rather look like one. It is a fair morning with little wind. What is finer than flying?"
posted evening of April 5th, 2009: 3 responses
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Tuesday, March 31st, 2009
So here is the nice thing about being a kid -- you don't have to know that Gandalf is "not human" (as I said in comments below -- he seems to me to be without any kind of flaw that would make him human, reachable); so when Sylvia heard him talking with Thorin at the end of Chapter 2, saying that he had been warned about the trolls by elves he met on the road and had come back to make sure the dwarves were not in any danger, the first thing she thought was, "I bet he's just saying that, trying to take all the credit." Now internally I think, well, that doesn't make sense -- Gandalf's character is not that of a seeker after undeserved credit, plus what he's saying matches up with the plot of the rest of the book -- but I love Sylvia for giving me a different window on Gandalf's character, reminding me that I should be suspicious of his motives as much as those of anyone else in the book.
posted evening of March 31st, 2009: 7 responses
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Monday, March 30th, 2009
Two things about The Hobbit, which I started reading aloud with Sylvia last night: It is a whole lot of fun to read aloud, with opportunities for doing new voices at every turn; and it seems like it will be kind of fun to be reading in parallel with The Fellowship of the Ring. I'm just at the point in Fellowship, where the party is leaving Rivendell; in a lot of ways this seems like the real beginning of the story, with the first half of the book having been a prologue. I'm interested in Frodo, Sam, and Strider; none of the other travellers has really got my attention yet. (Besides Gandalf of course; but he distinctly does not strike me as a real character, as a human.) Pippin and Merry both have had moments but they are generally in the background so far.
posted evening of March 30th, 2009: 4 responses
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