LITERATURE: The Unbearable Lightness – Hypertext Wow Factor

Posted on September 16, 2008 by susan

Am in the middle of pressing wine (by hand) so I’ve not time enough to write the post itself but had to say that page 52 is about one of the best teachers of hypertext pattern reasoning I’ve absorbed. Will try to put it in a concise post entry later today.

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REALITY?: Deja Vu Again

Posted on September 16, 2008 by Susan

Well here it is, just 4 days short of a year and I come face to face with my little friend over at Adam’s Supermarket and just can’t keep my mouth shut.

Now I’ve let a lot go by when it comes to clerks because I realize that they get frustrated with dealing with people but this time, in my usual polite manner I asked for paper bags inside plastic as I always do because I recycle both by storing my own trash this way, and in both cases, the bag gives strength to the plastic and the plastic allows handles for easy carrying and tying the bag. And, I did offer to bag if he’d give me the paper bags (since I can usually stash more food in fewer bags that way) but this fell on deaf ears.

All was going well until the man asked if I wanted the two containers of meat in a plastic bag.  I said no, that I had a personal war going on against plastic bags.  He then said, "Well what you’re saying doesn’t make any sense."  I just stared at him.  "You’ve got plastic here," he said, pointing to the two plastic bags with paper liners that held my groceries.  "It doesn’t make any sense," he repeated.

"You know, sometimes you can be extremely rude," I said quietly, staring him right in the eye.

He was speechless for a moment, then turned back to his ringing up of items and we started talking about recycling for the duration of the process to smooth things out.

I happen to be in retail, and one thing you don’t do is insult the customer’s intelligence. Even when they pick an orange and black mat for the beautifully executed ink drawing of their house.

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CURRENT AFFAIRS: At Long Last…

Posted on September 14, 2008 by Susan

…the Church of England settles down about Darwin’s theory of evolution.

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WRITING: Of Natural Causes

Posted on September 13, 2008 by Susan

Beneath the bending leaves
of peonies and righteous branches
of the evergreen
the coon sleeps

Where once I found a fish
who had fallen from the sky
as if his faith in wings
had failed

Golden tail with rings
like prison stripes, a mask
like Clayton Moore, he is
a label

A final dream
grins of daring days of good
or evil, or maybe
only life

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LITERATURE: The Unbearable Lightness – Setting Up Theme

Posted on September 13, 2008 by susan

Finally getting some time to read and I’m finding myself intrigued by Kundera’s manner of posing a theory and illustrating it by introducing a couple of characters and from there, beginning a story.

The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum!  (p. 3)

Positing this statement and its possible outcomes is Tomas, a divorced father who has decided not to fight the system that allows his ex wife to run his life and who is warily entering into a relationship with Tereza:

Was it better to be with Tereza or to remain alone?
There i no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?  (p. 8)

Tomas has come up against a woman who by her persistence includes herself into his space that he has set as off limits to all other women.

Tomas came to this conclusion: Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite.  Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman). (p. 15)

This was Tomas’ last wall, the use of his bed for sleeping.  Tereza has broken down this wall. She may well have broken down the barrier of recurrence of the act so as to actually make it meaningful.

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WRITING: Back in Neutral

Posted on September 12, 2008 by Susan

Too many things in the way of a mood; a barn that needs painting, a job app at Wal-Mart, grapes that need picking and turning to wine.  And while they still come, the customers wanting their framing.

So the writing and creative force has dwindled down; bad timing as the reading season opens for short stories and poems. Don’t even find myself peeking back at the latest that still need some editing and rewriting work. I’m guided by seasons of nature; not of the unnatural world of publishing I guess.

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LITERATURE: The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Opening Thoughts

Posted on September 9, 2008 by susan

Just a couple pages, but it appears that we’re getting into story from this point on so I’ll make a quick comment here. I either just love the impossibility of reading this without giving it serious thought, or it makes sense because I remember thinking this kind of stuff somewhere in a blue haze:

Let us therefore agree that the idea of eternal return implies a perspective from which things appear other than as we know them; they appear without the mitigating circumstance of their transitory nature.  This mitigating circumstance prevents us from coming to a verdict.  For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine. (p. 4)

Then we are brought into the Parmenides question of opposites and in particular, lightness and darkness. We may negate the shades between, but the real emphasis is placed on which is the desirable, the weight of darkness or the freedom of lightness? If in fact, we are to say that darkness is the burden of weight, and not the light instead.

Fun, huh?

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CURRENT AFFAIRS: In the Arts!

Posted on September 9, 2008 by Susan

It looks like we’re all invited to the showing of the Ersinghaus/Mack poetry/art collaboration that we’ve been following this summer, that is, the 100 Images creation:

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The daily matching of poem to watercolor can be seen either here or here.

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CURRENT AFFAIRS: The Two-Party System of Thinking

Posted on September 9, 2008 by Susan

About as much as I believe that there are only a dozen types of people astrologically, I have faith that conservatives are strict Republicans and liberals are strict Democrats and that aside from a few Libertarians, Centrists, Greenies or other Independents, there are only two main bodies of majority thought that rule the American public. 

However, come election time, political challenges force people to take sides and I find it amusing to watch how far folks will go to rationalize their decisions to corral themselves into one group or the other instead of looking at things rationally and admitting the other guy may have some real fine points. There’s no bad or good here; there’s one that more closely aligns with your own thinking or has convinced you to think more in that vein as the better path to follow.

This post yesterday at Megan McArdle’s site says it a lot better: Media Matters She focuses on media bias, but the study of Reps and Dems and their fishtailing around statements made by both candidates all comes down to something dear to my heart: perspective.  Perspective rules.

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LITERATURE: The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera

Posted on September 8, 2008 by susan

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Up next, something a bit different. It seems I’ve been reading sort of realism based in the early 1900s and it’s time to go fly away a bit.

It was this, or one of Joseph Conrad’s pieces.  I have several, but Kundera sort of reached out and grabbed me by the throat.

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LITERATURE: Ragtime – Finale

Posted on September 8, 2008 by susan

I really did enjoy this novel more than I thought I would, once I got over the itchy effect that historical fiction seems to have on me. 

E. L. Doctorow may not have a particularly eloquent poetical writing style, but his gift for imagery in setting tone relies on sentence structure and stark statement of appearance. He draws a mood rather than an image for his stories, just as he tells a plotted drama through the minds of his characters.  What could, in lesser hands, come off as name-dropping and contrivance comes off as a skillful weaving of lives and circumstance.  One character meets another who goes his own way, meeting someone who will eventually know someone who meets the original character.  My own incredulity was assuaged by looking at the plot structure not as a dozen characters who unbelievably manage to walk into each other, but rather at the notion of a dozen characters who are inextricably woven together by chance meetings, and then following back their individual lives and the facts that brought them together.

While as I say, this may not particularly be a writer’s book, it certainly has much to teach about writing an intricate story that holds quite a bit of action and intrigue, while pounding home a theme of society and prejudice in a changing America.

Ragtime was a very easy read and when I found myself with a full day to kill in waiting, I managed to fly through 150 pages without tiring. I’m also glad that this was one of the better written historicals I may have read and I’ve learned to stop checking wikipedia to verify fictional writings.

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REALITY?: The Hospital Experience

Posted on September 5, 2008 by Susan

Well, it’s been a long day, starting at 4:00 a.m. to get into St. Francis Hospital by 5:30 for a 7:30 surgery with a driver who has bad night driving vision and a very scared guy facing his first surgery. Up through 7:00, when they told us to say our last goodbyes, I spent the day convincing him he’d make it just fine.

By 3:30, when the surgeon came to tell me he was in recovery and the surgery went fine, I knew everyone in the family waiting room by first name–as they came and left and I kept waiting. The system is that the surgeon calls one of two special phones in the room and asks for the patient’s loved one by first name to report in, as do the nurses to lay out the next steps which involve adding an extra hour at least to whatever the surgeon said would be the recovery time of an hour.  Well by 5:30 and no sign of an awake spouse and no clue when he’d have the breathing tube removed or be awake, they finally let me into the recovery room to see him and bad wife that I am, I left after that, figuring that a twelve-hour stint was proof enough of my love. 

Back home, however, several calls to the hospital started making me nervous since he was still out like a light and they were keeping him sedated until they felt they could safely remove the respirator. I hopped in the car and drove back out to Hartford.  By the time I got there, he was safely in his room and while a bit goofy, very happy to see me. 

It was a day with a happy ending–for us at least; one lovely older woman got some bad news on her husband and it broke my heart to watch her bravely accept the inevitable diagnosis.  But the amazing thing was that there wasn’t much bonding in this rather large room with all these people spending hours together.  Most of the folks had cellphones or some new little thingamajigs that attached to their ear while they sat there for all appearances to be talking to themselves.  TV, a couple of PC’s hooked up to internet, and wireless (for my laptop) together with all the phones gave me the oddest feeling of being at a distance from the crowd as people talked to instruments to communicate all day. 

And the surgeon? Never was within a few feet of my husband during the surgery.  Yep, robotic.  Amazing new world.

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LITERATURE: Moons of Jupiter/Connections

Posted on September 4, 2008 by susan

Alice Munro is extremely skillful at creating a world from a slice of life that may seem ordinary, and yet she recognizes that ordinary often contains drama that the reader can easily recognize.  In this first story of the anthology, Munro lays out a simple setting, a farmhouse, a family, and a visit by a trio of old maid cousins. Munro allows us to get to know these people a bit, enough to feel comfortable with them and with the narrator of the story, a daughter who eventually moves away from the homestead and the small town mentality.

Munro pushes us ahead to a scenario where this daughter is married and living in what appears to be not a haven away from the farm, but a more sheltered and restricted area in which she fears her husband’s disapproval constantly.  When one of the last surviving elderly cousins comes to visit, it is a situation which brings out the expected worst in her husband’s elitist attitude, and worse, her discovery of her own shame of her background.

Munro always promises to bring interesting characters and soul-searching moments in her stories, and often it is not obvious that the character is doing this–the only giveaway being that he or she finds a reason to tell the story.

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REALITY?: Planning

Posted on September 4, 2008 by Susan

Backed up the hard drive, decided to switch from Doctorow to Munro for tonight’s reading so that I have enough of Ragtime left to read tomorrow.

Getting ready for a day in a hospital waiting room. 5:30 a.m. for a 7:30 surgery; 4 to 7 hours from there. Just so my smile and not some nurse’s is the first thing he sees when he wakes up.

Then finding my way back home…alone.

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CURRENT AFFAIRS: Campaign

Posted on September 4, 2008 by Susan

While my mind is pretty much made up as to how I’ll vote in the presidential election, I am looking forward to the debates.

For me, aside from stance on issues and proven record, any campaigning done up until now is watched just to see how the candidates handle themselves. What they’ve said so far has just been campaign slogans and bs the crowd needs to hear.  The conventions are speeches written far in advance for whoever steps into the nomination.  By the way, I prefer to read the speeches the next day and in truth, am reading them for the writing skill above all.

But the debates are another matter.  That’s a think-on-your-feet discussion to some extent, though all questions are anticipated and easily prepared with answers. Yes, I allow for mispronunciation and surprises; just watched an Obama clip that looked like a Paula Abdul moment for him when the teleprompter wasn’t working.  Stuff happens.  Lies will still present themselves as good intentions, and a communication course will help the nervous speaker.  But the one on one is still an interesting indicator.

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