I live in California now
Jul. 6th, 2006 06:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
philenaHmmm; since my last entry the following events have occurred:
I graduated from college, with a rainy backdrop to our outdoor festivities, prompting the administration to recycle about 30 diploma cases for the look of things (i.e., give them to us as we walked, and then rip them away as soon as we descended from the platform) while keeping the real things dry and safe somewhere else. It was faintly reminiscent of what my mother told me about my Aunt Sarah's graduation from the same institution: inside the diploma covers there was a note saying, "Due to a printer's error, your actual diplomas will be mailed to you in x days."
I moved out of my Chicago apartment. Or rather, some movers that my parents hired for me moved us out of my Chicago apartment. These guys were amazing! They would take a strip of fabric, tie it around four boxes of books, of which Daniel and I could only lift two at a time with difficulty, and then strap the four boxes to their backs and walk with them down three flights of stairs to their truck as if it were nothing! Amazing!
I visited Fort Wayne to finish packing my room, and Canada to see a very elaborate musical spectacle of LOTR, and Santa Rosa ostensibly to help Daniel pack his books up to bring to our Berkeley apartment, but in reality to read on the couch all day for about a week. It was great! Since graduation I've read
Labor's Troubadour by Joe Glazer (my great-uncle), about his career as a folk-singer for the labor movement.
Unfinished People by Ruth Gay (my grandmother), about the assimilation into American culture and dissimilation from their Old culture of Eastern European Jews in New York. It's excellent, and won the National Jewish Book Award, but when I tried to find a copy to give to Daniel's mother it wasn't in any of the local Santa Rosa bookstores. I lent her Uncle Joe's book instead.
Le Divorce by someone whose name I've forgotten. My mother recommended it to hold my attention on a plane, and while it did hold my attention, it wasn't really good for anything more than that. Although it was cute the way she periodically mentioned that she had forgotten how sexy it was, in response to my comments on the affair between the 20-year-old narrator and her 70-year-old French patron. If recommending this book to me now gives my mother second thoughts, I can't imagine what she was thinking when she first recommended it to me in high school!
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, about a son of Indian immigrants whose father named him Gogol. My mother originally recommended it to Daniel, who loves Gogol, but I ran out of stuff to read on the flight to Vancouver, so I grabbed it. It was better than Le Divorce, but I still wouldn't re-read it. It did, however, inspire me to read
The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, by Nikolai Gogol. All of them have elements of mastery in them--Gogol's ability to set scenes is fabulous--but the tales themselves, especially the Ukrainian tales, are a bit rambling and digressive. According to the preface of the book, the digressions are part of Gogol's trademark pre-modernism narration, but I still found them a bit off-putting. They distracted me from the main thrust of the story, but sometimes the story was nothing but digressions, so there was no main thrust! My favorite stories were the two most cohesive: "The Overcoat" and "The Portrait," especially the latter.
I'm now working on Anna Karenina in RUSSIAN! It's slow going. I've gotten through about thirty pages (of what, six hundred? I'll get there eventually). It's becoming easier as I go--especially since I've already read the book, remember most of the scenes very vividly, and love it with all my heart, and I have no doubt that if I finish it I'll be reading it very fluidly by the end. But still, it's exhausting to be reading in Russian, so to relax my brain from that I've been reading Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. I swear, it's a thriller like The Da Vinci Code combining Kabballah mysticism, Knights Templar, Celtic druids, and even some Jason and the Argonauts, along with loads of ridiculous numerology and references to any other kind of mysticism you can think of. It's better narrated than Dan Brown's garbage, and I'm getting the feeling that Eco is really kind of kidding himself and the reader as he goes. The idea is that the main characters keep running into crackpots who say there's a secret treasure/power left over by the Knights Templar, and in order to amuse themselves the protagonists make up the wackiest crackpot plan to combine the other wacky crackpot plans, except--surprise!--it turns out that their plan is right! Gasp! The numerology is the silliest part, but the rest isn't that far behind. It's great fun, but I don't think it's as good as Eco's more serious works, in particular The Name of the Rose.
Daniel and I have now got library cards to the Berkeley public library, where we do most of our interneting, and I'm waiting with bated breath for a new novel that I saw in a bookstore in Toronto to be returned to one of the branches. It's called The Stolen Child and it's about changelings, and ever since I read Jonothan Strange and Mr. Norrell I've been wanted some more good stories about the world of faerie. I don't have any very high hopes that this will be as good, but it's a fun topic, and the first chapter that I read in the bookstore looks like it might be good.
Oh yes. and Daniel and I have an apartment now! It's as beautiful as it looked in the pictures I posted earlier, but even better because it has our furniture, and in a few days it will have all of our books, (we're in Santa Rosa right now getting another load of them, but even this trip won't get all of them!) up and organized, and then I'll take pictures and post them and it will be beautiful. Berkeley-area friends of mine, give me a call and Daniel and I will cook you dinner at our beautiful apartment and take you out on the town! The neighborhood near us is called Elmwood, and it's got cute little bookstores and coffee shops and ethnic restaurants and hair salons and super-organic grocery stores, and the residential area is exploding with bougainvillia and wysteria vines and jacaronda trees and cute houses with exquisite gardens, and there's a little kitty that hangs out around our apartment that I see every day or two. (It always approaches me and purrs and wants to be petted, and often moves expectantly towards our door as if it wants to come inside. I don't let it inside, but I'm thinking I'll buy a cat brush and start brushing it regularly, because it always has burrs in its fur when I see it, the poor thing.) The area is a little cuter and smaller and more expensive than the main drag of Shattuck Avenue that Daniel lived on before, but it's also cleaner, with fewer homeless people (none, in fact), so it's a trade-off that I'm willing to make. If I ever really need books I can always hike over to Shattuck in a pinch.
Er, I still don't have a job. Grrr. I'll start hunting for real next week, when Daniel and I are moved in for good.
I graduated from college, with a rainy backdrop to our outdoor festivities, prompting the administration to recycle about 30 diploma cases for the look of things (i.e., give them to us as we walked, and then rip them away as soon as we descended from the platform) while keeping the real things dry and safe somewhere else. It was faintly reminiscent of what my mother told me about my Aunt Sarah's graduation from the same institution: inside the diploma covers there was a note saying, "Due to a printer's error, your actual diplomas will be mailed to you in x days."
I moved out of my Chicago apartment. Or rather, some movers that my parents hired for me moved us out of my Chicago apartment. These guys were amazing! They would take a strip of fabric, tie it around four boxes of books, of which Daniel and I could only lift two at a time with difficulty, and then strap the four boxes to their backs and walk with them down three flights of stairs to their truck as if it were nothing! Amazing!
I visited Fort Wayne to finish packing my room, and Canada to see a very elaborate musical spectacle of LOTR, and Santa Rosa ostensibly to help Daniel pack his books up to bring to our Berkeley apartment, but in reality to read on the couch all day for about a week. It was great! Since graduation I've read
Labor's Troubadour by Joe Glazer (my great-uncle), about his career as a folk-singer for the labor movement.
Unfinished People by Ruth Gay (my grandmother), about the assimilation into American culture and dissimilation from their Old culture of Eastern European Jews in New York. It's excellent, and won the National Jewish Book Award, but when I tried to find a copy to give to Daniel's mother it wasn't in any of the local Santa Rosa bookstores. I lent her Uncle Joe's book instead.
Le Divorce by someone whose name I've forgotten. My mother recommended it to hold my attention on a plane, and while it did hold my attention, it wasn't really good for anything more than that. Although it was cute the way she periodically mentioned that she had forgotten how sexy it was, in response to my comments on the affair between the 20-year-old narrator and her 70-year-old French patron. If recommending this book to me now gives my mother second thoughts, I can't imagine what she was thinking when she first recommended it to me in high school!
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, about a son of Indian immigrants whose father named him Gogol. My mother originally recommended it to Daniel, who loves Gogol, but I ran out of stuff to read on the flight to Vancouver, so I grabbed it. It was better than Le Divorce, but I still wouldn't re-read it. It did, however, inspire me to read
The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, by Nikolai Gogol. All of them have elements of mastery in them--Gogol's ability to set scenes is fabulous--but the tales themselves, especially the Ukrainian tales, are a bit rambling and digressive. According to the preface of the book, the digressions are part of Gogol's trademark pre-modernism narration, but I still found them a bit off-putting. They distracted me from the main thrust of the story, but sometimes the story was nothing but digressions, so there was no main thrust! My favorite stories were the two most cohesive: "The Overcoat" and "The Portrait," especially the latter.
I'm now working on Anna Karenina in RUSSIAN! It's slow going. I've gotten through about thirty pages (of what, six hundred? I'll get there eventually). It's becoming easier as I go--especially since I've already read the book, remember most of the scenes very vividly, and love it with all my heart, and I have no doubt that if I finish it I'll be reading it very fluidly by the end. But still, it's exhausting to be reading in Russian, so to relax my brain from that I've been reading Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. I swear, it's a thriller like The Da Vinci Code combining Kabballah mysticism, Knights Templar, Celtic druids, and even some Jason and the Argonauts, along with loads of ridiculous numerology and references to any other kind of mysticism you can think of. It's better narrated than Dan Brown's garbage, and I'm getting the feeling that Eco is really kind of kidding himself and the reader as he goes. The idea is that the main characters keep running into crackpots who say there's a secret treasure/power left over by the Knights Templar, and in order to amuse themselves the protagonists make up the wackiest crackpot plan to combine the other wacky crackpot plans, except--surprise!--it turns out that their plan is right! Gasp! The numerology is the silliest part, but the rest isn't that far behind. It's great fun, but I don't think it's as good as Eco's more serious works, in particular The Name of the Rose.
Daniel and I have now got library cards to the Berkeley public library, where we do most of our interneting, and I'm waiting with bated breath for a new novel that I saw in a bookstore in Toronto to be returned to one of the branches. It's called The Stolen Child and it's about changelings, and ever since I read Jonothan Strange and Mr. Norrell I've been wanted some more good stories about the world of faerie. I don't have any very high hopes that this will be as good, but it's a fun topic, and the first chapter that I read in the bookstore looks like it might be good.
Oh yes. and Daniel and I have an apartment now! It's as beautiful as it looked in the pictures I posted earlier, but even better because it has our furniture, and in a few days it will have all of our books, (we're in Santa Rosa right now getting another load of them, but even this trip won't get all of them!) up and organized, and then I'll take pictures and post them and it will be beautiful. Berkeley-area friends of mine, give me a call and Daniel and I will cook you dinner at our beautiful apartment and take you out on the town! The neighborhood near us is called Elmwood, and it's got cute little bookstores and coffee shops and ethnic restaurants and hair salons and super-organic grocery stores, and the residential area is exploding with bougainvillia and wysteria vines and jacaronda trees and cute houses with exquisite gardens, and there's a little kitty that hangs out around our apartment that I see every day or two. (It always approaches me and purrs and wants to be petted, and often moves expectantly towards our door as if it wants to come inside. I don't let it inside, but I'm thinking I'll buy a cat brush and start brushing it regularly, because it always has burrs in its fur when I see it, the poor thing.) The area is a little cuter and smaller and more expensive than the main drag of Shattuck Avenue that Daniel lived on before, but it's also cleaner, with fewer homeless people (none, in fact), so it's a trade-off that I'm willing to make. If I ever really need books I can always hike over to Shattuck in a pinch.
Er, I still don't have a job. Grrr. I'll start hunting for real next week, when Daniel and I are moved in for good.