READIN

Wednesday, April 21st, 2004

Looking at the William Faulkner on the Web site at the University of Mississippi I found his address to the Nobel Prize committee in 1950 -- it is a speech I have read before but one well worth being reminded of.

It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

A difficult proposition for me to affirm but one which I hope and try to embrace.

posted afternoon of April 21st, 2004: Respond
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Tuesday, April 20th, 2004

Flags in the Dust -- I am trying to pay attention to what reading mode I am in as I read each sentence -- this is an experiment with some potential to disrupt my reading experience and if I find it is doing so too much, I will abandon it. But if I am successful I think this extra level of consciousness about my role in the story will be very useful -- I am trying to achieve a meditative consciousness in reading. My hunch is that Faulkner is particularly well-suited to reading this way.

posted morning of April 20th, 2004: Respond
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Monday, April 19th, 2004

🦋 Fluent narrative

I started a new book today; Flags in the Dust, by William Faulkner. It is the director's cut of his third novel, Sartoris, with over 40 minutes of previously unreleased Yoknatawpha footage.

I opened to page 1 and was almost instantly swept away by the lushness of Faulkner's imagery -- beautiful! I was seeing the scene inside my head like a movie privately screened, hearing the words like a bicameral narration. And as I read I would slip into and out of this state -- slip into it when I come across a particularly nice image, out of it when I realize I am not really understanding what is going on and I have to back up a paragraph or two to figure out where the story is.

This is a common experience for me when I am reading a good book. Some good books, e.g. House of Sand and Fog, I am in the "cinematic" mode most of the way through, rarely losing the thread. Some good books, e.g. Gravity's Rainbow the first 3 times I read it (well, the fourth time as well to be truthful), interruptions are much more frequent -- there is a lot more complexity and intricacy to the narrative. Both are enjoyable reading experiences; I would venture to say I'm more likely to reread the second type of book.

I am glad to be reading Faulkner again, he is a favorite of mine and I haven't read anything by him for a few years.

posted evening of April 19th, 2004: Respond
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🦋 Whose Mind is it Anyway?

Scott McCloud has finished Morning Improv #25, Whose Mind is it Anyway? -- It is just fantastic, by far the most complex and touching story he has written in improv format. Go read it! Set aside a little time to do so -- it is 9 pages long and there is a lot of visual detail to get your mind around.

posted afternoon of April 19th, 2004: Respond

Friday, April 16th, 2004

🦋 Have a nice weekend

Looks like the weather will be excellent here -- lots of sun and warm. I am going to spend an hour or two tailgating before the CRAFTS auction tomorrow morning, then come back home and take Sylvia to her first-ever soccer practice. Sunday will be our first cook-out of the season, Ellen's family is coming over and it is her mother's birthday. The tulips should be opening up today or tomorrow.

posted afternoon of April 16th, 2004: Respond
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Wednesday, April 14th, 2004

🦋 In the shop

I have not blogged about woodworking for a long time because, well, I have not been doing any of it. But I am hoping to change that. A couple of nights this week I was in the basement, working on Ellen's bookcase -- she has given me a deadline of September to finish it or she buys one, and I believe I can do it. Also I got the garage cleaned out and have made some stabs towards planning the workbenches I want to build in there.

In other home improvement news, Ellen is repainting the sitting room and boy, does it look good! (This is the room where I built in my windowseat, and it has looked funny unpainted ever since.) The color scheme is: sage green walls, bone white trim and doors and ceiling. There is a lot of trim in the room, doing it all took nearly two weeks (of quite intermittent painting). The walls and ceiling are going a lot faster. When she finishes I will put the final bit of molding on the windowseat (a cove between the top of the seat and the wall behind it) and put shades on the windows, and the room will get more use than it had in the past -- our plan is to have that be our general room for congregating in the evenings, instead of our bedroom.

posted evening of April 14th, 2004: Respond
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Saturday, April 10th, 2004

How different is a well-drawn character from a successful caricature? My impulse is to say, very different; that they are two totally separate things with almost nothing in common. But I'd like to put forth the conjecture that there is actually very little separating the two, that there is a good deal of cross-over between them and only a fine line separating them. (It should go without saying that there is virtually no difference between a poorly-drawn character and an unsuccessful caricature; indeed "caricature" is often used as a pejorative way of describing poorly-drawn characters.)

I was watching "Hannah and Her Sisters" on the T.V. tonight when I started thinking about this. My a priori take on this is that a "character" is something you identify with and feel sympathy for, where a "caricature" is something you mock and feel superior to. Watching Michael Caine's character thinking about having betrayed his wife, and how to get out of it, I felt both sympathy and scorn, superiority and identity. And again, when I was watching Woody Allen's character thinking about his remoteness from the world, and again, when I was watching Hannah help her sister shop for a dress.

So: characters, caricatures -- thinking a little more clearly now I realize that I have had this epiphany many times already, I may even have written about it when I was reading The Corrections. But there it is. I also am wondering whether "Hannah and Her Sisters" might be my favorite Woody Allen film. I think the chances are very good that it is but I do not have any of the other candidates clearly enough in mind to say for sure.

posted evening of April 10th, 2004: Respond

Thursday, April 8th, 2004

🦋 Long weekend

Nice... an extra day of rest, Good Friday. I will work with Ellen to make some progress in painting our sitting room.

posted afternoon of April 8th, 2004: Respond

Wednesday, April 7th, 2004

More on the Broonzy records -- I took disk A over to Bob's house last night and the four of us worked out a pretty fun version of "Pig Meat Strut". It is easy to play and we sounded pretty good, except too slow and not enough variation.

posted afternoon of April 7th, 2004: Respond
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Tuesday, April 6th, 2004

🦋 Dream blogging

In this dream I simultaneously am watching a movie (or something like a movie) and am a character, or several characters, in it. The dream-cinematography is shot from a God's-eye point of view, looking down from on high, with quick cuts to shots from the point of view of the characters.

We see a village on the banks of the Colorado River -- middle-class American suburbia of the late 20th Century. One night everyone goes to sleep... When I wake up, groggy, I can't quite tell what it is that seems different -- everything's changed somehow. Everyone in town feels the same way but no-one can quite remember where we are or what we're supposed to be doing. For instance it seems like there is supposed to be a lot of water somewhere; everything's so dry. A professor at the local college works out that we have all been asleep for a billion years, and slept through major geological change; the river that was once there has been covered over by hundreds of feet of sedimentary accretion. (The physical town, instead of being buried, has somehow floated on top of the sediment, and has not deteriorated.) My house, it turns out, is directly above the old river and will have to be destroyed in order to dig down to the river bed -- I feel some resentment and "why me?" My wife is running a load of laundry (the machines are located, oddly enough, on the third floor) and I notice a bulge running across the floor -- still groggy I wonder idly if this is something to do with the geological changes; suddenly shocked into awareness I realize that the drainpipe is clogged and our plumbing is going to burst from the strain on it. Will I be too late to fix things? This is the cliff-hanger ending.

posted morning of April 6th, 2004: Respond
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