The mediocre work, which is the daily fare for most of us, I regard as harmful because it is produced by automatons for automatons.
Stefanie tagged me with the following meme:
1. Go into your blog's archive.
2. Find your 23rd post (or closest to).
3. Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.
Anyone else want to play?
Wednesday, October 05, 2005
Peter Rushforth and other items
Sandra reported Friday that Peter Rushforth, author of Pinkerton's Sister and the award-winning Kindergarten, had died the previous weekend. Efforts to find an online obituary were futile until MMitchell of Rushforth's US publishing house linked to this report in the Whitby Gazette in Sandra's comments:
Peter Rushforth, of Station Road [Castleton], collapsed while walking on Blakey Ridge with his regular walking group at 11.15am on Sunday [Sept. 25]. He was taken to James Cook Hospital but died on the way. He had suffered a heart attack.
Rushforth had completed his third novel, A Dead Language, last spring. It will be published in the UK in April and the US next fall.
The latest edition of The Believer contains an interview with Lorrie Moore.
Are there books that you read before you should have been exposed to them? What would you be willing to do to keep such a book from others? A parent's strings-attached gift of $3 million has been returned; St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Austin intends to keep Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain" as optional reading in 12th grade.
Orson Scott Card says Serenity is a great movie and I agree. Everyone please go see it (twice or more if you can afford it) so that there will be a sequel. Everyone go see if so we can discuss the movie without spoiling it for anyone else.
Peter Rushforth, of Station Road [Castleton], collapsed while walking on Blakey Ridge with his regular walking group at 11.15am on Sunday [Sept. 25]. He was taken to James Cook Hospital but died on the way. He had suffered a heart attack.
Rushforth had completed his third novel, A Dead Language, last spring. It will be published in the UK in April and the US next fall.
The latest edition of The Believer contains an interview with Lorrie Moore.
Are there books that you read before you should have been exposed to them? What would you be willing to do to keep such a book from others? A parent's strings-attached gift of $3 million has been returned; St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Austin intends to keep Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain" as optional reading in 12th grade.
Orson Scott Card says Serenity is a great movie and I agree. Everyone please go see it (twice or more if you can afford it) so that there will be a sequel. Everyone go see if so we can discuss the movie without spoiling it for anyone else.
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
Trip prep
Have I mentioned lately that I'm going to Utah? We're flying to Salt Lake City next Tuesday, driving south to the canyons on Wednesday.
C. and H. and I went out for lunch and then shopped for rain gear, riding boots and gloves last month. They bought brightly colored bandanas but I demurred—I have my long-owned and oh-so-soft Heyes bandana after all. Of course, the last place I can remember seeing it was on the floor by the window in the bedroom a few months back and it's not there any more. Maybe it's with the missing portion of my long underwear, also not to be found.
Organizational skills would help in a time like this.
Yesterday I went to my doctor for a check-up and to beg for steroids to keep my allergies under control while I'm on the trip. I expected her to yell at me for being so stupid—what business does anyone who's been so allergic to horses in the past that her eyes swell to the point that she's functionally blind have signing up for a extended riding trip in the San Rafael Swell? Fortunately, she's ridden horses in Jackson Hole, so she was most sympathetic. She doesn't think steroids work well with eye allergies, so she wrote a perscription for Patanol instead.
A petting zoo is coming to the field in C.'s neighborhood this Saturday—I intend to put the drops and the Claritin to the test by dropping by that morning to sniff the pony.
Otherwise, I'm reading a book about Butch Cassidy to prepare for the trip. L.'s loaded my Audible player with Macbeth, A Death in Venice, and The Lambs of London. I have my Lightwedge for middle-of-the-night tent reading and a stack of books I'm attempting to choose from. I study topographical maps in the evenings. I check the weather in Torrey two or three times a day. I'm reminding R. to bring her camera's memory card home with her this weekend so I'll have two to take and I'm planning entries that L. can post while I'm gone.
I'm not all set, but I'm getting there.
C. and H. and I went out for lunch and then shopped for rain gear, riding boots and gloves last month. They bought brightly colored bandanas but I demurred—I have my long-owned and oh-so-soft Heyes bandana after all. Of course, the last place I can remember seeing it was on the floor by the window in the bedroom a few months back and it's not there any more. Maybe it's with the missing portion of my long underwear, also not to be found.
Organizational skills would help in a time like this.
Yesterday I went to my doctor for a check-up and to beg for steroids to keep my allergies under control while I'm on the trip. I expected her to yell at me for being so stupid—what business does anyone who's been so allergic to horses in the past that her eyes swell to the point that she's functionally blind have signing up for a extended riding trip in the San Rafael Swell? Fortunately, she's ridden horses in Jackson Hole, so she was most sympathetic. She doesn't think steroids work well with eye allergies, so she wrote a perscription for Patanol instead.
A petting zoo is coming to the field in C.'s neighborhood this Saturday—I intend to put the drops and the Claritin to the test by dropping by that morning to sniff the pony.
Otherwise, I'm reading a book about Butch Cassidy to prepare for the trip. L.'s loaded my Audible player with Macbeth, A Death in Venice, and The Lambs of London. I have my Lightwedge for middle-of-the-night tent reading and a stack of books I'm attempting to choose from. I study topographical maps in the evenings. I check the weather in Torrey two or three times a day. I'm reminding R. to bring her camera's memory card home with her this weekend so I'll have two to take and I'm planning entries that L. can post while I'm gone.
I'm not all set, but I'm getting there.
Monday, October 03, 2005
A great segmented body
But supposing we are more a nonhuman form of life. Imagine a great segmented body moving in contractions and dilations at a rate of twelve or fifteen miles day, a creature of a hundred thousand feet. It is tubular in its being and tentacled to the roads and bridges over which it travels. It sends out as antennae its men on horses. It consumes everything in its path. It is an immense organism, this army, with a small brain. That would be General Sherman, whom I have never seen.
I am not so sure the General would be pleased to hear himself described so, Emily said in all solemnity. And then she laughed.
But Wrede clearly liked this train of thought. All the orders for our vast movements issue forth from that brain, he said. They are carried via the generals and colonels and field officers for distribution to the body of us. This is the creature's nervous system. And any one of the sixty thousand of us has no identity but as a cell in the body of this giant creature's function, which is to move forward and consume all before it.
Then how do you explain the surgeons, whose job it is to heal and to save lives?
That the creature is self-healing. And where the healing fails, the deaths are of no more consequence than the death of cells in any organism, always to be replaced by new cells.
--E. L. Doctor, The March
I am not so sure the General would be pleased to hear himself described so, Emily said in all solemnity. And then she laughed.
But Wrede clearly liked this train of thought. All the orders for our vast movements issue forth from that brain, he said. They are carried via the generals and colonels and field officers for distribution to the body of us. This is the creature's nervous system. And any one of the sixty thousand of us has no identity but as a cell in the body of this giant creature's function, which is to move forward and consume all before it.
Then how do you explain the surgeons, whose job it is to heal and to save lives?
That the creature is self-healing. And where the healing fails, the deaths are of no more consequence than the death of cells in any organism, always to be replaced by new cells.
--E. L. Doctor, The March
Yesterday Fay Weldon told the Guardian: "I can see I wished in vain. The polarities are even greater now. Women buy women's books: men buy literary books, written by men or honorary males."
Okay, so it's time for the winner of the Orange Prize to be announced, but that's no reason to throw out nonsense like that. Yes, there are women who buy only women's books; yes, there are men who buy only men's books, but the fact remains that without the women, well, as Ian McEwan said last month:
Reading groups, readings, breakdowns of book sales all tell the same story: when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.
Okay, so it's time for the winner of the Orange Prize to be announced, but that's no reason to throw out nonsense like that. Yes, there are women who buy only women's books; yes, there are men who buy only men's books, but the fact remains that without the women, well, as Ian McEwan said last month:
Reading groups, readings, breakdowns of book sales all tell the same story: when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.
Sunday, October 02, 2005
Sunday morning random ten
1. I Second That Emotion--Smokey Robinson & the Miracles
2. There Goes My Heart--The Mavericks
3. If I Need Someone--The Beatles
4. Ghost in This House--Alison Krauss & Union Station
5. Field of Diamonds--Johnny Cash
6. I'm Losing You--Bob Woodruff
7. Cry, Cry, Cry--Robbie Fulks
8. Pagliacci's Opera Vesti la Giubba--Jose Maria Perez
9. Rainmaker--Michael Nesmith
10. Evangeline--Emmylou Harris
2. There Goes My Heart--The Mavericks
3. If I Need Someone--The Beatles
4. Ghost in This House--Alison Krauss & Union Station
5. Field of Diamonds--Johnny Cash
6. I'm Losing You--Bob Woodruff
7. Cry, Cry, Cry--Robbie Fulks
8. Pagliacci's Opera Vesti la Giubba--Jose Maria Perez
9. Rainmaker--Michael Nesmith
10. Evangeline--Emmylou Harris
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