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Friday, August 28th, 2009
Hmm... today is seeming like a very comfortable day for not taking a long bike ride as I had been thinking -- instead I think I am going to lie in a hammock and read more Alice Munro stories -- these are really grabbing my imagination! Sort of a similar sound to Annie Proulx (enough so that I'm wondering how much of an influence she had on Proulx), but more self-consciously cultured and introspective, I think. Took a short ride to Norwell this morning -- the countryside around here is beautiful! I saw a flock of birds on the road that I think were wild turkeys -- here in southeastern MA, ground zero for the first Thanksgiving. Will take a short ride to North Scituate later on and get some vegetables at the farm stand there...
posted morning of August 28th, 2009: Respond
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When we took the ferry out to Provincetown on Tuesday, among other fun things (Provincetown had me thoroughly charmed -- it seems like about the nicest beach town/resort town I can imagine, I am searching my brain for ways to make my future include living there some day...), we found Tim's Used Books -- funky little shop with a really interesting selection. We were in a hurry and on our bikes; under different circumstances I would have spent a few hours there and come away with a heavy bag of books. Other vacationing news... Sylvia and I went to sea yesterday afternoon on a whale-watching ship, we saw many humpback whales and a few minkes. Got some nice photos, I'll post them when we get back home. It was a beautiful day for it. (Weather has been really nice this week, though it looks like a stormy weekend.) I've been taking some moderately long bike rides around the countryside here, to places like Hingham and Hull; this afternoon I will try for Duxbury and Marshfield. Martha is coming over for dinner this evening.
posted morning of August 28th, 2009: Respond
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Thursday, August 27th, 2009
Another unexpected discovery from Deedee's bookshelf is Alice Munro's Selected Stories -- I haven't really heard or read much about this author before but she's really got my ear after a couple of stories. A really distinctive, fully human narrative voice, that reminds me of a lot of different contemporary authors without being any of them.
posted evening of August 27th, 2009: Respond
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Tuesday, August 25th, 2009
This is a very clear night and is making me very happy to be here where there is not a lot of light pollution... I haven't gotten a chance to really look at the night sky for years. Also very loud cicada soundtrack to the sky-examining.
posted evening of August 25th, 2009: 2 responses
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Today we rode the ferry from Plymouth to Provincetown; we biked around the tip of the cape, bathed in the beautiful, transparent ocean, looked around Provincetown a bit, and took the boat back to Plymouth. Here are a couple of images that I think could be assembled into a poem:
- The million tiny bubbles which comprise the whiteness of foam in our boat's wake, splashing and ebbing into the undulating surface of the harbor.
- The texture of the water's surface changing as the sun hits it; the sparkling tails of reflected sunlight streaming away from the focus of brightness into the green, gray, black, green darkness. Scintillating blackness blossoming from the choppy waves.
- Swimming off the beach -- moving through fields of colder and warmer water; looking at the mottled sunlight on the pebbles underwater.
 (...and riffing on this, what about a Borgesian-fiction spin on poetry, where the author describes a long imaginary poetic work by quickly examining images from the poem and impulses behind them, inventing an author.)
posted evening of August 25th, 2009: Respond
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Monday, August 24th, 2009
Hardship lives in me. What I suffer is myslf that outraces the water or the wind. But that it only should be mine, cuts deep. It is the half only. And it takes it out of my taste that the choice is theirs. I have the rough of it not because I will it, but because it is all that is left, a remnant from their coatcloth. This is the gall on the meat. Let the hail beat me. It is a kind of joy I feel in such things.
Eric the Red is the first character from American History to appear in Williams' In the American Grain -- its first chapter is pieces of narrative taken (as near as I can tell) from The Saga of Eric the Red and Voyage of Freydis, Helgi and Finnbogi with an internal look at the actors' motivations that is Williams' invention -- it is a little hard to know how to classify this writing but for now I am going with "historical fiction"...
posted evening of August 24th, 2009: Respond
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Here in Scituate, MA we are staying at our friends' Deedee and Paul's beautiful house -- they are vacationing in Maine this week and lent us their place. This is the best way to travel, I think -- for cheapskate-related reasons and personal comfort, I would much rather be in a house and making our own meals... In addition to having a lovely house, Deedee and Paul have a great library, full of books that I'm not expecting -- I did not bring along any reading material for the week, just browsing through their shelves. Two wonderful finds so far: Brooklyn Is: Southwest of the Island, by James Agee; and In the American Grain by W.C. Williams. Brooklyn Is is an essay about the borough that Agee wrote for Fortune magazine in 1939 -- they would not publish it and it was not printed until 1968. I love the descriptions of physical Brooklyn -- I can recognize much of it 70 years on -- and there are some hilarious notes about the people Agee meets in different neighborhoods. I'm reading Fordham U. Press's edition of the essay from 2005, which has a worthwhile introduction by Jonathan Lethem. In the American Grain is completely unexpected -- I do not really know much of anything about Williams besides some of his poetry, he was apparently also a deeply perceptive amateur historian. This book (published in 1925) consists of short prose pieces that examine figures in American history and the history of European colonization of the Americas -- in his foreword Williams says he has "sought to re-name the things seen, now lost in chaos of borrowed titles, many of them inappropriate, under which the true character lies hid." Some fantastic prose -- it presupposes familiarity with some source texts which I am lacking -- making me wish he had included a bibliography!
posted morning of August 24th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, August 22nd, 2009
(Yeah, I know, I've been on unannounced blog-vacation for a little while already...) We're going up to New England for a week, to play on the beach and ride our bikes along the cape -- we're staying near Plymouth. If you're in the neighborhood and feel like meeting up, drop me a line.
posted morning of August 22nd, 2009: Respond
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Thursday, August 20th, 2009
Perhaps you are a programmer; perhaps you use gdb to step through the programs you have written, looking for bugs; perhaps you have wondered why gdb will not let you examine the contents of the errno variable. Here's the deal: if you are typing print errno and getting the message Cannot access memory at address 0x8, it is because errno is not an actual variable; the compiler has replaced references to errno with *__errno_location() -- print *__errno_location() will give you what you're looking for.
posted morning of August 20th, 2009: 5 responses
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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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