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Wednesday, November 12th, 2003
I am going to throw this out into the æther and see if any help comes my way... When I was young, I read a book that I loved and reread several times. I have forgotten the author's name (I believe he was French) and the title. Here is all I know for sure about the book: - It was set in the Neolithic era. The characters were a family of cavemen who did things like discovering fire, inventing written language, etc.
- The narrator's uncle was named Vanya.
- On the cover of the book (a paperback) was a print of Picasso's The Minotaur.
If anyone knows the book I'm thinking of I would be greatly indebted to you for providing me with that information.
posted afternoon of November 12th, 2003: Respond
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Tuesday, November 11th, 2003
My first genuinely weird Google hit came in today: fish blog education. Hope you found what you were looking for, matey!
posted afternoon of November 11th, 2003: Respond
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Sunday, November 9th, 2003
Oh well, never did hook up with Tim. It was very nice seeing Bill and Kathy. If you're passing through DC, let me recommend you go to the Hirschorn Museum -- they have some excellent exhibits, and the fountain in the courtyard is quite spectacular on a sunny day. Sylvia's and my favorite exhibit was a room full of paper that you could walk through or lie down in.
posted evening of November 9th, 2003: Respond
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Saturday, November 8th, 2003
We're in Washington, DC today visiting Arielle. Later on I'm hoping to meet up with Tim Dunlop, and tomorrow with Bill and Kathy. Ellen and Sylvia are back at our hotel taking a nap and I went for a walk and found a nice coffee house called Soho at Dunlop Circle. Lunch today was decent Malaysian, not that exciting but tasty, and Sylvia was really enthusiastic about the Prawn Mee. (Which she would not have been if it had been a really good Prawn Mee, i.e. extremely spicy.)
posted evening of November 8th, 2003: Respond
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Thursday, November 6th, 2003
Hey, did I mention I've been working on organizing my shop space in the basement, for a couple of weeks now? It's going really well -- I'm just about in shape to start working on the bookcase. What I have done: I built a lumber rack, and stacked most of my lumber on it; built a shelf with separate compartments for my carving tools; built a fixture for hanging my clamps; cleaned off most counter surfaces; and went a bit of the way towards organizing the big closet where I keep hardware. The last thing is going to be building a rack for clamping up panels and holding them even while the glue dries, which is necessary for the bookcase project. I have a pretty simple design in mind and will be building it next week.
posted evening of November 6th, 2003: Respond
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I am zipping right through The English Passengers, nearly halfway now, and enjoying it. A geographical issue is bothering me -- if the voyage begins at London and has as its ultimate destination Van Diemen's Land, why would they be going to Jamaica and then to Africa? It seems to me that the logical route would be to head directly south around the Cape of Good Hope and across the Indian Ocean; a side trip to Jamaica means you have to cross and recross the Atlantic. The narrative style of the book -- each chapter is told from the point-of-view of a different character -- encourages me to go back to my reading of The Corrections, where I kept noticing how many different characters I felt sympathy for; I would expect something similar to happen here. But it does not, or not exactly -- I do sympathize with several of the characters; but the book is very broadly comic and much of it is caricature.
posted evening of November 6th, 2003: Respond
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Tuesday, November 4th, 2003
I got home last night to find a package had come for me in the mail -- how exciting! It is from Gary; I opened it up and found he had sent me a new book, with a note to the effect that he thinks I will enjoy it. (And a wonderfully cool bookmark, a snapshot of the Xyris crew from '94, the first year I was working there.) The book is The English Passengers, by Matthew Kneale. I started reading it this morning on the train and got hooked into it right away -- it has all the characteristics of a book I would like. The language is playful and erudite. The setting is 19th-Century Man, England, Wales, Australia, and Tasmania and it looks like I will get an introduction to some new history that I did not know, plus a little Manx dialect. I want to write a bit about comparisons to other books that are coming up as I read -- but I think I will wait a bit and see how these comparisons develop, before I commit them to "paper".
posted morning of November 4th, 2003: Respond
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Monday, November third, 2003
This post on Crooked Timber, and the response to it which I came up with in the comments, lead me to wonder which is preferable: false hope, or no hope? My gut reaction is to prefer false hope. But if you try sometimes, you just might find, just might find, you get what you need... -- not sure how this ties in but it does come to mind, yes.
posted afternoon of November third, 2003: Respond
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Sunday, November second, 2003
I took Sylvia and Natalie to the playground today, so as to give Ellen and Lorrain (Natailie's mother) both some time off. The first interaction at the park forebode some trouble; a little boy named (as it turned out) Mikhail was tagging along fairly close behind them when Natalie said, "You can't play with us." Sylvia picked up on that and started getting in Mikhail's face, yelling "You can't play with us!" over and over until he started crying, which he did just as the two girls ran off to the next thing. Well after a bit of chasing around I got them both in hand and walked them back over to apologize and say he could play with them -- I couldn't tell whether Natalie actually did apologize but Sylvia did, in a rather breezy way -- Mikhail cheered right up and the three of them had a pretty good time playing together for about half an hour. Later on, on the way back home, they were reading stories to each other. Sylvia was reading from "Polar Bear, Polar Bear, what do you hear?" -- this is a book where the question is asked of lots of zoo animals and each of them responds with the next animal and its characteristic noise -- then they all turn out to be kids imitating zoo animals -- it is by Eric Carle, Mr. Very-Hungry-Caterpillar. When Sylvia got to the hippo, she read "Hippopotamus, hippopotamus, what do you hear? I hear a... T. Rex!" Natalie: "No!... That's not a T. Rex!... That's a zebra!" Back and forth for a minute as to whether it is or is not a T. Rex; at last Sylvia says, "I call it a T. Rex." -- for which she adopts a particular, very cute, dramatic tone of voice.
posted evening of November second, 2003: Respond
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Friday, October 31st, 2003
Must be the season of the witch!
posted morning of October 31st, 2003: Respond
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