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Friday, April 22nd, 2005
Well having polished off (with mixed but generally positive results) Call It Sleep and Foucault's Pendulum, I turned my attention this morning to the king of the intimidating books, Ulysses -- a book that I tried to read when I was about 16 (and gave up after one or two chapters) and again when I was about 20 (and gave up about a third of the way in). The binding of the edition I owned back then crumbled, and when I turned 28 and was given a Barnes & Noble gift certificate by my parents-in-law, I bought another copy; which has been on my shelf ever since. I was reading Chapter I on the train this morning and enjoying the back-and-forth conversation (actually mostly "forth", I think Buck Mulligan is much more talkative than the other two -- also he seems like a bit of a flamer, is my first impression anyways). A Frolic of His Own made me dig this way of representing conversation -- with dashes and no quotation marks -- and it seems pretty natural now.
posted morning of April 22nd, 2005: Respond
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Wednesday, April 20th, 2005
The revelation (or summing up) at the end of Foucault's Pendulum really was excellent and made the book worth while. (Though I do wish he had spent a little less effort on putting together Belbo's journals -- there could have been half as much of that or less without negatively impacting the effect.) I felt at the end much more in sympathy with Casaubon than I had been before and it makes good sense that I should do -- he is after all the narrator, and plus his relationship to Lia and his son made me flash on my own relationship with Ellen and Sylvia.
posted evening of April 20th, 2005: Respond
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Tuesday, April 19th, 2005
Foucault's Pendulum was bogging down for me a bit in the last third or so but has picked up again near the end, as the narrative came into the present. I had found Belbo's character really sympathetic in the first half of the book but sort of lost my connection to him while wading through all the copies of his journals. Not sure what to make of this -- it makes me feel a little like Saure trying to listen to Beethoven...
posted evening of April 19th, 2005: Respond
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Monday, April 18th, 2005
Well things are going pretty well frankly. I finished Sylvia's cabinets; the flowers are coming up; I'm eating relatively well and losing some weight; and today I got an e-mail from the Columbia School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, to the effect that my application to their Computer Science master's degree program has been accepted.
posted evening of April 18th, 2005: Respond
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The following things are in bloom in our yard now: - Daffodils -- a profusion thereof. The first ones started blooming a week or two ago; every day since then we have seen new ones, new shapes and colors and varieties.
- Tulips -- the first (and to date only) ones to bloom are a pale yellow and next to our front steps. Many others are showing buds. Ellen is surprised they came back at all.
- Grape Hyacinth -- these are poking up between the daffodils here and there.
And you can see buds on a lot of other stuff; the dogwood for instance should be coming in in a week or two.
posted morning of April 18th, 2005: Respond
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Sunday, April 17th, 2005
So I have several projects I'm meaning to do, working on the house this summer. They are generally divisible into two categories; woodworking projects and patio/stone projects. Woodworking - Today I finished installing the wall unit I've been building for Sylvia's room, that's been dragging on since late last year. Oh happy day! (Actually the desk part of it remains to be done. For now Sylvia's work table fits okay in the space where the desk will go, and she has not quite outgrown it yet. I plan to build the desk in August or so.) Ellen will be painting the wall unit in conjunction with painting Sylvia's room, which she is planning to do in the next few weeks. Before she can do that, I need to install a chair rail around the room; I ought to get to that sometime this week. Also Ellen was mentioning that it would be nice to build a small shelf on the wall by the head of Sylvia's bed, to hold a box of tissues and some other things.
- Two summers ago I built Sylvia a sandbox in our back yard, with the intention to build a playhouse above it. That is currently the next project on my plate, and I am going to start designing it this afternoon.
- Ellen has asked me to build an enclosure for our garbage cans, which are currently loose in the side yard. I will be doing that after the playhouse is finished, hopefully in a month or so. I need to do this in conjunction with some of the patio work below.
- Also in conjunction with the patio work, I would like to build a small shed by the side of our house, to store our barbecue and some garden tools.
Patio The major project last summer was laying a bluestone patio in our back yard and a slate walkway next to our driveway. A few things remain to be done before that is really finished. - The slate walkway is just slightly too low, about 1/4 - 1/2", and it drains poorly. A quick project of a couple of hours will be just going down the length of it, lifting up each rock and packing more sand under it to bring the walk up level with the side of the driveway.
- A section in front of the porch, where I am going to build the enclosure for the garbage cans, needs to be leveled and filled with sand and stone. This is only about a day's work, but I need to finalize the design of the enclosure first.
- I would like to extend the back yard patio in one place to make it reach the fence. This is where I am planning to build the shed.
posted afternoon of April 17th, 2005: Respond
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Wednesday, April 13th, 2005
Say, I just noticed that most of my archive links are broken, which means a lot of search engine referrals are going to be broken too. If you're coming to this site from outside, with a maxid= or k= specification in the URL, this is not the page you want. I am going to try and figure out what's going on and if it can be fixed. Update: Okay, the problem with maxid= is fixed so search engine archives should be pretty accurate. k= still does not work and I suppose I ought to fix it but not right now.
posted afternoon of April 13th, 2005: Respond
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Friday, April 8th, 2005
I have been reading Foucault's Pendulum for a week now. (I started it last Friday, when I had a long train ride, because I thought I was going to need a long period of concentration in order to get into it.) This is another book that has been on my shelves for years, taunting me and intimidating me. But guess what: it is not difficult to read. Quite the contrary -- it is difficult to put down! I was anticipating a Gravity's Rainbow-type of experience where I get a lot out of reading the book, but only after putting huge amounts of effort and concentration into it. But this book is like a clear pool of warm water on a sunny day. Early in the book I was identifying strongly with Belbo and wondering how sincere that identification was. I am still not sure quite how to put into words, what my suspicion was -- somehow I was afraid that I was being conned into liking Belbo, that I was buying an incomplete characterization. I am not thinking about that as much anymore, since the section where Casaubon was in Brazil. I am assuming that the citations at the head of each chapter are genuine though I don't know that I'll ever actually check that out. If they were inventions, that would be kind of disappointing. I was thinking this afternoon, that reading the book is giving me a curious time-dilation effect, and that this effect is common to the books I have really enjoyed.
posted evening of April 8th, 2005: Respond
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Okay, it did! My "Edit Post" facility is however broken.
posted afternoon of April 8th, 2005: Respond
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Tuesday, April 5th, 2005
Okay, it did! My "Edit Post" facility is however broken.
posted morning of April 5th, 2005: Respond
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