I just got a Christmas card from a friend of mine, known him since high school (actually the card was from his wife, maybe he's pissed at me, whatever), who is living in Cairo. His wife, a doctor, got a job with the State Department. The card shows their kids on a camel in front of the pyramids.
Myself, I go to work in the morning, and in the evening I go home. I haven't been to Egypt. But I do get a lot of reading done. So I thumb my nose at him, and here are the books I've been reading lately.
It's a bunch of essays, most of which were published elsewhere already, so there's a range, a variety, some stuff is just ok but some is quite good. Her father was Alfred L. Kroeber, of the Anthropology Department at Cal Berkeley, in the days when Ishi, the last of the Yahi, wandered out of the woods into civilization, in 1911.
She writes about reading, and memory, and happy families (the Tolstoy quote), and gender, and feet, and where ideas come from, and, in a very detailed analysis, stress rhythms in poetry and prose. In that one, she actually counts words and stresses and syllables in paragraphs from Three Little Bears, Mark Twain, J.R.R. Tolkien, Virginia Wolf, Jane Austen, and Gertrude Stein. How they were written to sound out loud. Just looking at it now makes me want to go back and re-read some of it, which is good, because I just finished the last book on this list and this afternoon was reduced to reading the newspaper on the train on the way home. There is a great page where she compares a paragraph taken at random from Pride and Prejudice with a paragraph taken from Sense and Sensibility, to show how different the rhythms are and how completely in tune with the different senses of the two novels are the two rhythms.
My favorite line from the book I think is this:
When I was thirteen and fourteen I felt like a whippet suddenly trapped inside a great lumpy Saint Bernard. I wonder if boys don't often feel something like that as they get their growth. They're forever being told that they're supposed to be big and strong, but I think some of them miss being slight and lithe.
She has a whole chapter on "Rhythmic Patters in Lord of the Rings." That and the season got me thinkng about this book, which I'd read aloud to my wife a couple years ago. Tolkien wasn't just a fantasy writer, you know, he was an actual, accredited, and respected scholar of medieval English. If you ever read the Icelandic Eddas, it's obvious how much he borrowed from the literature of the time. Sir Gawain is a poem from the west of England, around 1400, contemporaneous with Chaucer from from a quite different tradition. For them, poetry was about alliteration within the line, not just rhymes at the end. Here's some lines chosen at random:
It's a Christmas book, the story starts on New Years Day and concludes with the Christmas season and New Years Day a year later. It reads aloud really well, that metricality and alliteration just drive it and drive it. And Tolkien thoroughly rocks on it, I couldn't imagine anybody doing it better, although according to the New York Times book review this weekend, somebody has recently tried, which was good, because in the review I learned the little four-line rhyming turnaround at the end of each stanza is called a "bob and wheel", the hanging two syllables before it is the "bob":Then he put spurs to Gringolet, and espying the track,
thrust in along a bank by a thicket's border,
rode down the rough brae right to the valley;
and then he gazed all about: a grim place he thought it,
and saw no sign of shelter on any side at all,
only high hillsides sheer upon either hand,
and notched knuckled crags with gnarled boulders.
So since it reads aloud so well, I determined to read it to the little family in the evenings, as Frank was going to bed. My plan was to do this and Dicken's Christmas Carol in the month of December. Well, I just finished this, and we're not going to get to the Christmas Carol this year. Frank listened patiently through it, which was certainly good, but I don't think he got much of it. I was usually rushing through it too, so that he could get to sleep at a decent hour.'A man must do as he is placed; be not pained nor aggrieved,'
said he.Said she so comely clad:
'Nay, noble knight and free,
though naught of yours I had,
you should get a gift from me.'
I've taken some interesting pictures with it, but I continue to wonder if I didn't actually take a greater number of more interesting pictures with the little pocket camera, that was around more often and didn't have very many distracting features.
But dad's recommendation sounded interesting, so I picked up Anne's college copy (Norton critical edition, too many footnotes) and started in on it. It wasn't like I remembered it at all, the encyclopdia stuff was actually interesting, and it certainly wasn't in the proportion that I remember it. But the plot doesn't really go anywhere, it's like this summer's movie Sunrise where these guys are flying a spaceship into the sun, there's not a lot of suspense about how it's going to end.
Which is it going to be? Can you guess?
- After unsuccessfully hunting the whale, Ahab says "Ah, never mind, it wasn't really that important," and goes home.
- In a final climactic battle, they conquer the whale, and bring it back to Nantucket to cheering throngs and a victory celebration, are acclaimed heroes, and live happily ever after.
- They are smashed into tiny, jellied smithereens by the creature for the hubris of having dared to take on the elemental forces of nature face-to-face.
So it wasnt' as bad as it was the first time, but I wasn't the impressed with it. BUT THEN, I needed some text for some test cases at work, and I availed myself of the Gutenberg project for some choice bits, and realized that in isolation they actually sounded pretty good:
So now I'm thinking I need to read it again, just slower this time. One more chance? Well, like I said, I am out of books...I say, tell Quohog there—what’s that you call him? tell Quohog to step along. By the great anchor, what a harpoon he’s got there! looks like good stuff that; and he handles it about right. I say, Quohog, or whatever your name is, did you ever stand in the head of a whale-boat? did you ever strike a fish?”
Without saying a word, Queequeg, in his wild sort of way, jumped upon the bulwarks, from thence into the bows of one of the whale-boats hanging to the side; and then bracing his left knee, and poising his harpoon, cried out in some such way as this:—
“Cap’ain, you see him small drop tar on water dere? You see him? well, spose him one whale eye, well, den!” and taking sharp aim at it, he darted the iron right over old Bildad’s broad brim, clean across the ship’s decks, and struck the glistening tar spot out of sight.
“Now,” said Queequeg, quietly, hauling in the line, “spos-ee him whale-e eye; why, dad whale dead.”
Action!! Romance!! Adventure!! Thrills!! All the things you can read about, in a book.
I find it frustrating when things that are obvious to me are not obvious to other people. When I fail to retain my equanimity in the face of that, that also frustrates me, that my empathy seems so restricted.
The oreo cookie video came up on a page with not-so-obvious information, but just as useful, especially for bicycle riders: How Not To Get Hit By Cars
For two decades, Tilden Park has closed South Park Drive from Nov. 1 to April 1 to prevent cars from squishing migrating newts.
Then Frank was all keen on going out into the driveway and taking hitting whiffle balls with his big blue plastic bat. We did it for like an hour, and he still didn't want to stop.
The Lamplighters were having their annual Champagne Gala and Auction. Gilbert and Sullivan greatest hits with made-up lyrics to a Harry Potter theme: Harry Patter and the Willing Suspension of Disbelief, or, A Series of Unfortunate Musical Numbers. Frank just finished book seven a month or two ago. Anne managed to pick up three tickets at the last minute. My god it was hilarious. Instead of "Three little maids from school are we" think "Three little witches on a spree" where the three witches are comprised of Paris, Lindsay and Brittany.
One of the items at auction was a pair of leftover Victorian costumes. I had asked Anne just a week or so ago if we were going to the Dickens Fair this year and if she was going to upgrade her costume. "Hoops!" she said, "Where am I going to get hoops!". The Victorian dress had hoops. It was her color. We bid. We won.
Plus tickets, plus a mirror box, plus a cute book on Victorian Christmas customs.
This was all at the Herbst Theatre. After having met "Snipe" and Harry "Patter" at the reception, Frank has to pee to beat the band and we run downstairs to find the men's room. The doors of the men's room are about a hundred years old, oak and brass, and with an aggressively brisk closing action so guys waiting to go during intermission aren't waiting too long. Frank was halfway through the door, turned to hand me the raffle ticket he'd been holding, and turned back just in time for his forehead to meet the door coming back at him. He got clocked, went down hard, and raised a cartoon-sized lump on his forehead.
When I finally get back to collect our box of stuff and fulfill our winning bid, it turns out the fitter for the costumes is none other than the old friend of Anne's from her Lamplighter days that we've been hanging out with all night. Are you serious? How much kismet can I stand? I figured Frank's lump was balancing out the karma for all the other scores me made that night (along with missing out on the newts). I tried to explain to him that his suffering was for us, for a greater good, that I would never have accepted that deal if I'd been offered it, but The Great Prankster upstairs sometimes just does it that way. He didn't seem to appreciate that idea much.
Yeah, well, whatever.
I'm getting exactly one thing right in life right now, but I'm getting it really right and it's the most important thing, so I'm going to say I'm doing ok.
The note was so sweet, it doesn't even bother me that he barely notices all the effort I spend to keep him interested in things that aren't the computer. This is the pizza we made a couple weekends ago, from scratch, natch.
I like kopete a lot, but it didn't seem to have a pounce feature. It turns out KDE's dcop stuff is all self-describing and discoverable. Fun stuff!
while true ; \
do \
if dcop kopete default contactsStatus | grep -i sekimura | grep Online ; \
then dcop knotify default notify 'pounceevent' 'pouncer' 'sekimura is here' '' '' 2 0 ; \
fi ; \
sleep 10 ; \
done
It was a year ago I "gave" this octave mandolin to Anne as a "present." With a wink and a nod that she was hoping to get a backup musician out of it rather than pick up another instrument.
After that long, I've got a couple of tunes I can almost play up to speed, and on a good day which almost sound like music. It's addictive, though, and I love the way it stretches out my left hand, even if I have to skip some days when my hand is sore.
How many tunes do I know now?
- The Rambler (Irish jig)
- Coleraine (English jig)
- Boys of Ballinafad (Irish jig)
- The Girl Who Broke My Heart (slow Gm reel)
- The Cliffs of Mostar (Cliffs of Moher done in 7/8)
- Kesh Jig
- Easy Club Reel (well, right...)
- When Jesus Christ Was 12 Years Old (medieval Cornish)
- Haste to the Wedding (Irish Jig)
- Boys of Blue Hill (hornpipe)
- Siroc (Romanian)
Hey, that's not too bad. 1,989 tunes later I'll be able to sit in on an Irish session.
Plus I just started fooling with the chords, playing to the Dead's "Loser", which has a nice chord progression (how many different places on the neck can you play a G chord?). Thus I shall fulfill my destiny as a backup musician.
Next I really want to learn a Bulgarian paidushko (5/8). I may have to do that one totally by ear since I don't have any sheet music for one lying around.
I was pretty proud of myself. Fleet Week, the Blue Angels, traffic, Columbus Day parade in North beach, Frank is just on the cusp of being willing to ride his bike in traffic, those were the variables, the question I worked on for days, like every year, is what is the best combination of cars, bicycles, walking, with the least amount of being stuck in traffic or waiting for parking, that gets us closest to the action for the least amount of effort. So this year it was load the bikes on the car, park across town, way across town where nobody would ever think of parking, and ride along the bay, squeeze through the crowds at the Wharf, and end up on a beach or a nice bit of grass.
And then, sneaking through the Wharf, we see signs for the boat rides--see the show from a boat! One of the (many) nice things about having spawned like a dozen kids is that forty bucks a head isn't really that bad for three people. So we got to tie up our bikes on a tiny platform next to the dock, and head out onto the Bay, from right behing Alioto's, passing Joe DiMaggio's dad's fishing boat on the way.
Exhausting, and windy, and wavy, and loud, but we sure were right there. The boat captain (Captain Frank, no less), played the show on KSFO AM so it was fun getting to hear the play-by-play, and the background music to the show, the cheesy patriotic schmalz, not so much fun being subjected to AM radio ads at high volume. It was exciting watching the planes do their high-speed passes, and after a while Captain Frank was driven to blowing his horn and cursing loudly, if ineffectively, at the Sunday boaters in their sailboats, and an even better show developed among the amateur sailor crowd as we watched the nimrods create some truly terrifying near misses.
The first mate made it even better, he'd memorized the Blue Angels' routine from previous years , and knew that they did three low-altitude passes from west to east, and that the third one was the ultra-high speed one where you could see the condensation envelope form around the plane as it just approached the sound barrier. And so he'd watch the west for the incoming jets, and start screaming, "Here he comes guys! Right on the deck! Here he comes!" And then BLAAAAAMMMMMM the jet flies right overhead, a couple hundred feet away. Great theater.
Afterwards it was an easy if slow bike ride through the crowds streaming away from the waterfront, and when we got back to our little family car, our quiet, still and warm refuge, still happily parked on a quiet street, in the shade, just a U-turn away from two blocks of cars waiting to get onto the Bridge, with an extra layer of relief that it hadn't been towed and that I'd deciphered the eldritch installation of parking signs correctly, it was almost the high point of the day. And I realized I had, in fact, scored probably the best parking spot possible for the occasion.
Meanwhile, or the next day really, remember what this was like? The wiggly teeth, working on that loose one, the anticipation. How tiny those baby teeth are in retrospect. It just struck me tonight, the contrast, between 18,000 horsepower of F-18's on a high-speed, low-altitude pass and noise and crowds of millions of people, and the quiet wet space inside your eight-year-old head as that one little tooth keeps wiggling and twisting.
But the other weekend I was visiting my parents and picked up a book on their couch, The House That George Built, and knew within the first couple of sentences that I'd love reading the book. The reason I was visiting them that particular weekend was that it was my birthday, and the next day I unwrapped my very own copy for myself!
And I loved it! It's a great read! I trace my own knowledge of the music of that period back to two main sources: the Butch Thompson Trio playing on the Prairie Home Companion back in the early Eighties, and the albums Linda Ronstadt made with Nelson Riddle, torch songs from the Jazz Age, also around the same time. Then sometime around 1991 listening to Sarah Klotz de Aguilar (then just Sarah Klotz) give me a tour in Cole Porter at a piano bar in the Crocker Galleria. Important as a matter of cultural literacy, I think I heard mentioned once that the only true American art forms are jazz, comic books, and Broadway musical comedy. I might have that wrong, though.
So in the chapters about the big guns, Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Rogers and Hart, I think I recognize about half the songs he mentions. In some of the chapters I've heard of neither the musician nor any of the songs. But writing still pulls me through the chapter, loving every word. So infectious, Sheedy's enthusiasm.
After reading, or while reading, I needed to hear some of that music. I went back to a CD set of American popular songs that I own but don't really like that much, but it wasn't doing it for me. Then I realized a better way to do it--my own fingers. Hurrah for the piano! Bravo to Amazon!
Rogers and Hart (Richard Rogers' first incarnation, before Hammerstein) is This Can't Be Love, It Never Entered My Mind, My Funny Valentine, Thou Swell, You Took Advantage Of Me.
Fun stuff. So much fun, in fact, I'm going to get away from the computer right now and go play some. (I already worked out on the octave mandolin this morning, and got addicted to a medieval Cornish tune called "When Jesus Christ Was Twelve Years Old.")
They say that raising kids is an ongoing series of surprises, but sometimes our interactions are so predictable, it seems like we're reading from a script, and the same script every week. Yesterday afternoon was our little family to a T.
Months ago my thoughtful, imaginative, and socially conscious wife had set up a birthday present for me, and bought us all slots in the Berkeley Rep's "Back to School" day at the Pixar studios, having only a sketchy idea of what that actually entailed. The morning of the big event comes and we all get up knowing only that we have to be there Promptly at some Time to get our pick of Activities. The Time we had was a little off, so for us Promptly meant getting there an hour before they opened the gates. By the time they did open the gates, the tension and excitement in the car were oozing out the cracks in the doors.
We park in the studio lot and join the streaming throngs headed for the front door. Knowing it would be wrong to tear hell-for-leather past everyone else, Who-concert style, I suggested the strategem of happily skipping as a way to increase our speed. Of course that made me think of the "We're Off To See The Wizard" step that Anne showed me a long time ago, which was kind of stupid to try in that context because you cover no ground at all with it, but just as I was trying to get the step up to speed, my giant size thirteens got in the way of Frank's and sent him skittering across the pavement.
Or that's what he'd have had you believe at the time. All he did was drop to one knee, and it didn't even draw blood, but he was wearing shorts, and it was concrete, and all of a sudden instead of making haste for the registration line we were stuck with a non-ambulatory but very loudly crying child.
Fortunately, he's only sixty or seventy pounds and not much more than four feet long, so I picked him up and the three of us made it the last fifty yards to the door, and inside, and picked our classes, and had a half-hour to roam the halls of Pixar before the first one. But Frank is now Crippled. The knee may look only bruised, but apparently it's been dealt its final blow, because it won't bear any weight at all. He makes a big show of hopping about on one foot, but it's clear he's Not Going Anywhere, certainly not on a hushed and respectful walk through the hallowed halls.
Here's were I start to lose it. I've been going on adrenalin all morning, but I'm fried from the week, and I start to consider just going home.
Oh, but I didn't mention which classes we picked. You get to pick two out of about half a dozen. We got into the Animation class first, since that involved sitting in a theater watching a software demo, we figured he could deal with that. After that, Anne wanted to take Acting, so she signed up for that, but I wanted to get Frank and I into Stage Combat. I was certain he'd like it--we stage light-saber fights at home, we'd be able to practice what we learned together, it would be pretty rigidly structured, none of this "now be a tree!" or "draw what you feel" stuff. But no! Anything but that! Please, please, don't make me take Stage Combat! Anything, I'll take the Playwriting class, I'll do Crafts, anything but that! Not only was he sure that his ability to stand on his right leg was forever gone, but I could sense there was another, more terrifying issue, that I couldn't get him to talk about, but afterwards I asked him and he said he thought we were going to start with crossbows.
I think he might have meant quarterstaves, but you get the picture. If you imagine signing up for a class involving carrying a iron-and-oak crossbow that's as heavy as you are, carrying it into a line across from a bunch of other people with their crossbows and having to wind, load, aim and fire it into a bunch of other people doing the same thing at you, your negative reaction to the idea would be as strong as his was.
So anyway, Anne leads him away and manages to get him interested at looking at PIxar art before the first class, leaving me to wallow in my foul black mood. The animation demonstration was cool. After that, of course he loved the Stage Combat class. Five minutes into it he was bouncing on his heels, like a tiny, skinny-armed, white, blonde-haired Muhammed Ali. I had to pull out the big guns and threaten him with the cancellation of a trip to his cousin the next day, and I have to give him credit for actually pulling himself together, but afterwards he couldn't wait to show mom our new three-punch-and-a-hair-pull choreographed fight scene.
By then my own mood had improved, and I was able to enjoy the day, which really was a blast. Pixar has a really amazing campus. It was a beautiful day, and a lot of fun. Just emotionally exhausting.
Also like us, we're very suggestible people, in the car on the way home Frank says "Let's make some more stop-action movies when we get home!" So we spent the rest of the night working hard on some good film making. This is a draft, only the first two scenes, and we still have to add dialog, music, and special effects sounds (yeah, right). I think I made it at too high resolution, so it might stutter on your computer, but that's an artifact of the flash-embedded video Vox uses, I think.
You can believe anything is possible...
