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Thursday, July 17th, 2003
Today I finished The Beginning of Spring -- I felt curiously moved by the interaction between Frank and Selwyn in the next-to-last chapter, "curiously" because I could not understand quite how I was reacting. I got a sort of adrenaline rush -- though the book is not by any stretch a thriller -- and I felt totally alienated from Selwyn, much more so than I had throughout the book. Not in a particularly condemnatory way, I just thought, This guy is not from my planet. The last chapter is total disintegration -- almost like the final third of Gravity's Rainbow in microcosm. And the ending did feel a bit like a tease. ... A little later I picked up The Birth of Tragedy and started reading Nietzsche's forward to Wagner and wow! realized that it was written in Selwyn's voice. I'm not sure what to make of this realization but there it is. The first few pages of the first chapter are inspiring me to get back up on my Jaynesian hobby horse -- but I will read a bit further before I decide to subject you to that. My favorite quote from these first few pages is, ...but nature itself, long alienated or subjugated, rises again to celebrate the reconciliation with her prodigal son, man. -- which I like in large part because every time I read it, it seems to me like Janis Joplin is speaking, and giving a different intonation to the final two words than that intended by the translator. (Who is, by the way, Francis Golffing of Bennington College; date of the translation is 1956.) ... I have the evening to myself, as Ellen and Sylvia are visiting Uncle Kenny on the east end of Long Island; I think I will walk to town and have a drink. I will be joining them tomorrow so no blogging this weekend. (Not that that is unusual or anything, but still.)
posted evening of July 17th, 2003: Respond
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I am nearly finished now with The Beginning of Spring -- I love these Fitzgerald books but they go by so fast! There is a bit of a mysterious feel to it like there is something under the surface that I am not quite getting -- I suspect is has something to do with Nellie's absense. Reference is made to her fairly often and yet she is not a character in the story, nor is it clear how important she is to any of the characters. There is no hint of approval or condemnation for her leaving -- very little even from the characters (who can be excused judgemental attitudes more easily than can the author), none at all from the author. And Selwyn's status is pretty opaque too -- he could be a parody but I don't really think so. I'm having trouble fitting these characters into the standard slots!
posted morning of July 17th, 2003: Respond
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Wednesday, July 16th, 2003
Go read Gummo Trotsky's site, the Tug Boat Potemkin -- it is on my blog roll under "Social Sciences" which is going to be renamed sometime soon. Update: D'oh! obviously the URL is not readin.com/blog/blog.asp -- Link updated.
posted afternoon of July 16th, 2003: Respond
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Tuesday, July 15th, 2003
After finishing The Ginger Man (and not thinking too much of it) I need a new book for my commute reading -- looks like it will be Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring, which I started this morning. I think it is going to be a good one! Last night on a lark, I picked up The Birth of Tragedy and read (for the manyth time) the forward -- it intrigues me and I may stick with it this time.
posted morning of July 15th, 2003: Respond
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Monday, July 14th, 2003
A milestone of sorts at dinner today; Sylvia figured out her first spelled-out word (i.e. one whose meaning Ellen and I are trying to keep from her by spelling it out). I served the corn and Ellen asked if she could please have a little pat of B U T T E R -- this going on the assumption, as we have for a while, that hearing the word "butter" while at the dinner table is a bad combination for Sylvia -- it drives her into a butter-eating frenzy that does not seem to be provoked by the mere sight of the comestible. But I digress -- Sylvia asked, "What['s] B R?"* So I gave her a little help -- passed the substance over to Ellen and said "Here you go Mommy, here's your B U T T E R." Now Sylvia, "I like some B R too!" So we talked about it in spelled-out form throughout the meal; by the end of dinner Sylvia was calling it B R T R, reminding me of the "Frances" books. ... In other Sylvia news, I was glad to read a book with her today (Dan and Dan, about a boy and his grandfather) and have her do almost all the reading -- she said about 12 sentences out of the book's 15 or so. She has taken to calling Lola "Mr. Dog"; and yesterday on the front lawn she wrapped a flag around her like a toga and said, "I'm Mr. Flag!" ----- * A note on punctuation -- when I use square brackets quoting Sylvia, it is something I think she said but I may have just filled in for her out of habit of listening to her learn to talk.
posted evening of July 14th, 2003: Respond
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Saturday, July 12th, 2003
I spent much of this morning and afternoon pruning bushes in our front yard, and came to really enjoy it. This is something that I am doing without investing any research in it, trying to go purely by instinct. (Plus I got a little advice from my father when he was here, and from the tree surgeon who worked on our big maple tree.) Figuring out which branch needs to come away and tracking it back to the appropriate separation point can be quite pleasurable. And trimming the hedges was really fun, like giving someone a haircut.
posted afternoon of July 12th, 2003: Respond
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Friday, July 11th, 2003
Two new entries on the blogroll: Crooked Timber is brand-new and one of the finest things to come down the pike in a long while; it features two of my very favorite bloggers, Kieran Healy and Daniel Davies, plus some others that I was not familiar with before but am glad for the introduction. (Note: if you browse with an old version of MS Explorer, the site will be hard to read. Current MS Explorer and current Mozilla both display the site well.) And Planned Obsolescence, which has been referring people over my way for a while now -- speaking of which, if you surf over here for the first time from whatever point of origin, I'd love if you'd give me a shout and let me know who you are. If you have any interest in Julian Jaynes' theory of consciousness -- or if you think the subject is played and I ought not waste my time on it -- let me know about that too.
posted morning of July 11th, 2003: Respond
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Wednesday, July 9th, 2003
For the past while I've been reading two books. The book I like is Cartoon History of the Universe part III, by Larry Gonick -- it surpasses the very fine parts I and II, it just shines. Gonick's history is excellent, lots of stuff I didn't know mixed with lots of stuff I knew but had forgotten or not bothered to really learn, and dry humor, and slapstick! I have been reading it before I go to bed and it is beneficial to my dreams. The book I don't like so well is Donleavy's The Ginger Man, which I have been reading on the train to and from work. Yesterday I found a passage that I think sums up everything that is wrong with this book, as well as its virtues. I look into Tone's face, which is Ireland."What would you do, Tone, if you ever got money. A lot of money." "Do you want the truth?" "I want the truth" "First thing, I'd get a suit made. Then I'll come along to the Seven Ts and put a hundred pound note on the bar. Drink up the whole kip of ye. I'll send a hundred quid to O'Keefe and tell him to come back. May even, if I get drunk enough, put a plaque in the sidewalk on the corner of Harry and Grafton. Percy Clocklan, keepr of the kip who farted on this spot, R.I.P. Then, Sebastian, I'll start from College Green and I'll walk every inch of the way from here to Kerry getting drunk at every pub. It'll take me about a year. Then I'll arrive on the Dingle Peninsula, walk out on the end of Slea Head, beat, wet, and penniless. I'll sit there and weep into the sea." So... this passage is clever, pretty funny, very cynical. But that's all it is. Tony Malarky has no soul, is just a creature put on the page to communicate to us this sardonic fantasy. (And I wouldn't really consider him a foil to Sebastian Dangerfield, either -- Dangerfield himself has no fullness of character.) That's how the whole book feels to me, kind of pretty but with no depth to it, and no unifying thread. I might call it juvenile. It tries to present cynicism in a romantic light which seems to me a pointless exercise.
posted afternoon of July 9th, 2003: Respond
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Following up on the spelling post below -- I wonder what Sylvia's understanding of "spelling" a word is... My impulse is almost to think that it is purely a collection of sounds, poetry without meaning. I mean, let's say she knows how to say "N O spells No" -- I am pretty sure that started out as just a sound pattern. But let's say she later puts the "N" and "O" magnets next to each other on the refrigerator door, points at it and says, "spells No!" This happened sometime last week, and at this point I think it is pretty clear that the sentence "N O spells No" is a fully fledged semantic unit for Sylvia. Where does recitation shade over into meaning? Update: Rereading this post, particularly the last sentence, I think it could easily lead in to a discussion of language along the lines of Jaynes in "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind". I have no clear ideas at the moment of how to move the discussion in that direction; but if you have any such I would most appreciate if you could share them with me.
posted morning of July 9th, 2003: Respond
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Tuesday, July 8th, 2003
The latest step in Sylvia's language acquisition, is spelling. She has known the letters of the alphabet pretty well for close to a year now (I think, or maybe half a year) and has associated each with a word that begins with that letter; S="Me!", D="You, da-da!", C="Clifford!",... A few weeks ago she started saying "N O spells No!" which we assume she picked up in nursery school; and at around the same time we started trying to teach her to spell her name. She's just about got her name down (long and difficult though it be) and is starting to get some other words, too. When I got home this evening she told me "P R A spells Monkey!" -- she said this several times, I don't know its genesis or if she was just riffing on the notion of spelling words... Eventually I told her, "M O N K E Y spells Monkey," and she got a big grin -- for the next 10 minutes or so she would ask me to "spell word —" (mostly animal species) and I would do so, then I thought I would try to pull the game back into pedagogical territory and asked if she knew how to spell Mom. "...help." "M O M." "No, no, you forgot the A! M A M A M A M A..." Turns out Ellen had been practicing spelling Mama with her earlier.
posted evening of July 8th, 2003: Respond
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