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Wednesday, July 18th, 2007
Those lines I was looking for yesterday, from the first two pages: If he hadn't been so tired, if he'd paid a bit more attention to the snowflakes swirling out of the sky like feathers, he might have realized that he was traveling straight into a blizzard; he might have seen at the start that he was setting out on a journey that would change his life forever and chosen to turn back.But the thought didn't even cross his mind. Some more good stuff from the first chapter: "I'm an old friend of Ka's, and I begin this story knowing everything that will happen to him during his time in Kars." (Aside: I wonder what's up with the assonance between "Ka" and "Kars" -- it threatens to be distractingly cutesy. Does the pronunciation of "Kars" rhyme with "Mars" or with "parse", or something different?) "After a lifetime in which every experience of love was touched by shame and suffering, the prospect of falling in love filled Ka with an intense, almost instinctive dread." Chapter 3 opens with a description of what has led Ka to make this journey, which makes it sound sort of like a search for "the real Turkey" -- I was extrapolating to my own experience to think, it sounds a little like if I, beset by mid-life depression, made a trip to (say) Kentucky looking for the real America, which America is completely alien to me. More extrapolation: Ka's fear of fundamentalist Islam is like my fear of fundamentalist Christianity and what it's doing to America. But, I don't want to commit to this reading yet, I don't know that it's going to be at all useful in understanding the book. Ka's blurted confession in Chapter 4 has me loving him. It is the first point where he is fully human.
Snarkout tells me, "The Ka/Kars thing will not get less irritating,although it's a pun in Turkish; Kars is a real city in northeast Turkey, 'kar' is 'snow', so snow is what lies between Ka and Kars."
posted morning of July 18th, 2007: 2 responses
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Tuesday, July 17th, 2007
I like Been Down So Long, It Looks Like Up To Me. But, it is seeming like it doesn't really hold anything new for me. So I've put it on the shelf for some time in the future when I feel like a comforting bit of psychedeliana. In its stead I have picked up Orhan Pamuk's Snow, which Dr. Snarkout was recommending to me. I read the first 40 pages or so a while back in the library; picking it up this morning my eyes leapt to the second page, and the lines (which I don't have the book to hand now to quote, but to the effect of): "He was tired and did not look up to see the snow coming down. If he had, and had noticed that he was heading into a blizzard, he might have turned back. But the thought did not even cross his mind." I'll look up the precise wording, which is more elegant than mine, later on.
posted afternoon of July 17th, 2007: Respond
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Monday, July 16th, 2007
Tonight we saw the New Zealand String Quartet performing four pieces by Mendelssohn, and challenging strongly my professed inability to dig classical music. I will say this, of "String Quartet #2 in A Minor Op. 13", which was my favorite piece of the evening and which the violist (Gillian Ansell) was selling as a love song in her introduction: I could not hear it as expressive of emotion. Rather it had the cold, haughty beauty of a fireworks display -- and indeed had many sensory ephemera in common with watching fireworks. A fantastic thing, it was.
posted evening of July 16th, 2007: Respond
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Saturday, July 14th, 2007
We are leaving tomorrow morning for Ithaca, for the Suzuki Summer Institute. It will be very good to get some time to unwind -- these last few weeks have been pretty stressful for me. (But hooray! On Friday, I finished up two important projects that have been bothering me, namely an HTML-to-text translation utility (which ended up being pretty simple; the main hassle was figuring out how to pipe both stdin and stdout for a child process) and converting a text reader to read XHTML input -- so no work projects to think about, much, on vacation.) Reading material for the trip is Been Down So Long, It Looks Like Up To Me, set in a fictionalized Ithaca. Hoping to do some busking in the town center, which is a pretty busker-friendly environment.
posted evening of July 14th, 2007: Respond
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(In the manner of Big Bill Broonzy) They took my pick an shovel away Lord, I can' dig no more
Took my pick an shovel mama, can't dig no more
Where'm I gone go now, Lord these diggin hands is sore.
posted afternoon of July 14th, 2007: Respond
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For about 4 years, I have owned a Reliant 14" band saw, which is a Taiwanese clone of the Jet model. For nearly as long, I have been angry at the shop owner who sold it to me, when I came in to purchase the Jet, persuading me that it would be just as good. Convinced I had bought a lemon, I never really bothered learning to use it properly; and every cut I have made on it has been a battle against the machine. Well, a couple of things happened recently -- I am planning a new project which is going to involve a fair amount of ripping, and having not used the saw in a while, I decided to have a go at tuning it up. As I got into the internals of it, I discovered a number of settings that I had not gotten right when I first set it up; I straightened some of those up (but missed a fairly critical one) and was doing a test cut, when I snapped the blade. So, I put on the spare blade that I had bought back at the time I bought the saw; and discovered in so doing that the blade guides were totally worn out. Ordered a new set, which arrived today; put them on, and noticed that I had been ignoring the vertical adjustment of the blade guides for all this time. Well with everything back together and tight, and the guides lowered to a more suitable level than they had been, I tried it out and found it cuts through wood pretty much like butter! Happy day -- I don't believe I will be using it to resaw through too thick a piece of wood, for the time being anyway; but I'm intending to get more comfortable with ripping than I have been.
posted afternoon of July 14th, 2007: Respond
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My plan for the site: I will create a new 404 error page, that redirects requests for pages other than this blog to the way-back machine. Since other content on the site is static this should be fine. I am going to buy a new machine, a Linux box, from Sub300, and move the server over. This will necessitate re-coding this blog, which I have wanted to do essentially since I first wrote it, to make it more powerful and more fully featured, in PHP. ... More interesting stuff will happen.
posted morning of July 14th, 2007: Respond
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Friday, July 13th, 2007
...And in keeping with today's date, I just accidentally deleted a slew of data from the site. Damn. This blog is all that's left! Time to go dig up some of the files that I was fond of, out of archive.org. ...And, success! In a very limited sense. The wayback machine has all my files but it is pretty laborious to replace them all -- infeasibly so. But I have replaced a couple of the ones I like best, and I'll replace more of them as I think of it.
posted evening of July 13th, 2007: Respond
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Friday the 13th falls on a Friday this month.
posted morning of July 13th, 2007: Respond
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Wednesday, June 27th, 2007
There's something in music I like, a quality I can't identify, that gives me this rush of pleasure that is strongly associated with wanting to sing along. I've talked about this before in relation to Perspex Island, and this afternoon when I was mowing the lawn and listening to Nextdoorland it hit me -- Robyn sings "Can you make it rain,/ Can you make it rain tonight" and I can't help it, singing along is just an instinctual reaction to the pleasure I feel. And then, just now I was sitting and listening to the Band playing "Up on Cripple Creek" and the same thing happened to me when Levon sang "If there's anything she can do --"... (A few nights ago Ellen and I were watching The Last Waltz and together we sang along with the whole song when they were playing "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down", and that was a beautiful thing.) I want to know what this quality is.
posted evening of June 27th, 2007: Respond
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