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Tuesday, February 10th, 2009
 Modesto gets the recognition which is its due! We are more miserable than Flint, MI, but less so than Cleveland, OH; our next-door neighbor Stockton takes top honors.
 Update from my dad: The idea that life in Modesto is "miserable" is laughable. Individual lives (anywhere) are miserable, but the total of misery here is not worse than most. I think I could name numerous places in the US where I would be more "miserable." These things are all dependent on the metric chosen. That said, Modesto seems to consistently come out in the bottom of the pack on these ratings listings. (I'll bet I could design one to boost it, though, just by choosing what factors/measurement sets to use).
posted morning of February 10th, 2009: 2 responses
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Monday, February 9th, 2009
I haven't really made up my mind what to think about the arguments in Elizabeth Costello -- I'm a little sorry nobody seems to believe any of them passionately? It's fun to engage with them playfully, in fun, but hard to treat them as actual advocacy. Well I don't think advocacy is the intent... That said, this is just lovely and seems exactly right to me: The behaviorists who designed [the tests for cognition in animals] claim that we understand only by a process of creating abstract models and then testing those models against reality. What nonsense. We understand by immersing ourselves and our intelligence in complexity. Coetzee's creation Costello is a marvelous speaker when she keeps her focus.
posted evening of February 9th, 2009: Respond
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Robyn Hitchcock's playlist this morning included a Beatles title I didn't recognize, "Rain" -- I asked Ellen about it this morning and she hummed a few familiar-sounding bars; I thought I'd look into it. Turns out "Rain" is the B-side of "Paperback Writer" from 1966. It is by John; it was not released on an album until "Hey Jude" in 1970. According to Wikipædia, it is the first commercial recording to feature backwards vocals. Sweet sounds! Here is video of the boys inventing MTV:
posted evening of February 9th, 2009: Respond
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Elizabeth Costello is a book which I am finding requires access to source material. (I am kind of ignoring the major piece of source material for this book, but trying to track down the incidental pieces...) Below the fold, some source material for chapter 4, "The Poets and the Animals." This interview with Coetzee from the Swedish magazine Djurens Rätt ("Animal Rights"), while not strictly speaking "source material," also seems useful.
↷read the rest...
posted evening of February 9th, 2009: 4 responses
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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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 After I watched the movie yesterday afternoon, I was walking around Soho, killing some time before I traveled out to Brooklyn to meet up with Dave. The neighborhood has -- not changed exactly; the character of the streets is quite similar to what it was ten years ago -- but sharpened, I think, become more distinct. It's as always, a pleasant place to walk around, and I had a good time peering into the new shops and the old shops alike.
One place that really made my day is an antique store on Houston just west of Bowery called B-4 it was cool, which specializes in old lamps and lighting fixtures. The person who runs it has an excellent eye for old metal artefacts, I was really impressed both by the pieces s/he had selected and by the way they were displayed -- the shop looks like nothing so much as a spare parts warehouse for robots from old science-fiction movies.
posted morning of February 8th, 2009: 2 responses
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...Storytelling works by lulling the reader or listener into a dreamlike state in which the time and space of the real world fade away, superceded by the time and space of the fiction.
-- But some books (and particularly this book, as I think Coetzee is making quite clear in this chapter titled "Realism") work by inserting themselves into the reader's "real world" head, rather than creating a separate "fiction" head -- instead of rivetting plot you have long reflective sessions riffing off the book.The narrator's intrusions, reminding us that he is telling us a story, become less frequent after the first chapter -- once Coetzee has established what kind of world he is creating, they are not necessary. This is good as they could become heavy-handed. I almost want to think of this as a book of essays rather than a novel -- each chapter centers around a long prepared talk, and the characters' responses to it. A curious sort of essays, though, as the narrator/author is explicitly not invested in the arguments being made but rather in the speakers' reasons for making and methods of making the arguments and in the listeners' understandings of the arguments. Elizabeth "is not sure, as she listens to her own voice, whether she believes any longer in what she's saying" -- but "on the other hand, she no longer believes very strongly in belief."
 The Kafka story to which Elizabeth alludes in some of her talks is Ein Bericht für eine Akademie (at the bottom of the page), translated as A Report for an Academy. Wolfgang Köhler's book The Mentality of Apes can be read in part at Google Books; and there is some discussion of it at the Tufts Animal Cognition page. Plutarch's essay "On the Eating of Flesh" (which John fears Elizabeth will start talking about while she is at Appleton) is reproduced at the Animal Rights Library site.
posted morning of February 8th, 2009: Respond
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I watched Waltz with Bashir with clinical detachment, and without understanding that this detachment was an authentic response to how the film was composed -- that the intent was to push the audience away from the events being narrated rather than to pull us in. I was not failing to get into the movie but was understanding Folman's approach to his own lost experience -- wondering about the motivations and reactions of the people talking, "as if watching a movie" as Folman's psychiatrist friend puts it; and  was completely surprised, at the end of the film, to find myself sobbing -- this brought me full circle to the very beginning of the movie, where I had been pretty choked up over Boaz' description of the dogs he had to shoot. I was a little confused by the psychiatrist's assertion early in the film, to the effect that memory can only take us "where we want to go," that there is a human mechanism which prevents us from remembering things that will damage us. This seems wrong to me as a general statement, and counter to my experience. But maybe he had intended it only in the context of the conversation they were having.
posted morning of February 8th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, February 7th, 2009
Let us assume that, however it may have been done, it is done. Let us take it that the bridge is built and crossed, that we can put it out of our mind.
I started reading Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello today (I went to the library looking for Disgrace, but it has been misfiled -- they put my name in the computer and will let me know when/if it turns up...) and found myself just immediately struck by the spare, elegant beauty of the author's constructions. A few notes at the outset.This novel puts me strongly in mind of In Hovering Flight, there are several points of detail that the two books have in common; I have no idea yet how strong a parallel actually exists though. I talked to Joyce this morning and she said she read Elizabeth Costello last year -- so not a formative influence certainly -- and that she could see where I was coming from with the comparison. I want to call this "a novel of ideas" and to use that as a way of contrasting it with some other books I've been reading lately; every page is sending me off into reveries of reflection from which I need to pull myself back to what I was reading. I think this would be a lousy book to hear read aloud. This book is making me more interested than I've ever been before in reading Ulysses, just so I can have more of a context for understanding The House on Eccles Street.
 Oh and also: I was put in mind a bit of Peter Cole's statement that the translator of a mediæval text is "creating a fictional character" for the author of the text -- I'm not sure how much of a linkage there is to Coetzee's project here since Coetzee is not "translating" Costello's book or indeed showing it to us at all; he is imagining it like Borges does in his fictions. But obviously Coetzee is "creating a fictional character" who's an author -- so, interesting, I'll keep Cole's statement in mind.
posted morning of February 7th, 2009: 3 responses
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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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