READIN

Monday, August 25th, 2003

🦋 Yard work

Today was spent digging. My back is sore, so are my legs, and my arms have very little energy left in them. I dug up the entire path in my front yard, about 25' X 1' X 8", and filled it with sand and started laying the stones in it. I had been planning to cut the stones to shape; but that turns out to be very difficult, so I am instead just hunting for stones of roughly the shape I need and using them as is. The beginning of the path looks pretty good, after several tries with different stones.

posted evening of August 25th, 2003: Respond
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Saturday, August 23rd, 2003

We're back in town -- the week was a flurry of fun activity. I would like to write a long post about it but I don't know whether I will or not -- I have other stuff to do this week like building a path in my yard and finishing the window seat. If you are dying to know about it send me a note and I will give that a higher priority.

posted evening of August 23rd, 2003: Respond
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Thursday, August 14th, 2003

🦋 A little time off

I'm off to Vermont -- we'll be in Burlington for a week, visiting Liling and family -- so no updates til I get back next Sunday. Read the sites linked on the left hand side of this page for information and opinion.

posted morning of August 14th, 2003: Respond

Tuesday, August 12th, 2003

I'm backpedalling from my assertion that the author of whose voice Martel's reminds me might be Rushdie -- I think the only reason I seized on Rushdie is the India connection, well and maybe also the accident-while-traveling-from-Asia-to-North-America^* connection. Now the echo I'm hearing is of Vonnegut; equally likely is that Martel has simply an individual, unique voice, one with echoes in it of many authorial influences.

Thinking of Vonnegut leads me into a distinction I wanted to draw between The Life of Pi and Nuns and Soldiers -- Murdoch was annoying me more and more as the book drew on with her absolute refusal to leave anything to my imagination; she insisted on following every germ of description up through its fullness of flower and keep going until it was a withered husk -- I wanted her beautiful descriptions a little less baroque, wanted some hasty sketch in with the luxuriant detail. Martel (from my reading thus far) tends a bit toward the Baroque but reins himself in, lets me figure some of it out.

And I'm going on a hunch here but I think -- if I were to sit down and catalog the books I have loved -- that I would find some inverse correlation between how much detailed description is in the book, and how much I like it -- and I realize as I am writing this that I am phrasing it wrong, I'm not sure just how to put what I'm trying to get at -- if you have a better idea for phrasing let me know.

Vonnegut would be an exception to this rule in a funny way. "Baroque" I guess is not at all a good description for his writing -- but I think he leaves very little to the imagination in his description of his characters' motivations and the consequences of their actions. And yet he was for a long time my very favorite author and is still up there on my (vague) list. I'm not sure quite why -- I have some ideas which I'll try to develop for a post on Vonnegut sometime.

--

^*Update: And now I realize how long it's been since I read The Satanic Verses; I don't think Rushdie's accident even occurred en route from India to America. I'm pretty sure one of the countries involved was Great Britain. Oh well, disregard the whole Rushdie thing.

posted afternoon of August 12th, 2003: Respond
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I found an essay by Martel: How I Wrote The Life of Pi.

posted afternoon of August 12th, 2003: Respond
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Monday, August 11th, 2003

This morning I started reading The Life of Pi by Yann Martel -- my initial impression is that it is going to be a very good read, but probably not something to put on my list of "great books". I like all the characters I've met so far, I like the author's voice (though I think it seems a little derivative, of what I'm not quite sure but maybe Rushdie), the rhythm of syllables, the flow of words.

posted morning of August 11th, 2003: Respond
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Sunday, August 10th, 2003

More progress tonight on the window seat -- it's just inside the bounds of possibility that I will finish it before the end of this month, which would be exciting since we're having a lot of people over on Labor Day, and I would be able to show it off to them. (Assuming it is worthy of being shown off...) Also that would make it a 2-month project from inception to completion, well under my average.

On Saturday my time in the shop was spent replacing a broken step on the staircase to our basement -- I cut it from a good stout piece of oak and rabbetted the ends to fit in the existing stringer. Then I helped Sylvia finish building a bed for her Clifford doll, a project we've been working on for about a week. She helped push the plane and helped turn the brace; we nailed on the legs and it was done. Clifford is sleeping in it now, on the floor nearby Sylvia's bed.

posted evening of August 10th, 2003: Respond
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Saturday, August 9th, 2003

So I finished Nuns and Soldiers yesterday and found it to be a bit of a disappointment. I was really getting into the story through Tim's character and really enjoyed it when he got back together with Gertrude. But then the last hundred pages or so were really downhill -- it seemed to be a lot of extremely self-conscious tying up of loose ends on Murdoch's part. I think the book was supposed to be about Ann Cavidge, whose character is not really too interesting; when Murdoch realized she had written a book more about Tim and Gertrude, she decided to write another couple of chapters to focus on Ann -- bad idea. The penultimate chapter in particular, in which Manfred and Mrs. Mount have their big conversation, was not related to the rest of the book in any organic way -- that is to say, it was tied in to the rest of the book by bringing up plot devices from earlier on -- ones which had not seemed particularly important at the time -- and revealing that Manfred or Mrs. Mount or both had played key roles behind the scenes -- which does not strike me as a very useful method of character development. And the last chapter too, with Ann searching for Daisy and hearing people talking about her, was out of left field.

posted evening of August 9th, 2003: Respond
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Thursday, August 7th, 2003

Geez, lots of stuff going wrong with my house this week -- a short circuit in the basement, water in the basement, a rotten piece of siding, and a broken step in the staircase going down to the basement. Lots of work for this weekend!

posted evening of August 7th, 2003: Respond
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Wednesday, August 6th, 2003

🦋 Here I Go

This is a fun song, by Syd Barrett. It is also quite easy to play on guitar, as I discovered this evening. I cannot guarantee the chords here are accurate but they sound alright. (Woops -- some of those chords were way off -- these should work a little better.)

 C                       G
This is a story bout a girl that I knew
           C                      G
She didn't like my songs and that made me feel blue
           B♭              A           G
She said a big band is far better than you.

    C              Am
She don't rock and roll
G
She don't like it
    C            Am
She don't do the stroll
         G
Well she don't do it right
    C            C7
And everything's wrong
       F           F6
And my patience is gone
       C
When I woke one morning
      G
And remembered this song.
C Am
G
   Kinda catchy,
C Am
G
 I hope 
              C          C7
That she will talk to me now
    F      F6
And even allow me
   C                                 G
To hold her hand and forget that old man.
F                        C  C7
I strolled around to her pad
F                            C  G
Her light was off and that's bad
F                       C        G
Her sister said that my girl was gone
F                       G            
But come inside boy and play play play me a song.

I said yeah
Here I go
She's kinda cute don't you know
That after a while 
Of seeing her smile
I knew we could make it
A-make it in style.
  
So now I've got, all I need
She and I are in love, we've agreed
She likes this song, and my, others too
So now you see my world is...
Because of this tune.
  
What a boon this tune,
I tell you soon we'll be
Lying in bed
Happily wed
And I won't think of that girl
What she said.

The key thing in picking this song is that nearly every time there is a G chord followed by a C chord, you need to end the measure of G by hammering on from an open G string to an A. That will establish the mood of the song -- for everything else you can pick and strum pretty loosely. Keep a nice walking pace, a little faster in the middle of the song.

posted evening of August 6th, 2003: Respond
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