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30 Dec 1997Got a CD by Martin Sexton “Black Sheep” with the amazing single Diner. 26 Dec 1997Watched Super Bridge, an outstanding documentary on building a large cable-stay bridge across the Mississippi river (north of St Louis). Any nerd would love it. 20 Dec 1997Finally read To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee). That particular plot (the town fool playing a heroic role) strikes a chord with me in a very fundamental way. Im not too sure of any other examples of a similar plot (Hunchback of Notre Dame?), but there must be some. 14 Dec 1997Saw Kiss The Girls: A crummy cross between The Silence of the Lambs, and The Collector. 6 Dec 1997Heard hilarious parody song Lord, I Was Born a NAMBLA Man sung to the tune of Lord, I Was Born a Ramblin’ Man, of course. From Seinfeld TV show: Ending a relationship is like tipping over a vending machine: You have to rock it back and forth a few times. (meaning there are always a few reconciliationsfore the final end). 3 Dec 1997Saw a hallmark TV movie “What the Deaf Man Heard”. Nice, but violated Neals #1 movie rule:
Lots of movies violate #1, including many peoples favorite movie: The Shawshank Redemption. 2 Dec 1997Read The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco. Not as good as Focaults Pendulum or The Name of the Rose, but good. The translator has his or her work cut out: Some words in the English version are: scabies, fluxion, rheum, protean, sheepfold, simulacra, punctilio, jujube, sapid, corolla, paralogism, trope, alembic, oriflammes, jerkin. Quote: What we honor as prudence in our elders is simply panic in action. “Perhaps it would be right to die now”, the Knight of Malta said. “Are you not seized by the desire to hang by the mouth of a canon and slide into the sea? It would be quick and at that moment we would now everything.” “Yes, but at the instant we knew it, we would cease to know” Roberto said. 7 Nov 1997Read Look Homeward, Angel. By the first Thomas Wolfe. Great autobiographical novel set in Asheville, North Carolina. Quote Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas. Ancient proverb: A daughter is a daughter for life; a son is a son until he has a wife. I wonder if Look Homeward, Angel is blacklisted on college campuses: it has lots of racial slurs against blacks and jews. The sequel You Cant Go Home Again is not quite as good. 21 Oct 1997It aint bragging if you done it. Title of a chapter in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Oxymoron – comes from greek “oxy” = sharp; “moron” = dull/foolish. 18 Oct 1997Read American Art by Robert Hughes. Neat paintings by American artists. My favorite artists were John Singer Sargent, Edward Hopper (his famous Nighthawks has been reproduced many times with Elvis and Marilyn Monroe),
Andrew Wyeth (most famous for Christina's World),
Thomas Eakins,
George Bellows
and Charles Sheeler.
Especially good is American Landscape by Sheeler (Museum of Modern Art).
Thomas Hart Benton is not mentioned much.
nor is Diego Rivera, but he was from Mexico:
15 Oct 1997Walt Whitman: I believe a leaf a grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars, And an [ant] is equally great, and the egg of a wren, and a grain of sand. And a tree toad is [masterpiece] enough for the highest; And the running blackberry could adorn the parlors of heaven, And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery, and the cow munching with depressed head surpasses any statute, And the mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels. (in the original: and = pismire; masterpiece = chef d’ouvre). 5 Oct 1997So impressed with Galatea 2.2, I read The Gold Bug Variations by the same author (R. Powers). Reminds me of Umberto Eco. One repeated theme in the book is the futility of trying to model nature or life with science and formulae. He quotes Quince from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: One must come in with a bush of thorns and a lantern and say he comes to disfigure, or to present, the person of Moonshine. About the only downside of The Gold Bug Variations is I get the feeling he is mimicking Godel, Escher, Bach, appealing to the same audience, stressing the same themes. But TBGV is a novel, so they are not in the same league. 21 Sep 1997Read Galatea 2.2 (R. Powers) Outstanding autobiographical novel, centered on the breakup of the author and his girlfriend. I felt like a voyeur, peering into his private life. I wonder what the former girlfriend thinks about the publication. At the next conference, she produced a photo out of her backpack … Flirting, under deniability’s cloak Assume a virtue, if you have it not [from Hamlet] I guess there are two kinds of love letters. If you don’t get out after the first three words, you need to press on forever. Once, as I kissed the birthmark that stained the small of her back, this seemed to me the point of literature. I could not think of a book that was not by, for, or about this … And the … calls we made to each other in the winter dark were the vowels that all stories tried to find their way back to. How many sufferers who are incensed when we speak of an almighty God would rush from the depth of their own distress to succor Him in His frailty? [regarding a book read a long time ago:] I haven’t looked up the passage since first reading it. I will never read it again. The real thing might be too far from the one I’ve kept in memory. 13 Sep 1997Learned about a neat auctioning technique: the Dutch auction. The auctioneer starts high, and gradually reduce the price, and the first person to bid wins it. Commonly used in the florist industry, and other commodities (cattle, etc) where large number of lots must be sold and there isn’t much time. They say that the average auction item (in the florist industry) sells in 2 seconds! That reminds of an arbitration technique (baseball arbitration) where the arbitrator hears all the evidence and arguments, then both parties submit “best and final” settlement offers, and the arbitrator must select the most appropriate of the two offers. It forces the parties to submit reasonable offers. A variant is “night baseball” where both parties write down offers, but the arbitrator does not see them. Then the arbitrator selects a settlement value, and the winner is the one whose offer was closest to the arbitrator’s value. Read The Saskiad (1998, Brian hall) – Very good book about a precocious girl living on a former commune in Ithaca, New York (Cornell?). She goes thru neat adventures at school, home, and Norway. Half the book is fantasizing about Odysseus, Tycho Brahe, Capt. Hornblower, and Marco Polo. 8 Sep 1997The Simpsons last night had a classic quote “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” from Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn. He also penned the famous “A thing of beauty is a joy forever” (Endymion). And of course Tennyson’s Ulysses: Though much is taken, much abides; and though 7 Sep 1997Listened to Huddy Ledbetter (Ledbelly) this week: classic American music. Goodnight Irene, The Rock Island Line, Christmas Day. Trying to read Dantes inferno, but the translation by Henry Cary is unreadable because it affects archaic English (“By all means for his deliverance meet, assist him. So to me will comfort spring. I, who now bid theee on this errand for …”. But the etchings by Dore are superb. “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here”. Although I always seem to recall it as “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here”. Similar to the common misquote “Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink” instead of the correct “Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink”. 20 Aug 1997Quote from Sacred Hunger (1992 Unsworth) another Booker prize winner: God is polycephalous, as the diversity of our prayers attest; his aspect varies with man’s particular hoped, and Kemp’s were pinned on fair winds and good prices. 10 Aug 1997The making of PCR, about Kary Mullis. Yet another example of Neals rule #33 “Really great achievers are ambitious self-promoters”. Sure, the Polymerase Chain Reaction is a great invention, but if I see another picture of Mullis posing with his surfboard Im going to vomit. 2 Aug 1997
Car Talk had a hilarious bit about "five questions from your wife that you need to think about carefully before answering":
That reminds me of another bit they did (during the Ebonics controversy) about Greasebonics (the language spoken by car repairman): Greasebonics is spoken by inserting f__king before every noun, as in "Hand me the f__king wrench" or "Take a look at this f__king engine". 13 July 1997
Read Oscar and Lucinda (1988 Peter Carey). Booker prize winner. Outstanding book: proof you dont need sex or violence to tell a good story. Fantastic surprise ending. Read Perfume (1986, Patrick Suskind). Translated from German (Das Parfum). Unusual story about a freak in 1740s Paris: super acute sense of smell. He crushes virgins to distill their essence: the distilled odor makes people euphoric and oblivious to bad. Murderer finally immolates himself with the perfume. A murder mystery without a detective. Lots of good historical detail. Reminiscent of The Alieniest. 18 May 1997
Watched La Strada on video: excellent movie. Right up there with 8 1/2 and La Dolce Vida. 4 May 1997
Read Morphio Eugenia (A. S. Byatt - Booker prize winner for Possession). Later made into a movie called Angles and Insects. Great novel: my favorite kind: very erudite and educational. Shocking plot twist at the end. 24 Apr 1997
Read Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell, the great populizer of mythology. His thesis is that many myths around the world share a common pattern: A hero leaves his homeland, encounters supernatural forces, winds some kind of victory, returns home and bestows favors. Campbell quotes Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West: Culture is society in in form - as an athlete is in form - each detail of the society oriented to maximize fulfillment. 8 Apr 1997
Read a biography of James Joyce. Im still not sure why he is so famous: Finnegans Wake and Ulysses are not very readable. Maybe A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the reason. More likely, Finnegans Wake has been the basis of hundreds of doctoral thesis around the globe. 8 Mar 1997
Before, say, 1900, before the explosion of radio, movies, books, and songs, everyone in a civilization could easily share a universal idiom: All learned people studied and understood the same books and thoughts. In Western civilization, the common idiom was the bible, Greece, Rome, perhaps Shakespeare. One could quote Cicero or Homer or Virgil and be understood. One could hum a Verdi aria and the listener would know the source. Aesops Fables, Grimms fairy tales, Greek Myths, Hans Christen Anderson: all universally known. But now, as people grow up, we have so much to study. No one studies the Greek classics, so what shared idiom can we have? Has pop culture taken the place of the classics? Today if one wants to be universally understood, one can quote from The Simpsons, or Mission Impossible, or Woody Allen. One can hum the Beatles or the Bee Gees. If I wave my fist and say "Im gonna send you to the moon", people of a certain generation will know Im quoting from The Honeymooners TV show. But if I mention the "rosy fingered dawn" who will know that is one of the common phrases from Homer? Wells Fargo impressed me with their customer service last week: I went to complain about an error on their part, and the customer service rep gave me $25 cash, on the spot. I left very satisfied. 7 Mar 1997
Listening to a CD set I bought by Philip Glass (one L :-)... an acquired taste to be sure. A quote from a music critic: A listener to his music usually reaches a point, quite early on, of rebellion at the needle-stuck-in-the-groove quality, but a minute or two later he realizes that the needle has not stuck, something has happened. Once that point has passed glass's music ... becomes easy to listen to for hours on end. The mind may wander now and again ... Unfortunately, this CD set does not have any excerpts from Glass's Civil War opera. I heard a fragment of it on the radio 10 or 15 years ago, and it was stunning. A voice was speaking in the background (a speech by a civil war general?) while the music played. I'll keep searching for it. I also like Glass's Satyagraha, and his music for Cocteau's La Belle et la Bete. 3 Mar 1997
A few decades in the future, when computers are dominant in our world, what 20th century inventions (and inventors) will future generations recognize as critical? Who is the Edison, the Bell, the Ford of computing? No one individual is outsanding. Who invented virtual memory? relational databases? object-oriented programming? Knuth? Gates? Kernigan and Ritche? Stroustroup? Have we no heroes in our field? 2 Mar 1997
A quote from a speech by Q. Caecilius Metellisu Macedonicus (131 BC) as censor, urging Romans to increase the birth rate (source: The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, 1937). If we could get on without a wife, Romans, we would all avoid the annoyance, but since nature has ordained that we can neither live very comfortably with them nor at all without them, we must take thought for our lasting well-being rather than for the pleasure of the moment. The Gettysburg address, ironically, says ".. the world will little note nor long remember what we say here". 1 Mar 1997
Read The Collector (1955, John Fowles) for the second time. Just as disturbing as the first time. Normally I can easily read a book about criminals and immoral behavior, but this one is a bit too over the top (although not as bad as American Psycho, which I couldn't finish). I cant help wonder if it reveals the author's own fantasies. Certainly the author had some courage: he must have known people would look at him and assume he was into kidnapping and rape. In any case, a heck of a first novel by the same guy that wrote The French Lieutenants Woman, and my favorite The Magus. 22 Feb 1997
Trying to read The Iliad, again. Not easy. The funny thing is that, as famous and fundamental as this book is, it doesnt really contain any stories that made it down to modern times. Contrasted, say, with (these are all from other Greek stories) the Cyclops, Penelope and her suitors, lotus-eaters, calypso, the sirens, (those are from The Odyssey), the Trojan horse, Achilles' vulnerable heel. What does the Iliad have? Hector and Ajax: whose names have come down to us. 8 Feb 1997
Read "Wildfire" (1990, Richard Ford) not quite as good as his smash hit "The Sportswriter" but has some good quotes like: .. The answer is simple: it is just low-life, some coldness in us all, some helplessness that causes us to misunderstand life when it is pure and plain, makes our existence seem like a border between two nothings, and makes us no more or less than animals who meet on the road - watchful, unforgiving, without patience or desire. Heard a neat song on the radio (the weekly World Cafe, an outstanding show): Lebannon, Tennesse by Ron Sexsmith. 15 Jan 1997
Read one of the original "buddy" novels: The Three Musketeers. Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. Later, a leader joins them, D'Artagnan, who becomes the fourth musketeer. Very popular books when originally published (1844 - 1855). Their motto, of course: All For One, and One For All! 3 Jan 1997
Last week PBS radio played a recording of a Christmas story, written and spoken by John Henry Faulk. I'm not embarrassed to say it moved me to tears. A story of giving and sharing set in poor Texas. The story is now rather famous (originally written in 1974?) and is all over the web. Cool book title: Every Breath a Prayer (about Bhudist temples in Tibet). |
