Blasphemy?

You decide.

My guess, Sean will have some definite opinions.

Hat tip: Tyler Cowen of the always interesting Marginal Revolution

- M

Read more

Comics, etc.

Two links:

Garfield minus Garfield. Andrew's right, Garfield's been off my Sunday morning comics required reading list for years, but I actually enjoyed these.

And don't forget to get your daily monsters.

Hat tip: VSL


- M Read more

How Do You Say 'Those Who Live In Glass Houses Shouldn't Throw Stones' in Spanish?

Architecture Quick Links

Madrid

Liverpool


- M Read more

War & Frickin' Peace

Hi everyone, I’m Sean. Just as a brief introduction, I’m in China. So if I seem out of touch with reality, it’s because my reality is invariably different from yours!

The Awesomeosity Project, hereafter abbreviated TAP, was birthed in a fit of hilariousness in front of the National Archives in Februaryish of 2007 by my then-new-friend-now-close-friend Brandon (the Originator) and since then, with the nurturing of myself (the Catalyst) and Mariel (who doesn’t have a nickname yet but will before long, I’m sure) it has developed into a full-blown philosophy about art, life, but especially yourself.

We’ll discuss this more as time goes on, but for now I want to kick this thing off with an appreciative note to the Classics of literature. Most people write these books off as longwinded and boring. We’ve all had our bad experiences with Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, The Mill on the Floss, and so many others, yes?

Well, it’s time we stopped razzing them, in my opinion. We’re all grown up now. Let’s give them another shot. As part of my work on the other half of TAP, The List, I have been reading War & Peace. Now, my love of classic literature is not terribly old, but is not terribly recent either. My three favorite authors are Twain, Dostoevsky, and Shakespeare, who will be counted as a writer rather than a playwright here, at least. As you may know, a new edition of War & Peace was just released by the two people considered to be the best Russian-English translators of our time, the married couple Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. In the introduction, Pevear quotes with:

In 1954, Bertolt Brecht wrote a note on “Classical Status as an Inhibiting Factor” that puts the question nicely, “What gets lost,” he says of the bestowing of classical status on a work (he is speaking of works for the theater), “is the classic’s original freshness, the element of surprise…of newness, of productive stimulus that is the hallmark of such works. The passionate quality of a great masterpiece is replaced by stage temperament, and where the classics are full of fighting spirit, here the lessons taught the audience are tame and cozy and fail to grip.” --p. x

And yet, we have to remember that War & Peace WAS once new. Pevear later says “War and Peace is a work of art, and if it succeeds, it cannot be in spite of its formal deficiencies, but only because Tolstoy created a new form that was adequate to his vision” (p. xi). We must remember in taking on War & [frickin’] Peace that what we are reading was shocking and revolutionary, or at least interesting to those that came before us. We have to read it with fresh eyes that do not see the thickness of the binding but the writings of the author (or at least translations of them), the machinations of the plot, and the strengths/failures/plights/desires of the characters. This is why we read ANY book.

I’ve found it to be true so far about several books, including Following the Equator by Mark Twain, Demons and The Idiot by Dostoevsky, and I’m very quickly finding it to be true about War & Peace. I simply CANNOT put it down. This is a terrible problem to have with a 1300 page novel because when you can’t put down a typical 2-300 page novel, at least you finish it eventually and can go to sleep or do something else constructive. War & Peace simply DOESN’T END. I have broken my New Year’s resolution to go to bed before 12 almost every night since I started reading it because when 12am roles around, and I’m deep into hating Nikolai Rostov or falling in love with Prince Andrei or laughing merrily at the exploits of the rascally loveable Denisov, it’s like a ball and chain tied to my arm (it’s about as heavy as one too), and I can’t put it down. In fact, at page 410 right now, I want to finish it as quickly as possible because I think I might just plow right through it a second time. I’m in LOVE with this book!

Read it! You will be WELL-rewarded. 15 pages a day easily puts you through the whole thing, introduction to endnotes in three months, and before long, you’ll find yourself reading far more than 15 pages a day. It’s simply engaging—and a perfect example if how a classic novel can still be fresh and relevant over 100 years after it was first-written.

There is a short article in Newsweek about the new translation here, and you can also go to a suite of stories on NPR, including an interview with the translators and a story comparing their translation to another translation that has come out quite recently. I encourage you to check it out. War & Peace always seems like a task not worth attacking to anyone who has glanced at the three-inch binding. But it reads lightly, beautifully, and gracefully, and I think you’ll find it much more refreshing than you expected.

-Sean

Read more

Blood on the Moon

This is really just a quick post, but the lunar eclipse last night was SO COOL! It started at about 9ish, and by 10 the Moon was turning this amazing red. I've seen orange moons, I've seen yellow moons, I've seen blue moons, but red is definitely unusual (and also one of the few things about which I'm superstitious). It was beautiful, if sort of creepy (not my pictures).

I heard on the radio yesterday that this was the same eclipse (or type of, I guess) that Columbus used to convince the Jamaicans or some group that it was God's will that they should feed him. Which of course reminded me that Tintin does the same thing with a solar eclipse in Prisoners of the Sun.


- M
Read more

So Much for the Chosen One

I really wish I could remember what the kid tells Neo in the Matrix about bending the spoon. Something about its not the spoon that bends, but him? Oh well.

Sadly, it will never happen. But Michael Crichton believes? He was totally spot-on with that whole global warming thing.....


- M

Hat tip: 3 Quarks Daily Read more

The Magic Kingdom

From last week's New Yorker.


- M


The Magic Kingdom
by Kathleen Graber February 11, 2008

And as in the daily casualties of life every man is, as it were, threatened with numberless deaths, so long as it remains uncertain which of them is his fate, I would ask whether it is not better to suffer one and die, than to live in fear of all? —St. Augustine, “City of God.”

This morning, I found on a slip of paper tucked into a book
a list of questions I’d written down years ago to ask the doctor.
What if it has spread? Is it possible I’m crazy? I’ve just returned
from Florida, from visiting my mother’s last sister, who is eighty
& doing fine. At the airport, my flight grounded by a storm,
I bought a magazine, which fell open to a photograph
of three roseate spoonbills tossing down their elegant shadows
on a chartreuse field of fertilizer-production waste.
Two little girls emptied their Ziplocs of Pepperidge Farm Goldfish
onto the carpet & picked them up, one by one, with great delicacy,
before popping them into their mouths. Their mother, outside
smoking, kept an eye on them through the glass. After my cousin died,
my father died & then my brother. Next, my father’s older brother
& his wife. And, finally, after my mother died, I expected
to die myself. And because this happened very quickly
& because these were, really, almost all the people I knew,
I spent each day smashing dishes with one of my uncle’s hammers
& gluing them back together in new ways. It was strange work
& dangerous, even though I tried to protect myself—
wearing a quilted bathrobe & goggles & leather work gloves
& opening all the windows, even in snow, against the vapors
of the industrial adhesives. Most days now I get up late
& brew coffee & the smell rises from the old enamel pot
I’ve had to balance under the dark drip ever since the carafe
that came with the machine shattered in the dishwasher last month.

One morning I found a lump in my breast & my vision narrowed
to a small dot & I began to sweat. My legs & arms felt weak,
& my heart thrashed behind its bars. We were not written
to be safe. In the old tales, the woodcutter’s daughter’s path
takes her, each time, through the dark forest. There are new words
for all of this: a shot of panic becomes the rustle of glucocorticoid
signalling the sympathetic nervous system into a response
regulated by the sensitivity of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis.
And, as I go along, these freshly minted charms clatter together
in the tender doeskin of the throat as though the larynx
were nothing if not a sack of amulets tied with a cord & worn
around the neck. But I tell you I sat on the bathroom floor for hours,
trembling. And I can tell you this because the lump was just a lump
& some days now I don’t even dread the end although I know
it will arrive. The garage is filled with buckets of broken china.
The girls chased each other & waved their arms, casting spells,
the trim of their matching gingham dresses the electric pink
of the birds’ wings. They turned each other into princesses
& super-girls & then they pretended to change back.
Oh, no. You forgot to say forever—they took turns repeating
with dramatic dismay, melting into puddles of themselves,
their sandals & sunburned knees vanishing beneath their hems.
Read more

Wow

Almost makes me wish I hadn't given up architecture as a career choice.


- M

Read more

Weekend Reading

I will admit to being a little behind on my New Yorker reading, but it is a double issue, and I like to think I have a life. So while the rest of the world probably already knows all about these two items, I'm just discovering them.

One of the things I love the New Yorker (besides the cartoons) is the random and quirky articles about random and quirky things.

One of the things I hate about the New Yorker is that even as a subscriber, I can't get half of the articles online.

This puts me in the position of reading something that I would love to share, but can't, because often, it's also so random and quirky I can't find it anywhere else.

Such is the problem for the first article of interest: David Owen's Personal History "Call Me Lloyd". All that I can find online is the abstract from the New Yorker, but if you can get a copy, read it and enjoy (for the record, I don't have a nickname, but do have several pet-names)

Luckily for me, other people share my interest in the second item that caught my eye: Steve Hollinger's attempt to build a better umbrella.

I'm a recent convert to the use of umbrellas (as in, I started two years ago, mostly because I got a very sturdy, relatively small one at a conference - I didn't steal it, they were giving them away. Previously I used hats). I still often don't use mine: either I forget it, or it just doesn't fit into whatever I'm carrying. I even went out and bought a travel-sized umbrella, but have mostly abandonded it due to unrelability in any but the lightest rainfall.

Still, this one looks cool enough (and I'm geeky enough) that I'd can see myself falling for it. Plus, it might actually work.

In the meantime, I'm still waiting for the traveler to come out (and shopping here).

- M

Read more

Blogworthy: Valentines Day Edition

Two really cute videos

Love in a Backwards World

The Space between Us


- M

Hat Tip: Very Short List for the first Read more