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Sunday, March 23rd, 2008
So I've been having this idea, one which I've posted about here several times, that the most important part of my experience of reading Pamuk is a conscious identification of myself with the author and with the narrators. Now I've also posted in the past about how I love singing along with the music I listen to. Hmm -- singing along is a kind of identification with the singer, right? I wonder... I also wonder whether my identification-with-the-author idea is already ground well trodden among people who think professionally about novels. Reckon I have probably alienated most of the people I could ask about that.
posted evening of March 23rd, 2008: 2 responses
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Aargh... Some water is dripping out of a pipe next to the combination boiler/water heater in our basement. It is not dripping out super-fast, but probably a few cups every hour, which is a lot in the scheme of things that is our plumbing. The pipe appears to be the output of the water heater portion of the mechanism; as near as I can tell it is a pressure relief valve, described in detail on this page; the likely candidates for causing the leak are - That the valve itself is broken (but this seems unlikely since a new valve was probably put in when the boiler was replaced a few years ago);
- that the water pressure regulator* attached to the main water line coming into our house is broken (this seems more plausible);
- that the main water supply pressure for our block has really unusually high pressure today (possible I guess?); or
- that something done during our bathroom renovation broke the system somehow (seems likely and unnerving, except I can't see any logical way that would work -- the water pressure is an input to the system not at all dependent on the devices attached to the system when they are all shut off.)
It is definitely pressure -- if I turn on a hot water tap upstairs, the leak stops. (Should check whether a cold water tap has this effect, but I think it will.) Of course we cannot get a plumber on Easter Sunday; I guess I will shut off the water coming into the house this evening before we go to bed, and turn it back on in the morning.
 ... Yes, the cold water tap has the same effect. The leak seems to be getting faster, too! Hopefully it will be a simple repair; we'll find out tomorrow, I guess. I'm glad we're doing a lot in the basement these days; I think there have been periods like late last year, where this would have gone undetected for a couple of days.
*(The next day: we don't actually have a water pressure regulator, which is the source of the problem, in combination with the third bullet point above. I was assuming there was one since the linked article made it look like this was standard.)
posted evening of March 23rd, 2008: Respond
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Saturday, March 22nd, 2008
Another jarring moment of recognition in The Black Book -- in the story Galip is telling in chapter 15, about a Turkish bachelor who obsessively loves Proust, he says, "like all Turks who come to love Western authors that no one else reads, he went from loving Proust's words to believing that he himself had written them." I'm a little blown away by this identity-with-the-author thing that I've come up with to describe my experience reading Pamuk -- it is very much Pamuk's own trope; but it seems to me I started talking about it before I had happened on Pamuk's use of it. This probably means he is describing a universal experience -- and thinking back now that I've constructed this way of relating to the book, I can see how it applies to some reading I've done in the past -- the coincidence just seems pretty shocking to me, that I would hit on it to talk about this particular author, whose work turns out to contain it.
 I am a little curious about whether each of the alternate chapters which is a column by Celâl, is the column which is printed on the day of the following chapter. This would mean that each of the narrative chapters takes place a day after the previous one, which I'm not sure that would work. ... And indeed it does not work: Chapter 17 takes place immediately after Chapter 15. Oh well, another hypothesis down the drain.
posted evening of March 22nd, 2008: Respond
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Friday, March 21st, 2008
No need to read Ibn Khaldun; those charged with this task would quickly guess that the only way forward was to rip away our memories, our past, our history, leaving us with nothing but our misfortunes.... But later on, the Western bloc's "humanitarian wing" had declared this reckless initiative too dangerous...and switched to a gentler approach that promised longer-lasting results: the new plan was to erode our collective memory with movie music.Church organs, pounding out chords of a fearful symmetry, women as beautiful as icons, the hymnlike repetition of images, and those arresting scenes sparkling with drinks, weapons, airplanes, designer clothes -- put all these together and it was clear that the movie method proved far more radical and effective than anything missionaries had attempted in Africa and Latin America. (These long sentences of his were well-rehearsed, Galip decided. Who else had had to hear them, his neighbors? His colleagues at work? His mother-in-law? The people sitting next to him in a dolmuş?) It was in the Şehzadebaşı and Beyoğlu movie theaters that they set their plan into action; before long, hundreds of people had gone utterly blind. Viewers who sensed the terrible plot that was being perpetrated on them and rebelled with angry cries were quickly silenced by policemen and mad doctors. When the children of today showed a similar reaction -- when they were blinded by the proliferation of new images -- they were fobbed off with new prescription glasses. But there were always a few who refused to go away quietly. A while ago, he'd been walking through another neighborhood not far from here around midnight when he'd seen a sixteen-year-old boy pumping futile bullets into a movie billboard -- and immediately he'd understood why. Another time, he'd seen a man at the entrance to a theater with two cans of gasoline swinging from his hands; as the bouncers roughed him up, he kept demanding that they give him his eyes back -- yes, the eyes that could see the old images.... We'd all been blinded, every last one of us, every last one...
(Want to write about this quotation in a minute, but I am being called away by Sylvia to read Pippi Longstocking just at the moment. Back in a little while.)
 A few observations: Rüya's ex-husband's (I believe he has not been named, though a few of his aliases surfaced in a previous chapter) sort of anti-semitic rant weaves uncertainly between weird craziness and poetry -- reminds me in a way of the Islamicists in Snow. Galip's parenthetical aside is just masterful. (There is a similar aside a few paragraphs later where Galip describes the man as "sinking into the pages of his encyclopedic metaphor".) I like the coincidence here with Blindness -- I wouldn't necessarily give it a whole lot of weight but I think this passage might be a good one to have in mind when rereading Saramago. Also -- not sure if this is valid but I see vaguely a reflection of the remarks that Jeremiah Wright is being pilloried for these days.
posted evening of March 21st, 2008: Respond
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They're ready to go now -- here's some of what the new generation is listening to (well at least based on communication from my nephew Cole) -- Ginny is, a punk rocker! Cole's a budding wizard rocker, he's learning to play bass.
posted afternoon of March 21st, 2008: Respond
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The open mic went ok. We played three songs; I thought we did really well on the two songs that Jerry sang ("Bed on Your Floor" and "K.C. Moan"), but had trouble keeping in time together when I sang "John Hardy was a Desperate Man". Not sure exactly what to make of that -- I want to work more on that, it's one of my favorite songs. The space is nice and there was a decent crowd. A couple of really good guitarists. Too many poorly-done Beatles covers, alas. My favorite performance for utter weirdness, was the tightly-wound guy strumming guitar and singing "All Through the Night".
posted afternoon of March 21st, 2008: Respond
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Thursday, March 20th, 2008
I heard a segment about Parsi New Year (which is today! Happy New Year!) on NPR this morning. (Chuckled a little when Freddy Mercury was mentioned as a famous Parsi.) It made me think, how many cultures with different New Year's days are there? Presently active and celebrating, it can't be that many -- less than 20 I would think offhand -- but historically there must be hundreds. So possibly every day of the calendar could be named as the New Year's day of some culture.
 (Thinking further: boy, the vernal equinox is an excellent day to celebrate the New Year.)
posted morning of March 20th, 2008: Respond
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We're playing tonight at Tierney's, in Montclair -- if you're in the neighborhood, come listen!
posted morning of March 20th, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, March 18th, 2008
Listening to "Sweet to Mama" in the car today, and then replaying it in my head all day at my desk. And thinking, that's really a song I could play pretty well on my violin. I came up with a nice-sounding rhythm part consisting of an eigth-note rest followed by a triplet of sixteenths followed by eighths -- it sounds catchy and unusual. So when I got home I tried playing it on my violin -- and was a bit disappointed in the sound. Put it down, and an hour or so later I wanted to try it again, but only the viola was handy -- so I picked it up and was amazed by how natural it sounded. The key is G minor, which I think fits just as well to a violin as a viola; but something about the lower register is just fantastic for this song.
Update: Well, tonight I tried it on the violin in D minor and it sounded just as good -- so it was a matter of finger positions rather than register. Unfortunately it seems pretty hard for me to sing it in either G or D, I'm going to need to work out fingerings for it in some other key.
posted evening of March 18th, 2008: 2 responses
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Handy to know: if you write to stderr from a CGI application (note: when I say "CGI application", I don't actually know what that means -- what I mean is, an application invoked by the http server in response to a GET or POST request and which uses environment variables to get information about the request), the output will go into the http server's log file. At least it will if the http server is Apache.
posted afternoon of March 18th, 2008: Respond
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