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Sunday, December 4th, 2005
...I'm sick in bed with a cold. Hoping it clears up tonight because I've gotta go to work tomorrow -- I was out all last week sitting on a jury. That was a trying experience, which I would like to write up; but I am not going to until I can get to something more than "I went here, I did that, then this happened, and I had another thought" kind of stuff. I watched "The Squid and the Whale" last week and liked it a lot, and started reading Unamuno's "Abel Sanchez". Three fun dates coming up: on Thursday I have my final exam in Operating Systems; next Sunday the Pynchon-l folks are meeting up to watch a puppet theater production of Gogol's "The Nose"; the following Tuesday many commenters from Unfogged are meeting for drinks. All of this seems like stuff I could write about but the creative impulse does not seem to be there.
posted evening of December 4th, 2005: Respond
➳ More posts about Miguel de Unamuno
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Friday, November 25th, 2005
Tonight we were driving home from Ellen's parents' place, and Sylvia wanted me to tell her a story. A Just-So story. Getting progressively more specific, she asked me to tell her "The Elephant's Child". Well I didn't really feel into that; but I started off, "In the high and far-off times... the Lion, o best beloved, had no mane." Sylvia immediately reacted -- that's not how it goes, it's an elephant -- but almost as immediately, she saw the possibilities, and she let me make up a story. It was a pretty lame one frankly, and not particularly long; no Kipling I. But as soon as the lion had gotten his mane, Sylvia asked to hear one about how the tiger got his stripes. I saw my opening and asked her to tell that story to me. And she did. It was mostly sound effects -- "In the high and flying times there was a tiger with no stripes. And he crashed into the lion and bang and whoosh and boom and he crashed and..." until he eventually crashed into the Mookoo, who had stripes, and they traded. For the rest of the drive home we were regaled with similar stories.
posted evening of November 25th, 2005: Respond
➳ More posts about Just-So Stories
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This morning I started reading Leslie Savan's Slam Dunks and No-Brainers: Language in Your Life, the Media, Business, Politics, and, Like, Whatever. Ms. Savan is in Ellen's writers' group, and she was signing books at Marshall School's (where Sylvia attends) Library Day. I was interested in the book because of a strongly negative review in the NY Times, by P.J. O'Rourke, who is not the first person I would have thought of to review a book on pop culture. (O'Rourke offers a quintessential lack of self-consciousness with such lines as: "I didn't learn any fresh ripostes, topical quashers or new verbal conveniences from 'Slam Dunks and No-Brainers' except 'What is the dilio?' I take this to mean 'What is transpiring here?' I tried it on my children. They looked at me blankly.")
posted morning of November 25th, 2005: Respond
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Saturday, November 12th, 2005
Last night for bed-time story, Sylvia requested a Just-So story. (An "old favorite" -- about 9 months ago we were reading from that book just about every night; but it's been on the shelf untouched for a little while now.) After a consideration of the contents she settled on "How the Leopard Got his Spots", saying even though "The Elephant's Child" is her favorite story, she wanted to see about this one. (When we were reading it regularly, she would ask for "The Elephant's Child" about one night out of three; I got so used to it that I was able to recite it from memory one night when we were driving a long distance and she really wanted to hear a story.) Well "How the Leopard Got his Spots" is one of the more objectionable stories in the book but with a bit of editing you can get most of the racism out and just have it be about colors. So that's what we read. Now our edition of "Just-So Stories" has two sets of illustrations, line drawings that I think are from the original edition -- they have captions that read as if Kipling wrote them -- and more recent color prints.* When we were reading about Baviaan, the "dog-headed, barking baboon" who is the wisest animal in South Africa, there was a line drawing of him, a drawing which looks nothing like a baboon. Sylvia objected -- "that's not a baboon with a dog's head, that's a person with a lion's head -- like a backwards sphinx!" (She learned about the Sphinx recently and is pretty into the idea.)
*I wish, I wish that I could find the edition of "Just-So Stories" that my dad read to us from when we were young. It was oversize and the illustrations were just beautiful. It's possible I am misremembering and they were the same as the color illustrations in this book, just bigger; but I'm pretty sure they were more abstract and symbolic.
posted evening of November 12th, 2005: Respond
➳ More posts about Rudyard Kipling
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Monday, November 7th, 2005
This morning I started reading Data Crunching, by Greg Wilson, which Bill Delavega recommended on his site, Dispatches From the Prairie. The subject of the book is an activity that occupies a fair (and growing) piece of my attention, namely converting data between different file formats. Wilson writes in an engaging and accessible style, and his examples are useful. So far (I'm reading Chapter 2) there is an unresolved ambiguity about writing reusable code vs. being "reasonably sure" your code will never be reused. (I think this ambiguity will not be resolved because it's pretty universal; I've encountered it a lot in my own work and never been able to resolve it beyond making what seem like reasonable compromises.) A bonus: A lot of the examples are in Python, which is a language I've been wanting to start using for a while now.
posted afternoon of November 7th, 2005: Respond
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Sunday, October 30th, 2005
Our bedtime story tonight was "The Fir Tree", the final story in Tales From Moominvalley, which Ellen and Sylvia picked up the other day at Scandinavia House. Sylvia requested this story because the picture on the first page of the story is of a young Woody, who looks kind of like the Dweller Under the Sink from Moominland Midwinter. The DUS is a mysterious creature who does not speak the same language as the Moomins, and when Moomintroll tried to talk to him, he got angry and said "Radamsah!" which Sylvia found just hilarious. So, we read this story with Sylvia specifying that I call the Woody "Radamsah", which substitution I did make most of the times his name came up. (When I failed to make it, Sylvia was quick to correct me.) (This occasionally happens when we are reading a story, that Sylvia asks me to make some substitution -- for instance when we read Moominland Midwinter, the instruction was always to refer to Too-Ticky with masculine rather than feminine pronouns. -- Note that this is kind of interesting in a weird way as Too-Ticky was modeled on Jannson's female partner, maybe Sylvia is picking up on an intentional gender confusion?) "The Fir Tree" is a wonderful Christmas story, one of the best ever I think. To summarize: The Moomin family normally hibernates through winter and so do not know about Christmas; but this year the Hemulen wakes them up because he is resentful at their sleeping peacefully away while everyone else works so hard at celebrating Christmas. He doesn't bother to explain what's happening though, and the best the Moomins can make out from their fractured interactions with various Hemulens and Gaffsies, is that some kind of dangerous creature named Christmas is coming when it gets dark, and they need to find a fir tree and decorate it, and cook a dinner and set out presents to placate the monster. They end up setting up a very nice Christmas jubilee for the Woody and his small friends and relations, who are impoverished. And then go back to sleep, still not really understanding what is going on. While we were reading the part where the Moomins were arriving at their conclusion that "Christmas" is the name of some monster, Sylvia observed, "like the Dr. Seuss Christmas monster, who takes all the presents away." Yes, nice parallel to find.
posted evening of October 30th, 2005: Respond
➳ More posts about Moomins
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Saturday, October 29th, 2005
I bought a used copy of The Evolution Man by Roy Lewis, through Amazon. I remember it from my childhood as being a laugh riot -- it came yesterday and I read some of it tonight, and it does not disappoint. The idea of the book is to show some of the milestones of human evolution and social development, as seen through the eyes of a young early hominid named Ernie, his Luddite uncle and his forward-looking father. It's a little bit the same effect as Kipling's "Just-So Stories", but more clever and insightful.
posted evening of October 29th, 2005: Respond
➳ More posts about The Evolution Man
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Thursday, October 27th, 2005
Sylvia and Ellen were at Scandinavia House (on Park Ave. and 37th) yesterday, and found to their great surprise that the gift shop there is just full of Moomin merchandise. Gee, why didn't I think of that? Seems pretty obvious now -- they have stuffed animals, pottery and a bunch of other stuff. They did not get any of that, but did pick up the CD of "Muumilauluja" -- lovely but hard to understand, being in Finnish er, Swedish and all. We listened to it last night and played "try to guess the character who's speaking" based on the voice characteristics, which was pretty fun. This morning I did a search and found that the CD is translated into English as Moomin Voices, available from CDBaby. Update: Er, I'm confused here. Looks like "Muumilauluja" is, as I at first thought, in Finnish; and "Moomin Voices" is in Swedish. No English translation, I think.
posted morning of October 27th, 2005: Respond
➳ More posts about Tove Jansson
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Monday, October third, 2005
Tonight we finished Moominpappa At Sea -- Sylvia surprised me by telling me, "Dad -- maybe the lighthouse-keeper is the fisherman" about two pages before that identity is revealed -- she's been paying closer and more subtle attention to the story line than I had thought she was. Then she said, "I've been thinking about the moomins all day." And how cool is this -- the events of the last chapter take place on October 3rd, which is the date we're reading the last chapter on!
posted evening of October third, 2005: Respond
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Friday, September 23rd, 2005
Sylvia and I watched the first two episodes of Moomin-Mania last night. She was crazy about it, which strangely created a bit more distance for me, than when I watched the first episode before. I am thinking the changes in the story-line make for a less interesting story than the book. But, the visuals are fantastic. And the voices are generally really good too, although there are spots where they are not quite properly synchronized with the action.
posted morning of September 23rd, 2005: Respond
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