All Mixed Up
May. 23rd, 2001 10:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanpaku_backupJosh & Dalit's baby arrived yesterday. He called, clearly on Cloud Nine, very happy, everyone's OK. I didn't know what to say, so I mostly let him talk. Let's face it, it's an achievement. Never mind that he apparently told Dalit right after the baby was born that she had given birth to Zippy the Pinhead. There is a time for jocularity, and a time not. But we're very pleased for them. I played a small part in making things easier by steering him some chapter writing work for my company, which let him take some unpaid leave time for his company, so it's nice to help out in a small way.
I finished my journal article and am mulling things over again. What to do. We had my former high school student and her boyfriend, both now of Harvard, over for dinner last week. That went pretty OK, though I had screwed up the schedule so we had to run around making dinner while they were waiting, which is awkward. Dinner was good and tried to draw them into a conversation so I wouldn't have to listen to myself babble all night. The kid was from Alaska, and it took all of my effort not to say, every time the conversation lagged, "So. Huh. Alaska, huh? What's that like?" I succeeded but just barely. It was hard to draw them into involved conversation given that we are 10 years older than them and they are kind of shy to begin with. I had looked forward sorta to holding forth on philosophy or politics or whatever people are interested in when they're in college, but I didn't do too much of that. Mostly they admired the dog and then they had to go back to studying. It is finals week after all.
This week I invited my former boss over for dinner so I am all atwitter about that. I was kind of surprised that he accepted with such alacrity, but shabbos dinner is shabbos dinner, after all. It is nice to pretend that one has a social life. I would like to figure out how to invite everyone I know here, but I'm no good at that sort of thing. Anyway I got some smoked salmon and good wine and hopefully it will be a nice evening. I am handicapped by finding him a more interesting person than I'm sure he finds me, a familiar enough feeling for me, so we'll see how it goes. I spend so much of my life in a fog unable to meaninfully or casually communicate with people.
Anyway the house is beautiful and surrounded by green and looks pretty good. I am taking things slowly this week in figuring out what to do. I would like to learn how to play bridge but you really need 4 people and we're short on "couples friends." I started playing chess again-- whoo it is amazing how much you lose after not doing it for a few months. But it is such a time sink. I am trying to decide whether or not to do Something Big. I took the mechanical typewriter out and got a new ribbon for it. Uh-oh.
Yes, a literary mood, though writing itself will not be on the agenda, I'm sure. I am reading The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and enjoying it a lot. I would have to say that Michael Chabon's collection of short stories seemed okay enough until I got to the last story, the Lovecraft-type one, and then it really all WORKED incredibly well, and this book is pretty much all written in that tone. It's inventive and dark and intricate, making it well suited for his eye for detail. They don't seem as much like amateurish writer-workshop curlicues, like they did in Mysteries of Pittsburgh. So I'm about 2/3 of the way through and reading at a leisurely pace, though I do want to know what happens next.
Also read Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. Actually bought it. It was reviewed around the same time as Dan Clowes' new book so I had heard a lot about it. The hardest thing about getting into Chris Ware's stuff is that the narrative is put together like haiku, and you get one issue of Acme Novelty Library or whatever, and you learn just about enough about Jimmy Corrigan to go, "huh." I mean, I could never figure out what he was up to except to portray the bleakest human existence in the history of the world. I actually first saw his stuff many years ago, in Chicago's New City, when most of his cartoons consisted of panel after panel of a cat hitting a mouse's head with a mallet. The whole page would be the mallet slowly, slowly coming down, in about 100 shots, like you were watching the Zapruder film or something. It was weird.
So Jimmy Corrigan never made much sense to me piecemeal, so I decided to plunk down the $25 for the book. It improves things a lot, though the bleak stuff about Jimmy's life at the beginning again seemed kind of like overkill. The historical stuff about the World's Fair really makes the book take off, and then it really does make sense. The guy takes a bracingly chilly view of life but a common theme is how prone people are to Walter Mitty-esque moments of hope and transport. He meets a girl and immediately starts thinking, she's with me when the world ends, she'll fall in love with me, we'll have a kid... As someone prone to those kinds of flights I found that a nice touch. Another is his cinematic ability to show you what a building or a block looked like in 1893 and then show you the landscape today-- he's someone with an eye for that stuff. And the strings of the plot tie together brilliantly at the end. So it really impressed me, and of course it's beautifully illustrated. More of that literary mood...
I finished my journal article and am mulling things over again. What to do. We had my former high school student and her boyfriend, both now of Harvard, over for dinner last week. That went pretty OK, though I had screwed up the schedule so we had to run around making dinner while they were waiting, which is awkward. Dinner was good and tried to draw them into a conversation so I wouldn't have to listen to myself babble all night. The kid was from Alaska, and it took all of my effort not to say, every time the conversation lagged, "So. Huh. Alaska, huh? What's that like?" I succeeded but just barely. It was hard to draw them into involved conversation given that we are 10 years older than them and they are kind of shy to begin with. I had looked forward sorta to holding forth on philosophy or politics or whatever people are interested in when they're in college, but I didn't do too much of that. Mostly they admired the dog and then they had to go back to studying. It is finals week after all.
This week I invited my former boss over for dinner so I am all atwitter about that. I was kind of surprised that he accepted with such alacrity, but shabbos dinner is shabbos dinner, after all. It is nice to pretend that one has a social life. I would like to figure out how to invite everyone I know here, but I'm no good at that sort of thing. Anyway I got some smoked salmon and good wine and hopefully it will be a nice evening. I am handicapped by finding him a more interesting person than I'm sure he finds me, a familiar enough feeling for me, so we'll see how it goes. I spend so much of my life in a fog unable to meaninfully or casually communicate with people.
Anyway the house is beautiful and surrounded by green and looks pretty good. I am taking things slowly this week in figuring out what to do. I would like to learn how to play bridge but you really need 4 people and we're short on "couples friends." I started playing chess again-- whoo it is amazing how much you lose after not doing it for a few months. But it is such a time sink. I am trying to decide whether or not to do Something Big. I took the mechanical typewriter out and got a new ribbon for it. Uh-oh.
Yes, a literary mood, though writing itself will not be on the agenda, I'm sure. I am reading The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and enjoying it a lot. I would have to say that Michael Chabon's collection of short stories seemed okay enough until I got to the last story, the Lovecraft-type one, and then it really all WORKED incredibly well, and this book is pretty much all written in that tone. It's inventive and dark and intricate, making it well suited for his eye for detail. They don't seem as much like amateurish writer-workshop curlicues, like they did in Mysteries of Pittsburgh. So I'm about 2/3 of the way through and reading at a leisurely pace, though I do want to know what happens next.
Also read Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. Actually bought it. It was reviewed around the same time as Dan Clowes' new book so I had heard a lot about it. The hardest thing about getting into Chris Ware's stuff is that the narrative is put together like haiku, and you get one issue of Acme Novelty Library or whatever, and you learn just about enough about Jimmy Corrigan to go, "huh." I mean, I could never figure out what he was up to except to portray the bleakest human existence in the history of the world. I actually first saw his stuff many years ago, in Chicago's New City, when most of his cartoons consisted of panel after panel of a cat hitting a mouse's head with a mallet. The whole page would be the mallet slowly, slowly coming down, in about 100 shots, like you were watching the Zapruder film or something. It was weird.
So Jimmy Corrigan never made much sense to me piecemeal, so I decided to plunk down the $25 for the book. It improves things a lot, though the bleak stuff about Jimmy's life at the beginning again seemed kind of like overkill. The historical stuff about the World's Fair really makes the book take off, and then it really does make sense. The guy takes a bracingly chilly view of life but a common theme is how prone people are to Walter Mitty-esque moments of hope and transport. He meets a girl and immediately starts thinking, she's with me when the world ends, she'll fall in love with me, we'll have a kid... As someone prone to those kinds of flights I found that a nice touch. Another is his cinematic ability to show you what a building or a block looked like in 1893 and then show you the landscape today-- he's someone with an eye for that stuff. And the strings of the plot tie together brilliantly at the end. So it really impressed me, and of course it's beautifully illustrated. More of that literary mood...
