(no subject)
Sep. 6th, 2007 09:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
philenaSF Street performances in the last week:
-Dueling strings: a string quartet by one BART exit competing with a man playing Oh Susannah on an erhu at another exit. Oh Susannah on an erhu, I might add, must be heard to be believed.
-A man playing Greensleeves on bagpipes, except he could not do the sharps and flats, which resulted in a very distorted melody. Greensleeves is hardly in what anyone could call a major key, and you can't know how important those incidentals are until you've heard that tune without them.
-A woman with a spike heel caught in a grate on the road. Considering the number of women I see wearing those kinds of shoes in the financial district, I'm astounded it doesn't happen more often. The finest performance art.
Daniel on the ants in his classroom:
"I tried to herd them out, but it didn't really work."
"How does one herd ants?" I asked.
"Well, I walk around them and explain I won't hurt them but that I just don't want them in my room, but it doesn't always work."
"Does it ever work?"
Uninformative pause. Then, "So I had to spray Windex on them during 4th period, and now I feel bad."
Is anyone else amused by Larry Craig? I read each new headline with an increasing glee: scandal, arrest, guilty plea, released transcripts of arrest, resignation, rescinded resignation-- and all the while the GOP is getting more and more cranky and the columnists are going to town. For a while I felt a bit guilty reading the article under each headline. This can't possible be news, I would say, forcing myself to turn the page to Iraq or wildfires. But then I gave up and immersed myself in each new revelation. This kind of scandal is so much more juicy than the same behavior from celebrities. Brangelina are just doing their job when they make the news, but senators' activities are entirely extracurricular, and when they go above and beyond the call of duty in this way, I can only honor their efforts by giving them the attention they ask for.
Not that I read the sports section, but Daniel does, and I caught this name over his shoulder: Jasikevicius. How do you say that?
Good Will Hunting: this is the most dreadful movie I have seen in quite a while. Daniel insisted on it, so we watched it together, but he later apologized, saying that he had been told there was math in it. There wasn't, of course: any questions he might have been interested in were just flashed on the screen to show us fancy math, but not long enough for him actually to read them, let alone see the proofs, and the only time we actually see this Will Hunting character doing anything visibly, he's just canceling factors from some big fraction. And then the accents. Oh, heavens, the accents! They were attempting to imitate the Bahstan accent to show us that these people grew up in the inner city, but people! fronted low vowels and non-rhotic liquids do not an accent make! It was painful to hear, and I was embarrassed for them every time they tried to drop an r or broaden their vowels. Fortunately their attempts were intermittent enough that I didn't have to cringe too often, but the rest of the movie was so horrible I would have preferred more linguistic cringing to the additional suffering inflicted by the plot, dialogue, acting, moral, and everything else.
Tamora Pierce, a fantasy writer I discovered in middle school, is truly wonderful. I had read two sets of her books--the Song of the Lioness and the Immortals series, and liked them very much, and then I discovered that the Berkeley public library had four more of her series! I've been plowing through them and having a great time. It's so relaxing between the George Eliots and the Fausts to have the occasional well-written middle-school age fantasy novel. Or four. Or eight. I can read 10 of them in less time than it takes for one George Eliot.
However, speaking of George Eliot, I'm reading Daniel Deronda right now, and everything about her writing style suits me perfectly in a way I haven't really felt since I read Vanity Fair. I can't predict the events of the novels or form any accurate judgment regarding her constantly-developing characters, but everything I read is so right that I can just sit back and trust the author to do what's right. In particular I was fond of Miss Arrowpoint and Herr Klesmer's arguments against her parents' objections to their marriage, which had me snickering and commenting and laughing at their resulting discomfiture. Poor Daniel was trying to sleep, so he did not appreciate it as much as I, but I do feel that George Eliot writes pretty close to what I would consider a perfect novel, and I can't wait to read more of them. Interspersed with middle-school level fantasy, of course. Recommendations, anyone?
-Dueling strings: a string quartet by one BART exit competing with a man playing Oh Susannah on an erhu at another exit. Oh Susannah on an erhu, I might add, must be heard to be believed.
-A man playing Greensleeves on bagpipes, except he could not do the sharps and flats, which resulted in a very distorted melody. Greensleeves is hardly in what anyone could call a major key, and you can't know how important those incidentals are until you've heard that tune without them.
-A woman with a spike heel caught in a grate on the road. Considering the number of women I see wearing those kinds of shoes in the financial district, I'm astounded it doesn't happen more often. The finest performance art.
Daniel on the ants in his classroom:
"I tried to herd them out, but it didn't really work."
"How does one herd ants?" I asked.
"Well, I walk around them and explain I won't hurt them but that I just don't want them in my room, but it doesn't always work."
"Does it ever work?"
Uninformative pause. Then, "So I had to spray Windex on them during 4th period, and now I feel bad."
Is anyone else amused by Larry Craig? I read each new headline with an increasing glee: scandal, arrest, guilty plea, released transcripts of arrest, resignation, rescinded resignation-- and all the while the GOP is getting more and more cranky and the columnists are going to town. For a while I felt a bit guilty reading the article under each headline. This can't possible be news, I would say, forcing myself to turn the page to Iraq or wildfires. But then I gave up and immersed myself in each new revelation. This kind of scandal is so much more juicy than the same behavior from celebrities. Brangelina are just doing their job when they make the news, but senators' activities are entirely extracurricular, and when they go above and beyond the call of duty in this way, I can only honor their efforts by giving them the attention they ask for.
Not that I read the sports section, but Daniel does, and I caught this name over his shoulder: Jasikevicius. How do you say that?
Good Will Hunting: this is the most dreadful movie I have seen in quite a while. Daniel insisted on it, so we watched it together, but he later apologized, saying that he had been told there was math in it. There wasn't, of course: any questions he might have been interested in were just flashed on the screen to show us fancy math, but not long enough for him actually to read them, let alone see the proofs, and the only time we actually see this Will Hunting character doing anything visibly, he's just canceling factors from some big fraction. And then the accents. Oh, heavens, the accents! They were attempting to imitate the Bahstan accent to show us that these people grew up in the inner city, but people! fronted low vowels and non-rhotic liquids do not an accent make! It was painful to hear, and I was embarrassed for them every time they tried to drop an r or broaden their vowels. Fortunately their attempts were intermittent enough that I didn't have to cringe too often, but the rest of the movie was so horrible I would have preferred more linguistic cringing to the additional suffering inflicted by the plot, dialogue, acting, moral, and everything else.
Tamora Pierce, a fantasy writer I discovered in middle school, is truly wonderful. I had read two sets of her books--the Song of the Lioness and the Immortals series, and liked them very much, and then I discovered that the Berkeley public library had four more of her series! I've been plowing through them and having a great time. It's so relaxing between the George Eliots and the Fausts to have the occasional well-written middle-school age fantasy novel. Or four. Or eight. I can read 10 of them in less time than it takes for one George Eliot.
However, speaking of George Eliot, I'm reading Daniel Deronda right now, and everything about her writing style suits me perfectly in a way I haven't really felt since I read Vanity Fair. I can't predict the events of the novels or form any accurate judgment regarding her constantly-developing characters, but everything I read is so right that I can just sit back and trust the author to do what's right. In particular I was fond of Miss Arrowpoint and Herr Klesmer's arguments against her parents' objections to their marriage, which had me snickering and commenting and laughing at their resulting discomfiture. Poor Daniel was trying to sleep, so he did not appreciate it as much as I, but I do feel that George Eliot writes pretty close to what I would consider a perfect novel, and I can't wait to read more of them. Interspersed with middle-school level fantasy, of course. Recommendations, anyone?