Oh my goodness! My back was achin' achin' achin' from sitting living, lugging huge rucksacks of huge textbooks about and about, and a bed that just won't quit until I'm busted. Moanin' and groanin' and Corinne convinced me to hop on the Pilates crucifix, so I did and now I feel wonderful! Oh, what a little exercision can do for a soul (and his back bones).
--break--
OK, back from my day, winding down, the old lady's out partying while I'm here at home washing dishes, doing calculus and dinking around on the computer. Obviously. Don't ever let it be said I didn't pull my fair share of work!
Nothing new here really, you all already know the score. Trying to gear up for a Louisiana trip around Christmas time, that should be a lot of fun. Other than that just trudging right along, trying to have fun all the while.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Sunday, October 26, 2008
True Confusions
Sunday morning, blearily doing things like washing dishes, chatting with the children, wringing my hands over god knows what. Homework is calling, not too loudly though. Like to stay ahead of the wave, like a surfer way up not worrying about tanking. Feels good that way, although being in the tube can be a blast too. I'm guessing.
Watched Peter Greenaway's "The Draughtsman's Contract" last night. The man knows how to make movies that leave people in a state of "huh?", that much is for sure. I liked it, it was one his most straightforward movies I've seen, and yet still very quirky. "Drowning By Numbers" was also in a similar vein.
OK, time to go make pancakes and do some calculus. Ahh... Sunday mornings...
Watched Peter Greenaway's "The Draughtsman's Contract" last night. The man knows how to make movies that leave people in a state of "huh?", that much is for sure. I liked it, it was one his most straightforward movies I've seen, and yet still very quirky. "Drowning By Numbers" was also in a similar vein.
OK, time to go make pancakes and do some calculus. Ahh... Sunday mornings...
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Borg Template
Been cloning my thoughts lately, just to keep up. There's a decided lack of nothing in my life- it's like a circuit with no resistors, just keeps ramping up, theoretically impossible, but still in effect...
I often have this feeling of emptiness, maybe like a person who loses an arm or a leg feels, like there's nothing where something should be. But it's nothing that I had before, at least not that I can recall, so it's a more distant feeling of a void. To think of Rimbaud and those types, who did the world in by the age of 18, and to think of coming up on 40 soon, it's a little unnerving. Where did I think I would be by now? And doing what? Why did I think I was god's little comet, sent here to zip through the world and blind the citizens with my blaze of perfection? I would really love to blame it on being brought up "special", but I'm not that lazy. It's my own fault. It's a character flaw that I can live with or work out. How long did Narcissus stay there at the lake?
Bought two new books yesterday: Edith Hamilton's "Mythology" and Italo Calvino's "Italian Folktales". These are for reading to the girls and also reading to myself. The girls woke up in the middle of the night last night and I read a bit to them from each book. They were entranced, even in the Calvino one which has no pictures. Satie's getting better at pictureless books, but Odile generally needs something. I did convince her to look at the words like they were a picture and that worked last night, but I don't know how many more times that's going to work.
But they were enthralled with the convoluted tales, especially since they contained Queens and Goddesses... these are the great stories, the myths that have fed human minds for thousands of years. I think it will help the girls' minds expand and become more fertile.
I often have this feeling of emptiness, maybe like a person who loses an arm or a leg feels, like there's nothing where something should be. But it's nothing that I had before, at least not that I can recall, so it's a more distant feeling of a void. To think of Rimbaud and those types, who did the world in by the age of 18, and to think of coming up on 40 soon, it's a little unnerving. Where did I think I would be by now? And doing what? Why did I think I was god's little comet, sent here to zip through the world and blind the citizens with my blaze of perfection? I would really love to blame it on being brought up "special", but I'm not that lazy. It's my own fault. It's a character flaw that I can live with or work out. How long did Narcissus stay there at the lake?
Bought two new books yesterday: Edith Hamilton's "Mythology" and Italo Calvino's "Italian Folktales". These are for reading to the girls and also reading to myself. The girls woke up in the middle of the night last night and I read a bit to them from each book. They were entranced, even in the Calvino one which has no pictures. Satie's getting better at pictureless books, but Odile generally needs something. I did convince her to look at the words like they were a picture and that worked last night, but I don't know how many more times that's going to work.
But they were enthralled with the convoluted tales, especially since they contained Queens and Goddesses... these are the great stories, the myths that have fed human minds for thousands of years. I think it will help the girls' minds expand and become more fertile.
Monday, October 6, 2008
Trembling to Boredsville
Classes are definitely in full swing, and that hard lump that rises in the throat during the first few classes has melted into a semi-hard lump after days on end of hitting the books and realizing that I do still kinda have a brain.
Life is swinging hard, and without getting too much into it, I feel like I am sitting at the limits of a lot of types of internal energy. My time is stretched, my emotions are stretched, my patience is stretched, my mind is stretched, my body is in dire need of sports and exercise, my wallet is stretched. You would think with all this stretching I would be lumbered up. But one thing I've noticed about stretching: you don't feel that great about it until you're done doing it, then you're happy as pickled cabbage that you did. Tap, tap, tap on the old noggin', that's where being a conscious being comes into play, right old chap? I fucking hope so.
For those who care, vector calculus is not as hard as it sounds. What is hard is remembering all the calculus from I II and III that you need to pull this shit off, not to mention linear algebra and a penchant for patience with looooooong proofs that would knock out a freshly upped crack head on a roller coaster. That's me, jouncier than a freaked out, frazzled up froiker.
Dead Souls is really helping me at night. Gogol has got to be one of the most hilarious writers to grace the face. The premise, if you don't already know, is that one Chichikov travels the outskirts of a provincial capital, N., buying "dead souls" from acquaintances. These dead souls are simply the serfs on estates who have died but haven't been stricken from the tax logs. His reasons for doing so are murky, but the general idea is that he is going to build an estate that exists only on paper, with which to move up in the world.
The story is marked by what is known in Russian as "poshlost." Frequently translated as "banality" it is so much more than that. It is the quality of being human/sub-human and reveling in it, the quality of embracing yourself, warts and all and happily throwing the windows of your base side open for all to see, even calling the crowds outside to look in and, if not revel with you, then to experience your individual putrescence. But all of these "derogatory" terms don't do poshlost justice; it is seen as a good thing, because it is precisely these things that make one human. This concept is a precursor to Dostoevsky's more advanced notion of the necessary illogicalities that we humans commit. But enough of that.
Here's some decontextualized tidbits from Dead Souls:
on provincial Russian justice: The state peasants of the hamlet called Lousy Arrogance, joining with their fellows from the hamlet of Cockyville, supposedly wiped from the face of the earth the local police force, in the person of the assessor Drobyzazhkin. He was found on the road, the uniform or frock coat on the local police force was worse than a rag, his physiognomy was utterly beyond recognition. The case went through the courts and finally came to the chancellery, where the intimate deliberations took the following line: since it was not known precisely who among the peasants had participated, and there were many of them, and since Drobyzahkin was a dead man, meaning that it would not be much use to him even if he did win the case, while the peasants were still alive, meaning that for them it was quite important that the decision be in their favor, it was therefore decided thus: the assessor was himself the cause, having unjustly oppressed the peasants of Lousy Arrogance and Cockyville, and he had died of apoplexy while returning home in a sleigh.
So haughty, readers of the higher ranks, and along with them all those who count themselves among the higher ranks! And yet what exactingness! They absolutely insist that everything be written in the most strict, purefied, and noble of tongues- in short, they want the Russian tongue to suddenly descend from the clouds all on its own, all properly finished, and settle right on their tongue, leaving them nothing to do but gape their mouths open and stick it out. Of course, the female half of mankind is a puzzle; but our worthy readers, it must be confessed, are sometimes even more of a puzzle.
There's a lot of this in Dead Souls, a lot of meta-writing, where the reader is invited to examine the language and story, and even their own culpability in the tale. If I'm not completely off the mark, this style of writing began in earnest with Cervante's Quixote, at least there used to transcendent effect. Gogol uses it in such a strange way. Almost as punctuation, the story side-steps itself, the author makes half-assed excuses for the hero's actions, quarter-assed excuses for Russian slovenliness and zero-assed excuses for his very own actions. It is masterful and self-aware and funny and poignant and engrossing. In short, I am enjoying the hell out of it.
Life is swinging hard, and without getting too much into it, I feel like I am sitting at the limits of a lot of types of internal energy. My time is stretched, my emotions are stretched, my patience is stretched, my mind is stretched, my body is in dire need of sports and exercise, my wallet is stretched. You would think with all this stretching I would be lumbered up. But one thing I've noticed about stretching: you don't feel that great about it until you're done doing it, then you're happy as pickled cabbage that you did. Tap, tap, tap on the old noggin', that's where being a conscious being comes into play, right old chap? I fucking hope so.
For those who care, vector calculus is not as hard as it sounds. What is hard is remembering all the calculus from I II and III that you need to pull this shit off, not to mention linear algebra and a penchant for patience with looooooong proofs that would knock out a freshly upped crack head on a roller coaster. That's me, jouncier than a freaked out, frazzled up froiker.
Dead Souls is really helping me at night. Gogol has got to be one of the most hilarious writers to grace the face. The premise, if you don't already know, is that one Chichikov travels the outskirts of a provincial capital, N., buying "dead souls" from acquaintances. These dead souls are simply the serfs on estates who have died but haven't been stricken from the tax logs. His reasons for doing so are murky, but the general idea is that he is going to build an estate that exists only on paper, with which to move up in the world.
The story is marked by what is known in Russian as "poshlost." Frequently translated as "banality" it is so much more than that. It is the quality of being human/sub-human and reveling in it, the quality of embracing yourself, warts and all and happily throwing the windows of your base side open for all to see, even calling the crowds outside to look in and, if not revel with you, then to experience your individual putrescence. But all of these "derogatory" terms don't do poshlost justice; it is seen as a good thing, because it is precisely these things that make one human. This concept is a precursor to Dostoevsky's more advanced notion of the necessary illogicalities that we humans commit. But enough of that.
Here's some decontextualized tidbits from Dead Souls:
on provincial Russian justice: The state peasants of the hamlet called Lousy Arrogance, joining with their fellows from the hamlet of Cockyville, supposedly wiped from the face of the earth the local police force, in the person of the assessor Drobyzazhkin. He was found on the road, the uniform or frock coat on the local police force was worse than a rag, his physiognomy was utterly beyond recognition. The case went through the courts and finally came to the chancellery, where the intimate deliberations took the following line: since it was not known precisely who among the peasants had participated, and there were many of them, and since Drobyzahkin was a dead man, meaning that it would not be much use to him even if he did win the case, while the peasants were still alive, meaning that for them it was quite important that the decision be in their favor, it was therefore decided thus: the assessor was himself the cause, having unjustly oppressed the peasants of Lousy Arrogance and Cockyville, and he had died of apoplexy while returning home in a sleigh.
So haughty, readers of the higher ranks, and along with them all those who count themselves among the higher ranks! And yet what exactingness! They absolutely insist that everything be written in the most strict, purefied, and noble of tongues- in short, they want the Russian tongue to suddenly descend from the clouds all on its own, all properly finished, and settle right on their tongue, leaving them nothing to do but gape their mouths open and stick it out. Of course, the female half of mankind is a puzzle; but our worthy readers, it must be confessed, are sometimes even more of a puzzle.
There's a lot of this in Dead Souls, a lot of meta-writing, where the reader is invited to examine the language and story, and even their own culpability in the tale. If I'm not completely off the mark, this style of writing began in earnest with Cervante's Quixote, at least there used to transcendent effect. Gogol uses it in such a strange way. Almost as punctuation, the story side-steps itself, the author makes half-assed excuses for the hero's actions, quarter-assed excuses for Russian slovenliness and zero-assed excuses for his very own actions. It is masterful and self-aware and funny and poignant and engrossing. In short, I am enjoying the hell out of it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)