This and That

Real life has been a little hectic so even though I see things that interest me, I haven’t found time to blog about them.  Here are a few of those things:

• Maybe Emily Dickinson was more interesting than I’ve always thought.  Or at least, maybe her family was.   Her latest biographer thinks so.
  
  
• Stephen Emms didn’t like the ending of Anna Karenina.   Heh.  I thought Anna Karenina’s pastoral ending was a dream compared to the end of War and Peace which you might recall almost did me in.
  
  
• An interesting experiment in writing speeds on various modern gadgets.   With graphs.  Turns out the iphone keyboard, that most of us don’t like,  isn’t really that slow to type on.  (h/t Kottke)
  
  

• Finally, here’s an interesting youtube that shows how much television is shot in front of green screens (h/t Kottke).
  
  
  

  

Reading 2666 by Robert Bolaño – Week Seven

This week in the online read of 2666 we reached The Part About the Crimes and read the first 50ish pages.

I admit that I was not looking forward to this.  There was so much foreshadowing in the first three parts of the novel that I thought we would be seeing graphic details of the dead women.   It was like watching a movie with lots of atmospheric music; I just knew something was coming.  I usually put my hands over my eyes in those kinds of movies and watch through my fingers.  So I expected to be reading this section that way. 

I also didn’t go into this section with much momentum.  This novel just doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.  So the idea of reading graphic violence in pursuit of … nothing?   Didn’t appeal to me.

The first 50 pages wasn’t so bad.  It kept my interest.

Shadow Tag by Louise Erdrich

In John Irving’s latest novel, Last Night in Twisted River, one of the characters, a writer, complains about book reviewers:

In the media, real life was more important than fiction; those elements of a novel that were, at least, based on personal experience were of more interest to the general public than those pieces of the novel-writing process that were “merely” made up.

One can imagine Louise Erdrich, making the rounds to promote her new novel Shadow Tag,  making the same complaint and saying, as Irving’s character Danny “subversively” said,

…a fiction writer’s job was imagining, truly, a whole story … because real- life stories were never whole, never complete in the ways that novels could be.

So let’s get one thing out of the way to begin with.  Louise Erdrich used to be married to Michael Dorris, their careers were intertwined, their marriage ended in divorce with allegations of child abuse and Dorris committed suicide.

Now let’s move on to Erdrich’s fiction.

Atlantic Turns out to be Better than Other Publications

I criticized Atlantic  the other day for some of the decisions they made in the redesign of their website,  including their decision to force blog readers to access blogs via a summary list of blog post.  Today I find that they have restored their Voices section to its previous accessibility (and fixed their RSS feed so that we get more than headlines).  Now I get James Fallows on my Google Reader exactly as I did before.  And if I click his picture on the site I go straight to his blog, exactly as I do with Andrew Sullivan.

Reading 2666 by Robert Bolaño – Week Six

This week the online read of 2666 finished The Part About Fate.  At this point we are finished with more than a third of this novel.  In most novels the first third is the set-up, so I suppose we should expect to move into the main part of the story now.    And, sure enough, the next section begins the part about the murdered women.

I’m not really looking forward to that.  It’s a depressing topic and I don’t really have any momentum moving into it. 

A few thoughts:

Higher Math

I’ve been reading Steven Strogatz’ ongoing series in the New York Times about the basics of math.  In this post about Division, he referred to the above exchange between George Vaccaro and a Verizon customer service rep about an error in his bill.  Vaccaro was supposed to be charged .002 cents per kilobyte but was charged .002 dollars per kilobyte:

Atlantic Makes the Same Mistakes Everyone Else Does

I realized last year that my Google Reading experience was sliding downhill at a fast rate because of the number of sites I subscribed to. I just didn’t have time for them all, so I started cleaning it out.

I made myself a rule similar to the rule I have for my closet. Each season, when I switch my wardrobe, I look at the “new” clothes being put into my closet and if I haven’t worn a piece of clothing for the last two seasons I give it away.

Now I look at my Google Reader folders on a regular basis and if I find I’m regularly skipping over a site without reading it when it comes up, I delete it. New sites don’t go into a category folder until at least a month has passed. They stay at the bottom of the list to see if I’m really going to read them and then they get moved or deleted once I know how they are working out for me.